Sideways on a Scooter (2 page)

Even if the grass isn’t always greener, it is always worth checking just to be sure—that is my father’s belief, and I inherited it. Early on, I learned that it was easy enough to make friends and not get too attached to any of them; it was okay, my parents taught us, because we had one another. Committing to a group of friends and learning to belong to a school or a neighborhood—we didn’t do that in my family. I was the kind of teenager who kept a running tally of the European cities I’d visited and asserted my opinions about world affairs over the dinner table. When my father was offered a position in Ireland, at the University of Dublin, it seemed natural to transfer my college credits there and go along for the ride; I didn’t want to miss out on any of my family’s cool international adventures.

After college, I wanted to outdo my parents and crisscross the globe again, this time of my own accord. New York yielded me all the things I’d hoped it would: It helped me realize what I wanted to do with my life, and it gave me a boyfriend who believed in the poetry of adventure, as I did. I found a cockroach-studded apartment in a rent-stabilized building in Brooklyn that was cheap enough that after several years of working at magazines and radio programs, I could buy myself a ticket to India.

My friends were right to be skeptical about my tripping off. New York was full of opportunities for an aspiring writer, and my developing-world country of choice offered nothing in the way of career assurances. Although we knew plenty of journalists who’d decided to freelance overseas, they’d chosen higher-profile regions, such as the Middle East, where their reporting was actually likely to generate some attention. India’s economy was booming, but it wasn’t a major story. When I talked to editors about my plans, their eyes lit up when I mentioned Pakistan and Afghanistan. I said I was interested in reporting from those places, too, but I was quite sure that I didn’t want to get slated as a war-on-terror correspondent.

When the September 11 attacks happened, I was at the radio studio,
right below Canal Street, a few blocks away from the World Trade Center. I didn’t leave for the next two weeks. We slept and ate and worked in the studio—afraid that if we left Ground Zero, the police wouldn’t allow us back in. I spent every night down among the rescue workers. It was amazing to witness to such an important part of history, but it also helped me realize how difficult it was to burrow inside a major event like that and pull out the sad, quirky, and untold moments, as I like to. Part of me wanted to follow the story to Afghanistan; but I also wanted to get away from all the elbow-jostling of daily news reporters and go to the place I cared about most.

I got a small grant to train radio reporters in South Asia, which gave me enough money to get started. Other than that, though, I had no guarantee of work—just expressions of interest from editors at National Public Radio and a few other news outlets. My friends advised that if I stuck it out in the New York media world, I’d eventually work my way up to a job as a foreign correspondent. Even if they were right, I didn’t want to wait. I thought I needed to kick my way out of the claustrophobia of normalcy and show the world that I could become a foreign correspondent on my own, rather than waiting for an employer to hand me the job.

I’d started to feel at home in New York, and that was exactly the problem. I’d lie awake at night working myself into a panic as I imagined myself ten years hence: working a slightly better job, living in a slightly nicer apartment—a scheduled, comfortable life that my parents would consider mundane. Now that I was a slightly rebellious, itinerant adult, resisting the urge to claim a community as my own, India had taken on an almost legendary aspect. Far away and unfamiliar, it had become a kind of resting place in my mind. On some level, I knew that it was where I would go to define myself as a journalist, an adventurer, a woman.

Before any of that could happen, I had to find somewhere to set up my laptop and improvise a recording studio so I could start filing my stories. Most important, I needed an address so I could print up business
cards, which I’d quickly discovered were a mandatory accessory in India; without a card to present at the beginning of an interview, no one seemed to believe that I was real. I was already having enough difficulty convincing Indian officials and intellectuals to take me seriously as I made the rounds of their offices, trying to form intelligent interview questions about the opaque world of Indian politics and culture.

In status-obsessed India, my interviewees had reason to be skeptical of an unaffiliated reporter girl in inappropriate clothes. They were accustomed to meeting foreign correspondents of a different stripe—those who had been dispatched by their news organizations and lived a rather plusher Delhi life than I did.
The New York Times
’s correspondents, for instance, take up residence in a spacious colonial-era bungalow that the paper has owned for decades. Inside are the facilities they need to acclimatize and be as efficient as you can be in India—which is to say, not very, but every little thing helps: a full-time translator to lead them around the city, a car and driver, an imported washing machine. The
Times
’s bungalow is equipped with a permanent staff, including a gardener to beautify the outside spaces for entertaining.

When I found an inexpensive room for rent in the newspaper listings, the receptionist at the Lord’s Hotel was emphatic in his recommendation of the area: “A-one neighborhood, madam, top class.” So I was surprised when, looking out of the side of the rickshaw, I saw yet another Delhi neighborhood filled with vegetable vendors and the teeming impermanence of poverty. The smells of gutter rot and frying spices fused together into a heady brew. No wonder Indians laugh at Americans and Europeans who stroll across Delhi as though it were a pretty little New England town, I thought. The city is a flat outstretched plain of traffic and beggars; traffic circle after traffic circle, lush with hot pink bougainvillea bushes; and then this, chaotic markets choked with too many choices on which to settle your eye.

Outside the vehicle, I heard a squealing sound and cringed, convincing myself it was a monkey about to attack. Macaques have taken over the Ministry of Defence building in central Delhi, and stories
about the “monkey menace” are not uncommon on the nightly news. Still, I had an outsize fear of being chased by rabid primates my first few months in the country. I turned to see that the noise was only a small boy shoving stalks of sugarcane into a huge metal grinder. As he cranked a squeaky wheel handle around, the white juicy foam squirted out of a funnel: pure sugar juice, two rupees. A decrepit, shirtless religious pilgrim limped up to the machine and was wordlessly handed a glass of the stuff. He looked as though he needed the calories.

A cow swished its dung-crusted tail across my face through the side of the rickshaw, wakening me from my reverie. The grit of its feces brushed against my lips, a textured wetness that tasted like soil. My rickshaw plunged bravely through a jumble of narrow lanes snarled with animals, bullock carts, and scooters. The houses leaned into the street, their contents spilling out onto rickety balconies—cleaning buckets and brooms, long swaths of saris and men’s shirts hanging on laundry lines. The wobbly structures reminded me of the images of nineteenth-century tenements in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Were these really the homes of the fast-growing middle class that I’d read so much about? Was this where the call center workers slept during the day when they were not transforming the global economy from inside new office towers?

After a quarter of an hour of bumping along the maze of streets, I realized my rickshaw wallah had retraced his steps more than once. He actually had no idea where he was going. He was just sputtering gamely down the center of the road, ignoring the lane divider. We both stared at the haphazardly numbered houses piled atop one another: “432-L” announced one house; “34-B” read the number on the building beside it. I groaned in frustration—“How could 432-L and 34-B be neighbors?”—but my driver was undaunted. He slowed near a boy pushing a cart of mangoes and shouted the house number we were looking for. The boy couldn’t hear him above the engine’s explosive stutter. He heaved his cart to the side of the road and sidled over as he scratched his groin absentmindedly through his polyester pants.

Only when my driver cut the motor did I realize that my head was pounding from its staccato clatter and the searing heat. My driver was
suffering, too. He wiped his face with a corner of his grubby kurta, the long, loose shirt worn by both women and men in India. Then he reached below his feet, pulled out an old Coke bottle, the paper label long ago peeled off, and poured a stream of water into his mouth, making sure the rim didn’t touch his lips. He offered the bottle to me, and turned back wordlessly, unsurprised, when I declined: Foreigners never drink Indian water unless they can vouch for its origins. The mango boy, however, took a grateful swig, using the same germ-free Indian technique. He had the sunken-eyed look of the hungry that I was becoming accustomed to on the streets of Delhi. Giving directions was probably a welcome diversion from the sapping blaze of a 120-degree spring day.

In the afternoons, when it is too hot to work, the solidly employed retire to their homes for lunch and a siesta, as they do in southern Europe, where lives have long been patterned around making the seasons livable. This civilized luxury is not an option for Delhi’s underemployed immigrants, many of whom have no home to retire to. Some 70 million immigrated to Indian cities from the impoverished hinterlands in the decade before I moved to the country in 2002. Still more poured in from India’s poorer neighbors, Nepal and Bangladesh. They come in search of urban wealth and opportunity, which, sadly, they rarely find. Instead, they take whatever bits of work they can get—serving
chai
or cleaning toilets. In the afternoons, they seek out fellow villagers, squatting in companionable clusters in scraps of shade, or walking together with their arms draped across each other’s shoulders. Sometimes they hold hands loosely, in the village boys’ sweet, casual gesture of friendship.

The undereducated village boys stop and stare at anything slightly out of the ordinary. Even if it is the capital of one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, Delhi has a decidedly uncosmopolitan feel. It is, after all, a magnet for the rural poor. Eyes followed me everywhere unless I was safely ensconced inside a five-star hotel.
Feringhees
, or
goras
, as foreigners are called in Hindi slang, stand out in a city with little immigration from outside its national boundaries. The word
gora
is straightforward: It means “white.”
Feringhee
stems back to the time of
the Crusades, when Indian Muslims used the word to refer to Christians; the base of the word is
Frank
, once used for people of European descent. India has been home to dozens of ethnicities, skin colors, religions, and castes for centuries, but in spite of all the invasions and colonizations, the polyglot culture has still almost always been Indian.

The mango boy and my driver pondered our destination, and others strolled over to join the discussion, pointing here and there with lackadaisical arms. When one of them realized that the rickshaw contained a
feringhee
, they began popping their heads inside to peer at me: The effect was of a comic puppet show. Their expressions bore no hostility, just curiosity and surprise, as they took in the white face and platinum blond hair, which I’d dyed that color soon after college in an effort to stand out. The goal was easily achieved in India. After a couple of months of being treated like a freakish celebrity, inspiring turned heads and double takes on Delhi streets, I would decide to return to my natural brown.

From the backseat, I could see my driver nodding disinterestedly at the crowd of volunteer guides. He was getting comfortable, slipping off his
chappals
and folding his feet beneath him. I despaired that I would ever make it to the apartment viewing. Even with only three weeks of Hindi lessons, I could tell that my driver’s conclave was more idle gossip than route planning. I hadn’t learned enough of the language to ask directions for myself, though, and my driver was indifferent to my restlessness, so I just sank back to wait for the socializing to conclude.

We lived in semidodgy urban neighborhoods growing up; I wrote about gang violence for the newspaper at my public high school. I liked to think of myself as capable and street smart. During crises, such as the time I was robbed in Brooklyn by a neighbor wielding a gun, I’d been pleased with myself for staying levelheaded. But now, with the heat rising inside our steam box of a rickshaw, I had a fantasy of slamming my rickshaw wallah’s head against the hot metal dashboard. Of course, then I’d probably destroy his already half-broken glasses, and I’d be not just a yellow-haired weirdo but a wild-eyed crazy one.

I took a deep breath and reminded myself what an Indian friend in New York had told me: If I was to make it in the “real,” unsanitized
India, I had to be willing to surrender control and waste a lot of time. There was nothing for it but to swallow my impatience.

Eventually, the rickshaw wallah spat a trail of tuberculean red
paan
onto the road: “
Han-ji
, madam.
Chelliye!
” We were off, at the top auto-rickshaw speed of twenty miles an hour. Soon, we came to a halt again, beside an excited crowd of men. I craned my neck: A utility pole had collapsed, tipping a knotted mass of power lines onto the road, and a crowd of random guys was tugging the wires out of the pole, in the Indian spirit of any business is everybody’s business.

When we finally arrived at the house, I peeled my legs off the ripped plastic seat. As I pulled myself out of the rickshaw, I caught a glimpse of myself in the side mirror: Strands of hair were plastered to my head with sweat, and the rest had been swept up into a bouffant by the wind. The rickshaw driver extended his hand—stained black from engine grease and red from
paan
—demanding double the fare because of the detours. He spun off in his Indian helicopter without returning my dollar-fifty change.