Miss New India

by Bharati Mukherjee

  "I can teach you that. St. Louis English anyway. No, make that SoCalspeak, since Santa Monica's my latest home base. Or was." He wriggled his fingers as if to magically conjure up a scene. "Pretend it's nighttime in California," he said. "Actually, it really is. It's about two in the morning. We're on a blanket on a beach in Santa Monica. We have a bottle of nice, light red wine. The moon hides behind a cloud. A slight chill comes off the water. The stars wink in and out. I pour, and we drink. We're watching the planes rising from LAX, or coming in."

  She liked this make-believe game about being romanced on a beach with a lilting name by a Bengali-American MBA with a dimpled chin and floppy hair. A chill was an inspired touch. The suitor would offer his jacket, lean close, and drape it over her shoulders.

  "Really, Mr. Lahiri," she exclaimed as though he really had done so.

  He looked amused. "Really," he repeated. "But you don't need lessons. Your English is good enough."

  Only good enough? What did that mean, in the Bangalore world? Good enough for what—some dead-end job talking to Mukky Sharma? Or the sex lines—is that where they put Indian girls who were just good enough? Where an accent is advantageous? She envied Moni Lahiri's ease in both Bangla and English. She envied people blessed with two mother tongues. Her English was good, but it would never be a mother tongue.

  He seemed unaware of having hurt her feelings. "I've got a confession," he said, his voice soft with guilt. And he did lean close to her, so close that she was afraid she would impulsively touch his shoulder with hers, or worse, run her fingers through his straight, fine hair. "I'm not really a wastrel. I came back to India because this is where the money is, money and opportunity. I didn't want to be just another unhappy American doctor having to toe the HMO line. Like Baba and Dada."

  The country was being overrun with repatriates and immigrants. India had become the land of milk and honey for everyone except young people born and raised in Gauripur. It wasn't fair! Moni Lahiri had seduced her with fantasy games of wine and sand, only to betray her.

  "C'mon, Miss Bose, you've got the most expressive face in the world—you're angry at me, but I'm not sure why. Why?"

  "Everyone here comes from somewhere else."

  "In Bangalore, that might be true. That's the reason for this." He pulled a publication from the middle of the stack. "You'll be the star of the next issue."

  "This? "

  "It's my baby. The Bangla HotBook of Bangalore." He handled the booklet tenderly. It was the seventh edition of a directory that listed names, phone numbers, and local addresses, plus hometowns, of the three thousand newly arrived Bengalis in Bangalore. "Only singles, of course. And newly singles. I've put my MBA skills to use."

  She'd thought it was a book of pictures, shots of models like the girl on the cover. She flipped through the pages. There were sections announcing Bangla "First Date" mixers, and for the straitlaced, puja celebrations; announcements of who had been promoted, who was looking to date, and which Bangla-friendly companies were hiring, along with ads and discounts at restaurants and discos. Then she studied the list of names: two full pages of Boses, even three other Anjali Boses, along with rows and rows of the usual Bangla names, the Banerjees and Chatterjees, the Dases, Duttas, Ghoses, Guhas, and Sens, skipping ahead to the Roys and Sinhas. Then, suddenly anxious, she flipped back a few pages: Mitra, Subodh. Home address: Asansol. So he hadn't been lying; he'd actually worked in Bangalore. And maybe he was still here.

  "Something the matter?" Moni asked.

  In her most innocent voice she asked, "Who's this Subodh Mitra?"

  "Nice guy, but not the sharpest knife, if you get my drift. You know him?"

  The thought of Subodh Mitra slicing his way through Bangalore with a dull knife brought back all the terror: the dark mango grove, the rusting rebars, the blood on her sari. She was no longer under an umbrella in sunny Bangalore. "The name sounded a little familiar."

  "Tall guy, a little heavy? He left here a couple of months back, off to Bengal to find a wife, he said. Going through hundreds of bridal pictures finally got to him. One day he ran up to me and said, 'Moni! I found her! Miss Perfection!' You had to be happy for the guy. He was gone the next day."

  She tried to hide her disappointment. Any friend of Subodh Mitra was no friend of hers. The itching stopped. For no particular reason, except perhaps to press her bona fides, she said, "I might have been that girl"

  He dropped the directory on the stack of magazines. "No way. Subodh's a nice enough guy, but no way cool enough for you."

  And how cool am I, Mr. Lahiri? But she didn't ask. They sat there for another few minutes. The tables near them filled up. She waited for him to ask her out. Her father would have considered Moni Lahiri, MBA, with homes in America and India, the "perfect boy," but the perfect boy was slipping through her fingers. Was there something she should do, should say? "I have to get back," he said. He handed her the copy of The Bangla HotBook. He didn't ask to see her again. Rabi had given her a phone number, Mr. GG had given her a ride, and Peter Champion had given her money. Moni gave nothing, yet she felt connected somehow.

  "Do you have a cell-phone number to list in The HotBook?"

  She said she didn't. Bagehot House was the most temporary address in Bangalore. A cell phone was an unimaginable luxury.

  He scrawled a number on the back cover of the directory. "Anytime," he said.

  She watched him stride to the elevator and hop in just as the door was closing. It was his fault that she felt newly abandoned. She visualized the two of them walking, side by side, on the crisp, green spaces of the TOS compound. She felt his body against her, and her arms, her back were itchy. She wanted someone to scratch them. She wanted to hold her arms out to Moni Lahiri, but he was already gone.

  Just like that, a Bangalore legend enters my life, and then he's gone. Like the dancers in a Bollywood movie, a flash of skin, a hint of hidden wonders, then in a second they're gone.

  8

  Today's the day, every day's the day: she felt that rush again.

  She wasn't so far from the place where she had made her first grand entrance into Bangalore, her lucky spot, the Barista on MG Road. Things that had confused her just a few weeks earlier were starting to clear up. In her red kameez and cream-colored salwar and expensive makeup, and after weeks of fattening up on Minnie's potatoes and mutton stew, she was steadier on her feet. Tookie said she had that Bagehot House greasy glow. At least she wouldn't pass out.

  The scene of her Bangalore Grand Entrance was a cheap rickshaw ride away.

  The tables were full but the mood was subdued, lacking the high-spirited silliness and cast of characters she had encountered on her first morning in Bangalore: no Mumbai Girl or overly friendly Mike, no Millie the chain smoker or Suzie with the butterfly breasts. Maybe they were on different shifts; maybe they'd moved on to newer IT call-center hubs that were luring away Bangalore veterans with better pay. Out on the fringes of the coffee sippers she spotted Mr. GG hunched over his computer. She bought a small coffee and moved in his direction.

  Mr. GG wasn't as dashing a figure as she remembered from the night of Mad Minnie's gala. In just two weeks it seemed he'd aged and softened into a short, squat man, with hair thinning on top. She remembered looking down on Peter Champion's balding head, the mosquitoes landing but not swatted away. There were no mosquitoes in Bangalore, at least not this month. The buttons of Mr. GG's white shirt strained against his belly. Like her pot-bellied father, she thought, and like the young people in Bangalore, getting fat on snacks as they worked through the night, fat on cafeteria food, fat on beer and savories after work, fat on being free and rich and away from home.

  "Still in Djakarta, Mr. GG?" Now she was the one standing, his face at her tummy level, and she could read the shock and surprise on his face. She flashed her famous smile, and he hit SAVE and flipped the lid down.

  "Miss Bose! You're looking very fit and happy."

  I am.

  "Very pert and glowing.
"

  "It must be Minnie's mutton stew."

  He laughed. "I assumed it was because you are in love."

  She bantered back. "I am in love. With Bangalore."

  "Why haven't you called?" he asked.

  "I don't have a phone."

  "Let's get you a mobile, then. You can't not be within reach by voice or text in this town."

  "I don't have the money."

  "Maybe not today, but you'll have it tomorrow. But only if you carry a mobile in your handbag."

  And so, half an hour later, Anjali Bose of 1 Kew Gardens, Bangalore, had a tiny silver cell phone, paid for by Mr. GG. She could call her sister or her mother or anyone in the world as long as she had the person's number, which she didn't, except for that of Moni Lahiri and Usha Desai and, if she thought about it, Rabi Chatterjee and Peter Champion. The phone presented more options than she could possibly master. "Is there a master number I can call for jobs?" she joked, and Mr. GG put his telephone number on speed dial for her. There seemed to be no need in the world that the phone could not satisfy. Owning a cell phone wasn't quite as impressive as inspecting virtual buildings in foreign countries, but on that morning, just having one, even a simple model—an unheard-of extravagance, in her family experience—felt nearly as miraculous. For weeks she'd been watching how everyone on the streets of Bangalore used this remarkable device, even the Muslim ladies in their black burqas: clutching their husbands, holding their children, and chatting on their silvery little phones as they rode on the back of a motorbike. Tookie carried hers in her hand, like a second purse; Husseina's had been stashed in a secret pocket sewn into her custom-tailored salwar. Anjali wondered where Husseina was honeymooning with Bobby of Bradford; she was the first-time owner of a phone, with no one to call.

  "Any other numbers?" Mr. GG asked.

  "Put in my father's," she said, and gave him the familiar Gauripur number. A sudden image of the heavy black phone, on a stool in the living room, its thick, dust-clogged cord gnawed by mice, appeared in her mind's eye. That number and the house must now belong to a stranger.

  "And Usha Desai," she said, then recited the number, which she'd memorized. "And this one"; she read the number from Moni's torn-off slip of paper. "Call it ML."

  "That's not a lot of numbers for a popular young lady," Mr. GG said.

  "Put in Peter," she said, and gave him the number. She wished she had memorized Rabi's California number. That would have impressed Mr. GG.

  "And how are things at Bagehot House?" he asked when he had inputted the numbers.

  "The building's still standing."

  "I meant the old lady. How's she holding up?"

  "Surviving. But her mind is failing."

  "Appearances can be deceiving," he said, smiling. "I trust in only the durability of the virtual universe."

  Her bargain with Mr. GG went unspoken; in exchange for a few smiles and bright comments, she'd get a lift back to Bagehot House. He bowed to her: "Your Daewoo is waiting, Miss Bose."

  The starving, bedraggled, overwhelmed Anjali, the one who, weeks ago, almost had to be carried into the Daewoo, had plumped into a "pert and glowing"—Mr. GG's words—cell-phone-owning HotBook cover girl.

  Once again, she was walking to the Daewoo.

  Mr. GG held the door open, always the gentleman. Vacation brochures were scattered on the front seat. "You asked about Djakarta," he said, "but we wrapped that up three days ago. Right now"—he put a brochure into her hands—"I'm working here, on a very cool condominium development in Puerto Vallarta."

  "A pristine desert lapped by sparkling seas," she read.

  "Mexico," he said, obviously amused. Anjali could see that he enjoyed imparting to her his wider knowledge. "Those seas won't be sparkling or lapping for very long without some high-level intervention. The good thing is, we've done oversight in Qatar and Dubai so we know something about heat and sandstorms and what they do to swimming pools and golf courses and yacht basins and how huge the power and sewage and refrigeration problems can be. It's a fun project. It's like building a small country."

  A fun project? In her English class, Peter Champion used to warn Anjali about this: "You'll hear fun used as an adjective. Resist it. Fun is a noun, not an adjective." Not to be outdone, or overwhelmed by Mr. GG's worldliness or the strange languages and place names he invoked, she said, "One of the girls in Bagehot House went to an American school in the Gulf." The news seemed to silence him.

  A moment later, he completed her thought. "I know. The famous Husseina Shiraz. I think she's no longer in residence—am I right?"

  How would he know that?

  "Some big changes on the way," he said. "All we can do is stay one step ahead." The city traffic was thinner than it had been that morning, when Rajoo's chauffeur had, cursing and honking, dropped her off at the TOS tower; they were moving along well, too well. She didn't want the ride to be over.

  Mr. GG must have noted her reluctance. "I want to show you something new," he said.

  Cubbon Park, she hoped. Moni had mentioned Cubbon Park. She was a woman with a phone and a glow from being in love with love.

  "We'll stop at my place on the way."

  "Where is that?" She knew Kent Town and Indira Nagar; she knew of Dollar Colony because Parvati Banerji lived there and Rabi crashed with the Banerjis when in Bangalore. Mr. GG had to live in an upscale area, something like Dollar Colony. She imagined him pulling up with her in front of a gate guarded by two watchmen; she would walk on a graveled driveway that sliced a flowering garden in two; she would beam at his white-haired parents as they greeted her warmly. Did he have living parents? "I'd love to meet your relatives," she heard herself say.

  "I said my place." He had two addresses, he explained, a family residence beyond Kent Town, where he lived with parents, the widowed sister-in-law, and an older brother and his wife and infant nephew—and a private office, with a kitchen and sleeping accommodations close to Vistronics.

  Every day is today! The morning had served her well, and now she was ready for whatever the late afternoon might bring.

  THE OFFICE-APARTMENT occupied a corner on the top floor of a modern six-story building overlooking the winding paths and gardens of Cubbon Park. Only a few tall, old trees obstructed the hazy view of the city. Those treetops sprawled beneath Anjali like a wild, tufted lawn.

  "Tea?" Mr. GG asked. A small kitchen and pantry lay just off the dining area. The familiar splash of water in a kettle, the snapping on of the gas stove: calming, reassuring Indian sounds. She wasn't sure why he had brought her here. A virtual voyage to Puerto Vallarta? To Djakarta? As long as it wasn't Gauripur, Anjali Bose had no fear of him.

  This was, after all, her second time in a man's bedroom. This one, unlike Peter Champion's, was orderly, well-appointed, its walls hung with cartoonlike paintings, architecture magazines spread in an arc, like a lady's fan, on the table. She liked what she saw, liked what she saw very much, and she realized she wasn't safe at all. A pleasant itch coursed up her arms, just as it had when Moni Lahiri had snapped her photo for his HotBook. After all, she could tell herself, it's not as though she'd awakened that morning, then coldly decided to visit her personal Barista on MG Road, and then gone over to Mr. GG, rousing him from his work with the intention of seducing him or letting him think he was seducing her. She was incapable of such plotting. Therefore, she was not guilty of planning it or even wishing it.

  She could not be held responsible for anything that happened in her life because she was not an initiator of actions. Angie the bold one, the initiator, was beyond blame, or shame. Anjali just watched and let things happen. Things like this: accepting tea from a man standing behind her as she watched the weaving lanes of traffic and the usual mix of strollers and exercisers in the park under the canopy of trees. The man behind her put his hands on her hips, then under her kameez, and began peeling it upward over her bra. She set the teacup on the windowsill and allowed him to continue.

  Now he whispered in her ear, nib
bling it ever so slightly before he spoke. "What sort of precautions have you taken?"

  "What precautions do you mean?" Heavens, she thought, if I took precautions, I wouldn't be here in your apartment, would I?

  "You know, devices. The pill?"

  She smiled at him shyly. Subodh Mitra hadn't bothered to ask. Things move slowly, like glaciers, until they erupt like tsunamis.

  Torn silver foil fluttered through the air. She heard a zipper, and the thud of heavy trousers falling to the floor. Mr. GG's fingers soothed her itch. "I've been thinking of you since we first met," he said.

  It seemed that all the strollers in the park and on the footpaths had stopped and were looking up and pointing in her direction. Everyone in Cubbon Park saw the naked girl in the window. The naked girl in the window looked down on Bangalore. She moved from the window, turned, and faced Mr. GG, who was hopping on one foot to free himself from his trousers. His shoes were still on. Coins were dropping from the pockets and rolling across the floor.

  "Please to sit down, Mr. GG," she ordered, and he did. For the briefest moment she thought, If I want to get out, this is the time. He reached down to unlace his shoes. "I will do that. Please sit back." As she bent forward, he groped for her bra strap.

  Not her bra strap, exactly. It had been Husseina's black silk lift-and-thrust.

  "Please," she insisted, this time louder, and he retreated. She made a lightning calculation: If I'm to give myself away, it might as well be to a well-established man who saved me and performed favors and kindnesses. A well-connected man who would owe me. A girl in a fancy black bra and half-discarded salwar, kneeling before a man on a sofa, pulling off his shoes: she's in control.

  She remembered a Gauripur ritual, her own father coming home from the office at the same minute every day. Tea would be waiting, he would sit at a chair by the door and hold his feet out, and her mother would kneel and pull his shoes off—dusty or muddy shoes, depending on the season—and Anjali would bring him his indoor chappals and kurta-pajama. He would unbutton his shirt and slip on the kurta, then unbuckle his trousers and cover his shorts with the pajama. Every night of her life she had performed the same little task, as had her mother and her grandmother and probably her sister too. If all those generations could see her now! Except this time, she was on her knees and nearly naked, and the man was, essentially, a stranger. And she remembered the lines of women in Nizambagh crawling over the trucks, ghost women, spidery thin, fighting each other for access to the drivers, and she hated the price of being a woman, and India, and every man she'd ever known.