Sideways on a Scooter (24 page)

The mother line—a crass exploitation of the importance of family connections in India—almost always worked. The besieged driver relented and waved us in. I let out a righteous huff, and Jessica followed me, looking intimidated.

We drove in silence for a few moments before she said, “You were really yelling out there, Miranda. How much extra was he trying to charge you?”

I was surprised by the disquiet in her voice. The bargaining session had seemed fairly routine.

“Not that much, but it doesn’t matter whether it is five rupees extra or fifty rupees—”

She interrupted my customary rant against Delhi’s dishonest drivers and cheating vegetable sellers.

“I know, I know, you’ve told me. It’s the principle of the thing. But … it’s still only a few cents. Who cares?”

I had no reply. After a moment, she asked, “What did you call him, anyway?”

“Oh. Um … I called him a sister-fucker.”

It somehow sounded a lot worse in English. A few days later, Jessica told me, as perhaps only a sister can, that she thought I had been a nicer person before I moved to India.

Sometimes, I’d feel a surge of true memsahib anger at my maid. Once, Radha threw away a plastic jug of wildflowers I’d put out on the dining room table; I found them in the garbage, jug and all. When I asked why, her Hindi sped up incomprehensibly. That evening, when Parvati stopped by, I showed her the jug and asked what was going on. She broke into her trademark cackle.

“You put flowers in
that
? That’s not a flower vase, that’s a bathroom jug!”

I was tired of missing the joke and amusing everyone with my
feringhee
blunders.

“I know it’s not a vase, but it’s not something I use in the bathroom,” I insisted.

“Well, I guess you use toilet paper, but the rest of us millions of Indians use these jugs to clean ourselves after we go to the toilet. That’s the only thing this type of plastic jug is used for. Radha’s Brahmin hair must have stood up on its end when she saw it on the table you eat off.”

Compared to disinfectant-obsessed America, India at first appeared to be coated with filth and grime. But in fact, the dirt is neither uniform nor ubiquitous. Purity of the body is one of the most important aspects
of Hinduism; even sweat and spit should be purged before praying or eating. Indians place a strong emphasis on personal hygiene, even if it isn’t immediately apparent. Slum dwellers crap in the fields and let their kids wander barefoot through fetid alleys; still, each morning they wash themselves at the public tap with a carefully preserved strip of family soap. Every Indian woman has mastered the skill of rinsing herself through her sari. Only the middle classes wear deodorant, though, which makes for pungent experiences on packed trains. Some of the poor take the edge off their body odor by patting themselves with baby powder in the mornings, creating a ghostly effect as it sifts out of their clothes into a white sheen on their arms and necks.

Indians draw a bright line between “inside dirt” and “outside dirt” and have a strict code of conduct for distinguishing between them. Most families are willing to endure the stench of a garbage dump as long as their kitchen is immaculate. Removing street shoes inside is only one part of the code of conduct; when Radha saw me walking barefoot around the apartment, she’d demand that I put on my indoor
chappal
s. The idea that I might step into the bathroom without shoes was repulsive to her, because she considered it the epicenter of filth. Many Indians reserve a separate set of
chappal
s for use in the bathroom. No matter how much it is scrubbed, it can never really be clean; it is, after all, the place where the body’s waste is expelled. Since only the lowest castes will touch latrines, they are often left to fester.

Mahatma Gandhi waged an unglamorous lifelong campaign to improve the conditions of India’s toilets. The bathroom, he said, is “a temple.… It should be so clean and inviting that anyone would enjoy eating there.” In a bid to eliminate the stigma of latrines, Gandhi required all the residents of his ashram to take turns doing Dalits’ work. When he first imposed this rule on his household, even his wife, Kasturba, refused, saying it demeaned her high-caste status. He eventually convinced her to live by his principles, though he didn’t have as much success with the rest of India. In my house, Radha resolutely ignored the bathrooms, so I cleaned the toilet bowls myself and paid Maneesh extra to do the floors.

When Parvati’s mother came to stay with her, Parvati told me she
actually had to keep her Dalit servant, Promila, out of her apartment. Her mother couldn’t stomach having a filthy garbage collector inside a small space with her, and certainly not in the kitchen. Parvati had hired Promila to do the tasks of an untouchable—cleaning the stairs and taking out the garbage—and after a while moved her up to the better-paid tasks usually reserved for the higher castes—chopping vegetables and washing dishes. For Parvati, allowing a Dalit into her kitchen was a way to prove that she was no longer defined by the highly stratified society that she’d grown up in. But her mother was having none of it.

“She considers Promila filthy because she picks up garbage with her hands. In fact, my mom won’t eat my food if Promila so much as enters the kitchen.”

“What if Promila washes her hands when she comes in?”

Parvati laughed. There was a bitter edge to it.

“My mother wouldn’t be satisfied even if she bathed in Dettol disinfectant for two days.”

Promila had recently caused a bit of a scandal when she’d informed Parvati, and her other employers in the building, that she was not an untouchable. Her name, Promila, was not a Dalit name, she pointed out. While this was true, Parvati had heard Promila’s husband calling her by the Dalit name Sushila. Parvati suspected that her servant was trying to disguise her origins to improve her lot in life. She didn’t like being lied to, yet she couldn’t help but admire Promila’s bold ambition. She laughed as she told me that Promila would come by the apartment to try to irk her mother.

“She’ll take my hand and say in this high, sentimental voice, ‘Oh,
deedee
, don’t you miss me cleaning and cooking for you?’ My mother hates it. As soon as Promila leaves, she snaps at me, ‘Go wash your hands! That garbage-collector girl is filthy!’ ”

Promila wouldn’t have dared to try to disguise her caste if she were still back in her village, where the majority of Dalits live. Gandhi may have idealized the Indian village as “a complete republic” of enlightened agrarian life, but the Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar called it “a sink of localism, a den of ignorance.” The city was the only hope of escaping discrimination, he said. Of course, there is no way to know how many
untouchables try to discard their identifying last names. Even if they don’t, the city has an anonymizing effect, making it easier for them to avoid working as cobblers or street sweepers once they leave the rural areas.

“I was born a Hindu and I have suffered the consequences of untouchability. I will not die a Hindu,” Ambedkar declared in 1935. Toward the end of his life, he—along with half a million other Dalits—converted to Buddhism in a public ceremony. In the decades since, many millions have followed his lead. Unless they clamber onto a bus to Delhi or Mumbai, though, Dalits are rarely able to transcend their caste. In their villages, they are known as “converted Dalits.”

If my apartment had become the proving ground for Radha’s caste pride, Maneesh was the standard against which she measured herself. The two maids would squat on the floor gossiping—though never as equals. Maneesh was careful not to interrupt Radha or disagree with her opinions, and Radha tossed out regular reminders of her innate superiority to Maneesh. When she found food in the fridge that was more than a couple of days old, she’d say, “You shouldn’t eat this. I certainly wouldn’t—give it to Maneesh.”

Radha’s disdain for her low-caste colleague was complicated by the fact that her life was not materially better than Maneesh’s. Yes, Maneesh had to clean bathrooms and collect garbage, but Radha had to mop floors on all fours. Both were only a crisis or two away from irredeemable poverty.

The main difference was that Maneesh shared little of Radha’s shame about her low status or lack of material wealth. She’d been asking me to come home with her for more than a year, and I decided to make the trip when she told me her niece was about to get married. Geeta shuddered when I told her my weekend plan. She found it hard to comprehend why I would spend my free time making anthropological excursions into the ugliest parts of India—and this time I wasn’t even reporting a story. It also made Geeta nervous to think of the negative impressions I might come back with after inspecting the least-proud aspects of her country.

When we got close to Maneesh’s neighborhood, we climbed out of the car and left it with K.K. The alleys in her area were too narrow for rickshaws, let alone wider vehicles. Maneesh lifted the edges of her
salwar
pants so they wouldn’t drag in the mud, tugged her
dupatta
over her head, and led me down her lane. The familiar stench of sewage greeted us. Two bare-bottomed children were playing in the alley, naked except for a string tied around each of their waists. Their kohl-lined eyes and skinny frames gave them an unearthly aspect. They trailed after us, far more interested in the
feringhee
than they were in the sewage-splattered pig lying comatose nearby with a few granules of yellow grain stuck to its snout.

Someone had pressed green-brown henna handprints into the whitewashed concrete walls of the building, decorations for the wedding celebrations. Above the cement staircase, a battered gold paper banner read, in Hindi, “Bless this marriage.” Maneesh, her husband, and their two teenage sons shared the place—three rooms, a bathing area, and a separate latrine—with her husband’s brother and his family. It felt palatial compared to Radha’s room. Maneesh’s sons slept out on the patio at night, rather than next to her, as Radha’s son did.

“I lived in a
jhuggi
growing up, made of mud brick with a hay roof. This is better,” Maneesh pronounced.

I gave her sister-in-law a box of sweets to congratulate her on the wedding, and a young cousin brought us cups of
chai
. The milky substance had been boiled into sticky goo that caught in my throat. I tried not to cough as I forced it down. Maneesh squatted off to the side. I noticed she was as deferential to her sister-in-law as she was to Radha, laughing amenably at her jokes and offering no conversation of her own. There is a strict hierarchy inside Hindu extended families, based on the birth order of the sons. Maneesh, married to the younger son, ranked second in their shared home. Her status was depreciated even further because her husband contributed no income to the family.

After her sister-in-law left the room, Maneesh gave me an unsentimental, matter-of-fact description of her life.

“My husband is not good,
deedee
. All he does is lie around and get drunk. He’s out gambling in the
bustee
now.”

Maneesh was about fourteen when her father got her married to his neighbor’s son, Om Prakash, a fellow Dalit. He’d worked cleaning floors in a public hospital in Delhi, but had recently decided it interfered too much with his drinking. Now, Maneesh said, he badgered her every night for money to buy hooch from the slum dealer.

“My husband always feels awful when he wakes up.” She referred to Om Prakash in the usual wifely way by not using his name. “He complains that his head hurts and his body aches. When I tell him it’s because he drinks too much, he starts slapping me around. But he beats me up even if I am quiet.”

Maneesh wasn’t making a bid for pity, simply stating the sorrowful facts as they were. Her concern was now for her sons, who seemed to be following Om Prakash’s example: Both had dropped out of school after sixth grade and refused to get jobs. She didn’t expect her sons or husband to show up to the wedding celebrations over the next few days.

“Everyone said giving birth to two sons was my good luck, but maybe not.” She pushed herself up from her haunches. “This topic is too sad for the wedding season. Let’s hope the bride’s fate will be better than mine.”

The bride was surrounded by visitors, so we didn’t spend much time with her. In the car on my way home with K.K., a city bus lurched to a halt beside us. Delhi public buses are the cheapest mode of transportation; scarred and rusted like abandoned hulks at a scrap metal dump, they cruise through the streets as if they’ve been raised from the dead. This one had glassless window panes and bare metal benches; the outside was encrusted with red
paan
spit and greenish-yellow vomit stains. Inside, passengers swayed hip to hip in the vehicle’s sickening lurch. All but the poorest classes avoid city buses in Delhi—especially women, because eve-teasing on board is almost inevitable. In the years I lived there, I only once traveled by public bus, and I was fondled by so many different hands during that fifteen-minute interval that I jumped off the first time it came to a full stop.

I imagined Maneesh wedging her tiny body into a sliver of space on one of these buses each morning, strands of hair flattened to her forehead with sweat. I wondered what she thought about as the bus pushed
through the Delhi smog and traffic, taking her to another day of collecting other people’s trash.

Radha had been glassy-eyed with a high temperature for days, but she refused to let me take her to the clinic, saying she’d already invested in a visit to her own temple doctor. She pulled a small brown-paper packet of unmarked white pills out of her sari blouse and, with some pride, informed me that his complex system of medication was too complicated for anyone else to understand.

Then she stopped showing up for work. Eventually, Joginder came by. She had cholera, he said, a severe bacterial infection that leads to such a rapid loss of body fluid that some patients die within days. Joginder was taking a collection in the neighborhood to help her get moved to a better hospital, because she wasn’t getting enough rehydration therapy in the public facility.