Miss New India

by Bharati Mukherjee

  Asoke spotted Anjali as he was handing down an etched-glass wall bracket to a helper, lost his footing on the ladder, and yelled an obscenity as the glass shattered. She darted into the kitchen to avoid a confrontation. Women from the compound were emptying pantry shelves into plastic bins, buckets and cloth sacks. The squatter girl with the luxuriant hair invited Anjali to join her as she tossed large cans of ham and small tins of Spam and sardines into baskets held steady by two elderly women. Next, the girl turned her attention to rows of bottled olives, gherkins, capers and mayonnaise. The contents of a tiny jar mystified her. Anjali identified it: Marmite, Minnie's favorite sandwich spread. The women feigned disgust, and the girl put the jar back on the pantry shelf. She moved on to the shelves in which Asoke stored sweet-tooth Minnie's cans of condensed milk and packets of jelly-filled cookies.

  Then Anjali stepped forward, dropped the jars of Marmite and four packets of cookies into her roomy pocketbook, and rushed out of the kitchen. Did that make her a looter too? No, no, she was a victim surviving on instinct. She could imagine her room already ransacked: clothes, shoes, toiletries, and costume jewelry heaped into a bed sheet and the four corners tightly knotted like a washer man's bundle, and her suitcase in which she kept what was left of Peter's gift of cash, her da Gama certificates, and the silver goblet wheeled away and hidden in a shed in the squatters' village. She bounded up the steps two at a time.

  The home invaders were busting bedroom doors with their shoulders and with hammers, broom handles, and chair legs. Anjali's door bore gouge marks from claw hammers, but the heavy old-fashioned padlock was still intact. Sunita's room was open, but there was no trace of the tenant. Anjali dared not extract the key from her pocketbook to let herself in. Safer to pretend she was one of the mob, caught up in greed or revolutionary fervor. And it became easy to pretend. She was among the whooping marauders when they broke down the door to the tenants' bathroom and discovered Minnie.

  Minnie Bagehot lay on the tiled floor between the bathtub and toilet, naked except for the wig and the rhinestone tiara on her head. The rioters fell silent, then drew away.

  She must have collapsed while pulling on a corset. The stiff, sweat-stained undergarment lay on the floor by her feet. A wasp-waisted, pearl-studded ball gown hung from the showerhead. What vanity! Anjali thought, at first. And then it occurred to her that maybe Minnie had died from some crazy valor, thinking she could appear at the head of the stairs in a mildewed gown from her golden years and wave the rioters away.

  Her prophecy about the gathering of evil forces had come to pass. Evil forces were sacking Bagehot House. But now, stung by this vision of its owner, they picked up their hammers and their booty and retreated down the main staircase.

  No corpse deserved to be gawked at. Anjali latched the bathroom door and rested her head against it. Too late to call for an ambulance, and even if it had not been too late, she realized with shock that she had no idea what number to dial. In Gauripur, emergencies requiring intervention by police or firemen didn't happen to decent middle-class families. When Mr. GG had surprised her with her very own cell phone and asked her whom she wanted on speed dial, it had not occurred to her to include the police. How naive she had been until now!

  What was it that Mr. GG had said about butterfly effects? Minnie's death meant a windfall of profitable antiques for Rajoo of All-Karnataka Auction House, whose crew was still loading Bagehot treasures into trucks. Now Anjali had in effect been dumped, because the house and its owner and everything it stood for had been dumped. She felt more homeless than she had while riding interstate buses from Patna to Bangalore. She punched Mr. GG's number on her cell phone. He didn't pick up, so she left a message: "SOS ... Girish, need your help ... desperate. Please, please hurry. Bagehot House is under assault, and I'm in the middle of it."

  She waited and waited for the call back. Who else could she count on for rescue? I'm sitting on the lid of the toilet in a bathroom in my rooming house, with Minnie's body inches from my toes: she couldn't, she absolutely couldn't spring this on Moni Lahiri. Moni, the beautiful Bengali Svengali, belonged in her life of daydreams and her Photoshopped future. She called Mr. GG again and left another desperate message: "I'm ready for the trip to Mexico. Girish, please, please, come right now!"

  Mr. GG would know how to right her upside-down world. He would insist she move into his apartment and his life. What was keeping him from calling her back? To give her hands something to do, she opened the bathroom cabinet and listlessly went through Tookie's and Sunita's toiletries. She dabbed an index finger into a jar of sandalwood face cream and massaged the cool, perfumed goo into her cheeks and forehead. She rubbed gel into her flyaway hair and squirted hairspray to keep every strand in place. She loosened the tiara from Minnie's tangled wig and tried it on. A cartoonish princess frowned back at her from the mirrored medicine cabinet. The tiara looked right on Minnie, so she stuck it back on her head. Minnie may have lived too long to be happy all the time, but she had died maintaining the illusion. Now Minnie was dancing a quadrille in her final durbar while Anjali again sat on the toilet seat, awaiting resolution.

  SHE HEARD POLICE sirens, but because the bathroom window looked out on the old Raj-era tennis court, now a desolate stretch of red clay sprouting clumps of weeds, she couldn't see how many cruisers had pulled up under the carport. She hoped the police convoy included a paddy wagon for arrested looters. She heard barked orders and boot soles crunching gravel. Asoke, followed by a tall, paunchy police officer and three constables, strutted into her view. They conferred by the ragged net on the tennis court. Asoke radiated a butler's air of obsequious expertise. From their body language, Anjali guessed that the officer regarded Asoke as a reliable informant and not a vandal.

  As wary of the police as her parents and Gauripur neighbors were, she now worried about being discovered alone in the tenants' bathroom with the landlady's naked corpse. She pressed her forehead against the window grille, hoping the cool metal would calm her. Below, police put up barricades to control entrance to the tennis court. Asoke's squatter youths carried a small fussy writing desk, which Minnie had called an escritoire, and a chintz-covered wing chair into the court. Asoke eased the officer into the chair as though the officer was a high-ranking army guest at one of Minnie's cantonment garden parties. He dispatched four of his youths back indoors. They came back with hand fans, a tall glass of limbu-soda, and Minnie's favorite ginger cookies on a plate from Minnie's best china.

  Asoke presented the refreshments to the officer before answering, at length and with extravagant hand gestures, the questions the officer snapped at him. Anjali couldn't understand a word of their speech, it being in Kannada. And wasn't that mousy little Sunita Sampath, suddenly resurfaced, helping to serve the food and drinks, talking to the police, and occasionally pointing up to the bathroom? Soon after he had finished interviewing Asoke, the officer sent his three constables back into the house. They returned with a long file of women in their midteens and midtwenties, taken from among the looters and squatters. The girls who had emptied the pantry shelves and sneered at Minnie's hoard of Marmite were at the head of the sullen file. Why weren't the men lined up when their plundering was so spectacularly brazen? "Hi, Girish, it's me again with an SOS!"

  The interrogations had gotten well under way before she gave up on Mr. GG, opened the window, and yelled down to the seated officer in English, "Mrs. Bagehot's here! Heart attack!"

  "That's her!" An agitated shout from Asoke, this time in English. He pointed at the window. "That's the tenant! There she is!" And Sunita stared as well, smiling but not bothering to point.

  Before Anjali could duck, an angry woman, the first to be interrogated, scooped up a fistful of pebbles and flung it at the bathroom window. She inspired her friends. Some squatter men joined in, hurling chunks of concrete loosened from the front wall and broken bricks from the edges of wilted flowerbeds. The window grille, originally installed to deter burglars, repelled the large projectiles. Why ha
d they suddenly turned on her? Anjali's distrust of the police softened into gratitude. Their duty was to protect her; they had no choice. She backed away from the window, crouched on the tiled floor, inches from Minnie's body, and prayed for rescue. When the officer, with a policewoman and two male constables in tow, finally burst through the bathroom door, that's how they found her. Asoke sidled in after them. He didn't shriek or wail at the grotesque sight. Instead, while the policewomen pulled Anjali to her feet and handcuffed her, he covered the naked corpse with the only bath towel, still damp from use, hanging on the towel rack, a servant's small gesture of gallantry.

  "You are paying guest of this lady?" the officer demanded, and pointed his baton at Minnie's body. He had the sagging, full lower lip of a heavy smoker and sprayed saliva as he spoke. With her hands cuffed, she couldn't blot; she could only watch patches of spittle land on her silk clothing and spread. Like a Bollywood cop, the man wore oversize, mirrored sunglasses, like a mask, but the accusatory growl in his voice made her feel like a criminal. She'd already been judged. "Please to describe your relationship to the deceased."

  "She was dead when I got here," Anjali blurted. "I don't know why all this craziness is happening."

  "Please to make response only to question posed." The officer ordered a policewoman to confiscate Anjali's pocketbook, watch and cell phone before continuing his interrogation. "What is nature of connection you are having with deceased aged lady?"

  "I had nothing to do with any of this. She must have died of shock. I wasn't here. Goondahs were breaking into her home and stealing all her property."

  "You are putting my patience in jeopardy." The officer extracted a pack of cigarettes from one of his many pockets but didn't light up. "I'm asking one more time only. You are residing as tenant in the deceased's lodging, but owing rent money?"

  She lowered her gaze from the officer's plump, moist lower lip to his heavy khaki socks and brown ankle boots.

  "Yes or no?"

  She said nothing. Why would the officer believe that the dead landlady had offered to run a tab for this handcuffed tenant?

  "Your good name please?"

  "Angie. Anjali Bose." It conferred no identity. She didn't own the name. She could have been anybody.

  "Your name is Anjali Bose? Why your purse is saying HS?" He was pointing to the gilt letters on the leather strap.

  "I don't know." She lied.

  He made a dismissive gesture, a sweeping of his hand, and the two policewomen dragged her down the stairs, across the foyer, down the porch steps cluttered with Bagehot furniture, past the single-minded auction-house representative in the sky-blue suit and the screaming mob and into a police cruiser. Her foot crunched the photo of dead Sikhs, which lay on the ground, stripped of its pewter frame, something new for the trash bin of history. There was no paddy wagon in the police convoy. There was no convoy.

  11

  So long as she'd been in Bagehot House, Anjali had felt in control. Surely there was someone around to vouch for her, a Tookie to say "Hi, girlfriend." She was a Bagehot Girl, after all, but in the back of the police car, handcuffed to a grille behind the driver's seat, she realized there was no one in the world she could reach who knew who the hell she was.

  In an interview room in the Central Bangalore Police Station, as she sat across a table from a square-jawed, sari-clad policewoman, waiting to be interrogated by a senior detective, Anjali Bose finally broke down. On the ride to the station in the police cruiser, she had acted composed, almost cocky, demanding to know the charges against her. But in that small windowless room, guarded by two uniformed women, one of them about her mother's age, she started to cry, and in crying, started great body-shaking heaves. There were no actual charges, hence nothing to defend herself against. She was being accused of who she was, not what she'd done. The policewoman was someone's wife, since she was wearing a mangalsutra wedding necklace, and probably someone's mother. But in her midriff-covering, four-button khaki-cotton regulation blouse and khaki teri-cotton regulation sari secured on the left shoulder with an Indian Police Service metal badge, she looked merely brutal.

  The younger policewoman threatened in broken English to shut Anjali up with "tight slaps." She had a thin, mean face, a stout, muscular body squeezed into a khaki shirt and unpleated khaki pants, and huge, wide feet, judging from the size of her Derby brown leather shoes. Anjali feared the woman was itching to carry out her threat, but she couldn't choke back her dry heaves and grunts, not even when she heard the squeaky leather shoes stride across the room toward her. She steeled herself for the blows. What the policewoman did instead was grab her shoulders in a hold painful enough to make her shriek. Pleased, the policewoman relaxed her grip, thrust her fist down the back of Anjali's kameez, and pulled up its designer label. "Dubai," she sneered. Then in Kannada she launched into what sounded like mocking insults.

  She recognized what had unleashed their taunts: her expensive silk salwar-kameez. It didn't seem to matter to her guards that her clothes were wrinkled and sweat-stained from day-long stress. In one day, that day, she had flunked out of CCI, witnessed mob fury, been accused of murder, and hauled off in handcuffs. She read her guards' minds: How did an unemployed working girl afford such a fancy wardrobe? Drugs? Who but loose women flaunt their bosoms and hips in tight, attentiongetting clothes? Whores! She sat as still as she could while the excitable younger policewoman patted her down with palms that felt as large, flat, and hard as Ping-Pong paddles, first up and down the length and width of the back, then over the front. Thick fingers pressed into her collarbone, swatted her breasts, rested on her nipples, and flicked them as though turning light switches off and on and off and on, flic-flic, and when they hardened, both policewomen burst into giggles. Without her cell phone, Anjali felt totally cut off. No one knew what was happening to her. Worse, no one would care that she had disappeared. They would assume that she had raced into new adventures. Helpless, hopeless, she prayed for the detective to enter the interview room. He would admit that the police had made a mistake—or a mistake had been made—and let her go. But where could she go when freed? She had no Bagehot House to shelter her, no mother and sister to console her, no lover to embrace her.

  The door lock clicked behind her. She knew, from the guards' abrupt halting of their game, that a senior officer had just entered. Finally she felt safe. Her worry that she would just disappear when Bangalore had had its fun with her, that she would be just another anonymous body buried under the building boom, was over. She twisted around in her chair to flash her signature smile at the man come to deliver her. The man was good-looking in a jowly, hirsute way, about the same age as Mr. GG but taller and thinner. He wore a dark suit with a pink shirt and a paisley-patterned silk tie instead of a uniform.

  The man took his time approaching the table and taking his seat across from Anjali. He took more time tugging his watch off his wrist and placing it on the table, and still more time lining up two identical ballpoint pens on either side of a notepad and a slim folder. To make room just where he wanted to put his things, he had to push away a cracked plastic tray that held a small glass carafe of stale-looking yellowish water and a plastic glass. When he was finally ready, he announced, "Very-very serious offense, Miss Anjali Bose."

  "What offense? I don't know what you're talking about!"

  "Very-very serious," he repeated before introducing himself as the detective in charge. She didn't catch his name and dared not ask him to repeat it. Her bright smile had failed her this time. "What are the charges against me?"

  "Treason against the Indian state. Terrorism. Abetting mass murder." The detective glanced at the ceiling and turned his head from side to side as if to relieve soreness in his neck. "Murder of Mrs. Minnie Bagehot, autopsy pending," he added.

  "Is the charge withholding rent money? We had an arrangement for that."

  "Not a joking matter, Miss Bose. Soon you will be weeping."

  "What, then?"

  He massaged the
sides of his neck with his knuckles. "Miss Bose, we are not playing a guessing game." He fingered the knot of his tie. He moved his watch from the right of the notepad to the left, then back again to the right. Finally, without looking at her, he announced, "Let us talk about terrorism, Miss Bose."

  "I had no knowledge that goondahs were planning to wreck Bagehot House." The absurdity of his accusation enraged her.

  "Truths only, please. Cooperation is a better strategy than prevarication. This is my recommendation to all serious offenders." But he didn't give her time to comprehend, let alone consider, his advice. In a swift, sudden show of anger, he whacked the table so hard with the notebook that she screamed as though he had hit flesh and not wood. "Now," he said, a smile twitching his mustache. "Now please to tell"—he paused to realign the ballpoints that had rolled inches from her case file before he finished his sentence—"current habitation of your friend Miss Husseina Shiraz. I note her initials are on your purse. We can therefore assume you have stolen same. No need to waste time by sending us on wild goose chase to Hyderabad and whatnot."

  Husseina? Husseina had been nowhere near Bagehot House. Maybe she'd heard wrong. She could barely understand the detective's southern rhythms, the weird vowels and thudding consonants. In this topsy-turvy world of Bangalore, detectives extracting "truths" from suspects in police stations probably earned less than honey-voiced customer-service agents in sleek call-center offices. She didn't want to risk offending him by asking him to repeat what he had just said. He was playing some kind of interrogation-room version of the cat-and-mouse game. He was poised to trap her in lies.

  "What?" This time it was a whispered admission of anxiety, not an exclamation of outrage. One whack of his lathi across her ribs would crush her. One flick of a practiced wrist, directed against her skull, would spill her brains.