away from him, but because I hoped that by setting off to India, I would prove that I was just as carefree as he. He’d spent his postcollege years hopping illegal rides on freight trains, staging theatrical protests to save community gardens in New York, and living in an artists’ commune in Brooklyn, a lifestyle he supported by working at magazines and writing travel articles. In the six months we’d been together, I’d discovered to my dismay that just because I shared his ideals and his wanderlust didn’t make him believe I wouldn’t suffocate him.
In the weeks before I left, the decision seemed to have the desired impact. Benjamin started hesitating about whether he shouldn’t come with me, after all. He initiated discussions about our relationship. We set limits on our “arrangement,” promising we’d only have affairs when we were in different countries. When we were together, we told each other, we’d wipe all of that away. He promised to get writing assignments in India, so he could spend a couple of longish stints with me each year. After we’d both had our adventures, I’d move back to the States, and we’d fill a rambling house in Vermont with kids and animals.
The vagueness of this plan suited us both. We thought we wanted to be together—although neither of us was sure we wanted to get married—and this seemed like a good way to bookmark the idea. Plenty of women I knew were starting to settle down at my age of twenty-six or twenty-seven, but I had no such urge. I’d always been ambivalent about marriage and kids; I’d certainly never drawn up a plan to make them happen by a certain stage of my life. I just wanted to have my experience of India, without having to worry that I’d severed myself from New York altogether.
When Benjamin emerged in the airport terminal, he was taller than I’d remembered, even hunched under the weight of his pack. My first thought was that Radha was going to be very impressed by my Americanhusband. For a moment I saw him through her eyes: fair skinned and well built, with dark hair and light eyes, like one of the actors she’d seen on
Baywatch
reruns. Watching him walk up the arrivals hall, I felt suddenly distant from him and my life in New York. My year in India had already changed me in ways I hadn’t figured out yet, and I was, for a moment, not at all sure that I wanted my old life to catch up with me so soon. There was nothing for it, though; he was here.
When he leaned to kiss me, he became familiar and wonderful again—the self-confident grin, as wide as the curve of a banana, the slightly unwashed smell of his clothes. As we drove to Nizamuddin, the taxi breezing through the red traffic lights in the empty streets, his face shone with a small-town boy’s wonderment at Delhi in the gray smoggy dawn. Benjamin was the best of companions in India. He didn’t mind the hassle, dirt, and discomfort. He didn’t care that the guys in the market stared at him in his baggy shorts, which made him look goofy and half naked—men in Delhi almost always cover their legs. To him, India was just another in a lifetime of adventures. That freed him from the pressure of trying to fit in, and seemed a welcome break from my own obsessive concern about what my neighbors thought of me.
Soon after he arrived, Benjamin bought a clunky Indian-made bicycle, thinking it would be an efficient way to avoid bargaining with Delhi’s notoriously unscrupulous auto-rickshaw drivers. I warned him that he’d be the only cyclist in the city who earned more than a dollar a day. India has a caste system for the roads, as for everything else, and bicycles rank lower than bullock carts and camels.
Benjamin came home sweaty and grimy after an especially trying afternoon ride. An aggressive “jingle truck,” so called because the hand-painted vehicles are hung with jingling ornaments, had edged him off the road. He’d walked the bike home along the freeway.
“If I’m going to
In the weeks before I left, the decision seemed to have the desired impact. Benjamin started hesitating about whether he shouldn’t come with me, after all. He initiated discussions about our relationship. We set limits on our “arrangement,” promising we’d only have affairs when we were in different countries. When we were together, we told each other, we’d wipe all of that away. He promised to get writing assignments in India, so he could spend a couple of longish stints with me each year. After we’d both had our adventures, I’d move back to the States, and we’d fill a rambling house in Vermont with kids and animals.
The vagueness of this plan suited us both. We thought we wanted to be together—although neither of us was sure we wanted to get married—and this seemed like a good way to bookmark the idea. Plenty of women I knew were starting to settle down at my age of twenty-six or twenty-seven, but I had no such urge. I’d always been ambivalent about marriage and kids; I’d certainly never drawn up a plan to make them happen by a certain stage of my life. I just wanted to have my experience of India, without having to worry that I’d severed myself from New York altogether.
When Benjamin emerged in the airport terminal, he was taller than I’d remembered, even hunched under the weight of his pack. My first thought was that Radha was going to be very impressed by my Americanhusband. For a moment I saw him through her eyes: fair skinned and well built, with dark hair and light eyes, like one of the actors she’d seen on
Baywatch
reruns. Watching him walk up the arrivals hall, I felt suddenly distant from him and my life in New York. My year in India had already changed me in ways I hadn’t figured out yet, and I was, for a moment, not at all sure that I wanted my old life to catch up with me so soon. There was nothing for it, though; he was here.
When he leaned to kiss me, he became familiar and wonderful again—the self-confident grin, as wide as the curve of a banana, the slightly unwashed smell of his clothes. As we drove to Nizamuddin, the taxi breezing through the red traffic lights in the empty streets, his face shone with a small-town boy’s wonderment at Delhi in the gray smoggy dawn. Benjamin was the best of companions in India. He didn’t mind the hassle, dirt, and discomfort. He didn’t care that the guys in the market stared at him in his baggy shorts, which made him look goofy and half naked—men in Delhi almost always cover their legs. To him, India was just another in a lifetime of adventures. That freed him from the pressure of trying to fit in, and seemed a welcome break from my own obsessive concern about what my neighbors thought of me.
Soon after he arrived, Benjamin bought a clunky Indian-made bicycle, thinking it would be an efficient way to avoid bargaining with Delhi’s notoriously unscrupulous auto-rickshaw drivers. I warned him that he’d be the only cyclist in the city who earned more than a dollar a day. India has a caste system for the roads, as for everything else, and bicycles rank lower than bullock carts and camels.
Benjamin came home sweaty and grimy after an especially trying afternoon ride. An aggressive “jingle truck,” so called because the hand-painted vehicles are hung with jingling ornaments, had edged him off the road. He’d walked the bike home along the freeway.
“If I’m going to
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