Miss New India

by Bharati Mukherjee

  She had to puzzle out the word predeceased. It was a new English word for her to absorb. You are dead to me! Predeceased suggested a less violent end; her family had pressed the DELETE button and she had vanished into the ether. No corpse, no cremation. They had morphed her into a ghost. Baba was dead, but so was she. She felt dizzy. Her teacher was talking at her, tossing words as if they were life jackets and she was drowning.

  "This isn't the time for self-blame," she heard him say. That had to mean that Peter, somehow, blamed her. But she wasn't the one who had done the killing; they had—her father, her mother, her sister. Her father was—had been—"fit as a fiddle" according to the railway doctor, who was also a Bengali and the treasurer of the Durga Puja Committee. The doctor, stethoscope around his neck, would drop by the Bose flat two or three evenings a month, enjoy a whiskey and her mother's deep-fried savories, listen to her father's heart, and pronounce him "fit as a fiddle."

  "If you're wondering, it wasn't from a heart attack," said Peter. "But that's the story they're putting out."

  What was he saying?

  He died "suddenly"; that can only mean a heart attack, a stroke, something to do with high blood pressure. All Indian men suffered from high blood pressure. Salty food, smoking—it was a known flaw.

  "I am taking up too much of your time. You'll be late for your flight," she said. For all his empathy for Gauripur students, Peter didn't understand their family problems, especially not hers. She'd grown up with chaos masquerading as coherence. Fear, not steadfastness, had kept her father in dead-end Gauripur. Fear had forced him to follow his father's and his grandfather's footsteps into the railway office of Gauripur. She was an ungrateful, unworthy daughter; she accepted that. She was selfish and recklessly impatient. In fact, she embraced her flaws. Confessing unworthiness delivered a newfound freedom.

  Her family had orphaned her. She had not even any pretense of a home back in Gauripur. The Bose flat would already be occupied by another tenant. Ma must have been taken in by Sonali-di. A month ago Sonali-di had been the disgraced, divorced daughter; now Sonali-di was the good, dependable one. She pictured her mother in Sonali-di's drab apartment, fussing over her granddaughter, cooking, cleaning, and faking middle-class respectability while Sonali-di did for her boss whatever he demanded so she wouldn't lose her job. "You have more to go back to in Gauripur than I do." She rose from the armchair, not sure if a good-bye hug was appropriate.

  "I don't have Ali to go back to, if that's what you mean." He slumped on the mattress, cupping his face with his hands.

  She heard the sobs. "Oh, Peter!" Anjali rushed to her teacher and sat cross-legged beside him on the mattress. Peter's love story emerged in halting phrases. Ali had run off to Lucknow for back-alley surgery. She heard the phrases "instant gratification" and "black-market butcher" over and over again. Peter had counseled, cajoled, finally begged Ali to please be patient while he researched and ranked safe big-city clinics and experienced surgeons. But Ali had acted on a grapevine lead in Lucknow from one of his secretive acquaintances. "Instant gratification" had compelled Ali to risk death or maiming.

  "He wanted to be a woman. He thought that's what would make me happy."

  Awful as it seemed, as terrible as the judgment, she felt greater pity, greater pain, for Peter than she did for herself. Now Baba was dead, but he had first killed her off. She sat with Peter until Asoke knocked on the door and announced that he had taken it upon himself to flag an auto-rickshaw, which was now in the portico, its meter running.

  4

  At exactly nine on Monday morning, just as she had been promised, Anjali received a call from Usha Desai to set up an interview. "I can see you at eleven A.M. on Thursday. The only other possibility this week would be three P.M. on Friday." Though Peter's friend's voice was as soothing as it had been at Minnie's gala, her manner was more businesslike. "I have to be out of town Tuesday and Parvati is busy all day Wednesday."

  "Friday, please. Friday is suiting me better," she stammered, to give herself time to prepare for the interview.

  "Do you know where we are located?"

  A wilier student applicant would have done her research and found out not only the CCI street address but how best to get there by bus. Anjali was relieved to hear Usha Desai reel off the information in a nonjudgmental voice before Anjali could mumble no. "Apartment 3B, Reach for the Galaxy Building, Reach Colony, Ninth Cross, Indira Nagar, Stage 1. If you say 'Reach Colony' to the driver, he'll know. Three P.M. on the dot, please."

  "Thank you, Ms. Desai. I'm much obliged."

  "Much obliged? You couldn't have learned that phrase in Peter's class."

  "No, madam. I mean, Ms. Desai."

  Usha Desai's manner softened. "Peter broods over you like a mother hen, you know," she confided before saying goodbye and hanging up.

  Asoke appeared in the foyer just as Anjali was slipping out. He tapped the telephone logbook with the ballpoint pen attached to it by a red-and-blue crocheted cord. "Incoming call. Please to sign."

  Reluctantly Anjali scrawled her initials, the time, and the date on the line Asoke indicated. Minnie might make an exception for calls to and from her "darling boy," but obviously not for calls to Anjali from the darling boy's business contacts. Anjali had reverted overnight from being Peter's special friend to just another Bagehot House boarder on permanent probation. But Anjali was no longer the impulsive, naive runaway whom Mr. GG had deposited at Bagehot House's rusty gates. Her father was dead. Dead of shame and heartache. Dead, cremated, ashes scattered in some muddy stream or more likely some ditch, since the ghats of the holy Ganges were too far away. She had murdered her father. She felt grief. Grief for her mother, for Peter, but also for herself. The source of true pity is self-pity. She'd read that. Her father had mistaken ambition for restlessness. Why was it wrong for a daughter to want more than what her father could give her? Why couldn't Baba have let her go instead of forcing her to run away?

  NOT OWNING A Bajaj Chetak like Tookie's to zip around town and get to know distances between neighborhoods, Anjali miscalculated the time an auto-rickshaw would need to ferry her from Bagehot House to Indira Nagar. She arrived at the Reach Colony complex of buildings twenty minutes late for her three o'clock interview. At least she was looking head-turning chic, she consoled herself, in the designer shirt-and-slacks outfit she had borrowed without permission from Tookie's closet.

  Reach for the Galaxy, a four-story building with aspirations to luxury, stood between two identical blocks, Reach for the Stars and Reach for the Universe. So that explained the colony's name. The apartment façades were painted with black-rimmed rectangles of bold colors: red, yellow, blue, and white. The top floors of all three were still under construction, bristling with bamboo lifters and half-walls of raw brick pocked by window cutouts, with outer walls waiting for their final coats of plaster and paint. The boxy balconies of the lower floors were littered with children's toys and draped with drying laundry. A team of uniformed malis watered a still-scruffy cricket pitch, while a construction crew worked to complete the second floor of a supermarket for the convenience of Reach Colony residents. The billboard map indicated a yet-to-be-built shopping center and Montessori school: the Bangalore dream, a self-contained, self-sufficient city for the affluent.

  Usha Desai lived in one of the four apartments that took up the third floor. Galaxy had an elevator shaft, but the elevator had not yet been installed. Even the air was tinged with the smell of wet concrete. Anjali had a flash memory of crumbling Pinky Mahal: she had spent her life amid empty promises and the expectation of decay and dissolution. What must watching glass skyscrapers and shopping malls rise intact from hacked earth and churned rice paddies do to a child? At that strange dinner party of Minnie's, she had intuited the Bangalore spirit and blurted out her longing for it. But now, as she stood before the front door of apartment 3B, she wondered if she had the brashness to gut her Gauripur past. Except that she had already lost it. Peter had flown in just to inform her of
that loss. Her father was dead. Her mother and sister had chosen to be dead to her. Moving forward was now her only option. The wooden nameplate on the door bore two names: DESAI DATA SYSTEMS and CONTEMPORARY COMMUNICATIONS INSTITUTE. She rang the bell and was let into the apartment by a maid who was about her own age.

  "I hope you didn't have trouble finding the place," Usha Desai said. Her voice was creamy-smooth, betraying no annoyance at Anjali's lateness. "I should have told you that I live in a building that looks like a Mondrian."

  Anjali wasn't going to let on that she didn't know what a Mondrian was. She was here for one specific purpose: admission to CCI. Stay focused. "It's almost like a painting," Anjali offered.

  Usha was wearing a gray salwar-kameez set this time, not an imported couture pantsuit, as she had at the Bagehot House party. A fifty-year-old with a teenager's body: Anjali marveled. She wore her graying hair in a bob and her reading glasses on a silver chain around her neck. Diet, exercise, authority, composure: she radiated self-discipline. And speed: she covered the long, narrow hallway to the parlor as though her legs were motorized. Anjali's mother and maternal aunts were plump, slow-moving women younger than Usha, quick only in perceiving slights.

  Usha led Anjali through the parlor into a sunny, spacious room she called her office. It was furnished with a squat glass-topped desk, swivel chairs, filing cabinets, and a colorful Sankhera sofa and armchair set. Lined up, facing the windows, were two large exercise machines, which Anjali had seen advertised in lifestyle magazines that Tookie passed around, and a stationary bicycle. The windows looked out on a part of the Reach Colony that she hadn't noticed from her auto-rickshaw: a partly bulldozed strip of forest, and beyond that, an intact small village. Perhaps the villagers provided the colony's labor; or equally plausible, perhaps they ignored the encroaching urbanization altogether.

  Anjali was about to invent excuses for her tardiness—a motorbike had bumped her auto-rickshaw?—but Usha cut her short. "Let's not waste more time. I have a meeting in Electronic City later this afternoon."

  Parvati Banerji was seated at the desk, a stack of dossiers before her and more stashed in a leather tote bag, on which the letters PB were stamped in gold paint. Two large dogs lounged at her feet. They looked like groomed, pampered versions of pariah dogs. The larger of the two growled at Anjali. "Chill," Parvati commanded. She calmed the dog by stroking it behind the ears; then she shot Anjali an amused look. "You aren't afraid of dogs, are you?"

  "No." She lied, but she didn't approach the desk. Anjali hadn't known anyone in Gauripur who kept dogs as pets. There were packs of stray pariah dogs, which lived off scavenged garbage, and fierce, unleashed German Shepherds owned by rich men to scare burglars off their property.

  "How's Mrs. Bagehot?" Usha asked. She checked the large dial of the men's watch she wore on the inside of her wrist, and frowned.

  "That was an odd evening, wasn't it?" Parvati added. "The poor dear hasn't been out of her house in forty years." She pulled a slim folder from the stack on the desk. Anjali assumed it contained information on her, though she hadn't formally applied to CCI. Probably the letter of introduction Peter had promised to send. Could Desai Data Systems have pieced together her bio?

  "We don't want to rush you," Usha said. "But traffic's bound to be atrocious."

  Parvati tossed a treat to each of her dogs. "Mind you, we're not biting the hand that feeds us," she explained.

  Usha checked her cell phone. "We're all profiting from the boom in Bangalore, but we wish the city fathers would widen the roads!"

  "Well, shall we get started?"

  Usha flipped shut the lid of her cell phone. "Hold on a sec. I have to make sure Mother takes her new pills. She's hidden them again, but I think I know where." She darted back into the hallway.

  Anjali was grateful for the delay. The thought of being interviewed by two women powerful enough to open doors flustered her. She was confident that she could charm or tease favors from men in positions to help her once she figured out their vanities and weaknesses, but she had honed no strategy for getting what she needed from women.

  Parvati swiveled in her chair, pointed to the sofa and chair, and asked Anjali to please sit down. "Make yourself at home. Usha won't be long. She knows all her mother's hiding places." Then she went back to reading dossiers and making notes. Anjali sank into the low-footed Sankhera chair, which turned out to be an uncomfortable choice for a long-legged candidate with frazzled nerves. Newspapers in English, Hindi, and Gujarati lay in a basket on the floor within easy reach, and glossy business weeklies were displayed on the matching Sankhera coffee table. What would more impress Parvati: pretend to be engrossed in a periodical or pretend to be lost in rich inner resources?

  "Usha's a saint," Parvati sighed. She wheeled her desk chair closer to Anjali. "When Urmila-behn—that's her mother—took ill, Usha re-signed her job. She'd headed HR—that's the human resources office—at a huge textile company, so building up CCI and being a dutiful daughter was a breeze for her. Her sister and brother had no time for their mother. The brother said flat out that he wasn't about to relocate from Australia. The sister flew in from Canada for two weeks, then flew right back, saying that her husband and children needed her more than her mother did."

  Dutiful daughter. Anjali squirmed in shame. How was she to respond when she herself had chosen personal fulfillment over her parents' welfare? "Why is it that Indian women become so selfish when they leave India?" Parvati continued. Anjali's face felt hot. She inferred that her forehead was probably visibly perspiring when Parvati called out to the maid to bring a glass of chilled water for the guest.

  "Mr. Champion speaks very highly of her too," Anjali managed to say, but very came out as "wery."

  "Of course we have to face the same kind of ethical crisis within India. My parents spent their last years in Rishikesh while I was in Bombay with my husband and sons. We have to go where the jobs are."

  The maid carried in three glasses of water on a tray and a plate of cookies. She was wearing a pretty purple salwar-kameez with a beadfringed dupatta. In Bangalore, you couldn't tell who was a student and who a servant.

  "In my own case, I left home for the possibility of securing employment that I could be good at," Anjali mumbled in self-defense. At which I can be good? Avoid complicated constructions. Keep your mouth shut until the formal interview starts.

  PARVATI WAS STILL going through the pile of dossiers and Anjali still unfolding her legs, crossing them alternatively at the knees and at the ankles, when Usha reappeared. "Well, at least you two have had a chance to get acquainted. Would you like a cup of tea, Anjali? Coffee is doable too. Kamini doesn't have to get to her computer classes for another couple of hours."

  In Bangalore, even servants took computer lessons! In Bangalore, even servants were in competition! Soon Bangaloreans would be importing their domestic staff from Gauripur! Anjali declined the offer of tea or coffee.

  "Maybe we could start by having you tell us a bit about your background," Usha suggested.

  Don't get rattled. Live up to the image you cut in Husseina's and Tookies clothes. Fake coolness under pressure. "P'hine, madam!" She saw right away how her saying "P'hine" had jolted both interviewers. "My name is Angie Bose." She rattled off her rehearsed self-introduction. "We're Bengalis, but my family settled in Bihar long ago. My Hindi is better than my Bangla, and my English is better than both—"

  Parvati interrupted her. "So we should call you Angie?" She checked off something on one of the forms in front of her. "Angie, not Anjali. Fine. The last name's still Bose?"

  "Did you catch the difference, Angie?" Usha asked. "Fine, not p'hine. Efff. Flower, frost, forest, fever, full, fool, fluff, fish, fat, fell, fast, five, fair, far, farther, further ...for want of one right consonant sound, et cetera?"

  She had failed the interview even before it had begun! For want of the correct fff sound, her future might be lost. Peter's gift of money wouldn't last forever.

  "Excuse my n
ervousness. Fine."

  Parvati consulted the form again. "Angie, what are your career goals?"

  "You are asking for my job goals, madam?" She had prepared for this question. "My ambition is to be a call-center agent. It is my vocation."

  "Call-center agent!" Usha snapped. "Please. Customer-support specialist. U.S.companies are very uncomfortable with any term that smacks of outsourcing."

  Parvati intervened in a soothing voice. "We're interested in you as a person. We want to know what makes you tick, what makes you leave family and hometown, what sports you play or follow, that sort of thing."

  "You want I should recite my job qualifications? Highest marks in first-year B. Comm. course in statistics, certificate in advanced conversational English, diploma in American English..." She let her voice trail off because Usha was playing impatiently with a tiny bronze trophy in the shape of a woman golfer on the neat desk. Move on to sports and hobbies. "Forward on the da Gama women's field hockey team..." Should she brag about having been a mean ball flicker? Ma and Baba had been ashamed of her unwomanly stick-wielding skill. "Silver cup in inter-missionary-schools girls' Ping-Pong tournament..."