Sideways on a Scooter (48 page)

Climbing into K.K.’s van, I remembered that Radha’s husband had once worked as a
chowkidar
in Nizamuddin. That was before he contracted “brain fever” and before I moved to the neighborhood that I now considered mine. Eventually these watchmen, too, would die or
move on, and new ones would replace them. The landlord would take down the brass plaque with my name on it, and Radha would find another house to work in. The hot season would come, the rickshaw drivers would curse at their customers, and still the crows would pester the monkeys in the trees. Nowhere would the children invent a game in which my name was.

T
wo years after I left Nizamuddin, I woke up to the
han-ji
wallah announcing himself on his bicycle with his drawn-out call. In an unlikely turn of fate, my old apartment was empty of tenants, and the landlord offered to let me stay in it for a couple of weeks. Being there exaggerated the sensation of drifting, specterlike, through my past. In Nizamuddin market, the cobbler and electrician were still industrious in their stalls. The press wallah stared at me from her perch on her charpoy as I walked past her that first day, unsure whether it was me or a different
feringhee
. She’d lost more of her teeth, so her lips were pulled flush against her gums. Her daughter, still as thin as a stalk of bamboo, was old enough to take care of the ironing herself now. She leaned the weight of her body on the coal-filled iron, pressing down onto a man’s white cotton shirt. Steam sizzled up in a shield shape. A mound of clothes behind her lit the hut with color and spoke of how much work they had to do before evening.

The air of the market was thick with the smell of raw sewage, released by the recent rains. It mingled with that of freshly cooked chapatis and
chickpea stew at the little local food stall. Several rickshaw drivers stood beside it, hastily gulping a morning meal to sop up their arrack-induced hangovers. A dog panted in a corner of shade—protruding ribs, dull eyes—too sapped of energy to beg for scraps. All was right in the world, except that the sign outside the Fitness Circle was gone and the door was sealed with a wire lock. I went over to inspect it more closely. The lock was wrapped with gauze and, ridiculously, covered with a wax seal, as though that made it impenetrable; clearly it was the work of the Delhi government.

The city authorities had been on a rampage recently of enforcing their widely ignored building codes. Like many small-business owners, Leslie didn’t have a commercial license to operate out of her basement space, but she’d never been especially worried about it. India’s government had neither the resources nor the will to consistently implement its rules, and city building regulations were ambiguous, filled with loopholes and opportunities for bribes. One day, though, without any notice, the city authorities showed up at the gym and declared they were locking the equipment inside.

With the Fitness Circle gone, it was hard to track down the gym ladies. None of them had cell phones—neither did Radha or Maneesh, for that matter. India may have lurched into economic success, but it had brought neither technology nor stability to my friends in the neighborhood. In fact, in a fast-changing, cheap-labor economy, their lives were even more vulnerable to sudden transformation than they would have been a generation ago. Now slums were routinely knocked down to make way for new hotels and malls; the upwardly mobile were getting rid of their own servants and transferring into new buildings with professional maids and garbage-collection services.

I spent days searching Nizamuddin for them all. I lurked outside the house where I’d heard Maneesh had been hired; I perched myself on Maniya’s charpoy waiting for Radha to appear; I wandered around the Muslim
bustee
hoping to run into Azmat. Eventually I saw her brother, Mehboob, on the street. He gave me the number for the family cell phone, and I called it until Azmat picked up. She sounded positively
giddy about reuniting with a former gym lady and promised she’d be over as soon as she changed into an outfit appropriate for afternoon tea.

I found it comforting to see that Azmat’s clothing tastes had not mellowed. She was wearing a hot pink
salwar kameez
outfit, the sleeves hung with beaded tassels. With evident pride, she handed me a gift of a handkerchief on which she had hand-painted her name and an orange flower: “So you will always remember me.” She said she missed the Fitness Circle so much that she couldn’t walk past the building anymore. Her loyalties to the ladies were astoundingly deep. If she’d come from my world, Azmat would have been president of the college alumni club.

“It’s bad to lose the income, but that’s not the worst part. It’s that it’s so much harder to keep up with what all the ladies are doing. It takes me days to find things out now! I hate it.”

Nevertheless, Azmat had an impressive stockpile of gossip about each of the ladies I could think to ask after. She’d been spending time with them again, because Leslie had started holding aerobics classes in her living room. The class was packed; she’d had to move the furniture into the front yard to make room for them all. Leslie had asked Usha to help, and they were now offering living room gym classes a couple of times a week.

“I’m glad to have something to fill my time,” Azmat said. “I still haven’t done my marriage,
deedee
, and that means I have a lot of time to sit around. No good boy has arrived.”

The only prospect who’d “arrived” for her was a boy who worked on a ship. He’d expressed interest through a mutual friend, but when Mehboob had discovered that the boy could be gone for up to a year at a time and that he had no family to speak of, he’d nixed him. In the meantime, a good boy
had
arrived for Azmat’s sister—not for the older sister, Rhemet, but for the youngest girl in the family, Khushboo, who was only eighteen.

Azmat called her sister’s suitor a “boy” because that’s the appropriate way to refer to an unmarried male, but Khushboo’s suitor was at least fifteen years older than she was. His family was cagey about his
exact age, either because they didn’t know it or because they wanted to disguise it; Leslie suspected it was the latter. Despite that drawback, and the fact that ignoring sibling chronology and marrying off Khushboo first could seriously impair the older sisters’ chances, Mehboob didn’t feel he could turn down the only acceptable proposal that had come in for any of them. Azmat seemed sympathetic to the decision: “She’s prettier and younger, so it was easier to find her a match.”

I was impressed, again, by her ability to not hold a grudge. Azmat was truly good-natured, I thought; a great catch for any boy. She no longer seemed to believe so herself, though. In the last year, Azmat told me, she’d suffered a serious setback in her marriageability.

“See these black spots on my face? They are from my uterus. I bought some skin-lightening cream, but still the spots aren’t going away.”

I’d forgotten that discussing matters of health with the gym ladies required a different vocabulary. It took some effort to assemble the facts. Eventually I made some sense of it: Azmat had been ill with a high fever for weeks, and she’d paid a visit to the local
bustee
homeopath. He’d told her that she would never have children.

“I went black,” she said, apparently referring to both her physical and mental state: She’d never get married if word got out that she was infertile. One of the gym ladies took Azmat to a real doctor, who gave her an ultrasound and told her that the homeopath was right—she had cysts on her uterus, which meant it should be removed. This doctor had agreed to allow Azmat to delay the surgery for a year, in the hope that she’d get married and pregnant before then. In the best-case scenario, he said, she’d be able to have only one child. Given the slow pace of her husband hunt so far, even this seemed optimistic.

The medical verdict sounded awfully extreme, but who was I to contradict the word of an Indian ladies’ doctor. When I talked to Leslie—the neighborhood health expert—about it, she said she’d given up trying to work out the facts; it was too frustrating. Instead, she said, she tried to focus on Azmat’s positive attitude about what was surely the worst crisis an Indian girl could face.

“When she was sick, she’d joke that at least she was losing weight
without working out. She has a good perspective on life. You know, when I was feeling depressed a couple of years ago, she told me that she was sure that life would turn out well for me because I’d helped people in the neighborhood. It didn’t matter whether it was true so much as that she believed it. But I wish the same could really be true for her.”

It took more than a week to get to Radha. I was pretty sure she was playing coy with me, either still annoyed at me for leaving or trying to prove that she didn’t need me anymore. I asked Joginder and three shop delivery boys to send her messages before she finally told one of them she’d meet me. In the rising heat of a September midday, she and Maniya were seated cross-legged on the charpoy in the alley. They eyed me affectionately as I walked toward them. Maniya’s boy was still playing cricket in the park, using a bigger stick for a bat now.

“It’s been such a long time,
deedee
. I didn’t think you were coming back.” She and Maniya were both smiling, or at least as much as I could expect them to—they looked pleased, in an understated, weary way. Radha’s voice was gruff as I sat down. “I had to take up two jobs after you left,
deedee
, because these people aren’t paying me well.”

She wanted to establish right off whether I was moving back into my old apartment. When I told her I wouldn’t be staying in Delhi for good, she informed me she only had a few minutes: “I’m glad to see you again, but I can’t just sit around and chat.” Babloo and Sujla would be waiting for her to make lunch.

She agreed to give me a quick update on the family essentials. First off, she informed me that Pushpa wasn’t yet pregnant. I absorbed the information with the solemnity with which I’d learned to treat all of Radha’s news.

“The girl has been trying,” added Maniya. “But still, no child has come.”

After a moment of silence for the lack of a grandson, Radha’s face brightened. Babloo was almost finished with his two-year college degree, she said. She’d send him over to my apartment to see me.

I probably wouldn’t have recognized Babloo on the street. He
looked as though he was eating more than one slum meal a day now. His complexion was ruddy, and he’d grown a soul patch under his bottom lip, as was fashionable among Bollywood heroes of the moment. He was decked out in the familiar outfit of the aspirational middle class: an Indian knockoff button-down shirt, bearing the logo of some unknown company on the breast pocket, and tight jeans. As he sat down at the table where I’d once taught him English, he filled the empty apartment with the fragrance of a sharp, inexpensive cologne that made me sneeze. Gone was the scent of hair palm oil that I’d always associated with him.

Babloo brought me gifts, a strange collection of things: an Indian-made tube of moisturizing cream—“I think it is a very good brand, madam”—a pencil holder stamped with the logo of an Indian company, and a package of sweets tied with twine. The oil had seeped through the paper wrapping, creating a dark square.

“Things must be going well for you, Babloo.”

“Yes, madam, very good!”

He looked at me, waiting for me to direct the conversation.

I gave him a sari for Radha for Diwali and asked him not to call me madam—I wasn’t his teacher anymore. It was a silly thing to say, because the other options—my first name,
deedee
, or auntie—were designations too familiar for a
feringhee
who had employed his mother for five years. He smiled politely.

Once Babloo warmed up, though, it became apparent he was much more comfortable in the world than he had been a couple of years before. His English was pretty much fluent now. His comfort with the language had allowed him to transcend his class and make friends who spoke English socially—middle-class friends. If it wasn’t for the slum cut of his jeans, he could have been one of them. Once he graduated, Babloo told me, he wanted to get an MBA somewhere—he was even thinking of applying for a passport, because he had dreams of doing it overseas. He wanted me to help him figure out how to do that.

It seemed an almost impossible leap within one generation. Radha couldn’t have pointed to India on a map; she wouldn’t even know what
a map was. When Babloo asked for my email address, it took me a moment to recover from my stunned silence and write it down for him. He gave me a funny look, informing me that he regularly “did the email and the Google” at Internet cafés. As he gathered up his notebooks, he asked, with studied casualness, “Shall I show you a snap of my GF?”

I didn’t know what he meant, but he said the acronym with so much freighted meaning that it almost sounded like a teenage dare.

“Of who?”

Babloo stroked his soul patch self-consciously, determined to keep playing it cool.

“You know, my GF! She’s a girl in my college. A Brahmin girl.”