Miss New India

by Bharati Mukherjee

  Janey Busey of Rock City, Stephenson County, Illinois, rose from the ashes of Anjali Bose of Gauripur, Bihar, India. On the CCI computer she Google-Earthed the Rock City street map and even found "her" house; she memorized the population (only 315, she noted with horror; not even the poorest, most isolated Indian village was that insignificant); median age—an elderly 33.5—and 99.7 percent non-Hispanic white, whatever that meant. Median family income, twenty-five thousand dollars, just a quarter-lakh; median house value under one lakh dollars.

  Insofar as reality can be composed of raw data, Anjali had created Rock City. The rest of her virtual life was inspired by her own unbounded longings. Janey Busey had grown up in a cheerful, wholesome, Midwestern family of five, headed by a veterinarian father and nurtured by a gift-store-owning mother. She replaced sullen Sonali with two good-hearted, extroverted brothers, Fred and Hank. Fred worked in Rock City's only bank and aspired to become a manager. Hank toiled in the office of the town's only insurance firm, though he dreamed of building boats and sailing to Mexico. Puerto Vallarta, to be exact. Vasco da Gama High School and College morphed into Lincoln High, where kids from Rock City had to hold their own against swaggerers from Chicopee and Davis. Then she got swept off her feet by her fantasies and invented sweet summer experiences of working weekdays in the big Wal-Mart in Freeport and flirting with a stock boy named Karl. She brought herself to tears just thinking of poor, slow, inept Karl shipping out to Iraq with hopes of returning with money enough for college.

  For the final exam, Parvati arranged for her group of seven surviving students and herself to be transported in the CCI van to Bangalore's Electronic City offices of GlobalSys, an up-and-coming outsourcer for American and Canadian corporations.

  Electronic City, Phase 1, Phase 2! The world was pouring euros, dollars, and sterling into Bangalore! Hewlett-Packard! Citibank! Siemens! GE! Timkins! Birla Group/3M India! Tecnic! Bifora Intercomplex! Dalmia Cement! Wipro! Infosys! Solid, spectacular glass temples built on raw, red clay so freshly cleared, it still bled. The CCI van bore down wide, curving lanes to the edge of the built-up area and disgorged its passengers at the front gate of the GlobalSys complex.

  Parvati led her CCI test takers through GlobalSys security and ushered them into a "bay," rows of individual cubicles for teams of customer-support-service employees. She introduced them to two CCI graduates, one male and one female, one-time customer-support agents now elevated to the role of monitors. Neither was much older than Anjali. As was her habit, she studied their clothes and appearance. The boy was tall and thin, with dark-framed glasses, but athletic. He wore a dark suit; his hair was spiked and gelled. And she immediately recognized him: Darren, from her first morning in Bangalore. My God, Bangalore was a fluid world.

  "Dharmendra and Rishika will play the parts of callers and monitors," Parvati explained. The monitor's job was to correct every stammer, every mispronunciation, and every error in telephone etiquette. "Don't hate the monitor," she instructed her nervous students. "Please don't take the criticism personally." Anjali remembered her first morning in Bangalore, the muttered references to "the Old Bitch," and another lingering mystery was suddenly solved. "When you turn on your computers, you'll see the credit history and the contracts your caller has signed with our client. Your job will be to scan the contracts as you engage the callers. Don't make them feel as though you're reading their credit history. It's just a chat. You're here to help them. You'll have to learn how to integrate a particular complaint with what you're reading on the screen. Some of the callers might be hostile, but you're not to take personal offense. Nothing here is personal."

  And then Darren/Dharmendra took over, in perfect English, crisp and authoritative. To the question "Where are you from, sir?" he responded, "I grew up in Delhi."

  "You have a good American accent, sir," the student said.

  "No, I have the absence of an Indian accent. Among ourselves, we call it a Droid accent."

  Before leaving the bay, Parvati posed one final question to her students. "What's the number-one rule of your profession?"

  Anjali ventured a guess. "Phone poise?"

  "Right. Don't lose your cool no matter what. You lose your cool, the company loses a client, and you lose a job. Best of luck!"

  ***

  THE PHONE IN Anjali's cubicle rang even before she had settled into her chair. The caller's name and address popped up on her screen. Thelma Whitehead of Hot Springs, AR. Alaska or Arkansas? An igloo? Cotton fields? And what kind of name was Whitehead? Wa-wa Indian? Thank goodness, the caller was not from an M state, which she'd never have sorted out. MA, ME, MD, MI, MN, MO, MS, MT: that was a nightmare. And no doubt the monitor was listening in.

  "Hi, this is Janey. How can I help you, Ms. Whitehead?"

  Thelma reeled off her problems, which, if Anjali understood correctly, had to do with not having received her Social Security check, which prevented her from paying her bill on time.

  And how exactly, Anjali wondered, am I expected to solve your Social Security problems? "Come again, please?" she said.

  "What do you mean, come again? I ain't never bin there yet!" Thelma cried. "You don't understand the first thing I bin sayin', do you! I bet you don't even speak our language! Where the hell y'all setting at right now? India? I used to be on y'all's side, but when I get off the phone I'm fixing to call my congressman."

  "Miss Thelma, please to calm down!" Stay calm yourself. You're making mistakes because you're too agitated. No job's worth a heart attack!

  Thelma Whitehead hung up after one last, inscrutable imprecation: "This ain't all bin did yet!"—Anjali didn't recognize those words as English. If only she could say "Go to hell!" Her own anger shocked her, as it had that day in Minnie's spare room.

  "Well, that didn't go too well, did it?" Rishika the monitor broke in. "Let's see how many gaffes I counted. She's not 'Miss Thelma.' This isn't Gone with the Wind. And where did you pull 'Please to calm down' from? I deliberately threw you a curveball with that thick accent, and you didn't respond very well, did you? You were probably seconds away from correcting her. Remember this: when you're running an open telephone line from America, you're going to get every kind of accent and every level of mangled English. You have to interpret it and laugh along with it or respond to it as if it was perfect English from a textbook. Everyone in America speaks a different English. And then, in Thelma Whitehead's sugary Southern accent, the monitor concluded, "Hon, you bin losing your cool."

  The phone calls kept coming. Why was she being picked to deal with the most difficult names? It wasn't fair. Slava from MD. Shun-lien from CA. Tanyssha from TN. Witold from IA. Esmeralda from AZ. Changrae from NJ. Aantwaan from LA. Gyorgy from OK. Weren't there any American-sounding names left in America? Why didn't guys like her goofy brothers, Fred and Hank, call from Rock City, Illinois?

  She mustered phone-voice cheeriness for Gyorgy. "Hi, this is Angie, I mean Janey."

  "Huh?"

  She pictured a large man in a fur coat and knit cap with earflaps, fleeing a pack of wolves in snowy Siberia. "How can I help you this morning, Gee-orr-gee?"

  The monitor broke in with an angry "It's not morning for your caller!"

  "Sorry."

  "And forget how the name's spelled. It's pronounced George. Keep the conversation to the point."

  Why wasn't the caller doleful Mukky Sharma of IL instead of Geeorrgee/George of OK? She couldn't afford to flunk out of CCI. She needed a job, she needed paychecks. She had to pay for room and board. Minnie hopped on her desk, a vulture sniffing carrion.

  George wanted to know if he could renegotiate the terms of his contract. Of course, these were just practice calls, and she was not expected to know what kind of contract he held or the company he held it with. That wasn't the point. The point was to field a difficult problem and make the client go away happy.

  "George, have you contacted your local service representative?"

  "I keep getting bounced to you guys. Where are you, Ind
ia?"

  "No, I'm right here in Illinois," she answered perkily. "Good old Rock City, Illinois."

  "No shit," said George. "You could have fooled me."

  "Why not just tell me your problem."

  "I subscribed to one magazine—one magazine, one computer mag—and I get about forty every month and I can't cancel them. Wouldn't you say that's a problem?"

  "I certainly would."

  Then the call was suddenly terminated, and Parvati herself broke in. "Anjali, what have I told you about agreeing with a caller's complaint?"

  "Deflect it," she said.

  "Precisely. Do you understand the meaning of deflect? Under these circumstances, does it mean 'I certainly would'? What would be your proper answer?"

  In a panic, she riffled through mental notes. Don't agree: deflect. But how to deflect? "I should have said..." She started to explain, but her mind was saturated. All day long she'd been absorbing censure from the monitors. Defend our client, sympathetically if you have to, but never agree with the callers. Maybe once in a hundred calls they'll have a legitimate complaint. The caller already has a grievance; don't encourage it.

  She had to admit failure. "I don't know, madam. What should I have said?"

  "You might have found a way of exchanging one magazine for another. You might even have found a way of reducing the overall number, maybe by five or ten. And between us, forty is certainly an exaggeration, so you might have asked for a full listing. I doubt that he gets more than five or six."

  The phone rang again. "Janey," she mumbled in panic. But this time it was her mobile. Against CCI policy, she'd forgotten to turn it off. She'd barely had time to adjust to having it.

  "Janey, aka Miss Bose? Having a bad day?"

  Mr. GG! "I could use some cheering up, Mr. GG," she said. At least she'd swatted the Minnie vulture off her desk.

  "Dinner tonight?"

  "Afraid not."

  "Come with me to Mexico?"

  She was feeling cocky. "I'll think about it." Miss Anjali Bose didn't have to stay Deadbeat Janey. Not forever. She had options.

  Parvati's amused voice came through. "That was your best demonstration of phone poise. Now please put away your mobile, and stay focused. It's the bottom of the ninth."

  THE CLASS AND monitors and Parvati met at the end of a very long day. She'd been up since four A.M. It was now three-thirty P.M. She had taken thirty-two calls—a fraction of a normal day's workload for a normal call agent—and now she had to listen, in private, to the monitors' assessments.

  She knew from Parvati's body language—a term she'd learned from Peter—that her career was over. "Anjali," Parvati said, "we knew from the beginning that you were going to be different from our usual fresher. We just didn't know how different."

  She hung her head.

  "You seem to lose your composure under pressure. Your language skills deteriorate."

  "Yes, madam."

  "I've decided this line of work is not for you."

  "I understand." And with this understanding came visions of running out of Peter's money, being kicked out of Bagehot House, and having to go back for good to Gauripur.

  "Look me in the eye, Anjali. Customer support is a very demanding and very specialized profession. One of the things it demands is the ability to submerge your personality. No one is interested in you, or your feelings. You are here to serve our client, and the client is the corporation, not the caller. I think you have a great deal of difficulty erasing yourself from the call."

  "Yes, madam. I agree."

  "I think you can take something positive from this." Parvati passed a file across the table with Anjali's name on it. On it was stamped the word SEPARATED. "Being a call agent requires modesty. It requires submission. We teach you to serve. That's not in your makeup, Anjali."

  "I can try to change—"

  "Don't even try. I have an investment in you. Just not this one. We'll be in touch."

  Whatever that means, she thought as she walked out into the cloudy Bangalore afternoon. Mr. GG's Daewoo was not parked outside. She clutched the folder, keeping the word SEPARATED tight against her silk kameez. The wads of rupees Peter had given her, or lent her, were divided by a hundred in Bangalore. From now on she must take public buses rather than auto-rickshaws. The immediate problem was that she didn't even know the bus route back to Kew Gardens.

  10

  Three long bus rides, and on each ride straphangers pressed their sweaty bodies into hers. Their hands patted her bottom. Until that afternoon, Anjali had inhabited a Bangalore as virtual as Mr. GG's Djakarta, a futuristic village instantaneously connected to all time zones on the globe, but segregated from raw life lived out on real roads. She had no certified job skill to peddle; worse, she had shamed the three people who had believed in her. And worst of all, Mr. GG had taken her response seriously and not called back to confirm a dinner date.

  The bellicose symphony of dusk-time Bangalore rang in her ears as she got off at the stop closest to Kew Gardens, which was not close at all. She was immediately sucked into a tidal wave of pedestrians. She was disoriented by the coughing, hawking, and throat clearing of anonymous office workers, the pulsating police sirens, and the imperious honking of chauffeurs driving imported sedans. Bhajot Lane had never seemed so loud, so clogged. On guard against pickpockets, she shunned beggars and tightened her grip on her shameful folder and expensive pocketbook—a fancy Gucci with Husseina's initials etched in gilt on leather. Anjali found it hard to shake off a beggar mother cradling a comatose infant. The woman pursued her, listing in Hindi her woes—widowhood, starvation, homelessness, tuberculosis, malaria—and called on heaven to shower blessings on alms givers. Another northern villager, a transient in a tattered, dirty sari: Anjali's own fate, if she couldn't find a way out? Don't you know my fancy silks mean nothing? Getting no response, not even a reprimand, the woman thrust the infant in her face. Anjali shrank from the touch of its hot, grimy cheek, and, swerving sharply from the contact, stepped in a puddle of half-chewed, vomited food. There was no time to stop and wipe the muck off Husseina's fancy sandals because the throng of pedestrians propelled her forward to the end of the long block, then around the corner into Kew Gardens and through the wide-open gates into the Bagehot compound.

  Strangers swarmed the grounds, trampling flowerbeds and flattening wide swaths of the overgrown front lawn. Men hauled Minnie's garden statuary—cracked stone cupids and armless nymphs blackish green with moss—out of the jungle behind the house and piled them into trucks in the carport. Women rolled drums of rice and canisters of flour and sugar down the steps of the porch. Everyone smiled; they were laughing, spirits were high. The massive wooden front door had been pried loose from its frame and flung over the porch railing so that wide pieces of furniture, such as credenzas and armoires, could be dragged undamaged out of the house. Among the looters, she spotted Asoke's "villagers." Squatter youths who had helped out at Minnie's gala were now carrying off Minnie's Hepplewhite chairs, card tables and decorative clocks, Satsuma vases and elephant-leg umbrella stands, balancing them on their heads.

  A convoy of brightly painted trucks and a white van, all honking, careened into the semicircular driveway and parked under the carport. ALL-KARNATAKA AUCTION HOUSE announced the logo on the van, and standing by its open rear doors was Tookie's bad boy Rajoo, peeling off hundred-rupee notes from a wad, diverting—or was it bribing?—freelance looters into dumping their goods into his vehicles. Rajoo's crew placed the pried-off front door over the crumbling porch steps to use as a ramp, then directed the looters to ease bulky pieces from Minnie's public rooms—cupboards, sofas, dressers, hutches, a grandfather clock, even the dining table—down the angled door, wrap them in quilts and dhurries, and segregate them in numbered lots. Anjali wouldn't have given Rajoo credit for such organizational skills.

  Rajoo's organizational skills! She was witnessing a premeditated, methodical dismantling of her only asylum in Bangalore. This was different from the occasional s
pontaneous looting of shops and the breaking of car windows with cricket bats by jobless young men that she had watched from her balcony in Gauripur. You could guard yourself against such sporadic eruptions of anger; her mother hoarded staple foods in her "just in case" bins; her father pasted a fake Red Cross decal on his bike. Rajoo was dispassionate, efficient. The moment Anjali acknowledged this, she went into a panic. By the time Rajoo finished stripping and wrecking Minnie Bagehot's property, she would be homeless and rupeeless. The little she possessed was inside the red Samsonite suitcase. She had to get to the suitcase before Rajoo's men found the cash Peter had given her.

  Determined to salvage what she could of her own possessions, she clawed her way through the delirious throngs of scavengers. Tookie would be on her pre-shift pub crawl, and in any case she didn't own anything worth stealing. She trusted Sunita to be cool-headed enough to barricade herself in her room and call the police on her cell phone. Minnie would fall apart in a crisis, but where was Asoke? If anyone could negotiate safe passage for Minnie and her tenants, it would be Asoke, since everyone seemed to be related, or obligated, to him.

  She found Asoke in the foyer, and he was acting more predator than prey. He had climbed halfway up a rickety ladder and was demonstrating to eager squatter kids how to rip Raj-era sconces off the walls without damaging them, so they could be sold by Mr. R's auction house. Farther inside the foyer, men she didn't recognize were dismantling an oversize dusty chandelier. She'd fantasized this scene of vengeful vandalism the afternoon she had discovered Maxie Bagehot's museum of colonial horrors, but now that she was witnessing the stripping of Bagehot House, it brought her little pleasure. Minnie and Maxie had been cantonment Bangalore's spit-and-polish opportunists. In Asoke and the auction house crew she recognized a twenty-first-century update. And what was she? Where could she go? Her best bet was to slip past Asoke and sneak into her room, stuff what she owned into her red Samsonite suitcase, and wait for the police to rescue her.