Through the car horns and jangle of an Indian street at market hour came the cry "Anjali!" but Anjali was not the name she answered to. Over blaring music from open-front shops she heard it again, sharper for its foreign edge: "Anjali!"
At nineteen, Anjali Bose was a tall girl, one hundred and seventy-three centimeters-five foot eight-taller than most boys in her college. She was on the girls' field hockey team. She smiled readily and when she did, she could light up a room like a halogen lamp. The conventional form of Indian femininity projects itself through long-lashed, kohl-rimmed, startled black eyes. Modest women know to glance upward from a slightly bowed head. Anjali did not take in the world with saucer-eyed passivity. Her light, greenish eyes were set off by high cheekbones and prominent brows. Her face resolved itself along a long jaw and generous mouth, with full lips and prominent teeth. Her parents, looking to the day they would have to marry her off, worried openly about her overly assertive features. But the rare foreigners who passed through town, health workers or financial aid consultants for international agencies, found her looks striking and her boldness charming. Speaking to them, she sometimes claimed a touch of Burmese or Nepali ancestry. She told many stories, all of them plausible, some of them perhaps even true. She always made an outstanding first impression.
On any street at market hour in the provincial town of Gauripur, in the state of Bihar, there could be a dozen Anjalis-"offerings to god"-but no man not a relative would dare call them by name. Most of those other Anjalis would be married, hobbled by saris, carrying infants or clutching the hands of toddlers while their husbands haggled for fish and vegetables. To be hailed from the street by a man on a scooter would be scandalous. The call had to be for her, the strider in jeans and a T-shirt advertising the maiden tour (Hamburg, Stuttgart, Köln, Basel, Zürich, Wien, Bratislava-she loved the umlauts) of Panzer Delight, a German punk-rock band, some few years back-the young woman who could wait to be called by the name she preferred, Angela, or better yet, Angie. A rusty old Lambretta scooter, the kind that had been popular with Gauripur's office workers way back in the 1960s, braked to a wheezing stop; its driver waved and nudged it toward her through the blue diesel smoke from buses and trucks, the dense clutter of handcarts and bicycles: swollen, restless India on the move.
She was standing outside Gauripur Bazaar, known locally as Pinky Mahal, the town's three-story monument to urban progress. When Pinky Mahal was being built, bricks had been carried, one by one, by dozens of child laborers hired by the day. Rows of women workers had threaded their way along single planks, balancing bowls of cement on their heads and then dumping the contents into plastic buckets. During the construction a corporate billboard had stood on Lal Bahadur Shastri (LBS) Road, an epic portrait to feed a credulous public: a magnificent, five-story office tower behind a small landscaped forest of shade and flowering trees, lawns, fountains, and sundials. On the billboard turbaned doormen greeted the gleaming row of imported cars pulling up at the building's entrance. And above the turbaned heads floated two legends: YOUR NEW CORPORATE HDQS IN BEAUTFUL, EXCITING GAURIPUR! AND ACT NOW! COMMERCIAL SPACE GOING FAST!
Fanciful renderings of a future that would never come.
The office tower, with three stories instead of the advertised five, was completed in a year, but within six months of its ceremonial opening the pink outer plaster had begun to crumble, leaving long veins of exposed brick. The contractor claimed that the pink paint was sour and had reacted to the sweet plaster. Acid and alkaline, the developer explained to the press, then absconded to the Persian Gulf. And so Pinky Mahal, its two top floors unoccupied, its ground floor leased and subleased by owners of small shops who put up with fluctuating electrical service and no air conditioning because of the low rent, had become an eyesore rather than a proud monument in the center of town.
When Pinky Mahal failed, the spirit of Gauripur was crushed.
Then the call came again, slightly revised: "Angie!"
Mr. Champion pulled his scooter into the safety of the gutter, and Anjali towered above him, standing on the high edge of the cracked sidewalk. She hadn't seen much of her former teacher in the twelve months since she'd graduated from Vasco da Gama High School and enrolled in Vasco da Gama College's B. Comm. program. During that time he'd grown a reddish beard speckled with gray. A patched book bag was slung over his shoulder, and he still wore his trademark handloom cotton kurta over blue jeans. From her elevated vantage point, she saw that his hair was thinning. Mosquitoes buzzed over the bald spot. They landed, but he appeared not to notice.
He had to be over fifty, considering that he'd been in Bihar for nearly thirty years, but was still so slim and energetic that he seemed boyish. All American men-within the tiny compass of her experience-seemed boyish. Her father, a railway clerk, was younger than Mr. Champion but looked older. It was impossible to think of her stout father, with his peremptory voice and officious manners, in anything but the role of upholstered patriarch. He would never wear a wrinkled shirt in public or shirtsleeves to the office, and he had never owned blue jeans.
"I thought you were leaving," the American said. Then, with more emphasis, "In fact, I thought you told me you were leaving, and that was months ago."
When in doubt, smile. She smiled. "I like your beard, Mr. Champion."
"I'm not your teacher anymore, Anjali. You can call me Peter."
"Only if you call me Angie."
She'd had a secret crush on her teacher her last three years at Vasco da Gama High School, though, like all other da Gama students speaking to teachers, she'd addressed him as sir and Mr. Champion to his face, and as "the American" behind his back. He was the only layman under sixty and the only white man in the school run by Goan and South Indian priests.
"Angie, why are you still here?"
It was a question she often asked herself. She could more easily visualize herself in a fancy Mumbai café overlooking the Gateway of India, stirring a foamy pink falooda with a long spoon in a frosty glass, than nibbling spicy savories from a street vendor in Gauripur, something she had been about to do when Mr. Champion startled her.
"I might ask the same of you, sir-I mean, Peter," she retorted, grateful that her lips and chin weren't greasy from eating deep-fried pakoras.
"Same as you, Angie. Studying."
It was their special joke: although he earned his living as a teacher, one in fact openly admired for having introduced a popular course on U.S. business models and advertising strategies with supplementary units on American culture and idiom, he considered himself "a perennial student." But not like typical Indian students, those driven rote learners with one obsessive goal: admission to an Indian Institute of Technology. A lifetime of prosperity and professional success or poverty and shame depended on how relentlessly they crammed for national entrance examinations.
"I thought you said you had to get out if you wanted to stay sane."
"There were weddings." She lied. "My sister got married. I couldn't just pick up and leave." A spontaneous untruth; it just slipped out.
He frowned and she felt a liar's momentary panic. Maybe she'd already used the wedding excuse, and forgotten. Family weddings and funerals are the incontestable duties and rituals of Indian life. There's always a sister or cousin being married off, an ailing uncle being nursed, a great-uncle being mourned.
Truthfully, Angie had a sister. Her name was Sonali, and she had been married five years before to a bridegroom whose ad and picture in the matrimonial column of a Bangla-language local newspaper had met Sonali's, and their father's, approval. Now Sonali was a divorced single mother, living with her four-year-old daughter in a one-room flat in Patna, the nearest large city, and working as steno-typist-bookkeeper for the stingy owner of a truck-rental company. The bridegroom was discovered, too late, to be a heavy drinker and philanderer. But when Sonali had finally got up her nerve to institute divorce proceedings, their father had turned against her for wreaking on the Bose family the public shame of divorce.
How could she explain to Mr. Champion how difficult-how impossible-it was for a daughter in a family like hers to just up and leave town except as the bride of a man her father had hand-picked? Why did family honor and fatherly duty involve his shackling her to a stranger when he had already proved himself so fallible? It was her life he was threatening to ruin next. Her father had a simple explanation: "It is not a question of happiness, yours or ours. It's about our name, our family reputation." Even at nineteen, Anjali was determined not to yield her right to happiness.
Mr. Champion, oblivious to what she had to contend with at home, was back to smiling. Maybe all Americans were inscrutable in that way. You couldn't tell what they really thought. Maybe he hadn't noticed her little lie; maybe he'd noticed but forgiven her. She sailed through life with a blithe assumption that she would be forgiven.
"Remember what I told you. India's leaving towns like this in the dust. You've got prospects." He shifted a heavy jute shopping sack strapped to the back seat of his scooter and patted the empty space. An overripe orange tumbled out of the bag into the gutter. Two crows and a pariah dog zeroed in on the smashed fruit. "Hop on, Angie."
If Gauripur was that doomed, why hadn't he left?
"I'll give you a ride to your house if you don't mind stopping off at my place while I put this stuff away." He retightened the strap around the jute sack. "There's fish at the bottom."
She liked the idea of not having to go right back home to her father's bullying and her mother's tearful silence. They were obsessed with finding a respectable son-in-law who would overlook negatives such as green eyes, a stubborn personality, and a nominal dowry. Her father blamed her for his lack of matchmaking success. Usually he pointed to her T-shirts and jeans: "What you wear, how you talk, no wonder! What good boy is going to look twice?"
Plenty, Baba, she could have retorted but didn't. She was not lacking for admirers. Boys were attracted to her, though she did little enough to encourage them. She knew what her father meant, though: prospective bridegrooms-"good boys" from good families-would back off.
With her sandaled toe, Angie traced a deep dent on Mr. Champion's scooter. The strappy sandal was the same shade of lilac as her painted toenails. She knew she had pretty feet, small, high-arched, narrow. He had to have noticed. "Looks like you need a new set of wheels, Mr. Champion," she teased.
The American wiped the passenger seat with the sleeve of his kurta. "Don't wait until it's too late."
He didn't understand her struggles; how could any aging, balding American with tufts of nose hair do so? She had one, and only one, legitimate escape route out of Gauripur: arranged marriage to a big-citybased bridegroom. That B. Comm. degree would increase her stock in the marriage market.
"Okey-dokey, Mr. Champion." She laughed, easing herself in place beside the jute sack on the passenger seat. Let the sidewalk throngs stare; let the crowds part for the young unmarried woman on the back of the bachelor American's scooter. When the word got out, as it inevitably would, that Anjali Bose, daughter of "Railways Bose" of Indian Railways, sister of a working-woman divorcee, was riding off in plain sight, with her arms around the stomach of a foreigner, her parents would find it harder to make a proper-caste Bengali matrimonial match for her. So be it.
"And I've got someone I'd like you to meet," he said.
"You are inviting me to go to your flat, Mr. Champion?" She tried not to sound shocked.
It would not be her first visit to her teacher's home. Mr. Champion offered an English conversation course on Saturday mornings, and an advanced English conversational skills course on Sunday afternoons, at his apartment. Anjali had completed both courses twice, as had a dozen ambitious male da Gama students hoping to improve their chances of getting into professional schools in engineering or medicine or business management. A few of Mr. Champion's students were now doctors in their early thirties, waiting for immigrant visas to Canada or Australia.
The very first time Anjali showed up for Mr. Champion's Saturday conversation class, she had been severely disappointed with how little he owned in the way of furniture and appliances. No refrigerator, no television, no air conditioner, no crates of carbonated soft drinks. He owned a music system, professional-looking tape-recording equipment, and a bulky laptop and printer. Wooden office chairs and a pile of overstuffed cushions served as extra seating. Dozens of Indian books in every language were stacked on a brick-and-plank bookcase. A divan that surely doubled as his bed was pushed alongside a wall. Anjali had expected a professor's home to be shabby, but a shabby portal of learning, crammed with leather-bound books by world-renowned authors.
Anjali had been the only girl in those classes. She had been brought up to revere her elders and teachers, but whenever she visited Mr. Champion's place, she'd imagined his shame: the rooms were so barren, so like a servant's quarters. Some Saturday afternoons the sheets on the divan still looked mussed. She was embarrassed to be in a room with a man's bed, with his clothes hanging from pegs on a wall as though he had undressed in front of her. His apparent loneliness depressed her; his exposure agitated her. The silence of Mr. Champion's room made the beehive drone of an Indian family seem less insane. She was not much of a homebody-according to her mother's complaints-but if it hadn't seemed too forward a gesture by the only girl student, she would have brought her teacher small house gifts, a flower vase or just a wall calendar, to make the room look cozier.
Now terra-cotta pots of blooming flowers lined the narrow walkway to Mr. Champion's back staircase. Vines hung over the stairwell, and the stairs themselves were fragrant with flowers she couldn't name in any language. Could it be the same place?
"Mr. Champion! Have you gotten married?" She laughed, and from the top of the stairs he turned to her with a smile.
"Some difference, wouldn't you say?"
The door was painted bright blue. It opened inward before he could even insert the key. By then, Anjali had gained the top step, and there she faced a young man wrapped in a lungi, bare-chested, rubbing his eyes. "Jaanu," he said in a low voice, and Mr. Champion said a few words in what sounded like Urdu. Angie made out the universal "tea" and "biscuits" and maybe a version of her name.
There were cut flowers on a round table, a colorful tablecloth, and paintings nailed to the walls. There were two comfortable-looking cane chairs and a floor lamp. An old wooden almirah now held the clothes that had been hung on pegs, and bookcases ran along every wall, right up to the sleeping alcove. The bed was not made, almost as though the boy had been sleeping in it. She didn't see his sleeping mat. "Angie, this is Ali," said Mr. Champion. Then he added, "He is my friend."
Americans can do that, she thought: make friends of village Muslims. Young Ali, Mr. Champion's jaanu, his life (if the Hindi and Urdu words were congruent in meaning), a handsome enough boy if nearly black, with long hair and flaring cheekbones, had painted his fingernails bright red. He opened the almirah to find a shirt for his half-naked body. Either the shirt had been donated by Mr. Champion but still hung in the master's closet, which was cheeky enough-or else the two men shared closet space, which to her was unthinkable.
Mindful of parental wrath if she was to return home on the back of a man's bike, Anjali insisted that she would stay only a few minutes and then take a bus back. If Baba or the nosy neighbors saw her get off the bus at the stop close to home, they would suspect nothing. She wasn't ready for a screaming match with Baba. But she stayed an hour, speaking more freely of her longings than she did with her girlfriends. She didn't want marriage. Her classes were dull. She wanted something exciting, life-changing, to save her from the tedium of Gauripur. "I understand," Mr. Champion said. Ali was sent off to buy sweets. Angie had been Peter Champion's fondest project, someone very much like him, he said, who couldn't live in the small town of her birth. What a pain it is, to know that one is somehow fated to set sail for the farthest shore. "What a calling it is for someone like me," he joked, "to fill that ark with passengers."
Mr. Champion was in high teaching mode, in full confessional selfdisplay. He was, he said, a man in love.
"So that explains the woman's touch," she said. "But where is she?"
"Angie, Angie." He tut-tutted.
She wondered for a moment if she herself was the woman he'd chosen and if the next words from his mouth would be "I love you, Angie, I always have, and I won't let you leave until you agree to go to America as my bride…" She had a romantic nature; she assumed any man could love her.
Bravely, she asked, "So who is this person you want me to meet?"
"You've met him, Angie."
She was left in the dark, still smiling. She hadn't seen anybody, and there was no place to hide.
"It's too late for me to leave," he said, "but for you I want the best." Is this a proposal, she wondered, and almost asked out loud, trying to help him. I'll do it! I'll make you happy! Then he said, "You must try a larger city." She'd always imagined herself in Bombay or maybe on the beaches of Goa, and so she mentioned those possibilities to him. Eventually, even in America, she thought, though she dared not say it for fear of inviting the evil eye.
"Bombay?" He laughed. "You've been seeing too many bad movies. Bombay is yesterday. It's a hustler's city. Bangalore's the place for a young woman like you."
She wondered, Is that where he's taking me? Why not? I'll go. Then: What kind of girl am I?
She knew nothing of Bangalore, a southern city as alien to her as the snows of Kashmir. Mr. Champion was back in teaching mode. He explained that for two hundred years Bangalore had been a British army base, a cantonment, and the Britishers had left a few scars-golf courses and racetracks and private gymkhanas-that moneyed Indians adopted a little too enthusiastically. But now it's a hopping place. And he had contacts in Bangalore, people who would listen to his recommendations. The call centers, luring thousands of young people from all over the country, people like her, the new people.
Ali returned with a box of sweets.
"In Bangalore," Mr. Champion said, "if you've got the talent, there's a market."
This time she asked the question that was always on her mind. "And what is my talent, Mr. Champion?"
"Peter, please. Don't you know what your talent is?"
"I haven't the p'oggiest."
"Foggiest, Angie. Initial f-sound, not p. Initial w-sound, not v, and vice versa. Wedding, not vedding. Vagaries, not wagaries. Not wice wersa. Develop, not dewellup. Keep practicing."
She could cry. They'll always find you out.
"Your talent, Angie? You have the passion. You're not satisfied. But you're still very innocent. Innocence is appealing in a young girl, but not blindness, not ignorance. Look at us." She smiled at his way of including her, but then he said,-"Look closely at us, Angie, take a long look at Ali and me."
At the mention of his name, Ali smiled and began to dance. The boy was a good dancer; he must have seen a hundred movies. And then Peter stood and put his arm over Ali's shoulder, and Ali nestled his head against Peter's cheek.
A clash of emotions met the dawn of consciousness: she could have screamed, but instead she whimpered, barely above a breath, "Oh."
Peter went on about places in Bangalore where she could stay. He knew old women from the British days who let out rooms in old mansions in the middle of the city, houses that could have been sold for crores of rupees (and leveled, their tangled gardens hacked down for parking lots and swimming pools), but where would the old women go? Old Anglo-Indian women whose children had fled to Australia or Canada, whose grandchildren would never see India, dotty old women whose sense of decorum reached back to pre-Independence days and who ("Believe me!" he laughed) would never be sympathetic to India's freedom fighters and Independence, but who nevertheless offered rooms and breakfasts of tea and toast and suppers of mutton stew at 1970s prices. Much was forgivable in such women. A place in Kew Gardens or Kent Town, that's what Angie needed. And he knew the women who ran the new money-spinning call centers were always looking for girls with good English and soothing voices who could fool American callers (I can do that? she was about to ask.I'm good enough to fool Americans?) into thinking they're talking to a girl in Boston or Chicago.
"Finally, a chance to use those regional accents I taught you," he said. "You're very good, Angie, you're the best student I ever had."
"That'll be five dallars," she said, remembering.
Chicago o's sound like a's. So do Boston r's.
"I told you at graduation you had to leave this place before you got trapped in a rotten marriage. I'm telling you again, let that happen and you're as good as dead."
Why do they say as good as dead? Why not as bad? But this was not the time to ask. He seemed about to put his hand on her arm and she felt excited. "I have dreams for you. You get married to some boy from here, and the dream dies. You'll never see the world." He studied her T-shirt. "No… Dortmund, no Bratislava. You'll have kids and a husband who's jealous of your intelligence and your English and won't let you out of the house, and that would break my heart." This time, he did put his hand on her arm-"You understand?"
Ali snapped up the plate of sweet crumbs as though it was crawling with ants and noisily dumped it into a bowl of soapy water. He was jealous of her! He was just a child. He lifted his dripping fingers to eye level and glared at a chip on a painted fingernail.
"All I've done is give you a start. The rest is up to you."
In the movies, there was a moment of accounting. She wouldn't be allowed to leave her benefactor's house, not without a favor, or worse. The rest is up to me? The door would be blocked. He'd reach for her hand, then close in on it, like a trap. But Peter was her teacher and a teacher's help had purity and noble intentions behind it. It came from his heart because she had earned it honorably. Peter was smiling and even Ali was smiling, and Peter held out his hand to her and said, "Good luck, Angie."
She took his hand. Ali thrust out his, which confused her: shake a servant's hand? Up close, she could see a fine line of kohl limning his eyes. In that moment of confusion she saw Peter's arm reach around Ali's waist and pull him close. "I hope you'll find happiness too," he said.
More words followed, in Urdu, and Ali laughed and said in English, "Good luck, Anjali."
Then he walked her to the bus stop.
If a girl is sufficiently motivated, she can distill ten years' worth of Western dating experience-though maybe not all the sex and heartbreak-from a few months of dedicated attention to the photos, backgrounds, and brief meetings with the "boys" her father selects. She can enjoy the illusion of popularity, glamour, and sophistication. She can fabricate "relationships" and fantasize about new cities, new families, and new worlds opening up, without the terror of leaving home and sneaking off to Bangalore. Even in the heavily chaperoned world of the arranged marriage market, a girl can fabricate passion and lose her innocence. Anjali was tuned in to her culture's consolations for the denial of autonomy.
She was nearly twenty, a few months into her bachelor of commerce studies. But why, her father wanted to know, delay groom-hunting for two more years until she received her B. Comm.? It was therefore decided that while he wore himself out in search of a worthy "boy," she was to resume attending the English conversation classes the American held in his apartment on weekends. Good English equals good match. He was willing to dig into his savings to pay the American's fees because if any misfortune was to befall her mythical husband, she could help out by tutoring school pupils. English-language skills would always be in demand.
"What husband, Baba?" Anjali protested, though she was pleased to have his blessing to attend the weekend classes. "You haven't even started looking, and you're worrying he'll be disabled or destitute!" This was as close as her father could come to admitting the horrible mistake he had made in hand-picking Sonali's husband. In the Bose family, a married woman forced by circumstances to hold a job to make ends meet was a tragedy. A divorced single mother supporting herself and her four-year-old daughter by working long days as an office typist was a catastrophe.
Mr. Bose went back to his nightly pegs of whiskey, ignoring her. Anjali toted up her assets and liabilities in the marriage market. Unlike Sonali, she was tall and slim, and under favorable light and clothing, pleasant looking-no, make that passably good looking. On the minus side, she lacked accomplishments such as singing, dancing, and sewing, traditionally expected of bridal candidates. She was also stubborn, headstrong, and impulsive, and by middle-class Gauripur standards, inappropriately outgoing. Those were correctible or at least concealable failures. The one flaw that couldn't be overcome was her eye color: greenish hazel. Her mother prayed for her pale eyes to turn black. Black hair, black eyes, fair complexion, sharp nose, and thin lips were unassailable proof of ethnic purity, whereas brownish hair and light eyes hinted at hanky-panky with a European in some long-ago time and place. Anjali reminded her mother that Sonali's long-lashed black eyes had fetched a lecherous cad who paid no child support and no alimony.
To marry her off was her father's Hindu duty: Anjali accepted that. Given her willful personality, he was eager to marry her off before she sullied her reputation and disgraced the whole family: she understood that too. She couldn't talk about her wants and fears with her parents, but she knew when to humor and when to defy them.
The matchmaking campaign began casually. Her father might come home from the office saying, "Took tea with Mr. Pradip Sen this afternoon. He's looking for someone for his son." Meaningful pause. "Anjali, you remember the Sens, no?" And she might drop what she was doing, which couldn't be much, since she was fairly useless in the kitchen, and say, "I trust you're not talking of Buck Tooth Sen. Good luck!" Little tests like that, easily deflected. And her father would shoot back, "Sen is good family. Everyone is remembering Mr. Pradip Sen's maternal grandmother's brother, just a boy, was hanged by damn Britishers on Andaman Islands." The formalities of matchmaking were conducted in English in the Bose household. Over breakfast Mr. Bose might linger on the page of marriage ads in the local Bangla paper, checking out the boys. "Promising lad, engineering, awaiting U.S. Green Card." The newspaper photo was reduced from a visa-size, visa-posed grainy black-and-white, rather insulting to her estimation of her prospects. She thought, They actually think this clerk-in-waiting is worthy of me? "Shall I drop this young chap a line?" her father would ask, and Anjali, feeling more like Angie, would reply, "You do that and I'm out the door, thank you very much." They sparred and chuckled. Their girl had self-respect, which the parents considered a good thing; she was also a little willful, which was not.
Angie wrote to Sonali that things at home were much as usual. Grumbling, threats, entreaties, criticism, and promises: the whole parent-unmarried daughter bag of tricks. Nothing she couldn't handle.
Sonali warned that matchmaking might start as a small cloud on the distant horizon, but before it was over, the marital monsoon would break, and no one in the world could hold the floodwaters back. Anjali secretly looked forward to its destructive fury.
THREE MONTHS LATER Anjali was still in Gauripur, making excuses to herself. The pre-monsoon summer was at its zenith. Nothing moved, all was heat and dust, but two thousand kilometers to the south, seasonal low pressure had been sighted. Low pressure meant monsoon. Monsoon meant mud, cooler weather, and a temporary reprieve from mosquitoes-and it meant that the next school year would soon be starting.
A sudden marriage, outside of her control, could certainly occur. Nonetheless, she felt it was only fair to her parents to let them test the marital waters. The possibility of going to Bangalore on her own would be a monumental life-destroying-or liberating-decision. She needed time to plan. She had saved the cash from occasional money orders Sonali had sent her over the years, but it probably wouldn't be enough for train fare. Hiding even the slim stack of bills from a family intolerant of privacy would be a challenge. Maybe she could stash it at the bottom of one of her mother's "just in case" metal drums in which was hoarded a six months' supply of rice, sugar, and lentils. "Just in case" was her mother's mantra. Disasters are waiting; they can't be avoided, and there's no one to trust. Everyone is corrupt, with twisted values. Even Anjali's father came in for scrutiny: "When bad times come again," she'd say as they chopped vegetables, "you think your father can save you? Hah! My father provided for my sisters and me. We never wanted, even in famine time. Five daughters all married, with decent dowry!"
"Buzley?" Did you understand?
"Buzlum." Yes, I understood. This was Bose-family Bengali: an inside joke in an ancient dialect. But on this occasion it was meant to enforce. Do you understand what I am saying, and will you do as I say?
Buzley, buzlum.
The Boses were part of a remnant Bengali community inside a sea of Hindi-speaking Biharis. Angie's parents and three generations of once-prominent Boses had absorbed communal memories of riots and shop burnings, lootings, assassinations, and political scandal and had drawn a lesson from them. "These people…" her parents would complain, sometimes saying nothing more-"with these people, what to say?" These people could be anyone outside of their tight, dying, small-town "probasi" Bengali-Bihar community. Even other Bengalis-those exposed to the temptations of big-city Kolkata-were part of the plot against them. So was anyone not of their caste and general income level, or anyone with fewer than three generations of local roots, not to mention all minorities except maybe Parsis (not that any Parsi had ever stopped in Gauripur and stayed) and everyone from other regions.
"God, what I'd give for a little temptation!" Anjali used to say.
Even in Gauripur she had grown up on the modern side of a great national divide. From the backwater of Gauripur, she'd somehow caught the fever; she was part of the bold new India, an equal to anywhere, a land poised for takeoff. Her parents were irremediably alien, part of a suspicious, impoverished, humiliated India. How could they believe in the things they did and go through life hoarding food, denying themselves comforts, and delaying pleasure? How can you move ahead when all your energy is spent looking over your shoulder? They would never make progress; they were ill equipped for it. How cruel a fate, to be intelligent and ambitious and to crave her share of happiness-and to be denied the opportunity!
With her flawed Bangla language skills and no one to practice on except her parents, she'd always found herself attracted to Hindi movies, Hindi culture, and if it came down to it, Hindi-speaking boys. Bengali boys, like the ones in her ethnically isolated neighborhood, seemed too goody-goody, too cow-eyed. But given cultural patterns and long-nurtured prejudices, Mr. Bose would not consider non-Bengali applicants.
"No need to rush," Anjali would say. What if there was a perfect boy out there? Didn't she owe it to herself to give it a shot? She still had time to see if her father could find him, the Perfect Him, a Lord Ram with a trim mustache in modern dress. She doubted he could. His imagination was limited to boys who would grow into men like himself, boys in white shirts with secure prospects in a moribund bureaucracy. She'd be fair to her father. She'd give him another six months. If it looked hopeless, if he couldn't come through with a fancy catch, then she would definitely sneak out of the house, go to Peter, and wheedle a counterdowry out of him, and send a postcard from Bangalore. Peter had made out Bangalore to be an asylum for bright, driven women from hellhole towns. Gauripur was a hellhole, but she didn't know if she met Peter's high standard for brightness, or desperation.
In the meantime, she could enjoy something new, the buzz of desirability, being the center of attention. Until the young Lord Ram was found, nothing that could enhance her beauty would be denied her. No new sari would be held back. There would be trips to the gold store, to Calendar Girl Hair-and-Nails Salon, even to the fancy hotel restaurant, just to be put on public display with her parents. She might even win the marriage raffle: get money and good-looking children from a sweet-tempered and handsome husband with loving in-laws. Then again, she'd never heard of such a marriage.
But a girl could dream, couldn't she? She could believe that she was still in control and that the orchestrated tsunami of marriage preparation could be reversed, that she had the power to call it off.
Now that it was time to marry her off, her parents reversed nineteen years of harsh assessments and suddenly expressed guarded approval. She could be advertised as modest and pliable, a flawless embodiment of Bengali virtue. Of course, she couldn't cook, dance, sing, or recite Tagore's poetry. But at least she wasn't a modern, citified, selfish materialist girl. Bihar was a sanitized bubble, far from the debilitating distractions of modern city life. Until the marital ax fell, severing her from all of life's promise, she would be the center of everyone's attention.
The monsoon was building, growing ever closer.
Her parents mandated that jeans and T-shirts could be worn only inside the house, early in the morning. After lunch and a beauty nap and bath, she was to appear decorous in a freshly starched sari, hair braided and decorated with flowers, eyes emphasized with eyeliner, face whitened with powder, in expectation of unannounced visits. After all-in the mutual ambush of marriage negotiation-a boy's parents might drop by, ostensibly to view the goods but also to assess the general character of the family, the quality of housekeeping, the mother's modesty, the father's authority, the spontaneous hospitality, the obsequiousness of the staff, the absence of ostentation. Certainly there was very little ostentation to worry about, and no staff to speak of, except a woman who came every morning to sweep the floors and scrub the cooking utensils used the night before and a boy who cleaned the toilet every afternoon. At dinner, Anjali's chapatis would be smeared with extra ghee to enhance her radiance, and sweetmeats (such as raabri, rasmalai, rajbhog, expensive treats the Boses would buy only when they had guests) heaped on her plate in the hope that she would add a little more weight in all the right places.
Most evenings, in the quiet hour when her father sat in the only comfortable rattan chair in the front room of their rented apartment, drinking his three pegs of local whiskey before dinner, and she and her mother sat on the floor, her mother darning frayed shirt collars and cuffs and Anjali tapping out hit Bollywood songs on the family's heavy harmonium, with its chipped keys and scuffed bellows, the dreams were almost enough.
"I shall find a good boy this time," Mr. Bose promised his wife regularly. "Your father wore out the soles of his sandals looking and looking before he found me. I am prepared to do the same."
He answered scores of matrimonial ads in the two Bangla-language papers. Angie didn't expect him to snare a single worthwhile candidate-he was a railway clerk, after all, not even a regional director-and the fact that he was still restricting his attention to a tiny fraction of available boys was just fine; her back-door escape plan was not in jeopardy. All the same, some siesta hours while her mother snored in bed next to her, she allowed herself to daydream that maybe a Bollywood hunk, a Shah Rukh Kahn or Akshay Kumar, would find her irresistible during the marriage interview and would deposit her in Mumbai, Canada, or America. In daydreams, even Dubai seemed bearable.
Everything about the Bose flat, especially the front room, where any interview would have to take place, depressed her. This room, the larger of the two, was furnished with a mattress-covered wooden chowki, which served as seating for visitors and as a bed for her father, a glassfronted bookcase, and two wooden office chairs with uneven legs. A grimy, rolled-up tent of mosquito netting was suspended above the chowki by its four loops from nails hammered into the plaster walls. The only wall hangings were two calendars, a current one with a flashy picture of Goddess Durga astride a lion, and a useless but auspicious one from ten years earlier, which had been current in the year her father had received his last promotion.
Her parents' continual squabbling made it hard for her to improvise bouncy Bollywood beats on the old harmonium. It was her lone feminine grace, hence, important.
"I'm not despairing yet of finding a decent jamai," Mr. Bose kept saying between sips of whiskey. "If your father could find someone like me, I can find someone equally good."
The silence was deafening.
"My father received many, many decent proposals," Mrs. Bose protested. "From day one. I could have married an actuary and lived in a big house in Patna."
"No actuaries," Anjali declared. "No dentists, no professors either."
"Who asked you?" Mrs. Bose shouted.
"And nobody from an armpit town like Patna!"
Mr. Bose made a menacing gesture, slipping the sandal off his left foot and holding it up as though he meant to strike her. "You think you can give ultimatums to your elders? Maybe I should marry you off to a village schoolteacher-would you approve of that? Iron his dhoti under a banyan tree every morning?"
"She's an obedient girl. She'll do what you tell her."
"You think my family and my salary are not good enough for an actuary or a tooth puller?"
"She is a Vasco graduate."
"Useless." Mr. Bose snorted.
"Drunk," said Mrs. Bose.
"Why only Bangla ads?" Angie demanded. "Why not English papers? I'm too good for any guy taking out ads in any Gauripur paper."
"You see what state you've reduced me to, woman, by not bearing sons? All my brothers are fathers of sons. But me? Two donkeys for daughters." He would never own a house, not with two daughters, two dowries, the larger one already wasted.
"Ill luck is ill luck." Mrs. Bose clutched at her throat. It was not the proper time for Anjali to bring up the known fact that sex determination is male-linked. "But this one isn't donkey-headed like…"
Mr. Bose was on a roll. "Donkey for wife, donkeys for daughters!"
"You're not wearing out your sandals, you're wearing out your tongue!"
She took hope from her father's proven incompetence. One failed marriage in the family, although her father took no blame for it, had weakened his authority.
For Anjali, he could no longer muster the pinnacle moment, the operatic ultimatum that he had risen to with her sister. She remembered the cold precision of that final night, after weeks of shouts and slammed doors: "I have told his father you will marry this boy. Astrologer has spoken, horoscopes are compatible. I am printing the invitations. There is no more to be said!" Her sister had run to her room to cry; her groans had filled the house.
"Give me a knife! Give me poison!" she'd screamed.
Then she emerged two hours later, pale, dry-eyed, and submissive.
"You are right, Father," she said. "I have been behaving badly." She'd dressed herself in a new brocade sari and raided the stash of dowry gold. Arms heavy with bangles, earrings brushing her bare shoulders, necklaces and chokers disappearing under the sari-fold into her bosom, she said, "Just as you see me now, so will you see me when I am dead."
Anjali remembered the chaos of the marriage ceremony itself. Invitations had been delivered to every Bengali family in Gauripur, but the presents were tawdry-outdated saris, cheap purses, re-gifted lemonade sets, an electric table fan, and nine flat envelopes, each containing 101 rupees in cash. Because Angie had a neat hand, her parents had assigned her the duty of keeping an accurate record of the wedding gifts. The food had run short, drawing churlish comments from the bride groom's party. The priest had abbreviated the marriage rites and afterward complained about the poor quality of the silk dhoti-punjabi he had received from the bride's stingy family. A troop of hijras had shown up in their gaudy saris, with flower wreaths, plastic baubles, and bright lipstick on their leering male faces. They extorted money for their stumbling dances, frightening the children and even Anjali with their lewd sexual gestures, their deep voices, their braided hair and spreading bald spots. Her wedding, Anjali vowed, would have glamour and dignity.
And so it went, with variations, night after night in the Bose household. But during the day, with Mr. Bose away in the office, Mrs. Bose hatched new plans. "In six months," her mother practically chirped, "you will be a married woman." She reeled off common Kayastha-caste surnames: a Mrs. Das, Mrs. Ghosh, Mrs. Dasgupta, Mrs. Mitter, Mrs. De, Mrs. Sen, Mrs. Sinha, Mrs. Bhowmick. "You will have a new house in a new city with a new family of brothers, sisters, and parents. You'll become a whole different person." As appealing as a new family might sound in the abstract, it surely meant future entombment.
Mr. Bose didn't have access to a computer at work and did not know how to use the Internet. He asked around for help, for anyone's son or daughter who might have a computer to come to his rescue, but the computers were in the college and the college was on summer break until the monsoons started. Neighbors suggested names, everyone recommended Bengaliweddings.com as the most reliable website with the widest distribution. There was a boy in the neighborhood, Nirmal Gupta, called Sure-Bet-IIT Gupta, a classmate of Anjali's and a genius with computers. Go to Nirmal, the Boses were told. Truly, it takes a village to marry off a daughter. Mr. Bose sent the word to distant relatives in Kolkata and alerted managerial-level colleagues at work that he was on the lookout for a jamai for his number-two daughter.
All of the adult mysteries were about to unfold, her mother told Anjali. One's secret fate, hidden behind the stars, would suddenly burst forth like a seed in fertile soil, nurtured by sun and rain. The One True Mate whose destiny had been waiting for this glorious conjunction since the beginning of time would materialize in all his worshipful strength and beauty.
This was parent-talk from the other side of the great modern divide. Mrs. Bose was silent on what Sonali, in her first month as wife, saucily confided to Anjali about men's "animal nature." The sisters had giggled over Sonali's graphic descriptions of marriage-bed drama. Angie doubted that her father, even in his youth, had been endowed with animal nature. Her mother could not possibly have ever expected, let alone experienced, conjugal delirium with her father. Angie wished she could ask her mother what shape her dreams of married life had taken before Mr. Bose had become her bridegroom. Her mother had married at seventeen. The senior Mrs. Bose, her mother-in-law, did not want a vain, ambitious, educated woman in the family, so she had demanded that the girl drop out of school just a month before graduation. Anjali's mother had hoarded that grievance, polished and buffed it to radiance over the years, and brought it out to great effect during domestic squabbles. For her father, marriage was a sacred duty; for her mother it was an accumulation of insults and an avenging of hurts.
But for Sonali, as Sonali explained to Anjali on their rare secret reunions, successful marrying off of one's offspring was neither an art nor a science. Horoscopes might correctly calculate astral compatibility. But marital happiness? That was in the hands of fate.
The volume of response to the new ads was overwhelming. Along with thirty responses from India, three letters arrived from Dubai, two from Kenya, one from Canada, and one from Mauritius: a village of Bengali bachelors strung around the world, working their computers. The long list selected by Mr. Bose was so promising that Mrs. Bose, in high spirits, secreted a slim wad of rupees and instructed Anjali to go to Calendar Girl in Pinky Mahal. "Best to stay prepared for short-notice interviews," she explained. "They use bleaching creams and whatnot that last for weeks."
While her mother prayed to the household gods, Mr. Bose shifted into high gear, even reading English ads and reopening old school contacts. ("Remember the Dasguptas in Ranchi? They had a boy, I'm sure. Anil, isn't it? I will write Deepak Dasgupta and ask after Anil…") and so on it went, letters sent out, responses coming back… the promising, the disappointing. Deepak Dasgupta wrote back, "Our boy Anil is finishing MBA in Maryland-USA. I regret to say he intends to make his own match in the so-called modern manner."
Which means he's already living with an American girl, thought Angie.
"I will spread the word in Ranchi about your lovely daughter whose picture is very simple and pleasing…"
The mailman too began to take an interest as he left off envelopes thick with bios and photos. "Word is getting around, Big Sister," he would say with an ingratiating grin as he handed Mrs. Bose manila envelopes with foreign postage. "God willing, we'll be celebrating with sweetmeats soon."
"That man is just interested in getting his baksheesh for delivering the right application," Mr. Bose complained. "These people want something for nothing."
All of her life, Anjali had been made aware of the ways in which a prospective bride could lose her footing. In the Snakes and Ladders game of marital negotiation, a girl has a hundred ways of disappointing, then it's tumble, tumble down a hole or worse, like Alice in Wonderland. Leaving aside questions of incompatible horoscopes, rejected dowry proffers, ancestral scandals, and caste irregularities, a girl could lose points on the desirability scale for being too short or too tall, too dark or too fair, too buxom or too flatty-flatty, with eyes too small or too light, hair too frizzy, a personal manner too outspoken or too repressed, school grades too high (potentially showing too much personal ambition) or too low (indicating a potential hazard as breeding stock). Of course, a decent dowry can always smooth the edges. Needless to say, her father could not provide it.
Angie found 99 percent of boys simply unappealing. The idea of sleeping in their beds, bearing their children, cooking for them, sitting across from them and watching them eat and burp, and listening to their voices and opinions for a lifetime put the idea of marriage in a category with a life sentence on the Andaman Islands. Thirty boys rejected; none even progressed to the interview stage. "I will decide who is good," Mr. Bose now threatened. "I've left you too much in charge. You are abusing a privilege that was never yours to begin with."
She rejected the first batch of short-listed candidates on the basis of their photos alone. "Look at those shifty eyes!" she'd say. Or "He's fat as an elephant!" Or "Eeesh, what happened to his teeth? He's wearing dentures." Bald spots, double chins, hairy arms. She automatically rejected boys with fancy mustaches and sideburns, those striving for coolness in blue jeans and sunglasses, and those who appeared too goody-goody, too pretentious or too homespun. No pictures, please, with mommy/daddy or grandparents or household pets. No Man-of-the-People shots with servants. She detested foreign settings ("Here is a snap I have dug up from base of Eiffel Tower"…or "Buckingham Palace"…or "Statue of Liberty"…or "Gate of Forbidden City"…). Those were the easy ones. But if a boy with outstanding prospects or handsomeness actually turned up, she'd make a show of serious scrutiny before complaining, "He thinks too well of himself, he's posing like a fashion model." Or "A boy like that-if he's so perfect, why couldn't they find him a rich girl in Kolkata?"
"It's your fault." Mrs. Bose charged her husband with this failure, reminding him of all the trouble with "your other daughter," reminding him of all of Sonalis prideful rejections of acceptable boys from reasonably good families. Sonali had imagined their soft, round, bhad-bhada faces aging into double chins, their bristly eyebrows that could only grow untamed ("I'm sure he's already clipping his ear hair!" Sonali had complained). And look at what all her rejections finally got her-a man too handsome for his own good, a man with glorious prospects and no accomplishments, a man who stole her dowry gold and made a mockery of marriage.
"Two daughters!" Mrs. Bose wailed. "No jamais!"
After Anjali's final English conversation class-tuning up for interviews, she told her parents; prepping for Bangalore, she told herself-she informed Peter that this visit was to be her last class, her last public appearance in jeans and a T-shirt, her last day as a student. After all, she had a marriage-worthy English proficiency certificate, first class. Peter asked if she was perhaps having a bovine interlude.
"A what?" she asked, and he stared back.
"Cowlike," he said. But she'd turned down thirty-five potential suitors, a few of whom under different circumstances might have been worthy of a follow-up; that could hardly be considered cowlike. But Peter showed no interest. She assured him that Bangalore was in her plans; she was only testing the waters, placating her parents.
He said his offer of help-meaning money as well as contacts, she wondered-for Bangalore was waiting, but it had an expiration date.
"When?" she wondered aloud.
"Soon," he said. "All right," Peter said, "one bonus private English lesson before Bangalore. Do you like poetry?"
She didn't, but she knew the proper answer.
"I want you to read this, and then recite it."
Even the title confused her. "What is a rawen?" she asked. How could she read it if she didn't know what it was?
"A raven is a big black bird like a crow that can get an Indian student hired or fired," he said. "You just said 'ray-wen.' Try again."
She got it on the second try, and didn't mess up on "weak and weary."
"Good," Peter said. "You aren't too out of practice, Angie."
And then she was hopeless on "Quoth the raven, nevermore!" Two th's in a row? Back-to-back middle v's? She could cry. But Peter just kept tapping his pencil like a music teacher, muttering "Again, again" until, exhausted, she got it right.
TWO DAYS LATER, shopping with her mother for mangoes and oranges, she spotted Peter at the outdoor market. She was about to lift her arm and signal, but no, she couldn't, not in a sari, with jingling gold bracelets. Angie-in-sari was Anjali, a stranger to her student self.
And she thought, just like a hundred generations of potential brides had thought before her, why all this talk of new sisters and new brothers and a new house in a new city and not a warning about a new mother-in-law to ridicule her while her new husband sits back and criticizes her sloppiness and cooking? Her promised resurrection into the state of marriage would be little different from her mother's and grandmother's, except that she had education and ambition, Bangalore-and Bollywood-size expectations and a wealth of ready-made suspicion, thanks to her sister's fate.
In the months as a full-time bridal candidate, she finally grasped enough of the world to place Peter and Ali in a kind of murky marital matrix. And to think, not long ago, she'd imagined herself in Ali's role as Peter's beloved. It was all fascinating, and just a little sickening. And with the revelation of Peter and Ali came dozens more complications, as though they'd all been lined up, waiting for her to open the door and see with fresh eyes: new combinations, weird embraces, convoluted sexual dimensions with higher peaks of improbability and deeper, more complicated valleys, like the wrinkly march of the Himalayas across Nepal.
It took three hours of sitting in a crisp silk sari at Sengupta's Marriage Portrait Studio, WHERE DESIRABLE DAUGHTERS MEET THEIR MATES, Gauripur's center of marital entrapment for the dwindling community of Bengali girls. When old Shaky Sengupta had been a younger, steadier-handed roaming photographer without a back-alley studio, he'd taken Anjali's grandmother's photo, and then her mother's, and even the garlanded marriage photo of her parents that still sat in the middle of the bedroom dresser.
She was posed at a table in front of a Qantas poster of the Sydney Opera House, which could be replaced by All Nippon Airways pull-down screens of Mount Fuji and the Ginza district in Tokyo for additional shots; finally she was seated at a bistro table, with an unwashed espresso cup, in front of a Toulouse-Lautrec poster. The espresso cup had recently held sweet coffee. A fly struggled to escape the sticky residue. She kept her face a mysterious blank, saw that her silk sari remained uncreased, and allowed herself only five-minute breaks to dab the perspiration from her upper lip.
A British-era thermometer advertising Pond's cold cream read 121 degrees.
A tall young assistant lugged lights and reflectors. She tried to radiate allure from an imagined alpine café under a Martini & Rossi umbrella, with the Matterhorn in the background, while Shaky Sengupta, the palsied photographer, patted her face with tissues and tried to tease a dimple from a smile she could barely force.
"Never mind, I put in dimple when I take out frown," he said, in English. "Dimple very popular."
Shaky Sengupta and his diminishing breed of Indian marriage photographers shared a total disregard for truth, passion, or integrity. Which is to say they were ideal enablers in the inherent duplicity of the marriage arrangement. Every girl was fetchingly beautiful in a prescribed manner. The camera and its expressive potential worked more like a shovel. The art was in the touch-up: slimming down the dumplings, puffing up the ironing boards, inflating bosoms, enlarging eyes, straightening teeth, and moistening lips.
The young assistant caught Anjali's attention. He was extremely tall and thin, wearing blue jeans and a plain light-blue T-shirt. He moved with grace and competence, and his Bangla was even worse than hers. It was he who set up the shots, arranged the reflectors, and measured the focus, doing everything that Shaky in his earlier years might have been able to do by himself.
When he bent down to clean out her espresso cup, he said, "Studio sessions really suck, don't they?" His accent was pure American, without Peter Champion's decades in India to soften it. He had the longest, most delicate fingers she'd ever seen on a man.
"What did you say?"
A convincing American accent, easy enough to acquire these days in India though not in Gauripur, didn't give him the right to flirt with a paying customer. His major duty was to tell her how beautiful she looked. Instead, he was standing with his hands on his hips, insolently separating her from the pull-down screen of cherry blossoms on snowy Mount Fuji.
"What are you trying to prove?"
Now he'd insulted her in her zone of grace, fresh from the beauty parlor, in her uncreased silk. Indignantly, she answered, "I'm not trying to prove anything." She could feel the heat rising. "Just that I'm a worthy bridal candidate."
"No, you're not. Your heart isn't in it."
"My heart has nothing to do with it. It's just a marriage photo. You're not wearing a silk sari without a fan. It must be fifty degrees under the lights!"
She saw him glance at the thermometer. So, she figured, he needed a metric-system equivalence; he might really be American. He stepped behind Mount Fuji and returned with a metal cup of cool water. As she gulped it down, he confronted the mountain. "Everything's so fake, we ought to go with the joke." He tugged down on the screen and the mountain partially rolled up, exposing other rolls of tourist posters, ladders, and chairs behind them. "Voila!" he said. "The Wizard of Oz." She decided on the spot that he was a very kind, very funny boy. Was he available?
"Everyone knows I'm in a hot little studio and the mountain is just a prop."
"Exactly! You're sitting like a corpse in a formal sari in front of a fake landscape. So if everyone knows they're fake, you should show you're in on it. A meta-marriage photo! You'd be the coolest, heat or not."
Shaky Sengupta called, "Restore mountain, please. No talking with subject."
"A godlike mission, restoring mountains. See you after," the boy said, pressing one long finger against his lips. "My name is Rabi Chatterjee." He squeezed the tips of her fingers. His hand was cold. "I'm a photographer too. Only different."
Chatterjee? A Brahmin, so marriage to a Bose was effectively out the window. She thought she knew all the Bengali families in Gauripur, especially those with interesting boys, even the Brahmins who these days couldn't always be choosy. She'd seen the ads, "Caste no bar," especially for the poor, less attractive, and less educated Brahmin boys or girls.
AFTER SHE CHANGED back to her jeans and T-shirt for the short walk home, Rabi was waiting. "Let the fun begin," he said. Before she could pose, there in the chaos of lights and reflectors and cables and halfrolled-up props, he took out a small silver digital camera and shot her, again and again. He promised her that the girl in his pictures was destined for a different fate than marriage, quite the opposite of Shaky Sengupta's girl with a dimple, in uncreased silk.
When they were walking along LBS Road past Pinky Mahal, he asked if she was really serious about finding a boy. He was the first boy her own age she'd ever walked with in public, alone, not in a student group. And probably the last. She answered hesitantly, wondering, as was her custom, if he was offering himself. He spoke so rapidly that his English sounded like a foreign language in a different cadence. She felt herself growing breathless, just trying to keep up.
"It's for my parents," she said.
He stopped, turned, and stared. "You're getting married for your parents? That's crazy."
"Other people have said the same thing." Of course, that one other person was American. She could get interested in a boy like Rabi, all energy and enthusiasm, with a quick mind, long fingers, and startling English. "You know how it works. I don't have a say in it." Then she wondered, Did he know how India worked? Despite his name and looks, he seemed more foreign than Peter Champion.
"India's on fire. If you get married now, you'll miss what's happening and you'll be sorry."
Gauripur, on fire? Peter used to say that, and it still seemed funny. "Bangalore and Mumbai might be on fire, but Gauripur is still in the deep freeze." Then, on a perkier note, "I thought I knew all the Bangla families in Gauripur. So where have you been?" Where have you been hiding? Why haven't you come forward and answered any of the ads? If she had to guess, he was one of those boys from boarding school, from Dehra Dun or Darjeeling, an Indian boy with international connections. Or maybe his parents were diplomats and he'd been raised overseas and gone to American schools.
"I've been in California all of my life."
She laughed. "Now that's crazy. Why would anyone from California come to a pokey little town like Gauripur? This is a prison!" She'd slipped into Bangla, just to slow things down. She was a little afraid of making a mistake in his rapid-fire American. His even-shakier Bangla fired her confidence. His long, skinny legs ate up the footpath; she had to run to keep up.
"You ask what I'm doing here? I'm having fun. When you're taking pictures, every place is interesting… every face is beautiful… every day's incredible and every night's an adventure… When you're looking through a camera, Gauripur's amazing. When I put my eye to the viewfinder, everything changes. I only see things, really see them, when I'm looking through the camera. They rave about painterly light in southern France… Ha! It's feeble compared to India. What is that thing called-Pinky Mahal? Just look at it! It's magnificent! Better than the Taj! It's your own Rouen cathedral. Monet would go crazy for it."
Normally she would have nodded and smiled, afraid to show her ignorance. But she trusted the boy; he wouldn't laugh at her. He was the first person, with the slight exception of Peter Champion, who after all was still a teacher and her superior, to understand, even blunder into, her nascent yearning to be respected. "Moray?" she asked. "That's a fish." A fish painted a ruined cathedral?
"Claude Mo-nay, M-O-N-E-T, the father of impressionism." His tone was offhand, conversational, as though Claude Monet and his weird cathedral in a town in France were the subject of everyone's light-hearted conversation. "I'd call him the father of photography too. He painted the Rouen cathedral at various times of the day, just to show the effect of different angles of light."
Angles of light! And he's only my age! she thought.
The pace of his speech was picking up. "Monet changed everything. He ended the tyranny of the subject. The medium became the subject, and the medium was light." Faster, faster.
Slow down, please, she thought. I can't follow-you speak too fast. Tyranny of the subject? What does that mean? The medium becomes the subject; the medium is light? You walk too fast. You get too excited. You don't know how ignorant I am. "He did the same thing with haystacks in different seasons. Usually I don't work in color, but I came out here yesterday at seven in the morning, then at noon, then at three, and finally at six, and each time the pink was different and the angle of light brought out different fractures and shadows… it was beautiful. Bihar is beautiful. Nothing in the world is as it seems-it's all a matter of light and angles. Anyway, even if it is a prison, there are lots of good pictures you can take from inside."
"Not if you're a prisoner," she said. Not if you don't have a camera and no one's ever taught you how to use one. "What were you doing at Shaky's?"
"Is that what he's called? Shaky? That's cruel. But funny." He had a broad smile, a lilting laugh. "I was learning studio technique, putting in the dimples and taking out the frowns. It's very retro, but there's an art to it: setups, lights and reflectors. And those pull-downs are so cool, I wouldn't mind having a few. I gotta be prepared for anything, right? Maybe I'll end up doing weddings and baby portraits- not. Anyway, I'll be moving on in three days."
She didn't understand a word, but the news of his leaving cut her like a slap. She was already imagining an inquiry to his parents, his visit to her house. "That's very disappointing"-a bold thing to say. "Why not stay? Why not keep the prisoners happy?"
"The rest of India's calling. There's Mumbai. There's Bangalore. I came to Gauripur because I heard there was an expat here. I met him, and I shot him-sorry, took his picture. I'm doing India's new expats-not the old Brits-and the gays, and the prostitutes and the druggies. And the villages. And the slums."
"My teacher is American."
"Yes, I know. We're everywhere, Anjali."
"Angie," she said.
They took a few more steps, Angie deep in consternation. What kind of boy was this? Why would an American want to be anywhere near the kind of awful people he shoots? Just thinking about them made her skin crawl.
"Let me show you something. Would you like to see a picture of the most beautiful woman in Gauripur?"
"Of course," she said.
What girl could refuse?
He guided her to Alps Palace Coffee and Ice Cream Shop for a cooldown. It was a college hangout, but school was not in session and the AC was broken. When Alps Palace had opened, it seemed like the Gauripur equivalent of all the Mumbai Barista and American Starbucks coffee shops she'd read about, something chic and air-conditioned, with uniformed girls behind the counter. Now she saw it for what it was, another sad failure, run down and a little unsanitary. Rabi asked for a moist rag, swabbed down a table, and dried it with a handkerchief. Then he reached into his backpack and took out a folder marked Bihar and set out a row of black-and-white prints, matted under clear plastic. She barely recognized the subjects. Their very familiarity-Nehru Park, the college, Pinky Mahal-was their best disguise. Now she understood about the light. He was truly, as he'd said, a different kind of photographer.
In Rabi's photos, Gauripur was eerie, exotic-even its most familiar monuments. The marble dhoti-folds of the iconic Gandhi statue in Nehru Park were pocked, streaked, and spray-painted. The market crowds looked furtive and haunted. Five kilometers south of town, under a small dark forest of untended mango trees, Rabi had found a MODREN APARTTMENT COMPLEX-according to its signboard-that had been abandoned early in construction with less than one floor completed. A rutted construction road and a row of workers' huts disappeared into a cryptlike darkness. She'd never imagined anything remotely like it so close to Gauripur. He'd focused on rows of rusted iron bars-rebars, he called them-like twisted sentinels bristling from the concrete half-wall, disappearing into the shadows. She imagined cold, dank air, even in the heat of a Bihar May, issuing from its depths.
Rebar: a word to avoid.
It was a relief to anticipate turning to "the most beautiful woman in Gauripur." She expected something cheeky from the boy, cheeky and American. Maybe he'd show her one of the digital photos he'd taken in the studio and come up with some flirtatious opening, like "You want to see beauty? Just look in the mirror." She was prepared to slap him for it, but not too hard. A tapping, gentle rapping, like in the poem. A playful tap, like in the movies.
"Here's the woman I was talking about."
Truly, he had not lied. Angie was staring at film-star beauty, goddess beauty, old-fashioned sari-jewelry-hairstyle beauty, deep, Aishwarya Rai beauty, twice the woman she could ever be. She was the most beautiful woman Anjali had ever seen.
"In Gauripur? I don't believe it."
"And you know her," Rabi said.
"That's a lie."
"Right! Only I think she pronounces it…'Ah-lee.'" He seemed pleased with the wordplay. "I guess you could say that men make the best cooks, and they make the best-looking women."
"But you said 'she.' "
"Exactly," he said.
Over the weeks, with some difficulty, Angie had begun to accommodate to what it must be like, romantically, between Peter and Ali, but this revelation was something new, outside her ability to process. In her reconstruction, Ali had been the abused and grateful village boy, and Peter the all-powerful American who had saved him from a life of squalor. She'd seen it as a variant of a normal Indian marriage between economic unequals. Virtuous and beautiful village girl; spoiled, rich city boy won over by her goodness. She hadn't understood it as profoundly sexual, as it apparently was, because she'd always considered marriage a protection against sexuality-obligation, not adventure.
"That's Ali by night," Rabi was saying. "By day he's a pretty enterprising guy. He started out cutting ladies' hair in Lucknow and then he worked wardrobes and makeup in Bollywood. You watch-some day he'll open up his own beauty parlor."
"But those kind of men-they aren't-"
She started to speak, then paused, remembering swishy Bollywood characters who were in all the films-but they weren't to be taken seriously. You couldn't call them accomplished in any way. They were scared of their shadows. They dropped things; they were clumsy. They screamed when they saw a mouse, rolled their eyes and flapped their wrists and ran away from fights. They were put in the films in order to be laughed at.
Rabi stared back. "What about them?" he asked. "What aren't they?"
"They aren't servants," she said. Servants don't suddenly open their own business.
Rabi was fiddling with a larger camera. "And he's not a servant."
In the next few moments, the true education of Anjali Bose began. Many seconds elapsed. She thought she was going to be sick. Many questions couldn't quite form themselves and went unasked. She was reassessing probability, rewinding the spool of her experience and discovering that she knew nothing. Something treacherous had entered her life.
"Oh, my God," she said. "I know him."
"I know you do."
The next picture on the tabletop was of Peter Champion, Peter the expatriate scholar reading an Indian paper in his dingy little room, with a blurred Ali in his servant's attire of lungi and undershirt behind him, washing dishes. Peter, whatever else he was, was a serious man. He'd devoted his life to things in India that were disappearing. He couldn't be laughed at. But as she kept looking, Ali came into focus. It was as though he'd taken a step or two forward. He wasn't washing plates-he was staring at Peter.
"I got real lucky. I came to Gauripur to shoot an expat, and I get a gay and a tranny at the same time. Who'd have figured, in a town like this?"
She could accept it. It even restored Peter's mysterious edge. Being homosexual-did Rabi say "gay"?-was more exciting than being CIA, which is what the smart boys in her class assumed the American was. Tranny? She was afraid to ask. This tall, skinny Rabi with all his photos, the first boy she'd felt comfortable with, what was he? If all this intrigue was happening under her nose in a boring little town like Gauripur, where nothing was strange and nothing held surprises, among the people she thought she knew the best, then what was the rest of India like? Bangalore? Mumbai? She felt the terror of the unprepared, as though she'd been pushed onto a stage without a script.
What if, in the larger world, no one held true? What if everyone was two people at least, like Ali, like Peter?
What could she do but cry? It was involuntary. She wasn't sad or frightened. It was as if she'd missed a step in the dark and knew she was going to fall and hurt herself badly, but at that precise moment she was still suspended between here and there, between now and then, and Rabi snapped the picture. Years later, people would say that it made a beautiful composition, enigmatic, Mona Lisa-like.
When Rabi asked her why she was crying, she said, "I've seen more in the past two minutes than I have in nineteen years."
He said, "I'm eighteen. Photography teaches you everything."
She didn't have the foggiest idea of what he meant.
Nevertheless, that was the moment that sealed their friendship.
"When you look at great photos, you see the whole world in a context. The whole world may only be five by seven inches, and it might last only a five-hundredth of a second, but within that time and space it's all true, and it's the best we've got."
Angie Bose had lived nineteen years in Gauripur and was a year and a half from graduating with a degree from the best school in town, and no one had ever spoken to her about the nature of truth or art, or assumed she cared or knew anything about it. She knew there were plenty of pretty shots of the Taj Mahal-hard to mess that one up-and the Himalayas and animals and famous faces, but she'd never thought of them as plotted except in a Shaky Sengupta sort of way. Truth? Context? Composition? She'd never had a serious discussion about anything. She was the second daughter of a railway clerk; she was supposed to go to school, obey teachers and parents, graduate and get married, obey her husband, and have children. Truth was what the community, teachers, parents, and eventual husband said it was. Truths were handed down from the beginning of time and they held true forever, not for one five-hundredth of a second. The thought that things were not as they appeared to be, or that people were not what she thought they were, left her with a feeling akin to nausea.
She knew, vaguely, that worlds existed beyond the assigned books and lectures-Peter Champion would occasionally depart from scripted discussions in his corporate cultures class to sprinkle in asides on literature and history and politics, little moments no one paid attention to because they would not appear on examinations. She had learned a Russian word, Chekhovian, from something he'd said about the Indian social and political structure. But the idea that a mere child, someone even younger than she was, could show off such knowledge as well was unimaginable.
When she listened to her parents at dinner, she wanted to scream, "Life isn't like that! Nobody cares! It doesn't matter! Nothing matters!" Like any American teenager, she wanted to scream at her parents, "You don't know a thing!" But every day the same food was bought and every night it was cooked and served in the same way, and the same rumors and gossip were chewed over, the same questions asked, with the same answers given, and everything was meaningless.
"Did you have to fight your parents in order to come to India?"
From the way he laughed, she could tell she must have said something funny. "Why would they stop me? I've got an auntie in Bangalore, and I was with my mother's parents in Rishikesh until they died, and I've got my father's folks in Kolkata and cousins everywhere. The only hard part is finding a way of avoiding them. A billion people in this country, and it feels like half of them are relatives! Just imagine how helpful they'd be in tracking down gay bars and whorehouses! I went out with a bunch of hijras-a blast! Natural performers." What he referred to as a "gay bar" sounded like a happy place, but she wondered how a Brahmin boy from a good family would be admitted to a whorehouse, and when she thought of hijras and their leering made-up faces and men-in-women's-clothing and flowers in their oily hair, she felt sick. Performers? They were perversions!
They talked a bit about their parents, how hers were so loving and concerned, how supportive they were. Lies, lies! Ask me, and I'll tell the truth, but he didn't. He said he hadn't talked to his parents in weeks but sent them emails of some of his photos. She made her father into a bank manager, hoping that would impress; he said his father ran a kind of telephone company, but the man was housebound and partially crippled, and his mother wrote novels about India for American women. In their mutual inventions, they weren't so far apart.
"I was just thinking," he said, as he tore out a sheet from a pocket notebook. "My mother would love to sit down with you!" Why? she wondered. I'm nothing special. She was about to ask why when he announced, as if in explanation, "She is Tara Chatterjee." The name meant nothing to Angie except that Tara was a common enough first name and Chatterjee one of the few Bengali Brahmin surnames, all of which meant that there were probably a dozen Tara Chatterjees of varying ages even in Gauripur. He took in her blank look and laughed. "The Tara Chatterjee who writes, that's my mom. You mean you haven't read her stories? Anyway, here's my San Francisco phone number. And let me give you my auntie's Bangalore number. I stay with her when I am there." He scribbled a telephone number on the back of his San Francisco card. "You'll get there if you really want to," he said.
Bangalore? How did he guess?
THE GIRL in Shaky Sengupta's formal glossies was definitely not Angie. Not even a version of Anjali. In fact, as Rabi had said, there was no one there, and that, of course, triggered a new wave of interest. The nature of Shaky's art was to drain personality from the frame and replace it with fantasy. She'd always seen herself as too tall and thin, made for T-shirts and jeans, her narrow dimensions lost inside a sari. But Shaky's magic had managed the impossible, implying cleavage and billowy wonders under the sari, along with the smudgy dimple. She was luminous and mysterious, a synthetic bonbon of indeterminate age. Shaky was a master of light and shadow.
While her parents were fretting over the caste purity and social standing of interested probasi Bengalis with twenty-something sons, vowing this time they'd wipe out the stigma of their other daughter's divorce, Anjali was imagining herself in the real world behind Shaky Sengupta's pull-down screens. The beaches of Australia were beckoning, the Ginza, the Great Wall, why not? Even in Gauripur a girl could dream, especially a reasonably attractive girl with good English, a dimple and cleavage, and an adventurous nature.
The girl/woman in the portrait had nothing to fear from an uncertain marriage market. She would definitely find a husband. She could imagine the crashing of teacups around the world as thousands of bachelor engineers, the loose network of longing that had thus far yielded nearly fifty interested inquiries from half a dozen countries, checked out the new photo on Bengaliweddings.com. She feared having to go through with the Bangalore alternative. When Peter first proposed it, Bangalore had seemed the answer to all her fears and all her anger. Bangalore was a great game, a way of profitably using her English, avenging Sonali, and becoming independent, while picking and choosing among thousands of boys with good English and the same ambition.
But that was an innocent Anjali and a different Peter. That was before she got swept up in the marriage current and before her vanity was engaged. The Bangalore commitment meant packing a bag and sneaking out and admitting she wasn't desirable enough to overcome the stigma of coming from nowhere, and her parents' poverty. Her parents could live with another failed marriage. They could tolerate her misery so long as they felt they'd done their duty. But they would not survive the shame of a second daughter's act of defiance and insubordination.
She wanted to-no, she needed to talk to Peter about the photograph of Ali that Rabi Chatterjee had shown her. But she didn't dare; so one day Shaky Sengupta's bridal portrait in hand, faking jauntiness, she showed up-as she now thought of it-at Peter and Ali's. This was a forbidden visit, according to her father's newest rules, but at least she was in a sari. She presented Shaky's marriage portrait and waited for the response. "Well… would you marry this girl?" she asked.
Peter frowned and then passed it on to Ali.
He checked it twice and gave it back.
"Who is she?" Ali asked in Hindi.
Peter said, "I think this picture is a monstrosity. So what kind of monster is it supposed to attract?"
He'd approved of everything she'd ever done. She was the model by which he judged all his students. She could only answer, "It was my mother's idea."
Peter stiffened. "Your mother, God help us. You're not a little girl anymore, Angie. If you get married-and I don't care how good he looks or what his prospects are-if you get married based on a picture like this, you'll get exactly the treatment you deserve."
She smiled, putting on that big halogen beam that always came to her rescue. "I met Rabi Chatterjee. He showed me pictures he'd taken of you. And Ali."
Peter frowned and looked away. He nodded at the mention of the photos but said nothing. No one was the person she thought she knew.
"Rabi Chatterjee is a serious young man. He has an indestructible ego-that's a good thing. I had one too. It means he's got the inner strength to stand up to convention. And he brings you along, into his wildest plans. He could be going to any college he wanted, so what is he doing? Walking to villages and taking buses and third-class trains. He reminds me of a younger me. He said, 'You can't take pictures of India through a limousine window.' His father happens to be Bish Chatterjee, and Bish Chatterjee happens to be the richest Bengali in the world, one of the ten richest overall-I mentioned him in B. Comm. Honors, but I never expected his son would be sitting in my rooms taking my picture-he speeded up the way computer networks communicate. The world is small, but Gauripur is huge: remember that. Every cell phone uses CHATTY technology. Some day that boy who took your picture will be even richer. And I don't imagine he told you any of that."
"He said his father owns a telephone company, and his mother writes books about India for American ladies." Why would he lie to her? Sleeping in buses and servants' hotels was the least impressive thing she could imagine. She didn't understand this American behavior. Impressive people looked and acted prosperous and confident, or else what's the use? "Maybe he's looking for a wife?"
"I'd be very surprised. But we talked about you. He said you have a quality."
"And what did you say to that?"
"I told him there was a struggle going on for your soul. He said he took a picture of that." She started to smile, but he was serious. "If you get married here, you'll be lost to me."
"If I get married, you won't lose money sending me to Bangalore," she said.
"It's never about money. You'd be surprised how many women in Gauripur were girls I once taught. Girls with good grades and good minds, with curiosity about life outside of this town. Ambitious girls, not just daydreamers. And we talked then just as you and I are talking now, and that was before India took off, before there were real opportunities in this country and you didn't have to fill your head with nonsense dreams of England or America. And I see those women in Gauripur today, in the market with their husbands and children, and when we cross paths, they bow their head, afraid I'll call them by name. They never left; they never got a proper education. These are girls who wanted to be doctors and teachers, not flight attendants. Their fathers pulled them out of school as soon as they got their high school certificates and had them married off within the month." Peter changed to a mocking, local Hindi: "What if I end up with an unmarriageable daughter, what if she becomes too smart for any local boy? What if some eligible boy will say 'Don't you think I can support her? You think I am sending my wife off to work?'" And then in English: "The money isn't my investment in you. My investment is you, Anjali Bose."
After a pause, he added, "I don't even blame the fathers or the mothers or the girls or their husbands. We talked about all of this in class. Companies fail when they keep making the same product in the same way, even when the customer base is changing. Well, the base-that's India today-is changing and the old ways are dead ways. This marriage portrait is a wasted effort. Hoping there's someone out there who'll answer your dreams in an ad, that's death. I don't want to lecture you because I don't think you, above all, need it. Don't prove me wrong."
But he was lecturing her. He wasn't talking to her as he did to students in the classroom. He was telling her in the plainest terms that both the bride-to-be-Anjali of the studio portrait and the gutsy-rebel-Angie who had ridden on the back seat of his scooter were frauds. He had become a dangerous mentor, sowing longings and at the same time planting self-doubt.
"Carpe diem," he said, almost to himself.
"Carpey what?" What did carp have to do with her situation?
"I can't make you take the big step. All I can do is cushion the footfall." He took a couple of deep, wheezy breaths, and asked Ali to please bring him a glass of water. Ali delivered the water on a tarnished silver tray, and with it, a small pill. Peter Champion gulped them both down before tearing two sheets off a notebook he carried in his kurta pocket.
Malaria pill? Aspirin because she'd given him a major headache? Hypertension? Cholesterol? Was he dying? Feeling a new urgency, she watched him scribble a name and address on each of the two sheets.
"Minnie Bagehot will put you up in Bangalore if I ask her to." He handed both sheets to her. "And Usha Desai can help you work on your job skills. I'm cashing in these chips because I want to be proved right. About you."
So, if she married, she'd be lost to Peter. If she didn't marry, she'd be dead to her father. How very odd it was, taking tea in her teacher's room, as she had on so many occasions over the years, and now watching Peter and Ali from the corner of her eye, the way Rabi's picture had captured them: Peter up close, Ali in the background, then Peter walking over and placing his hand on Ali's bare shoulder and whispering something, which caused Ali to smile. He's treating me like an adult, she thought. He's forcing adulthood on me. This is what the adult world is like; this is how adults interact. I'm seeing it, but I shouldn't react to it in any way. It seems odd, but also familiar. Was that a little kiss on his ear? I've passed through an invisible wall and I can't go back. Maybe I'm a ghost.
And for the first time, she was able to articulate it, at least to herself: Maybe I'm not here. Maybe I'm not seeing any of this. Maybe "Anjali" is seeing it. "Angie" is somewhere else. Splitting herself in two was a comfort.
ANGIE WAS CRUSHED that Peter hated the picture, but Anjali was drifting above it with a smile, trying to show her the way. As she walked the familiar path home, LBS Road past Vasco da Gama High School and College and Pinky Mahal to MG Road, along the fence of Jawaharlal Nehru Park, she noticed a light on in the Vasco Common Room.
The college was officially not in session. It was mid-June. School was closed until the monsoon broke and cooled things off, ending the days of crippling heat and the nightly reign of mosquitoes. But the peak hour had passed. It was the quiet time when windows were shut and everyone tried to sleep before bathing-if there was water-and then went out to shop for the evening meal. Once the rains started, the fruits and vegetables would begin to rot, and the open markets would close.
In the Common Room someone had pulled the shades: premature darkness in the late afternoon of an Indian summer day. Without turning on a light, Anjali made her way to the computer room and stood at the door. From deep inside she heard the clacking of computer keys. As her eyes adjusted, she could make out a single illuminated monitor and a shape in front of it, the bulky form and reflective glasses of that harmless neighborhood boy, the computer genius Nirmal Gupta.
Her mother would have called it auspicious. She had her photo. She was alone with Nirmal. And Peter Champion had just crushed Angie's confidence. But Anjali had plans.
Sure-Bet-IIT Gupta had the keys to the Common Room; he ran the computer center, all six units. He was one of the few boys in the college she could talk to, largely because she didn't consider him an eligible bridegroom candidate. And it was easy to guess what might have brought a lonely, computer-savvy boy to the computer room on a dormant campus: the marriage sites, and the hundreds of photos of hopeful girls just like her.
"Don't mind me," she said. "I saw a light."
But he did mind. He'd practically tipped over the computer, trying to hide the pictures of eligible girls. She'd wanted to say, "That's all right. Bengaliweddings.com?" But she asked, "See anyone interesting?"
"The screen…" He started babbling; the screen was already blank. He tried to excuse himself. Someone else, some other Bengali, must have been using it.
"I didn't know you were looking for someone," she said. "I thought you were going off to an IIT."
He looked up at her with big moist eyes, like a beaten dog.
"Please, big sister, don't tell anyone. I did not receive admittance," he said.
What else could a bright boy in science do but go to a technical college? "It's all crooked," she said, repeating what she'd heard from her father and others. But she had a favor to ask, and if a bit of sympathy helped, what did it cost her? And so she asked, "Where will you be next year?"-a bold question, but he'd been straightforward himself.
"I have no prospects," he said.
"You'll find something, I'm sure. You're the best science student. Maybe not IIT, but there are so many others." Actually, she couldn't name any.
He thanked her. She smiled and asked, "Would you do me a favor?"
"Of course," he answered, a mite too quickly. "Anything you ask."
That's when she suspected he had special feelings for her, not that she could have predicted how far he would take it. It might have been love, but at the time it was merely a chit she could cash in. "If I gave you a new photo, could you take the old one off and put this one on the Internet?"
"What kind of photo?"
She showed him Shaky's portrait, the plump and dimpled Anjali at an alpine resort. "Can you put it on Bengaliweddings.com?"
All he said was "If you want me to." He took the picture, remarking only that "The portrait is very beautiful, is it of you?" And when she admitted that it was, just maybe a little deceptive, he said, "No, no. No deception. It does you justice," and within a day it was plastered across five continents.
As often happens to those who dither, waiting for that moment when all doubt and indecision would be suddenly resolved, that moment arrived in an unexpected way. The English-language ads had marginally improved the candidate pool; so had the original posting on the Internet. Fifty candidates had been rejected.
More to the point, Anjali had begun to educate herself in the secret ways of the heart. After the new Internet posting, she began receiving flattering inquiries from desirable countries on every continent. There were intriguing dimensions beyond her experience, and the movies she'd watched, and they were all open to her. There were men like Peter, without his complications. There were boys like Rabi and his hijras and prostitutes and gay bars. If she could hold out for a few more months, and if she could learn to value herself above what her untraditional looks and humble economic standing warranted, she might win the marriage lottery. In those months, while conforming to the predictable behavior of a bridal candidate and submitting to all the indignities of daughterhood, she clung to an indefensible belief in her own exceptionality.
THE FINAL EVENT followed the posting of her picture. Two weeks after Nirmal Gupta had put her formal portrait on the web, he'd gone to his bedroom with her picture and drunk a canister of bug spray. He began writing a long declaration of his lifelong devotion to a goddess he'd been too shy to approach, but he'd started the letter after drinking the spray and wasn't able to finish it.
The Gupta parents set their son's framed photo on an altar surrounded by flowers and brass deities. "He was always going to those cinema halls," his mother cried. "He was in love with a screen goddess."
They didn't recognize the portrait as Anjali's.
"The boy lost perspective," his father said. "These boys today, what to say, what to do?"
Buzley, buzlum. Anjali wondered, Did he even tell his parents he'd failed his entrance exams to an IIT?
SHE TOLD HERSELF, I owe it to poor Nirmal Gupta. I owe it to Baba and Sonali. I'll give them one last chance. She agreed to meet the next acceptable boy: number seventy-five. He turned out to be Subodh Mitra, the first boy to be brought to the house for inspection. His letter alluded to a distant connection to Angie's mother's sister-in-law in Asansol, a grimy steel-making center on the western edge of Bengal. "Yes, I remember the Mitras," her mother exclaimed. "Very respectable. Very well connected!" He was twenty-four years old, tall enough for a girl like Angie, clean-shaven and handsome enough to charm mothers and turn any girl's head. He held an undistinguished engineering degree from a prestigious school, but, according to his posted résumé, he had also earned a First-Class MBA degree from a business college in Kolkata. He'd worked a year in Bangalore at a call center ("customer-support agent," it read), but now he'd returned from the South, ready to marry and settle down. With family power behind him and connections in government, he would never be unemployed. If everything checked out, he would be a catch.
Even Angie could not manufacture serious objections. She'd exhausted every possible reason, both objective and whimsical, for rejecting a boy. Probably her most heartfelt one, in the case of Mr. Mitra, could not even be voiced in the family: she simply could not imagine carrying on civilized discourse with anyone from Asansol. But in the Bose family-just look at her parents-failure to engage in civilized discourse was not grounds for marital disbarment. She remembered Asansol quite well. When the train passed through it, she'd had to secure the coach windows against the coke ovens' soot and sulfur fumes, but the toxic stench still drifted through. Men would breathe through moistened handkerchiefs; women pulled their saris across their nose. Asansol was a place even Gauripur could look down on. Subodh Mitra's place of origin was his only prominent demerit.
Her father tried to read between the lines of Subodh Mitra's CV. "The boy did engineering to please his father, but his heart wasn't in it. When he got a chance to study business, he shone like the sun!"
Anjali had never heard of his Kolkata business school. Probably hundreds of "business schools" and "colleges" were run out of the back rooms of hot little apartments, all advertising First-Class MBA degrees the equivalent of those from Delhi, LSE, and Wharton. She was tempted to argue but kept her silence.
"This is a golden boy." Her father persisted. "His parents are very reasonable. They want this marriage as much as we do. I have counteroffered more than they asked."
Subodh Mitra, the intended, the all-but-fiancé, arrived from Asansol in a red Suzuki, an eight-hour drive on the clogged, narrow national highway, in the first week of the monsoon rains. A red Suzuki! Mr. Bose still negotiated the streets of Gauripur by scooter, just as he had in college-another humiliation for which Anjali and her mother and sister were somehow to blame.
The young man swept into their apartment, bearing flowers and sweets. The photo hadn't lied: he was tall, athletic, and handsome, with real dimples. He was attentive to both parents and showed the proper deference to Mr. Bose. He barely looked at Anjali, fulfilling the etiquette demands of the marriage market.
"Oh, and this must be your daughter, the lovely Anjali. I was enjoying our conversation so much, I nearly forgot…" Anjali then allowed herself to be pushed into the conversation.
He complimented her on her white cotton dhoni-khali sari, with its yellow and green stripes: "A very nice selection for the occasion." He went on. "I must compliment the feminine sensibility of the Bose household. Unexpectedly simple, not a showy tangail or fussy kanjeevaram."
She was impressed; a man who knows his sari styles is refined indeed.
He must have been through many such interviews, Angie thought. She had worn her lone kanjeevaram for the day in Shaky's studio. She would wear a red brocaded Benarasi for the actual wedding.
"Anjali is very artistic," said Mr. Bose.
"I can see that. Taste is a rare quality these days. Taste in such matters speaks well of her parents' example."
"Our daughter has graduated from Vasco da Gama, with honors…"
The "boy" had to feign surprise and interest, as if he hadn't known all along, and Anjali had to deny, modestly, any great intelligence or motivation. He declared himself passionately devoted to his parents in Asansol, but his ambition was to move to Kolkata and convince his parents to settle nearby. Even Gauripur was preferable to Asansol, Subodh readily admitted. He spoke in elegant Sanskritized Bangla, the pinnacle of decorum. "Mr. Bose, I am myself looking for a post in international communications, hopefully in Kolkata, but failing that, I look with favor on Lucknow or Allahabad."
Lucknow? Angie thought, with horror. Allahabad? What modern girl would chain herself to a dreary place like that?
Her parents were impressed by his chaste, mellifluous Bangla, with no infiltration of Hindi, and they strained to meet its standard. This offered Angie the perfect out. She stumbled so badly in the language, half deliberately, that the unruffled, indulgent Subodh continually asked her to please repeat her questions. Then the young couple were allowed an afternoon alone to get to know each other, with the unstated assumption that to know Anjali, despite shortcomings, was to fall madly in love with her.
Once out of parental range, as he drove down LBS Road past the major intersection of MG Road and Pinky Mahal, past the cheap hotels, where Rabi must have stayed, and the Vasco campus and the apartment block where Peter and Ali lived-a light was on in their window-he finally burst out in English, "What a strain! But that was a very good show you put on back there. Very convincing. Very funny, actually." It was his first lapse from his flowery Bangla. His English was no match for hers.
She'd expected that he would park the car and they would stroll down MG Road to Alps Palace or maybe to the hotel restaurant. She wondered if she should take his arm. She wouldn't mind being seen in public with him. She would tell him Allahabad-no way! She didn't know what young people in the early stage of prenuptial negotiation were supposed to talk about. The photo sessions and letters, the gold and sari shopping, the piles of rejected suitors, had happened in a vacuum. But he acted confident and she was good at picking up cues, and anyway, it was happening to an imaginary girl named Anjali while the real person, Angie, could sit back and watch. Hobbies? Thank God for her minimal talent with the harmonium. Favorite foods? How should she pose-sophisticated and international, pizza perhaps-or sweetly, coyly desi, just an unassuming Bengali girl raised on fish curry and rice?
Subodh had no intention of walking or of stopping for coffee and ice cream. They were out of Gauripur in just a few minutes, across the main highway to Patna, five hours to the west, into the monsoon-lush countryside. It was a sunny afternoon between bouts of rain. Rabi had been out here too, on a bus; she recognized scenes from his photos: the now-glistening, once-dusty vegetation, the red soil, the woven patterns of the thatched roofs, the returning long-legged wading birds in the now-flooded fields, the bright saris of women walking along the side of the road. India was beautiful. The countryside was peaceful.
And she felt comfortable, secure, in Subodh's company. This is how she'd imagined it, driving through the countryside in a red car with a handsome, confident husband. It could work. She felt certain that her mother and her sister had never known such a moment. Mr. Mitra's English might impress in Asansol, or Bangalore, and especially in her parents' house, but she held the upper hand.
"A very good show? What are you implying, Mr. Mitra?"
"You are a total fraud. No one with the name of Anjali Bose could possibly speak Bangla as poorly as you!"
"And is this customary praise for all your lady friends, Mr. Mitra?"
"I am an honest man. I speak my mind. I take what's mine."
At least he didn't deny having lady friends.
"Honesty is a poor substitute for decent manners, Mr. Mitra. My honesty makes me ask what in the hell is Lucknow all about? What modern girl is going to settle in Lucknow or Allahabad?"
"My uncle in Lucknow is Civil Judge, Junior Division. In Allahabad my oldest uncle is manager of the State Bank of India." A few minutes later, he added, "For your information, I have no intention of going to either place."
"I have no interest in Kolkata," she said.
"Good for you. Kolkata is dead and buried. And you'd have to learn the language."
To which, of course, she smiled broadly. She decided he was not really a bad catch. A different Angie might have looked him over and said "He's honest, he's funny, he's certainly handsome, he's shrewd. I could do worse." In English she could be as saucy and seductive as any Bollywood heroine. She turned on him with that smile and asked, ever so sweetly, "So all that business about settling your parents in Kolkata was what… a lie?" Not that it mattered. A certain amount of mutual inflation was built into the marriage negotiation. She was not above the deployment of subterfuge on nearly any level.
"You've got a big mouth, you know," he said.
He turned off the highway. A muddy trail led through a partially cleared forest to a construction site. The place was desolate. Workers' huts lay strewn about, but the various buildings seemed abandoned. Concrete had been poured for the shell of an apartment block, abandoned because of the monsoons or a sudden withdrawal of funding. Rusted iron rods protruded from the stark slabs. Anjali remembered the word: rebars. He stopped the car in a dark grove. This place too was familiar. Rabi had been here; she'd seen the picture. Black and white, to bring out the shadows, he'd said. He'd made it seem a dark and brooding place, ghostly in its abandonment. She opened the car door, prepared to get out and inspect it more closely, to enter the picture, as it were.
"We won't be bothered here," he said.
She turned and asked, "How do you know?"
"I drove in this morning." He'd reverted to Bengali, a language that robbed her of power and nuance. "I had time to find a place."
"A place for what?"
He snorted. "Our marital negotiations."
"What sort of negotiations would that be, Mr. Mitra?"
"Get back inside and close the door," he ordered. "What do you think? You're going to be my wife."
He put his hands over her breasts on the bright green choli under the dhoni-kali sari. "Everyone knows the kind of girl you are."
"Take me home, immediately," she cried.
He smiled that dimpled smile, then laughed. His fingers pulled the end of her sari down. "I don't want to rip your fancy cotton choli," he said. "Unhook it now." She refused, and he popped open the row of hooks, exposing her bra. It was her push-up bra, forced on her for this occasion by her mother. She pulled the loose end of her sari over it. He slapped her hand down and kept it there, on her lap.
"I am within my rights to see what I'm getting," he said. "Just like your American."
Rabi? she thought. I have done nothing with any American-or any Indian, for that matter. This couldn't be happening, not while she was wearing her tasteful sari. Isn't that how he had described her sari in the living room? In a Bollywood movie a savior would arise, the ghost of Nirmal Gupta perhaps, whom she'd laughed at with his goo-goo eyes every time they passed on the street. Just like the movies: the good, faithful, passed-over boy comes to the rescue of the virtuous but slightly too proud and headstrong girl, who allows herself to be compromised, but not fatally. Maybe this was her punishment for not taking Nirmal Gupta seriously enough, for underestimating that little letter he'd tried to write before the poison took over. She would say a prayer, "Ram, Ram," and Ram in one of his many forms would rescue her. She turned away and stared briefly at the dead slabs of concrete, but Subodh Mitra's hand on her chin pulled her back, hard.
"Look at me when I'm talking!" he commanded. "I asked around. I know about you and your so-called professor."
"You're crazy. Take me home immediately, Mr. Mitra."
"I did my research. We still have ninety minutes, and we've got some negotiating to do first."
"Don't even think-"
She started to speak, but with a flick of his hand, he slapped her. Not hard, but not an idle tap, either. He unhooked the bra and assessed her breasts. She tried again to cover herself, but he pulled her arms down. "Not much there," he said.
She began to cry, but tears wouldn't come. She knew his hands were on her breasts, pulling hard, then weighing them, like small guavas, and she thought of all the girls she'd envied, the mango-breasted, the melon-breasted, and suddenly the stench of decaying mango penetrated the closed windows, and she could see the husks of fallen mangoes all about the abandoned huts and around the car.
A voice that seemed to issue from deep in the forest commanded, "Do me!" and when she came back to her senses, there was Mr. Mitra with his trousers unzipped, and a pale, tapered thing standing up like a candle in his hand, a thing she knew of but had never seen, a long, tan, vaguely reptilian creature with a tiny mouth where its head should be. In her panic she felt a brief wave of compassion for him; this couldn't be the real Mr. Mitra, but the result of some unfortunate invasion; he'd been possessed by a demon-but before she could study it further, Mr. Mitra's spare hand brought her head crashing down upon it, and she could hear him command, "Open that big mouth of yours…" He pulled her head up when she gagged, then down by the hair, pumping her head until she was able to do it herself, and his voice died out into a hum and she had to catch her breath, had to find a way to stop the gagging and the roaring in her ears. When his hand loosened from the back of her head, she was able to roll off and to see what she had done, the mess that was spewing over his pants and her sari, and he grabbed a handful of her sari to wipe himself and the steering wheel, even the window, cursing her all the time for leaving him at just the instant, humiliating him in such a way, ruining his suit, his borrowed car, even her sari. "You bitch, you bitch," he said, along with Bangla words she didn't know.
She stared down at the bra and sari pooled in her lap and tried to cover her breasts. She asked, almost in a whisper, as though to ask was to plant the notion, "Are you going to kill me?" He was still using the ends of her sari to clean himself. She remembered a hugely advertised Hindi movie from years back, Jism, and when she'd asked some boys in class what the word meant-she, the top girl in English, and they the simpleton sons of clerks and shopkeepers-they said they'd be happy to demonstrate.
"Don't be stupid. I'm going to marry you," he said. "Your father almost begged me."
If there had been any way of cleaning her mouth, she would have done it. If she'd had a can of bug spray, she would have swallowed it. When she conjured the image of what she'd done, all she could do was vomit, and she did so in her lap.
"Now," he said. "You know what you have to do." Wordlessly, looking through the steamed-up window at the twisted metal spikes, he pulled her panties down.
BACK AT THE house she had to run from the car, through the parlor, directly to the bathroom.
She could hear Subodh in the front room. "It must have been something we ate at the coffee shop. It came over her suddenly."
Her father said, "Please don't worry. She is a healthy girl. We're not hiding any medical history."
Her mother added quickly, "On both sides of the family, extreme good health. No sick leave, ever. As for Anjali, except for the usual jaundice, measles, and typhoid, she is in the pink of health."
Anjali returned, in T-shirt and jeans, her gesture of defiance, but she kept her head bowed. She wouldn't look at the monster or at her parents. She would not collaborate.
Mr. and Mrs. Bose begged him to stay for dinner. Even in remote Bihar, where the big river carp were harder to come by, Bengalis knew how to cook the traditional fish curry. Mrs. Bose had gone to the Bengali market especially for fat, fresh rui, and Mr. Bose had ranged beyond the usual sweet shops featuring ersatz rasmalai for something authentically Bengali.
Still looking down at her lap, Anjali said, "Mr. Mitra said he has to get back to Asansol tonight. Eight hours-he should be making his move."
"Your daughter is correct, as usual," he said. "I should be going. You'll be hearing from my father, I'm sure."
Anjali's parents didn't know how to interpret her interjection. Was it tender concern for the boy's feelings? A desire to get rid of him? She admitted to more stomach distress and a need to sleep in the dark in the back room, and left the parting formalities to her parents.
From the back room she could overhear the front-room language of marital negotiation: "Of course, it is all subject to your father's approval… But you and she got along beautifully, anyone can see that…" And her mother breaking in: "Poor girl, you got her so excited she can't keep her food down…" And the laughter, between her father and Subodh-whose very voice brought out murderous thoughts-joking over dowry claims: "My father's a really sharp businessman, so don't let him demand too much. I want this marriage to go through smoothly," met with laughter. "We do too!" her father said. He suggested that maybe a Japanese watch and a computer would close the deal. "Yeah, maybe he'll go for the gold watch-Swiss, not Japanese-a set of matched golf clubs and an American computer and an imported laptop for me-a PC, Toshiba or Dell-and a selection of games and movies," and her father laughed. "We'll have to see about that."
Lying in the dark after Subodh had left, staring at the slowly revolving ceiling fan, timing her inhale and exhale to the thumpa-thumpa of its wobbling orbit around the oily, dust-webbed post, she remembered the echoes of an earlier melodrama. "I will call -thumpa-astrologer. I will call -thumpa-printer. I will write -thumpa-boy's father." And in this room five years earlier, behind this door, in this very bed, she remembered Sonali's screaming, "Just give me the knife!" until she'd submitted, then apologized.
Her mother slept in the same room, on the same bed. Anjali, eyes closed, feigning sleep or exhaustion, waited for an opportunity to break the silence. She would have spilled the beans on Mr. Mitra, but her mother had simply collapsed on her bed and fallen asleep. Apparently, there was nothing of interest to discuss, not even a giddy welcome to the world of soon-to-be-married women-no "Hello, Mrs. Mitra! He's so handsome! You'll be so happy!" In the front room, just minutes after closing the door on Mr. Mitra and wishing him (if she heard correctly) "Godspeed" back to Asansol, her father dropped his trousers and began rattling the shutters with his snores. Just as though the world had not stopped.
She had expected to be assaulted by dreams. Alone in the bedroom, she'd been afraid to close her eyes until her mother came to bed, but when the rustling of the dress-sari and sleeping-sari was over, and the snoring began, she opened her eyes again. In her childhood, she'd felt the presence of ghosts. She'd often felt their weight on her bed. She and Sonali, lying side by side, had imagined ghostly faces beyond the lone high, unopened bedroom window. They'd filled the long nights with made-up names and the reasons for their reappearance. Any deceased relative could pop up unexpectedly. Family ghosts were always on a mission of vengeance. Their grievances-and she knew all of them, all the stories of rivalry and cheating, the bitterness and unkept promises, the favoritism, the thievery, the poverty, all the infidelities, the dead babies, the deserted wives, the cruel mothers-in-law-could transcend a single lifetime. Fifty years was too brief to avenge all of the indignities of a lifetime. They had to keep coming back. That was her father's excuse: his fate was cursed. A fortuneteller had once warned him he had a jealous uncle, long-long dead, who had blocked every male Bose's path to wealth and happiness. That was her mother's excuse: I must have the same name as a distant auntie; I must be paying for her misdeeds.
And now she knew the old stories were true. There were monsters, and innocent children were their victims, and no one, especially not her parents, could save her from them.
She slipped off the bed and walked through the house, staring down at her parents in their oblivious helplessness. She wandered like a ghost. She dropped her stained sari in a corner of the bathroom. Let her mother discover the traces of her glorious jamai. Nothing had changed in her house, but the world was different. She took Sonali's old red Samsonite from the cupboard and threw her two best saris and all her T-shirts and jeans into it. She stuffed her backpack with underwear and toiletries. She could have turned on the lights, banged shut the lid of the suitcase, dragged it across the stone floor, and neither of her snoring, dreaming parents would have noticed.
She took out her old Vasco da Gama exercise book, flipped through the dozens of pages of perfect schoolgirl handwriting, the meticulous notes she'd taken- all useless, useless! -and tore out two clean pages. On her last day in Gauripur, she went to the little table on the cramped balcony where she'd always done her assignments and read her books, and began writing. By the wan streetlight she composed a note and left it in her mother's "just in case" lentils jar.
Dearest Ma and Baba:
I will not marry any boy selected by anyone but myself, especially not this one. If this leads to a barren life, so be it. As you should plainly see, the boy you selected has dishonored me. He should be sent straightway to jail.
I am leaving this morning for Patna to see my sister, whose name you are reluctant to utter.
When I am settled again, I will write. The process may take many months. I am ready to take my place in the world. I beg you not to try to find me.
Your loving daughter, A.
She was Anjali. She could look down and see poor little Angie whimpering on her bed.
The dark alleys of Gauripur by night were unknown to her. The night air was even warmer than the stillness of the bedroom, and filled with groans and coughs and sharp words and the occasional horn-but many sounds were simply unplaceable, maybe the wings of bats, maybe just the creaking of the earth resting from the day's abuse, the brushing of thick leaves against one another, the urgent business in the bushes of dogs and men, rats and mongooses, the endless grinding of a million small claws and the hot breezes against tree limbs and rocks and movie posters nailed to every lamppost, and she thought then, as she often did, that ghosts explained it all, just as the stars at night or the face on the moon had told stories to our ancestors. Men sleeping on the broken footpath, a cast of nighttime characters invisible by day, playing cards under the streetlamp and making animal noises, calling to her to come for a drink (the last thing they expected to see, a determined young lady pulling a noisy suitcase over the paving stones down the middle of the street). The distance between her house and Nehru Park had never seemed so vast, and the park never so dark and full of trees and tall grass, the town itself never so small, disheveled, and evil smelling.
It was five o'clock, an hour and a half before dawn, as she reckoned it. A few lights were already on, servants perhaps, starting their masters' day. Her mother would rise at dawn and perhaps not even notice the empty bed until she returned a few minutes later, with tea. Then she would see the sari. She would pick it up and hold it to her face, and she would sense what had happened. She would do all this before waking her husband. Maybe she'd even find the letter before waking him. Would she be screaming, or crying, or would she coldly accuse her husband-"You see what you've done? No jamais, and now no daughters!" What would her mother do, what would she say? Anjali couldn't predict.
She stood on the footpath outside Peter's apartment. Five-fifteen. Five-twenty. Along LBS Road, the early risers were on the march: clusters of young men laughing and jostling; a troop of haughty langurs after a night of garden plunder, their tails high and curled, sauntering back to the safety of Nehru Park and a day of mugging for photos and begging for ground nuts; older men in khaki uniforms, on bicycles, pulling carts of empty, rattling milk pails; bedraggled rag-and-paper pickers bent under enormous burlap bundles; and men lifting a corner of their dhoti or setting down a briefcase and unbuttoning their suit pants to relieve themselves against the public walls. Municipal workers dumped cartloads of trash along the gutters, swarmed by dogs and pigs and curious cows and a row of squawking crows perched atop the public walls: the predawn stretching and coughing and nostril clearing of a small Indian city.
In an hour-the hour at which she was normally awake to begin her school day-the roadways would be jammed with all manner of vehicles, the noise level so high she'd abandon all hope of conversation, the sun already high and hot. She, who'd aroused such unwelcome interest an hour earlier, was invisible to everyone now. At five-thirty the lights went on in Peter's apartment. She waited another five minutes; then, leaving her Samsonite on the bottom stair, she picked her way to the landing between new rows of terra-cotta flowerpots. She rapped twice on the blue door.
When Ali opened it, she greeted him with a smile and by name, not as a servant but as just another boy of nearly her own age. "I have to see Peter," she said. Peter, not your master, not Mr. Champion. He let her in and then went down the stairs to retrieve her bag.
Peter was standing by the two-burner gas stove, sipping his morning tea. He wore pajama bottoms, and a knotted shawl covered his chest. For just an instant he stared, and she wanted to say "It's me, Angie. I know it's early, I know this is shocking," but he refocused his eyes and smiled. He took a step toward her, arms out, and she took a step forward, then another, and found herself in his arms-he, who'd barely ever touched her, had never even shaken her hand.
Ali came back with the red suitcase. For a moment he seemed confused, then scampered to the almirah and took out an ironed shirt. He lifted Peter's shawl, folded it, then helped Peter into the shirt. He buttoned it. The action was, to Anjali, tender, even erotic. Ali's fingernails were long and red. Then he took down a mug and poured tea for her.
"Ginger cookie?" Peter asked, and Ali lifted a cloth off a platter. "Please," he said. "Things must have taken a bad turn."
"Very bad," she said. "I should have seen it coming."
"As I remember your last visit, we didn't part on the best of terms. There was that question of a marriage portrait. After you left, I thought to write you an apology-"
"I was so confused. I went straightway to the college and asked poor Nirmal Gupta to post that portrait on the biggest wedding site he could find. You said that picture would only cause trouble, but I thought that it would change everything. And just look what it did. I still don't know anything except that I was vain, and I caused that boy's death, and for a while, I thought maybe mine too. The boy my parents want me to marry attacked me. I had to leave."
PETER SICNALED TO Ali and pointed to the almirah. Ali came back with a round cookie tin. Inside were stapled stacks of hundred-rupee notes. He began counting them; each stack a hundred notes, ten thousand rupees. Twenty, thirty, forty, fifty thousand rupees, half a lakh, more money than she'd ever seen, ever handled.
"This may seem like a lot of money," Peter said, "and for a girl in Gauripur, it may be. But you can make this in a couple of months in Bangalore." He slipped the entire tin into her backpack.
"You have the two names and addresses I gave you?"
"Yes," she said. She pointed to the Samsonite. "Everything I have is in that." She sipped her tea and nibbled on a proffered ginger cookie. "Two saris, two salwar-kameezes, three pairs of jeans, and my T-shirts." She patted the closing flap of her backpack. "And addresses of your two friends in Bangalore."
"Don't lose those addresses, Angie. I'll write them so they expect you. And guard the money just short of your life. The train to Bangalore leaves at nine o' clock. Ali will walk you to the station."
"I didn't reserve," she said. "How could I reserve a train ticket with my father sitting in the railway office? He would have heard of it." She had imagined his furor over and over again: "Bose-babu, quick, quick! Daughter is buying one-way ticket to Bangalore!"
"Anyway, I thought there'd be a wedding."
"Or you counted on a magic solution?"
"I want to go to Patna and visit my sister there. Then she can buy a train ticket for me."
"Then the intercity bus is your only option." Peter seemed to be contemplating a gargantuan task. "Lord," he sighed. "I did it thirty years ago. We had to close the windows against dacoits and tribals with bows and arrows. The price you pay for procrastinating."
She recognized the word but had never used it.
"Putting things off-you've got to work on that."
"I will."
"When? Tomorrow?" But he asked the questions with a smile, gathered up the remaining cookies in the cloth, and knotted the ends. "Who knows when you'll get to eat next?"
"Thank you for the ginger biscuits," she murmured to Ali.
Ali went to the pantry and came back with a bottle of water and two bruised apples. In elaborate Urdu she could barely follow, he asked Peter for directions to the bus station. Peter instructed Ali to take enough money with him to buy the bus ticket to Patna for her, so she wouldn't have to take out her cookie tin in the crowded station.
IN HER PERSONAL dire-straits scenario, she'd always planned on escaping to Bangalore by train. She'd never anticipated taking the intercity bus. Buses were for laborers and farmers, the very poor. Intrastate buses ran every few hours, daily, west to Patna. From Patna, she could continue to Varanasi and Allahabad. Given the elasticity of space on the roof and floor, there was always room for last-minute boarders to squeeze in. People who ride by bus are humble, she'd been told, and respectful to their economic betters. Space could always be cleared for a young college girl in a T-shirt and jeans.
But going all the way across India by local buses-anything beyond Varanasi-was like voluntarily entering a black hole, especially the black hole of central India called Madhya Pradesh, with its jungles and tribals, and hoping to come out the other end somehow intact. A distant relative of her mother's, the family's lone adventurer, had once made it all the way to Jabalpur, the equivalent of the place where ancient mariners assumed they would fall off the edge of the world. Central Madhya Pradesh still had places where even the police were afraid to go. And Jabalpur was not even a third of the way to Bangalore.
On the four-hour trip to Patna, she could still smell the mud and the decayed mangoes, the taste and rubbery feel of something terrible in her mouth, the searing pain, and even more, the transformation of a handsome boy, dimples and all, into a monster. Walking out of her house as a confident, desirable bride-to-be in a flashy sari, in a red Suzuki, wondering, Coffee or a sandwich? And running back sick, her sari wet with blood and men's stuff she never knew about. Jism. On the bus, an old man who boarded late and could have sat anywhere took the aisle seat next to her and almost immediately put his hand over her breast, as though he owned it, as though it was something he'd bought along with his ticket and paan, even as the outskirts of Gauripur were passing by. He was looking straight ahead, and she stared at his unshaven white stubble, his dirty white kurta, and his jaws working mightily on his betel leaf. Then she stared down until he removed his hand. He got up and chose another seat.
SONALI'S TWO ROOMS were not far from the bus station. s.Das, the buzzer panel read.
"I couldn't call, Sonali-di," Anjali apologized as soon as Sonali unlocked her front door. They spoke in Hindi, as was their custom. "It was all so sudden."
"Do they know you're here?" Sonali asked that with a smile. "Anyway, come in." She eased the knapsack off Anjali's shoulder and carried it indoors. "It isn't much, but we aren't complaining."
Sonali and her little girl slept in the back room, much in the way Anjali and her mother shared a bed in Gauripur. Sonali had gained ten kilos since the divorce. At twenty-four she looked more like a younger aunt than an older sister.
It wasn't late, barely past seven o'clock, but little Piyali was already asleep on the chowki in the bedroom, a bony leg nestling a bolster and an elbow shading her eyes from the ceiling light. In a way, Piyali was lucky. Her father had dropped out of her life. No visits, no checks, no harassments, no disappointments. Anjali reached out and stroked the child's hair.
In the tiny kitchen alcove, Sonali put the kettle on the gas stove and spread salty crackers on a chipped plate. "So, what now, Anjali?"
"I had to, didi," Anjali said, "I had to leave." Anjali longed to talk woman-to-woman, for the first time in her life. As Sonali slurped down tea, Anjali recounted the assault by Subodh Mitra. "He was so charming," she cried. "And they were going to marry me off to him." The brute, the monster. She thought-but couldn't say, of course- it would have been just li\e your marriage, except that he showed his true nature even before the ceremony. She expected sympathy and finally support from her sister, but something was holding Sonali back. If I can't confide in Sonali-di, who's been through it all, whom can I talk to? Sonali-di had to understand; she wouldn't tolerate Baba making the same mistake again.
"So I ran away, when they were asleep. What else could I do, Sonali-di? I had to."
"You want to know what you could have done? With your Vasco degree and your wonderful English? You could have made Ma and Baba happy and married him. And if it didn't work out, you'd still get a better job than me."
Marry him? My sister hates me!
Sonali opened the steel trunk that had once contained her dowry of saris, bedding, and kitchen utensils. It was nearly empty. Like their mother, she preferred neem leaves to mothballs. Sonali handed a small pillow to Anjali. It reeked more of mildew than neem. "You can stay the night," she said.
"Thank you," Anjali mumbled, shocked. "I intend to be gone in the morning." Not exactly her initial plan, but now her only choice.
"In fact I'm glad you stopped by," said Sonali. And before Anjali could smile, she added, "I have to go out a little later. I don't expect Piyali to wake up, but if she does, you'll be here."
"Go out where?" Anjali asked, but from the look on her sister's face, she knew.
"Just an hour. Maybe less, maybe more," she said.
"What are you doing, Sonali-di? Seeing a man, isn't it?"
"You think a secretary is just a secretary?" Sonali asked. "You're such a child still." She gave the pillow a whack with her palm before slipping a pillowcase over it. "Men are men, they're all the same. You don't have to lead them on, it's in their nature." Piyali whimpered in her sleep, and Sonali immediately lowered her voice. "Look at us," she muttered, "take a good look at Piyali and me, do you really think I'm better off being divorced? Do you have any idea what the word divorced means to any man? It means 'Take it, it's free.' Wouldn't I be better off married, no matter what?"
"You had no choice, Sonali-di! He practically moved those women into your flat!"
"What do you know? Nothing, you know nothing, and you come to my house and lecture me? This handsome Mr. Mitra of yours thought-no, he was positive-that he was Baba's choice of jamai. What he does to you before the wedding or after, does it matter that much? Does it matter enough to ruin other people's lives? Four lives, in my case. Baba's and Ma's, Piyali's and mine?"
And so the great divide was not just the thirty years that separated Anjali from her parents-that wasn't a divide, it was a chasm-but the five years between her and her sister. Five years ago, Sonali had capitulated to her parents' demands. Five years ago, it would have been impossible for Sonali to have resisted, and fled. A wife might conceivably leave her properly arranged husband and move back in with her parents, even divorce him for cruelty or drunkenness, but never for the laughable motive of personal happiness.
"But you sent me money, didi," Angie said. "You're the one who told me not to cripple myself." Every few months, Sonali had sent her small money orders and inland air-letters, care of an unmarried, club-footed girlfriend she had gone to Hindi medium school with.
"That was for clothes and whatnot," she said. "It wasn't meant to heap more shame on the family."
That night, lying with her niece on the chowki while her sister "stepped out," Anjali thought about how the world had gone mad. Sonali was jealous of her sister's still-open future, Anjali decided, because she could do what Sonali hadn't. In just a day, India had gone from something green and lush and beautiful to something barren and hideous. Her sister had deserted her, and her parents were prepared to marry her off to a monster whose father demanded a set of golf clubs.
THERE ARE WAYS of crossing India by overnight buses, short-haul trains, even by flagging down truck drivers, but very few that single young women would ever try. The discomfort, especially at night, as cold air and rain blasted through the open windows and men relieved themselves anywhere, then crawled about, feigning sleep in order to grope the sari-bundled women: intolerable. If she spoke to no one and answered no questions and requested no favors-posed, in fact, as a tourist on the model of an Indo-American like Rabi-she prayed no one would dare bother her.
At a crossroads village south of Nagpur in eastern Maharashtra, near the Andhra Pradesh border-really just a cluster of tea stalls and a petrol pump called Nizambagh-prostitutes and their children, and maybe just desperate women fleeing their villages for work in cities, swarmed the parked row of long-haul trucks. The women were lined up, holding their babies, and the drivers lifted their lungis and the women climbed onto the running boards and performed their services. It was not a view of India from behind a limousine window. Anjali walked like a ghost past the trucks; nothing shocked her, nothing disgusted her. She could see herself armed with a knife or a gun, walking down the row of trucks parked at night and executing every single driver and his helper. If hell and all the citizens of damnation had an Indian address, it was here. If she ever saw Rabi again, she'd have something to tell him. Had he been here? Had he caught this picture?
Somewhere down south in Bangalore, drawing closer every hour, a luxurious neighborhood called Kew Gardens and an old lady named Minnie Bagehot waited with a room for her, she prayed, and an Usha Desai to give her a job bigger than her father's.
On a hand-painted signboard, she saw the arrows: west for Mumbai and south for Hyderabad, which she knew to be in the direction of Bangalore. It was a crossroads for her as well, two possible fates, different buses. She went to the ladies' toilet, the very center of hell, the foulest few square inches in the universe, and changed into her last clean T-shirt, her favorite, Panzer Delight. She was nearer to Mumbai than Bangalore, just a day and a half away to the west, just the Ghats and a desert and a second range of mountains to cross, but no one could tell her when the Mumbai bus would arrive, and she couldn't bear the thought of another minute of the lingering stench. The Hyderabad bus was ready to leave. She couldn't wait; she couldn't stand to watch the women and children and the truck drivers with their insolent faces, and the knowledge that she was just a little luckier, but fundamentally no different.
The numb certitudes of her life: I have no family. The only money in my pocket comes from a man whose world is alien to mine and whom I'll never see again. I have no job, no skills. School teaches little.
IT WAS NOON in Hyderabad, a legendary city she never thought she'd visit. At least she had been dropped at its bus depot early in the morning and been able to sit on a bench for two hours and sip hot tea before heading to the line for the last bus, the final leg. "Bangaluru? Bangaluru?" she kept asking, having learned Bangalore's southern name, though she could not read the southern script. By following vague hand gestures and leaving her perch two hours before the scheduled departure, she'd managed to stand near the head of the line. At boarding time, however, passengers lugging heavy burlap sacks and taped-together cardboard boxes had rushed from behind and shoved her aside. But nonetheless she was now on the bus to Bangalore. Five hundred and sixty more kilometers to go. Two thousand kilometers behind her. Assuming no breakdowns, there'd be another hot day and a cold all-nighter on the bus. Bangalore by morning.