Holy Cow! an Indian Adventure

by Sarah Macdonald

‘Sarah, what have you done, your women things are growing? Isn’t it?’

  Jonathan, who has now been home for a whole week, is rather impressed with my new assets. I know he’s planning a surprise party for my birthday so I go shopping for an outfit to show them off. In the wee hours of the morning of the day of my party the phone rings. There’s been another South Asian tragedy – the Crown Prince of Nepal has shot his entire family – and Jonathan has to fly to Katmandu immediately. The party is cancelled. We’ve now been married for six months and have only been together for about six weeks.

  I spend my birthday alone, sulking and, as Indians say, ‘paining’. And I’m literally paining, too, for my breasts are not just growing they are hurting. The pain builds so much I can’t sleep on my side; at times it feels like a hot skewer is piercing through my nipples and I think I can feel major lumps of hardness.

  Nearly everyone I know has abandoned the Delhi summer and Jonathan is too busy in Nepal to be of any comfort or help. Mindful of the Indian modesty, the ABC’s insurance company takes a day or two to find me a female doctor who will touch my breasts. But they can’t find one with a bedside manner. She has a quick grope behind a curtain.

  ‘Listen, I don’t think it’s cancer, but you are old, you have no children and you are western, that’s all very bad. Veeeeerrrrrry bad. You have to have mammograms and the like.’

  The insurance company flies me home to Australia for tests. I spend the trip with my face at the plane window worrying. Again, the reality of mortality is harder to face than the meditation on its inevitability. My parents are grim-faced at the airport. It hurts to hug them. We head straight to a specialist who orders a mammogram and ultrasound. Three horrible hours later I’m called into his office. The doctor gravely explains he cannot find any cancerous lumps but it appears I’ve suffered a massive hormone explosion.

  ‘What on earth were you doing a month ago that could have triggered an extreme estrogen flow?’

  I can’t tell an Australian doctor about Amma and my wish within her holy hug. He may commit me. But what do I tell myself? Did the Divine Mother’s powerful presence activate my female hormones? Is she sending me a message to come back to her? Or is she cursing me for my cynicism? I take off my plastic Amma ring; freaked-out and frightened, I decide to forget faith in her for a while. The doctor prescribes vitamin B and rest and when my period begins my breasts stop hurting and begin to deflate.

  In Sydney I spend days eating sushi, gulping lungs full of fresh air and staring up at endless bright blue skies. I walk through the pristine quiet of the suburban bush, crush its leaves to smell freshness and marvel at the wide empty streets during peak hour. I prickle with pleasure when I see the sea and gasp at the open joy and the jokes and the intimacy between friends. But most of all, I adore the liberty of being ignored! I deliberately buy a pair of skin-tight bumster jeans just to enjoy walking around in them without attracting a riot. One day when I’m with a friend, a big boofy bloke passes, looks us straight in the eyes and drawls ‘g’daaaaay girls’. I have to restrain myself from giving him a huge hug. To be acknowledged, to be appreciated by a stranger without feeling like a prostitute is so wonderful, so liberating. Close to the thrill of jumping in the car and going to a supermarket to buy chocolate and a bottle of wine. My Sydney life seems so easy and so picture perfect.

  I fly back to Delhi to find that Razoo has come home from the USA. She rings, highly excited and raving super-fast; her thick Indian accent now tinged with an American twang.

  ‘Hi it’s Aarzoo, I’m back. New York issssso hotttttt, I am telling you …’

  I interrupt: ‘Aarzoo? I thought your name was Razoo?’

  ‘No, Sarrrrah, what are you saying? It’s Aarzoo.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us it was Aarzoo? We got it wrong for so long.’

  ‘Oh, noooooo, I couldn’t, that would have been ssso rrrrrrude.’

  But Aarzoo is brasher now she’s been in New York for more than a year, more confident and more outspoken. She forgives me for calling her a gambling chip when her name actually means ‘gift from god’, but she’s furious when I tell her about my tits.

  ‘Saarrah, you stupid! Such gurus as the Mother are farrrrrrr too powerful for you. Let’s parrrty. Us foreigners are all the rage in America, such a put-down Indian woman they feel I am, so I got great work and great bucks. Let’s go for it.’

  I hesitate to re-embrace the life of a material girl living in a material world, but Sydney has teased me with luxury. While India may well have a soft spiritual centre, it’s also got a hard head for cash, and its middle class (the biggest and fastest growing in the world) is energetically embracing the products and symbols of western consumer culture. It may be stiflingly still and steamy but there’s still a wind of change blowing through New Delhi and it’s impossible not to be ruffled by it. This city has changed more in the last year than in all of the twelve years since I first came here.

  When I visited in 1988 India was still in the grips of swadeshi, a centrally planned bastardisation of Gandhi’s love for ‘home grown’ – soft drink and other symbols of western imperialism and decadence were not welcome. Now the Indian economy has started opening up and the top two Bollywood stars are shoving Coke and Pepsi down our throats in ubiquitous advertising. At times I feel like I’m living in America in the fifties. On TV, beautiful housewives sing and dance around new washing machines, airconditioners, refrigerators and ice machines. On the roads, the increasingly rare Ambassadors are struggling to keep up with the new imported zippy sports cars, and tractors trundle behind fleets of Lexus and Mercedes. The old diesel rickshaws have been replaced with new models powered by CNG and the pollution is slowly beginning to clear. New electronic shops are doing a roaring trade in flat screen TVs, DVD players and boom box stereos.

  Our middle-class suburb, Vasant Vihar, is at the heart of the transformation. Up the road at the aptly named Modern Bazaar, cows and beggars graze around McDonald’s and Pizza Hut, and shoe shine boys sit on the steps of a delicatessen that sells Australian meat and Italian cheese. The ubiquitous fast food duo were here when we arrived but they are fast facing competition. Every week a new shop opens and by the end of summer there’s Benetton, Nike, Adidas, Levi, Pepe Jeans, Norgen Vaas ice-cream and an American-style bar called Thank God It’s Friday where staff wear baseball caps, name tags and rows of badges on elastic suspenders. But the hottest hang out of all is the brand new Barista coffee shop, part of a chain leading a lust for lattes in this traditional chai town. Each cafe is contemporary cool combined with eighties nostalgia – teenagers sit in jeans and t-shirts and strum guitars while singing along to Billy Joel and John Denver songs. Karaoke is also catching on, with western songs regularly massacred. The hot favourite is ‘Hotel California’ – almost unrecognisable when screeched in a strong Hindi accent at double decibels.

  Aarzoo and her friends don’t share my middle-class guilt – they prefer to embrace what money can buy and enjoy it for all it’s worth. Most are openly contemptuous of westerners trying to buy up a spiritual fix in India. It’s not the cultural appropriation that upsets them, it’s more the dress sense – there’s a general impression that travellers are dirty, messy and dress like peasants. Aarzoo insists I’m different.

  ‘Sarrrrah, you may not wear enough jewellery but you’re clean, your hair is growing, you wear okay clothes; why you’re almost Indian now.’

  It’s the highest possible compliment and right now I need it. For I’ve slowly but surely been losing my social confidence lately. I’m not respected much in New Delhi as an individual – but as a wife – and Jonathan and I mostly hang out with people he has met through his work. I am the partner who ‘travels and writes a bit’, and while my Buddhist being embraces the eradication of ego that came with being a ‘Triple J celebrity’, I still feel slightly vulnerable so cut adrift from what people once knew to be me. Most Delhi women size up other chicks rather superficially, and among their impeccably groomed lot I feel like
a bit of a wall flower. Aarzoo is my special friend and hanging out with her gives me credibility and a sense of belonging. She and her friend Billie become my wardrobe consultants, etiquette educators and social swamis.

  First, they insist on frequent threading, as thin eyebrows are essential this season. Every six weeks a beautician stretches cotton thread between her fingers and teeth and pecks above me like a chicken while she rips hair out by its roots. If it’s done well, it’s painless; if it’s done badly it’s agony. On my first attempt I go to the wrong place and walk out with a ridge of blood blisters that make me look like Marilyn Manson. The girls don’t let me out for a week.

  When I’m healed we cruise markets and bargain for new nylon clingy clothes that we hardly dare to wear. Our favourite shopkeeper is the elderly but sprightly Mrs Sharma who sells short skirts and halter-tops made from old saris. In her tiny shop stacked to the rafters with bright silks, she’s making a mint but refuses to even buy new teeth for her toothless gums. Mrs Sharma giggles and guffaws as she collects and counts the cash.

  ‘Whattthh thhhtto do, hey? I’ve gothhh you. I’m the only one doing the Indian westhhhern thing, thooo you pay. I’m nearly ninety and old people can’t be argued witthhhhhh, heeeeee hhaaaa.’

  In the late afternoon (when it’s only thirty-eight degrees) we sometimes stroll around Lodi gardens where the former Sultan rulers of Delhi are buried. But this walk is not for fitness or to admire majestic tombs, it’s a serious Italian-style passeggiata with Aarzoo and Billie out to see who is with whom and who is back from America for holidays or marriage meetings.

  Aarzoo always warns me not to eat before we go out at night. I always disobey and she scolds me, as food puffs out the stomach and I’m getting rather round. Aarzoo often wears jeans or western dresses, but Billie, who’s far more sedate, wears Indian clothes or conservative long skirts and will only come out when her brother is around to accompany her. The weekly club ritual begins at one of the few discos. Due to licensing laws and a Punjabi prohibitionist attitude to alcohol, most of the places that offer drinking and dancing are in soulless five-star hotels or in the smoky basements of bad restaurants. There’s one new nightclub that, apart from having too much exposed brass, is bearable. It always has a competitive queue out front but Aarzoo is a practised pusher and hustler and we get in relatively easily. Indians always carry their ID – they can get married at the age of fifteen but can’t drink in this state until twenty-five. Inside, the décor is bland and the fashion is black. Hundreds and hundreds of young Delhi things in tight black pants and little tops do the puja of the pose.

  Aarzoo outlines her dogma of the disco with five commandments of clubbing:

  A chaperone is necessary to keep an eye out for us girls and buy the drinks. Jonathan is always away so Billie’s brother, currently on summer break from his American university, is the best.

  Drink Diet Coke (only cheap girls like me want alcohol all night).

  Walk with elbows bent, ready to knock the wind out of any slimy men who try to touch.

  Dance in the middle of the dance floor because fat forty-year-old sleazy business blokes inevitably ring the outside. (I’m having to find a different dance style. I don’t know if it’s cultural catch-up or just an obsession with soft-cock rock, but Delhi disco-heads love the seventies and eighties. Deep Purple, the Doors, Toto and Bryan Adams are popular, and the city’s major anthems are Bon Jovi’s ‘It’s my life’, Queen’s ‘We Will Rock You’ and, believe it or not, ‘Living Next Door to Alice’ by Smoky. The DJ even stops the record so everyone can scream ‘ALICE! WHO THE FUCK IS ALICE?’ No-one believes I bought the song when I was about seven. When the music gets really bad I stand and practise rule number 5.)

  Suck in stomach, push out eyeballs and bitch.

  Aarzoo and Billie lead the charge.

  ‘Look at her, that’s the one he’s now marrying after being turned down by my friend. Oh my god! She has the face of a horse.’

  ‘Twenty degrees right – she shouldn’t be wearing that bra with that top, look at her going jingle jangle jingle jangle.’

  ‘Look left – Shanaz Husain just walked in.’

  (We don’t bitch about Shanaz, she’s the ageing Queen of Delhi; a cross between Joan Collins and Maria Venuti, she is to be respected for all the money she makes out of the Ayurvedic beauty goods she sells in leopard print packages.)

  I feel terrible about the cattiness of the conversation. Yet after weeks of being surrounded by women looking me up and down and mouthing off about my belly, my now deflated boobs and my dress, I abandon my Buddhist-inspired compassion, my Sikh desire to stand up for the weak, the tolerance learnt at the Hindu Kumbh Mela and the love learnt from the Divine Mother. I join a group ritual far less transcending than the Jewish love-fest and the Parsi secret ceremonies. I suck my stomach in and surrender.

  ‘Look at her, she’s drrrreadful, and who does he think he is? John Travolta? Trrrrrragic.’

  I’m still learning the ‘Hinglish’ of middle-class northern urban India. Basically conversations are super-fast, high-pitched sing-song and, while smattered with Hindi, mostly in English with plosive ‘Ts’ and rolling ‘Rs’. Hindi words are said through the nose, especially ‘ha-ji’ (yes), or the equivalent ‘hhhaaa’ (yeah). I sit on the phone for hours while Aarzoo talks, replying ‘haa, haaa, haaa, haa, haaa’, like Laurie Anderson in the ‘O Superman’ song.

  Our favourite sayings, all with dramatic upward inflections are:

  ‘What are you say-ing?’

  ‘Shuttup!’

  ‘You’re stuuuupppid.’

  ‘Yaar.’

  And, my personal favourite: ‘I will give you ssssuch a sssssslap.’

  I see Hari Lal even less frequently these days and usually just to chat, while Aarzoo and her friends teach me the street Hindi words and phrases he so detests. I’m back at being hard on boys, so I shout out the Hindi equivalent of ‘I will skewer your eyes out with a pitchfork if you don’t stop staring’ to perverts. Those who pinch or grab me get a punch and a screamed ‘sister-fucker’ – the worst possible insult. I’m not so good at the drawl of ‘man’, ‘dude’ and ‘coooooooool’ that’s meant to show you’ve studied ‘State side’, but I make up for it in Indian gesticulation. I wave my arms around, flick my wrists, gesticulate with my fingers and wobble my head like a back-seat Garfield.

  When I’m not out with the girls, I’m inside the ABC house enjoying the airconditioning and the imported cable TV – which is quite a lot at the moment, for the monsoon has finally hit Delhi after a year’s absence and the roads are either flooded or steaming. New channels are delivering a steady diet of the early episodes of ‘Ally McBeal’, ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, ‘Angel’, ‘Seinfeld’ and ‘Friends’. One channel even has ‘West Wing’, but accidentally plays the episodes back to front so it doesn’t make sense. With all this television, Rachel’s sublime cooking and the fact that it’s far too hot to exercise, I’m rapidly gaining weight. My timing is bad. While I’ve been slothing and scoffing, India has been turning away from the fat fetish and moving towards the thin look.

  I’ve grown from the post-pneumonia skinniest I’ve ever been to become fatter than I’d dreamed possible. Aarzoo urges me to give up the yoga and go to the gym. In a five-star hotel J-Lo whines from the stereo and we sweat on walking machines. I quit quickly because every time there’s a power cut the machines stop with such force that I’m almost caterpulted through the window. I refuse to do the Jane Fonda tapes and put the fat belt around my hips to let it wobble. I try swimming but the pool is as hot as a bath and, in places, yellow with kiddie wee.

  Aarzoo decides it’s time I start driving, and I consider it – having Abraham around is cramping our style and driving with her is terrifying. She careers at top speed in a white, battered dinged dodgem car and doesn’t obey the road rule of stopping for things bigger. The only thing that stops Aarzoo is a cow – even the beggars avoid her car. One night I have a drink for courage and grab
the keys.

  ‘Madam, what are you doing,’ cries our guard.

  ‘I’m taking the car, Lakan, out of the way.’

  Lakan swallows and steps aside, and Abraham and his family look down from their window nervously. I hit the accelerator and hoon around the block, liberated at last. I’m all brash confidence and after a few dings I’m soon King of the Road.

  When Jonathan finally returns from Nepal I pick him up at the airport. He’s shaking by the time we are home; he says driving with me is scarier than being in the Taliban-controlled streets of Kabul.

  He’s also arrived home on a day when all the men of Delhi are wearing bracelets. Some of the wrist wear is modestly made of string, but this year’s extra showy style is infiltrating an ancient ritual – gold glittering sequins, fluffy pink and bright green wrist bands are hot stuff. Once a year, sisters put these rakhee around their brothers’ wrists to show their affection and to ensure he will look after her and help marry her off. At a nightclub Aarzoo ties a rakhee on Jonathan. He’s flattered but nervous about this. Aarzoo has called off her engagement to Sunil and this bracelet means Jonathan is now responsible for finding her a new mate. He doesn’t know many single guys Aarzoo would possibly want. She’s sworn off Indian men altogether.

  ‘They just want a slave. I want a carrrrrrrreeeer, I want to make movies, I can’t give it up for a dorrrrrrrrk who wants me to make chai all day long.’

  The problem is, she’s also dubious about western men.

  ‘They just want one thing and when they get it, they leave you. Besides, if you marry them, they cheat on you.’

  ‘Shutttup, don’t be stupid, that’s a generalisation, an Indian man might cheat,’ I screech back.

  ‘Yaaar sure, but they don’t tell you about it and rrrrrrrrub it in your face and then leave you.’

  Aarzoo decides to stay single and Jonathan wipes his brow.

  Billie is under pressure to get married soon, but she’ll accept an arranged match. My feelings on arranged marriages have changed since I’ve lived here. For months I was righteously furious about what happened to Padma and her mother because they’d dared to look for love. Yet now I’ve seen that organised matches can often work. Most couples are really very happy. Besides, finding someone in a culture where there’s not that much girl-boy mixing can be difficult, if not impossible. Lust doesn’t last and couples with things in common do. Billie doesn’t have much experience with boys and she trusts her parents to know what she wants and needs. Besides, Billie says if she becomes an old maid she won’t feel like a loser – her parents will take the blame and wear the shame.