Sideways on a Scooter by Miranda Kennedy Page B

a vamp and be successful.
    Although Geeta complained about Bollywood’s limited female characters, Mallika’s multiple on-screen kisses and steamy videos were a bit much for her. She preferred a more moral school of movies, a subgenre of Bollywood blockbusters aimed at upwardly mobile Indian audiences and the Indian diaspora. The female characters in these films are often college students or professional women; SRK usually plays the hero, successfully negotiating the complications of contemporary sexuality. His characters often move overseas, where they struggle to maintain Indian traditions or battle with love that precedes marriage. I think Geeta found these films comforting. In the end, the hero always recovers his fundamentally Indian sensibility; the heroine always proves her noble character. When we watched SRK’s blockbusters together, I could see her scanning them for clues about how to resolve her own struggles over identity, love, and marriage. Geeta wanted to live a modern life, at least in theory, but she worried that her identity as independent Delhi girl could overshadow her other identity as pious virgin.
    I learned a lot about Geeta those nights in Nanima’s apartment. She’d sometimes bring me into her bedroom, where she’d rifle through boxes of her photographs. I could tell that she was proud of her highly educated Brahmin family. Her home state, Punjab, has relatively liberal attitudes toward women, she told me, and her grandmother sent all five of her daughters to school in an era when that was anything but common in India. Geeta’s mother had worked as a schoolteacher when Geeta was young, though the vast majority of Indian women—even today—quit work after marriage.
    Marriage is a topic on which Geeta’s family had more traditional views—but that’s only to be expected in India, where some 90 percent of Indian partnerships are arranged, either by the family or by matchmakers. Most marriages are still a merger between two families of similar caste backgrounds and religious beliefs. Euphemism abounds inside the institution of Indian marriage: Parents talk about finding “a mutually agreeable match,” meaning one that meets a set of religious and astrological specifications. Geeta told me that her family had been looking to arrange her into marriage for years already with a “boy froma good family,” meaning a Punjabi Brahmin from a family of equal status to theirs.
    In the vocabulary of arranged marriage, potential mates are referred to as
larke
and
larkiya
, boys and girls, because for centuries marriages were formalized at puberty. Mahatma Gandhi was betrothed at the age of seven and married at thirteen. As far back as 1929, the Indian government raised the legal age of marriage to twenty-one for boys and eighteen for girls, but no one paid much attention. According to the United Nations, in 2007, 47 percent of Indian women had been married before they were eighteen years old. In rural areas, it is 56 percent. Modern-minded, middle-class Indians in cities are marrying later than ever before, though. Geeta said that in her community it was acceptable for a girl to hold off until her mid-twenties. She was veering uncomfortably close to the age of thirty, though, and I couldn’t help but wonder about the delay.
    When Geeta showed up at my door one evening clad in a denim miniskirt and heels, I found it hard to hide my surprise. The skirt wasn’t actually that short, in retrospect, but at the time, I was under the full sway of Delhi’s prudish fashion sense. Wearing a Western skirt at all, but especially a knee-length one, was a freighted decision. Geeta noticed my eye on her hemline.
    “I’m going out dancing with my friend from college tonight. We always wear skirts.” Her confidence faltered. “Do you think it’s too short?”
    I raised an eyebrow, unsure how to answer. Just the other day, she’d told me that although she liked wearing the comfortable
salwar kameez
, she was