Free Sideways on a Scooter by Miranda Kennedy Page A

fading evening light, I saw that the bushes were actually spread with women’s saris. From under the fabric came the murmurs of Indianlovers on the evening grass. I couldn’t suppress my curiosity. I loitered nearby until I spotted a couple emerging from one of the bushes. The guy stood up first, glancing self-consciously around him as he tucked his shirt back into his jeans, which were tight and stonewashed, in a style I called “slum-cut” because they are so pervasive among the poor. A minute later, the woman darted out behind him—tousled, though completely clothed. It was a “boyfriend bush”! She smoothed back her hair and folded up the sari with crisp, humiliated efficiency, staring at the ground. There was no playfulness between them. No smile lingered on her lips. I felt inexplicably sad as I walked away from the scene of their secret lovemaking.
    My own Delhi affairs were infused with a similar sense of wrongdoing and embarrassment. Even when I got involved with fellow
feringhees
, we sneaked around behind the backs of the coterie of servants that surround you in India; having successfully propagated the myth of my so-called husband to my new community, I didn’t want to destroy it. Rafi, a young Indian journalist I met through a mutual friend, was the first of my Indian relationships. We had coffee and dinners together for a couple of months, which, I realized, qualified me as his girlfriend. Dating in India is sort of like in middle school. We’d have inexpensive dinners of South Indian
dosas
, and he’d drive me home, weaving through the Delhi traffic on his scooter. He showed me how to perch behind him so that I wasn’t straddling the seat, which is considered unseemly for proper Indian ladies. After a couple of months living there, sitting astride a scooter behind a man started to feel obscene to me, too. I tried to get comfortable sitting sideways, my legs dangling into the street, even though it gave me the sensation that I was about to tip forward into traffic.
    In fact, no matter how I sat on his scooter, Rafi thought of me as anything but a proper lady. I don’t think he considered telling his friends about me, let alone his family—especially not after our relationship moved out of the virtuous Indian realm and into Rafi’s rented room. He lived separately from his family, in a crowded block of tenements near the campus of Delhi University, one of the city’s largest, in a dank cement box of a room with a single window. I learned to hold mybreath while using the squatting toilet. There was no stove on which to brew tea, so we’d go out to a shopping complex near the university and bring it back in plastic cups. At night, we’d lie on his mattress on the floor and curl sadly into each other under his bright block-printed bed sheet. Being with him made me realize how lonely I was for home. And although the rules of my relationship allowed me to do as I wished, and I’d told myself this was the adventurous life I wanted, Rafi made me miss Benjamin all the more. In the mornings, I felt as though I was crawling out of a boyfriend bush. I’d want to fold up the sheet quickly and leave the room.
    Rafi said he was getting nervous that his neighbors would see me coming and going from the apartment. He suggested I cover my head with a scarf to disguise that I was a
feringhee
, so that he could say I was his sister. If someone reported that he, an unmarried boy, was spending nights alone with a girl, he could actually be evicted. I didn’t know how to respond when he told me that. After a while, we decided we’d be better off being friends. I think I missed the idea of him more than the person he was; but it was hard to know, because all my interactions in Delhi during those first few months seemed somehow unreal. I’d never struggled like this to form bonds with people.
    In the meantime, I had Geeta. Although we had little in common other than our proximity and our loneliness, I’d remind