Holy Cow! an Indian Adventure

by Sarah Macdonald

  One day, when the weather is warm, Rachel takes me to the market. Head high, red dupatta shawl rippling in the wind, she breezes through the masses of stalls like a queen, ignoring the stinking open drains, the grazing goats, cud-chewing cows, the hawkers, beggars and pushy Punjabis. I trot behind her like a pesky child, spellbound by the way she swoops on certain foods, demands a discount and flicks a wrist to signal a coolie to collect her purchase in an enormous basket on his head. The coolie – a little boy perched on skinny stork legs and dressed in rags – joins me in her train. The stalls display their products in wonderful artistic designs; gorgeous splashes of colour and beauty flash among the filth, the flies and the forlorn.

  The narrow shops and stalls are crammed with so many staff that we customers can’t get too close. There is no self-serve in India; jobs are strictly demarcated and structured for organised chaos. One worker gets the fruit, another cuts it, another weighs it, another wraps it, another takes the money and another will give the change. Most workers are obviously underemployed and very bored. They sweep dirt from one place to another, dust, rearrange things and sit on their haunches watching the world go by with infinite patience and passivity. When a customer comes close they leap up from stupor to frenzy in seconds.

  India’s frantic lethargy is catching. Within half an hour I am walking in slow motion like a zombie with a blank-eyed stare.

  The doctor’s latest tests have shown I’m anaemic, so Rachel now grabs my shawl and leads me like a lamb to the slaughterhouse. Down a dark alley we lift a grimy curtain and enter a dark round room. Dead sheep and goats hang from hooks and a row of Muslim men wearing white square caps squat with huge knives sitting between their black toes. (Many Hindus do not eat meat and most won’t kill animals, so India’s Muslims have cornered the butcher market.) Rachel selects a chicken to die and waits while its neck is wrung. As a Christian, she doesn’t mind the carnage, but I consider Hindu vegetarianism for the first time as I head back to the car gagging.

  We drive home in the opposite direction to which we came. New Delhi is Canberra behind the looking glass – endless roundabouts ensure that when you head off in the opposite direction to where you want to go, you always get there.

  I begin to live out an Asian Jane Austen existence and in my weakened state submit willingly to the protocols of the new Raj. The neighbours begin to call, have tea, inquire about my family, chat about arranged marriages, passionately debate whether milk is good for health, hand me their calling cards and slightly bow as they leave. It’s a truth universally acknowledged that one must be polite and charming on the surface but bitchy beyond belief just below the veneer, especially when one is talking about ones lower than oneself.

  Mrs Dutt, who lives in a pink mansion at the end of the street, is my most frequent guest. Enormously fat and caked with white powder, she huffs and puffs into my room, tells me how terrible I look, runs a finger along the mantelpiece, pulls a face at the black diesel dust (which resettles ten seconds after Mary wipes it clean) and complains.

  ‘One just cannot get good help these days. My dear, Rachel is on the phone again, don’t let her be so idle, you are paying her good money, get her to do something.’

  ‘Mrs Dutt, if she’s made the food, she can do what she wants,’ I bleat naively.

  ‘No, impossible, don’t be stupid, yaar, get her to make jam or rearrange the shelves and, by the way, I must tell you that that Mary is selling your garbage.’

  ‘People buy garbage here?’

  ‘Yes, of course, she will be getting a couple of rupees a week, you know.’

  ‘Well, she cleans it up, she can sell it.’

  Mrs Dutt splutters and turns pink under the white over the brown.

  ‘You are spoiling them, they will turn on you and cheat you. They all steal, and cheat and lie and connive. By being soft you are ruining them for us.’

  If she only knew the worst of it. My staff are not only being corrupted by my western slackness, but also by my western morals. I hear a huge debate raging from the kitchen one day and go to investigate. Rachel has been reading Mary an article from my Vanity Fair magazine, they are discussing ‘fluffies’ – fetish folk who dress up as fluffy toys and fuck each other.

  I have only one gripe with the workers of India. They just won’t say the word ‘no’. Taxi drivers tell me they know where something is and get hopelessly lost, waiters insist something is ‘most definitely’ available and then don’t deliver it, Abraham drives me to a market that he knows is closed, shopkeepers say they have something, then hide because they don’t. It’s bizarre. Perhaps it’s an honour thing, perhaps it’s a hangover from the Raj, or perhaps ‘yes’ can mean ‘no’, like the head nod can mean ‘no way’ and a side-to-side shake can mean ‘of course’. The puppet-like wobble mixture of a shake and a nod can mean anything or nothing.

  Razoo comes over, takes one look at my new scarecrow look, and summons a beautician to make me presentable.

  Indian women are incredibly obsessive about their looks, and whether they wear salwar suits, saris or shawls they’re always tastefully dressed with coordinated accessories and makeup. Razoo always looks divine. An only child and a self-confessed ‘brat’, she is woken up every morning by a woman massaging her with almond oil. Every third day she’s given a scrub, and once a month she has a facial, an arm and leg wax, eyebrow shape and manicure and pedicure. This is all before breakfast and without leaving her bed.

  I have never been a girlie girl but I submit to a pedicure, manicure and facial, which all together costs about twenty dollars. It’s wonderful and well needed. Thanks to the Delhi pollution my skin is leathery, as dry as a stringy bark and clogged with black dust and brown dirt. But the beautician, Rupa, touches me like I’m a rare doll.

  ‘Madam, my first white skin, so nice, pale is good, very good, so lucky.’

  With Rachel translating, I tell Rupa that in my country we put on fake tan and lie in the sun. She’s horrified – she’s been using skin-whitening cream every day of her life.

  ‘No, pale is best, pale is most beauteous. Stay inside, madam, bestest for staying pale.’

  I decide to submit to paling into Indian significance and sensuous spoiling. If I can’t have convenience I may as well have luxury.

  And power. India’s boundaries of behaviour are still dictated by caste, upbringing and wealth. I may not have good breeding, be a Brahmin or be related to the Minister for Railways, but I’m considered filthy rich and that means I can treat people dreadfully and get away with it. In fact, it’s expected. Mrs Dutt tells me to stop being so sucky crawly all the time.

  ‘Why are you saying please and thank you all the time to your servants? It’s not necessary, you sound too desperate to be nice. Have some backbone, you’re very annoying.’

  We all hear Mrs Dutt screaming at her cook every night and it’s rumoured she belts her cleaner, but mostly she shows her power by pretending people don’t exist and complaining about how stupid they are when they’re standing right behind her. It’s appalling, but it rubs off. I’m beginning to get a little impatient and short sometimes when people are slow or stare too much. But Rachel pulls me up by saying ‘yes, madam’ when she hears snobbery in my voice.

  Other ‘servants’ fight back with the weapon of knowledge. Dolly, the General’s cook, is the compound gossip. She’s a round and happy woman who feeds me apple pies and badly kept secrets. This genteel suburb is hiding a lot. The Christians around the corner are divorced but both names stay on the gate to save face. The girl across the road had a husband who beat her and has been on a ‘quick visit’ to her parents for four years. Her neighbour married an Indian man from Seattle but when she travelled to the United States she found out he already had an American wife and family – she stayed to save face and is now the nanny. And Mrs Dutt, the suburb’s moral guardian, actually lives with a man she’s not married to, because her husband left her for a white woman. Even Dolly has a secret. The General’s cleaner says Dolly had
a daughter who was either kidnapped and forced to marry a brute or went off with him (no-one is quite sure). Saving face is so important that living a lie is accepted practice.

  I should have been prepared for this. I have an Australian–Indian friend Padma who grew up in Sydney but has been increasingly forced to live under the yoke of Indian face-saving deception. Strikingly handsome, tall and sporty, Padma has only returned to India once. She came to New Delhi with her mother after the HSC but found it difficult to make friends and maintain her active lifestyle, so she returned to Sydney to study at university and have a career. Her mum stayed in Delhi and remarried. I always thought Padma rather conservative – she works in banking, doesn’t drink much, never does drugs and doesn’t believe in sex without love. She never mentioned a dad and I just assumed her parents were divorced. Of course I didn’t find it shocking that she had been brought up by a single mother and didn’t blink when she moved in with her Aussie boyfriend. Then one night last year Padma’s boyfriend rang me from a hotel.

  ‘She chucked me out.’

  ‘Have you broken up?’

  ‘Worse, her mother’s in town and she can’t know I exist.’

  For the next month Jason had a better time than his girlfriend did. Padma’s mother spent her entire visit displaying emeralds, topaz, gold and diamond solitaire rings and slyly teasing her daughter.

  ‘Look, but don’t touch, not until you are married.’

  Padma laughed. Her mother began to pray aloud to her Shiva statue.

  ‘Oh god of marriage, please let my daughter be married. Don’t let me be a failure as a mother.’

  The pressure was on. After a campaign of blackmail, tears, threats and angry fights, Padma promised to come to Delhi to meet marriageable men. Jason moved back in and she delayed the trip time and time again with work excuses. Then a friend of a relative of a friend saw Padma kissing Jason on the Bondi beachfront and wasted no time in calling Delhi. Padma’s mother wrote a one-line letter.

  Beti (child), it’s me or it’s him, if it’s him you won’t exist anymore, to me you will be dead.

  Love Mummy

  At the time I thought this disgusting, but one night, while tipsy, Padma told me why her educated, intelligent mother was so strict. India didn’t have a swinging sixties, so when her mum committed the ultimate crazy trip of marrying a man for love, her family handed over her inheritance (which she handed on to her husband) and disowned her. They never talked to her again. Seven months later, while heavily pregnant with Padma, she met a woman on a bus who told her that her husband already had a wife and child in Poona. The shock triggered an early labour and Padma was born by the side of the road two months premature. When her ma confronted her husband, he beat her. With no family and no social services to help, she suffered his violence for four years while she secretly studied at university and stole enough housekeeping money and jewellery to escape. She went to Australia to get a job and to get as far away from him as possible. She’s never got over the shame and she’s never seen her family again.

  Padma doesn’t even know her father’s full name, where he is, or whether her grandparents are still alive. She has grown up being told that only she can pay for her mother’s sins. Finding a girl a suitable man, filling a huge glory box with jewellery, clothes and sheets, and throwing a massive elaborate week of wedding festivities for the couple can absolve past bad acts and help earn better future lives. But I only half believed Padma, it all sounded too clichéd, too melodramatic, too movie. Until she announced she would obey her mother.

  ‘I can’t let Mummy be all alone in the world and I can’t make her relive the shame and the isolation of rejection,’ she flatly explained after she dumped Jason a few months ago.

  ‘But she’s married again, she’s not alone,’ I tried to argue.

  Padma just shook her head sadly and promised to see me in Delhi. At the time, I couldn’t understand and didn’t know how to comfort her. Of course my mum hasn’t loved all my boyfriends and I get the impression she wants me to marry someone with prospects, but I know she would always support my choices and never reject me. Now I’m in India, Padma’s life makes a little more sense. Here, life is lived so publicly and saving face is all-important.

  One night Padma calls, her voice low and soft.

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘You’re in Delhi?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Great. Come over!’

  ‘I can’t, I’m here to meet men, wish me luck.’

  Every night for a week we whisper on the phone while her mother sleeps. At first we laugh about the dorky boy who went to Oxford and wears a cravat, about the guy with dreadful acne and a lisp, about the military officer who demanded her measurements, about the bloke from Calcutta who’s obviously gay.

  ‘He’s ahead so far,’ Padma says, ‘at least I could have my own life and he’d probably love to move to Sydney.’

  But as the days go on she sounds more and more depressed. Despite being slim, spunky and super-smart, Padma is not considered a great catch. She is old (twenty-eight) and she hasn’t got a father or a star chart (her mum is not sure where the bus was when she gave birth). What’s worse, she grew up in Australia where everyone drinks and most girls are considered ‘damaged goods’. Her mother must scrape the bottom of the barrel of her caste, and Padma is forced to sit and smile and be interviewed as if she’s applying for a job as a lifelong slave. They fire questions like, ‘You will quit work after your marriage, won’t you? Career girls are so crude and masculine, don’t you think?’

  ‘Do you know how to cook proper Indian food?’

  ‘Do you know the rituals of fasting for your husband?’

  The interviewers are also savage in giving her performance feedback.

  ‘You’re very dark, too tall and your nose is funny,’ states a short, fat, ugly guy with a mono-brow.

  As the rejections pile in, Padma’s mother gets increasingly desperate, setting her up with a guy crippled by polio, an albino and a forty-five year old divorcee with a hair-lip.

  Padma sneaks out to meet us for dinner one night. She sighs with hopelessness but can still crack a joke.

  ‘Imagine if I told them I ate meat and wasn’t a virgin.’

  There’s a spluttering and coughing as the eavesdropping woman at the next table chokes on her food.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ I whisper.

  ‘Fuck them all.’ She slams her fist on the table, loudly defiant. ‘We’re giving up on the Delhi boys and going to London where they’re taller and maybe equally damaged. Mum’s going first to set up meetings, and I’m leaving for Thailand tomorrow to go to an international banking conference for a tax dodge and a final fling.’

  The woman at the next table chokes again and almost has to be resuscitated.

  As Padma flies to Bangkok, I stop judging her for living a lie. In India, it’s easy and expected. I, too, have succumbed. This country does not recognise defacto relationships, socially or bureaucratically. Sick of the disapproving looks and murmurs, I’ve started telling people I’m engaged or married.

  When my visa nears expiry, I apply for a new one, dressing demurely in a salwar kamiz and carrying a letter from Jonathan saying we are engaged and I need to stay in India until our marriage. After lining up and filling in four forms, I sit in a dark room until my number is called. A huge hairy man in a safari suit comes out with my application and the letter, looks me up and down like he’s buying a leg of lamb (or a tub of dahl, if he’s vegetarian), and yells, ‘You are not married?’

  ‘No, sir, I am engaged, we are organising the wedding, that’s why I need to be here.’

  ‘No, get out, you can’t stay until you’re married.’

  ‘Just two months, sir.’

  ‘No, you’re no good to India if you are not married.’

  He stamps ‘REJECTED’ on my form and strides off. I leave hyperventilating with anger.

  A week later, Jonathan puts on a suit and sneaks in with me
. The same man comes out with his hands on his hips and a growl in his voice.

  ‘Look, madam, I told you, get out until you are married, go away.’

  Jonathan jumps up, gives the man his card and shakes his hand.

  ‘G’day, I’m from Australian Broadcasting. I’d like to see the manager.’

  The bureaucrat bends and smiles.

  ‘Of course, sir, come this way.’

  I sit in the back of the room while Jonathan, the manager and the middle manager have chai and discuss the cricket. I’m given another visa. We walk out smiling a snarl – this country would be easier with a strap-on penis.

  Saving that, I now decide to arm myself with language. India has hundreds of languages, but Hindi is the common tongue in Delhi. The ABC office finds me a teacher and he arrives bowing low.

  Hari Lal (whose name means ‘green red’) is tiny, balding and has shiny skin the colour of warm walnut. Softly, sweetly and firmly, he tells me that he’s one of the few people in Delhi who speaks proper Hindi and he’s glad to be of assistance. His first insistence is that I attach a ji to everybody’s name as this is a term of high respect and means ‘soul one’. Hari Lal tells me the Hindi hello, namaste ji, means ‘I recognise the divine in you’. It’s a lovely sentiment I’m happy to adopt. But Hari’s Hindi is more practical than spiritual. It’s memsahib Hindi; the language of the lady of the manor. I repeat after him:

  ‘Clean the table.’

  ‘Make Indian dinner tonight as we are holding a reception.’

  ‘Please send this telegraph to London.’

  ‘Go call sahib.’

  And my favourite phrase: Agar magar mudt kidjeaye – ‘No ifs and buts please.’

  Jonathan and I lay a bet on who will use it first.