Sideways on a Scooter Read Online Free Page B

mingled with other assaulting odors—the earthy fragrance of cow-dung patties leaching their odor into the streets, the tang of tamarind and lime from a roadside food stall outside the airport.
    Who was in charge? I wondered as I looked around the airport arrivals hall that first, disconcerting night. It was a question I would ask myself hundreds of times in many different settings. The official who stamped my passport had dead eyes and food stains on his shirt. The roof was leaking. The baggage carousel screeched around with a frightening wail, and the passengers were shoving one another as though their lives depended on collecting their bags. One sari-clad woman pushed me aside with broad hands, and as I caught myself from falling, I clamped down on my tongue. The metallic taste of blood always reminds me of my first night in Delhi.
    I’d expected a much more modern and globalized country than I found. I anticipated poverty, but I also thought I’d find a large, liberal-minded middle class that would approximate my own Western experience. I’d heard that a troupe of Indian actresses was staging
The Vagina Monologues
, Eve Ensler’s graphic feminist play, and that gave me high hopes. In fact, I would learn, nothing in India is straightforward. It is home to highly educated entrepreneurs, and also to millions of illiterate villagers whose lives are guided by feudal principles and regressive social attitudes. India opened itself to me in ways I never would have thought possible of a culture so different from my own, and it also slammed the door shut on me like the Delhi landlord who assumed I was a whore because I wanted to live alone.

CHAPTER 2

Boyfriended
    T here is no word in Hindi for
boyfriend
, so the English word is dropped into Hindi sentences, and once there, it rings like a curse. Being boyfriended implies a depraved, decadent life; a girl with one boyfriend is sure to have many others. During my first year in India, when the language rang strangely in my ears, just a rhythmic patter of unfamiliar sounds, I would clutch onto the word as I did to other recognizable scraps inside speech. When non-English-speaking Indians use English words and phrases—such as
tension, operation
, and
by chance—
it is either to emphasize a point or to impress someone. The word
boyfriend
is different; it is always heavy with ugly connotations.
    I’d been living in seedy hotels for several months while I made exploratory reporting trips around India, still waiting to find a landlord in Delhi who’d agree to rent an apartment to a single foreign lady. My unmarried status wouldn’t have been a problem if I’d been able to afford a place in one of the city’s elite enclaves, where the moneyed Indian classes stretch out in spacious colonial homes beside those of foreign diplomats and businessmen with generous expat packages. Inlower-middle-class Indian neighborhoods, though, the landlords are unaccustomed to the wild ways of Western women who live by themselves or—worse—with a boyfriend. So I was scrutinized just as are Indian women when they try to break the grip of tradition.
    The surges of electricity from Delhi’s irregular power supply had decimated my laptop battery. I was living on cheap street food—fried potato patties with tamarind sauce, lentil dal in leaf bowls, thick
parantha
breads right off the iron griddle. It was all delicious, if not very good for my insides: I’d become accustomed to regular bouts of diarrhea. The drug-addled Europeans at the Lord’s Hotel were getting to me, too, so I asked around for a hotel in a nontouristy part of town. At the New City Palace, a tiny single room was only four dollars a night, so I didn’t mind that this hotel didn’t live up to its name any more than the Lord’s did. The only thing palatial about the New City Palace was the view: It faced directly onto the Jama Masjid, the largest mosque in India.
    My first morning there, I was woken by the call to prayer before