NEW DELHI, INDIA -- The motorized rickshaws of this city have the engines of lawn mowers but are driven like rocket ships. It is a rainy day in March, and as buses, fuel trucks, grandmothers on motorcycles, and vintage cars swerve within inches of us, all producing their mad cacophony of honking horns, my face goes whiter and whiter.

Beside me a young woman laughs.

Her name is Priyanka and she is a 22-year-old university student. She has volunteered to help me find sources for a story I’m working on.

But on this Wednesday afternoon, as we careen around the curves and charge across the flyovers, I do nothing but pray for survival and listen to Priyanka’s melodic voice.

“Let me tell you something about this Jennifer Lopez,” she says. “Americans think she is fallen from the sky. I don’t understand. She is not so beautiful.”

“Can you tell him to drive slower? I think I’m going to—”

“And Leonardo DiCaprio? Let me tell you. I was happy when that boat sank.”

The rickshaw stops. A woman holding an infant runs through traffic to tug my arm. We pull away as Priyanka hands her a tiny silver coin.

“How old are you?” Priyanka asks. I’ve told her my job in New York is to write about love and dating. Perhaps that’s where this question is leading.

“I’m 33.”

“You’re so old!” She laughs. “In India if you are not married by 30 you are finished. For girls it is 27.”

This seems a little harsh.

“I will finish university when I am 25,” she continues. “Then I will be married at 27.”

To a New Yorker who writes about dating and nightlife, who has interviewed so many women who have abandoned even the idea of finding a spouse, it sounds like someone saying she will find a six-bedroom apartment on Central Park West. On a Friday. In September. When it happens to be windy. Sure, it’s possible, but life isn’t ever that simple, is it?

A Different Way

But perhaps the point is that for many Indians, it is that simple. Forget the reports that appear in magazines like Newsweek, each featuring the obligatory photos of scantily clad 20-somethings in the nightclubs of Mumbai. This country, when it comes to marriage, is still founded more on the customs and principals of Hinduism and the extended family than those of “Sex and the City” and the free market.

Spouses meet through parents. Overwhelmingly. Recommendations begin in the late teen years and serious introductions start not long thereafter. The entire family—parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles—constitutes the search committee. I’ve begun to wonder whether the word “arranging” even comes close to how marriages begin here. “Networking” better captures it.

The sexual mores of secular American youth—premarital sex beginning at 17, for example—that are purportedly on the rise here, are still largely blocked by two obstacles: religious tradition and to a lesser extent, logistics.

Families live together, often in the same room. Even in Mumbai, where there is money and anonymity, desire is held in check by the extant elements of the Rent Act. Think of New York City’s rent control laws re-written by Lenin and you have a sense of this legislation. Many tenants pay what they were charged in the 1950s. Developers don’t build apartment buildings—what would be the point when you can’t raise rents or evict anyone? The housing shortage is just staggering. There may be 18 million people in that city, but not many of them are young and single and have their own apartments.

But even those who are young, dress in Western clothes, speak English, go to nightclubs, and who are ambivalent about arranged marriage, will scoff at this typical American arrangement: two people living together for years, unmarried, childless, unsure if the other person is “the one.” Isn’t the whole point to be loved, to carry on your traditions, and to start your own family?

In America

12,000 miles away, on an April afternoon in Flushing, Queens, Jagdish Sabbir is praying. He is a 19-year-old undergraduate at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, part of the City University of New York. Today he is inside the Ganesha Temple, 45-57 Bowne Street, circling the navagraha, a shrine to the nine planets. He is dressed in designer jeans and a sweatshirt, he lives in one of the world’s most secular cities, but he comes here everyday.

“A devout young man,” says, Ganapathy Pamanabhan, the temple’s public relations officer who is affectionately known as “GP.”

It is a Saturday and the temple is crowded. Most of the women wear traditional Indian dress; most of the men do not. Sabbir is one of the few people who appears to be by himself. I can’t help asking him a few questions about marriage. Is he open to his parents finding him a spouse?

“I would like to meet her on my own but that really isn’t the most important thing. So long as she respects my mother and we can carry on the traditions, you know, how we meet isn’t what matters.”

The answer is a key to understanding not simply Indian cultural values, but Hinduism itself.

It is a religion with neither a centralized bureaucracy nor a uniform dogma. Beyond the trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, there may be millions of other gods. Ceremonies vary widely from region to region, family to family.
And yet it connects the majority of Indians in a way Judaism may be said to connect Jewish Israelis: it is a religion, yes, but one that is synonymous with national origin, ethnicity, and a way of life. And a key to that way of life is marriage.

I ask Sabbir if he has a time table.

“My mom wants me to graduate first, get a degree, get a job, and then think about marriage. She doesn’t want me to think about it all right now.”

When does he expect a wedding to take place?

“Late 20s. Early 30s. At the latest.”

Changes

The debate over arranged marriage, at least as it is posed in the West, has been framed not unlike the debate between socialism and capitalism. Should one submit to planning from above, and the limitations of freedom that might entail, or is one better off when individuals are left to compete for resources – in this case a spouse – in the marketplace? We see it, in other words, in the secular terms of contemporary politics: freedom versus subjugation.

Most Indians don’t see it that way. For them, there is nothing oppressive in meeting a potential spouse through family recommendations. Some might say involving the extended family and paying attention to matters of social standing and character actually have many more centuries of success behind them than modern American love marriages.

Perhaps the real question for Indians is whether the values and practices of Hinduism—with its emphasis on the family, and view of marriage as being not just between two people, but between two families—can thrive despite changing economies and immigration to the West.

And when asked about the continuation of their religion and their traditions with respect to marriage, around the world, from the streets of New Delhi to a temple in Queens, the answer still appears to be a very firm “yes.”

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Day 12. We are almost broken.

For nearly two weeks, we have rumbled across India, taking in two, sometimes three, world-important sites per day.

We have slept on trains. We have been bounced silly in five-hour bus rides on stretches of cratered terrain that prompt Sree Sreenivasan to quip, “and these are the GOOD roads!” We have been overcome with fatigue, and some of us (ahem) have been stricken with stomach ailments best described as medieval.

But we have also gazed at the moon from the Golden Temple in Amristar, ascended the steps of the mighty Jama Masjid, watched the changing of the guard at the border with Pakistan, broken bread with gurus, imams, and political leaders, and begun to form a view of this great country and its religions that could only come from a journey that has been as vast and varied as it has been arduous.

And now, in our bus, in an opulent section of Mumbai, where there are neither cows nor beggars, and where we are shaded by a canopy of trees (trees!), I get the sense that the group’s attention is beginning to wane.

We are quiet. We stare out the window. Our tour guide’s words are like a breeze floating over us. Perhaps I’m not alone in assuming all the surprises on this trip are over.

How wrong I am.

Meet The Zoroastrians

11:40 a.m. We arrive at the Athornan Boarding Madressa. It is a school for training Zoroastrian priests.

We are seated on wooden pews in a large concrete room. There is a small altar up front on which there burns a small but intense fire. Two children, dressed in white tunics stand next to it, watching its flames in silence. They are training to be priests and their mouths are covered with thin veils of white cloth to protect the sacred flame from their saliva.

Two young Parsi priests demonstrated a fire ritual. (Dikla Kadosh)

Ervad Parvez M. Bajan, the head priest of the Mevawala Fire Temple, presents us the history of the Parsi people and of the Zoroastrian faith. How it is the first monotheistic religion. How it charges its followers with three edicts: good thoughts, good words, good deeds.

How its priests are required to memorize every syllable of their single-volume sacred text. Why this policy was created: to avoid the calamity of the Arab conquest hundreds of years prior, when every last copy of the other 20 volumes was destroyed and lost forever.

The Parsis are a numerically tiny ethnic group that settled in India after fleeing persecution by Muslims in eighth century Persia. They are followers of the ancient Zoroastrian faith and they have achieved spectacular commercial and intellectual success in India. They own hotels, run finance companies, and were leaders in the movement for independence from the British.

And there are only 60,000 of them in a country of one billion people.

As Mr. Parvez speaks, we can’t help noticing the small boys. They’ve been standing the whole time. Sullen is the word that best describes their faces.

“Do these kids seem happy to you?” Amanda Millner-Fairbanks turns to ask me.

“Of course not,” I say, though I am aware I posses a very Western, bourgeois idea of what kids that age should be doing. It involves lots of television and very little priestly training.

Jesse Ellison, who studied the Zoroastrians while we were in New York, broaches the subject of inter-marriage and conversion. The Zoroastrian community worldwide is at a crossroads when it comes to conversion. For generations, the Parsi community in India has refused to allow conversion, but now the ethnic group is in danger of dying out, with the Zoroastrian faith potentially disappearing along with it. Recent census data projects there will be fewer than 20,000 Parsis in India by 2020. Despite the dwindling numbers, the Indian Parsi community has refused to open the Zoroastrian faith to converts, even as communities worldwide have grown more flexible, opening the doors of their fire temples to the children of inter-marriage and non-Zoroastrian spouses.

So why is the Parsi community so rigid in their stance?

“Well, even Hitler said keeping races pure is important,” says Parvez, as if this settles the matter. He reiterates the point a bit later. The Hitler part. We take it all in for a few moments, then get a short tour of the first floor.

Later I ask Jesse about the comment.

"I was surprised," she says. "I had heard Parsis here were more militant in their stance against conversion, but I had no idea they would be this extreme."

After our meeting with Parvez, Sreenivasan explains to the group that references to Hitler in India shouldn’t be perceived as having the same significance as they would in, say, Jerusalem. Many Indians just don't have a sense of the scale of Hitler's evil.

So much for a day without the unexpected.

A Party That Night

9:30 p.m. The Wodehouse Gymkhana.

We are at a reception that has been arranged for us by Sameera Khan, a Mumbai-based journalist and activist, and Columbia J-School alum along with Manjeet Kripalani, Mumbai bureau chief of BusinessWeek magazine, and a Columbia School of International and Public Affairs alum. There’s food and wine and even a face I recognize. It’s Bachi Karkaria, an op-ed columnist for the Times of India. Some say Ms. Karkaria is as famous in India as Maureen Dowd is in America.

“I’m a Parsi,” she tells me. “And let me tell you something about what this priest said about racial purity.”

“I personally think it’s foolish and it’s suicidal and many Parsis agree with me. The trouble is that the extreme group can be that much more articulate... I sometimes think of an old American bumper sticker: The Moral Majority is Neither.”

She describes how the refusal to allow the children of inter-marriages to become Zoroastrians has led to a frequency of intra-Parsi marriages that may be contributing to higher incidences of diabetes, diverticulitis, and even birth defects among Parsis.

“This is something no one wants to talk about,” Ms. Karkaria says.

Her overall message is that however strident our high priest may have been, there are many other Parsis who feel differently, and that there is a movement afoot to reevaluate the current interpretations of rules concerning the children of intermarriages.

My surprise at what she’s told me reminds me of a lesson this trip has taught me over and over: don’t fall into the trap of giving extremists a bullhorn. There is, at the very least, a silent minority in any religion, and the only way to learn what its members think is to find them and ask them questions.

Another Party

11 p.m. The group has crashed a nightclub called The Red Light. Stacey Samuel and Jesse Ellison have persuaded the managers to let us in, even though the space has been booked for a private event.

We enter. There are three women and what seems like 1,000 men. They are staring at the televisions. They are British. They are here to watch cricket highlights.

Numerous rounds of drinks later, the British guys and the ladies of our group are dancing the night away.

I spend most of my time observing. And I can’t help thinking that we’re still in India, we still have a day to go, but already we’re a very long way from the madrassas.

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Students of ultra-traditional Sunni Islam bid their visitors goodbye by quietly lining the staircase of their Deoband madrassa. (Erik Wander)

This is it.

We're in a classroom in the infamous town of Deoband, 100 miles north of New Delhi. This is, according to some, the point of origin of the radical form of Sunni Islam whose sphere of influence ranges from the Wahabists of Saudi Arabia to the ousted Taliban regime of Afghanistan.

We have been anticipating this day since we first learned it was on our schedule, way back in January, when we were in America, a lifetime ago.

Before us is a sea of faces. They belong to bearded young men in white outfits wearing white knitted skull caps. We entered the room and there they were. It's hot. We're on display. No one prepared us for this. We sit quietly.

A young man stands. He's in the front row. He's speaking in Urdu. There is fire in his voice. What could he be saying?

Farooq Quasim, a senior lecturer at the school, translates. He is bespectacled, around 50 years old. He utters his halting, careful English through the microphone.

"He is wanting to know why it is in the West that Muslims are humiliated," he says.

There is a pause. The eyes are upon our tiny group.

No one speaks. The ceiling fans whirl.

"Go ahead."

It's Sree, our indefatigable leader, whispering to me. I'm no spokesperson, but it is my assigned day to report. More importantly, I suppose, I happen to be sitting closest to him.

So I stand. And I can't help thinking, as the microphone is turned toward my mouth, and the heads tilt back and all those eyes wait patiently, that a man who has been known to screw up jokes, wedding toasts, and restroom directions is perhaps not the ideal choice representing his nation in a Q&A.

But then the words start coming out…

*

The building is a part of Darul Uloom Wakf, a madrassa, or Islamic school. Its students are as young as 14-years-old and appear to be as old as 30. Its curriculum is a part of the "Deobondi tradition."

This combination of theology and politics was forged in the middle and late 19th century in opposition to both British colonial rule and a perceived laxness in the prevailing interpretations of Islam.

But in the late 20th the literalist interpretations of Islam coming from this part of the world have become known for something else. In the West, fairly or unfairly, fundamentalist Islam of this sort has become associated with a violent antagonism toward American influence in the Middle East, restrictions against women, and, of course, the attacks of September 11, 2001.

You won't find much in the way of positive comment about madrassas in many quarters of American and Indian political thought. Indian BJP leader L.K. Advani, speaking to us several days prior, said madrassas fail their students because they don't give them the requisite skills for getting employment in the Indian civil service.

Some Americans have argued that these schools are breeding grounds for terrorism.

The students and instructors we interviewed at Darul Uloom Wakf denied these claims, often with great passion.

So it was a bit jarring to later hear a student ask a question with a sincerity so total it bordered on the benign: "My learned teacher says the media in the West is under the total Jewish control. What will you tell them about us when you return to them?"

*

In front of the microphone, I can only come up with a short answer about why Muslims are humiliated in America. It doesn't really answer his question, but if an American is given an opportunity to offer some words at a moment like this, I'd like to think one could come up with worse ones than these:

"I think in any country, and in any religion, there are extremists. It's that extremism that most of us oppose. So when people from America mistreat anyone based on their religion, it wounds us all."

It's a far cry from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream," or Lou Gehrig's farewell speech at Yankee Stadium, but on hot day in a tense situation, perhaps it was something we could, for a moment, agree on.

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