By Uttama
You wouldn’t expect it to be written by a reporter who covered September 11th, the Asian tsunami, and conflicts in Afghanistan and Kashmir.
Miranda Kennedy’s Sideways on a Scooter reads more like a journey through the humorous details of everyday life in Delhi, documenting three very different types of women in modern India.
You’re just as likely to find statistical analysis of Shaadi.com (men’s biggest priorities in search of a wife are “innocence and fairness”) as you are the juicy details of an extra-marital affair. The story follows the lives of Radha (a bossy servant who’s obsessed with marrying off her daughter), Parvati (a single woman dating a not-so-single man), and Geeta (a friend stuck between conflicting identities of virginal bride and mini-skirt-wearing diva).
It’s Delhi through the eyes of a feringhee (as she calls herself unashamedly); and although in some parts it seems quite typical (fear of being hounded by men on the road and cheated by the vegetable seller) Kennedy manages to compensate by offering a microscopic lens on macro issues; a perspective quite refreshing and eye-opening, especially to a South Asian reader.
She notes the way the caste system is avoided in narratives of the middle class, much like racism was in the American South—but draws attention to the fact that untouchables are still forced to remove their chappals to avoid polluting high-caste houses.
Perhaps best of all is Kennedy’s ability to add humor to even the most dire of challenges faced by a woman who sticks out in every crowd of a 1.2 billion population.
“India opened itself to me in ways I never would have thought possible…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.”
Sideways on a Scooter does a good job of mixing the familiar with the unfamiliar; in the same stride in which she shares that Gandhi considered bathrooms “a temple…should be so clean and inviting that anyone would enjoy eating there” so she documents a columnist’s view on the plight of marriage and Indian women: “They’re allowed to make all kinds of choices that previous generations of women couldn’t…what they will study, where they will work, where they will live. And yet, when it comes to the most important decision of their lives, their parents don’t trust them with it. It’s like they’re only partly allowed to enter the real world.”
If you’ve ever experienced feeling like both an insider and an outsider, this book reflects in light-hearted simplicity the complex overlap between the two.
As Kennedy puts it in her last few days before finally leaving Delhi, “If India had been a man, we would have had a very unhealthy relationship.”
