Sideways on a Scooter Read Online Free Page A

the hope of escaping, my father decided to apply for a Fulbright scholarship. He didn’t get India; instead, the committee offered him a lectureship at the University of Karachi, in Pakistan, a rather less appealing choice since it was reeling from a brutal civil war. Still, it got them out of Michigan.
    As my mother anticipated, it was spending a couple of months in India, afterward, that had the greatest impact on her. After my sisters were born, she converted the whole family to Hindu-inspired vegetarianism, and stuck with it throughout our childhood. When my sisters and I complained that we didn’t have name-brand clothes, she’d lecture us about the frugal lifestyle of India’s independence hero Mahatma Gandhi. My mother always seemed to have Indian friends, and decorated every house we lived in with objects she and my father had collected in the East: leather safari chairs, antique tribal rugs, and a heavy brass statue of the god Shiva dancing in a circle of flame, which my father would complain he’d lugged all across India.
    When I announced I was moving there myself, my parents didn’t seem surprised.
    “If I’d lived a different life and stayed single longer, I would have liked to do something like you did,” my mother once said wistfully. “Just head off on my own.”
    She offered advice about how to clothe myself appropriately in India and how to avoid getting amebic dysentery, which she and my father had repeatedly suffered from in Karachi. She tried to prepare me for the harshness of life in India, telling me that what had shocked her most was the desperation, the bodies wasting away on the streets. I didn’t pay much attention to all this, though. Even though my interest in the place was born of the family history, I was determined to make it mine. It was ironic that the most exotic destination was, for me, also the most conventional. I wanted to at least make my own mistakes.
    I’d educated myself pretty thoroughly about India, I thought, having read obsessively about it for years. I knew that the country was yielding more nuanced stories in the U.S. and British press than it had for decades. It used to be that an assignment in India meant penning lyrical essays about starving men in
lungis
, exotic snake charmers, and the country’s multiple truths and mysteries, but when India opened its economy to the world, it inspired a new level of engagement.
    Now the press seemed to have arrived at a glowing consensus—that the country’s transformation was social as well as economic. I read that millions of Indians were buying their first cell phones and upgrading from scooters to cars. According to the American papers, India’s lowest castes were hoisting themselves out of their villages and hereditary occupations, couples were choosing their own life partners rather than being pushed into preordained parental arrangements, and women were buying microwaveable curries so they could develop careers as news anchors and lawyers.
    Even these optimistic portraits couldn’t neglect to mention India’s poverty and grime, though. The average annual income was less than a thousand dollars a year. In China, the country whose economic rise was most often compared to India’s, the annual income was almost three times that. The nation now produced more than enough food to feed its people and was growing a vibrant service-based economy; and yet its endemic inefficiency meant that millions of farmers and laborers struggled for one meal a day. Although my mother’s warnings about lepers and teeming slums were based on an India of thirty years ago, little seemed to have changed.
    I thought I was prepared for whatever would greet me off the plane, but India knocked the swagger out of my gait. The dissonant smells seeped into the aircraft before I even stepped onto Indian soil—a mix of burning plastic and metal that reminded me of the afternoon of the 9/11 attacks in New York. In Delhi, the smell of burning was