A dozen times in the night, the bus from Hyderabad passed through cities many times the size of Gauripur, and Angie thought, This must be Bangalore. Six million, seven million, Peter had said, sixty, seventy lakhs, how could she imagine such numbers? But the bus would merely stop under a streetlamp to let off or take on a passenger or two, then ease back into the black of the night. She couldn't read the strange scripts of southern languages, and they seemed impossible to speak, all thudding consonants linked with breathless spurts. She, so proud of her Hindi and English and even, if pushed, her Bangla, had been struck deaf and dumb.
Gradually the stops grew more frequent, the towns more closely connected, and the streets busier, even in the dark. Then, a few minutes after sunrise, they joined a long line of buses and pulled into Majestic, the open-air, bowl-shaped Bangalore bus depot.
She hadn't expected to start her new life half-frozen, exhausted, and starving. On the crowded intercity buses, she'd fought sleep all night, every night, guarding her precious cookie tin, which she held with both hands on her numbed lap. All she'd eaten during the week since leaving Patna were greasy samosas and scalding tea, which hawkers passed through the bus windows. Most passengers had either brought home-cooked food in tiffin carriers or gotten off the bus for hearty meals at roadside stalls. The spicy smells had tormented Angie, but she hadn't dared leave her suitcase unprotected in the luggage rack. The hard-sided Samsonite was too heavy to carry on and off the bus for food breaks. Now, as passengers elbowed her aside to lift their baggage out of overhead racks and stepped on her painted toes in their scramble to get off, the arrival in Bangalore seemed like the beginning of another ordeal.
Even from the side of the bus, at seven in the morning, she could see building cranes swivel, scoop up giant vats of concrete and tons of bricks, and reach into the dawn-bright heavens. Mechanical cranes controlled by a single man, not the long lines of women and children tipping their small bowls of concrete. The roads around the depot were already clogged with traffic. This was energy, something palpable that she'd never experienced, and it left her frightened and indecisive. She'd never witnessed "progress" or placed herself in its path.
Angie was finally standing and stretching but she felt unrefreshed; the dull ache of an early morning sun after a cold, wakeful night, the throbbing diesel clouds off a metallic ocean of dented bus roofs, the hundreds of vendors and laborers shouldering their bags and boxes, all with a purpose and a destination, drained her confidence. Unlike Gauripur, Bangalore had built its fancy bus depot far from the city center. This was the first morning of her new life, but it felt like death. Barely seven in the morning, and even villagers were loading their burlap sacks of fruits and vegetables and heading up the roads feeding into the city. All she had was an address on a torn piece of paper: Bagehot House, Kew Gardens.
She'd assumed South India (when she'd considered it at all) to be at least as backward as Gauripur. But Gauripur, and Bihar state in general, were exceptions to the industrious, prosperous north. South Indians were smart in math but too frail and pious to show much initiative. She remembered her Indian literature class, taught by a Keralan priest, in which she'd tried to read a novel by a southern writer named Narayan, set in a village-Malgudi, the writer called it-probably not too far from Bangalore. Father (Dr.) Thomas pronounced its characters the authentic voice of South India, as comforting to him (not even a Hindu) as sweetened rice, as healthy as fruit and yogurt, and as stimulating as thick, rich, steaming traditional coffee. The book offered nothing to her except the revelation that traditional Hinduism, one of the pillars of her parents' lives, was totally irrelevant to the life she wanted to live.
So, who was responsible for something as roaringly capitalistic as Bangalore? Certainly not diminutive vegetarians reciting the Vedas under a banyan tree. While still on the intercity bus, glancing out the window, she'd seen more crosses than she'd ever imagined in India. Christians, then? Certainly not South Indian Christians like Father "Elephant Fart" Thomas. Who supplied the energy, the go-for-broke, rule-bending, forget-about-yesterday, and let's-blow-it-all confidence for this transformation? Foreigners like Peter Champion? Internal migrants, displaced northerners like her? Peter had once talked of accident and propinquity in the rise of capital; if Bombay is oversubscribed, overpriced, where can new capital go? It went farther south. If she ever ran into Rabi Chatterjee again, she'd ask him to take a picture of the Bangalore bus depot and send it back to Father (Dr.) Thomas. Where's your tiny, tranquil Malgudi now? He'd die!
Everyone but Angie Bose was on the move. She sat on her red Samsonite at the curb, dazed, hungry and confused. In her nearly twenty years, until meeting up with Subodh Mitra, she'd never felt overmatched. She'd made a joke of any challenge. But in less than a week she'd moved from the passive duties of childhood, waiting for marriage and adult life to begin, into something not quite like womanhood, without instruction. The immense journey and the enormous implications of her impetuousness remained. What-have-I-done? What-was-I-thinking? Nothing in her earlier life could guide her. Nothing was relevant.
Here and there, middle-class youths much like her-although most had alighted from express trains and had not sat cramped and halfstarved all night in a freezing bus, crossing deserts or steaming jungles-presentable young men in business suits and attractive young women with soft hands and letters of introduction and hearts set on making it in Silicon City, wheeled their bags directly to the taxi stands, around the burlap-covered mounds of produce and the jumble of cars and cycles, and through the crack-of-dawn mayhem caused by rural India assaulting the city.
Still sitting on her suitcase by the curb, Angie picked up a tattered English-language Bangalore newspaper and started reading. From the scowls and mutters of porters and passengers, she assumed she was being cursed for being in the way, but since they were speaking in Kannada or Tamil, she chose to ignore them.
She scanned the stories, none of them particularly relevant to her but all of them interesting and frightening, and she settled on an op-ed column by the paper's resident wit, "Dynamo." He declared that it was wrong to think of Bangalore as all "heartless materialism, lacking a proper respect for history." Dynamo claimed there was more passion-even knife play and gangs of hired thugs-behind every deed transfer in Bangalore than in Chinatown or The Godfather; more twisted connections between families than Faulkner ever dreamed of; more convolutions and memorable characters than in a Dickens novel. If Hindus buried their dead instead of cremating them, there'd be more crushed bones under the latest skyscraper than under the Great Wall of China. In fact, it could be said that history is proving to be Bangalore's most profitable industry. Every true Bangalorean is becoming an Arnold Toynbee. Every day in every municipal office, Bangaloreans are lining up to inform themselves of their ancestral stake in every deed transfer of the past two hundred years and how they might profit from it.
She did not relate to Dynamo's allusions to films or literature, but she was stirred by the evocation of reckless, even violent energy. If so many thousands-so many lakhs-had made the same decision she had, to come to Bangalore and start life over, and if she could regain her self-confidence and retain her stamina, then she had nothing to fear. She had good English and a quick smile. She had Peter Champion's two friends to count on. He had promised to write to them about her. From her curbside Samsonite perch, she could see scooters, auto-rickshaws, and bright new cars clogging every roadway, many of them driven by girls her age or younger.
What she knew was simple but profound. Energy and confidence create links between bright new cars, a rising ring of skyscrapers, and busy people clutching shopping bags with fancy logos. She wanted to be one of the people being waited on in upscale shops. She saw girls her age wearing crash helmets and maneuvering their motorcycles between stalled cars and around bullock carts, and she was determined to be one of them. She had nothing to lose, no good name to tarnish. No one knew her parents, and her parents had no idea where she was.
All of this and more she learned during her first half-hour in Bangalore from a single newspaper left folded on a bench. Kids fresh out of college were the new managers. She noted their names, from every region of India. Boys still in their twenties were building apartment blocks. Girls in their twenties were opening lifestyle shops. Hadn't Peter Champion let drop that she could be earning a monthly salary bigger than her father's, and for what-just for exercising her only talents, conversational English proficiency and a pleasing phone voice?
"Need taxi, big sister? I carry your luggage to taxi, no problem, and make sure meter is working."
Angie clutched her backpack even tighter. Her parents had warned her to be wary of Good Samaritans offering help in public places. In her parents' paranoid vision of the world, Good Samaritans were pickpockets working in teams of two. In Gauripur she had rebelled against this crippling cynicism, but not here in this bus depot. The young touts badgering her had been fellow riders on her bus, country boys, but they'd hit the ground running. They kept circling her, inching closer and closer. Then suddenly they melted away into the crowd of embarking and disembarking passengers.
A gang of older youths now menaced her. "Need hotel, big sister? Clean room. Close by bus and train. Concession rate. Bherry, bherry respectable."
She needed to sit tight and look composed while thinking through her immediate questions: How far is Kew Gardens and Minnie Bagehot's house from the bus depot, and could she afford an auto-rickshaw? She'd never been on her own in a real city. In Gauripur she'd always walked between school and home, and except for emergency trips to Dr. Triple-Chin Gupte's storefront clinic in Pinky Mahal (most recently for an excruciating ingrown toenail and before that for a hilsa fishbone stuck in the soft tissue of her throat), where else had she needed to go?
"Mind over matter" was one of her father's favorite adages. "Where there's a will, there's a way." So long as she didn't put all her eggs in one basket and remembered to look before she leaped, she'd be fine. Better than fine. She was not desperate; okay, she'd felt abandoned when the bus that had brought her to Bangalore pulled away from the curb, and, okay, okay, she'd panicked when the vendors and hostel touts had swarmed around her, but she hadn't felt despair. What she felt now… was guilt. Why had she had to hurt her parents to realize they cared for her, cared too much? Mind over matter, Baba. Silently she begged his forgiveness.
FINALLY A POLICEMAN approached and spoke to her in Kannada. The language sounded so alien, the tone so ambiguous, that she wasn't sure whether he was offering help or ordering her to move on. "Kew Gardens?" she asked.
The policeman shrugged. He tapped her suitcase with his lathi.
"Kew Gardens?" she repeated.
Again he shrugged. He looked her up and down and tapped the side of the suitcase. After a pause, he said, "Majestic." Then he made a sweeping gesture with his baton. "Bus stand, Majestic." He pointed his baton at the line of auto-rickshaws a few yards away. Then he lost interest in her and sauntered toward a knot of boys selling toys from trays suspended around their necks.
Angie slid off the suitcase and pulled it to the auto-rickshaw at the head of the stand. "Kew Gardens," she announced, as though it was the only street in town.
The driver turned his head from side to side and helped her load the big red bag on to the narrow seat beside her. He took off, bobbing and weaving on a thoroughfare that would have been generously wide anywhere in India but here was too narrow for the variety of vehicles. Motorcycles darted in and out of traffic lanes, almost brushing her elbow. Hyundais and Skodas were twice the size of anything she'd seen in Gauripur. Mercedes-Benzes, liveried chauffeurs at the wheel, sped past. Huge American cars, many with women drivers, snaked around her auto-rickshaw. To avoid panicking, she concentrated her gaze in the direction of the footpath that had to run alongside the road, but the footpaths-Sidewalk, she told herself, think American -had been torn up to make way for new sewers. She shut her eyes and kept them shut for a long time. When she opened them again, the road was wider, the trees shadier, the older buildings statelier, and the newer buildings taller and fancier. Towers of blue glass reflected the perfect blue sky. Bangalore had been built by a race of giants.
"How much farther?" she asked the driver in Hindi.
Without turning his head, he answered at length in one of the South Indian languages, extending his arm in an all-encompassing sweep. The only words she understood were "soon-soon" and "MG Road." Another MG Road. Peter Champion once said, "Every American town has its Main, Oak, and Elm, just like India has its Gandhi-Nehru-Shastri." But Bangalore retained British place names too, like Kew Gardens and Cubbon Park.
"Hindi?" she asked. "Don't you understand Hindi?" The auto-rickshaw was moving erratically through fast-moving traffic on a wide artery flanked by office buildings, government offices, and shops.
Finally the rickshaw lurched to a stop by a muddy puddle a couple of feet from the curb. All the buildings on that block were office towers, with street-level showrooms and fancy shops. It was barely eight in the morning and the shops were still shuttered. High-rise office buildings in Bangalore indexed their tenants' names on signboards visible from the street. The tall building immediately in front of the rickshaw boasted corporate logos of companies from twenty different countries, marked by their flags.
"This isn't Kew Gardens," Angie snapped. "I'm looking for a house, a private home. Bagehot House."
"MG Road," said the driver, smiling shyly.
He got out of his vehicle and gave the back tires vicious kicks. It was clear that the rickshaw had died. He held out his hand for the fare. "One hundred rupees," he said, this time in Hindi. She stayed put. He checked the rate card against his meter and asked again for one hundred rupees. It wasn't fair that he was demanding to be paid for dumping her who knew how far from Kew Gardens. A hundred rupees would pay for a month's to-ing and fro-ing in Gauripur. But before she could decide whether to complain or haggle, she got out on the street side, and the driver grabbed her suitcase with both hands and dropped it with a thud into the puddle in the gutter.
She flung a ten-rupee note at him. "Go to hell!" she screamed in English, startling herself for saying something she would never have said in the old days. The driver's actual competence in Hindi, expressed in fouler words than any movie villain's, came pouring out, but he was quick to scoop the ten-rupee note out of the puddle and dry it on his shirt.
Angie rolled her suitcase past three buildings, wondering if Kew Gardens was anywhere within walking distance. It was not quite eight-thirty in the morning; the sidewalks were still relatively empty. No one to ask for the right way to Kew Gardens. No one who looked Englishor even Hindi-speaking. She'd seen only one major road in the center of old Bangalore, and she began to imagine the sheer extent of the city in every direction.
From the sidewalk she could make out an outdoor coffee bar with patio umbrellas on an elevated plaza between two skyscrapers. A gaggle of voices floated down to her, tinkly voices of hyperconfident break-fasters, chattering in American English. Finally, a language with familiar cadences! She climbed the stairs to the plaza and found herself in a crowded coffee shop. Not just any coffee shop, not another Alps Palace with mold blooming on water-stained walls: this was a Barista. Most of the small round tables were occupied by large groups of noisy patrons her age, dressed, like her, in jeans and T-shirts. Many of the girls were smoking, gesturing wildly, and giggling like schoolgirls. Except for vamps in movies, Angie had never seen women smoke in Gauripur. At the outer fringes of the plaza, young men and women were plugging away, doing work on laptops.
In Bollywood films, the coolest stars casually meet in a Barista. Angie felt cool as she trundled her suitcase to the counter indoors. She would splurge on a tall iced coffee with a scoop of ice cream. In fan magazines, actresses were photographed while seductively licking strawberry-pink or saffron-yellow ice cream off a long-handled spoon. Hadn't she just saved maybe ninety rupees on the auto-rickshaw ride to nowhere? But when it was her turn to place her order, she asked for the cheapest, smallest hot coffee listed on the board above the counter. She blamed her Bose family training in frugality for the failure to splurge.
Really, why shouldn't she buy into the self-indulgence on display all around her? She knew her worth, and she had money-okay, borrowed, in a cookie tin in her tote bag. She'd shaken off the dust of Bihar and the mud and jungles in between, and now she was in Bangalore, where the towers are made of blue glass, but they could just as easily be gold. She'd done it entirely on her own. Next time in a Barista, she promised herself, she would order the most expensive coffee on the board.
"New in town?" asked a cappuccino drinker at an adjacent table, glancing down at Angie's Samsonite. She wore an I MUMBAI T-shirt.
"Just got off the train," Angie confessed, flashing her biggest smile. "I got in from Kolkata an hour ago." It's a new life, who's to know?
"Cool," said Mumbai Girl.
Angie put her coffee down on Mumbai Girl's cluttered table. A young man in a black muscle shirt that showcased his biceps gave up his chair for her. "Fresh Off the Train. F-O-T. Cool," he said.
"Now I've got to find Kew Gardens," Angie confided. "Do you know where it is?"
Mumbai Girl shouted over to the next table, "Any of you guys rooming in Kew Gardens?" Her English was perfect, better than Angie's. And the responses from the other tables were also in English: "Hell of a commute!" "Try Kent Town instead." "Isn't your ex looking for a roomie?" "Don't sign a long lease straightaway. Landlords are crooks." "And all landladies are bitches."
"Chill, F-O-T," Mumbai Girl counseled. She got on her cell phone. "Moni," she said, "Lalita here. Barista's, where do you think? Really? She agreed? I'm surprised. No, I'm shocked. Look, there's a new Bangla babe here." She looked up at Angie with a big smile, then winked. "Moni, you'd better get here fast. She's a real cutie. Hot and going fast. You want her in BanglaBazaar before those MeetMate guys snag her."
Cutie? Angie thought. Cute was something small and soft and dimpled. She was too tall and skinny for cute.
Mumbai Girl put her hand over the phone and whispered, "His name is Monish Lahiri-we call him the Bengali Svengali. Movie handsome, but kind of short. Not short-short, but shortish. He romances all the girls, so he's too busy to concentrate on just one. Anyway, he's minting money on his Facebook ripoff. He has us recruiting all the F-O-T Bangla babes and studs for his directory."
Angie tried to follow it all and came up… short. What's a Svengali? she wondered.
Lifting her hand off the phone, Mumbai Girl said, "I don't know-pretty tall, hundred and seventy-five, hundred and eighty, maybe. Wear your shoe lifts."
"Tell him a hundred and sixty," Angie said.
Lalita continued. "Cool, Moni. Oh, she says a hundred and sixty." She turned to Angie. "Moni started the trend. Now every group in Bangalore, the Gujaratis, the Tamils, the Konkans, the Punjabis-everybody's getting into these Bangalore directories."
Angie's head was spinning, faces popped up like flashbulbs, voices twittered, coming from nowhere, or everywhere, and she couldn't understand a word they were saying. Maybe she'd strained something, hauling her Samsonite up from the sidewalk.
The smart-looking boys working on their laptops made her occasional Gauripur heartthrobs look like cow herders. Her clothes might be sour, and she hadn't been able to comb her hair, and she was pulling a muddy suitcase, but she still had her smile. She was in a Barista on MG Road in Bangalore, the new center of the universe. Her smile was more valuable than any amulet or mantra. But damn, her voice seemed slow and muffled and everyone else's loud and fast.
"Way cool-did I hear the magic words 'new girl in town'?" a bearded, mustached man in Ray-Bans called out. Angie assessed and dismissed: too short and dark, too loud and outgoing, too much laughing and joking, the mustache too full and hairy, and the double strand of gold chains definitely unnecessary. Probably a local boy, she thought, trying to ingratiate himself with cooler, big-city types, pushing too hard. If he'd been in a Bollywood movie, he'd be the hero's comic sidekick, too itchy and impetuous, cracking too many jokes in a too-high-pitched voice, too eager to please, getting the turndown from every girl he meets. He slung his arm around a tubular girl with spiky hair in a very tight T-shirt from which she threatened to spill at any minute.
"Do you have a room yet?" Javaroomyet? "Say no, we can squeeze you in." He said his name was Mike and his English was easy and a little coarse. He introduced the others: Millie and Darren. The tubular girl was Suzie. Darren was a handsome boy in a T-shirt and jean jacket, more her type, Punjabi-tall and fair, with none of Mike's strained flash and swagger. Millie was the classic "tall, slim and wheat-complexioned" girl of the marriage ads, with highlighted hair, twirling her cigarette with practiced ease.
"Can't smoke in the residence. Can't smoke on the job. Gotta get my fix when I can," she said, lighting another.
"I'm Darren. This week, anyway." Darren sniggered. "I think I'm going to kill him off. I fancy myself a Brad."
"You're not cool enough for Brad, lover boy," said Suzie. "He broke up with Jen last year."
"He's a has-been," laughed one of the girls. "He's with Angelina now. She'll spit him out her backside!" The girl looked like a servant; you'd never think she knew a word of English, let alone loud, aggressive American English. She called herself Cindy.
"So let me lay it out for you," Cindy continued. "If you say you're Brad, they'll say where's Angelina? Then what'll you say? Quick, quick, Old Bitch'll be listening in, hears anguished attempt of expendable agent to extricate himself from the deep shit he's gotten himself into… and you're out on your ass, wasting company time just 'cause you wanted to be Brad Pitt. Not cool, dude."
"I was Jen a few weeks ago," said Millie. "That's all I ever got. 'Where's Brad?' I said, 'Brad? Brad's so last week, man. Now what-say we cure your printer blues.'"
"Yeah, well, HP's a little loosey-goosey," said Darren.
"Motorola's a little uptight," said Mike.
"Mine'd shit bricks," said Cindy. "Play by the rules, that's all we ever get. You got a name-stick with it."
"Dudes, dudes, what is this, a bitch session? What'll our new friend think?" said Darren.
What could she think? She was numb with confusion. Brick-shitting was a new one on her. Shit, piss, fuck, asshole: so much to learn. And cool, cool, cool: everything cool or not cool, but never warm. These must be call-center agents, her competition and would-be colleagues. Her neck hurt from keeping up with the repartee. She felt the way she had on a family visit to Kolkata so many years before, recognizing the Bangla words but missing the meaning. She should know all this, it should all be second nature, this was the currency of her deliverance from Gauripur-but she truly didn't understand 90 percent of it. These people seemed better than she was, even though their vocabulary was minimal and they looked like servants or movie prostitutes, except maybe Darren, who was now pouting because he couldn't play Brad.
"Gotta keep it fresh," said Mike. "Russell Crowe's still good, but there's the bloody accent. Nicole's great. Bill and Hillary. George and Laura, but when you use those names, they might hang up on you. Lots of names out there. What's yours, honey?"
When she said Angie, Millie and Suzie admitted to having been Angies too, on different days. Suzie said, "I stopped being Angie when one American guy said, 'Yeah, you're Angie like I'm Mother Teresa.' They're catching on. Gotta be careful."
"They got 'tudes," said Darren.
"Yeah, but we got game," Mike responded. They high-fived. Angie wanted to cry, so she smiled, and Mike turned to her. "Bitchin' name, Angie. Real cool. Great smile. Love it." Still too enthusiastic, not cool, she decided. How could a bitchin' name, if she heard right, be cool? She remembered a favorite Championism: used-car-salesman friendly. She felt better.
Angie or Suzie or whatever, leaning across the table with her breasts all but pouring out, and one of them, she saw, with a butterfly tattoo fluttering up from the dark interior, would have caused a riot in Gauripur. And the tall girl with highlighted hair, calling herself Angie on Tuesday and Saturday and Millie on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, who had to smoke on breaks and at the coffee shop, said she was looking for a new roomie at two thousand a month with kitchen privileges. Angie said she hoped she had a room through a relative in Kew Gardens, a statement that caused no dropped silverware, no raised eyes. Two more boys from a neighboring table, a Steve and a Charlie, offered her a ride on their bikes, which, too late, she realized meant motorcycles. They were with girls, a ponytailed one named Gloria and a green-haired one named Roxie, "from Chicago," she said. "Where else?"
Ah, but did they teach you a Chicago accent? she wondered, remembering Peter. That'll be five dallers.
"Mukesh Sharma called again last night," Cindy said, "poor fucking loser, I almost feel sorry for him. He calls himself Mickey now, but it's the same old Mukky."
"You can block him," said Mike. "A guy calls support three, four times a week-they'll deal with him. You can say whatever you want to him, even the Old Bitch'll back you."
"Mukesh Sharma is a real Hannibal Lecter. He creeps me out from twelve thousand miles away," said Suzie. "I don't know why they let those guys into the States. University of Illinois used to have some class. I keep hoping I get him-he won't have the balls to call back again."
Mike started singing, "I get no kick from Champagne." He had a surprising voice: deep, American. "Mukky Sharma lives in Champaign."
"Well, no wonder he's crazy," Angie said, "living in Champagne!" Everyone laughed, and she didn't know why what she said was so funny. The sun was so bright, pouring directly into her eyes and boring into her skull. How does a person even manage to live in Champagne? They drink it like crazy in Bollywood movies. What's the word-flutes? An actual Indian name like Mukesh Sharma sounded strangely comforting in this ersatz America, with all its Mikes and Steves and Charlies.
"Indian guys in the States," Millie explained. "They're the sickest perverts. They spend all day in the lab, then they spend all night on the Indian marriage sites. They're so fucking horny, they invent computer problems just so they can be patched through to Bangalore and talk to an Indian girl. They don't know we have their name and credit history and previous calls on our screens as soon as they call in."
Cindy was playing to an attentive circle. "He goes, 'Hi, my name is Mickey. What is your good name please?'" She did a good imitation of a certain kind of Indian accent-Angie's father's, for example. "I say, 'Angie.' He goes, 'Am-I-detecting-an-Anjali-under-that-Angie-disguise, Miss Angie?' I nearly said, 'No, but am I detecting some kind of sick shit under Mickey?' What he really wants to know is, what's the weather like in Bangalore today? What's playing at the Galaxy? Do we still hang out at Forum? What about Styx or Pub World? What's your real name and where do you come from and are you married and how old are you and 'Please, Miss Angie, your height in centimeters…' Gawd, I hate this job!"
Darren raised his arms. "Silence, please. Kolkata Cutie needs to hear our tribute to Mukky Sharma." Everyone looked at Angie, raising their coffee cups in her direction, and began singing in what seemed to her nonsense syllables:
I get no kick from Champagne,
Urbana too is a kind of a zoo,
But I know now what has to be true-
There's something sick coming off of you.
"Lyrics by Girish Gujral," said Bombay Girl. "He'll come over soon enough."
Angie knew the meaning of the words fuck, shit, asshole, though she'd never used them. Where do young Indians learn to use such language? What frightened her was the simple truth that if a boy from an American college, even a psychopath, had sent in his marital résumé, her father would have lunged at it. Any Indian going to any American school was, by definition, a catch.
"There's always the phone-sex line," Mike said. "You'd be way cool. They actually favor exotic names and Indian accents."
"A girl in our dorm went over to phone sex," said Suzie. "The money's good, but you have to find weird ways of keeping those guys talking."
"Not that you couldn't," said Mike.
"Oh, just shut up," said Suzie. She waited for silence. "You have something more you want to say… Mahendra? Oh, sorry, Mike."
My God, how a simple name change changes everything!
"Three hundred bucks a night weird, I hear," said Darren. Who was he in his pre-Bangalore life, Angie wondered. Dinesh? Dharmendra? "Pretty cool."
"One step up from the streets," snorted Roxie. And you, Roxie: Rupa? Rukhsana?
The women didn't seem jealous or possessive. Most of them were plump and the men already getting stout, like her father. Their friendships didn't seem like lead-ins to marriage. The young people in Bangalore had no parents, no nearby families to appease. No gossip or scandal could compromise them. They had come from all over India to get away from gossip.
It was exciting just to be part of such a flow, even for one morning, and to be carried along like a twig in a flood. She'd been accepted, no questions asked, even if she didn't understand most of what she'd been hearing. It was English, but… From her perch on the Barista's plaza, she could see the tops of skyscrapers flashing their international names in blue and red neon. She knew those companies: IBM, Canon, Siemens, Daihatsu. None of them existed in Gauripur. A Pizza Hut in Gauripur would automatically become the luxury hangout, the Place to Be Seen, and would draw longer lines than a cinema hall. In Gauripur there was only Alps Palace, a Welcome Group hotel with a vegetarian restaurant and innumerable tea stalls, where men sat or stood, sipping and spitting. For Gauripur's alcoholics there were two back-street liquor stores where bottles were wrapped in straw and newspaper and smuggled out in used plastic sacks with sari shop logos.
High on the side of one building she could read hand-painted placards: ENGLISH LESSENS. CALL-CENTRE PLACEMENT. FRESHERS TAKE NOTE. FOREGIN LANGUAGES TAUGHT; FRANCIAS, ESPAGNOL, ITALINO. She found it reassuring, as though they'd known she was coming and might need a brush-up course, even if Bangalore spelled words differently.
She would like to stay. Barista was comfortable, with a touch of conspicuous luxury and a hint of intrigue. The young people were just like her, open and friendly, and probably held the kind of job she was hoping to get. She'd heard that ten thousand agents a month were hired, and six or seven thousand quit or were let go. What could a girl buy, with fifteen thousand rupees coming in? For one thing, she could stop in a Barista and order cold coffee with ice cream and not think twice. For Angie, a lakh-100,000 rupees-represented a lifetime of scrimping and saving. In Bangalore, she could be earning a lakh, or even two lakhs, every month.
She was swept up in visions of stuffed clothing closets, a scooter, and an apartment of her own. Big-city ambitions; small-town desires. Her poor sister worked her fingers to the bone-fingers and more-for two thousand a month, if that. From a few tables away, a pleasant male voice spoke up. "Kew Gardens is on my way," but Angie was still lost in her future. In a few months, after promotions, before she turned twenty, she'd be earning more than her father, far more than her father.
Those pleasant words from a distant table had been meant for her. Suddenly there he was, in blue jeans, white shirt, and blue blazer, belt buckle at her eye level, dangling his car keys. He seemed slightly older than the others but still young, plump, and round-faced, with glasses: a harmless, even friendly face. "My name is Girish Gujral," he said. "They call me GG. I hear you need a ride to Kew Gardens. My Daewoo is at your service. Don't worry, it's on my way."
He kept on talking, but she couldn't make out the words. His lips were moving, but nothing got through to her. She thought she should stand, get closer, and shake his hand, but as she tried to rise, her legs went numb, then her head filled with light, her knees buckled, and she was falling against him. He threw his arms around her, keeping her half-standing, then let her down to the ground, easily. She saw faces, all the girls and some of the boys she'd been watching, arranged in a semicircle around her. Mr. GG cradled her head in his hand and shouted to the others, "Get toast and juice." Then, to her, he almost whispered, "When did you last eat?"
"This morning." She lied.
"Not to pry, but are you by any chance diabetic?" he asked. She was offended; diabetes was for old people.
"Of course not."
"So it's just my manly charm?"
"Pardon me?"
She didn't know where she was. Lights kept spinning behind Mr. GG's head. Her head was a big, hollow, swaying balloon; her legs and arms were numb. Then she was drinking the juice and tearing off mouthfuls of toast.
A minute later, she was back in her chair. The world had stopped spinning, and Mr. GG was buttering another stack of toast. He said, "You're looking much better." He pushed the platter closer to her. "You seem to have fallen in my lap. What am I to do with you?"
Just like that, she made the lightning calculation: She who hesitates is lost. She who worries over the future or her reputation or skimps on comforts and counts only the rupees in her pocketbook and not the dreams inside her Samsonite, she who dwells on can-it-get-any-worse, and not pie-in-the-sky, cannot compete.
"My name is Angie Bose," she said, introducing herself to him formally. "Thank you for the offer of the ride."
A COURTLY STRANGER had offered her a free ride to Kew Gardens, wherever that was, and she'd been in Bangalore not much more than an hour. In Gauripur the only answer would be a polite "Thank you, no." But in Bangalore? "Why not?" was the smart answer.
Besides, she didn't have to own up to anyone at Barista that she had spent all her life in Gauripur. She didn't even have to be Angie Bose; she could invent a flashy Bollywoodish first name, like Dimple or Twinkle or Sprinkle. Why not? No one in Bangalore seemed to be stuck with a discernible identity. She could kill off Angie Bose, and who would know, or care? She could be anything she wanted, a Hindi-speaking girl from Varanasi or a Brahmin from Kolkata. Who do you want to be? Bangalore doesn't care. Bangalore will accommodate any story line. She could eliminate her parents and her sister. No, she couldn't bring herself to do that, but she could make them more solidly, more powerfully middle-class.
The man who'd called himself GG led the way out of Barista to a sleek Daewoo sedan parked at the curb. Let the story line of her life write itself! Like a typical Bollywood heroine-the eternal innocent, the trusting small-town girl placing herself at the mercy of a confident, benevolent older man-she climbed into the stranger's car. She'd seen this movie a hundred times.
Anjali Bose decided she'd already encountered at least one version of every likely male she would ever meet. Not every man was as befuddled as Nirmal Gupta, or a bully like her father, or a rapist like Subodh Mitra, or a lying cheat like Sonali's ex-husband, or an exploiter like Sonali's current boss, or a brutish john like the truck drivers of Nizambagh. Some were kind but twisted, like Peter Champion. All the fifty-odd matrimonial candidates she'd rejected had to belong in one of those categories. Any young man she had recently met, or might in the future, would fit into one of them-everyone except maybe Rabi Chatterjee. It would be interesting to see where Mr. GG and his big silver Daewoo fit in. In broad daylight in a big city she felt she had nothing to fear.
He started off predictably. "Did I hear you were from Kolkata?" Uh-oh. She rummaged through family memories, arranging a few street names and neighborhoods, just in case. Where should she come from? Ballygunj, Tollygunj, north Calcutta? They were just names to her; if anyone asked about addresses, she'd be exposed. Salt Lakes? Too new. Dhakuria Lakes? No longer trendy. Bowbazar? Sealdah? Too poor, crowded, too dingy. Don't say a thing. Mr. GG continued. "I've never lived in Bengal myself. People say they're all-talk and airy-fairy, but-"
She cut in. "We have our share of dolts, Mr. Gujral."
"Please call me Girish. Or GG."
He didn't press her to reciprocate. As they passed a five-star hotel, he said, "Three years ago, all this was an old apartment block. They got rid of five hundred families and replaced them with two thousand tourists." He pointed out a new shopping center: "Big black-money operation there. Dubai money." He seemed to know the inside story about every new building they passed. "First mixed-use high-rise in Bangalore. Ground-floor boutiques, middle floors for offices, and top five floors, luxury condos." For the condo owners there were two indoor swimming pools, a spa, a spectacular roof garden, and of course full-time maid service. If you had been lucky enough to get your bid in before construction had begun, you'd bought your condo for two crores. A steal. That was three years ago. "Now you could sell it for eight crore plus."
"I'll have to keep that in mind," she said.
Mr. GG laughed.
She read aloud the passing signboards: AID'S LATEST PROJECT!
ACT NOW! LIVE IN I0-CRORE LUXURY AT ONLY 5-CRORE PRICE! Mr.
GG seemed proud of Indian achievement, and the wealth was breathtaking, yet he also seemed somehow ashamed of it. She understood, in a way: Bangalore excited her, but it left her depressed. All the money made people go slightly crazy. And what was this about AIDS? She'd heard about it, a big problem, but in Bangalore they advertise it? "Isn't AIDS…?"
"AID is All-India Development. People used to joke that you can take medicine for AIDS, but it's AID that will get you in the end."
The morning's "Bang Galore" column, which she had read while sitting on her suitcase at the bus depot, was still fresh in her mind. Dynamo had written, "In Bang Galore, crores are the new lakhs," and now she understood. In her experience, crores were like light-years, signifying numbers too large to comprehend. Crores were reserved for serious occasions with mystical gravity, such as government budgets and projects ("1000-Cr. Barrage Planned for Upper Jumna…") or whole populations ("with India having crossed the hundred-crore threshold and Mumbai's masses now pressing three crore…"). A lakh was a hundred thousand. A crore was a hundred lakhs.
Crores were mentioned everywhere. In that same discarded paper, she'd read of a hundred-crore land deal, converting rice paddies into a gated colony (subscribe now!) with schools and a golf course cum health club and a shopping mall with international designer boutiques inside the compound (no crowds!). She'd read charges that an underlying 4.5-crore bribe paid for the land. But no poor farmer was ever going to profit from it. Farmers were as welcome as their bullocks inside those gates. Someone had already found an ancient title to the farmland, or invented it and paid off a judge. If crores were the new lakhs, was everyone automatically a hundred times bigger and stronger just for being here? Did it also mean that if you failed here, you failed a hundred times faster and fell into a hole a hundred times deeper?
Mr. GG drove her past her first Starbucks, her first Pizza Hut, and then a Radio Shack, all wondrous logos, with expansion plans and corporate cultures that she'd studied back at da Gama. At the end of her corporate management class, Peter Champion had told her, only halfjoking, "Congratulations. You know more about Starbucks than any eighteen-year-old girl in Bihar." Seeing the logo was as miraculous as watching a family of white tigers crossing the road.
Mr. GG had gone to an IIT for civil engineering, then to architecture school in the United States, and after returning to India he had picked up an additional MBA from an IIM. He'd had a job in a place called Pasadena, but his older brother had died in a traffic accident, and Mr. GG had to return home to look after his parents, his widowed sister-in-law, and two nephews. His wife had refused to leave the States. "Was she an American girl?" Angie asked.
And he replied, "She was American by birth and Punjabi by name and background, and her parents were very proud Punjabis, but she was raised over there. I find American-raised Indian girls too independent. They lack true family feeling."
She couldn't let that one pass. "There are many Indian girls who've never left India who lack what you call true family feeling, Mr. GG." Maybe she was American after all. "My sister ran out on my parents. She waited for the middle of the night and left a note saying she would not marry the boy they found for her, and when she was ready she would write them again. We haven't heard from her in the past five years!"
How liberating it felt, creating characters, obliterating oneself, being a composite.
"Well, then, she's probably dead," he said. "Five years is a long time for an Indian girl to be gone. A girl on her own, bad things can happen. My wife had a job. A small job, mind you, office manager in a branch bank, one step up from teller. She could have done much better here."
But Angie was already calculating the benefits of staying behind: why would any self-respecting modern girl come to India when she already had a job in the States? Being an office manager sounded like a worthy goal. Why would any childless wife give up America, safely removed from a nagging mother-in-law? But Mr. GG hadn't gone back to Delhi either. He'd taken off for Bangalore because making it here meant making it anywhere in the world.
"And what did you do in the States, Mr. GG?"
"I inspected buildings."
"Then all this new construction must keep you very busy." And very rich, she supposed. It was common knowledge that inspectors made more money than the builders and the architects because of bribes and kickbacks.
"Putting on a hardhat and pawing through pipes is extremely boring," he said. "It's much nicer staying inside my air-conditioned office, drinking pots of tea. Last night I inspected an enormous project in Djakarta that isn't even built yet. We live in a virtual city, Miss Angie, inside a virtual world."
She couldn't tell if he was serious or just playing with her. The long story came to this: "Forget all the clutter you see-Bangalore is the most advanced city on the planet. Let's say a Danish-Dutch consortium puts up a shopping center and apartment block in Djakarta, designed by a Brazilian architect. Dazzling plans, prize-winning stuff. It's going to be the biggest shopping center in Asia, bigger than anything in Japan or China. But none of those world-class thinkers really, intimately, knows the Indonesian building codes or the reliability of the supply chain or the union rules or a million other little things like plumbing and electrical systems and subsoil drainage. Are you with me so far, Miss Bose?"
She wasn't. She hadn't the foggiest.
"Of course."
"Those are things known only in Bangalore. We have the building codes for every city in the world. We have ecological surveys and subsoil analyses for every square centimeter on the planet. So our back-office architects and engineers sit around their computers, modeling the buildings on special software, scan the blueprints, correct the budget forecasts and the deadlines, and then our financial guys run the numbers and we come up with a tighter figure. We can save our clients up to twenty percent. We don't budget for bribes and kickbacks. We're cleaning up the world, one shopping center at a time."
His architectural consulting company, a Swiss-Canadian collaboration, 50 percent locally financed, was three years old. It had started with five architects who returned from the United States and five engineers, and now it employed three hundred people.
So he inspects buildings that aren't there, in cities he's never been to.
"Every business in the world is outsourcing. Without us, the world would collapse. Maybe in a couple of years some version of a Bish Chatterjee will come along and buy us out and we'll sit down and figure out the next big thing."
Idly, she said, "I know Bish Chatterjee's son, Rabi. Wouldn't we collapse without them, Mr. GG?"
"Hold on a second. You just said you know the son of Bish Chatterjee? I'm still processing that. How many Chatterjees are there in Bengal? A guess."
"Crores," she said.
"How many of them might be named Bishwapriya Chatterjee?"
"Lakhs," she said.
"And how many Rabi Chatterjees and how many Anjali Boses, would you say?"
"Crores of Anjali Boses." But maybe only one Rabi Chatterjee, she thought. She flashed a smile.
"Ah-hah! Very cool." He smiled back. "So technically speaking, some cognomen of yours has met the cognomen son of some cognomen Bishwapriya Chatterjee. Maybe you should be a lawyer. To answer your other question: yes, we would collapse without international collaborators. For a while, at least. Then they'd collapse without us."
"You're very sure of yourself, Mr. GG," she said, and thought, but was afraid to ask, What's a cognomen?
"I'm beginning to think I'm not nearly as brazen as you. That's a compliment, by the way."
Bangalore was endless! Just when the tall new buildings began to fade, a new center opened up, a new satellite city with even more office towers, car dealerships, dug-up sidewalks, and cranes, with never a letup in traffic. If Mr. GG intended any funny business with her, it would have to be in front of thousands of people. But she couldn't imagine him even trying. He seemed a round-faced jolly sort, not like Subodh Mitra, whose profile reminded her of a long-snouted street dog.
"Have you seen Chinatown?" he asked, and she thought immediately, So that's his little game! That's where he's taking me. Back alleys, and men in pigtails. She'd read about evil Chinatowns, with their opium dens and concubines.
"I like sweet and sour," she said. Gauripur once had a Chinese restaurant, run by a refugee family from Calcutta's Chinatown. Her parents took her there once and declared the food inedible, although she'd liked it, but it soon went out of business. "Premature sophistication, misreading of the commercial environment," Peter would say. Mr. GG was laughing. Apparently she'd said something funny, or else he was making fun of her.
"I was referring to an American movie. It's about how L.A. really got built. It's about power and deals and corruption and a lot of buried bodies. You can rent it some night."
She remembered the newspaper article from that distant time a few hours ago, at the Bangalore bus station. "Why should I?"
"Because you said you wanted to know what Bangalore is like. Well, it's a lot like L.A., but it took L.A. a century. They had a movie industry, and we've got hi-tech. We're both virtual and we've both got buried bodies, but we'll be a much bigger city in maybe five years."
She really didn't understand. She'd used a computer in the da Gama Common Room, but only for games. Virtual was one of those frightening words. "I have a question. What is an L.A.?" she finally asked.
"Oh, my God-and you say you're from Kolkata? It's Los Angeles. California. U.S.A. Hollywood, the poor man's Bombay."
In front of pokey little shops where pariah dogs still languished in the sun, rows of posters proclaimed: AID PRESENTS: SITE OF FUTURE FIVE-STAR LUXURY HOTEL and FUTURE HEADQUARTERS OF (fill in the name) MULTINATIONAL CORPORATION, ending in the parenthetical (INDIA, LTD.). Painted signboards featured luxury flats underscored with prompts: SUBSCRIBE NOW! ONLY TWO REMAINING! Artist's renderings of strolling couples in a landscaped garden, flowers and fountains, and flashy cars pulling up-all in a place where nothing had yet been demolished or erected and no trees were standing. Future, future, future! And enough of the future hotels and headquarters had already been built and filled to lend credence to any claim. Every company in the world had to have a Bangalore address, and every modern mogul from India, Korea, Japan and the Middle East had to have a Bangalore condo or mansion.
"Who do you know in Kent Town?" Mr. GG asked. He acted as though she had no right even to know any resident of Kent Town. "That's old money. The money's so old, it's moldy. It's so old, they still calculate in annas, not rupees."
She hadn't realized that Kew Gardens was a street in Kent Town. "I don't know anyone. I have a letter of introduction from my old professor to Mrs. Minnie Bagehot."
This too amused him. "A letter from an old professor who knows Minnie Bagehot. So, you've got powerful connections. You want to be a Bagehot Girl, then?"
For the first time, he sounded slightly interested in something she'd said. "I didn't know there was such a thing. What does it mean-a 'Bagehot Girl'?"
"It means a very proper, upstanding girl from a very good family. Or it can mean someone who does a good imitation of being a proper, upstanding girl from a very good family."
"And am I special enough to be a Bagehot Girl, Mr. GG?"
"I detect possibilities."
"You have software for that too? Detecting possibilities?"
"You have a certain style. Even without software I predict that you'll do fine. You'll get a job, no problem."
"Why do you say that? You don't know a thing about me. Maybe I'm a total fraud. Maybe I'm a dolt and I'll flub my interviews." Of course, she was fishing for compliments-you're fresh air, you're radiant, and your English is perfect.
"Your English is decent and you've got a pulse. In Bangalore that means you'll find a job. And if you feel your highest calling is to know the difference between NH and NC or MS and MD or maybe even AK and AR, you'll do fine."
She had no idea. Strange monsters dwelt in the linguistic interstices of the English language. All things were possible. Morays could paint French cathedrals, but at least she already knew the difference between medical doctors and multiple sclerosis, thank you very much.
And then for some reason, perhaps to clear the air of her misrepre-sentations, she confessed, "Back at that Barista, everyone was friendly, but I didn't understand a word of what they were saying."
"It's just Bangalore babble," he said. "It's not meant to mean anything. Just that they're here and have jobs and with it comes the freedom to talk nonsense. They're like locusts-in six weeks they'll be moving on. Chennai and Hyderabad beckon."
"Will I be moving on?"
"I don't think so. I think you'll stick in Bangalore. I hope so, at least."
Chennai or Hyderabad would be unacceptable. She saw herself as a high-quality individual, destined for the best job in the top place, and according to what she'd heard and what she could see, that was Bangalore. If she needed a job, why not start at the top? Why not use her only "contact," as the business world put it? She pulled out some old questions from Peter Champion's class. "What is your corporate culture, Mr. GG? Are you hiring?"
"My 'corporate culture'?" He seemed amused. "I've never been asked a question like that. Offhand I'd say it's making the most money with the fewest people in the shortest time. And yes, absolutely, we're hiring. If you have an architect's or engineer's license from an IIT or an overseas equivalent."
"Now you're being mean. You must be needing someone to answer your telephones. I have a high school-leaving cert and two years of college, B. Comm. with English proficiency, first class."
"Very nice," he said. "Now let me tell you something. Three years ago they called us a 'scrappy little startup.' Now we're 'worldwide leaders of a new industry.' You're just like Bangalore, Miss Bose. Today you're a scrappy, starving little startup. So what's your corporate culture? What's your plan? If you play it right, in three or four years you'll have your own corner office. And by the way, we don't use telephones."
They were finally in a proper residential suburb. Many of the houses were old Anglo-Indian-style one-story bungalows, crumbling and partly demolished, hidden behind towering trees and overgrown vegetation. They had names, and she read some of them aloud: THE HEATHER, SNOW-DROP LODGE, PRIMROSE PALACE, and HYACINTH GLORY. Names right out of British poetry, she remarked. His explanation was that the original builders and later occupiers had refused to believe-or perhaps had known only too well-that they would never see England again. The street names had undergone orthographic decolonization: CHARLESS WRIHGT ROAD and KENT TOWN, or KENTT or KHENNTAON; words changed their spellings block by block.
She'd been noticing the impatient march of gleaming new mansions, built on tiny plots, and three- and four-story luxury apartment buildings with doctors' clinics and fabric shops on the ground floor, wedging their way between the remaining bungalows. Every old mansion that died had given birth to half a dozen offspring.
Every block seemed to contain a small church, an old house converted to that purpose, with a signboard announcing its name and denomination and times of services. Farther on, an immense white mosque occupied an entire block. On the streets around the mosque, on the back seats of scooters and motorcycles, clinging to their husbands and holding their children, were Muslim women clad head to toe in black and looking at the world through thin eye slits. Where had all the Hindus gone?
"This little area is called Bagehot camp," Mr. GG announced. "We're coming up on Bagehot Alley and Kew Gardens Road." The street sign read BHAJOT.
"And there…" He paused for effect. "There in all its glory stands-well, leans-Bagehot House. Every architect in Bangalore has dreamed of getting his hands on that property. There's even a book about it."
Of course, had Angie Bose been intellectually curious (or had Peter Champion bragged even a little about his accomplishments in those months before she'd left), or had she even thought to ask GG, "Oh, who wrote that book on Bagehot House?"-and if the answer had come back, "Some American guy, Champion's his name, if that means anything," Angie's resulting gasp might have forced GG to slam on the brakes. Had she known to drop the name of her benefactor, GG might have corrected his tone of mild condescension and begun treating her as a fellow sophisticate. He might have asked, "You know Peter Champion, that gypsy-scholar who wrote Classic Indian Architecture: Public and Private?" Or "Peter Champion? Don't tell me he's still alive!" But of course she was not intellectually curious, at least not about the realm of books.
In a neighborhood of old mansions, Bagehot House was the largest. It was dark and sprawling, its grounds untended. The outer wall, topped with glass shards, had lost most of its stucco; the old bricks were crumbling, and parts of the wall were worn down to shoulder level. Even from the car she could see holes in the roofs of the larger outbuildings. Other houses at least maintained a pretense of serviceability, with uniformed chowkidars seated outside the gates and pots of flowers lining the driveway. Bagehot House looked abandoned.
"Well, you wanted Bagehot House, and now you've got it." He pulled to a stop around the corner and across the street, facing what had once been the front gates and lawn. "The old biddy is sure to be inside, but it'll take a while for her to hobble to the door. Every developer in Bangalore is praying for her to pop off."
Anjali visualized the developers as vultures circling a dying cow.
No room for sentimentality in this city, she realized.
The house was daunting enough, but she wondered what she owed Mr. GG or what he might try to extract from her. He was the first real man, the first settled, unattached professional man she'd ever met. He'd traveled, been married, and he'd taken an interest in her. In just one morning, three hours into her new life, she'd been lifted from Gauripur into a new city, into a new century and a new currency, where crores were the new lakhs, lakhs the new rupees. She would have gone anywhere with Mr. GG, done anything he asked. Next to Mr. GG, Peter Champion seemed flimsy and Rabi Chatterjee a mere child. All that remained was making a first move, a sign of interest or intent, and she didn't know if she should make it, or even if he would recognize it. And so she just waited.
"You're wondering what comes next, isn't it, Miss Bose?"
He could read her mind. "I am a little frightened," she admitted. "I haven't slept in a bed or eaten a meal since I left." Oops, that was getting too close to the truth. And I haven't bathed and my clothes are filthy and I can still smell the privies and see women and girls climbing into trucks while drivers lifted their lungis… Mr. GG's concerned face drew a little closer, and he took out a handkerchief and daubed her eyes.
"If things get really bad, you can always go back to Kolkata."
How to tell him she'd been to Kolkata three times in her life, and she couldn't even go back to Bihar? Banned from Bihar: that had to be the pits. Bangalore was it, the beginning and the end. What was it that Rabi Chatterjee had told her? She repeated it. "It's all a matter of light and angles, isn't that so?" she said.
That seemed to stun him. "I suppose you could say so." He studied her face; she flashed him a full-wattage smile. He relaxed.
"A girl like you won't be lonely for long."
A girl like me? What did it mean, and who or what, exactly, am I like? Why does he hope I'll stay? And so she voiced the question. "A girl like me, Mr. GG?" He seemed to know her better, or thought he did, than she knew herself. He did reach out for her hand and gave it a squeeze and she drew closer, expecting at least to give or to receive a hug or maybe a kiss, but Mr. GG was the perfect gentleman, which left her even more confused.
"What I meant is a girl like you is full of surprises. Next time we meet, I might not even recognize you. But I'm sure we'll meet again," he said.
She replied, "I'd like that."
"Unassailably genteel, but no mod cons." He thrust a hand out the driver's window and gestured toward the derelict mansion that was to be her new home. "You must be wondering why I haven't directed you to more modern lodgings. Or at least offered you temporary hospitality in my house." It hadn't crossed her mind. "With my parents and my sister-in-law and her children visiting, spontaneity is a burden."
Why is he telling me these things? she wondered.
He squirmed a bit in the driver's seat, and she prepared herself for whatever was to come, but he only released his seat belt, got out, and took her muddy, battered Samsonite from the trunk. Then he opened her door and took her hand to help her to the curb. He handed her his business card. "You're wondering how you can thank me, aren't you, Miss Bose? Not to worry, let's just forget it for today." He scribbled a cell-phone number on the card. "That's for when Mad Minnie makes life inside hell."
With a mock salute, he strode back to the Daewoo. Angie tried to reconcile Peter Champion's Mrs. Bagehot with Mr. GG's Mad Minnie. She was glad, she decided, that she had his private phone number. No shame in accepting help from people willing, even eager, to assist her. A job is the key to happiness, she calculated. A job brings respect and power. Money brings transformation. Stagnation creates doubt and tyranny. Money transforms a girl from Gauripur into a woman from Bangalore.
Anjali waited by the curb until twelve o'clock. No one had entered or departed the property. Two goats wandered through the untended gate and soon lost themselves in the undergrowth. Finally, she followed the goats, dragging her bag behind her. The carved iron door knocker, surely an original relic, had lost its matching plate. A single horn of the brass ram's head thumped into the door's soft, bare wood like a woodsman's ax into a rotting stump.
A stooped old man with stubbly cheeks and chin opened the door. He wore a frayed service jacket like a railroad porter's, but with the name BAGEHOT stitched over an unmended pocket. The elbows were torn and the jacket was not clean.
"I would like to give this to Madam Bagehot," she said in Hindi. The old man, whose first name she later learned was Asoke, silently accepted the torn-off sheet on which Peter Champion had handwritten Minnie Bagehot's name and address and then signed it. He shuffled back inside, leaving the front door slightly open. She took this as permission to enter but then wondered if she should stand and wait on the threshold or take a seat on the long teak bench in the foyer. She stood stiffly by a round hall table with a cracked marble top, keeping her backpack and mud-streaked suitcase close to her for some minutes; then she tiptoed to the bench so she could peek into the hallways and rooms that led off the foyer. The corridors were cluttered with bulky armoires, chests and tall-backed chairs and seemed to stretch endlessly in every direction. She made out a main sitting room and a formal dining room with chandelier. The light was dim and filtered through sun-bleached velvet curtains. A broad stairwell descended from upper floors.
From what she could determine from the foyer, Bagehot House was a storage barn, more a warehouse for unusable possessions than an active residence. In the sitting room a hundred years of carved wood furniture and worn upholstery lay piled in a jumble. The walls were filled with portraits of women in ball gowns and bearded men in belted and braided military uniforms, shoulder pads with tassels and pointed helmets topped with what appeared at a distance to be upside-down banana peels. All available horizontal surfaces had been taken over by silver trays piled with dishes and ivory-handled cutlery. Everything seemed secondhand, even the air. Yet she sensed that every object had once held immense value. For some reason she was suddenly reminded of Peter Champion's words: every note a symphony.
She was hesitant to wander too far indoors. There were probably house rules against curiosity, and she didn't want to ruin her chances even before getting started. After twenty minutes, however, she wondered if she was not being tested, if Minnie Bagehot was not watching from behind a crack in the door just to see how many liberties she would take if she thought herself unobserved.
At twelve-thirty she heard voices from the second floor. She stood at the bottom of the stairs and smiled broadly. Three girls her own age, two of them dressed more or less as she was, in T-shirts and jeans, the other in a green salwar-kameez, were chattering in English as they came down the stairs. Anjali heard a breathless "I told him no way!" and a passionate rejoinder, "They should fire him on the spot!" They were nearly upon her before she was noticed.
"Well, hi," said the first girl down, the no way girl. She had spiked, highlighted hair and was much shorter than Anjali. "I'm Tookie D'Mello-Teresa, formally speaking. So you're the new boarder?" She held out her hand. Her scoop-neck T-shirt revealed deep cleavage and featured the three monkeys named see-no, hear-no, and speak-no, which were circled in red, with red lines struck through them. Where are the stores that sell cheeky T-shirts like the ones Anjali had seen today, cut so deep? Even if she borrowed one, Anjali doubted that she could produce even a shadow of a cleft.
"I was promised a room, sort of promised-I hope I have a place." Her story-the Gauripur teacher knowing Bagehot House's proprietor and orally guaranteeing that she would be accepted as a boarder-seemed too convoluted an explanation.
"Don't worry, there's always a place," said the second, she of the pale green salwar-kameez. She introduced herself as Husseina Shiraz, from Hyderabad. Her voice was warm and low, a good phone voice and, from what Anjali could tell, a perfect American accent. A Muslim girl from fabled Hyderabad, but no black sack and eye slits for her. She was as tall as Anjali and as fair, with the same green eyes. Anjali repressed her first impulse, which was to say Did you say Hyderabad? I changed buses there yesterday! And then she censored a second thought: We could almost pass for sisters, more than my own sister and I could. Husseina also seemed to notice that likeness, staring almost to the point of remarking on it, then turned her head. Sisters, Anjali thought again, only if I dressed up in expensive silks.
"Or space will open up," said the third, much shorter and darker, with glasses, dressed in what looked like an old school uniform of gray tunic and white shirt. "Sunita Sampath," she said. She described herself as "a local girl" and named a small town halfway between Mysore and Bangalore. Whom did she know, to make it into Bagehot House? Anjali wondered.
"Sunita even speaks this wretched language," Tookie joked.
"I can give you lessons," Sunita offered.
When Anjali gave them her full name, with its unmistakable Bangla identifier, Tookie rattled off the names of half a dozen Bengali women she worked with. Refugees from marital wars, Anjali wondered, or well-heeled adventurers from progressive families, pursuing the perfect match? Tookie was obviously Goan, neutralizing Anjali's sour memory of Fathers Lobo and Pinto, dull teacher-priests back at da Gama. Tookie sounded friendly but flaky as she ran down her list of ethnic stereotypes: Goans are party beasts, Tamils dorky number-crunchers, Pathans burly hotheads, Bengalis flabby eggheads. Then she added, "Maybe not all the Bengali guys I know. There's one exception. One genuine Romeo." Anjali was about to interject Not the famous Monish Lahiri? But she was smart. She caught herself in time.
Instead she asked, "Where are you girls off to?"
"Smokes and caffeine," said Husseina. "Then it's hi-ho, hi-ho. Back by midnight."
"After more smokes and booze," said Tookie.
"Actually I don't drink," said Husseina. "My fiancé would not approve."
"Nor do I," added Sunita. "Or smoke."
And I never have, thought Anjali. But I had a fiancé. For an hour, at least. It was a frightening word.
Bangalore worked off the American clock. Everything about Bangalore-even its time-was virtual. Call centers ran 24/7; shifts were constantly starting or ending nine to twelve hours ahead of American time. Peter had said some of the girls even kept Los Angeles or New York time on their watches, calibrated to a mythical home base so they wouldn't be trapped in complicated calculations if asked the time. No "Good morning!" when someone was calling at midnight in America. Some white callers liked to play games, she'd heard, "exposing the Indian." And of course there were the lonely Indians in America, like Mukesh Sharma, trying to tease out phone intimacy from call-center girls.
Then she became aware that all three girls seemed to be looking over their shoulder at the front door. Husseina broke away from the group. "Oh-oh, got to go," she whispered. "Ciao, ladies." She pulled open the heavy front door before Asoke could shuffle to it. The other two tittered. Angie spotted a taxi waiting at the curb. She was about to ask Tookie where Husseina was off to when suddenly a black-sheathed wisp of a woman, with close-cropped white hair, moved like fog into the hallway.
Sunita and Tookie mumbled, "G'day, madam," and sidled out of the hallway, leaving Anjali alone with Minnie Bagehot.
"Cat got your tongue?" the woman snapped. "No greeting? Where are your manners, young lady?" Ten seconds into Anjali's new life at Bagehot House and-from fear or fatigue-she had committed some fatal mistake in etiquette. The old woman turned her back on Anjali and led the way to the dining room. Very straight posture, Anjali noted; Mrs. Bagehot glided rather than walked, the only sound being the clicking of her glasses, suspended on a silver chain, against her strand of pearls. She gripped the carved armrests of a chair at one end of a long, formal dining table and carefully lowered herself into it. She wore white lace gloves without fingertips. Anjali tried not to stare at the bluish tint of the exposed finger pads as they gathered up thin sheets of a handwritten letter. Angie recognized Peter Champion's spidery scrawl.
"G'day, madam," Anjali mumbled. Should I stand? Should I sit in the chair next to her or across the table from her? My clothes must smell, best not to get too close.
"I can't hear you. Did you wish me good day? Rather late in the day for that. Come closer." It was a command. The old woman indicated that Anjali should seat herself in the chair to her left by rapping the tabletop in front of that chair with the knuckles of both hands.
Seen from inches away, Mrs. Bagehot's forehead, cheeks, and throat were deeply wrinkled, and the wrinkles were spackled with pinkish face powder and orangy rouge. Her eyes were large and brown, her lips so thin they couldn't quite hide stained dentures.
Minnie Bagehot waved a gloved hand at the clutter on the dining table: stacks of floral-patterned, gilt-rimmed china dinner plates, salad plates, soup bowls, soup tureens, platters, tea cups and saucers, cake stands, butter dishes, red glass goblets furry with dust, a couple of tarnished silver trays, and a few pieces of crockery Anjali couldn't identify. "What do you think?"
Anjali was being interviewed by an imperious octogenarian whose good opinion she needed. She didn't have to like Minnie, but she did have to humor her if she wanted a cheap, safe roof over her dazed head.
"I am truly speechless, madam."
"This is a historically important residence, as your former teacher has doubtless informed you. In this very room, on these very plates, a very long time ago, His Majesty Edward VII dined, as well as innumerable minor royalty."
And they haven't been washed since, she thought.
Minnie's voice was deep, almost masculine, and her accent, so far as Anjali could determine, perfectly British. Unlike earlier generations of Indians, Anjali was too young to have heard a pure English accent or to have experienced the icy rectitude of the British character. Mrs. Bagehot's questions left her defenseless. "May I ask why you have come to Bangalore?"
No problem; she'd already rehearsed it. "My father just died, madam. I have to support myself." May my lies be forgiven. I am dead to my father; therefore he is dead to me.
Minnie's painted face registered no response. "Will you shame the memory of such company?"
She answered, "I shall never be worthy of royalty, madam."
"But your teacher says you are quite the best English student he has ever had! Is he lying? I must admit I am most fond of that boy. He doubtless told you of our friendship."
"Of course, madam." She lied.
"He wrote his book right here, staying in these rooms, interviewing me and tracking down old pictures. He even made a complete inventory of all the furnishings-their origin, style, provenance, and date of manufacture. It's still somewhere on the premises."
His book? Had the old lady confused Peter with some famous scholar? He didn't just tape village music-he actually wrote a book? She almost laughed out loud: For a minute, I thought you said he'd written a book! She knew Peter as a man who read books, but she never imagined knowing a person who'd actually written one. If anything, that knowledge was more wondrous than taking the gift of his money and knowing his sexual secrets. Then she connected the dots: the mysterious American who had written the very special book that Mr. GG had been praising was her own Peter Champion.
She wondered whether she should lower the expectations concerning her English proficiency or add to this praise of Peter Champion. Mrs. Bagehot arched an eyebrow. "My English was judged very good in my school, madam. But… that was in Bihar." Anjali said it as though she'd uttered a confession. "I've only been in Bangalore a few hours and I've already heard much better English than I'm capable of." Of which I'm capable? Minnie frowned, and Angie scrambled for a save. "Better American English, at least."
Minnie briefly smiled, or twitched her lips. "If you can call that English." She seemed to be taking in everything Anjali had said and for some reason was finding it amusing or not quite relevant. "This residence has ten bedrooms, but only four are kept open. We had a retinue of over one hundred, including drivers, gardeners, cooks, butlers, khid-mugars, chaprasis, bearers, durwans, and jamadars. Now only Asoke is left, and he has worked here for over seventy years. The garage in the back housed twenty motor cars-when I say motor cars, I am referring to Bentleys and Duesenbergs, not the rattletraps Indian people drive. My late husband staged durbars for five hundred guests, nizams and maharajas and the viceroy. For entertainment we knocked croquet balls into the hedges and played badminton under torchlight, and the guests arrived on fabulous elephants decked out in silk brocade, with gold caps on their tusks and wondrously decorated howdahs, making their way in a procession down Oxford Street, which I hope you've noticed is now Bagehot Alley, turning in at Kew Gardens Corner, then up to the porte-cochère. There, each dignitary would disembark down decorated ladders, still stored somewhere on the premises. If you doubt me, there are photographs to prove it."
"I know it is true, madam," she said.
"How so?"
Anjali's talent for spontaneous dissembling never failed her. "I've seen Mr. Champion's book," she said. "Then a photographer named Rabi Chatterjee showed me more pictures. He said there are many wonders in Bangalore, but that Bagehot House is the most important."
"Perhaps you've also seen pictures of my late husband?"
"I don't believe so, no, madam."
She lifted her arm, and Asoke shuffled to her side. "Asoke, album deo," she commanded. Page after page of blurred and faded photos of Raj-era life in Bagehot House had to be admired, awe expressed, weak tea in chipped cups sipped, stale ginger cookies nibbled, and finally Anjali passed the landlady's interview and was admitted as a paying guest with probationary status.
"Unfortunately, no bedrooms are open at the moment," said Minnie, and Anjali must have flinched. But Mr. Champion promised! Where am I to go, then?
"I quite understand, madam," she managed to say.
"No proper bedroom, that is." Anjali detected a softening of tone, and leaned forward. "You might even hesitate-"
Was she being tested? A British game of some sort? A test of her dignity, of her self-respect? Her desperation? Should she grovel?
"I have a shuttered porch, humble but livable, cot, chair, and dresser, two hundred a week, bed tea and one tiffin included."
"That would be most satisfactory, madam." A thousand a month, she calculated, with food, in Bangalore. I can live for months on Peter's gift!
"In England after the war, we would have considered this a very desirable bed-sitter for a single working girl." After assessing Anjali's reaction, she added, "I understand that some ladies in Kent Town are asking for more, with no food," she said, but left the corollary unstated-I am doing a great favor, but if you break house rules, you'll be out on your ear.
Anjali didn't know what the house rules were because Minnie deployed them according to her whim. The only rule she spelled out, in a cross-stitched sampler that hung above the bookcase containing her collection of hardcover romance novels was
ALL GLORY TO THE BAGEHOT NAME
MAY IT NEVER BE DARKENED BY SHAME
Fortunately Tookie D'Mello knew everything and loved to share it.
On Anjali's second day in Bagehot House, Tookie said, "We'll have to go out to Glitzworld some night. I know the bartender. That's my advice to all freshers in Bangalore. Get to know the bartenders."
Everything in the old days had a white version and a black one. It was understood, by Tookie at least, that Minnie could afford the low rents and the weekly arrival of fresh mutton and brandy because of a secret agreement with certain local interests. Rolling off Tookie's tongue, "interests" took on a sinister sibilance. These interests paid a monthly stipend (as long as Minnie lived and not a second beyond) in return for exclusive rights to the deed to the entire Bagehot compound, including the main house. The interests were patient; they apparently had many irons in many fires.
"The thing to keep in mind," said Tookie, "is that Bagehot House is a madhouse. The old lady is crazy. The rules make no sense. The grounds are haunted. The girls who live here aren't what they seem."
Angie could go along with Tookie's cynical theories. In a country that runs on rumor, every event has its own powerful, unofficial motivation. Nothing is as it seems. Everything is run by dark forces. Back in Gauripur, Peter Champion "had to be" a CIA agent. Always, a search was going on for a "larger explanation," but no matter how grand the invention, it was never large enough to explain the failures and disappointments. What else explained Peter's thirty years holed up in Bihar? Who knew what those same voices, the they-saids, "knew" about her? Subodh Mitra had thought he "knew" about her and "her American." Her parents lived in that world, the other side of the great divide.
But in Bagehot House, generations of otherwise discreet and well-mannered girls had constructed an alternative history to explain Minnie Bagehot and passed it on, with new refinements, down the generations. Minnie had poisoned Maxie in order to take over the house and grounds. No, said others, it wasn't poison. It was a stabbing, made to look like the dacoits' doing. It was well known, at least at the time-nearly sixty years ago-that young Minnie and even younger Asoke were having a torrid affair, stumbled into, or over, by the gin-dazed Maxie. Asoke even now only played at being a servant.
Barring mishap, Minnie might go on forever. She'd been a widow for nearly sixty years. Her mind was sharp, but seriously off track, dwelling only on defunct virtues like Shame, Honor, Duty, and Loyalty. ("God," said Tookie, "sounds like something out of the catechism!") Has she told you about the stable of elephants? The Prince of Wales and the rajahs and the nawabs and whatnot? And Rolls-Royces, and dancing guests plucking champagne flutes off gold trays? Just ignore them. The old girl wasn't there. Ever.
Minnie was eighty-two, give or take. She dropped the impression that she and her unnamed first husband, a colonel, had "come out" to India from Dorset when the officer corps of the Indian army was still a recognizable offshoot of Sandhurst, all pukka sahibs in piths and puttees. She suggested he'd died during the Partition riots, protecting British wives and children. In reality, according to the alternative history compiled by decades of Bagehot House Girls, Minnie had entered Maxie Bagehot's life as a twenty-six-year-old divorcee, abandoned by the colonel after Independence and the turnover of the cantonment to the new Indian army. Maybe there had never been an official registry marriage with either man. Minnie was vague and forgetful about the documentary side of her early years.
Minnie and Maxie Bagehot: aka Mini and Maxi, a private joke among generations of Bagehot Girls.
In the Bagehot Girls' snide recitation of their landlady's handeddown life story, Minnie had never been to Dorset or anywhere in England. Minnie Bagehot was the product of the old cantonment culture, the untraceable interaction between an anonymous soldier and a local woman, decades or centuries ago. Minnie was Anglo-Indian, her mother a nanny, her father a stationmaster, and she'd set herself up as a domestic organizer (whatever that meant, but easily guessed, Tookie giggled) for British widowers and bachelors who'd decided to stay on. She'd known her way around the old Bangalore and she showed the proper firmness toward natives and deference to authorities. She knew how things were done and, more important, how to get things done.
She'd made herself indispensable to Maxfield Bagehot and eventually she'd made herself sufficiently irresistible to ensure her proper survival. He'd married her-or at least solidified an arrangement of some sort-sometime in the early 1950s, when he was in his seventies, with not many years or months left on his clock, and she in her late twenties. The champagne days of durbars and decorated elephants, foreign and domestic royalty, were long in the past, long before Minnie, old as she is, had arrived on the scene. At best, she might have sipped tea with the new Indian officer corps. Tookie could do a fair imitation of Minnie. "Sikhs and Mohammedans, the martial races, loyal as mastiffs, not to forget those nearly white chaps, the Parsis and the Anglo-Indians."
The old Brits like Maxie Bagehot knew that so long as their former underlings and aides-de-camp, the proud remnants of a once mighty army, were in charge, they'd be shielded from the rabid majority. Throw in a Gurkha or two and you'd have a functioning country. Everyone knew that India needed the bracing authority and esprit de corps of a military dictatorship, with some democracy around the edges. And just look at what we've been left with today. People dare to call it progress.
When Minnie moved into Maxie's house, he had been a widower with no reason to return to England. His grown children had decamped to Rhodesia and Australia, never to write or visit. A fine house, a loyal and underpaid staff like the adolescent Asoke, a coven of old friends like himself, early tee times, and a British army pension went a long way in those days. So long as the imported whiskey holds out, they used to joke. And Bangalore? Well, Bangalore was a splendid place, so long as the natives kept their filthy hands off it. Bangalore's weather, a year-round seventy-five degrees, with no bloody monsoon and no mosquitoes, was the clincher. No finer place in the Empire, they agreed, not that an empire in the expansive sense of the word still existed.
And so, as a Bagehot-Girl-in-training, Anjali took to heart her first set of instructions: nothing is quite as it seems. There are unbendable rules, but no one really knows what they are. "Bringing shame" can mean anything the Old Dame wants it to mean at any given time. In fact, Anjali's little alcove room had been let to a girl from Mangalore named Mira, a "fun girl" (Tookie's highest compliment) who got "dumped" (the Bagehot House word for sudden eviction) for having come back from work at two in the morning. Nothing strange about that-but her mode of approach sealed her fate: she was on a motorcycle, clinging to a boy.
"My question to you is," said Tookie, "who's watching at two in the morning? Is the Old Dame an insomniac who sits by the window in the dark to catch rule breakers? Or does she force poor, overworked old Asoke to spy on us all night? Even the walls have ears here, so play it cool and close to the vest."
In her first three days in Bangalore, Anjali calculated that half of her mission had already been accomplished. Maybe even more than half: she'd escaped Gauripur, crossed India, gotten to Bangalore, met a "boy," as her father would label Mr. GG, and secured a desirable room. Well, maybe more like a miserable half-room in a moldering but fabled residence. But when she wrote her first letter to Sonali, she didn't want to frighten her sister with tales of what she had witnessed in interstate bus stops on the long odyssey or sound superior about having a room to herself in a mansion and being served by a servant in livery, or having smitten Mr. GG, so she wrote instead that she had arrived safely; that Mr. Champion's friend, who owned a huge house, had rented a prettily furnished room to her; that she expected to meet Mr. Champion's other friend, who ran a job-training school, soon; that, once she had found her way around Bangalore, she would send little Piyali a typically Karnatakan toy. Then she added, as a P.S., the questions that burdened her most: "Have Baba and Ma forgiven me? Have they asked about me?"
She could take time to get settled, rest, fatten up. I was starving! I could have died! Winning a place in Usha Desai's training center and then finding a job seemed a snap-of-the-finger inevitability (she ran through the list of acceptable synonyms: a walk on the beach, a cinch, a piece of cake, a picnic, just to convince herself she wasn't losing it). If she could pass stuck-in-the-Raj Minnie Bagehot's crackpot tests, she would ace very-new-millennium Usha Desai's. So long as Peter's rupees held out, she could tell herself that she deserved some downtime to escape the tyrannical gentility of Minnie's boarding house and explore the city, window-shop in the newest mall where Tookie bought her designer T-shirts, find her way back to the Barista on MG Road and this time order iced coffee with a scoop of ice cream, try Continental cuisine or sushi in a restaurant inside a five-star hotel. She wouldn't be procrastinating; she would be developing the composure and confidence that make for professional success. Her goal was to be relaxed, not just appear relaxed, when she presented herself to Mr. Champion's job-training contact.
Contact: noun. She remembered contact and mentor as loaded words in the most popular of the da Gama first-year B. Comm. courses. An adjunct professor, a recent graduate of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, had taught the popular course. He wore white three-piece suits and drove an imported Prius. According to his business card, which he distributed to his students on the first day of classes, he was the CEO and the CFO of CommunicationsFutures, Inc., which had headquarters in Gauripur and branch offices in Bradford, U.K.,and Hoboken, U.S.A., but he described himself as an iconoclast. "Break your feudal habit of revering masters and elders," he harangued his spellbound students.
Early in the academic year, he'd brought Peter Champion in to guestlecture on developing contacts and networking. "Don't even think of tackling the job market until you have contacts with connections": that had been Peter's mantra. As a diligent student she had memorized the lecture's bulleted points, but until now she hadn't worried about whether they made sense. She hadn't needed to, because she was never going to be in the job market, Baba having already shunted her into the arranged-marriage market. Now she would have to put Peter's business counsel to a sink-or-swim test.
In the curtained privacy of her alcove, she lounged in a silk kimono that Mrs. Bagehot had lent her until she had time to go shopping, and she scribbled contact, mentor, neutral acquaintance, and personal friend as column headings in a new notebook she had bought at a variety store on the corner of Kew Gardens. Ms. Desai and Mrs. Bagehot were contacts. The Bagehot Girls were acquaintances for the moment, but they-at least Tookie and Husseina-might slither into other categories. She invented another classification: informal mentor. Rabi Chatterjee was a reach for any column in her book, since she hoped, but couldn't be sure, that their paths would converge again. She had known him for only a few hours, but she felt close to him, closer than she did to Sonali-di, because he had talked to her as though she was his equal in intelligence and experience. He had opened her eyes to the color and light shimmering under Gauripur's grit. She entered him in both the informal mentor and the personal friend columns.
She kept Mr. GG as her final entry. She savored going over and over again their chance meeting in the MG Road Barista, his offer of a ride to Kew Gardens, the long trip, and every word he had spoken during it… Was he nothing more than a transient acquaintance doing his impersonal Good Samaritan deed of the day? Could she get away with entering him as a contact with international business connections? In the best of all possible scenarios, he was a well-connected, deep-pocketed suitor. Why not? She created a skinny new column: suitor.
Peter would be appalled if he could see how she had expanded on his networking theory. His provocative critiques of Indian business models would have been hard for any student to ignore or forget. Peter didn't pull punches: historically, Indian society wasn't structured around networking and contacts, but rather around family and community. In backward places like Bihar, allegiance to family and hometown and religion and language group and even caste counts more than competence. Peter's lesson of a year and a half ago became a fresh revelation. He could have been talking about Baba. Even in Bihar, Baba's only friends were Bihar-born Bengalis. Everyone else was deemed slightly, or grossly, untrustworthy. Baba couldn't escape the community that he, and the three generations of Gauripur-born Boses, had known. But with his two daughters, even in Bihar, he'd failed.
So that was the secret of Mumbai's and Bangalore's great success. You work at KFC or Starbucks or Barista, and the person working next to you, and your boss, and the people you serve have absolutely no interest in your community or where you came from.
Like at Bagehot House. Before Tookie, Anjali had never been friends with a Goan. In fact, not with a Christian either. Her impression of Goans had been based on the teacher-priests at Vasco da Gama-dull, pious rule enforcers or rule followers, afraid of their shadows. And what of that mysterious group she'd always called "the minority community"? Some of the workers in her father's office were Muslim. Back stabbers, her father called them-traitors and terrorists. Her father complained of their laziness, their four wives and twenty children. "They don't work on our holy holidays. They don't work on their holy holidays. Next they'll demand time off for Christmas and Easter."
Now she was sharing a bathroom with a Muslim and a Christian.
At their first lunch, Tookie had advised Angie to keep two boyfriends: one for the workplace, offering convenient rides and innocent companionship, and a fun-time boyfriend. Tookie's job-site-and-Barista beau was named Reynaldo da Costa, a goody-goody Goan who wanted to marry her before sleeping with her ("What a bore, no?"). Her fun-time guy was Rajoo, a local bartender ("A badass, but what a trip, man").
"How about you, Husseina?" Angie had asked.
"Oh, I have a fiancé, in London."
"Muslim girls-what to say?" Tookie teased. "How do you know this fiancé of yours isn't raising a big English family with a fat blond floozy?"
"I don't." Husseina said that with a smile.
Buzley, buzlum.
USHA DESAI, Mr. Champion's friend, was Anjali's only reliable "contact," but Anjali held off calling her because… she was ashamed to admit it even to herself… she hoped Mr. GG would call and suggest a more exciting career option or spring her from the dull boarding house and fly her off to a foreign city for a surprise vacation: all that was possible in the Bollywood version of her life. She didn't call Mr. GG, of course-what sort of young woman, except a Tookie, initiates contact?-but she found the thought of calling him and flirtatiously playing the damsel in distress very pleasing. She knew she should be grateful that Peter had sent a letter of introduction to Usha Desai, which meant she was assured admission into this woman's prestigious career-training academy and, on completion of the training, a job that paid better than Baba's or Sonali's. But calling Peter's contact and setting that process in motion meant banging the door shut on all that could be, all that might happen if given a chance. Network, or trust intuition?
Anjali promised herself that she would call Usha Desai soon but procrastinated, her excuse being that she wasn't yet savvy about big-city office etiquette. She needed Tookie's and Husseina's mentoring before she made the call. She needed more time in Bangalore. She needed to study Tookie and Husseina closely so that she could pick up their ways of sounding self-confident, or at least professionally competent. She had made a little bit of progress, but not enough.
In Gauripur, she'd slept between Sonali-di and Ma, and after Sonali-di's wedding, just with Ma. In Bangalore, the dark, musty mansion was empty most nights, but for Mad Minnie and arthritic Asoke, because the resident girls were at work; sleeping here, surrounded by noises coming from the untended, overgrown grounds, terrified Anjali. Ghosts and monsters circled her. An angry Baba and a tearful Ma clawed the thin cotton quilt she pulled over her head. She needed time to overcome her fears.
Gauripur memories collided with Bagehot House nightmares. Smothering memories: the same neighborhood noises at the same time, day and night. Chopping the same vegetables from the same vendor at the same market, spicing them and frying them in precisely the same manner, eating at the same hour after her father's nightly three pegs, then piling the dirty cooking pots in the sink for the part-time maid to clean the next morning, putting away the leftovers, and going to bed by ten o'clock at her father's command of "Lights out!" You could run away from home, but not from the rituals of family.
Some sleepless nights she looked down through the shutters at the grounds, now a jungle, but once the setting for croquet hoops and badminton nets. In modern Bangalore terms, it embraced just one city block, a few crores of value, but somehow it engaged the whole soul of India. Anjali heard the nighttime coughing and throat clearing of rural India inside the Bagehot compound. She saw cooking fires in the second floor of the broken-roofed garage that had stored Maxie's fancy cars; the building's windows were long gone. Old Asoke, recognizable because of his white livery jacket, flitted ghostlike in and out of patchy moonlight, carrying trays of food to the shadowy villagers who inhabited this dilapidated realm. Perhaps Minnie's retinue-their children and grandchildren-had never left, though they now bore no connection or obligation to the owner of the main house. More likely, they were invaders from the countryside; like her, they were both refugees and squatters. Staring down at that night world of Indian survival, of rural life in the middle of a thriving city, Anjali asked herself, What makes me more special? Why would Usha Desai accept me as a trainee and help place me in some American company that pays salaries as fat as Tookies and Husseina's?
A girl of fifteen or so, backlit by a cooking fire, straddled the ledge of a window frame, combing out her hair. Oh, Rabi, Angie thought, if you were here now, you'd make a picture of this. Every minute in Bagehot House, day or night, is a portrait in contrasts, lights and angles, old and new, and this strange, indescribable present moment in history. I could be your scout. You might have gone to all those terrible places, the whorehouses and gay haunts, but I can find you scenes you haven't dreamed of! I could carry your cameras and lenses and lights. I'm smart, I notice things, I can learn.
For a week Anjali put off calling Usha Desai. Bagehot House had only one phone, an old-fashioned, heavy black instrument with a short frayed cord. Minnie kept it, together with a bound logbook for recording all incoming and outgoing calls and a wind-up clock, on a card table in the foyer. The rules and rates for its use by boarders were listed in red ink on a piece of cardboard taped to the wall above the table. Only Minnie and Asoke were permitted to pick up the receiver when the phone rang. Boarders were charged for receiving calls as well as for making them; they paid an additional surcharge for calls that lasted more than five minutes. Since Tookie, Husseina, and even Sunita had their cell phones, Anjali was the only one affected by Minnie's rules. She thought the rates unfairly steep. Fortunately, except for Usha Desai and Mr. GG, she knew no one to call in Bangalore, and she invented new excuses hourly for delaying that career-building call.
On the eighth day into her new life, worried that Peter would get wind of her procrastination and write her off as a bad investment, she steeled herself to dial the number for Usha Desai. To use the phone free, which meant without Minnie's and Asoke's knowledge, she had to loiter in the foyer until Minnie retired to her bedroom for her midafternoon nap and Asoke slipped off to the "village" on the Bagehot compound. After two rings a taped message came on, informing callers that they had reached the Contemporary Communications Institute, the location of the institute, and the instruction to leave name, phone number, and a brief message after the beep. Anjali had never spoken to a tape. By the time she started to say her name, the dial tone came on, and she hung up, flustered. Such a bumpkin!
She would be prepared for the answering machine the next time she dialed the Contemporary Communications Institute. She knew she should mention Peter's name with her first breath-that would set her call apart from other supplicants-but should she refer to him as Mr. Champion or as Peter, and should she mimic a regional American accent ("Five dallars!") to show off her aptitude?
At lunch the next day, with Tookie pub-hopping with friends and Sunita away at her job, Anjali took advantage of being alone with Husseina, Queen of Cool. She asked, "If you closed your eyes and heard me for the first time, would you guess I'm Indian?"
Without a second's hesitation, Husseina answered, "Of course. How else could you sound?"
Was Husseina assuring her that an Indian accent wasn't necessarily a demerit for a future call-center agent? Anjali decided Husseina intended her remark as a pat on the head, a well-grounded opinion that a non-desi English accent was seriously overrated. She pursued the point: "How did you come to sound so American?"
Husseina stripped forkfuls of mashed potato off the top of the wedge of shepherd's pie on her plate. "If you really want to know," she said finally, "I had no choice. My parents sent me to the American School in Dubai."
What was the point in Anjali's even trying to compete with the rich, cosmopolitan Husseinas of Bangalore? She didn't stand a chance of getting a job here. Why had she bothered to run away from Gauripur, and run away so melodramatically at that? It was unfair that the Husseinas led charmed lives. Her hands curled in rage around her napkin ring. All of those call-center workers at Barista, who had so dazzled her during her first hour in Bangalore-were they also graduates of expensive foreign schools, getting reacquainted with their parents' homeland?
Asoke shuffled around the dining table, removing plates and the cruet stand. Husseina gulped down a full glass of water. "If I'd had a say in the matter, I'd never have left India." It seemed a startling confession, coming from Her Serene Highness, the never-ruffled Husseina Shiraz. "The American School was a very great mistake. My parents were clueless! Not that anything can be corrected now." Her words were bitter but delivered lightly, and with a smile. "Spilled milk, water under the bridge, sleeping dogs, et cetera, et cetera."
Anjali was dying to ask Husseina about growing up in glamorous Dubai and, if she dared, what Husseina meant by "mistake." She waited until Asoke finished serving dessert, which as always, except on Sundays, was a gelatinous blob that Minnie called blancmange. "I wish we could talk some more."
"We shall," Husseina said.
"I have a favor to ask." Anjali ignored Husseina's frown. "I have a contact in town, a lady who runs a job-training academy of some sort. If I phoned her, do you think she would reject… is my accent, you know…"
"Miss Husseina, Miss Anjali, Nescafé?" Asoke interrupted them. Minnie charged extra for after-dessert instant coffee. Asoke removed the matching sugar bowl and creamer and their coffee spoons without waiting for them to answer. "Sweet course finished, miss?" He clearly meant to hurry them out of the dining room so that he could lock up the dining-kitchen-pantry area and disappear into the village of squatters for the rest of the early afternoon.
Husseina waved him away with an imperious hand. Her blancmange remained untouched in its glass dish. "Let's do a little rehearsal," she said, turning to Anjali. "Pretend I'm that contact. Say what comes into your head when I ask questions. You've just rung me, the contact lady. I'm picking up the phone. What's the contact's name?"
"Usha. Usha Desai." She heard Asoke pace the hallway.
"All right, I've picked up the receiver after four rings," Husseina said. "Usha Desai here." She modulated her voice, making it sound middle-aged and slightly stuffy. "To whom am I speaking? Please state your name and business clearly."
"Hullo, madam…"
"No, no. Never madam. Unless it's a crone like our Mad Minnie."
"Hullo, Mrs. Desai. My name is Anjali Bose…"
"No. No, and again no. How do you know she's married?"
How could she not be, Anjali thought. The woman is middle-aged and she's prosperous. "I don't," she admitted.
"Make mizz your default for her. Okay, give it another go. Usha Desai here. Who is speaking?"
"Good morning, Mizz Desai. My name is Anjali Bose, and I am, I mean I was a student of Mr. Peter Champion in Gauripur, Bihar. He has recommended I enter your training facility."
"That's very thoughtful of your teacher. Have you applied for admission? What are your qualifications for admission?"
Anjali dropped her imaginary telephone. Bumpkin, bumpkin, bumpkin!
"Who is this teacher?" Husseina continued the role-play. "He sounds like a foreigner."
"Mizz Desai will know him," Anjali protested. "Mr. Champion said she knows him. Everybody knows him."
Husseina lifted a skeptical eyebrow. "All right, feedback time. Your greeting to her is fine. Introducing the teacher's name and place are also fine. Say what you need to say simply and precisely: Good morning, et cetera, et cetera. My name is et cetera, et cetera. I was a student of et cetera, et cetera, in whatever town, and wait for the contact's reaction. She might go, 'Oh, dear old et cetera, et cetera. How is he?' And then you come back with 'He's hale and hearty, he sends his et ceteras." Is there a wife? If so, don't forget to mention her, so there's no hint of hanky-panky. Go on to 'My teacher said I must call you when I reached Bangalore to see if you could find a place for me in your training school.' After that, you play it by ear. Those classes can be shockingly expensive. Just so you know what expenses you're committing to."
Husseina's casual aside on fees was the most chilling information yet; Anjali hadn't counted on having to peel off rupees-thousands of them-from Peter's stash for the CCI course.
ANJALI DIDN'T WASTE her energy cultivating short, bespectacled Sunita Sampath. Sunita had nothing to teach her. She was too familiar a type; a middle-class Hindu girl from a nearby small town, the eldest of five sisters and a brother, with a Second Class Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature. Her brother was in Bangalore, but out of work and estranged from the family. She was working to help her family until her father found her a caste-appropriate bridegroom. "I am not a demanding person," Sunita confessed to the Bagehot Girls, "but I'll nix any candidate who expects a dowry."
Poor Sunita, thought Angie; as though being short and myopic was not bad enough, she also underplayed the marriage market. What kind of desirable boy thinks so little of himself that he doesn't demand a dowry? And are you of such little value in the eyes of your father or even yourself that any boy with minimal qualifications and no self-assurance can just grab you? Even my father thought I was worth a matched set of golf clubs. And then she thought, almost ashamed to admit it, Yes, Sunita, you are of little value.
Of the Bagehot Girls, Husseina was the one who could help her most, Anjali decided. But though she tried to corral Husseina in the foyer whenever the other boarders were not around, she couldn't get close to the sophisticated Hyderabadi. Anjali pried, but Husseina Shiraz disclosed next to nothing of her family or her hopes and wants. She deflected Anjali with a wink and a clever phrase: "What happens in Hyderabad stays in Hyderabad." As for her family's fortune, she had a two-word explanation: "Daddy dabbles." Her English was perfect and her voice so low, so appealing, and ultimately so authoritative that Angie conjured her own picture of the Shiraz family: an armada plying between India and Hong Kong, Singapore and the Gulf. Tookie, on the other hand, was compulsively friendly. Instead of "Hullo," she always greeted Anjali with a hearty "Hey, got yourself a guy friend yet? If not, I can set you up."
Tookie was inscrutable. Maybe all Christians were inscrutable. One of Tookie's sisters was a nun in Mozambique, one brother a priest in Massachusetts, but she declared herself a devotee of guiltless gratification. "I have a thing, you see" she'd explained to Anjali, "for boys, booze, and cash. Lots of cash." She had three sisters and five brothers, with whom she communicated only at Christmas. Her stories about her family were amusing but nasty. Her father hadn't worked in fifteen years, since a bus accident left him unable to sit long hours-except on a stool at a pheni bar. Her mother, who didn't believe in divorce, had chosen instead to go crazy and was living in an asylum.
Tookie's tales of her dysfunctional family fascinated Anjali. How could a daughter spill shameful secrets about her parents? She herself had been raised to hide unpleasant family failings from nosy outsiders. Tookie could make violent incidents sound hilarious. She had funny nicknames for her brothers who hadn't entered a religious vocation-Brother Sloth, Brother Gluttony, Brother Envy, and Brother Lust-four of the seven deadly sins. If Husseina was an invaluable mentor, Tookie was a pretty good coach for loosening up.
And today Goan Tookie was greeting Anjali with something more than her usual offer to set her up with a "guy friend." Today she was offering "a Bengali guy hunk."
Men's names came swimming up from Anjali's first morning in Bangalore, at the Barista. Mumbai Girl and her work buddies. All those high-fiving, caffeine-fired call agents with made-up American names: Darren, Will, Mike, Brad, Tom, Fred, Hank, Paul, Josh, Jeff. And Mukesh/Mickey Sharma, the sicko caller from Champagne. She said to Tookie, "Who would that be… Monish Lahiri?"
Tookie dropped her spoon. "What! Tell me again how long you've been in Bangalore?"
She would have to learn to keep her silence. "Actually…" She groped for other Bengali men's names. "I could come up with other possibilities." No need to mention Mr. GG since he was a Punjabi.
"Only one important thing to remember, Anjali." Tookie paused to retrieve the spoon from the floor and flick dust mites off it with her napkin. "Check out the date's income. The body parts are interchangeable."
Anjali couldn't believe that she was seriously considering being set up by Tookie, let alone enjoying Tookie's salacious references to men's body parts. "Girl talk" is how the prim Sunita referred to Tookie's chatter about sex, as in "I have no time for your girl talk and you wouldn't either if you had to send money home."
"How's your brother doing?" asked Tookie.
"He's found work," Sunita answered. That wasn't what Tookie was asking.
The boarders confided in one another mostly over their early lunch. Tookie and Husseina worked all-night shifts-Tookie handled claims for an automobile insurance company, Husseina spelled out mortgage and home-loan options for Citibank customers, and Sunita had a day job, meaning a middle-of-the-night American job, for a home security company called SecurTrix. "You wouldn't believe the number of home break-ins there are in America! Every night I get these 'Help me!' calls, and I have to alert local police to get out to some address I've never seen in some American city… all this from India!"
Over lunch, which invariably consisted of rice-clogged mulligatawny soup, a main course of insipid mutton stew, or goat-meat shepherd's pie, and a dessert-Asoke's culinary skills having been honed as an adolescent in that very house and not been challenged since-Anjali did her best to glean information on work-site etiquette at call centers. For instance, Husseina and Tookie lost their temper if anyone addressed them as call-center agents. They were "customer-support service specialists," and don't you dare forget it. She also squirreled away information on the American mentality and economy. From Tookie's insurance perspective, every car on the American road must be a dented wreck and all drivers were the walking wounded. In an exaggerated American accent Tookie would exclaim, "My job's a bitch! I'm burned out, man!" To Husseina, all Americans were heedless borrowers mired in debt, their home ownership hanging by a thread. From a distance, Husseina said, America might seem enticing, but viewed up close it was a scary place to live. Somehow Tookie always managed to steer the dining-table chatter back to nasty gossip about their landlady.
"You can't trust anything these Anglo-Indians say. If Minnie's precious viceroy was ever in this house, you know Maxie would have locked her away in the servants' shed." Tookie, like Minnie, was not one to disguise her prejudices, except when she thought Minnie was eavesdropping. Anjali drew a deft lesson from Tookie's version of Mrs. Bagehot's life: obstacles are steppingstones. The unsentimental stay smart. They trade up.
For her part, Anjali offered up morsels of a mythical Gauripur cast in a lurid, Bollywoodish light. Ali the gay servant was a big hit with Tookie. In Anjali's telling, she passed her old saris along to him. The comedy of Hindu marriage arrangements-she was careful to omit her horrible car ride with Subodh Mitra-was a winner. Rabi Chatterjee was transformed into an old school friend, maybe the suitor she was destined to marry. She fabricated all this in English because English was the only language the Bagehot House boarders had in common. Besides, English was the language of fantasy. Hindi and Bangla brought only dreary reality.
For the time being at least, Anjali's obstacles were manageable money troubles. She had depleted her stash from Peter Champion (which she now told herself was a merit scholarship and not a loan). To save on expenses, Anjali began to dip into other tenants' bottles of shampoo, squeeze swirls of their toothpaste onto her old brush, scoop dollops of their expensive face creams from squat little jars, and squirt imported cologne from frosted-glass flasks. Gauripur's Anjali had been too timid to experiment with expensive toiletries, and Gauripur's Angie too proud to stoop to stealing. Bangalore's Anjali, a creature of fantasy, considered herself a wily survivor, leveling an uneven playing field.
Besides, Anjali rationalized, Tookie and Husseina could afford to be stolen from. Not that they bragged about their salaries, but they huddled over which make of motorized scooter they should buy, which area of the city made the most sense for investing in a condo, and which banks were courting them most aggressively with offers of low-interest mortgages and loans. They spoke often of "the bottom line," and "long-term interests." Tookie's paycheck had to be astronomical, since she was a "team leader" in charge of ten or twelve "freshers." What must a constant cash flow be like? She vowed to get it together enough to call Usha Desai's number again. Tomorrow, or the day after.
ONE AFTERNOON, WITH all three of her fellow boarders gone to work, Minnie asleep after lunch, and Asoke off to visit the outbuilding squatters, Anjali did some incautious snooping around in the closed but unlocked ballroom, billiards room, conservatory, reception hall, smoking room, and the three ground-floor bedroom suites with attached bathrooms and dressing rooms. The ballroom floor tilted at such an upward angle that she had to catch her breath to simply walk across it. The dressing rooms were twice the size of the room in which she and her mother used to sleep. Two sets of curtains, one thick and one sheer, hung from a velvet-covered pelmet above each window. Sparrows had nested in the sconces and chandeliers, and no one had removed the twigs and twine. Rats had chewed through the brocade upholstery of settees and gnawed on the heavy wooden chaises longues. Geckos darted up and down cracked statues of cherubs.
She was about to sneak out of the ballroom when a row of photographs along the far wall drew her attention. Unlike the usual commissioned portraits of vanished officers with their banana-skin helmets, these were wide, black-and-white landscapes, seemingly military scenes, framed in pewter. As she drew closer, she began to feel sick. Sari-clad bodies lay strewn along a riverbank. The faces were young, no older than she was. Bodies of Sikhs-you could identify them by their turbans-lay stacked like firewood, and walking among the bodies were uniformed British soldiers, grinning broadly. One had his foot on the head of a dead Sikh, striking the pose of the Great White Hunter. Maybe he was the young Maxfield Bagehot. She hoped he was. If so, all actions and opinions of Maxie and Minnie were unforgivable and all transgressions by Bagehot House boarders heroic. Another painting featured a distant row of hanged men, Sikhs with their hair chopped off, hanging by their turbans, silhouetted against the setting sun. Bagehot House was a museum of horrors.
She felt herself swelling with rage, then venom. There had to be a reckoning. She wondered if other Bagehot Girls over the years had taken the same secret tour, and how many "dumps" resulted from their quiet acts of deliberate spite. She missed Peter Champion-he could have explained these photos. Maybe she was the first since Peter to invade this warehouse, to touch the objects and feel the blunt insult of history.
She was tall, and icy. Nothing could touch her. If Minnie had been standing at the door, about to invoke Bagehot House rules, Anjali would have pushed her down and walked over her bones. She slipped a silver goblet under her sweater. In school, she'd never really warmed to the history-book chapters devoted to India's "heroic freedom fighters," and the exalted statues of "martyrs" to Indian independence had left her cold. There were families in Gauripur even today living off the glory of their great-grandparents' arrests and jailings. Now three old pictures had driven home an appreciation she'd never felt.
I am Indian, she thought. I'm Indian in ways no one else in this house is Indian, except maybe poor little Sunita Sampath. I have no roots anywhere but in India. My ancestors were hated and persecuted by everyone but themselves. I understand Sonali-di, even Baba. Finally, she had a test for authenticity: Which side of this picture are you on? Is your foot on my head, are you a hanged fighter, or were you laughing at the sight of men dangling by their turbans and women's bodies clogging the riverbanks? Everyone in my life has tried to change me, make me want something alien, and make me ashamed that I might not be good enough. Why should I want to change my name and my accent, why should I plead for a chance to be allowed to take calls from people who've spent too much money or driven their cars into a ditch?
She sauntered back to her bare cubicle in a better mood. At least now she knew she didn't have to be cowering and grateful. Minnie wasn't just the past-she was that thing the newspaper column had described; she was Chinatown, she was the bones under the building boom. Bagehot House was considered a respectable address, a first stop for young working girls. Bagehot House carried its own recommendation. Minnie was admired for running a no-nonsense boarding house that was good training for the corporate world, but there was nothing admirable about it. Anjali, who'd looked on the British period as a long comic opera, felt a sudden connection to all the Indian dead, and the indignities they suffered. She saw her parents still cowering and still recovering from the scars of colonialism and the dazzling new Bangalore as a city of total amnesia. And it was all a lie. House rules did not apply, not when dispensed from a Minnie Bagehot to a young woman like Anjali Bose. She wrapped the silver goblet in a T-shirt and stuffed it inside her Samsonite.
THE SECOND TIME Anjali tried the Contemporary Communications Institute, she again got the answering machine. But this time the voice on the tape informed callers that the institute's office was closed until the start of the next session, for which there were no vacancies. The answering machine did not accept messages. Anjali wasn't fazed. Usha Desai must have received Peter's letter about her. No way could the "no vacancy" message apply to Peter's best student. In fact, she'd be disappointed in Peter's networking skills if Usha Desai didn't get in touch with her at Bagehot House instead of waiting for a call from her. Just in case the tape allowed it, she launched into an unpremeditated message: "This is Anjali Bose, a student of Peter Champion in Gauripur. He sends his regards and told me to contact you as soon as I got to Bangalore. I am now at Bagehot House. The phone number is-"
But there was a click, and the dial tone came on.
THREE WEEKS INTO her stay, Anjali discovered that she was being charged the same rent for her closed-in porch as the other three boarders, even though those three had huge rooms, each with a high ceiling, an overhead fan, and a door that could be bolted and padlocked for extra security. So what if Sunita's sofa smelled of cat pee, or that the gilt-edged mirror in Husseina's room had a crack right down the center, or that bedbugs drove Tookie crazy?
She asked the others if she should confront the landlady.
"Confrontation is never the way," Husseina advised. "Never tip your hand. A dab of honey is always the answer."
Tookie jumped in. "Definitely, go with the honey. First few days, you're on probation. The old girl wants to make sure you meet her standards."
"What standards?"
"Only the old girl knows. I think it's a low threshold of pain. My first week here a paying guest got kicked out because she picked up her soup bowl and slurped it instead of using the soup spoon. The old girl's a stickler for idiot table manners."
"But there are dozens of rooms just on this wing. Why can't she open up another one for me?"
"Get real! Who knows what you'd find? I can't imagine what's behind any door. Snoop around for yourself. But if the old girl catches you, it's a dump for sure."
"Have you snooped?" she asked.
Sunita looked up from checking her text messages. "Wouldn't dare!" she exclaimed. "The public rooms are strictly out of bounds. Verboten!" She was learning German from language tapes in hopes of getting an early promotion at her security company, which had just been taken over by a German conglomerate.
Tookie laughed. "Why risk everything? As far as I'm concerned, the bottom line's all that counts. We may be inmates in a madhouse, but we're paying bargain rates because the old girl's stuck in a time warp. She thinks the rupee is still five to the dollar. In a newer boarding house, we'd be forking out twenty times more cash for pokey rooms shared with three other girls."
"Actually, I have copped a look," said Husseina. She cast a glance down the long, dark hallway. "We might not be the only roomers in Bagehot House. We're Minnie's only paying guests, yes, but… I'll let you figure out what I'm getting at."
"I took a tour," Anjali admitted. "You can't imagine the trash she's got down there."
"I wouldn't call it trash, exactly," the regal Husseina snapped. "Unsorted, maybe. Like a museum without a curator."
A museum of unsorted, uncurated horrors, Anjali thought.
They left the decision to Anjali with this final reminder: taking the risk of confronting Minnie might mean getting dumped, which was bad for the pocketbook, temporarily at least. But expulsion from the airless Bagehot House, with its cloistered secrets and ornate rules, promised a release into Bangalore's special freedoms-love and adventure. Minnie provided clean rooms cheap and a touch of the Old Bangalore prestige, but at a cost to one's self-image as a modern, quick-on-her-feet, funloving Indian girl.
Shh-she's talking to Maxie's ghost!"
The Bagehot House Girls had gathered at the top of the stairs at twelve noon, waiting for Asoke to sound the gong announcing tiffin, which was Minnie's term for the lunch-hour meal that she had Asoke serve them in an alcove off the padlocked formal dining room. But Minnie was in the foyer, speaking on the telephone. Her back was arched forward as she cupped the heavy receiver with both hands against her left cheek; her voice was louder than usual and sounded giggly-girlish.
"She has a gentleman caller!" Sunita gasped.
Regal Husseina gave an unregal wink. "Tookie, you put one of your guy friends up to this trick, didn't you? Just look at Mad Minnie, she's blushing under all that thick makeup!"
"And you," Minnie simpered. "It's been ever so long! And I'm not getting any younger, but I'm still good for a waltz or two. Or three."
Tookie crossed her heart. I'm above reproach, her look said, as she led the other three down the staircase. Sunita coughed to warn the landlady that she had company in the foyer.
"Oh, splendid! Well, ta-ta, for now." But Minnie didn't hang up. She turned to face her boarders. "For you," she announced, holding out the receiver. None of the young women reached for it. The earpiece was caked with beige face powder. "What's the matter? I'm not charging you for receiving this call, Anjali."
"Me, madam?" The only person who knew where to reach her was Mr. GG. She hoped her excitement wasn't too obvious to Husseina and Tookie. "Anjali Bose here," she mumbled as Minnie pushed the receiver into her face.
And from a vast distance she heard a familiar voice: "Angie, it's me, Peter."
His voice was so American, so not like the Americanized banter of the Willies and Mickeys and Hanks at Barista.
"Peter! I was just talking about you!" It wasn't a lie, not really. She had mentioned his name when Husseina played the role of Usha Desai, to prep for the call she had not yet made. "Where are you, Peter?" Oh, please, please, she prayed, let him be far away from Bangalore.
"It's Peter" were the words she'd most feared. She imagined what he'd ask: Why haven't you called Usha Desai? How much money have you squandered? She hadn't prepared her defense. I tried to call Mizz Desai, but the lines were occupied, I mean, the line was busy. Or a bold lie: I called but she didn't recognize my name. Except that Minnie would then find out she had made a freebie outgoing call and definitely dump her. Or I just came down to the hall to call her. It's mental telepathy! How could she admit the humiliating truth that she had been scared away by Usha Desai's answering machine?
"Well, I'm glad you made it to Bagehot House. You couldn't be in safer hands than dear Minnie's. Now about CCI…"
Minnie, Tookie, Husseina, and Sunita huddled around her, listening in. Even Asoke, waiting at the door to the dining room to serve the soup course, showed interest in Anjali's one and only telephone call in over three weeks. This was one time she didn't savor being the center of attention.
"CCI?" Anjali asked. She felt the idioms and accents she had practiced assiduously in Peter Champion's conversational skills classes desert her.
"Usha's outfit. Contemporary Communications Institute. She said she hadn't heard from you."
"Oh, CCI," she mumbled. So her Gauripur benefactor was tracking her lack of progress. Mumble a noncommittal response; don't admit to procrastination. "I agree…"
"Pardon? You're breaking up, Angie. Bad connection."
"Monday next I am planning…"
"Can't stay over till Monday, but at least I can make sure you have an interview set up with Usha. Listen, I'm flying in for the weekend."
"Here? You are coming?"
"Getting in Friday afternoon."
Tookie mimed a lover's swoon, collapsing into Husseina's arms. "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou"-she mouthed the words.
"This Friday you are coming?"
"Minnie's readying a room for me."
"In Bagehot House you are staying?"
Minnie snorted. "Where else would I put the adorable boy?"
"I thought it best to deliver Gauripur news in person, Angie."
An "Omigod!" slipped out before she could stop it. Why couldn't Peter accept that she had scoured Gauripur out of her life as roughly as her father scooped corns and calluses off his feet with a used razor? She tried to recover by asking after Ali.
"We have a lot to talk over, Angie."
"Does that mean…"
Minnie rapped her lace-gloved fingers on Anjali's back. "Long-distance call," she said sternly. Anjali got the hint and kept her goodbye brief.
"The dawning of a new durbar." Tookie giggled as she grabbed Anjali by the waist and fox-trotted her away from the landlady. "Would you believe the old cow is jealous?"
Asoke ushered them into the eating alcove without sounding the tiffin gong. Their places were set as usual on a wiped-clean plastic tablecloth. As they took their seats, Minnie launched into a soliloquy on the difficulty of hosting a Bagehot House gala, a true durbar, without the help of Maxie, God rest his soul in peace. The number of guests other than the guest of honor had to be limited to eight, because only ten diners could be accommodated at the table in the formal dining room. In her excitement, she'd taken out her hearing aid. "Let's see now, dear Opal Philpott absolutely cannot not be invited. You've all heard me talk of the poor, dear brigadier general's untimely death."
Sunita murmured a dutiful "Yes, madam."
"Dropped dead playing polo," Minnie informed Anjali.
Tookie nudged Anjali's foot with hers. "Last time she told the story, the late, lamented codger took an accidental bullet in the head during a tiger shoot," she whispered.
Asoke shuffled around the table, serving the soup course. Thick cream of cauliflower, Anjali noted happily, instead of the usual tasteless mulligatawny. She was about to dip her spoon into the soup when she caught sight of wiggly, white bugs among the florets. Her mother always soaked raw cauliflower bits in salted water for half an hour to tease bugs out before she started currying them. How was her mother coping? Had her own scandalous running away brought Sonali-di and Baba closer?
"Asoke could hand-deliver an invitation to Ruby. Ruby Thistlethwaite never made it to New Zealand as she'd hoped." Minnie took a dainty spoonful of soup and blotted her lips with her linen napkin, leaving a scarlet lipstick smear. "No. Dear Opal would never forgive me if I invited Ruby, not after Ruby insulted the brigadier general at the Gymkhana after too many gin fizzes."
"Widow Opal's the only living friend she has," Tookie muttered. "And she's barely alive."
By the time Asoke cleared the dessert plates, the landlady had come up with no additional names. She discovered, and casually reinserted, her hearing device. She asked Anjali-almost begged her-if she knew of Bangalore friends of her former teacher who should be invited. Anjali was absolutely sure she didn't want to meet Usha Desai yet, not on Minnie's terms, but what a fluke opportunity to impress Mr. GG with that fact that she knew the American expert on Bagehot House history well enough to get him invited to the dinner party. "Actually there is someone," Anjali offered. "Mr. Gujral is a fan of Mr. Champion's book on your home."
Minnie beamed. "Perfect! Make the call today at your convenience, no charge. Asoke, smelling salts. Oh dear, I'm in such a tizzy about the gala, my head is spinning like a top!"
Asoke pushed the landlady's chair away from the dining table and helped her stand. Then he pulled a small green bottle out of a pocket of his soup-stained livery jacket, unscrewed the cap, and held the bottle to her nostrils. She took a shallow sniff. "You girls are also invited," she said as she allowed Asoke to help her out of the room for her usual afternoon nap.
"How can the old cow stand that smell?" Tookie shuddered.
"More important, where does one buy smelling salts in this day and age?" Husseina said. She turned to Anjali and winked. "Smooth move. Getting former and future suitors acquainted!"