Sideways on a Scooter

by Miranda Kennedy

  Geeta had set aside a separate puja room in the new house and brought in a wooden shrine that held a dozen idols of Hindu gods, including a turquoise plastic Hanuman, the monkey god, inexplicably dressed in what looked like a pink diaper and seated on a swing. When I picked it up and chuckled, she narrowed her eyes at me.

  “It isn’t what the gods look like that matters, Miranda. You should know that by now. I see how contented Ajji looks while she is meditating, and how peaceful the whole house becomes. Praying is one of the reasons I’ve become happy here.”

  Some nights, Geeta would wander over to her puja room before she went to sleep, switch on the fluorescent tube light, and stand there for a few minutes in silence, just looking at the idols. It made me wonder what she was thinking. Was she communing with the gods in some way, or just checking that all was in order and the flowers were fresh in case her mother-in-law stopped by?

  Ramesh’s family still provided the shape to their married life. They hadn’t had a chance to make friends in Bangalore, Geeta said, because they spent all of their free time with her in-laws. When her brother-in-law had minor laser surgery, Ramesh’s father instructed them to join the rest of the family in the hospital during the operation and recovery. I entertained myself while they spent a full two days in the waiting room.

  The following weekend, the in-laws bustled in unannounced one morning before any of us was dressed. Geeta, sleepy eyed in a pair of pink sweatpants, was unenthusiastic when her mother-in-law instructed the driver to unload a trunk load of watermelons, cantaloupe, and dates for them. Then she lied and told her that we’d already had toast and chai for breakfast.

  “I need to prove to them that I can take care of my husband myself,” she said after they left. “If I’d told my mother-in-law that we hadn’t eaten yet, she would have sent the driver off to bring us a cooked breakfast from their house. It’s ridiculous—they treat us like babies and then constantly hint that we should be having our own kids.”

  She slammed a pot of water on the stove to make Ramesh’s tea.

  When we were alone, I asked whether Ramesh’s family was still bugging her to get pregnant.

  “Of course they are. It’s been two years since we got married. I am practically middle-aged by Indian standards. They bring it up all the time. My sister-in-law says things like ‘You should have babies before Ajji dies.’ She partly means that it will be easier for me with Ramesh’s grandmother around, because I won’t have to lift a finger for the baby. But she also means that Ramesh and I owe it to Ajji to give her a great-grandchild before she dies.”

  Geeta sounded annoyed, but she was also more temperate than she’d ever been about her in-laws before. Even though dealing with them was still a daily challenge, moving out of the Murthy household had obviously been the best thing for her relationship with them.

  “The thing is—we’re working on a different schedule to most Indians. We wanted to take some time for ourselves before we had babies. But there’s no way to explain that to them. How could they possibly understand? It doesn’t make sense in the traditional Indian context.”

  I could sympathize. Now that I was a married lady myself, I was experiencing it, too: Indians across the board were anything but shy about reminding me that I should be with child. That was my next task in life, and by not fulfilling it I seemed to make people suspicious. Within minutes of greeting me, Radha and Maneesh had both asked why I hadn’t had a baby yet. Even the lady who used to teach me Hindi acted a little strangely when I said I planned to wait a while before trying. It seemed to make me suspect, just as being single in Delhi once had.

  Of course, I felt the pressure back in the States, too. My friends and I laughed that there was a widespread expectation that we would swiftly reproduce—even in the land of older marriages, IVF, and childless professional couples. One of my good friends in New York admitted to me that she was terrified she wouldn’t be able to get pregnant in the months immediately following her wedding. “I would feel like such a failure,” she said.

  Still, Geeta was right when she said that she imagined it was more acceptable to hold off having kids in the States than it is in India.

  “There’s no models for people like us in my family or Ramesh’s,” she said. “In fact, what Ramesh’s parents keep saying is that we’ve both had plenty of time to ourselves. His mother tells me that because I waited so long to get married, I’ve already had my selfish time; now it’s time to stop thinking of ourselves and give her some grandchildren. Like it’s my duty to get pregnant.” A half second later, she added, “Really, they are right, though. It is my duty.”

  Geeta, like everyone around her, considered having kids to be the natural follow-up to marriage; she felt compelled by tradition, family, and timing to do so. Still, it was complicated for her. Geeta’s modern self rebelled against being pushed into motherhood, just as much as it did against the idea that her new family dictated her decisions now.

  I could see how Ramesh’s family would make Geeta feel claustrophobic, even after she and her husband had “gone nuclear.” And yet—I had to admit that a life defined by family didn’t seem so awful to me anymore. The idea of living in the same country as my boyfriend had once filled me with terror, but that had changed. When I’d left Delhi, I’d moved not just to the same country but into the same apartment as my new boyfriend. Mingling my books with Ted’s on his shelves felt like the greatest expression of intimacy I’d ever made.

  What if we forget whose are whose? I remember thinking.

  Now I was a part of his family. While it sometimes felt like more responsibility than I was prepared for, what stood out to me was how light it could be. We spent the Christmas before we were married in Ted’s conservative southern town, a place as foreign to me as India once was. I made mince pies for their Christmas dinner, the way my mother always had. Ted’s mother had a stocking knitted for me and hung it up on the mantelpiece with the rest of the family’s. A few years before, matching Christmas stockings would have made me want to run screaming from the room; now, seeing them on the mantel, I felt tears come to my eyes, and realized that I felt grateful and proud.

  In Bangalore one night, after Geeta cooked a heavy Punjabi meal, we went for a digestive wander around the neighborhood. The moon was almost full, and in its light the white marble houses shone like temples. Our voices set off the stray dogs, but we ignored their howling. The air, rich with the fragrance of jasmine and freesia, felt soft and freeing. Geeta asked Ramesh to tell her the South Indian names of the flowers and trees as we passed them. She always sounded impressed by his answers.

  “I never used to notice nature before—but here women use flowers all the time. They put them in their hair and decorate their houses with them. I do it, too. Every morning, I pick white jasmine from the bush in the driveway for puja—never the blossoms on the ground, only freshly picked ones.”

  She ran over to a shrub hung with graceful greenish white blossoms.

  “Look, Ramesh! This one I know. We have it in the Punjab. We call it raat ki rani—queen of the night—because its fragrance comes out only after dark. A sweet smell. It reminds me of home.” She looked at Ramesh, and they both smiled as she corrected herself. “My first home, that is.”

  Acknowledgments

  The women in the book were my friends long before I imagined writing about their lives; they trusted me with their secrets not because I was a reporter but because I was a friend. Both Geeta and Parvati understandably felt some discomfort about the project. My greatest thanks go to them, and to Azmat, Maneesh, Radha, and Usha. Because their stories are sensitive and their lives are fluid, I have changed Geeta’s and Parvati’s names and altered some identifying details to protect Geeta. Several other names have also been changed.

  The list of those who helped me make sense of India over the years would be many pages long, but I especially need to thank Binu Alex; Bhavna, Kajal, Kiran, and Kuku Bhardwaj, who made Nizamuddin sing; Praful Bidwai; Sadanand Dhume; Vin
od K. Jose; Poornima Joshi; Aunohita Majumdar; Anosh Malekar; Chandana Mathur; Janis McClinch; Jawed Naqvi and his clan; M. P. Nunan; Amit Sengupta; Kalpana Sharma; Rakesh Sharma; Leslie Weightman; and Aanchal White.

  My agents, Gail Ross and Howard Yoon, saw the shape of this book before I did and challenged me to find it. Susanna Porter at Random House saw it, too, and I am lucky to have as sensitive and engaged an editor as she, and such a wonderful team in her colleagues.

  Thanks to Ted Clark and Loren Jenkins at NPR, and to Karen Lowe and Julie Small at Marketplace, for their support to me as a reporter; and to Lynda Blake, Rosemary E. Duncumb, Jocelyn Gordon, Stephen Tyrrell, and Win Waters for graciously sharing their memories of Edith and missionary life.

  I am grateful to the mentors and friends who helped me with the manuscript: Susan Cheever, Hillary Frey, Rob Gifford, Jordana Hochman, Richard Lehnert, Wyatt Mason, Nandan Nilekani, Matthew Power, John Schidlovsky, Erik Shonstrom, and Madhulika Sikka.

  My forever thanks go to Jessica and Megan Kennedy, Emily Noelle Lambert, Diane Spear, and Susie Tyrrell. And above all, to Ted Jones, for believing in Bollywood.

  Select Bibliography and Suggested Reading

  Adiga, Aravind. The White Tiger. New York: Free Press, 2008.

  A shocking vision of India as we’ve rarely seen it rendered in English; the Booker Prize–winning novel about a modern country that tramples over its lowest castes and classes.

  Bumiller, Elisabeth. May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons: A Journey Among the Women of India. New York: Ballantine, 1990.

  One of the very few books in English about women in India, written by a New York Times reporter, is a sensitive rendering of their lives.

  Chopra, Anupama. King of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema. New York: Warner Books, 2007.

  An insider’s view of India’s movie world, written by the wife of one of the biggest producers in the industry, Vinod Chopra.

  Dalrymple, William. City of Djinns: A Year of Delhi. London: HarperCollins, 1993.

  This travelogue is one of the most evocative and hilarious portraits of New Delhi ever written.

  ——. Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.

  A beautiful exploration of the religious heritage of the subcontinent.

  Das, Gurcharan. The Elephant Paradigm: India Wrestles with Change. New Delhi: Penguin India, 2002.

  A treatise in favor of globalization, written as part memoir and part economic analysis by a prominent Indian economic thinker.

  Debroy, Bibek, and D. Shyam Babu, eds. The Dalit Question: Reforms and Social Justice. New Delhi: Globus, 2004.

  A collection of essays on caste in modern-day India.

  Desai, Kiran. The Inheritance of Loss. New York: Grove/Atlantic, 2006.

  A novel that switches between the narration of a sixteen-year-old girl coming of age in tumultuous times in India and that of an illegal Indian immigrant in the United States.

  Dinesen, Isak. Out of Africa. New York: Random House, 1938.

  Magical stories of expat colonial-era life on a coffee plantation in Kenya.

  Doniger, Wendy. The Hindus: An Alternative History. Penguin, 2009.

  A fascinating popular history of Hinduism by one of the world’s foremost scholars of the religion.

  Ghosh, Amitav. The Hungry Tide. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.

  A luscious novel set in a far corner of India, where the mangrove forests and Bengal tigers teach us something of the consequences of globalization.

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  Guha, Ramachandra. India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.

  An intensely engaged, highly readable survey of a fascinating period in India’s history, as it grows into the proud, independent nation we know today.

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  A manifesto of the Dalit caste, this book is laced with fury and sarcasm.

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  The searing tale of a Dalit family determined to escape the rigid confines of the bottom of the caste system.

  Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer. Out of India: Selected Stories. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint Perseus, 2000 (first published in 1957).

  A fascinating collection of stories by a German writer who spent most of her life in India.

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  Three deeply revealing studies from India’s best-known psychoanalyst.

  Khilnani, Sunil. The Idea of India. New Delhi: Penguin India, 1997.

  Trying to make sense of India’s founding principles in light of its fast-changing attitudes.

  Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. London: Macmillan, 1901.

  A novel written from the center of the British Raj in India.

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  A tale of the struggle to belong, told through a family of Indian immigrants to the United States.

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  A careful look at the contradictions of a fast-globalizing India from a Financial Times correspondent.

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  A furious and well-considered rebuttal to the controversial book Mother India, which was written in 1927 by an American journalist to attack the idea of Indian self-rule.

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  Essays on topics as diverse as jihad and Bollywood by one of India’s most interesting contemporary writers.

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  An illuminating novel set inside a love-torn Mumbai family.

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  The final volume of Naipaul’s brilliant trilogy of nonfiction travelogues exploring the land of his ancestry.

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  A history of the untouchable leader and lead author of India’s constitution.

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  A heartbreaking account of one of the world’s least-chronicled conflicts.

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  A sprawling novel that makes its declaration of love for India from inside the country’s slums, drug gangs, and jails.

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  A way to experience viscerally the history of the subcontinent.

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  A translation of the Sanskrit text of the first recorded Hindu law book, The Laws of Manu.

  Srinivas, M. N. Social Change in Modern India. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1966.

  A groundbreaking text about the rules that guide India.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  For five years
, MIRANDA KENNEDY reported from across South Asia for National Public Radio and American Public Media’s Marketplace. From her base in New Delhi, she covered the conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan and other major stories across Asia. She wrote extensively about women, caste, and globalization in India, and her stories have appeared in publications like The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Nation, and Slate. Before she moved to India, Miranda was a magazine editor and public radio reporter in New York, where she covered the September 11 attacks. On returning to the States, she moved to Washington, D.C., to work as an editor at National Public Radio’s Morning Edition.