Sideways on a Scooter (23 page)

“I hate having to come this way.”

On the other side, the street shimmied into a crooked laneway. Stagnant gray pools of gutter sewage lay between the sidewalk and the small houses. A stream of dirty bathwater spewed out of a window into the alley below, and I looked up to see a woman swinging her long, wet hair inside the window. Kids squatted in the dirt over their games of sticks and pebbles, their brown hair bleached orange-red by malnourishment. We passed a whitewashed temple, where Radha said a “miracle
puja
doctor” worked. Through the windows, I could see a long line of patients snaking through the dark interior.

Her concrete apartment building loomed enormous in the tiny lane. The hallways echoed with the squalor of a refugee camp—the sounds of many families living in close proximity and great poverty. On each of the four floors were thirty apartments, in each of which were crammed as many as twelve people. Radha shared latrines and bathing rooms with sixty of her neighbors. At the entrance to her apartment, I kicked off my shoes and followed her in, but then I couldn’t figure out what to do with myself. I’d visited dozens and dozens of shacks and slum dwellings on reporting assignments all across India, and had sometimes wondered whether the tight quarters explained the emotional closeness in Indian family relationships. But my own servant’s home was smaller than most of them. It was shocking that Radha paid any rent at all for this place—a single room the size of my bathroom.

Her sixteen-year-old daughter, Pushpa, was cross-legged on a cot, squinting at a textbook in the dim light. She smiled shyly, like a much younger girl, and gestured for me to climb up beside her onto the bed,
which was raised off the floor with bricks to create space beneath. From this perch, I looked around. Long ago, someone had painted the walls an eerie combination of baby-girl pink and putrid green; now the garish colors were muted by years of soot from the stove. The sole window in the place looked out into the hallway; a curtain was pulled across it for privacy. The only other light came from a fluorescent tube. A shelf shrine with plastic statues of Ganesh and Krishna took up most of the wall space. Stacked in one corner were the family’s electrical appliances: a battered fan and an outdated TV whose enormous antenna was doing little to appease the static snowing across the screen.

I thought of how pleased Radha had looked when I’d bought my first TV in India. Even though it was no bigger than my laptop screen, it was nonetheless a brand-new television with a cable connection, which seemed to make her feel proud of the home she worked in. Her own set received only the government-run channels—that is, when there was electricity in the building. If Radha finished her day’s duties at my apartment early, she’d crouch on her haunches directly in front of my TV, pushing the buttons on the set—she was intimidated by the remote—until she found a Hindu prayer channel. As the camera panned across tens of thousands of pilgrims trooping toward a sacred site, her features would relax into righteous pleasure. “With God’s blessing, one day I’ll also visit Somnath Temple,” she’d say.

I recognized my old minifridge crowded into the electrical appliance corner of the room. The power surges had eventually killed it, and I’d thrown it away—or so I’d thought. My heart suddenly pounded. Why hadn’t Radha just told me she wanted the broken refrigerator? She followed my eyes.

“
Deedee
, I took your old fridge because we didn’t have one. I was embarrassed to ask you for it.”

I’d never noticed the streaks of gray in her hair before. We sat in silence for a moment, listening to Pushpa scribbling in her notebook with a pencil stub.

“Well, if you got it working again, then I’m glad you took it.”

Radha set her jaw.

“The electrician wallah was going to charge fifty rupees just to look
at it. I told him, I got this for free, why would I spend that much on it? So I just use it for storing food. It keeps the bugs out of the chapati flour.”

As if on cue, a big brown cockroach scuttled across the floor. Earlier that year, when I’d found roaches in my apartment, Radha and I had spent several mornings strategizing about how to eliminate them. She’d instructed me to buy a chalklike homeopathic remedy, and in my desperation I’d complied. She’d drawn circles with it around the apartment and sworn that roaches wouldn’t dare enter inside the lines because they were afraid of the stuff.

I’d never have guessed that the woman who bent down on her swollen knees to mop my floors to a luminous sheen lived in filth and squalor herself. Maybe because Radha couldn’t apply her Brahminical notions of purity and pollution to her own home, she applied them instead to mine. I looked away so she wouldn’t see the tears that welled up in my eyes. I wished I hadn’t made her bring me here. Perhaps I really was no different from my great-aunt Edith, the British missionary decked out in a long frock and a European sun helmet who spent her life imposing her religion on the pagans. In spite of all my efforts to tread carefully in India, I was living out my own
Passage to India
story.

Female foreign correspondents have a bad reputation in expat circles: For the most part, we’re considered either hard-boiled and callous, or desperate and flirtatious. I couldn’t help but notice that the women journalists in Delhi were disproportionately young and single. Our male counterparts were generally older and more successful, and most of them were accompanied in Delhi by wives and kids. I’d banded together with the few other women my age. We’d often get together for brunches or drinks at someone’s apartment and compare notes. We traveled too much and were beholden more to news schedules than to our own plans; most of us had messy personal situations as a result, but all of us got a high from the overseas reporter’s life.

My friends and I would talk sometimes about what a rush it was to be intimately involved in the goings-on of the world, not from a newsroom in New York or Washington but from the center of the story. I felt
lucky to get to see the wild beauty of places that were difficult to visit as a tourist, such as rebel-occupied Sri Lanka. My job allowed me to feel as though I was seeing the world from the inside out: I got to talk to poppy farmers and politicians, police recruits and militants, people whose dreams and expectations were completely different from my own. Whether I was sitting cross-legged in a Mumbai slum or running toward a building under siege in Srinagar, I was living life intensely.

Like my friends, I’d become somewhat addicted to the thrills of unexpected travel and reporting under harrowing circumstances. I still believe that working as a foreign correspondent is the only job I will ever truly love—but that doesn’t mean it was good for me.

One night, curled into comfortable chairs in my friend M.P.’s enormous Delhi apartment, we tried to come up with a list of women who’d succeeded in holding on to both a globe-trotting reporter job and a stable partnership. We expanded the list to include women we didn’t know in person; still, we couldn’t think of more than six names. Adding children to the formula narrowed the list even further, to a mere two. It was one thing to talk abstractly about how being a reporter overseas required a sacrifice. Seeing the hard data inspired a new round of soul-searching.

My friends and I came up with a code phrase to describe the stark life of the long-term female foreign correspondent: “Miserable Jen,” as we’d nicknamed a journalist we knew in Delhi. She’d been reporting from overseas for more than twenty years, and her skin was leathery from sun and alcohol. At parties, she laughed too loudly and sometimes bragged about flings with her Afghan and Pakistani translators. Miserable Jen was the only foreigner I knew who’d caught dengue fever, a mosquito-borne disease also called “breakbone fever” because that’s apparently what it feels like. When I’d tried to sympathize with her about it, she waved me off dismissively, saying she’d already had it twice before, in Africa.

Jen was one of the few reporters I knew who actively lobbied her paper to send her back to Baghdad after it became so dangerous that it was difficult to get out and do any real reporting. It was hard to believe it was still good for her career at that point.

“Maybe she likes Baghdad because the odds are good,” M.P. joked.

M.P. liked to say “the odds are good, but the goods are odd” to describe the many opportunities for liaisons we had while living overseas. We’d all noticed what Geeta complained about: the paucity of single Indian men over the age of thirty. Married Indian men were more than happy to have affairs with feringhee girls, but that was not what we were after. The single expats we met in places such as Baghdad, Delhi, and Kabul were reporters, UN workers, and security contractors; it naturally followed that they were drifters, swashbucklers, or womanizers, generally uninterested in real relationships. Like them, we, too, were searching for bright flare-ups to grant us fleeting solace from the fear and sadness we so often witnessed and felt.

Miserable Jen worked hard and was often first on the story, but she no longer seemed to have any real interest in the places or people she covered. She’d get drunk and spit that she hated India and all its whiny inhabitants. Worst of all, Miserable Jen made other people miserable. After she left India, her translator told us that she’d often found her in the mornings passed out in her home office, a bottle of gin under the desk. When she came to, Jen would holler and throw things at her employees.

The sordid tale became a reverse source of inspiration to my friends and me.

“We will not become like Miserable Jen!” we’d promise one another, raising our glasses of overpriced imported red wine.

Most Westerners who visit India can agree that it inspires love or hate, or both. The German novelist and Academy Award–winning screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala said that some Westerners “loathe it, some love it, most do both.” Jhabvala married an Indian and lived in India for most of her adult life, and yet her conflicting emotions about the place seemed to only grow stronger. In her 1957 book
Out of India
, Jhabvala wrote that she felt “strapped to a wheel that goes round and round,” cycling between tremendous enthusiasm for India and thinking that everything in it was “abominable.”

Expats often claim that the only way to get anything done in India is
to be rude, and they may be repeating what they’ve heard middle-class Indians say. I think the extreme stratification of India’s caste system makes it more acceptable to take advantage of people, because inside every interaction lurk station, caste, and wealth. Everyone I knew in India abused power, at least occasionally. Parvati brought out her “Delhi bitch” around government bureaucrats, rickshaw drivers, shopkeepers, and anyone else who got in her way. She had an affectionate relationship with her servant, Promila, but she wasn’t above cussing her out for a minor infraction such as chopping the carrots before rinsing them. Another Indian friend would smack her driver on the head so hard that the
thwunk
would reverberate through the car whenever he got lost or drove too fast.

I had my own such moments; it wasn’t for nothing that my Delhi friends called me “Demanda.” At some point, I’d started to think it was acceptable to yell when things didn’t go my way. Since that happens pretty routinely when you are an outsider in a developing country, I was quite often unhinged. Once, while waiting in the Lahore airport for information about the next flight out of Pakistan, I stormed up to the counter several times to holler that I needed to know what was going on. That part was not unusual; the reason I remember the event is because I eventually turned in aggravation to an expat journalist I vaguely knew who was standing near me and said, “No information about these canceled flights. Doesn’t it make you want to kill someone?”

“I just try to think of something else,” he replied coolly from behind his sunglasses.

I took a step back. It was a pitch-perfect rendering of what my phrase-coining friend M.P. called “third-world Zen.” She’d spent seventeen years in Asia trying to hone this state of mind herself. It was harder in India, she said, thanks to the legacy of colonialism, which allows foreigners to be treated like high-caste dukes and duchesses. I’d often find myself whisked to the front of the line and escorted to the cleanest toilet, privileges that were easy to take for granted.

I didn’t realize that the memsahib treatment had gone to my head, but my family and friends back home did. My aunt Susie once sent me a care package consisting exclusively of Buddhist books, a not-so-subtle
prod to get me to calm down and treat people more kindly. One of the books suggested turning up the sides of your mouth, just ever so slightly, in what it called a small inner smile. I tried to practice that, sitting in the back of a rickshaw or walking through the market: smile my Buddhist half smile, try to think sympathetic thoughts, and take things less seriously. Of course, all I really wanted to do when I found myself lost again and late to another appointment was scream like a madwoman into the oven-hot air and smack the face of one of those ogling teenage boys.

Parvati was right when she warned me that I’d need to toughen up to make it in a harsh city such as Delhi, and that was even more the case in Kabul and Karachi. As I lay in bed listening to the sounds of a hostile city outside my hotel room window, I could almost feel myself growing another layer of skin. Soon, I imagined, nothing would be able to get through, and I’d become Super Reporter Girl—the hard-ass star of the movie of my life.

I got an inkling of the toll South Asia had taken on my personality when my younger sister, Jessica, came to visit me in Delhi. K.K. was away in his village that week, so we set out into Nizamuddin market to hail an auto-rickshaw. I dreaded this part of the morning, because Delhi rickshaw drivers consistently refuse to run the meter and always overcharge their customers, assuming that
feringhees
, even more than the rest of Delhi’s population, are suckers. Parvati had taught me to bargain aggressively to avoid paying the extra fare, even if it required yelling and cussing in Hindi. After a couple of drivers named outrageous prices, I launched into an attack on one of them, using Parvati language: “You bloody
behen chode
! Do you really think you can charge that? Is this how you would treat your mother?”