Sideways on a Scooter (25 page)

When it comes to health care, India is rather like nineteenth-century America, where local healers, bloodletters, and ministers served as general practitioners for their communities. In modern-day India, mainstream doctors face competition not just from local quacks and temple doctors, but also from alternative doctors who have been officially endorsed by the Indian government. The Indian ministry of health has a branch specifically dedicated to such therapies: the Department of Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathy. With a name like that, even the acronym, AYUSH, is amusing. When I saw the hand-painted sign outside the building in Delhi, I thought it was a joke. In fact, it’s just the Indian government’s effort to cover all bases: Unani medicine for conservative Muslims, Ayurveda for South Indians, and homeopathy for the middle class. Almost everyone I knew in India would visit the homeopath before seeing a mainstream doctor. Geeta referred to practitioners of Western scientific medicine as “allopathic doctors,” the dismissive term coined by the founder of homeopathy.

By my American standards, health care in India was fabulously cheap. I didn’t even have health insurance in India, because I was certain
I could afford to pay for whatever treatment I needed, and because almost no one has insurance, 80 percent of health-care costs are paid out of pocket. Indian companies manufacture generic versions of almost every medication, which keeps the prices down. Not only that, but few Indian pharmacists demand to see a prescription before doling out drugs.

Health care didn’t seem cheap to my maids, though. Although Maneesh had cataracts in both her eyes, she couldn’t afford the private hospital fees, nor could she bear the idea of joining the crowds outside the government-funded All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), a prestigious medical college where she could get it done practically for free. At AIIMS, patients pay as little as twenty-five cents for treatment; almost four million people flock there each year. The streets around the hospital are filled with moaning piles of the sick. Having journeyed from their villages, they wait for treatment for days or even weeks. Inside, signs in English and Hindi above the hallway sinks plead, “Please do not clean cloth & utensils.”

At the Kachhwa Mission Hospital outside Varanasi, where my great-aunt Edith worked in the 1940s and ’50s, several hundred patients would cram into the compound every day. They were suffering from the range of urgent problems that regularly killed Indians seventy years ago—snakebites, tuberculosis, smallpox. Since Edith’s day, the government has begun running regular vaccination programs in villages and has established a lot more rural clinics. Many are open only a few hours a week, though, which isn’t much help to those Indians who continue to suffer from infectious diseases that disappeared from the Western world decades ago.

It was six weeks before Radha returned, heavy lidded and slow moving. Priya and I decided to tell her that she shouldn’t cook for us for a while, since cholera can be transmitted through contaminated food. This seemed to make Radha worry that her sickness had undermined her superior status in our household.

“
Arre?
You had Maneesh cleaning for you while I was gone? Did she cook for you too?”

Priya reassured her that she had not abandoned her Brahmin principles and fallen so low as to have a Dalit make her food. Still, she
pointed out that no Delhi apartment can go six weeks without a sweep, which only made Radha more catty.

“Well, it doesn’t look as though Maneesh did much to improve it. She left dirty spots on the floors, and the dishes are greasy.”

I made a disapproving face. Radha huffed off into the bathroom, where she spent the next hour kneading away at the pile of our dirty clothes, pushing her hair from her forehead, looking like nothing so much as an overworked
dhobi
laboring on a polluted riverbed. She made a show of meticulously dusting the bookshelves—her least favorite job—and when I put a hand on her shoulder to stop her, she snapped at me. Her eyes still looked feverish.

“How much more do you pay me than Maneesh?”

I wondered what this was about. Was Radha angling for another raise?

“Maneesh only collects the garbage,” I reminded her. “You get paid more because you do way more work.”

She swiped the bookshelf aggressively with her dusting cloth. I was about to walk away when she hissed, “It still isn’t right to give her the recycling!”

So
that’s
it, I thought. The recycling. In a country where everything is worth something, my yellowing newspapers and glass bottles were a valuable commodity. The Indian government doesn’t run a recycling program, and it doesn’t need to. The low-caste urban poor have created a complex private industry around discarded goods. Together, ragpickers, garbage sorters, and garbage collectors reuse and resell more than half of the country’s plastic, whereas only about 10 percent of plastic in the United States is recycled.

In Nizamuddin, the recyclables collector was an old man with a Muslim beard, who rode on a clunky bicycle. By early afternoon, his rear basket was weighed down with old paper and plastic. My neighbors referred to him as the
han-ji
wallah—the “yes man”—because he called out
“Han-jiiii!”
as he cycled around the neighborhood, dragging the Hindi word for “yes” into a long, memorable solicitation. He didn’t get my newspaper and bottles, though, because Radha had them as a
condition of her employment. She’d lug the piles downstairs and cart them off herself to the local recycling depot.

If the world were fair, Maneesh would have been the one to get the recycling. Probably the only real perk of the job she’d inherited from her ancestors was the right to sell the valuables she found in the trash. I’d often see her separating our garbage into little salable piles on the pavement outside our apartment. In her pile of things worth keeping: a shampoo bottle, a cracked mug, rusty bobby pins. There was something very sad, and also kind of intrusive, about the care Maneesh took with the discarded objects of my life. I’d find myself thinking about her when I threw stuff away, wondering whether a sturdy plastic bag or piece of ribbon would make it to her pile. Sometimes I’d see them in their new incarnations—Maneesh carried a ripped cloth purse, once a gift from my mother, tucked into the waistband of her
salwar
.

When Radha was sick and Maneesh asked for permission to recycle the growing stack of old newspapers in a corner of my office, I’d been unable to refuse. Now I had to make amends. I asked Radha to sit down with me in the living room. As usual, she refused the chair and squatted beside me.

“I hope you know that you are essential to our household, Radha. We both really missed you when you were sick.”

She shrugged like an offended teenager and looked down.

“I am in debt because of the hospital bills,
deedee.
”

I had already given Joginder money to help fund her hospital stay, but I felt inexplicably guilty. I offered to pay her what she would have earned from the recycling, and she nodded in grudging acceptance. Later, I saw her beckon Maneesh into the kitchen to explain the situation to the lesser maid in her imperious way.

“From now on,
deedee
says, only I get the paper and glass recycling. But I don’t want to deal with the plastic bottles. They aren’t worth much. Those, you can take.”

I
was watching Geeta have her facial hair removed. She had a long list of beautifications to achieve at Madame X before her arranged marriage meeting that evening. It was her first in a long time, and she was nervous, so I’d agreed to accompany her to the salon for moral support. Geeta only occasionally brought up her stagnated husband hunt these days. When she was feeling lighthearted, she’d joke that
Shaadi.com
should give her an award for the longest-running matrimonial ad, or that her marriage meetings were keeping Madame X in business, if nothing else. She’d also started saying, more pessimistically, that she wished she’d married Mohan. Even though he was “bad natured,” at least she wouldn’t have had to think about marriage anymore.

Her father had come up with the latest Shaadi prospect—Ashok, a Punjabi who worked for a technology firm in California. That qualified him as an NRI, the acronym for “nonresident Indian.” Since Indians first began emigrating to the West in large numbers, in the late 1960s, NRIs have registered right at the top of the husband hierarchy, even higher than engineers and doctors. Because they usually earned good
salaries, in dollars, they were considered the ticket out of an impoverished India. Now, of course, Indians no longer need to leave home for a well-paid job with a multinational company; still, many Indians persist in wanting to move overseas. Sixty-two percent of women looking for a husband say they would like an NRI, according to a Shaadi survey.

Geeta’s interest in an NRI husband was different: She thought he was more likely to be socially progressive than the average Indian boy. Her evidence for this theory came mostly from Bollywood. In fact, her model of an ideal husband was Shah Rukh Khan’s character, Raj, in the blockbuster film
DDLJ
. Raj, a second-generation Indian living in London, humbles himself to the heroine’s family to prove that he is worthy of her. In one scene, he is actually peeling vegetables in the kitchen with the women of the house—unthinkable in preglobalized Bollywood.

Even more memorably, Raj fasts along with the women during Karva Chauth, the annual festival when North Indian women refuse food and water between sunrise and moonrise to pray for the health and prosperity of their husbands. Geeta’s mother had observed the Karva Chauth fast every year since her marriage, and Geeta planned to do so for her husband, too, even though she’d once noted archly that there was no equivalent holiday during which husbands fast for the health of their wives. Seeing Raj go hungry all day in the name of his wife probably made Geeta overoptimistic about her options for an Indian husband.

More to the point, NRIs were more likely to be interested in marrying a girl over thirty, since they tend to be a little older themselves when they embark on the marriage search. Because the families of NRI boys usually expect their sons to marry Indian girls, NRIs make up a full third of Shaadi’s male members; the site has staked its business model on the commitment among Indian families to marrying their children to fellow Indians.

Ashok, whose online Shaadi handle was “NRIgroom,” was clearly taking advantage of the desirability of his overseas status. He had come back to India on what Geeta called a “marriage pilgrimage”—his parents
had flown him back to the homeland to help him find a wife. It’s a common practice among NRIs: The family sets up arranged marriage meetings with as many as two dozen girls, and their son is often engaged by the end of his two-week vacation in India.

Although Geeta referred to the marriage pilgrimage sardonically, I could tell she also found something comforting in its no-nonsense, pro forma attitude. At least this way, she said, she knew she was getting a boy whose family had committed him to an arranged marriage, which she hoped meant he’d be less ambivalent about the institution himself. In theory, Geeta had resigned herself to this type of marriage, but she still wasn’t sure, and she was fed up with meeting boys whom she had to sell the idea to. She’d made a point of telling Ashok in an instant message that she was “on the arranged marriage track,” and he’d messaged back that he agreed that love-cum-arranged was the best kind. That’s why he wanted to meet Geeta with his older sister in tow, he said; marriages worked better if they were approved by the family.

As good as this sounded, it raised an issue. Geeta’s parents couldn’t come with her to the meeting—they had a family wedding to attend. Geeta couldn’t bear the idea of sitting by herself opposite the boy and his older sister, as though he were the celebrity and she his agent. Determined not to give another boy the wrong impression by showing up unaccompanied for a marriage date, she asked me to come. A
feringhee
escort was better than none at all.

In trying to get married without a full protective network, Geeta found herself rewriting the rules. She was hardly alone in doing so, of course: Almost every young urban professional who goes for an arranged marriage in today’s India changes it up somehow. But unlike many globalized Indians, what Geeta wanted, more than anything, was an acceptable tradition through which to make the most important decision of her life. She was looking for someone who fell between two worlds, and there simply weren’t many of them out there: modern-minded boys interested in pairing off with a near stranger. Geeta used adjectives such as “conservative” to describe the kind of husband she wanted, but she also expected him to be sensitive and open-minded, meaning he couldn’t ask for dowry or forbid her to work outside the
home. In more than six years of arranged meetings, Geeta had only met a handful of boys who made the cut.

When Geeta told Sameena at Madame X that she wanted her back and arms waxed for the evening meeting, I forced myself not to smile. It still amazed me that Indian women were determined to rid their bodies of so much hair. On top of that, it scarcely seemed necessary: I knew that Geeta’s date would be lucky to catch a glimpse of her arm above her elbow, let alone her back. Nevertheless, I settled in for a long day and decided to get my nails painted while I was waiting. I chose a light pink shade, which seemed to say “sister of the bride” or, perhaps, “lady chaperone.” Watching the teenage stylist coat my nails with cheap lacquer, I felt a sudden qualm about my role that evening. Geeta had insisted that having me along would impress the NRI by demonstrating her comfort with Americans. But I was worried I would reveal the worst aspect of my Americanism and say something inappropriate. I wasn’t exactly schooled in the protocol of arranged marriage meetings.