Sideways on a Scooter

D
elhi’s stale April air caught in my throat. Each breath had already been recycled through millions of Indian mouths, I imagined, growing hotter and thicker with each exhale. This is what it must feel like inside a burka: It was as though I was enclosed from head to toe in black cotton and inhaling the fabric that covered my mouth as I tried to scoop the dusty soup into my lungs.

“Natural air-conditionings, madam! Full breeze—open like a helicopter!”

When a three-wheeled auto-rickshaw slowed to a sputter alongside me, I was uncomfortable enough to pay attention to the driver’s offer. I’d only been in India for a couple of weeks, but I’d already learned that most of Delhi’s rickshaw drivers choose to nap away as much of the seven-month hot season as they can, sprawled across their backseats in a pool of sweat. When the temperature sails above a hundred degrees, they hike their fares to ensure that the predatory customers leave them to nap in peace. This driver must have been especially hard up. He gave me an exaggerated salesman’s smile, disturbing the too-small pair of
plastic glasses jammed onto his face, and agreed to a reasonable fare without arguing. I scrambled in, immediately grateful for the relief his rickshaw’s flimsy canvas top provided from the sun, and for the slight breeze of his “helicopter” with two open sides.

The peppery smell of areca nut stung my nostrils as my driver dug a leaf-wrapped packet of
paan
out of a metal box and pulled it open with his teeth.
Paan
, a strong stimulant like chewing tobacco, reddens the teeth and lips of laborers, delivery boys, and shopkeepers across India. When my mother had first come to South Asia, she’d assumed the men were all dying of tuberculosis, spitting blood onto the streets. She had been only twenty-three—younger and even more naïve than I was when I first arrived, at twenty-seven. In fact,
paan
is a relatively innocuous vice, “the working man’s way of getting through the day,” as one friend later described it. If the middle class relies on air-conditioning and chauffeur-driven cars to endure the disorder and discomfort of Indian city life, everyone else blunts its frustrations with cheaper and more accessible aids, such as
paan
, hand-rolled cigarettes called bidis, and Bollywood films.

The rickshaw spluttered through Paharganj, a seedy district for low-budget tourists where British accents jostle with the guava sellers’ Hindi cries and the shouts of the aggressive red-shirted porters at the railway station nearby. Adjacent to New Delhi Station, this area is the landing point for Israelis letting off steam after their mandatory military service, and for lost European souls in search of Afghan heroin or Russian prostitutes, or both. It’s a little ironic that it is also where those in search of spiritual awakening come to lay their yoga mats. Paharganj isn’t the “real India,” but it was the version my parents would have seen when they made their way along the hippie trail to India back in the seventies. This, the spiritualized, photogenic India sought out by Western wanderers, didn’t really parse with the globalizing India that I’d read about, of cable TV and McDonald’s McAloo Tikkis.

Although I have been known to do yoga, I wasn’t especially interested in a New Age-y ashram experience of India. However, there was no getting around the fact that I’d shown up in Delhi dressed the part. It took me longer than it probably should have to realize that outfits
such as a long, wrinkled beaded skirt and tight black cotton eyelet top weren’t doing me any favors in India, where neatness is sometimes the only way to tell the slightly poor from the desperately impoverished. Compared to Delhi’s ladies—impeccable in freshly ironed silk saris and tiny beaded slippers, and radiating a fragrance of baby powder and palm oil—I looked like a sloppy hippie.

A few hours earlier, in the breakfast room of the Lord’s Hotel, I had looked down at the strips of papaya and clumpy yogurt in front of me and tried to concentrate on my goals for the day. Half watching the translucent geckos skitter across the walls, I reviewed the list of interviews I wanted to set up, the apartment search I needed to embark on. It seemed overambitious and strangely irrelevant when I considered my surroundings: a cheap druggy traveler’s hotel in a chaotic city that would seethe its way through the day no matter what I did with mine. I sighed in frustration and turned my attention to the geckos. Through their bodies I could see the cheery red and pink frescoes of Hindu gods.

I was determined to be more than a casual visitor to India. I’d been saving everything I earned at my job as a producer at a public radio show so that I could pick up and go overseas to try my hand at becoming a freelance foreign correspondent. The lack of transcendent, transformative experiences in my life so far had disappointed me: My days seemed a blur of headlines and deadlines. And even though it was a nineteenth-century idea, I couldn’t help but worry that I needed to make a dramatic gesture to convince my New York boyfriend to stick it out with me. As much as I wished I could stride into the world without caring about such things, it wasn’t that simple. I hoped that by taking myself off to the farthest, most exotic place I could imagine, I’d make myself more appealing to him.

There was never any question in my mind that India was where I’d go to do it. My family’s fascination with the place dates back to 1930, when my British great-aunt Edith traveled there as a Christian missionary. My mother’s side of the family is a small, close-knit group of wanderers, and I’d always expected that I would be like the rest of them. Going to India was like a rite of passage, entwined with my very idea of myself. Although the decision didn’t make much sense to my
friends, I had an idea that I would become my fullest, most interesting self there.

Moving around was also just a part of who I was. When I ask my mother to list the cities we lived in when I was young, she has to pull out a pen and paper to keep them straight. I think I went to four different first grades, beginning in England, where my mother comes from. Unlike some families, who are forced to change cities by circumstance or jobs, moving was itself the goal for my parents. Often, they would create the reason to leave. My father, a theater studies professor, seemed equally compelled by the drama of a life lived on the move as by practicalities such as career development or earning a good salary. Living in many places was important enough to them that they decided we’d never buy a new refrigerator or car. My mother was frugal by nature anyway; she’d half joke when telling us to eat our apple cores that this was how we’d be able to afford plane tickets to see her family in England.

My great-aunt Edith died when I was eleven, and all I have left of her is a family of brass elephants and a few leather-bound books of photographs carefully mounted onto wax paper. As a teenager in Pittsburgh—where my parents settled long enough for me to attend middle and high school—I would look at the three elephants lined up on my windowsill, each one slightly larger than the next, and imagine the life I would have. In every photo, Edith is wearing sensible black lace-up shoes and a dour Victorian expression. She and her missionary sisters look out of place, to say the least, under groves of South Indian palm trees, or floating on elaborately decorated wooden Kashmiri houseboats on Srinagar’s Dal Lake.

In one picture, Edith is being carried by several underfed Indians in a covered sedan chair through a mountain passageway. Transported through Kashmir like a princess in a palanquin to her summertime retreat in the cool hills! To my adolescent self, stuck in an utterly un-romantic postindustrial town, these images were reason enough to consider becoming a missionary. We rarely went to church and I didn’t believe in God, so my mother had a good point when she suggested that
I might want to consider something that required less religion—such as being a foreign correspondent, perhaps.