Miss New India

by Bharati Mukherjee

  A museum of unsorted, uncurated horrors, Anjali thought.

  They left the decision to Anjali with this final reminder: taking the risk of confronting Minnie might mean getting dumped, which was bad for the pocketbook, temporarily at least. But expulsion from the airless Bagehot House, with its cloistered secrets and ornate rules, promised a release into Bangalore's special freedoms—love and adventure. Minnie provided clean rooms cheap and a touch of the Old Bangalore prestige, but at a cost to one's self-image as a modern, quick-on-her-feet, funloving Indian girl.

  5

  Shh—she's talking to Maxie's ghost!"

  The Bagehot House Girls had gathered at the top of the stairs at twelve noon, waiting for Asoke to sound the gong announcing tiffin, which was Minnie's term for the lunch-hour meal that she had Asoke serve them in an alcove off the padlocked formal dining room. But Minnie was in the foyer, speaking on the telephone. Her back was arched forward as she cupped the heavy receiver with both hands against her left cheek; her voice was louder than usual and sounded giggly-girlish.

  "She has a gentleman caller!" Sunita gasped.

  Regal Husseina gave an unregal wink. "Tookie, you put one of your guy friends up to this trick, didn't you? Just look at Mad Minnie, she's blushing under all that thick makeup!"

  "And you," Minnie simpered. "It's been ever so long! And I'm not getting any younger, but I'm still good for a waltz or two. Or three."

  Tookie crossed her heart. I'm above reproach, her look said, as she led the other three down the staircase. Sunita coughed to warn the landlady that she had company in the foyer.

  "Oh, splendid! Well, ta-ta, for now." But Minnie didn't hang up. She turned to face her boarders. "For you," she announced, holding out the receiver. None of the young women reached for it. The earpiece was caked with beige face powder. "What's the matter? I'm not charging you for receiving this call, Anjali."

  "Me, madam?" The only person who knew where to reach her was Mr. GG. She hoped her excitement wasn't too obvious to Husseina and Tookie. "Anjali Bose here," she mumbled as Minnie pushed the receiver into her face.

  And from a vast distance she heard a familiar voice: "Angie, it's me, Peter."

  His voice was so American, so not like the Americanized banter of the Willies and Mickeys and Hanks at Barista.

  "Peter! I was just talking about you!" It wasn't a lie, not really. She had mentioned his name when Husseina played the role of Usha Desai, to prep for the call she had not yet made. "Where are you, Peter?" Oh, please, please, she prayed, let him be far away from Bangalore.

  "It's Peter" were the words she'd most feared. She imagined what he'd ask: Why haven't you called Usha Desai? How much money have you squandered? She hadn't prepared her defense. I tried to call Mizz Desai, but the lines were occupied, I mean, the line was busy. Or a bold lie: I called but she didn't recognize my name. Except that Minnie would then find out she had made a freebie outgoing call and definitely dump her. Or I just came down to the hall to call her. It's mental telepathy! How could she admit the humiliating truth that she had been scared away by Usha Desai's answering machine?

  "Well, I'm glad you made it to Bagehot House. You couldn't be in safer hands than dear Minnie's. Now about CCI..."

  Minnie, Tookie, Husseina, and Sunita huddled around her, listening in. Even Asoke, waiting at the door to the dining room to serve the soup course, showed interest in Anjali's one and only telephone call in over three weeks. This was one time she didn't savor being the center of attention.

  "CCI?" Anjali asked. She felt the idioms and accents she had practiced assiduously in Peter Champion's conversational skills classes desert her.

  "Usha's outfit. Contemporary Communications Institute. She said she hadn't heard from you."

  "Oh, CCI," she mumbled. So her Gauripur benefactor was tracking her lack of progress. Mumble a noncommittal response; don't admit to procrastination. "I agree..."

  "Pardon? You're breaking up, Angie. Bad connection."

  "Monday next I am planning..."

  "Can't stay over till Monday, but at least I can make sure you have an interview set up with Usha. Listen, I'm flying in for the weekend."

  "Here? You are coming?"

  "Getting in Friday afternoon."

  Tookie mimed a lover's swoon, collapsing into Husseina's arms. "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou"—she mouthed the words.

  "This Friday you are coming?"

  "Minnie's readying a room for me."

  "In Bagehot House you are staying?"

  Minnie snorted. "Where else would I put the adorable boy?"

  "I thought it best to deliver Gauripur news in person, Angie."

  An "Omigod!" slipped out before she could stop it. Why couldn't Peter accept that she had scoured Gauripur out of her life as roughly as her father scooped corns and calluses off his feet with a used razor? She tried to recover by asking after Ali.

  "We have a lot to talk over, Angie."

  "Does that mean..."

  Minnie rapped her lace-gloved fingers on Anjali's back. "Long-distance call," she said sternly. Anjali got the hint and kept her goodbye brief.

  "The dawning of a new durbar." Tookie giggled as she grabbed Anjali by the waist and fox-trotted her away from the landlady. "Would you believe the old cow is jealous?"

  Asoke ushered them into the eating alcove without sounding the tiffin gong. Their places were set as usual on a wiped-clean plastic tablecloth. As they took their seats, Minnie launched into a soliloquy on the difficulty of hosting a Bagehot House gala, a true durbar, without the help of Maxie, God rest his soul in peace. The number of guests other than the guest of honor had to be limited to eight, because only ten diners could be accommodated at the table in the formal dining room. In her excitement, she'd taken out her hearing aid. "Let's see now, dear Opal Philpott absolutely cannot not be invited. You've all heard me talk of the poor, dear brigadier general's untimely death."

  Sunita murmured a dutiful "Yes, madam."

  "Dropped dead playing polo," Minnie informed Anjali.

  Tookie nudged Anjali's foot with hers. "Last time she told the story, the late, lamented codger took an accidental bullet in the head during a tiger shoot," she whispered.

  Asoke shuffled around the table, serving the soup course. Thick cream of cauliflower, Anjali noted happily, instead of the usual tasteless mulligatawny. She was about to dip her spoon into the soup when she caught sight of wiggly, white bugs among the florets. Her mother always soaked raw cauliflower bits in salted water for half an hour to tease bugs out before she started currying them. How was her mother coping? Had her own scandalous running away brought Sonali-di and Baba closer?

  "Asoke could hand-deliver an invitation to Ruby. Ruby Thistlethwaite never made it to New Zealand as she'd hoped." Minnie took a dainty spoonful of soup and blotted her lips with her linen napkin, leaving a scarlet lipstick smear. "No. Dear Opal would never forgive me if I invited Ruby, not after Ruby insulted the brigadier general at the Gymkhana after too many gin fizzes."

  "Widow Opal's the only living friend she has," Tookie muttered. "And she's barely alive."

  By the time Asoke cleared the dessert plates, the landlady had come up with no additional names. She discovered, and casually reinserted, her hearing device. She asked Anjali—almost begged her—if she knew of Bangalore friends of her former teacher who should be invited. Anjali was absolutely sure she didn't want to meet Usha Desai yet, not on Minnie's terms, but what a fluke opportunity to impress Mr. GG with that fact that she knew the American expert on Bagehot House history well enough to get him invited to the dinner party. "Actually there is someone," Anjali offered. "Mr. Gujral is a fan of Mr. Champion's book on your home."

  Minnie beamed. "Perfect! Make the call today at your convenience, no charge. Asoke, smelling salts. Oh dear, I'm in such a tizzy about the gala, my head is spinning like a top!"

  Asoke pushed the landlady's chair away from the dining table and helped her stand. Then he pulled a small green bottle out of a
pocket of his soup-stained livery jacket, unscrewed the cap, and held the bottle to her nostrils. She took a shallow sniff. "You girls are also invited," she said as she allowed Asoke to help her out of the room for her usual afternoon nap.

  "How can the old cow stand that smell?" Tookie shuddered.

  "More important, where does one buy smelling salts in this day and age?" Husseina said. She turned to Anjali and winked. "Smooth move. Getting former and future suitors acquainted!"

  Part Three

  1

  Bagehot House was staging its first durbar in sixty years.

  By late afternoon of the day that Peter Champion called from Gauripur, a Wednesday, Asoke had recruited a small army of the compound's squatters to haul musty Raj-era furniture, mildewed velvet drapes, and a rat-gnawed Oriental rug out of a downstairs bedroom, scrub the cracked mosaic floor and water-stained walls with disinfectant, sweep cobwebs from the blades of the ceiling fan, and refurnish the room with lighter furniture from Minnie's private suite: a twin platform bed with a thick slab of foam instead of box spring and lumpy mattress, a dressing table with an oval mirror and upholstered stool, a three-drawer chest, a coat tree, a compact writing desk with hinged lid, and a chintz-covered overstuffed loveseat.

  All—well, many—of Minnie's claims about Bagehot House's Raj-era opulence were true. There actually were stacks of silver trays and silver tea services, wooden chests of heavy silver cutlery, cut-glass decanters and goblets, gilt-edged champagne flutes, fine bone china bearing the Bagehot family crest, silver-capped elephant tusks and tiger-skin throw rugs stored on the premises in locations known only to Asoke. Live caparisoned elephants were beyond his powers. But he had the power to—and did—conscript scores of the squatters on the Bagehot compound to do the work that must have been done by liveried butlers, bearers, cooks, and sweepers in the heyday of durbars.

  But who was paying for the delivery of live chickens and ducks and fresh-killed mutton, Anjali wondered. Baskets kept arriving: fruits, vegetables, sweets, a cake. And finally a case of French champagne. Champagne? Who could afford such gifts? None of her fellow boarders, not even nosy Tookie, offered a convincing guess. Minnie had mysterious purveyors.

  On Friday morning Asoke had a half-dozen teenage boys chop down boughs from flowering trees, which he then stuck in umbrella stands made out of hollowed elephant feet. Minnie herself supervised as two garage-dwelling mother-and-daughter teams rinsed and dried stacks of dinner plates, soup plates, water goblets, punch bowls, and lemonade pitchers. Asoke trained a squatter girl, the one Anjali had seen straddling a window frame and combing her hair in the firelight, in the correct way to wait on tables, then sent her into the snake-infested jungle behind the main house to gather flowers. The girl must have been fearless; she sashayed barefoot into the dense vegetation and came back with two bucketfuls, which Husseina and Anjali had to arrange and rearrange in improvised vases—mainly lemonade pitchers, punch bowls, and old chamber pots—until the arrangements won Minnie's approval. Anjali remembered Peter's little joke: "I have a way with older women." The preparation for his visit was indeed monumental, an overturning of history itself. Out with the pewter-framed portraits of colonels with apoplectic pink complexions; in with brass-topped Indian tables and wall hangings of blue-skinned Krishna, the God of Love, at play with ivory-pale almond-eyed milkmaids. Watching as Minnie, giddy as an infatuated schoolgirl, fussed over plans to make Peter welcome, Anjali felt an odd sense of power. Minnie knew nothing of Ali; Anjali held that secret.

  ***

  EARLY ON FRIDAY evening, as Anjali paced the cluttered floor of her alcove, trying to decide which of two tops to wear with her slinkiest pair of black cotton pants, Husseina poked her head in. "Which do you think?" Anjali asked. "I don't have a decent mirror in this rat hole. Minnie has some nerve charging me the rent she does!"

  Husseina took the tops from Anjali. "I was wondering if you would like to borrow one of my gharara sets. Minnie thinks of tonight as a dress-up night." She managed a theatrical shudder. "Who knows what sumptuous moldy gown she'll deck herself out in."

  Anjali thrilled at the chance of greeting Mr. GG in one of Husseina's elegant formal outfits. The one and only time they had met, they'd clicked. And what had she been wearing that first day of her new life in Bangalore? The sweaty, rumpled jeans and T-shirt in which she had finished her odyssey all the way from Gauripur. She coveted Husseina's look of effortless stylishness. But on her, Anjali was convinced, Husseina's expensive clothes would look seductive as well as sophisticated. How could Mr. GG not be overwhelmed?

  Husseina's room was huge. Anjali envied the massive four-poster bed, the rosewood chests of drawers and cupboards with lion's-head brass pulls, the sun-bleached velvet curtains and the elaborately framed paintings: golden-haired little girls in frocks with frills and bows, kittens playing with balls of wool.

  "Borrow what you like," Husseina urged Anjali, as she unlocked the door to a ceiling-to-floor almirah. "Sunita's ironing the salwar-kameez I'll be wearing tonight. That girl's so selfless, it's almost annoying." The interior of Husseina's almirah glowed with a pastel rainbow of silk. "Key lime, lemon chiffon, apricot, mango, raspberry sorbet. My just desserts, I call them. Go on, take your pick. I'll be in blueberry."

  "I couldn't," Anjali said, without meaning it. She fingered the silks, georgettes and organzas.

  "Don't you like them?" Husseina sounded hurt.

  "They're beautiful."

  Husseina pulled two pistachio-green gharara sets out of the almirah. One was decorated with crystal beads, the other with sequins. "Swarovski," she said. "That's what I wore on my first real date with my fiancé after we were engaged. We had ice cream sundaes." She shut the mirrored door of the almirah and pointed to their reflections. "Pistachio matches your eyes." She pulled Anjali closer to her, pressing her body hard against Anjali as if trying to fuse their flesh. "The same greenish eyes, would you believe?"

  Husseina's sudden intensity frightened Anjali, but she didn't want to risk losing the chance to borrow an expensive gharara that might inflame Mr. GG.

  "We could be sisters," Husseina continued. "If we dressed alike, I bet we could pass for twins." She laughed as she handed the crystalspeckled outfit to Anjali. "I want you to have this. And not just for tonight."

  "Oh, I couldn't..." Anjali said, but she grabbed the top. Rich and mysterious Husseina could afford to be magnanimous, so why insult her by refusing her exquisite gift? As Tookie often remarked, there was no point in worrying about Husseina's motives: "She's so rich, she lives on a different planet."

  Husseina draped the shimmery top over Anjali's navy stretch T-shirt. "You're going to look very beautiful for your young man."

  My young man? She decided Husseina was referring to Peter Champion, not Mr. GG. "He's not my young man." She could take Husseina into partial confidence. "Peter isn't young. You'll see tonight."

  "But you call your teacher by his first name?"

  "It's an American thing. Actually, he's more like my father's age."

  Husseina arched a finely plucked eyebrow. "What's twenty, twenty-five years in the giant scheme of things?"

  "He may be older than my father ... and he's got someone else."

  "Ah, the fatal hesitancy. That fatal someone else."

  Anjali couldn't tell if Husseina was consoling her or teasing her. "I think Americans like to say, 'He has a partner.'"

  Husseina laid a maternal hand on Anjali's shoulder. "It's all a business arrangement. You'll get used to it."

  "In the giant scheme of things." Anjali repeated Husseina's phrase. It was a comforting notion. "It's all a matter of light and angles, isn't it?"

  2

  Mr. GG, carrying a huge bouquet of flowers and a copy of Peter Champion's book, was the first to arrive. In the old days, according to Minnie, guests in ball gowns and tails were greeted by a long receiving line that ended with Maxie, Minnie, and the guests of honor. Gout and poverty had forced Minnie to dispense with such Bagehot House t
raditions. Asoke, instructed to meet guests in the portico with a welcoming salaam, ushered Mr. GG to the threshold of the formal drawing room, then hobbled back to his post. Minnie, majestic in a brocade caftan, had installed herself in a wing chair in the center of the room and Anjali on an ottoman right next to her a full hour before. The other three boarders hovered behind her like ladies in waiting, offering her appetizers of meat-filled pastries and refilling her glass of rum punch.

  "That gentleman with charming manners, is he the fan who wants to meet our Peter?" Minnie asked Anjali in a tipsy whisper. "He cuts a dashing figure."

  Anjali couldn't get over how dashing! She had remembered Mr. GG as a lithe man with a slight paunch, but here he was, tall and princely in black silk sherwani and white ruched churidar, gliding toward the hostess.

  "Where are your manners, child? Go on, get up, introduce him to me."

  "Mr. Gujral!" Anjali couldn't hide her excitement. She rose from the low ottoman in such a hurry that the stiletto heel of one shoe got caught in the threadbare weave of the rug, and if limber Mr. GG hadn't managed to tuck Peter's heavy tome under one arm and rush with the bouquet to steady her, she would have taken an unromantic fall instead of merely bruising a few flowers.

  "I keep having this effect on you," he joked. Then he turned his full attention to Minnie. "Ah, finally I have the fortune of meeting the chatelaine of this gem of a manse that I have long admired." With a gallant flourish, he presented the dented bouquet to her. "How do you do, madam? Girish, please. Not even my clients call me Mister Gujral."

  Minnie accepted the bouquet with a tinkly giggle and handed it to Sunita to place in a vase. "Girish, it is. How do you do, Girish. Thank you for making time to dine with a recluse in a mausoleum."

  "Gem," Mr. GG said, air-kissing the gloved fingertips she offered him, "not mausoleum. And speaking of gems"—he returned his attention to Anjali—"has it been a week or a month since ... Barista? Itfeels like twenty-four hours." Anjali glowed, flattered by his courtly come-on. "What a transformation, and you're not even wearing glass slippers!"