Sideways on a Scooter

by Miranda Kennedy

  The city was infamous for its “Chinese restaurants,” in which food was not the item for sale; these brothels were regularly frequented, we heard, by American security contractors. I don’t know if the rumors of orgies were true, but every foreigner in Kabul did seem to be sleeping with every other one; there were stories of unhinged parties, stormy affairs, broken marriages, and high-drama scenes at the airport.

  After a couple of months of reporting from Kabul, I found myself even more susceptible to high-drama romances. Recently I’d been indulging in an affair that was all boil and no simmer, to adapt the Indian phrase to my circumstance. Jehan was an Indian-origin guy with a smart-alecky charm that made my knees buckle. When I met him, he’d been working on Afghan economic development projects in Kabul for a couple of years. He seemed sane and less intense than other men I met there, though I guess that was a fairly low standard.

  We were both determined to believe that this was more than just another war-zone fling. After a few weeks together at his Kabul guesthouse, we were both telling our parents about each other. I loved the image of myself I saw reflected in his eyes. He thought my sardonic comments were hilarious and my ambitions profound; he described me as adorable and delicate and sweet—not adjectives I’d often had applied to me.

  The stream of compliments didn’t last. After I went back to Delhi, Jehan visited a couple of times; during each visit, he slipped a little farther off the pedestal. Everything I knew of him had been exaggerated into wonderment by the intense circumstances of our meeting. Now he seemed controlling and closed-minded, and I heard harshness in his voice when he spoke to me—or was I just creating faults where there were none because he was leaving?

  Worse than realizing I might be wrong about him, though, was watching myself come crashing down in his estimation. At the end of his second visit, he said something sharp over dinner, and I could tell when he looked at me that his tenderness had drained away. It seemed terribly clear that we’d been fooling ourselves. To my amazement, I was suddenly crying, and we had to abandon our plates of pasta. I remember thinking that our waiter there had a much more sympathetic face than my boyfriend.

  Climbing back into the car with K.K. after my appointment with Dr. Kapur, I slammed the door against my knee, giving myself a mighty bruise. K.K. glanced at me, alarmed by the violence in my voice as I let out an ugly Hindi curse. Sometimes when he looked at me in his rearview mirror, I felt as though he could see into my soul, straight down to the most despairing parts of me.

  “Okay, Miss Mirindaah?”

  I couldn’t bring myself to turn up the ends of my mouth into a smile even for my beloved driver.

  “No, K.K. Let’s just go home.”

  Married life in India is not complete without the pressure to procreate. Pushpa’s saas despaired that the girl had crossed the one-year marriage mark without conceiving. Even though her husband lived in another state eleven months of the year, even though she was only eighteen and had many fertile years ahead of her, Pushpa got no reprieve from the duty to quickly bear offspring.

  At the Fitness Center, Usha told me that her own mother-in-law had begun dropping hints a mere three days after her wedding.

  “At first, she’d just say things like ‘I hope my grandson will have your fair coloring.’ It sounded like a compliment, but it still made me worry.” She laughed nervously, as she always did when she was saying something that could be interpreted as unkind. “That was nothing. When I still wasn’t pregnant three months later, my saas started to get nasty. She’d moan to my husband, ‘What terrible fate to marry you to a girl who refuses to bear me a grandson!’ Of course I could hear her, and she knew it. We live in a tiny space.”

  It was not an accident that Usha’s saas was specific about the gender of the grandchild she expected. In the words of the Bollywood film Jodhaa Akbar, “a marriage is complete only when there’s an heir.” Until recently, Indian law restricted women’s ability to inherit property, and even now, families almost always pass it on to their sons. In a country where the vast majority of senior citizens will never receive a pension, sons represent social security, because it’s considered their duty to care for their parents in old age. And, of course, families with sons receive instead of pay out dowry.

  India’s son preference is actually better described as a daughter dispreference. The latest Indian census data found only 927 girls for every thousand boys nationwide. India is in the center of an epidemic of female feticide, and, strangely, modern technology is to blame. When ultrasounds became available in the 1980s, “doctors” opened private clinics all over rural India that advertised sex-determination tests—a miracle solution to the perennial desire for sons. Low-income villagers were encouraged to take fate into their own hands and abort the fetus if it was female.

  The UN says two thousand girls are aborted every day now in India. In some parts of the country, there’s such a shortage of marriage-age girls that families are forced to share the same wife among several men or import brides from other states. I reported from one village in eastern India where every other household had a paro, or outside bride. Sex-selective abortion is now a crime in India. But although doctors can be imprisoned for revealing the gender of a fetus, they’ll offer hints after an ultrasound instead. They will say, “Your child will be beautiful like Lakshmi,” if it’s a girl, or they’ll make a V sign for victory if it’s a boy.

  Once Usha got pregnant, she again annoyed her saas by refusing to take a sex-determination test. She’d read enough articles in Grihshobha magazine to know that it wasn’t practical to keep popping babies out in the hopes of having a boy, as her own mother had. But she said she couldn’t have aborted a girl child. Luckily, her “very-very nice” husband agreed that they should keep the child no matter the gender. Usha admitted that she nevertheless felt a pang when the nurse told her she’d given birth to a girl—in spite of herself.

  “Not because I think boys are better, deedee. I just knew my saas would give me more trouble. And it was true: Even before I left the hospital, she reminded me about my duty to bear her a grandson. ‘How can I die in peace unless I know that my son has a son to take care of him in old age?’ That’s the kind of thing she says.”

  Usha tried to become immune to her saas’s pleas. Still, when her second turned out to be a boy, she took an auto-rickshaw from the hospital straight to the temple to thank the gods. I was at the Fitness Circle the morning she called. The gym floor exploded with shrieks of excitement, drowning out Red FM. Even though the gym ladies would insist earnestly that the sexes were equal—they’d all seen the Indian government billboards to that effect—it seemed embedded in the culture to feel greater joy at the birth of a boy. For Azmat, the best part about the news was that Usha invited a few of us over for tea to celebrate. Since she spent her days cleaning the floors and waiting for her brother to find her a husband, any excuse to socialize outside of the Fitness Circle was a treat for Azmat.

  “Usha hasn’t ever been able to invite us over before, deedee, because her saas is bad natured,” she informed me. “She doesn’t want Usha to work outside the home, and she thinks we working ladies are a bad influence.” Azmat chuckled at the ridiculousness of the notion. “Now her saas is handing sweets out to the whole neighborhood and inviting us to visit. She must be out of her head with happiness.”

  On the afternoon of our tea date, Azmat showed up in an elaborate salwar kameez outfit decorated with yellow sequins, which seemed a hot and uncomfortable choice for the cycle-rickshaw ride over to Usha’s. Leslie and I were dressed up, too, though, as per Azmat’s instructions. We’d brought a ceramic dish set and a chocolate layer cake for Usha’s saas. Leslie rested the cake box on her knees. This Western extravagance thrilled Azmat: She kept pulling up the lid to marvel at the cake’s glistening surface.

  Usha met us in the lane outside the cement apartment block where she lived with her husband’s extended family. A toothless old uncle was cross-legged in the shade on a charpoy. He
eyed us suspiciously: two foreigners and a Muslim girl dressed to the nines. Usha didn’t introduce us. She led us up a crooked set of stone stairs, smoothed by decades of wear into a treacherous surface. I felt my sandals slipping and clutched at the wall in the dim light. Others had done so, too: The green paint was smeary with the grease of many hands. Usha said the power had been out for several days. Still, the interior walls, painted pink and mustard yellow, seemed to glow with color. I could make out a portrait of the Dalit hero B. R. Ambedkar on one wall, garlanded with fresh marigolds. Almost every Dalit home in India boasts his image: round face, round glasses, and an inscrutable expression.

  Usha’s mother-in-law was in a corner on the floor upstairs, cooing at the newborn boy in her lap. In one fluid, wordless motion, she nodded a greeting, gestured for us to sit on the daybed, and ordered Usha to make chai at the two-burner stove in another corner of the room. A grudging look of pleasure flickered across her broad, ungenerous face as she received the chocolate cake. She held up the grandson to show him off. He was wrinkled, with sallow skin and eyes lined with kohl. When Usha’s toddler daughter wandered over, a shy finger in her mouth, the old woman ordered her to hand out slightly sweet English-style tea biscuits to the guests.

  After she’d made chai, Usha joined Leslie, Azmat, and me on the bed. She had to step around the plates of her teatime offerings, because the room was too crowded for either table or chairs. I asked where her husband was, and she said he’d started working on Saturdays since their son was born. Even if sons end up being a financial net gain in the long run, Usha explained that they require an early output of cash, in that everyone expects the new parents to share the joy around.

  Usha lowered her voice, but her mother-in-law wasn’t paying us any attention—she was still goo-gooing into the newborn’s face. Usha said that her saas had insisted they host a dozen celebratory tea parties like this one; an even greater expense was the upcoming Hindu baby-naming ceremony. Expectations were higher for such an event if it was for a boy. Usha’s saas had informed her that the family was expected to hand out saris and gold rings to all the female relatives.

  “We’ll have to take out a loan. It’s not that different from having to borrow money to get my daughter married when she grows up. It costs almost as much.”

  Usha must have been missing the gym-mat chats. Normally hesitant and self-effacing, she was now eager—impatient almost—to discuss her troubles. We shook our heads sympathetically, and Azmat murmured that she’d heard other parents make a similar complaint, but we were all taken aback by Usha’s next admission.

  “My husband recently suggested that I get the operation”—she used the English word—“because we can’t afford to have another child.”

  Leslie spoke first.

  “What operation? Do you mean getting your tubes tied?”

  “I don’t know exactly what it is, deedee. The thing that stops you from having babies. My husband says there’s a wife version and a husband version. He doesn’t want to have it.”

  India’s population more than doubled in the first seventy years of the twentieth century, leading Western journalists and scientists to prophesy widespread famine. The government responded with coercive and forced sterilizations: In the 1970s, officials would round up men with three or more children and herd them off in police vans to “vasectomy camps.” Between 1975 and 1976, the government conducted more than eight million sterilizations, more than anywhere else in the world at that time, which means there is still widespread unease about the procedure. A mandatory population control program like China’s would never work in today’s India; people would simply refuse to abide by it. As India’s population swelled to the 1.2 billion of today, many state governments began offering compensation for voluntary sterilizations, though. One especially creative state government plan offers a gun license to men who get the snip.

  The compensation from the Delhi state government wasn’t quite that exciting. It was the equivalent of twenty dollars, half a month’s earnings for Usha’s husband. Still, he was “worried that he might not be able to do sex afterwards,” Usha said. Azmat let out a bawdy cackle at the English word sex, but Usha pretended not to hear; her eyes were fixed on Leslie, the neighborhood health expert.

  “My husband found out that ladies get higher compensation than men for the operation. But will it hurt? Do you think I’ll be sick afterward?”

  We all turned to Leslie.

  “I’m not sure about all the details, Usha, but I think if a woman gets the operation, it’s riskier. You have to go under general anesthesia—you know, go unconscious. That’s probably why the government pays women a little more.”

  Usha bit her lip. She hadn’t realized she would have to go unconscious, she said. Her husband had already made the appointment.

  Geeta was allergic to South India. Six months after she’d moved into her in-laws’ house, she was bloated and spotted with pimples, and she’d gained fifteen pounds. I hadn’t seen her since the wedding. This was her first trip back to Delhi, and she was staying with me and Priya in the Nizamuddin apartment. After Geeta got married, Nanima had left the neighborhood; one of her children had finally taken charge of her.

  Geeta sat down on the sofa and looked around as though she’d been gone for years.

  “Wow. I’ve really been missing Delhi—everything about it. I wouldn’t have expected that! I’m especially homesick for North Indian food—even Radha’s Bihari food that I used to complain so much about—even that is an improvement over South Indian food. Her chili and oil is nothing like as bad as what Ramesh’s family uses. South Indian food is so spicy and fattening—I swear, my stomach is constantly upset.”

  Geeta blamed her ill health and weight gain entirely on the Murthy family cooking, though after spending a little time with her, I thought it was probably due to something more than that, since she also seemed profoundly depressed.

  One of my cats wandered in and stared at her. Geeta had never expressed much interest in the scrawny alley cats I’d made my pets—like Radha, she didn’t know why anyone would choose to keep dirty felines inside the home, let alone shell out money for their food. But now she held out her hand. The creature turned her back and strutted off, as though to punish my friend for her history of Brahminical anticat sentiments. Geeta looked hurt.

  I was struggling to adjust to the new Geeta, too: a puffy, mellower version of my punchy Punjabi friend, now dressed in a prim salwar kameez with her hair neatly pulled back. The miniskirts were obviously gone for good. I wondered whether she’d gotten any use out of her Curves attire, but I didn’t dare ask. Her honeymoon was a touchy subject: Ramesh’s father had asked them to cancel the trip to Thailand because Ramesh would have been away from the office for too long, so they’d traveled to the more predictable destination of Goa instead. After all her excitement, she’d had a quotidian domestic honeymoon.

  Sitting down beside her on the sofa, I wondered whether we would have stayed good friends if we hadn’t also been neighbors. Of course, Nizamuddin was the reason we met; and then for a while after that, we’d become so close that it had stopped mattering. Now that we were separated by geography and lifestyle, though, our personality differences seemed to outweigh our bond.

  I noticed that Geeta’s arms were still decorated to the elbows with wedding bracelets and tried to come up with an appropriate remark.

  “You’re still wearing your chura. I hope they’ve been treating you as a new bride should be treated!”

  She looked back at me dully.

  “Yeah, they won’t let me do anything. I am like the princess of their household—totally pampered and silent and a stranger.”

  Being well cared for in her new home should have been the ultimate triumph, but Geeta offered none of the victorious dimpling that should have accompanied such an announcement.

  “I have a bad feeling there. It’s like they want to keep me an outsider in their household. Like they treat me well to keep me out or someth
ing. Bangalore is very different to what I know. I feel like a feringhee in my own country.”

  As I’d learned from KSBKBT, the TV show about saas-bahu tension, mothers-in-law can torture new brides in many ways, most of which, according to the show, involve the kitchen. New bahus are sometimes forced to slave away at housework—as in Pushpa’s case—and sometimes they are locked out of the kitchen, and therefore the family. In Geeta’s new world, it was the latter. Making food was an honor reserved for the better-established women of the Murthy household. Ramesh’s mother, grandmother, and aunties competed for space in the kitchen, only occasionally granting his older brother’s wife access though she’d been in the family for several years now. The women produced a rotating buffet of traditional fare, all of it rendered eye-wateringly hot with mustard seeds and green chilies. Even at breakfast, there was no reprieve: In Ramesh’s house, the South Indian rice cakes called idly were served with a fiery morning stew.

  A few months after she’d moved in, Geeta asked her mother-in-law for permission to make a Punjabi meal. It is a wife’s greatest honor to serve her own food to her husband, she pleaded. It was hard for me to imagine Geeta begging to be allowed to cook, but domestic tasks had taken on a new profundity in her few months of marriage. When she told me that Ramesh’s family had complimented her mild potato curry and roti, she looked exultantly proud of herself. Her saas had made it clear it wasn’t going to be a regular thing, though.

  “There was tension every time I went into that kitchen. Some kind of possessiveness, like I was infringing on their territory. I guess that’s why they call it kitchen politics.” She sighed. “Ai-yore-ramachandra.”