Miss New India

by Bharati Mukherjee

  Young men were pounding the bar for more drinks. He ignored them. A scrawny young busboy brought out two trays of still-dripping glasses from the kitchen and arranged them by highball, beer, and wine. "Lalu!" Rajoo snapped his fingers and pointed to heaps of plates and glasses stashed in plastic bins under the bar. "Idiot." He apologized to Anjali. "What to expect? Your friend Sunita's stupid brother."

  Before she could respond—the very idea of Rajoo's hiring Sunita's brother and the possibility that Rajoo, from behind a bar on Brigades Road, controlled an empire of hirings and real estate placement sent her spinning—Rajoo leaned forward simply to stare at her face.

  "You've got to say this about Tookie," he said. "She has the prettiest friends in Bangalore."

  7

  Anjali took advantage of Tookie's new, almost fawning, admiration for her to set up a visit to the campus of Trans-Oceanic Services (TOS), Tookie's all-night home. That way, she reasoned, she would experience a day at a call center, gaining a decided edge over other students at CCI. Except for rare trips to her father's railway building in Gauripur to bring him a file or spectacles or acid reflux pills, she had never been inside a business office. And Bangalore office complexes were vaster, glitzier, scarier than the long dusty room with rows of wobbly wooden chairs and file-cluttered wooden desks in which her father had worked. Tookie acted eager to do Anjali a favor. Security was tight in all downtown glass-tower office buildings, but she would get her "badass beau" Rajoo to call the head security officer of TOS. "I'll switch to a day shift for the next couple of weeks, girlfriend." She even offered Anjali a bonus: she would arrange for Moni, "the Bengali Svengali," to bump into her.

  It was available, the world that she, Anjali/Angie, aspired to. She did aspire to it, didn't she? In any case, it was a challenge, and challenges turned her on. She had no idea of the entrance requirements, or if she had the skills and the stamina to stick it out. She knew only that she was a young woman with a very slight advantage, and she'd better grab Bangalore and whatever it offered, or else she'd end up living her sister's life.

  On the morning of the scheduled visit, Rajoo showed up at Bagehot House to pick up Tookie and Anjali—in a chauffeured Jaguar. "You sure make things happen, Rajoo. I owe you one," Tookie said.

  He acknowledged Tookie's compliment with a leer worthy of Bollywood cads. "Give and take, take and give. That's what society is about, no?" Anjali hung back as they bantered. To her, Rajoo, in his indigo silk shirt, tight white slacks, and dyed-blue snakeskin boots, looked more Dubai than Bangalore. She couldn't visualize Mr. GG in such a getup. Squatter kids materialized from the green wilderness of the Bagehot compound to check out the fancy automobile. The chauffeur scrambled out from behind the steering wheel to shoo them off.

  But Rajoo intervened. "Like these wheels?" he asked, beaming at them. They moved away from the car and clustered around the flashy stranger, who was extracting a wad of rupees from the back pocket of his snug-fitting pants. "It's a matter of giving and taking," he explained to Tookie, who looked pained as he distributed a one-hundred rupee note to each of the kids. "Not baksheesh," he told them. They rewarded him with worshipful stares. "Make it work for you. I'll be back to collect my cut." Since he was speaking in English, the effect must have been meant for Anjali.

  Tookie cut it short. "Some of us working stiffs have cards to punch," she snapped at Rajoo as they strode toward the car. Anjali followed.

  "I hope you weren't expecting a Rolls, Miss Bose," Rajoo joked, catching up with the women. "Deep down, this capitalist is a Gandhian."

  It was Anjali's first-ever ride in a Jaguar, and she sank into the leather seat, savoring its aroma and its chauffeur's imperious honking, his lane-changing maneuvers, and his way of swearing at slow traffic.

  When the Jaguar pulled up in front of the guardhouse of the TOS compound, the chauffeur leaped out and held the car door open for his boss instead of the women. Rajoo speed-dialed his contact in the TOS office tower before helping Anjali out of the Jaguar. Tookie was left to clamber out without help from either her nighttime fun-beau or his chauffeur, and get in place in the employees' line at the guardhouse. Intimidated by the elaborate security procedure, and feeling more Anjali than Angie, she stayed close to Rajoo. He sensed her anxiety and personally escorted her through the security post; informed the uniformed guard that she was not carrying cameras or tape recorders on her person; watched her print her name and address, Anjali Bose, 1 Kew Gardens, as well as sign into the logbook; took her visitor's badge out of the guard's hand; and clipped it to the shoulder strap of her purse. Since Tookie would be working a full shift, he even offered to send his car and driver back in a couple of hours so that she wouldn't have to take crowded buses back to Bagehot House. Give and take, take and give: he was practicing what he preached. He got off on power and gratitude. To show gratitude, she flashed her halogen smile at him, but she declined the ride back. "I'll take a taxi," she said, lying.

  THE VISITOR'S PASS allowed Anjali access only to the roof floor cafeteria and the landscaped grounds of the TOS campus. Tookie had just enough time to give her a tour of the roof floor before reporting for her shift—this day, working as "Tess" from Lubbock, Texas—in a monitored bay on the third floor of the tower.

  The open-air cafeteria-cum-patio roof floor of the glass and steel tower was crammed with benches and refectory tables under broad, tasseled umbrellas. It looked like a luxury resort floating above a modern city, missing only pull-down screens of Goan beachfront hotels. Agents on break huddled over laptops, white buds in their ears, colas within easy reach. But when she walked past, they invariably looked up from the screen to size her up. They had to know that since she wasn't wearing a TOS employee photo ID around her neck, she wasn't one of them.

  Without even trying, Anjali slipped into her high-wattage Angie persona. Angie was smart, sexy, and special. Angie's steps had a bouncy lightness, her posture an eye-catching swagger. She took her time crossing the width of the terrace to the railing, from which she could view landscaped lawns ribboned with concrete paths. Early-afternoon shadows cast by neighboring office buildings left dark prison bars on sunlit stretches of pampered grass. Young men and women employees strode the footpaths, chatting, leaning toward one another, but not quite touching. Malis and sweepers manicured the edges. Below her lay the New India: business-efficient, secretively erotic, and servant supported. She felt a rush of sympathy for the high-fiving, head-banging, hard-drinking friends of Tookie she had met on Residency Road and the Brigades. The call-center survivalist inhabits separate yet simultaneous lives. These were the luckiest times to be young, adventurous, and Indian. And the saddest for those like her, who knew she could be anything she wanted to be yet hadn't the foggiest idea of what she wanted.

  Over the PA system a self-important voice announced, "Paging Ms. Anjali Bose! Ms. Bose, please meet your party at the espresso machine! Paging Ms. Anjali Bose! Your party is waiting!"

  Why was Tookie's team leader allowing her a break this early? Confused, Anjali turned her back on the poster-worthy view of New Millennium India and scanned the employees relaxing around the espresso machine. There were three women, two in color-coordinated salwar-kameezes and one in a snug Versace T-shirt and white capri pants, and two mustached young men in starched shirts and carefully pressed slacks, chatting and sipping, but no Tookie.

  "Ms. Anjali Bose, please meet your party!"

  A tall, lithe man, likely in his late twenties and definitely handsome, maybe even beautiful, approached the group by the espresso machine. Anjali liked it that he had no mustache. She liked even more the way his shiny black hair flopped over an eyebrow. She started walking to where the PA system was instructing her to "meet her party" and realized that she loved the prominent biceps of the polo-shirted, chino-wearing beautiful man. He was holding a stack of magazines, each as thick as the Gauripur telephone directory, against his chest. The five employees acknowledged his arrival with smiles or nods, but he didn't join their conversation
and they didn't make an effort to draw him in. Tookie had told Anjali about "team ethos," and so she assumed that the beautiful man and the chattering five were on different teams of customer-service agents. He stood slightly apart but did not look at all isolated. Anjali guessed that he too was waiting for someone. Why shouldn't that someone be Ms. Anjali Bose? She preened when she caught his body jolt to attention as their eyes met. He immediately headed in her direction. Even with an armful of magazines, he moved like an athlete, a cricketer at the pitch.

  "Anjali Bose. Who else could you be but Anjali Bose?"

  So this had to be the Bengali Svengali. Tookie D'Mello had set up this meeting, but she hadn't let on what a heartthrob he was. What else hadn't she let on? Not a hint of India in his accent, but he didn't sound American like Rabi Chatterjee or Mr. Champion.

  Even before introducing himself, the heartthrob said that finding her was like locating your car in an airport parking lot: the sudden realignment of your steps when you press your smart key and somewhere down a long line of cars the lights go on and the horn beeps.

  The analogy of cars in an airport to people meeting in the TOS dining patio—or of her to a car, if that's what he'd meant—sailed over her head. She'd never had a car, Gauripur lacked even a single parking lot, and car keys, in her experience, were far from "smart"; in fact, they were dumb as nails. She took it as more evidence of her unenlightened state and feared asking what he was talking about. And so she flashed a broad smile of recognition. "But you've never seen me," she said.

  "The day I can't spot a pretty Bengali face in a crowd is the day I change my name to Singh." He guided her to a small bistro table and dropped the stack of magazines on it. "You're everything Leila said."

  "Leila?"

  "She called me as soon as she saw you, remember? But I was working and I couldn't run over."

  Ah, Leila the I MUMBAI girl. She'd seen Anjali pass out—did Moni know how desperate she'd been? No one would recognize her now.

  Should she be Anjali for this champion of Bengali culture? She peered at the magazine cover on the top of the pile. A pretty girl, identified as "Bengal's Latest Beauty Export to Bangalore" and posed against a modern city skyline, stared back. But the modern Bengali Beauty, like the ladies in fake antique Mughal miniatures sold in Gauripur bazaars, was holding a lotus blossom in her manicured hand and gazing dreamily at a birdlike speck soaring above the geometric tops of office towers. Anjali picked the magazine off the top of the stack and turned it over. On its back cover, perhaps again in parody, the art director had reprinted a British-era map of historical Bengal—including all of Bangladesh and Indian West Bengal, Upper Burma, much of Orissa as far south as Puri, and north as far as Assam and west all the way to Bihar, even the area around Gauripur, the catchments where Anjali's parents' families had been marooned, and labeled it as "The New Bengal-Bangalore Raj." How grand and powerful Bengal had been in her great-greatgrandparents' days!

  Moni took out a digital camera and aimed it at her. "Amazing, isn't it?" And before she could ask what, exactly, he gushed, "How big Bengal was! A long, long time ago, my family was in Upper Burma, involved in teak. It's not even on the map. They kept elephants to load the logs, and then they floated the wood downriver; they had family members with sawmills all along the riverbanks and they trained little native boys, Burmese, to walk on the logs with hooks and steer our logs into the mill. Our logs had little flags on them, like branded cattle. Imagine all that!"

  "We're from Bihar," she said. Gauripur too was just off the map.

  "We were a mighty people." He snapped her picture without asking permission. "Moni Lahiri at your service. But sad to say, no relation of Jhumpa Lahiri, the renowned novelist and Bengali beauty."

  She would have responded by saying "We Bengalis are still a mighty people," but she didn't want to be photographed with her lips parted. Two of her teeth were crooked—gaja danta, or elephant tusks, her father had all too often lamented when he had been bridegroom hunting. He should have paid Canada-returned Dr. Haldar, Gauripur's only orthodontist, to align her teeth if they had bothered him so much. She had to stop thinking about her father; she had to keep bitterness and guilt out of her expression for the Bengali Svengali's camera. Try out the cover model's dreamy look but without corny props like bird and lotus.

  Moni took a break from his viewfinder. "See that guy serving food over there? Third one in?"

  Anjali looked in the direction that Moni had indicated with his chin, a dimpled chin she found irresistible. Four men wearing hairnets and white aprons were lined up behind the long cafeteria counter. The third waiter was unmistakably Bengali; Anjali could tell from his facial structure. She suddenly wondered if Indians born and raised in America, Rabi Chatterjee, for instance, lost that ability to identify ethnicity just by looking at an Indian face.

  "His name's Mohammed Chowdhury, from Bangladesh," Moni Lahiri informed her. "I heard him and a couple of other guys speaking Bangla, and his accent and voice were so pure I asked if maybe he also sang. And does he ever! I featured him in a Rabindra-sangeet, and people were amazed. He showed up in a silk kurta, some of his friends played tabla and harmonium ... so it was a big Indian bash starring a Muslim from Bangladesh, and he ends up the most perfect Bengali among us. And of course when he was back here serving food the next morning, no one recognized him."

  Moni waved in the servers' direction, and Mohammed Chowdhury lifted a hand in response.

  "In case you were wondering, my family doesn't consider itself the deep-down, sprung-from-god's-head kind of Brahmins," he said. "The last name might make you think so, but all it means is somewhere along the line we snared a Brahmin male. My father went to Johns Hopkins to study medicine, found work at Mass General in Boston, flew back home for two weeks to get married, settled first in Toronto, moved on to Madison, Wisconsin, and finally to St. Louis, Missouri, where he had two sons and a daughter. One son became an oncologist, the daughter's a biologist. Me, I'm a wastrel wannabe and amateur photographer with an MBA from Wharton. Anyway, if you think I'm babbling, it's to distract you from posing. You have energy. That's what I want to get across on your cover photo. Prettiness I can Photoshop."

  The Bengali Svengali was going to put her on the cover of a glossy? That made Anjali self-conscious. She assumed her signature halogen smile but could feel tightness in the muscles around her lips.

  "Don't try so hard." He glanced over at the freezer section of the cafeteria line. "Feel like an ice cream? They have sherbets, popsicles, frozen yogurts, everything."

  She knew sherbet from Alps Palace in Gauripur. Rabi had photographed her in Alps Palace with his boxy camera. "Sherbet, please," she said.

  He brought her two scoops of mango sherbet and a plastic spoon, but nothing for himself. She was relieved to have something to do with her hands and dug the spoon into the orangy-yellow sherbet. It was denser, sweeter than sherbets at the Alps Palace. She hoped Rabi would call her when he returned from his wanderings to his Aunt Parvati's house in Bangalore.

  "Do me a favor," Moni Lahiri said, picking up his camera again. "Sit on the table."

  She put her dish of sherbet on the chair seat and complied.

  "No, no, sit on the table and bring a spoonful of the stuff just to your lips. Desire and promise of gratification. That's it! You'll be Miss Two Scoops. Refreshing as sherbet on a hot day." He handed the dish to her as she rearranged her legs on the tabletop.

  "Now raise your left arm halfway up, as though it's around someone's shoulder."

  "Whose?" she asked. Yours?

  "I'm thinking Queen Victoria's. There's a statue of the old girl in Cubbon Park. I can Photoshop you into her lap."

  There was that word again. Photoshop had not appeared in Mr. Champion's workbooks.

  "Now, face me and keep your left arm up, as though it's resting on a railing; no, it's on my shoulder. Good. We're getting there. Look at me as though I'm the answer to all your prayers."

  "Mr. Lahiri, really." She giggled.<
br />
  "Concentrate. Give me intensity. Great! Love the set of that steely jaw! How about the eyes? You're in love! That's better. We're nearly there. I'll Photoshop you stepping out of a first-class air-conditioned carriage at the railway station. No, next to that big victory obelisk in Cubbon Park. You're taking in Bangalore for the first time. Or would you prefer Electronic City? I've got a hundred Bangalore backdrops."

  "So it's all a matter of light and angles? And backdrops?" She was afraid to ask about obelisks.

  "It's a Photoshop world," he said.

  So this was the famous Monish Lahiri. It wasn't hard to look headover-heels in love with this handsome man with floppy hair, bulked biceps, and quick hands. She could imagine pouring shampoo on his hair, kneading it over a lavatory sink, and rinsing it off with a pitcher of water. She'd never had such intimate fantasies. She'd never really fantasized touching any part of a man, especially not his hair. And now she found herself imagining other things, and she blushed, avoiding his gaze. Her body was itching, starting from down below. It was embarrassing, a disease perhaps.

  "Tookie said you'd be perfect for a cover. She didn't exaggerate." He followed this up with a brief Bangla poem she didn't recognize.

  "Isn't it a little early for poetry?" she asked. "Anyway," to discourage further excursions into the thicket of modern literary Bangla, she added, "I'm here to learn better English."