Miss New India

by Bharati Mukherjee

  Usha Desai held up her hand, signaling Anjali to stop.

  You want I should? Ping-Pong? You loser! But Parvati was trying to be kind. "Would you describe yourself as a people person? Or are you a loner who likes to be by herself and read a book?"

  Okay, she had an ally in Rabi Chatterjee's aunt. Good cop, bad cop?

  Parvati's roller-ball pen hovered over boxes to be checked off on the form. "Do you consider yourself a logical thinker or a go-with-the-flow, roll-with-the-punches type?"

  She hadn't read a single novel since graduating from high school. "People person," she admitted. Not that she wasn't a reader, but what she pored over were fanzines about Bollywood hunks. She was a movie groupie, not a bookworm. Ask me about Shah Rukh Khan or Akshay Kumar, go on, she silently challenged the two middle-aged women.

  "How about logic versus intuition?" Usha asked.

  "I'm a very logical person." Anjali craned her neck to read the upside-down words listed on Parvati's form: perfectionist; pliant; cautious; argumentative; compromiser; team worker; leader; secretive; loyal; competitive; manipulative; tough negotiator; diplomatic; impulsive; stubborn; plodder; methodical; serious; solemn; critical; fun loving; fun to be with.

  She had wants, she had longings and terrifying yearnings, oh, she had so, so many passions and obsessions, but none was named on Parvati Banerji's official interview form! You're failing! Suddenly a dam gave way inside her. "Do you want an honest answer? You want to know why I left Gauripur?"

  "I'm told it's the best policy," Usha said evenly.

  Instead of the pithy, sanitized answers she had prepared for likely questions, she heard herself offering these composed and cosmopolitan career women crazy fragments of Gauripur life, which made up the story of her own half-formed life. She unburdened on them Sonali's bitter compromises, Nirmal's fatal humiliations, Peter's hazardous generosity to her and his pained love for a young man (oh, my God, I've exposed him), her father's fatal despair, the criminal selected for her to marry: the injustice, the indignity, the powerlessness. Her happiest memory was walking in Gauripur with Rabi.

  "What can you know of people like Sonali and me and Nirmal? I had to get out before I died like Nirmal. You ask me what motivated me to come to Bangalore. I didn't have a life in Gauripur, like Peter has. I had to go. I am here to dictate the terms of my happiness."

  "Well, I'm glad Peter is dictating his," Usha remarked. She handed Anjali a tissue from a packet in the pocket of her kameez.

  It was only then that Anjali felt tears welling. She panicked. "I didn't mean to expose him." There was no taking back the confidences she had unleashed. Then, defensively, she explained, "I'm not the only one who knows. Rabi took some pictures. He described Ali as the most beautiful woman in Gauripur."

  "We don't find anything wrong with it." Parvati put Anjali's dossier back in the pile. "Are you feeling better after that emotional detour?"

  "My advice, whether you want it or not, is this: don't launch into a self-indulgent screed during an interview." Usha extracted a sheet from a loose-leaf binder.

  Screed: the day's new word. "I'm terribly sorry," Anjali said. "I don't know why all that gushed out of me. It just happened. I don't mean to make excuses for doing badly."

  Usha handed the sheet to her. It was a photocopy of the poem "The Raven." "Do you know what the title refers to, Angie?"

  What a relief! "A ray-venn?" she asked. "A large black bird with a big white beak? Like a kite, or a crow?" She was back in Peter's apartment, the pencil in Peter's hand punctuating each word. Again, again, no, again. Without being asked, she began to read the sheet. The "weak and weary," the "quoth the raven," the "never-more" all presented themselves fully formed, natural, without a pause.

  "Peter prepared you very well."

  Did that mean she was too advanced for the CCI program? "I still need training, madam."

  "Well, thank you for coming in this afternoon." Parvati signaled that the interview was at an end.

  "We'll call you. And please convey our good wishes to Mrs. Bagehot."

  On cue Kamini came out of the kitchen to show Anjali out. In the hallway, Anjali thought she overheard a soft laugh and something like the words "Well, definitely not your cookie-cutter..."

  5

  On the auto-rickshaw ride back from Indira Nagar to Kew Gardens, Anjali went over and over the questions the CCI partners had put to her, how stupidly she had answered them, and how she should have responded. Husseina's prepping hadn't seen her through the actual interview. She was anxious to describe her experience to Tookie and get her feedback before Tookie left for her pre-work-shift bar-hopping ritual.

  When she got back to Bagehot House, she changed into her own clothes before knocking on the barely open door to Tookie's room. All three of her fellow boarders were there, giggling and whooping about a column in Voice of the South, which was spread out on Tookie's bed. Sunita had found the paper on the top of the credenza in the breakfast alcove.

  "Hey, girlfriend!" Tookie high-fived her. "Take an eyeful of this! That Dynamo dude's got it right! Totally nailed us!"

  Even Sunita managed an air-high-five and made room for Anjali on the bed so she could read Dynamo's column.

  THE NEW MISS INDIA

  By Dynamo

  Dynamo this week is smitten. Congratulations to the New Miss India, Aziza Habib, selected last week in Goa by a panel of Bollywood heavyweights and at least one befuddled Hollywood B-lister, as the next Aishwarya Rai, self-evidently the most beautiful woman in the world. (By national consensus, any Miss India automatically doubles as the world Number One). Once again, the time-tested standard of Indian beauty has been upheld: simpering, doe-eyed, classically trained dancers in traditional attire (until they strip down to Western evening gowns and spike heels) in front of dozens of slobbering producers with checkbooks and film scripts at the ready.

  My question: Which of these lovely ladies is more in touch with the soul of modern India?

  Every week, Bang-a-lot (or maybe I should call it Bang-amour) receives (not "welcomes") several thousand young women from every part of this great country. They arrive by plane, by train, even by intercity bus. They come from the great cities and the mofussil towns. From Lucknow and Varodara; from Gauripur and Dhanbad. They represent all religions, all languages. They come bearing school-leaving certificates, letters of reference from old teachers, but most important, bearing hope and energy that is infectious. They don't simper, they don't dance (don't ask them!), and they don't wear saris or evening gowns. They stride in comfortable salwars or in blue jeans, and Bang-amour had better get used to it and be grateful for them. Our torpid institutions—like Bollywood standards of compliance—will try to beat them down, but that train has already left the station.

  While the moguls of Mumbai thrust their retro beauties in our faces, these call-center hopefuls manage to attract a smaller but more discriminating cadre of admirers. Bollywood has no use for India's women, apart from ornamentation. Far from Bollywood being India's international calling card, it cynically holds its "heroines" and their vast male audiences in a stage of infantilism that should cause us great international shame.

  Anjali read it through twice before Husseina grabbed the paper from her. Mr. GG had sneaked Gauripur into his column because he had fallen head over heels for her. Husseina said, "This guy must be dating a customer-service agent."

  "You mean he's having sex with one?" Tookie grinned.

  Anjali wasn't ready to let them in on Dynamo's identity—it was her special secret. She snatched the paper back from Husseina and read the column out loud, enunciating each syllable as self-consciously as she used to in dialogue drills in Peter Champion's advanced conversational skills class. How could her friends miss the obvious fact that Dynamo, aka Mr. GG, had penned a love letter to her, and to her alone? "He says he is smitten," she protested. "Smitten, that's how he describes what he is feeling. Smitten's a chivalrous word!"

  "He sounds more like an anthropologist to me,"
Husseina countered. "We didn't exist until he discovered us and talked us up. We're his newest tribe."

  Sunita missed Husseina's irony. "Hip-hip, Dynamo! I'm very okay with being a new breed of working girl."

  "Please, career women." Tookie corrected her. "Dynamo's smitten with a harem full of career women." She refreshed her lipstick and blush. "Well, got to hit the Brigades so I can get through my shift. Anyone coming along?"

  Husseina and Sunita declined, but Anjali eagerly accepted and hopped on behind Tookie on her Chetak. She was in the mood to celebrate Mr. GG's public homage to her. On the night of Minnie's dinner party she had been certain he would call her the next morning. No, she had expected him to surprise her by showing up at the front door of Bagehot House with a bigger bouquet than the one he had brought Minnie. What a sly suitor!

  One of Tookie's co-workers bought the first round in the first pub; strangers bought the next several. A secret admirer (of Tookie or of Anjali—it wasn't clear which) bought them second drinks at the second pub; a leering man in a Ralph Lauren shirt bought the next; a plump middle-aged man wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses indoors bought a few more. By this time Tookie began to repeat what she was saying, and Anjali felt more like an Angie. After the third pub, Angie lost count of who paid for what at which club. This was only the second night she had tasted liquor. In Gauripur the fast boys in Peter's American English conversation group went out for beers after class maybe once a month, but they'd never asked her to join them, and if they had, she'd have been genuinely shocked. Women from respectable middle-class Gauripur families didn't drink, period. Her father drank local whiskey in private, as other neighborhood men who could afford to probably did. The really rich—and there were only four or five such families—guzzled, it was said, imported scotch and brandy in the back rooms of the Gauripur Gymkhana; menial laborers soaked up cheap country liquor in remote shacks on the fringes of town and apparently dropped dead on their way home. She'd read in the papers about illicit liquor distillers being jailed.

  By eleven-thirty, when the bars were required to stop serving drinks, Angie was throwing up on the sidewalk. She couldn't remember any Bajaj Chetak ride back to Kew Gardens, let alone negotiating the steps from the front door to her room. At the lunch table the next day, Tookie gave her a big vitamin B-50 capsule and a lecture. There were two kinds of call-center boozers: big-city, upper-class practiced hedonists who could hold their liquor, and American-wannabe village bumpkins who got so puking drunk that they missed work. Angie prayed that Mr. GG hadn't witnessed her pub-crawling escapade the night before.

  6

  It was Parvati Banerji who called Anjali with the news that she had been admitted to CCI's two-week cram course and that she was expected at eight o'clock in the morning of the following Monday for the first class, which would be held in Reach for the Galaxy 3A, the apartment adjoining Usha's residence.

  "Usha usually runs the accelerated program, but I'm pinch-hitting for her this session." Parvati went on to explain that Usha's elderly mother had undergone complicated surgery to repair a heart valve, and had suffered a post-op stroke. "Severe deficit, I'm afraid." There was no predicting when Usha would return full-time to CCI.

  "Pinch-hitting?" Was that a form of Eve-teasing?

  Parvati laughed. "Don't sweat it. Our course includes an intensive culture-familiarization unit." She made arrangements for the CCI minivan, which ferried students to and from the institute, to pick Anjali up in front of Bagehot House at 5 A.M. on Monday. "The gate's still standing, isn't it? Or have hoodlums carried it away to sell as scrap iron?"

  "Not to worry, please. I'll be ready for shuttle bus by five minutes to five."

  So her life, her real life, would begin (again) in six more days.

  She was determined not to be overwhelmed by fellow students at CCI as she had been by call-center employees at Barista her first morning in Bangalore. To give herself an edge, Anjali went to bed early that night. She needed rest; she needed not just sleep but dream-free sleep. Banish the ghosts and night monsters. But she couldn't keep Baba away. He stormed into the room, screaming, "You're dead to me!" She scrunched her eyes shut and whispered, "You're dead to me too. Go haunt the 'Perfect Jamai Candidate' instead. He killed us both and got away." Baba melted into Subodh Mitra, and Subodh Mitra pulled her to a sitting position on the bed and, morphing into Ali, dirty-danced around her to a Bollywood soundtrack.

  SOMETIME THAT NIGHT Husseina rattled the beaded curtain to Anjali's makeshift room, startling her out of bed. She'd been deep in an anxiety dream, and she wasn't certain she was actually awake. Husseina pressed a painted fingernail to her full lips and motioned for Anjali to follow her down the hall to her room, which, according to Tookie, had been the bridal chamber in which Minnie the blushing bride had yielded to the dashing, retired army officer Maxie.

  A half-packed overnight case lay open on the four-poster bed. "I believe in traveling light," Husseina announced, smiling. "I'm leaving tonight. I'm so outta here, I'm already gone."

  I'm awake, Anjali thought. This is happening. A dump? But that was unthinkable; Queen Husseina was not subject to the fate of commoners like Mira of Mangalore or Anjali of Gauripur. "Going home? Why?"

  Husseina took in Anjali's look of shock and broke into a laugh that ended in a coughing fit. "Home to Hyderabad? What exactly is my home?" She flung open the doors of her almirah and pulled out the dresser drawers. Opulence! What was it like to be so rich? Anjali wondered, coveting Husseina's clothes, shoes, jewelry, stacks of wispy lingerie. She felt Husseina's arm slip around her shoulder and smelled Husseina's brand of sandalwood soap. She gave a squeeze, then let go. "They'll look even better on you, Anjali."

  Of all the questions she had, Anjali could only ask, "Why?" Meaning, why are you torturing me with this display of all the stuff you own?

  "Why am I leaving, or why am I giving all of this to you?" She tugged a slinky silk kameez off its hanger. "It's just a little trade, Anjali. My clothes for your clothes. It's a very good deal for you. It's something girlfriends do all the time, isn't it? Your jeans and T-shirts for all this. I'll throw in some underwear too." She scrunched the kameez into a ball and lobbed it into the open suitcase.

  "But my things aren't even clean." Why are you doing this? But as in a dream, the words wouldn't come out.

  "So? Bobby wants me to wear jeans tonight. Did I ever tell you about Bobby?"

  "You're engaged to a cousin in London," said Anjali. "At least that's what you keep saying."

  "Bobby is my fiancé."

  "He's in Bangalore?"

  "Actually he's not my fiancé. We've been married for seven years. He flew in from Bradford last week. He's so British, I barely understand him."

  Bradford dimmed the luster of Husseina the Mysterious. Married seven years? But she's my age! This was dream logic.

  Husseina flopped on the bed beside the suitcase. "I haven't been entirely honest with everybody. Actually, I've never been partially honest with anybody. But an air of mystery can be useful in a town like Bangalore, can't it? The truth is always more shocking than lies, isn't it?"

  Now who was babbling? But Husseina was talking into a vacuum, not expecting answers. "I've noticed," she continued, "you have a touch of mystery about you."

  Guile, yes; mystery, absolutely not. "I wouldn't know the first thing about acting mysterious," Anjali mumbled, to which Husseina merely cocked her head and retorted, "Perfect! Appearing innocent is the first step."

  Anjali flashed on something Peter had said. Innocence and blindness, something about them, but she couldn't keep them straight.

  Husseina finished packing a toiletry kit and threw it into the suitcase. Then she lifted a Gucci purse off the topmost shelf of the almirah and fanned out a fistful of passports. "My father does favors," she said. "People give him things, like free identities. What should I be tonight? American? No, too risky. Canadian? Too cold. Qatari, Aussie, Kiwi, Pakistani, Indian ... what-oh-what does poor little Husseina want to be? Whe
re do I want to go? I've got all the damned fucking choices in the world. I've got a million of them." She gestured at Minnie's posters of bland British children playing with pets. "I'm like those fucking little girls up there on the wall. Instead of kittens, I've got passports. That's all I've got."

  Tookie, not Husseina, was known for foul language and cursing. Anjali rushed down the hall to her room, plucked her jeans from the clothes tree and her T-shirts and underwear from the hamper, and then hurried back. Husseina had already stripped down to her bra and panties. "Thanks," she said, "just leave them on the bed. You can pick up your loot tomorrow."

  Dream logic or not, she was beginning to put things together. Husseina had acted strange the night of the gala. She'd been out on the porch, with her cell phone. And she'd been angry, difficult at breakfast. Husseina's careful façade was chipping.

  "Did you give Minnie a month's notice?"

  "Fuck the bitch! End of one chapter."

  "What should I tell Tookie and Sunita?"

  "Tell Tookie anything you want. Be careful with Sunita—she's not as innocent as she seems." Then Husseina launched into a monologue. "I'll go out as an Indian tonight. Maybe I'll be an American tomorrow—that might be fun. Fake identities are very easy when your whole life's been one big fucking fake." She read through the list of Panzer Delight cities before slipping the T-shirt on. "Been there, done that, except maybe Bratislava. Good to know there's still something worth living for." She was shapelier than Anjali. Then the jeans; there too, tighter and less boyish. She tucked her hair under Anjali's most colorful scarf, talking all the while.

  "You want to hear something funny? I never told anyone this. When I was in the ninth grade at the American School in Dubai, I got a phone call from my father to go to the airport, pick up a ticket, and fly back to Hyderabad right away. I thought someone had died! When I landed, he showed me a picture and said, 'This is my auntie's grandson. They call him Bobby. He is a good boy, with a scholarship to London. What do you think of him?' As if anyone cared a fig! His next words were 'You will be marrying him tomorrow.' I was only thirteen, and I had a paper due on Hawthorne and I wondered if getting married could be an excuse to pass in the paper late. Of course I couldn't mention it, but no one would believe it anyway. Truth is always more shocking than lies, isn't it? The next morning my new husband left for England and I went back to the ninth grade and no one knew I was married. My husband didn't write to me at school. He didn't write me, period."