Miss New India

by Bharati Mukherjee

  The idea was that everyone bring their eligible sons and their eligible daughters. Between them, Anjali should bond with one or two.

  The two Dollar Colony families arrived in a convoy of a Combi and two Marutis. The Ghoshes were a family of five: Kolkata-born parents in their midfifties, two of three Calgary-born daughters in their twenties, the third in her last year of high school. Mrs. Khanna, the recent widow of a World Bank executive, brought her two sons on break from Georgetown, and the sons' three American friends. Anjali wasn't sure how much of her Bagehot House drama Parvati had disclosed to the Drs. Ghosh and Mrs. Khanna. The Drs. Ghosh asked the usual polite questions about where she had grown up, what company her late father had worked for, where her married sister had settled. Anjali, for once, told the absolute truth, and that ended the potential Ghosh connection. The older Ghosh daughters, who had master of social work degrees from the University of Calgary and who had set up a nonprofit organization that rescued at-risk urban children, didn't hide their contempt for migrants who invaded Bangalore with the dead-end goal of answering phones all night at call centers.

  Mrs. Khanna corralled Parvati and Dr. (Mrs.) Ghosh—all three were collectors of contemporary Indian art—to lament how, after Mr. Khanna's death, she dared not squander any savings on the painters she admired. Anjali hovered near them so she wouldn't look and feel a party-pariah. They strolled from painting to painting, praising Parvati's eye and investment smarts. Anjali had lived with the paintings all these weeks but had never looked at them closely, never peered at the artists' signatures. Even now the names meant nothing to her. Anjolie Ela Menon. Arpita Singh. Rini Dhumal. In her old Gauripur bedroom there had been a browning studio portrait of her paternal grandfather, with a dusty sandalwood garland around it. Anjolie? That was a spelling she intended to try out.

  "You're such a feminist, Parvati," Dr. (Mrs.) Ghosh pronounced. "No male artists at all?"

  "Not only a feminist. Mrs. Banerji is a Bengali chauvinist!" Mrs. Khanna countered.

  So Menon, Singh, Dhumal were Bengali women who had married non-Bengalis! Anjolie Gujral? She sidled toward the front door, waiting for Mr. GG to show up. The dog walker was on front-door duty for the night, which meant he stood on the shallow porch step, helped guests heave themselves out of their cars, led them past the foot-high brass statue of Ganesh seated on a fluffy, fragrant bed of petals, held open the heavy, ornately carved wooden front door, and showed them into the marble vestibule. Since the two house dogs were hostile to visitors—"Poor, dear things," Parvati had said—she shut them in the absent Dinesh's suite for the night.

  The Khanna sons and their American houseguests had drifted upstairs to Rabi's suite, where the "scruffies" and the "jocks" were listening to Rabi's cache of African and Brazilian music. Anjali could hear their excited voices. "Dude, check this out!" "Hey, my older brother knows the guys at Wesleyan who started the Modiba label!" "Legends of the Preacher? No shit!" It wasn't her kind of music. Actually, except for her excruciating exercises on the old harmonium, she had no favorite music. Can't sing, can't dance, can't cook, that's me. She stayed put in the vestibule, just inside the doorway, and was almost knocked down when Tookie and her two friends, all three motorcycle-helmeted, shoved the door open with their shoulders before the dog walker could do his job.

  "Angie darling!" Tookie shouted at Anjali, as she unfastened the chin strap, "you won't believe what we've just been through!" She pulled off her helmet and lobbed it to the dog walker. Anjali noticed Tookie's changed hair—cropped at the back, skinny bangs dyed indigo and pink—before she took note of the swelling bruise on one side of her face.

  "Eesh! I knew those machines were dangerous! Tookie, you could have died!" A word Anjali had recently learned from Auro suddenly floated off her tongue. "Poor infrastructure, that's the problem. We're stuck with Bagehot-era roads and Tookie-era traffic."

  Tookie shrugged her leather jacket off her shoulders. The dog walker was just behind her to catch it. "Girlfriend, this kitty still has six lives left." She introduced her two companions as "gal pals" Dalia and Rosie; no last names. They too burdened the dog walker with their jackets. Both were model-tall, their legs encased in white stretch jeans, their bra lines visible under halter tops, bruises tattooing the bared flesh of shoulders and forearms. The dog walker was too entranced to go back to front-door duty.

  "What happened to you!" Mrs. Khanna cried. She and Dr. (Mrs.) Ghosh had just finished their tour of Parvati's art collection and were crossing the hallway on their way to the origami display in Auro's office.

  Parvati took charge at once. She shouted to the kitchen sisters to bring a bowl of ice cubes to the powder room. "Any broken bones, do you think? Concussion? Our driver is here, he can get you to the hospital for x-rays. Too many bikes, too many accidents. No, don't sit down. Oh, dear, are you feeling drowsy?" She ordered the dog walker to alert the chauffeur.

  "Can you get her to chill?" Tookie mouthed the words to Anjali.

  "Ice pack," Dr. (Mrs.) Ghosh said. "Anjali, take them to the bathroom and apply an ice pack to the swellings straightaway."

  Once inside the bathroom Tookie asked, "How can you stand to be around these crisis freaks?"

  "Mrs. Banerji means well."

  "I heard good things about her painting collection. Where is it?"

  Boys-and-Booze Tookie, an art lover? "I'll take you," she said, and tried to remember the names of the lady painters. There was an Anjolie. Dalia dumped the bowlful of ice cubes into the sink. She traced the edges of the largest bruise on her forearm with a loving fingertip. "Medal of war. Sidewalks have become war zones."

  "Fucking fundamentalists! We're talking Bangalore, IT capital for God's sake, not the fucking Swat Valley!"

  Rosie let loose a war cry. "Bring it on, assholes!"

  "You didn't crash? You got beat up?"

  "Yeah. Boys with chains and cricket bats, looking for girls coming out of bars. Where do you stand? You can't be a civilian anymore."

  Dalia unlocked the door and poked her head out. "All clear! What's that thumpy music? What's upstairs? Action central?" She didn't wait for Anjali's answer.

  Rosie and Tookie followed Dalia up the stairs to Rabi's suite. Anjali stood behind them as they peered into the crowded room. Rabi's party was in full swing. Large emptied bottles of Indian beer. Low lights and loud beat. Just-met acquaintances forging cosmic connections. Anjali felt like an alien in Rabi's universe.

  Tookie didn't hide her disappointment. "Dude, so not-our-scene," she grumbled as she led her posse back down the stairs. "Give us a ring when you need a pub run on Residency. Ciao!"

  Tookie had judged Anjali unfit to be one of Tookie's "gal pals." It brought a closure of sorts. Minnie was dead, the Bagehot Girls disbanded, Husseina an international miscreant, Bagehot House wrecked, and the jungle cleared for Jacaranda Estates, advertised by the development company as "a self-sufficient, ultra-luxurious lifestyle complex for the ultra-affluent." The first phase of her Big Bangalore Adventure was over. What next, and where? The forces of evil had amassed.

  Tookie's apocalyptic vision and Rosie's war slogan didn't inspire the same urgency that Peter's exhortations to get out of Gauripur had. Anjali lingered on the threshold of Rabi's suite, reluctant to crash, unwilling to leave. The older Khanna son, lean, and looking leaner in a black muscle shirt and black jeans, waved at her with his beer bottle. She smiled back. He was on the fringes of a knot of Scandinavians whom Rabi had fished with in Bheemswari. The Khanna brothers, their American college friends, and the Scandinavians seemed so in the moment. The past held her in a headlock. She could step over the threshold; she could fake having a blast; why not? Both the Bengali Svengali and Mr. GG had stood her up; so what?

  She ventured a tentative toe inside, and suddenly in a far corner of the hot, smoky room she spotted the Bengali Svengali. He must have arrived while she was attending to Tookie, Dalia, and Rosie. There he was, dimpled, floppy-haired, Bollywood-handsome, Hawaiian-shirted, his back pressed ag
ainst the wall, a wineglass in hand, as teasingly real as water in a mirage. Rabi stood facing him, Rabi's scrawny torso leaning toward him, Rabi's bony arms encircling him without touching, palms flat on the wall. This had to be their first-ever meeting, but she detected a connection between them ... not just the music ... trust, ease, unself-conscious confidence. And some other quality ... a tenderness, yes, that was it.

  From the landing of the stairs, she could hear Mrs. Khanna, the Drs. Ghosh, and their three daughters saying their drawn-out thank-yous and goodbyes to Auro and Parvati. "Mrs. Banerjee, I applaud your kind heart," Dr. (Mrs.) Ghosh boomed in her judgmental voice, "but ... you don't want her around when Bhupesh and Dinesh get back." Mrs. Khanna too had a suspicious nature. "These modern working girls flocking to Bangalore, they're full of schemes, I tell you. They trap innocent boys from good families. I don't let my two hang out on the Brigades!"

  Anjali stole down a few steps so she could see as well as hear. Parvati dropped Mr. Champion's name—the famous author—to reassure Mrs. Khanna and the Ghoshes, or maybe to reassure herself; Anjali couldn't be sure. She had thought of herself as the victim of gathering evil forces, just like Minnie Bagehot. To the cautious Dollar Colony mothers, evil forces had taken over, and she—schemer, gold digger, opportunist migrant—was the enemy.

  You can't be a civilian anymore, Tookie had warned her. But why must there be a duel-to-the-death before Dynamo's new species could emerge?

  Down in the front hall, the hugs and farewells continued. The house dogs had somehow escaped their sequestering, but they behaved themselves. "They're charming on the surface, but cunning inside."

  "Mrs. Khanna is giving you the unvarnished truth, Parvati." She was using Bangla, and Anjali, after a few weeks in the proudly Bangla-speaking Banerji home, understood it perfectly. "The time for this beating-around-the-bush politeness is past. You decide what you want to do about the noose around your neck. By the way, that gorgeous gold choker you're wearing, did you get it at Tanishq?"

  It may have been an unconscious gesture, but with her left hand Parvati protected her throat. Twenty-two-karat gold glimmered between her splayed fingers. Anjali fled upstairs to her room in shame.

  6

  Early the next morning, a peon from Mr. GG's office arrived in a noisy auto-rickshaw with a letter and a bouquet of tiger lilies for Parvati. When Anjali heard the rickshaw brake to a stop, she assumed the passenger was Parvati's tailor, a bespectacled, professorial-looking Sikh gentleman who could no longer ride his bicycle to his clients' homes because of cataracts in both eyes. He stopped by once a week to drop off orders completed and to pick up lengths of fabric and sketches for new clothes. Auro kept him busy making dark suits for the office, linen leisure suits for dress-down Fridays, and colorful kurtas for evenings and weekends. For Parvati, who wore saris, he sewed choli blouses, coolweather capes, and caftans for family-only evenings at home. Anjali snapped up Parvati's invitation to let him sew a replacement wardrobe for everything she'd lost in the Bagehot House riot.

  The earnest old man with milky irises copied avant-garde slacks, vests, jackets, and peignoir sets from fashion magazines. The frugal era of mall prowling and drooling over designer outfits on mannequins was over, at least for as long as she kept on the good side of Auro and Parvati. She was teaching herself a new two-step of Desire and Fulfillment. The tailor needed work to feed his family; Parvati, a compulsive benefactor, needed feel-good projects. Why couldn't the Dollar Colony matrons see that she was compulsively dispensing happiness?

  But there were clouds on the horizon. The warnings from Dr. Ghosh. Parvati might wave them away, in her goodness, but Anjali couldn't. Objective outsiders saw her as something unsavory. Not just a small-town usurper, but someone with bad connections.

  When the dog walker ushered Mr. GG's peon into the glassed-in breakfast patio, Anjali and Parvati were finishing their second round of Assam tea. Auro had switched to drinking strong Karnataka coffee since moving to Bangalore, but Parvati remained a tea snob. Anjali would have welcomed a huge caffeine hit that morning. She associated the smell and taste of brewed coffee with her first Barista cup during her first hour in Bangalore.

  A heart-to-heart aimed at encouraging her to move out was inevitable, though Parvati, ever gracious, would deliver the "dump" notice obliquely. Anjali was waiting for the subtle questions: Your family must miss you so. Don't you miss your mother and sister? But Parvati procrastinated. She fed scraps of chapati to Ahilya and Malhar, who were sprawled on the dhurrie by her feet.

  Ahilya stood, stretched, then laid her muzzle on Anjali's thigh. Do I pet her, rub her ears? Would she bite if I touched her? It was Anjali's first doggy moment.

  Parvati launched into a monologue that sprinted from topic to topic, including her CCI lesson plans for the day, Usha Desai's mother's improving health, her fear that Dinesh was getting seriously involved with an international student from Norway, and the importance of getting fish oil and magnesium into people's diets, especially that of poor people. Her heavy briefcase was on the floor by the dogs, propped against a chair leg, ready for the driver to carry to the car.

  Every few days she fed CCI questions to Anjali. "Keeping you on your toes," she'd say. Somehow, according to Parvati, whatever future she had would be attached to her ease with the English language.

  The dogs made low growling noises when the peon, his terrified eyes fixed on them, approached Parvati. The peon backed away and took cover behind the dog walker. Anjali noted the dog walker's smug grin as he took officious custody of the envelope and bouquet, and laid the envelope on the bistro table. Parvati rubbed Malhar's broad bottom until his growl stopped. Anjali boldly scratched Ahilya's ears. "With these brave fellows, who needs an electronic security system?" Parvati joked. With an unused knife, she slit the envelope open and scanned the note inside.

  Anjali recognized Mr. GG's handwriting on the discarded envelope: Mrs. Parvati Banerji, and under the name, RSVP per peon.

  "The Bagehot Trust meeting lasted longer than Girish had expected," Parvati summarized. "Incendiary, apparently." She reached down to pull her roller-ball pen out of the briefcase. "He'd like to stop by this evening so he can apologize for missing the party. Not that that's necessary, but you've seen how Auro loves to argue politics with him!"

  Mr. GG hadn't meant to stand her up. That buoyed Anjali's spirits. Mr. GG the assiduous networker was cultivating Auro and Parvati, and Dynamo the futurist was courting his muse. She missed Rabi, but he had left at dawn for another travel magazine assignment. With Rabi, she could blurt whatever outrageous thought came to her because he wasn't judgmental. Mr. GG was signaling his desire for her, wasn't he?—but in a respectful way. What they'd both let happen that one time in his apartment had to do with lust, with the quality of light in the bedroom, and, through an uncurtained window, with Cubbon Park's lushness. Her face felt hot. She needed to do something with her hands, pour more tea if the teapot hadn't been drained, or stick the flowers in a vase, something physical to tamp down her excitement.

  "I'll get a vase," she said abruptly.

  Parvati stared at her, baffled, so she pointed to the tiger lilies dripping greenish stains on the dog walker's shirt front. "Vase?" Parvati repeated. She had scribbled her RSVP at the bottom of Mr. GG's note and was about to slip it back into the original envelope. "Are you all right? Oh, of course, it's Bagehot House, isn't it? How insensitive of me to have let slip that name. I'm so sorry, Anjali, would you rather I disinvite Girish? He has business in Mexico next week, but we can have him for dinner when he gets back."

  "Oh no," Anjali protested. "Please don't change your plans for my sake. I've already been enough of a burden. I feel like such a parasite."

  "Stop!" Anjali couldn't remember Parvati ever sounding so sharp. "You are not a burden. Let's get you a flower vase. If you are here long enough, I'll make you an ikebana enthusiast."

  The dog walker perked up when he heard the English word vase. The Banerjis joked that he knew more Englis
h than he let on so that he could eavesdrop. "Swati!" He shouted instructions in Kannada, and the younger kitchen sister bounced in with a cut-glass bowl nestled against her chest, a thick braid dancing down her back. A teenager in love, and not hiding it.

  So that was her name. Swati. Anjali felt guilty that she hadn't learned the names of even the kitchen sisters, let alone the compound staff: the dog walker, the driver, the watchman. Swati pried the tightly bound bouquet out of the dog walker's bemused grip. Anjali didn't miss the intensity of that covert caress.

  Mr. GG's peon dropped the resealed envelope into his bag. The dog walker responded to that stimulus and escorted the peon out to the waiting auto-rickshaw. Then he ran back into the room and handed one internal air-letter to Anjali, which the mailman had just left off in the mailbox nailed to the guardhouse. Anjali took a look at the address— P. Champion, Gauripur —and crumpled the letter. When she went back to her bedroom, she stuffed it into the top drawer of her dresser.

  7

  Girish Gujral texted Parvati: cu @ 7pm dnr raincheck?

  By four in the afternoon Anjali had decided on her look for the special evening. (Artfully) simple, (effortlessly) sexy. She mixed and matched every piece of clothing in her made-to-measure Dollar Colony wardrobe, and by six in the evening she'd achieved that look: dusty rose linen capri pants; rosy dawn midriff-baring sleeveless top with daring neckline; silver anklets and high-heeled snakeskin sandals dyed neon pink; tiny rose-quartz ear studs; and as a hair ornament, one of Mr. GG's tiger lilies.

  Anjali came down to the living room at six-thirty and installed herself in a corner chaise longue, where she knew the lamplight was pinkish and flattering. Parvati was on the phone with Rabi's mother in San Francisco, sharing kitchen chitchat twelve hours and half a world apart, including tips on shrimp malai curry (go crazy with the garlic; caramelize the diced onion; slow-sauté the spices so they don't taste and smell raw; canned coconut milk is for amateurs; steep, squeeze, discard coconut flakes and use just enough of the liquid so the jhol has thok-thok consistency). Auro was still showering. Anjali tuned out Parvati's voice, now gone on to serious topics with her sister, in Bangla, the hiss and sizzle of the kitchen sisters deep-frying pakoras, the gardener's son and nephew practicing birdcalls just outside the open window. Soon Mr. GG's car tires would scatter gravel on the unpaved road.