The Lost Girls (26 page)

NORTHERN INDIA
OCTOBER

I
wanted to close my eyes to avoid seeing the accident, but my lids felt glued open. The jeep in front of us swerved to avoid hitting a cow that seemed to think a highway teeming with rickshaws, motorbikes, and cars was a fine spot for an afternoon nap. Cows are considered sacred in India and often roam free. The frenzied scene morphed into slow motion as I watched the jeep crash into a man, woman, and baby all perched atop a motorbike.

The crash catapulted the mother and child, who'd been riding on the back, off the bike. Rather than using her arms to break her fall, the woman instinctively wrapped them around the baby swaddled to her chest. She did a somersault before landing flat on her back on the pavement.

Almost as soon as the woman's body touched down, she miraculously sprang up, peeling away the layers of fabric used to bind the infant to her chest so that she could inspect it for harm. The baby seemed to be unscathed. The man, however, didn't fare so well. The bike lay on its side with the wheels still spinning, and his legs were pinned underneath the smoking metal.

Traffic halted, the cow wandered away, irritated that her
nap had been disturbed, and I grasped the door handle to jump out.

“Stay inside! It's dangerous,” ordered Sunil, the driver and guide for our Golden Triangle tour, which covered Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur. His black eyebrows resembled two fuzzy caterpillars and twitched uncontrollably, making him look like an Indian version of Groucho Marx.

“Dangerous? But the accident is over,” Amanda said, and Jen nodded in agreement, ready to spring out of the car to see what we could do to help. Not that we had any idea of
what
to do exactly—we didn't have a cell phone to call for assistance, and, even if we did, we didn't know the Indian equivalent of 911.

“Don't get out,” Sunil repeated firmly. “The driver of the jeep will now be beaten.”

Having Sunil as a tour guide was kind of like viewing India through the reflection in a fun house mirror: we had no way of knowing which explanations of his native culture were real and which were distortions. We were pretty sure the majority of Sunil's caveats—from warning us that women shouldn't wander alone after dark due to the high risk of rape to banning us from eating at hotels because owners often poisoned guests so they'd stay longer—were exaggerations.

Suddenly dozens of men materialized to form an angry roadside mob. They'd abandoned nearby wooden shacks, food carts, or their vehicles to ball up their fists and bang on the perpetrator's jeep door. At the same time, a smaller crowd surrounded the injured family, lifting the motorbike to free the man pinned underneath.

The vigilantes kept on coming. If the hodgepodge of vehicles fighting for space on the roadway struck me as anarchy just moments before, the swelling mob and haphazardly abandoned bikes charged the air with utter lawlessness. The men succeeded
in opening the driver's door and pulling him from the vehicle even as he tried to clutch the steering wheel like a lifeline.

I strained my eyes to see what was happening, and Amanda quickly started her video recorder to capture the drama. “We just witnessed our first traffic accident in India and—”
SLAM!
A man's fist pounded on the window near her face, blocking the lens.

“Maybe you should put the camera away,” Jen said as another fist slammed into the thin glass, rocking the car. My own hands gripped Jen's arm, fear freezing my heart and confusion clouding my brain. I had no previous experience with traffic accidents in India and no idea of what was going to happen. Not knowing made the scene seem all the scarier.

Beep! BEEEEEP!
Sunil honked the horn like a man possessed, trying to inch the car forward despite being blocked by a crowd. He honked louder and hit the gas. The noise made the men disperse slightly so Sunil could drive around them. He sped away, leaving behind the acrid scent of burning rubber.

Since our car lacked working seat belts, the three of us could only grab the “Oh shit!” handles for dear life. We watched Sunil steer between trucks headed straight for us as well as the occasional cow idling on the highway—not one of them cognizant of the concept of separate lanes.

When we finally regained control of our vocal cords—hoping the same could be said of Sunil's grasp on the steering wheel—we asked why anyone would leave the scene of an accident.

“If you hit people, you drive away fast. If you don't, the men will beat you in payment. You only have five seconds in India,” he said. “If you don't drive away fast, people will hit your head until you must go to the hospital.”

That sounded like a tall tale to me. “You mean you're
supposed
to hit and run?” I asked.

“Yes! If you're too slow, the crowd will beat you,” he explained.

I didn't believe for a second that a driver responsible for a crash would hit the gas in order to escape roadside vigilantes. In any event, logic dictated that the police would both arrest the driver and protect him from the angry mob in question. Jen, Amanda, and I exchanged more skeptical looks.

“Will the driver be beaten to death?” I asked, deciding to play along with Sunil to see how far he'd take this.

He gave me a look in the rearview mirror that illustrated that he thought me extremely uncivilized. “No, he just has a lot of blood. And he has to pay in cash at the hospital for the family's medical bills and broken bike.”

“But what if he doesn't have the cash?” Amanda asked.

“Then they keep his jeep as payment and he has to take a bus home.”

Too incredulous to respond, I watched the world turn into a blur outside the car window. It rolled by in waves of women wearing jewel-toned saris and puffs of curry-laced smoke from cooking fires near the roadside. Families piled atop single motorbikes like some kind of circus act. India made me feel more alive, with competing sights, scents, and sounds putting me on sensory overload until I felt hyperaware. The country was more different from my own than any I'd ever visited before. It struck me in everything I saw: small stuff like eating masala dosas instead of pancakes and bacon for breakfast, and big things like seeing a society built on the caste system, in which people are born into certain roles, so totally different from the Declaration of Independence's notion that “all men are created equal”—even if the idea wasn't always practiced in reality back home.

In India, the caste system lives on—despite being outlawed—in traditions such as arranged marriages. Parents searching for a match for their child typically look for someone from the same caste, barring other deal breakers such as age, height, and education. Sunil's parents, for example, had arranged his marriage
to a woman who, like him, was a member of the highest caste, known as Brahmins.

When I first learned about arranged marriage while on Semester at Sea, I was just twenty-one and idealistic, and the idea struck me as painfully unromantic. But after listening to countless girlfriends in New York stress about dating, I could see how having someone else make the decision for you might be a relief. Plus, arranged marriages actually last longer—love marriages in America are more likely to end in divorce than Indian marriages. Of course, the lower divorce rate could stem more from women's rights than from matrimonial bliss. Since Indian women seem to depend on their husbands for social and economic standing more than their American counterparts do, maybe divorce wasn't such a feasible option.

Curiosity now got the best of me, and I asked Sunil about his own upcoming wedding. Sunil was twenty-eight, the same age as us, and his bride was twenty-five. He'd invited the three of us to the wedding happening that spring in the Himalayas, but by then we'd already be in Southeast Asia.

As he explained that his wedding celebration would last four days and would have two dozen costume changes, Jen's eyes widened in fascination. Jen loves dressing up and going to black-tie affairs and weddings, so the idea of extending festivities for days rather than merely hours must have sent her brain into fantasy overload. However, it was much harder for the three of us to stomach the idea that Sunil would have to wait for the wedding to see his bride-to-be in person for the first time. That gave a whole new meaning to “saving it for marriage.”

“So do you think arranged or love marriages are better?” I asked.

“Both are good, but an arranged marriage is much more successful.” He said he'd had a love relationship once in college, but his parents had made him break it off.

“If I defied my parents and married her for love, I would inherit nothing.” Sunil thought love marriages were more apt to fall apart because there's too much pressure that comes with being estranged from your family and cut off from your inheritance.

“What do women do who don't want to get married?” Amanda asked, and I laughed. Generally the one of us with the most spunk, Amanda never thought you had to do something just because everyone else was doing it. Sunil gave us yet another glance in the rearview mirror that suggested he thought we were uncivilized—or maybe just plain crazy.

 

W
hen we'd arrived in Delhi a few days earlier, it had been like landing on another planet. Nothing was ordinary to us, and we were thrilled to be in a place that felt so, well, foreign. Venturing outside our dingy, $12-a-night hotel, we'd stepped right into a chaotic side alley clogged with rickshaws, women frying cumin-laced rice in pans near the roadside, and half-naked children scrubbing themselves down with soap in the gutter. Packs of kids grabbed at our skirts, trying to sell us everything from postcards to bracelets to gum. The air smelled like curry, car exhaust, and jasmine from the garlands women sold on the streets, and tinny, warbled lyrics sung by invisible Bollywood stars ricocheted down from radios perched in open windows. It was both awesome and disorienting.

We quickly learned that three white women wandering around without male escorts attracted much more attention in India than anywhere we had visited so far. We'd been in Delhi barely a day, and already numerous men had “accidentally” bumped into our breasts as we strolled along the congested sidewalks. And soon we'd traded in one type of adventure for another.

We'd walked into a tourist office to grab a few maps to help us get our bearings and walked out with Sunil, who had strong-armed us into an all-inclusive tour. Though this was not our usual traveling style, we were all bewildered by our newest surroundings. It was a relief to let a guide choose which temples to visit and hotels to book.

With Sunil in the driver's seat, our first destination was arguably one of the greatest monuments to love of all time: the Taj Mahal. None of us had been to the Taj before, and, like a lot of tourists, we didn't want to leave India without seeing the legendary site. Besides, with Elan on the other side of the world, it'd been a while since I'd experienced any romance, and I was eager to witness that famous testament of one man's undying devotion to his beloved.

The story goes that Shah Jahan had the marble tomb built after his favorite wife died (apparently he had others) so that a symbol of their love would last forever. He supposedly fell for her at first sight, and she gave him fourteen children. (If that's not a reason to love your wife, I don't know what is.) Set on the banks of the Yamuna River, the Taj took some twenty thousand workers more than seventeen years to finish.

Driving through Agra on the way to the Taj was like sifting through dirt to get to the buried treasure—the city was filthy and poverty-ridden. The air was filled with both burning brush and body odor. Monkeys and dogs marked their territory atop piles of trash, and men shat on the roadside. The Taj was the diamond in the rough, and to help protect its delicate marble from pollution such as car exhaust, vehicles had to park far away from the site.

As soon as the three of us left the safety of Sunil's car (well, safe now that it wasn't in motion), we were surrounded by more suffering than I'd seen even in the line of sick patients waiting outside Sister Freda's clinic. On our walk to the Taj, barefoot
toddlers with rags falling off their bony bodies put fingers to their mouths, gesturing for food. A guy dragged himself down the dusty path, carrying what appeared to be his own leg in his hands. Children grabbed at our clothes and bags, begging us to buy their postcards.

My first instinct was to move closer to Amanda and Jen and to block out the suffering, because I was scared and uncomfortable. But Esther and Sister Freda's faces were with me now. Having had the chance to talk to them, to get to know them a little, had blotted out my instinct to run away, and I wished I knew how to do it again here, even as a tourist. Was it possible to move beyond seeing those in front of me as beggars before I saw them as people just like myself?

I forced myself to slow down, to make eye contact with a girl, probably about five years old, clutching a handful of postcards. When she held them out to me hopefully, I stopped and asked her for her name. “Padma,” she said. I crouched down to sift through her collection of images of that famous mausoleum at different times of the day, pretending to consider each one carefully. Then I selected three and handed her some rupees. She yelled, “Thank you!” as she laced her fingers around mine to shake my hand. I smiled at her as I stood, and suddenly there was a frenzied mass of kids pressing up against me from every side and thrusting postcards and gum into my face. This time I pushed past, jogging to catch up with Jen and Amanda. I looked back to see the kids all circling around Padma.

Falling into step beside Jen and Amanda, we joined the long line of pilgrims—Indians, Europeans, and Asians—that radiated out from the sandstone gateway. Both barefooted children and men dressed in crisp white shirts grabbed at those in line, offering tour-guide services.

We crossed the threshold of the gates inscribed with words from the Koran, a legacy left by the Muslim rulers known as
Mughals. Once inside, we were greeted by immaculate open space, acres of manicured lawn, and gardens exploding in full bloom; the sandstone mausoleum that housed the queen's body was reflected serenely in a rectangular pool. Each building looked symmetrical, a mirror image of the other.