Sideways on a Scooter (22 page)

One morning Radha was bringing the day’s milk to a boil, which she did every day because it is sold unpasteurized and is unsafe to drink. I joined her in there and started cleaning out the stove-top espresso maker I’d imported from the States—one of the kitchen tools Radha considered high-tech and refused to touch. She seemed to be in a good mood, so I asked her about the tattoo on her arm. I’d wondered about it since she’d started working for me. The pale, inexpensive ink was
faded like a prison tattoo; the Hindi script was blurred and illegible. Radha waved me off, but when I persisted, she leaned against the kitchen counter. Soon after she was married, she said, she’d seen the tattoo wallah outside the temple in her husband’s village and had been tempted to make an unlikely romantic gesture. She’d asked him to inscribe their names on her arm.

“I was naïve and silly. I didn’t know he was going to pierce the skin with those needles to make the picture come! It hurt!”

She’d hurried back to her husband’s house to dunk her arm in cold water. Only later did Bhaneshwar look at it carefully and inform her that the tattoo wallah, who was probably as illiterate as Radha, had tattooed the wrong name on her skin. According to her arm, her husband was married to a woman named Devi.

In ancient times, Bihar was a great cultural empire. During Radha’s lifetime, though, her home state was famous for the wrong reasons: endemic corruption and extreme political instability. Now the adjective most often used to describe the place is
backward
. Only 5 percent of households in Bihar have electricity, compared with 40 percent nationwide, which is a fairly miserable starting point. Education levels are lower in Bihar, infant mortality is higher, and more of Bihar’s citizens live below the poverty line than in the rest of the country. Indian intellectuals joke that the government would happily hand off the long-disputed region of Kashmir to Pakistan—if Pakistan would only agree to adopt disastrous Bihar as well. One Bihari politician liked to quip that kidnappings were his state’s sole industry.

Bihar remains as feudal as medieval Europe; land is the primary source of power. The landowning castes have never been Brahmins, though. According to the laws of Manu, members of the highest caste were supposed to live in poverty, collecting alms in return for priestly work. These days, there are other acceptable Brahmin occupations for the educated, such as accounting work and government jobs. But undereducated Brahmins such as Radha’s late husband are pretty much relegated to joblessness in India’s caste-based economy. He was as
landless as the Dalits who toiled in the fields, and unlike the merchant and warrior castes who fell beneath him on the hierarchy, he had no traditional occupation except one that required an education. Bhaneshwar’s last name guaranteed him nothing other than a sense of entitlement.

Like so many others who could not survive on the land, Bhaneshwar fled Bihar for Delhi in search of work. It took him more than three days to get to Delhi by the cheapest bus and train tickets. When he arrived, he tracked down Joginder, who found him work as a
chowkidar—a
neighborhood guard—with a monthly income of eleven dollars. This he supplemented by selling roasted corn from a stall on the side of the road: six rupees for two ears. It took Bhaneshwar many months to be able to afford to send for Radha, and when he did, they began their married life in a tiny bamboo shelter offered to him by his employer. Radha could cook only one meal a day—though this was an improvement, because even that much was not a certainty in the village.

When Bhaneshwar fell ill, he didn’t want to take a day off work to see a doctor, so he ignored his fever. By the time Joginder took him to the hospital, he was unable to walk. He had some kind of infection that spread to his brain—Radha and Joginder called it “brain fever.” He slipped into a coma and died a few days later.

Radha scarcely remembered anything of the days after that.

“When they told me he wouldn’t survive, I went into a trance. I was three months pregnant with Sujla.
Ay, bhagwan
.”

Joginder remembered, though. He told me he escorted Radha and her two young children back to her husband’s village. They performed the cremation rituals, and she sat through the mourning period. Six months later, she gave birth to her daughter Sujla.

Radha’s parents-in-law granted her a few days to recover from the birth before they kicked her out. They’d done their duty while she was pregnant, they told her, but they couldn’t be responsible for feeding her and her children anymore. Among strict high-caste Hindus, women who have lost their husbands are considered bad luck. Traditionally, Brahmin widows were forced to shave their heads, join an ashram, and give their children away to their relatives. But Bhaneshwar’s parents
didn’t want the children, so Radha piled everyone onto a bus back to Delhi.

Joginder, the neighborhood advocate for Bihari immigrants, found Radha a job doing the only thing she knew how to do—housework. That took only a few days; she needed much longer to snap out of her self-pitying daze. The ignominy of her life as a working widow haunted her, and was made much worse by the kind of work that she did. Radha described her life after her husband’s death as a series of humiliations.

“Brahmins are not supposed to clean other people’s houses,
deedee
. But this is my fate.”

One of the few facts of her life that she told me clearly and repeatedly was that she would not be working if her husband were alive. Even when Bhaneshwar’s former employer took pity on her and rescued her from the bamboo shack, the alternative didn’t amount to much of an improvement: He gave her enough money to buy a
jhuggi
, a rough shack with a tin roof in a slum. Radha’s new home was on the banks of the Yamuna River, a tributary of the holy Ganges. Although it is a sacred body of water, it is best known as Delhi’s sewer, because it is filled with the toxic effluent of thousands of unregulated factories. For Radha, though, the worst part about the slums was not the polluted living conditions; it was being forced to live in close proximity to Muslims and Dalits.

“In the village, we Brahmins don’t intermingle with these people. If an untouchable passed by my house in the village, he would never expect to be let inside.” Her chin was lifted; she met my eye directly. “Now these people live all around. There is nowhere in the big city you can live alone peacefully among your own caste people, without these others crowding around you.”

Radha showed up at the apartment one morning with her face tortured into an exaggerated expression of concern. My maid was undeniably
filmy
, the word Indians use to describe a propensity for melodrama. Even before she spoke, my thoughts flashed to a formula my mother had come up with when she was living in Karachi: one tragedy per servant per month. Her six servants came to her with terrible stories—the death
of a four-year-old daughter, an attack of malaria, and one outlandish tale about a brother who’d had all his toes chopped off in a prisoner-of-war camp. They wanted money for funerals and hospital visits, and my mother accepted that her role as memsahib of the household was to hand it out. She settled on twenty dollars each per disaster.

Because Geeta and Parvati thought I was being ripped off all the time, I was constantly trying to work out whether there was a subtext in my interactions with my servants. It didn’t seem as though Radha was after money this time, though; there was panic in her voice that I hadn’t heard before.

“They’re saying our
jhuggi
is going to be destroyed. Some big government babu showed up this morning and told us they’re going to knock down the whole shantytown!”

She’d paid sixty dollars for her shanty. That was two months’ wages, an unbearable sum to lose. The government routinely bulldozes homes in urban India, because they are illegal structures occupied by squatters. Maneesh told us that her previous home had been destroyed a few years before.

Some forty million Indians are illegal squatters in
bustees
. They are the underside of the new India, the migrant workers who fuel the fast-expanding economy. The Indian government never built low-income housing for its rural migrants, as did the United States, Europe, and, more recently, China. Instead, immigrants from the hinterlands rely on city slumlords, who pay off local politicians to protect the slums. The politicians allow the shantytowns to stay standing because that guarantees them the votes of the inhabitants and protects their careers. It’s a perfect circle of corruption, at least until the politician is voted out of power. Then the city comes in with bulldozers.

This time, the Supreme Court had ordered all “riverbed encroachments” to be cleared, in an effort to save the Yamuna from further pollution. Tens of thousands of people were expected to be moved out of their shanties on the Yamuna Pushta, the embankment of the river. Radha had a flicker of hope in a rumor she’d heard that the Delhi government was allotting alternate land, far outside the city, to
jhuggi
owners
who could produce their paperwork. The idea of trying to negotiate India’s opaque officialdom was deeply intimidating to Radha, though. With neither formal education nor street smarts, she found it a challenge just to get around the city on a normal day. Radha couldn’t tell time, so she had to rely on the height of the sun in the sky, and it was often blocked by buildings or smog. She couldn’t read numbers, so I made calls for her on my home phone. She always asked someone on the street which bus to board; she couldn’t identify the bus routes from the signs.

Luckily, Radha had her teenage son, Babloo, to help her manage city life. With no other man around, he’d considered himself the head of her household since he could walk. Babloo had grown into a serious fifteen-year-old with his mother’s black emotional eyes. He’d started working in a doctor’s office two years before, answering phones after school a few days a week. He told me that even though he gave all his income to his mother, he wished he could earn more than he did, so that she could quit the job she considered so demeaning.

Radha wouldn’t hear of it. For all her provincialism, she was a firm believer in the importance of education. She often said that she wanted to make sure her children weren’t
moorks
, or “idiots,” like her, unable to read or write. She wanted her daughters to finish high school before they married, and she had high Brahminical ambitions for her son. Because Babloo attended a Hindi-language high school, she’d asked me to tutor him in English, which I did for most of the years I lived in Delhi. She hoped he’d achieve what few from the slums manage to do: go to college and pull himself into the middle class.

It was with Babloo’s future in her sights that Radha endured the daily unpleasantness of her life. At four each morning, she collected the family’s allotment of water from the shared outdoor tap, and woke Babloo so he could take his cold bucket bath before dawn. He combed his hair back with palm oil so it would hold the pattern of the comb’s teeth through the morning. He visited the Sai Baba temple every Thursday afternoon to pray for his family’s health, and never neglected to collect two packets of milk from the local dairy on his way home. His mother’s shame about their low status defined his life. Only occasionally did he
act his age. Radha told me, laughing, that she once caught him in front of the cracked mirror in their shack, doing a dance step and smoothing his hair with his hand, imitating his favorite Bollywood hero.

Babloo had kept the ownership papers for their
jhuggi
carefully folded under the mattress. He made sure their name was added to the government list so they would be allotted new land, and was advised by neighbors that they could make a profit if they sold it and rented a place elsewhere. Other slum dwellers lost everything during the Yamuna Pushta demolitions, and an unnumbered, unnamed few were even buried under the rubble of their destroyed homes, according to some reports I read. But Radha made out pretty well from the ordeal. With the money they made off the land, they were able to rent a room in a tenement, in a pukka building made of cement.

When she told me how relieved she was to have moved out of her ramshackle shanty, I’d joke that I was going to follow her home one day and stay with her in her nice apartment. She’d look pleased for a moment, and then add quickly, “No,
deedee
, you wouldn’t like it. It isn’t in a nice place.” Her reaction reminded me of the obsequious character Dr. Aziz in
A Passage to India
, the E. M. Forster novel set in colonial India. He’s so embarrassed about his run-down bungalow that he comes up with a complicated and ill-fated scheme to prevent his British friends from seeing it. I didn’t want to imagine that my uppity Brahmin maid harbored similar insecurities about her memsahib. I told myself she was just being modest and pestered her to take me home to meet her daughters until she gave in.

Radha’s neighborhood was only a twenty-minute walk away, but it was literally on the other side of the Nizamuddin tracks from my middle-class enclave, and I’d never been there. The track crossing was closed when we got there, and the midmorning heat was beating down on the traffic that had accumulated on either side: vendors with wooden handcarts of hard oranges and tiny red onions; impatient families piled on scooters, the men with handkerchiefs tied across their mouths to protect against the dust; a group of boys stacked sweatily inside the cab of an industrial-size rickshaw, its cargo of burlap sacks of flour slowly leaking white dust onto the pavement. Since the rail crossing could be
closed for two or three hours at a time, Radha told me that pedestrians rarely waited for it to lift; instead, they scanned the tracks and darted across. Of course, she added nonchalantly, a couple were killed by oncoming trains each day.

We tried to make our way across quickly without stumbling on the raised rails. I was eyeing the distance for an oncoming train, so at first I didn’t notice the desiccated feces scattered on the tracks. Since Indian trains don’t have flush toilets, the passengers’ business falls straight down. Radha shot me an embarrassed glance.