Sideways on a Scooter (18 page)

Her eyes returned to her plate. She and Mohan, she said, were more friends than a couple, even in Delhi. They obviously lived in separate apartments—she with girlfriends from college, he with fellow medical residents. When they hung out, it was usually in a group.

“But we did sometimes spend time alone. He kissed me, but never anything more—never really involved. At least that much sense I had. That’s why when we split up, his lie made me so angry.”

I forced myself to wait for her to explain. Geeta got up to make a new batch of
nimbo panne
, without my asking. From where I sat at the table, I could see her in the kitchen. She squeezed the lemons into the jug fiercely, as though she was trying not to cry. I was glad that Priya was out of town, spending the weekend with her family as she usually did.

Geeta had collected herself by the time she sat back down again. After she’d been in Delhi a year, her parents gave her the “marriage ultimatum”: They had been patient enough with her love match. If he didn’t propose, they’d resume their own husband hunt. Mohan’s parents were saying the same thing, so he gave in. Only once Geeta and Mohan started discussing the marriage they’d long assumed would
happen did she realize that he had very different expectations for his wife than he did for his girlfriend. In Delhi, he liked her to don jeans and come out with him to nightclubs. After they married, he told her, all that would end. They would move into his family home in Patiala, where he would get a new job and she would not. She’d be expected to exchange her city clothes for saris to show respect to his family.

“I wouldn’t have minded to live with his parents. That’s the normal Indian way. But he couldn’t just
forbid
me from wearing Westerns and working. Well, I guess that’s normal, too, but not for me.”

Geeta stewed over their differences for several weeks until, she said, “My Punjabi temper just came out.” She accused Mohan of wanting to marry a backward village girl he could order around. He was shocked. He’d never heard her raise her voice before. He declared that he didn’t want to marry an angry feminist type, adding that a boy should never trust a girl who’d had a boyfriend anyway.

“
He
was my boyfriend all that time.” Geeta’s face was twisted with anger. “He was the one who knew my secrets. Now he was making it sound like this was proof that I wouldn’t make a good wife.”

When he sent her flowers two days later, Geeta did as a stubborn Punjabi princess should and threw them away. She refused his calls. Eventually, she told her parents that the wedding was off. Word spread rapidly around Patiala. Marriage isn’t personal in India. From the outside, it looked as though Geeta’s family had rejected Mohan’s. Mohan knew that Geeta’s family was devastated that she’d wasted the four most marriageable years of her life with a perfectly marriageable guy and that they would be doing all they could to limit the damage to her reputation.

“He called my father and insinuated the worst thing.”

Geeta raised her eyes from the table and looked at me expectantly. The motion of the fans had picked up several loose strands of her highlighted hair, and they drifted strangely above her head. I could hear the pained yowl of a sick cow that had taken up residence in the alleyway. I’d been wishing for days that someone would put the sacred beast out of its misery, though I knew no one would.

“You know, Miranda, he said that we had s-s-sex—to my father,”
she said, stuttering on the word
sex
. I wasn’t making it easy for her; I was having trouble coming to terms with the realization that Mohan was, after all, a crooked character.

“What? Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t have a good nature! I guess he thought I would have to marry him if he told my father I had gotten involved with him. Or maybe he just wanted revenge.”

I still found it hard to believe that in today’s urban India, the suggestion that a girl is unchaste can wreck her chance of marriage.

“Did your father believe him?”

“I think he did at first. Then he gave it some thought. I am his only child, Miranda, the only daughter he can see married. So he called me and asked whether it was true.”

“God, that must have been an uncomfortable conversation,” I said.

“It was awful. But at the end, he decided he believed me. He said, ‘That boy is trying to ruin your life, and I won’t let him. I’m not going to tell your mother what he said.’ That’s when I knew my father really loves me. And that’s why I say thank God I never got involved with Mohan. Because I couldn’t have lied to my father about it if I had.”

We sat listening to the cow making its pained plea to the dark street.

“Did you manage to keep that rumor quiet in Patiala?”

Geeta looked the vision of a crushed Bollywood heroine, much of her hair now swirling above her head in the breeze from the fan, her eyes in shadow.

“I don’t think Mohan dared to tell many people after my father dismissed him. Still, some families in Patiala have heard. Even if all they know is that I had a boyfriend and then something happened, that’s bad enough. Believe me. No family wants to align their son with a girl with a past.”

Saturday afternoons were reserved for Madame X. I’d seen the handwritten signs when I first moved to the neighborhood—“Madame X Beauty Saloon”—and I’d been confused by the double
o
into thinking it was some kind of middle-class bordello or ladies’ drinking venue. In
fact, Madame X was nothing more than a dinky neighborhood beauty salon with a misspelled name. It was two dank rooms that smelled of nail polish and hair dye, decorated with peeling 1980s posters of Bollywood stars. Actually, the stars were the same as those today—just with big eighties hair.

Geeta would spend whole Saturdays there, gossiping with the owner, Sameena, her hands and feet proffered for a ten-rupee manicure and pedicure. I was amazed to discover that there was anywhere in the world where you could get your nails done for a quarter, even if the arm massage was listless and the polish chipped off the next day. For Geeta, being pampered badly was better than not being pampered at all. Like many middle-class Indian women, she’d grown up relying on “beauty saloons” for personal rituals such as body waxing and facial hair threading, a way to remove hairs with two cotton threads.

The latest tidbit from the Madame X proprietress was that a women-only gym had opened up in Nizamuddin. The Fitness Circle was “completely American style,” apparently, with machines and trainers imported from the United States. I was skeptical: The health craze had been much slower to catch on in India than had other influences of globalization. Delhi could boast a couple of dozen European restaurants, lounge bars, and nightclubs, but its fitness facilities were limited to men’s boxing clubs and prohibitively expensive hotel gyms. If a state-of-the-art facility had sprung up in Nizamuddin, it definitely warranted checking out.

LADIES ONLY
warned a sign outside the gym. Several black burkas hung on the wall like so many molted snake skins. The gym probably catered primarily to Muslim ladies from the
bustee
, I thought as we entered, since many are forbidden to interact with members of the opposite sex. I thought I saw Geeta stiffen as she had the same realization.

Growing up in a close-knit Brahmin community had shielded her from much of India’s diversity. Although we lived only a few minutes’ walk from one of the biggest Muslim enclaves in Delhi, Geeta never ventured back there. When I tried to get her to visit the Sufi Muslim shrine with me, she’d plead, “I can’t help it. I was brought up to be afraid of those people.” Islam is India’s biggest minority religion, but
she’d never even spoken to a Muslim until she met Sameena, and the experience astounded her.

“Sameena is a Muslim, but you know what? We eat the same vegetarian breakfast,” she pronounced in a voice of amazement.

Geeta had more than once recited the clichéd anecdote that when India and Pakistan play a cricket match, Indian Muslims root for Pakistan’s team. She’d long heard this rumor cited as evidence that Indian Muslims are more loyal to their religion than to their country. It’s a fear that has plagued Hindu-Muslim relations since partition: that Muslims are less patriotic than Hindus. In fact, in 2010, when Shah Rukh Khan—who owns an Indian cricket league team—suggested that Pakistani players should be included in the Indian Premier League cricket tournament, there were protests on the streets. One parliamentarian declared that Khan “could go play his matches in Lahore, not in India,” insinuating that SRK took this position because he was a Muslim.

The Fitness Circle was a small, fluorescent-lit basement room with water stains creeping along the baby-pink walls. It was crowded with weight and cardio machines, none of which looked as if it was intended for commercial use. I noticed immediately that the gym had neither a generator nor an inverter; living in Delhi had given me a keen eye for such details. Clearly all activity would grind to a halt during the routine midmorning power cuts. Red FM, the Hindi pop radio station, was blasting out of a cheap boom box in the corner.

Having shed their burka skins, the gym members were clad in unlikely outfits—sweatpants over close-fitting silk tunics, for instance—not clothing that seemed conducive to hard workouts. These women seemed unenthusiastic about their fitness regimes in general, which was a disappointment for Geeta.

The owner came over to show us around. Leslie was American—that much of Sameena’s description was true—but she was hardly a top trainer; she had no experience teaching classes or anything.

“I got the idea to open a gym from my neighbor. She was one of the first people I met after I moved to Delhi, and I felt really sorry for her. She was cooped up at home all day, not even allowed to walk around the local park unless a male relative came with her.”

After the birth of her son, Leslie said, she’d felt trapped indoors, which made her want to open a place where it would be acceptable for neighborhood women to get out and about. She started learning Hindi and Urdu, the language spoken by many Indian Muslims; she invested in treadmills and a hydraulic resistance weight-training set and rented a basement space in Nizamuddin. The husbands and fathers considered the windowless room an advantage since their wives and daughters would be safe from prying male eyes.

Leslie decided to charge just seventeen dollars a month for membership, and partly because it was so cheap, the Fitness Circle had turned into more community center than gym.

“In the States, everyone shows up determined to burn calories, sticks their iPods in their ears, and runs hard on the treadmill. No one talks to each other. It’s the opposite here—I can’t convince the ladies to stop chatting! I figure that even if they barely break a sweat, at least they’re telling stories and getting advice.”

The gym ladies spent most of their time lounging on the gym mats, complaining about their husbands and exchanging tips about physical ailments. For most of them, it was the first time they’d done so out of earshot of their husbands and in-laws. Leslie was taken aback at the intimate stories that poured out onto the gym mats. They wanted advice on everything from how to lance an unsightly boil and how to shed twenty-five pounds to how to end bad dreams. The gym members assumed that because Leslie was a health-conscious American, she was also qualified to dispense advice on all matters nutritional and medical. After a couple of months of insisting she was neither a neighborhood health consultant nor a nurse, Leslie gave in. She’d look up stuff online and come back the next morning with suggestions for how to ease back strain or cook low-fat curry recipes.

By far the most popular class at the Fitness Circle was a yoga stretch session led by a timid slip of a woman, Usha Gotham, who Leslie had hired after a fruitless search for an experienced female trainer. Usha’s classes were not what I expected in the land that gave birth to yoga. There was an emphasis on breathing but no sun salutations or
vinyasas
. The gym ladies loved it because they could intimidate Usha
into conducting the class they wanted. When they thought a move was too tough, crows of protest would rise from the back of the room, and Usha, whom everyone knew was a pushover, would modify it.

One of the loudest voices in the back was that of Azmat, a young Muslim girl who cleaned the gym each morning. Leslie had not hired Azmat for her meticulous cleaning abilities—there were always dust bunnies floating in the corners—but because she wanted to help her family out. The boy at the door was Azmat’s brother. The parents had died before Azmat or either of her two sisters had married, so Azmat’s forty-dollar monthly salary was being saved toward her dowry.

Since she didn’t have to pay for membership, Azmat was unconcerned about getting her money’s worth from the classes or machines. After she finished her mopping duties, she would clamber onto an elliptical trainer and do a few turns before pausing to inform the room of her most recent scrap of news: “Nasmeen won’t be coming to the gym for the next week because she has relatives in town” or “Leslie-deedee told me she stayed up late watching a movie, so she already had three cups of
chai
this morning.” If she got any response at all, she’d eagerly fill in other details for the room to hear. After a while, she’d remember she was supposed to be working out and absentmindedly move her legs again.

The only time Azmat moved energetically was during the ladies’ impromptu dance circles. One of the women would lumber over to the boom box and raise the volume. Azmat didn’t need to be persuaded off her machine. Soon the bass was distorting and the mirrors were trembling on the basement walls, and all the ladies were making their way out to the “dance floor.” Once there, the ladies would break out grinding and shaking in their uncoordinated workout clothes. I preferred to watch from the machines, but I was rarely spared.

“Come on,
deedee
, show us your stuff!” the ladies would shriek as Azmat dragged me into their midst.

Azmat was the Fitness Circle’s self-appointed social secretary. She organized gym parties any time a lady shed ten pounds and for Muslim, Hindu, and Christian holidays. One Saturday my first year at the gym, the ladies showed up in especially jazzy outfits for Leslie’s birthday celebration,
carrying plates covered in aluminum foil. Class was particularly short that day. As soon as it was over, Azmat laid out the spread the ladies had brought, of homemade
mithai
and fried snacks. Leslie jokingly despaired at the caloric feast—“What about all my suggestions? What about fruit?”—and Usha laughed as she handed around plastic cups of
chai
. “It’s just one day,
deedee
! Let the ladies enjoy,” she said. They’d clubbed together to get Leslie a peacock-blue
salwar kameez
suit. When Azmat presented it, with a little speech about how Leslie had inspired them to be healthy, the unsentimental Leslie had tears in her eyes.