Bagehot House was staging its first durbar in sixty years.
By late afternoon of the day that Peter Champion called from Gauripur, a Wednesday, Asoke had recruited a small army of the compound's squatters to haul musty Raj-era furniture, mildewed velvet drapes, and a rat-gnawed Oriental rug out of a downstairs bedroom, scrub the cracked mosaic floor and water-stained walls with disinfectant, sweep cobwebs from the blades of the ceiling fan, and refurnish the room with lighter furniture from Minnie's private suite: a twin platform bed with a thick slab of foam instead of box spring and lumpy mattress, a dressing table with an oval mirror and upholstered stool, a three-drawer chest, a coat tree, a compact writing desk with hinged lid, and a chintz-covered overstuffed loveseat.
All-well, many-of Minnie's claims about Bagehot House's Raj-era opulence were true. There actually were stacks of silver trays and silver tea services, wooden chests of heavy silver cutlery, cut-glass decanters and goblets, gilt-edged champagne flutes, fine bone china bearing the Bagehot family crest, silver-capped elephant tusks and tiger-skin throw rugs stored on the premises in locations known only to Asoke. Live caparisoned elephants were beyond his powers. But he had the power to-and did-conscript scores of the squatters on the Bagehot compound to do the work that must have been done by liveried butlers, bearers, cooks, and sweepers in the heyday of durbars.
But who was paying for the delivery of live chickens and ducks and fresh-killed mutton, Anjali wondered. Baskets kept arriving: fruits, vegetables, sweets, a cake. And finally a case of French champagne. Champagne? Who could afford such gifts? None of her fellow boarders, not even nosy Tookie, offered a convincing guess. Minnie had mysterious purveyors.
On Friday morning Asoke had a half-dozen teenage boys chop down boughs from flowering trees, which he then stuck in umbrella stands made out of hollowed elephant feet. Minnie herself supervised as two garage-dwelling mother-and-daughter teams rinsed and dried stacks of dinner plates, soup plates, water goblets, punch bowls, and lemonade pitchers. Asoke trained a squatter girl, the one Anjali had seen straddling a window frame and combing her hair in the firelight, in the correct way to wait on tables, then sent her into the snake-infested jungle behind the main house to gather flowers. The girl must have been fearless; she sashayed barefoot into the dense vegetation and came back with two bucketfuls, which Husseina and Anjali had to arrange and rearrange in improvised vases-mainly lemonade pitchers, punch bowls, and old chamber pots-until the arrangements won Minnie's approval. Anjali remembered Peter's little joke: "I have a way with older women." The preparation for his visit was indeed monumental, an overturning of history itself. Out with the pewter-framed portraits of colonels with apoplectic pink complexions; in with brass-topped Indian tables and wall hangings of blue-skinned Krishna, the God of Love, at play with ivory-pale almond-eyed milkmaids. Watching as Minnie, giddy as an infatuated schoolgirl, fussed over plans to make Peter welcome, Anjali felt an odd sense of power. Minnie knew nothing of Ali; Anjali held that secret.
EARLY ON FRIDAY evening, as Anjali paced the cluttered floor of her alcove, trying to decide which of two tops to wear with her slinkiest pair of black cotton pants, Husseina poked her head in. "Which do you think?" Anjali asked. "I don't have a decent mirror in this rat hole. Minnie has some nerve charging me the rent she does!"
Husseina took the tops from Anjali. "I was wondering if you would like to borrow one of my gharara sets. Minnie thinks of tonight as a dress-up night." She managed a theatrical shudder. "Who knows what sumptuous moldy gown she'll deck herself out in."
Anjali thrilled at the chance of greeting Mr. GG in one of Husseina's elegant formal outfits. The one and only time they had met, they'd clicked. And what had she been wearing that first day of her new life in Bangalore? The sweaty, rumpled jeans and T-shirt in which she had finished her odyssey all the way from Gauripur. She coveted Husseina's look of effortless stylishness. But on her, Anjali was convinced, Husseina's expensive clothes would look seductive as well as sophisticated. How could Mr. GG not be overwhelmed?
Husseina's room was huge. Anjali envied the massive four-poster bed, the rosewood chests of drawers and cupboards with lion's-head brass pulls, the sun-bleached velvet curtains and the elaborately framed paintings: golden-haired little girls in frocks with frills and bows, kittens playing with balls of wool.
"Borrow what you like," Husseina urged Anjali, as she unlocked the door to a ceiling-to-floor almirah. "Sunita's ironing the salwar-kameez I'll be wearing tonight. That girl's so selfless, it's almost annoying." The interior of Husseina's almirah glowed with a pastel rainbow of silk. "Key lime, lemon chiffon, apricot, mango, raspberry sorbet. My just desserts, I call them. Go on, take your pick. I'll be in blueberry."
"I couldn't," Anjali said, without meaning it. She fingered the silks, georgettes and organzas.
"Don't you like them?" Husseina sounded hurt.
"They're beautiful."
Husseina pulled two pistachio-green gharara sets out of the almirah. One was decorated with crystal beads, the other with sequins. "Swarovski," she said. "That's what I wore on my first real date with my fiancé after we were engaged. We had ice cream sundaes." She shut the mirrored door of the almirah and pointed to their reflections. "Pistachio matches your eyes." She pulled Anjali closer to her, pressing her body hard against Anjali as if trying to fuse their flesh. "The same greenish eyes, would you believe?"
Husseina's sudden intensity frightened Anjali, but she didn't want to risk losing the chance to borrow an expensive gharara that might inflame Mr. GG.
"We could be sisters," Husseina continued. "If we dressed alike, I bet we could pass for twins." She laughed as she handed the crystalspeckled outfit to Anjali. "I want you to have this. And not just for tonight."
"Oh, I couldn't…" Anjali said, but she grabbed the top. Rich and mysterious Husseina could afford to be magnanimous, so why insult her by refusing her exquisite gift? As Tookie often remarked, there was no point in worrying about Husseina's motives: "She's so rich, she lives on a different planet."
Husseina draped the shimmery top over Anjali's navy stretch T-shirt. "You're going to look very beautiful for your young man."
My young man? She decided Husseina was referring to Peter Champion, not Mr. GG. "He's not my young man." She could take Husseina into partial confidence. "Peter isn't young. You'll see tonight."
"But you call your teacher by his first name?"
"It's an American thing. Actually, he's more like my father's age."
Husseina arched a finely plucked eyebrow. "What's twenty, twenty-five years in the giant scheme of things?"
"He may be older than my father… and he's got someone else."
"Ah, the fatal hesitancy. That fatal someone else."
Anjali couldn't tell if Husseina was consoling her or teasing her. "I think Americans like to say, 'He has a partner.'"
Husseina laid a maternal hand on Anjali's shoulder. "It's all a business arrangement. You'll get used to it."
"In the giant scheme of things." Anjali repeated Husseina's phrase. It was a comforting notion. "It's all a matter of light and angles, isn't it?"
Mr. GG, carrying a huge bouquet of flowers and a copy of Peter Champion's book, was the first to arrive. In the old days, according to Minnie, guests in ball gowns and tails were greeted by a long receiving line that ended with Maxie, Minnie, and the guests of honor. Gout and poverty had forced Minnie to dispense with such Bagehot House traditions. Asoke, instructed to meet guests in the portico with a welcoming salaam, ushered Mr. GG to the threshold of the formal drawing room, then hobbled back to his post. Minnie, majestic in a brocade caftan, had installed herself in a wing chair in the center of the room and Anjali on an ottoman right next to her a full hour before. The other three boarders hovered behind her like ladies in waiting, offering her appetizers of meat-filled pastries and refilling her glass of rum punch.
"That gentleman with charming manners, is he the fan who wants to meet our Peter?" Minnie asked Anjali in a tipsy whisper. "He cuts a dashing figure."
Anjali couldn't get over how dashing! She had remembered Mr. GG as a lithe man with a slight paunch, but here he was, tall and princely in black silk sherwani and white ruched churidar, gliding toward the hostess.
"Where are your manners, child? Go on, get up, introduce him to me."
"Mr. Gujral!" Anjali couldn't hide her excitement. She rose from the low ottoman in such a hurry that the stiletto heel of one shoe got caught in the threadbare weave of the rug, and if limber Mr. GG hadn't managed to tuck Peter's heavy tome under one arm and rush with the bouquet to steady her, she would have taken an unromantic fall instead of merely bruising a few flowers.
"I keep having this effect on you," he joked. Then he turned his full attention to Minnie. "Ah, finally I have the fortune of meeting the chatelaine of this gem of a manse that I have long admired." With a gallant flourish, he presented the dented bouquet to her. "How do you do, madam? Girish, please. Not even my clients call me Mister Gujral."
Minnie accepted the bouquet with a tinkly giggle and handed it to Sunita to place in a vase. "Girish, it is. How do you do, Girish. Thank you for making time to dine with a recluse in a mausoleum."
"Gem," Mr. GG said, air-kissing the gloved fingertips she offered him, "not mausoleum. And speaking of gems"-he returned his attention to Anjali-"has it been a week or a month since… Barista? Itfeels like twenty-four hours." Anjali glowed, flattered by his courtly come-on. "What a transformation, and you're not even wearing glass slippers!"
Glass slippers? She hadn't the foggiest. Her slingbacks were python skin, yesterday's impulsive splurge at a just-opened boutique on VM Road.
Husseina broke away from Tookie and Sunita, and introduced herself to Mr. GG. "Punch? No, you're more champagne than punch." She clapped her hands and called out to someone in the pantry. A rough-looking boy in a sweatsuit appeared with a tray of champagne flutes. "Please." She urged Mr. GG to accept one.
Mr. GG plucked two champagne flutes off the tray and offered Anjali one and Husseina the other.
"Oh, I don't imbibe, GG," Husseina explained. "Excuse me. I have to check on the kitchen staff. They're new." She walked away.
Anjali who had already taken a sip of her first-ever glass of champagne, worried that Mr. GG would consider her a lush. Why couldn't she have taken her cue from Husseina?
The noisy appearance of another guest provided Anjali with a convenient distraction. Two stout youths from the squatters' settlement in the "back garden" deposited Opal Philpott, in her pre-war wheelchair, next to Minnie. Tookie, looking uncharacteristically frumpy in a red velvet dress, fetched a glass of punch for Opal and another gin fizz for Minnie. Sunita made a face at Tookie. "Don't ply her with more," she pleaded as they joined Anjali and Mr. GG. "She needs food. Where is this American anyway?"
Tookie laughed. "Tipsy is the only way I can take the old cow."
"Where is the guest of honor?" Mr. GG pursued the point.
She hadn't the foggiest. He had not been in touch since the call from Gauripur. Flight delays? For all she knew, he had changed his mind about deserting Ali for a whole weekend. In any case, she was enjoying the princely GG's undivided attention.
"Patience, GG," Husseina said.
Anjali envied Husseina's easy grace. "Patience," she repeated. "Peter never breaks his promise."
And Peter Champion, toting a large khaki duffel bag and a cloth book bag, entered the drawing room as though on cue. He wasn't alone. He was flanked by two Indian women in their midforties.
"My dear, dear Minnie." He greeted Minnie with an affectionate kiss on each powdered cheek. "You don't look a day older than you were the last time I saw you!" He handed her a bottle of imported brandy.
"Rubbish, transparent rubbish! But gratefully accepted." Minnie rang a small bell hanging by a silk cord from an arm of her chair, to summon Asoke. "Asoke is becoming a dunderhead! How come he hasn't relieved our guest of his baggage?"
Anjali hung back with Mr. GG in a corner of the drawing room. The Mr. Champion she had known in Gauripur was tall and balding and often wore his thinning hair drawn back in a limp ponytail. The Gauripur Peter rode an ancient scooter, wore a kurta and blue jeans, and shunned the company of women. The Bangalore Peter was shorter than she remembered, wore a dark suit, white shirt, and red tie, and acted chummy with the two beautiful women, one in a tailored silk pantsuit and the other in an embroidered silk sari.
Peter introduced the two women to the hostess as his friends Miss Usha Desai and Mrs. Parvati Banerji. "Where's my brightest-ever student?" he asked, looking around the room. When he spotted the glamorous young woman in a pistachio gharara and realized that she was Angie, he bounded up to her, swept her up in a movie-like hug, complimented her on her big-city transformation, then whispered in her ear, "We have some serious business to discuss tomorrow. Tonight, though, is Minnie's night." Then he introduced her to pantsuited Usha Desai and sari-wrapped Parvati Banerji, adding that Parvati Banerji was Rabi Chatterjee's maternal aunt. He had gone directly from the airport to CCI, he explained, because he had business to discuss with the CCI board.
"Parvati and Usha are partners," he added.
It made sense, coming from Peter, but she would never have guessed.
Usha must have noted her confusion. She smiled and said, "I think Peter means a partnership. Parvati and I are CCI's cofounders." She promised to call Anjali on Monday to set up an admissions interview.
At least Usha Desai spoke English with a slight Indian accent. That made her less threatening. Anjali turned to Rabi's aunt. "I love listening to Rabi," she gushed. "He's so brilliant."
"Around Rabi all you can do is listen." Parvati laughed. Perfect American accent. California, Anjali decided. "He's my only nephew, his mother's the youngest of us three sisters and lives in San Francisco. Tara-that's my sister-was expecting him home for his dad's fiftyfifth birthday, but you know Rabi! He's gallivanting all over India, places I've never been to."
"Will he be visiting you?"
There was no mistaking the pleasure Parvati took in Anjali's admiration of her nephew. "Right now Rabi's somewhere in Kerala on a nature photography kick." She gave Anjali's cheek an affectionate pat. "I feel I know you a little bit. Do you mind my saying that? I don't mean know you, other than from a photo of you in Gauripur. Rabi left it with us before he rushed south. He was into portrait photography when you met him. We-that's my husband and me-loved his Cartier-Bresson phase, but he's over that."
"If he comes back…" Anjali stopped herself, embarrassed. How could she be so forward as to beg for an invitation? She knew what drew her to Rabi, but to his aunt? The spontaneity of her offer of friendship to a stranger about whose background she knew nothing? She envied Parvati's capacity for trust.
"Oh, Rabi will be back. He's in no hurry to return to America."
Mr. GG sidled toward Anjali's group, bearing a plate of savories and a freshened flute of champagne. Anjali had never handled social niceties like introductions. Was it man to woman? Younger to older? How much biography was appropriate? She let Mr. GG hover at the edges of the group to find his own conversational opening.
The CCI partners eased the awkwardness by taking the lead. Hands thrust out, firm shakes, their names. They seemed to recognize Mr. GG's name when he introduced himself. So Mr. GG had to be a celebrity of some sort in Bangalore. Anjali found her voice. "And Girish, I'd like you to meet my teacher, Peter Champion. Peter, Girish Gujral."
The four guests drifted into esoteric conversation about virtual construction and the projects under development by Girish Gujral's firm, Vistronics. Opal Philpott and Minnie Bagehot, stuck in their chairs, were engaged in a loud debate about what precise incident at the Gymkhana had led to the ferocious enmity between Ruby Thistlethwaite and Opal. Husseina was either still in the kitchen, supervising the squatter women's cooking and plating, or was on the empty front porch talking to her fiancé in London on her cell phone.
With the hostess and guests temporarily occupied, Tookie and Sunita huddled with Anjali.
"Isn't he too old for you?" Sunita sounded worried.
Tookie asked, "So have you fixed a date yet? And where have you been hiding this Girish guy? Girl, you've got more secrets and more angles than a Delhi politician. When you're finished with him, can you set me up?"
Not in that red dress, Anjali thought. Some girls are just made for blue jeans and T-shirts with scooped necks, and some of us can wear expensive silk.
Opal and Minnie were about to come to blows with their hand fans over which man was the guiltier party, "that silly goose" or "that cad, that bounder," when Husseina finally reappeared in the drawing room and announced that Asoke was ready for the party to move to the dining room.
FROM HER PLACE at the head of the table, Minnie tapped her water goblet for attention, and then with some gallant help from Girish Gujral, she heaved herself to her feet. In a deep, firm voice she delivered what sounded like a well-rehearsed speech of welcome to all guests: new visitors, old friends, and residents.
"When I inherited Bagehot House and everything you see tonight and much that you do not, I was still a young, innocent, and impressionable woman. Little more than a girl, actually. When my late husband introduced it to me, I confess I was overwhelmed. So overwhelmed that I felt unworthy of it. I trusted its maintenance to my just and brave husband and his loyal staff. Somehow or other, I was led to believe that the newly independent country of India would honor its responsibility to maintain and even enhance its inherited splendors. Many of your country's founding generation-I need not recite their names-have been entertained at this very table. But my years as a memsahib were tragically cut short. They lasted three years, to be precise. And over the next sixty years, I have learned that she who owns Bagehot House owns a sacred trust. And she owns it alone. She must fight for every drop of paint, every pane of glass, every broken tile. Our honored guest tonight has made that case: Bagehot House ranks with the great estates of Europe, with finest extant architecture of the Portuguese or the Mughals or even the British. I include the vaunted Taj Mahal. For over fifty years, I have provided native girls from good families a sense of the lost India. They have learned from this architecture and from these furnishings, and, I hope, from my personal example, that India was once the home of confident serenity. There was poverty then, of course, there has always been squalor in India, and unspeakable suffering… when in the history of India has there not been ignorance and superstition and poverty? But the poverty of sixty years ago was borne with the quiet dignity of their race…
Anjali felt the sting of Minnie's words: your country, your leaders. She could have crushed Minnie's water glass into Minnie's fist. She remembered the row of hanged Sikhs, the smiling white soldiers with their boots on the corpses, the old photos that had been carried out of Peter's temporary bedroom.
Peter rose, surprising Minnie in midsentence. He dipped his head in Minnie's direction, smiled, and thanked her for her hospitality, cutting off the rest of her speech on the deliberate mutilation of the glories of the Raj. He then launched into a dinner-table speech of his own. "That is a reading of history I think we recognize. It is very remote from my own experience, but not alien to generations of visitors and respected authorities.
"I've been thinking back to my first visit to Bangalore some thirty years ago, and to this very house. Bangalore was then a neat and tidy city. Its people were, as always, courteous and helpful. I would go to the hall of records and state my request in writing. Then I would be handed a heavy brass medallion inscribed, as I remember, with a number rubbed so smooth it was nearly invisible. Centuries of petitioners had held it. I would take a seat with other petitioners on a long bench. Patience. The patience of India, that's what struck me most. Hours would pass. Perhaps it is another aspect of the dignity that our dear Minnie spoke of. And that smooth brass medallion felt like an egg entrusted to me for hatching."
He turned to Asoke, who was serving the soup course, and asked him in Hindi, "Where are they now, I wonder? Do they simply vanish? I hope some museum is hoarding them. Perhaps our gracious hostess has stored one or two on the premises."
Asoke put his tray of soup plates on the sideboard and limped toward the pantry.
"In any event, after a few minutes, or a few hours, a gentleman would emerge from the inner sanctum, call my number, and usher me into his chamber. Tea would be ordered. And there, rolled up on his desk, would be the original specifications for any residence or official building that I wished to study. And, strange to report, those elderly officers took an interest in my research. They added suggestions. They were extraordinary public servants. They wrote poetry. They were passionate patriots.
"Of course, such access today is impossible. Original documents confer legal advantage, and modern Bangalore is all about lawyers fighting for advantage."
"Hear, hear!" Girish Gujral interjected.
Asoke returned from the pantry, bearing a brass medallion on a small silver platter, placed the platter on the sideboard, and resumed serving the soup course.
"Well, I'd expect nothing less," Peter said. "An echo of times when both Asoke and I had dark hair on our heads."
Where was Peter going with this nostalgic prelude? Anjali wondered anxiously.
Peter paused for a long sip of water, then, his eyes on Girish Gujral, he continued. "But I'm also a child from overseas, and it was in India that I found my soul. My first Indian home was a village in the hills of Uttar Pradesh. I had been given training in basic Hindi-Bollywood Hindi, I called it-but in my village they spoke a tribal language that had never been recorded. So I was supposed to start teaching public hygiene, but before I could teach anything I had to learn the language my students spoke. I count that as a blessing. If those villagers were to learn anything from me, I first of all had to learn from them. Those two years set me on a course. It set the stage for what I've been doing all my life.
"When I was a young man, I traveled all over India in search of something that was missing. I guess we called it purpose. It even brought me to Bangalore and to this house."
At Peter's mention of her house, Minnie perked up. Opal was preoccupied with gumming some vegetable slivers from her soup.
"I was able to take measurements and inventories and go through city documents. The book I wrote could not be written today. I would not be allowed official access. And for me, this is the most worrisome aspect of modern India-the disappearance of trust. I look at modern Bangalore, and at Delhi and Bombay, and I wonder, what are we creating? Not in our private sector, but in the public? Can we keep that old patience-dignity, as our hostess calls it-and the passion? Have we lost our sense of civic morality forever? The newfound prosperity in this city is breathtaking, and I don't mean to disparage it. Prosperity is a good thing. But I'm not so sure of the wealth that comes from outsourcing. I wish the prosperity was rooted to something. I wish it built something beyond glass monuments. It seems as flimsy as a kite or a balloon. What comes drifting in with the winds might just as easily drift away."
Husseina signaled Asoke with her eyes: it was time to bring in the next course.
"Fortunately, we have experts with us tonight. I've come back to Bangalore to learn, not to teach. I hope my suspicions and my doubts can be laid to rest. Usha I've known since her doctoral studies in Delhi. If anyone can persuade me that outsourcing is healthy, it is Usha Desai. I met Parvati for the first time this afternoon in the CCI office, but I know her nephew, and of course, the world is familiar with achievements of her brother-in-law, Bishwapriya Chatterjee."
Girish Gujral glanced at Anjali with new awe. So, it was that Bishwapriya Chatterjee, the legend. Anjali could almost hear the wheels turning: how is it possible for one innocent teenage girl from small-town Bihar to know the legend's family, and to know Peter Champion? She tried to keep a blank expression on her face.
Peter moved on to acknowledging his long acquaintance with this young lady from Gauripur, Anjali Bose, as her teacher, and his desire to get to know Girish, the force behind Vistronics.
From the pantry, Asoke sent in the teenage girl with the long hair combed by firelight to remove the soup plates and spoons. Her long black hair was tamed into a lustrous braid and decorated with fragrant gardenias. She had a saucy walk, which, Anjali jealously noted, also seemed to catch Mr. GG's attention.
"The defense of an entire industry has fallen on me." Usha sighed.
"Not at all, Usha," Peter protested.
"Peter, if training young Indians to sound convincingly like young Americans is all we do, or even a fraction of what we do, I'd agree that we'd be performing a disservice to our country. But it's not what we do."
The discussion continued through the fish course, for which Minnie had put out special fish knives. Anjali looked to Husseina for cues as to the appropriate cutlery for each course. She was dexterous with her fingers but clumsy with a fish knife. She had never sat at a dining table laid with formal china, silverware, and glassware. Nor had she ever heard serious arguments delivered with genteel humility. At home, she and her parents ate with their fingers and treated dinnertime as the nightly occasion for the venting of grievances. The same grievances, night after night.
She sensed that Peter was mildly rebuking Mad Minnie and challenging Usha. But hadn't he been the one who had lured Anjali to Bangalore, boosting it as the city of India's future and talking Usha up as the deliverer of liberty and prosperity to ambitious small-town women like her? She glanced at her fellow boarders for some kind of confirmation. But Tookie looked desperate to escape for a cigarette, Sunita seemed bored, and Husseina was distracted.
"I'm saying it could be ephemeral," said Peter. "We're tied to American prosperity. If America goes under, we'll drown."
But isn't that what Peter had been teaching her at Vasco da Gama and in his private classes? American corporate models? Starbucks? Regional U.S. accents? Get out of Gauripur before you stagnate? Maybe Usha Desai and Parvati Banerji caught certain important nuances, but she didn't. Under her glamorous outfit, she was still a sad, stupid bumpkin.
Girish disagreed with Peter. "If you dismiss it as outsourcing, then you're simplifying a complicated reality. Vistronics is a kind of outsourcing-we've drawn on a variety of resources-but no one else in the world is doing what we do. We might have started as an appendage technology, but we've evolved. Now we're outsourcing to Kenya and Bangladesh. And do you know what? I see us, in maybe three years, outsourcing our technology to the United States."
Right then and there Anjali fell in love with Mr. GG. He was so right. And so handsome and rich. Not that Peter was wrong, at least not entirely. But Mr. GG cut through Minnie's veils of nonsensical nostalgia and poor Mr. Champion's middle-aged missionary zeal, and he presented a future she longed to live in.
The discussion became more acrimonious through the meat courses. Husseina hustled Asoke and his helpers through the serving of roast duck, chicken fricassee, and mutton stew because she and Tookie soon had to catch their company vans for the all-night shift at the call centers. But Anjali didn't want the meal to end; she didn't want Mr. GG to leave.
Peter's friend Mizz Desai, Anjali noted, seemed to be on Mr. GG's side. She was saying, "When Parvati and I started CCI, our American corporate clients were adamant that our graduates sound American, think American, and fool American callers into believing their customer-service complaints and queries were being resolved by American workers in American cities. That was just four years ago. Our training program had students studying DVDs of American sitcoms, sporting events-"
"And U.S. politics." Parvati broke in. "State capitals, interstate highway numbers, pop stars, rock stars. We had the students study Star magazine. Pathetic, except that it's pretty funny."
"India was déclassé, and Indian-accented English laughed at," Usha continued. "So what does that do to a well-prepared, intelligent, motivated young agent who's mocked as soon as she opens her mouth? That's what we told our corporate clients. Do you want a human answering tape, or do you want a proactive, efficient employee?"
"Some of them came around," Parvati said. "They said just make sure our customers can understand the English that the agents speak." Her own accent was eerily perfect American. She spoke of having trained young women from mofussil towns and villages to handle complicated questions on insurance claims. Women who might have remained illiterate and dependent were now earning decent paychecks. "The point Usha and I have made is that the Indian accent is a sign of competence."
They were the experts, with their professional degrees and their years of experience with comparative business models and communications systems, but they just didn't get it: to a Gauripur runaway like her, Bangalore wasn't about global economics. It was an emotional and moral tsunami; it washed away old beliefs and traditions, the comforting ones together with the crippling, and if you survived, you knew you had the spunk and the grit to rebuild. "Excuse me, madam," Anjali interjected, and she suddenly found herself standing, the focus of everyone's attention. "It's more."
If Usha Desai was irritated at being interrupted, she didn't show it. "Please, Miss Bose, continue," she said, smiling; then she sat down.
Anjali had meant just to listen, just to absorb ideas, but now she was on her feet. And there was Mr. GG, also on his feet, raising his goblet of water in a toast.
Everyone at the table turned to Mr. GG, though none of them lifted their glasses. "Let's hear from the young women themselves," he urged, but his eyes were fastened on unemployed Anjali.
"Go on," Tookie urged Anjali. "You start."
The debaters stared at Anjali. She had their full attention. There was no backing away now.
"Hear, hear!" Mr. GG beamed at her. "Speech, please. We're all ears.
Let words tumble off my tongue, she prayed. "I have been in Bangalore only three weeks. I have no job, no paycheck, and no family here. But I have seen more and learned more in Bangalore than I have from twenty years in Gauripur. Here I feel I can do anything. I feel I can change my life if that's what I want!"
"Brava!" Tookie applauded.
Even shy Sunita dared to speak. "And I do change lives. It's not glamorous work, my life hasn't changed, but every day I save lives of people I'll never see. I work for a company that reports break-ins and medical emergencies of older people living alone, people who can't get up when they fall down. If I wasn't in my cubicle answering calls, American houses would be vandalized and senior citizens would starve to death on the bedroom floor."
Peter looked amused, and Minnie pained. But Anjali was inspired. "The word is… revolution," Anjali said. "That's it. We're soldiers in a social revolution."
"A bloodless revolution, we hope," Usha said.
Mr. GG chortled. "Oh, there will be blood." No one laughed. "That's the title of an American movie," he explained.
Husseina ignored Girish Gujral's attempt to lighten the conversation. "My friend, my sister Anjali is quite correct. You don't have to be a villager to recognize there's a revolution going on."
Minnie rang her bell to disrupt the talk of revolution. But Husseina was not to be stopped. "History tells us you cannot have a revolution without winners and victims. Most of you here are winners."
Most of you? Not most of us? To Anjali, Husseina sounded as removed from the Bangalore scene as Mad Minnie was. What had she unearthed, with her intuitive correction of the intelligent, worldly CCI women? There was a long, awkward silence.
Finally Peter responded to Husseina. "This same conversation is being repeated millions of times tonight, all over India. We know we are in the middle of a revolution, but is that a good thing? Where will it end? Are we riding a tiger, have we started something we can't control?"
"Anything is better than what we had," Tookie snapped at him.
Minnie rapped her fan against the armrest of Opal's wheelchair. Opal had fallen asleep. "Talk of revolution is poppycock! In a country like India, any mention of revolution is dangerous. Pure poppycock!" She gave Opal's wheelchair another vicious rap, but Opal stayed asleep. "Those of us who have lived through a real revolution know how bloody it is. How dare you turn it into a joking matter? We will not sit around my table and laud the virtue of revolution. What you Indians need to do is clean up your refuse and keep your mouths shut."
And with that she broke up the dinner party before Asoke had a chance to serve the dessert course, trifle.
Peter was already at the plastic cloth-covered table in the eating alcove, sipping tea and reading Voice of the South, the local paper, when Anjali came down on Sunday morning, a little before seven. She was glad to see him back in his familiar uniform of kurta and blue jeans. Asoke hovered about him, offering him coddled eggs and fresh batches of toast. Peter had asked her to join him over a very early breakfast both because he had a morning flight to catch and because he wanted to talk to her without the other boarders listening in. She took the facing seat, prepared to be lectured on the many ways she had disappointed him. Okay, she had… what was the damning word Peter had used? She had procrastinated. She was the Ultimate Procrastinator. If only one of the other Bagehot Girls would come down earlier than usual for chota hazari, which was what Minnie still called the day's first meal, and oblige Peter to dull the full force of his vocabulary! Okay, okay, her benefactor should not have had to incur the expense of traveling personally to Bangalore to introduce her to his local contacts. She was sorry; immensely sorry, really.
Peter looked at her over the top of his paper and wished her a subdued good morning, but he didn't put the paper down. It was a brief glance, but Anjali didn't miss its reflection of private despair. How could her failure to follow through pain him so deeply? If she had had Tookie's genius for flippant small talk, she could have eased the tension. She did her modest best. "Your friend, Usha Desai, is so different from the way I'd pictured her." There, she'd brought up the subject of CCI, her reason for running to Bangalore; get Peter's harangue over with. He would keep it short; he had a plane to catch. "I thought she would sound more American."
He folded the newspaper and pushed it toward her. "I don't think she's ever been out of India. Do you read Voice of the South?"
"Only when I find a discarded copy," she said. She didn't add that she had done so only once, and that was at the bus depot.
"Except for Dynamo's column, it's a rag. But you should get it just to read Dynamo. Very up to the minute."
"I try not to waste money on buying anything I don't absolutely need." She lied.
"Well, splurge on Voice. Dynamo has his finger on the pulse." He asked Asoke to remove his plate of uneaten toast. When Asoke was out of the room, he said, "Last night he couldn't take his eyes off you. I had no idea he was a friend of Minnie. She doesn't leave the house, but she stays wired."
He? Who couldn't take his eyes off me? Asoke? And then it all fell in place, click-click-click: he was Dynamo, and Dynamo was Mr. GG, and Mr. GG was madly in love with her. Before she could say a word, Peter continued. "I always said you have a kind of magic, Angie. Somehow or other, you manage to be in the middle of things. Who can explain it?" But she didn't let on to Peter that it was she, not Minnie, who'd invited Mr. GG. Dynamo couldn't take his eyes off of you. She squirreled that away to savor later.
"Well, shame on Dynamo! I thought well-mannered people didn't stare. Good thing I didn't notice; I'd have told him to stick his eyes back in his head." She glowed with pleasure at having ravished smooth Mr. GG into callow worshipfulness.
"He had his driver leave off today's Voice so I wouldn't miss his column." Peter drained his cup of tea and poured himself another. "He's gung-ho on this outsourcing revolution. Maybe I'm just getting old and cranky." And then a shadow passed over his face, as though the sun itself had been eclipsed. Here it comes, she thought. Prepare yourself.
"Angie, have you been in touch with anyone in Gauripur?"
She wondered which way to go. Maybe with the truth. "No," she admitted. "I've been so busy here." She was about to ask if Mr. GG had been in the back seat of the car when the driver dropped off the paper. He must have been hoping for a glimpse of her. She bet he was the kind who planned "accidental" sightings. Maybe he had gotten a thrill just from being driven down her street. She felt sexy thinking of him.
"Angie, I can't put this off any longer…" Peter's voice sounded anxious and gravelly, but he stopped short because Asoke was back from the kitchen, this time balancing a platter of browning banana slices and golden papaya wedges on one palm and a tray of clean cups and water glasses on the other. Anjali eyed the papaya. Minnie had never served fresh fruit since Anjali had moved in. She had Peter to thank for better breakfast fare as well as romance and free career training.
Asoke removed the folded Voice from the table to make room for the fruit platter; then he took out small fruit plates and fruit knives from a credenza. There was pride in his movements. "Finger bowl coming," he assured them.
Peter thanked Asoke and plucked a wedge of papaya off the platter. "Don't tell Asoke I am used to licking my fingers clean," he stage-whispered to Anjali. "And make sure he doesn't throw out the paper before you've read it." He separated the papaya flesh from its green skin with his fork instead of dirtying the fruit knife, with its mother-of-pearl handle. "Whether you like it or not, you'll find out if Dynamo's faith in the Bangalore experiment is justified. You're the guinea pig."
"Guinea pig? Is your American friend calling us guinea pigs?" Husseina entered suddenly. She was wearing her black silk dressing gown over black silk pajamas as she usually did for breakfast, but this morning she had hidden her long, lustrous hair with a black scarf. Some pre-shampoo hot-oil treatment, Anjali assumed. Muslim women from rich families inherited effective beauty secrets. Husseina slid into the chair next to Peter. He acknowledged Husseina's presence with a nod instead of a good morning.
Anjali sensed tension and tried immediately to defuse it. Guinea pigs were not pigs, but maybe Peter had offended the Muslim Husseina by likening call-center agents to them. "Oh, Peter was just chitchatting. How do you Americans say it, Peter? Shooting the breeze, no?"
"No." Peter objected sharply. "I wasn't joking. Bangalore is a lab where a clutch of scientists run bold experiments. You're the specimen. You are not the scientist."
Anjali intervened. "Husseina, pour you a cup?"
"Nor are you the owner of the laboratory." Peter finished his statement.
"Is it ignorance? Or with you guys, is it genetic arrogance?" Husseina stabbed two curls of butter in the butter dish with Peter's unused fruit knife. It was a vicious gesture, and Anjali saw Asoke, who was still hovering solicitously behind Peter's chair, cringe. Some days Asoke served butter shaped as hearts, diamonds, cloves, and aces. Curls, pats, and balls of butter meant either Asoke had been in a hurry or that he was ill. "What makes you think I am not the scientist? What makes you so sure that I am the sacrificial specimen instead?" She smeared butter on a triangle of cold toast, added a dab of marmalade, and handed it to Anjali. Asoke's homemade marmalade was too bitter, but Anjali didn't dare refuse Husseina's demand for solidarity. A sisterhood of guinea pigs. She wished that this morning Husseina had asked Asoke to leave her breakfast outside her room, as she often did, instead of coming down and ending Anjali's attempts to extract from Peter additional flattering information about the lovesick Mr. GG.
Fortunately Peter backed off. "I am happy to be corrected." He glanced at his watch, which prompted Asoke to ask, "Taxi, sahib?" On the rare occasion that a Bagehot House boarder required a taxi, Asoke had a squatter flag one down from an intersection three blocks away. It meant a tip for the squatter, and probably a cut of that tip for Asoke.
"Auto-rickshaw. I'll tell you when." Peter rose from the table. "Asoke, two teas in my room. Do you mind, Angie?"
Asoke was aghast. "This papaya not tasty, sahib?"
"Sahib?" Elegant Husseina let out a scornful snort. "Did this pathetic old man really use that word?"
"Lost my appetite, that's all." Peter helped Anjali out of her chair.
Eager to hear more about Mr. GG, Anjali scrambled out of the dining room ahead of Peter.
"Do you WRITE regularly to your sister?"
It was the first thing Peter said after Asoke had served them tea and left them alone in the cavernous, underfurnished guest bedroom, pulling the heavy door closed behind him. Just banal chatter to put himself at ease, Anjali decided. They sat, Anjali in the only armchair and Peter on the bed, with a low, wide table between them. Peter had stripped the mattress of sheets as though cleaning up was his job and not Asoke's. No need to bristle at him for asking after Sonali-di and accidentally reviving the raw pain of her final night in Patna. She would guide Peter back to the subject of Mr. GG. She needed to make efficient use of the fifteen or twenty minutes Peter had reserved to say goodbye to her in private. "I used to," she said. "I visited her the day I left," she said, turning on her practiced smile. "We are back-ing and forth-ing quite a bit by letter."
"Angie, Angie, don't lie to me."
What was the point of exchanging letters if the sisters couldn't get beyond polite, perfunctory formalities? "All right. If you want to know the truth, she thinks I'm selfish. She doesn't approve of my having left home."
Peter's packed duffel bag and bulging book tote lay on the floor just inside the door, ready for him to carry out to the auto-rickshaw. His multipocketed, handloom cotton vest, convenient for stowing airline tickets and wallet, was laid out at the foot of the bare mattress. She wouldn't allow flashbacks of her quarrel with Sonali-di to beat back fantasies of her future with Mr. GG. She wanted to gush to Peter about love, not family. "How is Ali?" He would want to talk about Ali just as much as she wanted to speak of Mr. GG. She checked his face for an automatic softening. But he stared at her as though she had punched him. She lowered her gaze to his lips, which pursed and parted a couple of times. He seemed on the verge of a profound confession or a disturbing confidence.
"I have very sad, very important news for you," he said. He reached for his vest, extracted a newspaper clipping from the breastpocket sewn into the lining to safeguard cash, and held it out to her. "This is the reason I came.
She recognized a smudged face in the tiny photo in the clipping from The Gauripur Standard: Baba's studio matrimonial portrait. A beadyeyed, mustached young man doing his best to project confidence and purpose. She had seen the original in the family album, which was stored, swaddled in a woolen shawl, in Ma's dowry trunk. Ma was proud of that photo. Anjali and Sonali had caught her taking the album out of the trunk and surreptitiously flipping it open to Baba's studio portrait on several Sunday afternoons while Baba slept off the heavy Sunday lunch of mutton curry. Ma, Anjali realized, was in love with the man she had conjured from that photo, but not with the obsequious Indian Railways bureaucrat her parents had forced her to marry. Ma had nagged Baba constantly. In Gauripur, Anjali had dismissed that nagging as white noise and paid no attention to Ma's words. The Ma who had brought her up must have been a bitter woman. Anjali tried to visualize Ma as a dreamy teenage bride-to-be, swooning over the youthful face in Baba's posed studio portrait. That girl must have prayed hard that she would be selected over rival candidates. Shaky Sengupta was an illusionist, and Anjali now better understood how the art of all the Shaky Senguptas was supposed to work: incite fantasies of permanent prosperity and protection. When disillusionment strikes, get out of range of the victim's vengeful feelings.
And then, click-click. That picture, in that paper. It could mean only one thing. Sonali-di must have selected that photo to send to the Standard. Baba was dead. He must have been cremated within twenty-four hours of his passing. Peter had hurried her away from acid-tongued Husseina so he could deliver his shocking message in private. She turned away from the clipping, which Peter was still holding out to her. She pushed his hand away. As long as she didn't read the obituary, she could pretend he was alive. Baba and Ma could live on, squabbling continuously, which was their version of conjugal togetherness. Peter held out his handkerchief to dry the tears she didn't know she'd shed.
"I can understand your wanting to be with your family at a time like this." Peter sneaked a look at his watch. "I'll take care of your travel arrangements as soon as I get back. If you want to come back here, I can arrange it with Minnie. The Patna-Bangalore return ticket can be left open."
"Patna?"
"Your mother has moved in with your sister. Would you rather I read this," he tapped the clipping, "out loud?"
"No. Just give it to me."
The whole time I've been here, Baba's been dead. I had these dreams, I had moments of forgiveness and moments I wanted to be forgiven. He'd been in my dreams, and now he was a ghost.
She heard a voice, in Bangla: "You killed him." Was it her mother?
"You were too good for that boy. You had to make more money than your father. You had to be your own boss. You never thought what Baba went through at the office. All of Gauripur laughed behind his back, 'There goes Bose-babu, two daughters, one divorced, the other a… a runaway. Went to Mumbai, became a prostitute.' He couldn't take it any longer. He ended his life."
BOSE, PRAFULLA KUMAR. 48, suddenly at his residence in Gauripur. Asst. sub-inspector (Goods), Indian Railways (north Bihar). Third-Generation Gauripur native. Like his father (Dipendu Kumar) and his grandfather (Neelkontho Kumar), Prafulla Kumar joined railway service straightway after obtaining B. Comm. Man of unyielding faith and steadfast integrity, elected Vice-President of the Gauripur Durga Puja Committee for seven consecutive years and was holding that office at his untimely demise. His patrilineal survivors include six brothers, who migrated permanently to Kolkata. He is mourned by his widow Archana Debi, his married daughter Sonali (Das) and granddaughter residing in Patna. He was predeceased by his second daughter. His ashes join cosmic unity. His loss to the Bengali community of Gauripur is immeasurable. We, members of the Durga Puja Committee, mourn his absence with inconsolable hearts and crestfallen minds. Nagendra Nath Bhattacharya, President, Durga Puja Committee.
She had to puzzle out the word predeceased. It was a new English word for her to absorb. You are dead to me! Predeceased suggested a less violent end; her family had pressed the DELETE button and she had vanished into the ether. No corpse, no cremation. They had morphed her into a ghost. Baba was dead, but so was she. She felt dizzy. Her teacher was talking at her, tossing words as if they were life jackets and she was drowning.
"This isn't the time for self-blame," she heard him say. That had to mean that Peter, somehow, blamed her. But she wasn't the one who had done the killing; they had-her father, her mother, her sister. Her father was-had been-"fit as a fiddle" according to the railway doctor, who was also a Bengali and the treasurer of the Durga Puja Committee. The doctor, stethoscope around his neck, would drop by the Bose flat two or three evenings a month, enjoy a whiskey and her mother's deep-fried savories, listen to her father's heart, and pronounce him "fit as a fiddle."
"If you're wondering, it wasn't from a heart attack," said Peter. "But that's the story they're putting out."
What was he saying?
He died "suddenly"; that can only mean a heart attack, a stroke, something to do with high blood pressure. All Indian men suffered from high blood pressure. Salty food, smoking-it was a known flaw.
"I am taking up too much of your time. You'll be late for your flight," she said. For all his empathy for Gauripur students, Peter didn't understand their family problems, especially not hers. She'd grown up with chaos masquerading as coherence. Fear, not steadfastness, had kept her father in dead-end Gauripur. Fear had forced him to follow his father's and his grandfather's footsteps into the railway office of Gauripur. She was an ungrateful, unworthy daughter; she accepted that. She was selfish and recklessly impatient. In fact, she embraced her flaws. Confessing unworthiness delivered a newfound freedom.
Her family had orphaned her. She had not even any pretense of a home back in Gauripur. The Bose flat would already be occupied by another tenant. Ma must have been taken in by Sonali-di. A month ago Sonali-di had been the disgraced, divorced daughter; now Sonali-di was the good, dependable one. She pictured her mother in Sonali-di's drab apartment, fussing over her granddaughter, cooking, cleaning, and faking middle-class respectability while Sonali-di did for her boss whatever he demanded so she wouldn't lose her job. "You have more to go back to in Gauripur than I do." She rose from the armchair, not sure if a good-bye hug was appropriate.
"I don't have Ali to go back to, if that's what you mean." He slumped on the mattress, cupping his face with his hands.
She heard the sobs. "Oh, Peter!" Anjali rushed to her teacher and sat cross-legged beside him on the mattress. Peter's love story emerged in halting phrases. Ali had run off to Lucknow for back-alley surgery. She heard the phrases "instant gratification" and "black-market butcher" over and over again. Peter had counseled, cajoled, finally begged Ali to please be patient while he researched and ranked safe big-city clinics and experienced surgeons. But Ali had acted on a grapevine lead in Lucknow from one of his secretive acquaintances. "Instant gratification" had compelled Ali to risk death or maiming.
"He wanted to be a woman. He thought that's what would make me happy."
Awful as it seemed, as terrible as the judgment, she felt greater pity, greater pain, for Peter than she did for herself. Now Baba was dead, but he had first killed her off. She sat with Peter until Asoke knocked on the door and announced that he had taken it upon himself to flag an auto-rickshaw, which was now in the portico, its meter running.
At exactly nine on Monday morning, just as she had been promised, Anjali received a call from Usha Desai to set up an interview. "I can see you at eleven A.M. on Thursday. The only other possibility this week would be three P.M. on Friday." Though Peter's friend's voice was as soothing as it had been at Minnie's gala, her manner was more businesslike. "I have to be out of town Tuesday and Parvati is busy all day Wednesday."
"Friday, please. Friday is suiting me better," she stammered, to give herself time to prepare for the interview.
"Do you know where we are located?"
A wilier student applicant would have done her research and found out not only the CCI street address but how best to get there by bus. Anjali was relieved to hear Usha Desai reel off the information in a nonjudgmental voice before Anjali could mumble no. "Apartment 3B, Reach for the Galaxy Building, Reach Colony, Ninth Cross, Indira Nagar, Stage 1. If you say 'Reach Colony' to the driver, he'll know. Three P.M. on the dot, please."
"Thank you, Ms. Desai. I'm much obliged."
"Much obliged? You couldn't have learned that phrase in Peter's class."
"No, madam. I mean, Ms. Desai."
Usha Desai's manner softened. "Peter broods over you like a mother hen, you know," she confided before saying goodbye and hanging up.
Asoke appeared in the foyer just as Anjali was slipping out. He tapped the telephone logbook with the ballpoint pen attached to it by a red-and-blue crocheted cord. "Incoming call. Please to sign."
Reluctantly Anjali scrawled her initials, the time, and the date on the line Asoke indicated. Minnie might make an exception for calls to and from her "darling boy," but obviously not for calls to Anjali from the darling boy's business contacts. Anjali had reverted overnight from being Peter's special friend to just another Bagehot House boarder on permanent probation. But Anjali was no longer the impulsive, naive runaway whom Mr. GG had deposited at Bagehot House's rusty gates. Her father was dead. Dead of shame and heartache. Dead, cremated, ashes scattered in some muddy stream or more likely some ditch, since the ghats of the holy Ganges were too far away. She had murdered her father. She felt grief. Grief for her mother, for Peter, but also for herself. The source of true pity is self-pity. She'd read that. Her father had mistaken ambition for restlessness. Why was it wrong for a daughter to want more than what her father could give her? Why couldn't Baba have let her go instead of forcing her to run away?
NOT OWNING A Bajaj Chetak like Tookie's to zip around town and get to know distances between neighborhoods, Anjali miscalculated the time an auto-rickshaw would need to ferry her from Bagehot House to Indira Nagar. She arrived at the Reach Colony complex of buildings twenty minutes late for her three o'clock interview. At least she was looking head-turning chic, she consoled herself, in the designer shirt-and-slacks outfit she had borrowed without permission from Tookie's closet.
Reach for the Galaxy, a four-story building with aspirations to luxury, stood between two identical blocks, Reach for the Stars and Reach for the Universe. So that explained the colony's name. The apartment façades were painted with black-rimmed rectangles of bold colors: red, yellow, blue, and white. The top floors of all three were still under construction, bristling with bamboo lifters and half-walls of raw brick pocked by window cutouts, with outer walls waiting for their final coats of plaster and paint. The boxy balconies of the lower floors were littered with children's toys and draped with drying laundry. A team of uniformed malis watered a still-scruffy cricket pitch, while a construction crew worked to complete the second floor of a supermarket for the convenience of Reach Colony residents. The billboard map indicated a yet-to-be-built shopping center and Montessori school: the Bangalore dream, a self-contained, self-sufficient city for the affluent.
Usha Desai lived in one of the four apartments that took up the third floor. Galaxy had an elevator shaft, but the elevator had not yet been installed. Even the air was tinged with the smell of wet concrete. Anjali had a flash memory of crumbling Pinky Mahal: she had spent her life amid empty promises and the expectation of decay and dissolution. What must watching glass skyscrapers and shopping malls rise intact from hacked earth and churned rice paddies do to a child? At that strange dinner party of Minnie's, she had intuited the Bangalore spirit and blurted out her longing for it. But now, as she stood before the front door of apartment 3B, she wondered if she had the brashness to gut her Gauripur past. Except that she had already lost it. Peter had flown in just to inform her of that loss. Her father was dead. Her mother and sister had chosen to be dead to her. Moving forward was now her only option. The wooden nameplate on the door bore two names: DESAI DATA SYSTEMS and CONTEMPORARY COMMUNICATIONS INSTITUTE. She rang the bell and was let into the apartment by a maid who was about her own age.
"I hope you didn't have trouble finding the place," Usha Desai said. Her voice was creamy-smooth, betraying no annoyance at Anjali's lateness. "I should have told you that I live in a building that looks like a Mondrian."
Anjali wasn't going to let on that she didn't know what a Mondrian was. She was here for one specific purpose: admission to CCI. Stay focused. "It's almost like a painting," Anjali offered.
Usha was wearing a gray salwar-kameez set this time, not an imported couture pantsuit, as she had at the Bagehot House party. A fifty-year-old with a teenager's body: Anjali marveled. She wore her graying hair in a bob and her reading glasses on a silver chain around her neck. Diet, exercise, authority, composure: she radiated self-discipline. And speed: she covered the long, narrow hallway to the parlor as though her legs were motorized. Anjali's mother and maternal aunts were plump, slow-moving women younger than Usha, quick only in perceiving slights.
Usha led Anjali through the parlor into a sunny, spacious room she called her office. It was furnished with a squat glass-topped desk, swivel chairs, filing cabinets, and a colorful Sankhera sofa and armchair set. Lined up, facing the windows, were two large exercise machines, which Anjali had seen advertised in lifestyle magazines that Tookie passed around, and a stationary bicycle. The windows looked out on a part of the Reach Colony that she hadn't noticed from her auto-rickshaw: a partly bulldozed strip of forest, and beyond that, an intact small village. Perhaps the villagers provided the colony's labor; or equally plausible, perhaps they ignored the encroaching urbanization altogether.
Anjali was about to invent excuses for her tardiness-a motorbike had bumped her auto-rickshaw?-but Usha cut her short. "Let's not waste more time. I have a meeting in Electronic City later this afternoon."
Parvati Banerji was seated at the desk, a stack of dossiers before her and more stashed in a leather tote bag, on which the letters PB were stamped in gold paint. Two large dogs lounged at her feet. They looked like groomed, pampered versions of pariah dogs. The larger of the two growled at Anjali. "Chill," Parvati commanded. She calmed the dog by stroking it behind the ears; then she shot Anjali an amused look. "You aren't afraid of dogs, are you?"
"No." She lied, but she didn't approach the desk. Anjali hadn't known anyone in Gauripur who kept dogs as pets. There were packs of stray pariah dogs, which lived off scavenged garbage, and fierce, unleashed German Shepherds owned by rich men to scare burglars off their property.
"How's Mrs. Bagehot?" Usha asked. She checked the large dial of the men's watch she wore on the inside of her wrist, and frowned.
"That was an odd evening, wasn't it?" Parvati added. "The poor dear hasn't been out of her house in forty years." She pulled a slim folder from the stack on the desk. Anjali assumed it contained information on her, though she hadn't formally applied to CCI. Probably the letter of introduction Peter had promised to send. Could Desai Data Systems have pieced together her bio?
"We don't want to rush you," Usha said. "But traffic's bound to be atrocious."
Parvati tossed a treat to each of her dogs. "Mind you, we're not biting the hand that feeds us," she explained.
Usha checked her cell phone. "We're all profiting from the boom in Bangalore, but we wish the city fathers would widen the roads!"
"Well, shall we get started?"
Usha flipped shut the lid of her cell phone. "Hold on a sec. I have to make sure Mother takes her new pills. She's hidden them again, but I think I know where." She darted back into the hallway.
Anjali was grateful for the delay. The thought of being interviewed by two women powerful enough to open doors flustered her. She was confident that she could charm or tease favors from men in positions to help her once she figured out their vanities and weaknesses, but she had honed no strategy for getting what she needed from women.
Parvati swiveled in her chair, pointed to the sofa and chair, and asked Anjali to please sit down. "Make yourself at home. Usha won't be long. She knows all her mother's hiding places." Then she went back to reading dossiers and making notes. Anjali sank into the low-footed Sankhera chair, which turned out to be an uncomfortable choice for a long-legged candidate with frazzled nerves. Newspapers in English, Hindi, and Gujarati lay in a basket on the floor within easy reach, and glossy business weeklies were displayed on the matching Sankhera coffee table. What would more impress Parvati: pretend to be engrossed in a periodical or pretend to be lost in rich inner resources?
"Usha's a saint," Parvati sighed. She wheeled her desk chair closer to Anjali. "When Urmila-behn-that's her mother-took ill, Usha re-signed her job. She'd headed HR-that's the human resources office-at a huge textile company, so building up CCI and being a dutiful daughter was a breeze for her. Her sister and brother had no time for their mother. The brother said flat out that he wasn't about to relocate from Australia. The sister flew in from Canada for two weeks, then flew right back, saying that her husband and children needed her more than her mother did."
Dutiful daughter. Anjali squirmed in shame. How was she to respond when she herself had chosen personal fulfillment over her parents' welfare? "Why is it that Indian women become so selfish when they leave India?" Parvati continued. Anjali's face felt hot. She inferred that her forehead was probably visibly perspiring when Parvati called out to the maid to bring a glass of chilled water for the guest.
"Mr. Champion speaks very highly of her too," Anjali managed to say, but very came out as "wery."
"Of course we have to face the same kind of ethical crisis within India. My parents spent their last years in Rishikesh while I was in Bombay with my husband and sons. We have to go where the jobs are."
The maid carried in three glasses of water on a tray and a plate of cookies. She was wearing a pretty purple salwar-kameez with a beadfringed dupatta. In Bangalore, you couldn't tell who was a student and who a servant.
"In my own case, I left home for the possibility of securing employment that I could be good at," Anjali mumbled in self-defense. At which I can be good? Avoid complicated constructions. Keep your mouth shut until the formal interview starts.
PARVATI WAS STILL going through the pile of dossiers and Anjali still unfolding her legs, crossing them alternatively at the knees and at the ankles, when Usha reappeared. "Well, at least you two have had a chance to get acquainted. Would you like a cup of tea, Anjali? Coffee is doable too. Kamini doesn't have to get to her computer classes for another couple of hours."
In Bangalore, even servants took computer lessons! In Bangalore, even servants were in competition! Soon Bangaloreans would be importing their domestic staff from Gauripur! Anjali declined the offer of tea or coffee.
"Maybe we could start by having you tell us a bit about your background," Usha suggested.
Don't get rattled. Live up to the image you cut in Husseina's and Tookies clothes. Fake coolness under pressure. "P'hine, madam!" She saw right away how her saying "P'hine" had jolted both interviewers. "My name is Angie Bose." She rattled off her rehearsed self-introduction. "We're Bengalis, but my family settled in Bihar long ago. My Hindi is better than my Bangla, and my English is better than both-"
Parvati interrupted her. "So we should call you Angie?" She checked off something on one of the forms in front of her. "Angie, not Anjali. Fine. The last name's still Bose?"
"Did you catch the difference, Angie?" Usha asked. "Fine, not p'hine. Efff. Flower, frost, forest, fever, full, fool, fluff, fish, fat, fell, fast, five, fair, far, farther, further…for want of one right consonant sound, et cetera?"
She had failed the interview even before it had begun! For want of the correct fff sound, her future might be lost. Peter's gift of money wouldn't last forever.
"Excuse my nervousness. Fine."
Parvati consulted the form again. "Angie, what are your career goals?"
"You are asking for my job goals, madam?" She had prepared for this question. "My ambition is to be a call-center agent. It is my vocation."
"Call-center agent!" Usha snapped. "Please. Customer-support specialist. U.S.companies are very uncomfortable with any term that smacks of outsourcing."
Parvati intervened in a soothing voice. "We're interested in you as a person. We want to know what makes you tick, what makes you leave family and hometown, what sports you play or follow, that sort of thing."
"You want I should recite my job qualifications? Highest marks in first-year B. Comm. course in statistics, certificate in advanced conversational English, diploma in American English…" She let her voice trail off because Usha was playing impatiently with a tiny bronze trophy in the shape of a woman golfer on the neat desk. Move on to sports and hobbies. "Forward on the da Gama women's field hockey team…" Should she brag about having been a mean ball flicker? Ma and Baba had been ashamed of her unwomanly stick-wielding skill. "Silver cup in inter-missionary-schools girls' Ping-Pong tournament…"
Usha Desai held up her hand, signaling Anjali to stop.
You want I should? Ping-Pong? You loser! But Parvati was trying to be kind. "Would you describe yourself as a people person? Or are you a loner who likes to be by herself and read a book?"
Okay, she had an ally in Rabi Chatterjee's aunt. Good cop, bad cop?
Parvati's roller-ball pen hovered over boxes to be checked off on the form. "Do you consider yourself a logical thinker or a go-with-the-flow, roll-with-the-punches type?"
She hadn't read a single novel since graduating from high school. "People person," she admitted. Not that she wasn't a reader, but what she pored over were fanzines about Bollywood hunks. She was a movie groupie, not a bookworm. Ask me about Shah Rukh Khan or Akshay Kumar, go on, she silently challenged the two middle-aged women.
"How about logic versus intuition?" Usha asked.
"I'm a very logical person." Anjali craned her neck to read the upside-down words listed on Parvati's form: perfectionist; pliant; cautious; argumentative; compromiser; team worker; leader; secretive; loyal; competitive; manipulative; tough negotiator; diplomatic; impulsive; stubborn; plodder; methodical; serious; solemn; critical; fun loving; fun to be with.
She had wants, she had longings and terrifying yearnings, oh, she had so, so many passions and obsessions, but none was named on Parvati Banerji's official interview form! You're failing! Suddenly a dam gave way inside her. "Do you want an honest answer? You want to know why I left Gauripur?"
"I'm told it's the best policy," Usha said evenly.
Instead of the pithy, sanitized answers she had prepared for likely questions, she heard herself offering these composed and cosmopolitan career women crazy fragments of Gauripur life, which made up the story of her own half-formed life. She unburdened on them Sonali's bitter compromises, Nirmal's fatal humiliations, Peter's hazardous generosity to her and his pained love for a young man (oh, my God, I've exposed him), her father's fatal despair, the criminal selected for her to marry: the injustice, the indignity, the powerlessness. Her happiest memory was walking in Gauripur with Rabi.
"What can you know of people like Sonali and me and Nirmal? I had to get out before I died like Nirmal. You ask me what motivated me to come to Bangalore. I didn't have a life in Gauripur, like Peter has. I had to go. I am here to dictate the terms of my happiness."
"Well, I'm glad Peter is dictating his," Usha remarked. She handed Anjali a tissue from a packet in the pocket of her kameez.
It was only then that Anjali felt tears welling. She panicked. "I didn't mean to expose him." There was no taking back the confidences she had unleashed. Then, defensively, she explained, "I'm not the only one who knows. Rabi took some pictures. He described Ali as the most beautiful woman in Gauripur."
"We don't find anything wrong with it." Parvati put Anjali's dossier back in the pile. "Are you feeling better after that emotional detour?"
"My advice, whether you want it or not, is this: don't launch into a self-indulgent screed during an interview." Usha extracted a sheet from a loose-leaf binder.
Screed: the day's new word. "I'm terribly sorry," Anjali said. "I don't know why all that gushed out of me. It just happened. I don't mean to make excuses for doing badly."
Usha handed the sheet to her. It was a photocopy of the poem "The Raven." "Do you know what the title refers to, Angie?"
What a relief! "A ray-venn?" she asked. "A large black bird with a big white beak? Like a kite, or a crow?" She was back in Peter's apartment, the pencil in Peter's hand punctuating each word. Again, again, no, again. Without being asked, she began to read the sheet. The "weak and weary," the "quoth the raven," the "never-more" all presented themselves fully formed, natural, without a pause.
"Peter prepared you very well."
Did that mean she was too advanced for the CCI program? "I still need training, madam."
"Well, thank you for coming in this afternoon." Parvati signaled that the interview was at an end.
"We'll call you. And please convey our good wishes to Mrs. Bagehot."
On cue Kamini came out of the kitchen to show Anjali out. In the hallway, Anjali thought she overheard a soft laugh and something like the words "Well, definitely not your cookie-cutter…"
On the auto-rickshaw ride back from Indira Nagar to Kew Gardens, Anjali went over and over the questions the CCI partners had put to her, how stupidly she had answered them, and how she should have responded. Husseina's prepping hadn't seen her through the actual interview. She was anxious to describe her experience to Tookie and get her feedback before Tookie left for her pre-work-shift bar-hopping ritual.
When she got back to Bagehot House, she changed into her own clothes before knocking on the barely open door to Tookie's room. All three of her fellow boarders were there, giggling and whooping about a column in Voice of the South, which was spread out on Tookie's bed. Sunita had found the paper on the top of the credenza in the breakfast alcove.
"Hey, girlfriend!" Tookie high-fived her. "Take an eyeful of this! That Dynamo dude's got it right! Totally nailed us!"
Even Sunita managed an air-high-five and made room for Anjali on the bed so she could read Dynamo's column.
THE NEW MISS INDIA
By Dynamo
Dynamo this week is smitten. Congratulations to the New Miss India, Aziza Habib, selected last week in Goa by a panel of Bollywood heavyweights and at least one befuddled Hollywood B-lister, as the next Aishwarya Rai, self-evidently the most beautiful woman in the world. (By national consensus, any Miss India automatically doubles as the world Number One). Once again, the time-tested standard of Indian beauty has been upheld: simpering, doe-eyed, classically trained dancers in traditional attire (until they strip down to Western evening gowns and spike heels) in front of dozens of slobbering producers with checkbooks and film scripts at the ready.
My question: Which of these lovely ladies is more in touch with the soul of modern India?
Every week, Bang-a-lot (or maybe I should call it Bang-amour) receives (not "welcomes") several thousand young women from every part of this great country. They arrive by plane, by train, even by intercity bus. They come from the great cities and the mofussil towns. From Lucknow and Varodara; from Gauripur and Dhanbad. They represent all religions, all languages. They come bearing school-leaving certificates, letters of reference from old teachers, but most important, bearing hope and energy that is infectious. They don't simper, they don't dance (don't ask them!), and they don't wear saris or evening gowns. They stride in comfortable salwars or in blue jeans, and Bang-amour had better get used to it and be grateful for them. Our torpid institutions-like Bollywood standards of compliance-will try to beat them down, but that train has already left the station.
While the moguls of Mumbai thrust their retro beauties in our faces, these call-center hopefuls manage to attract a smaller but more discriminating cadre of admirers. Bollywood has no use for India's women, apart from ornamentation. Far from Bollywood being India's international calling card, it cynically holds its "heroines" and their vast male audiences in a stage of infantilism that should cause us great international shame.
Anjali read it through twice before Husseina grabbed the paper from her. Mr. GG had sneaked Gauripur into his column because he had fallen head over heels for her. Husseina said, "This guy must be dating a customer-service agent."
"You mean he's having sex with one?" Tookie grinned.
Anjali wasn't ready to let them in on Dynamo's identity-it was her special secret. She snatched the paper back from Husseina and read the column out loud, enunciating each syllable as self-consciously as she used to in dialogue drills in Peter Champion's advanced conversational skills class. How could her friends miss the obvious fact that Dynamo, aka Mr. GG, had penned a love letter to her, and to her alone? "He says he is smitten," she protested. "Smitten, that's how he describes what he is feeling. Smitten's a chivalrous word!"
"He sounds more like an anthropologist to me," Husseina countered. "We didn't exist until he discovered us and talked us up. We're his newest tribe."
Sunita missed Husseina's irony. "Hip-hip, Dynamo! I'm very okay with being a new breed of working girl."
"Please, career women." Tookie corrected her. "Dynamo's smitten with a harem full of career women." She refreshed her lipstick and blush. "Well, got to hit the Brigades so I can get through my shift. Anyone coming along?"
Husseina and Sunita declined, but Anjali eagerly accepted and hopped on behind Tookie on her Chetak. She was in the mood to celebrate Mr. GG's public homage to her. On the night of Minnie's dinner party she had been certain he would call her the next morning. No, she had expected him to surprise her by showing up at the front door of Bagehot House with a bigger bouquet than the one he had brought Minnie. What a sly suitor!
One of Tookie's co-workers bought the first round in the first pub; strangers bought the next several. A secret admirer (of Tookie or of Anjali-it wasn't clear which) bought them second drinks at the second pub; a leering man in a Ralph Lauren shirt bought the next; a plump middle-aged man wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses indoors bought a few more. By this time Tookie began to repeat what she was saying, and Anjali felt more like an Angie. After the third pub, Angie lost count of who paid for what at which club. This was only the second night she had tasted liquor. In Gauripur the fast boys in Peter's American English conversation group went out for beers after class maybe once a month, but they'd never asked her to join them, and if they had, she'd have been genuinely shocked. Women from respectable middle-class Gauripur families didn't drink, period. Her father drank local whiskey in private, as other neighborhood men who could afford to probably did. The really rich-and there were only four or five such families-guzzled, it was said, imported scotch and brandy in the back rooms of the Gauripur Gymkhana; menial laborers soaked up cheap country liquor in remote shacks on the fringes of town and apparently dropped dead on their way home. She'd read in the papers about illicit liquor distillers being jailed.
By eleven-thirty, when the bars were required to stop serving drinks, Angie was throwing up on the sidewalk. She couldn't remember any Bajaj Chetak ride back to Kew Gardens, let alone negotiating the steps from the front door to her room. At the lunch table the next day, Tookie gave her a big vitamin B-50 capsule and a lecture. There were two kinds of call-center boozers: big-city, upper-class practiced hedonists who could hold their liquor, and American-wannabe village bumpkins who got so puking drunk that they missed work. Angie prayed that Mr. GG hadn't witnessed her pub-crawling escapade the night before.
It was Parvati Banerji who called Anjali with the news that she had been admitted to CCI's two-week cram course and that she was expected at eight o'clock in the morning of the following Monday for the first class, which would be held in Reach for the Galaxy 3A, the apartment adjoining Usha's residence.
"Usha usually runs the accelerated program, but I'm pinch-hitting for her this session." Parvati went on to explain that Usha's elderly mother had undergone complicated surgery to repair a heart valve, and had suffered a post-op stroke. "Severe deficit, I'm afraid." There was no predicting when Usha would return full-time to CCI.
"Pinch-hitting?" Was that a form of Eve-teasing?
Parvati laughed. "Don't sweat it. Our course includes an intensive culture-familiarization unit." She made arrangements for the CCI minivan, which ferried students to and from the institute, to pick Anjali up in front of Bagehot House at 5 A.M. on Monday. "The gate's still standing, isn't it? Or have hoodlums carried it away to sell as scrap iron?"
"Not to worry, please. I'll be ready for shuttle bus by five minutes to five."
So her life, her real life, would begin (again) in six more days.
She was determined not to be overwhelmed by fellow students at CCI as she had been by call-center employees at Barista her first morning in Bangalore. To give herself an edge, Anjali went to bed early that night. She needed rest; she needed not just sleep but dream-free sleep. Banish the ghosts and night monsters. But she couldn't keep Baba away. He stormed into the room, screaming, "You're dead to me!" She scrunched her eyes shut and whispered, "You're dead to me too. Go haunt the 'Perfect Jamai Candidate' instead. He killed us both and got away." Baba melted into Subodh Mitra, and Subodh Mitra pulled her to a sitting position on the bed and, morphing into Ali, dirty-danced around her to a Bollywood soundtrack.
SOMETIME THAT NIGHT Husseina rattled the beaded curtain to Anjali's makeshift room, startling her out of bed. She'd been deep in an anxiety dream, and she wasn't certain she was actually awake. Husseina pressed a painted fingernail to her full lips and motioned for Anjali to follow her down the hall to her room, which, according to Tookie, had been the bridal chamber in which Minnie the blushing bride had yielded to the dashing, retired army officer Maxie.
A half-packed overnight case lay open on the four-poster bed. "I believe in traveling light," Husseina announced, smiling. "I'm leaving tonight. I'm so outta here, I'm already gone."
I'm awake, Anjali thought. This is happening. A dump? But that was unthinkable; Queen Husseina was not subject to the fate of commoners like Mira of Mangalore or Anjali of Gauripur. "Going home? Why?"
Husseina took in Anjali's look of shock and broke into a laugh that ended in a coughing fit. "Home to Hyderabad? What exactly is my home?" She flung open the doors of her almirah and pulled out the dresser drawers. Opulence! What was it like to be so rich? Anjali wondered, coveting Husseina's clothes, shoes, jewelry, stacks of wispy lingerie. She felt Husseina's arm slip around her shoulder and smelled Husseina's brand of sandalwood soap. She gave a squeeze, then let go. "They'll look even better on you, Anjali."
Of all the questions she had, Anjali could only ask, "Why?" Meaning, why are you torturing me with this display of all the stuff you own?
"Why am I leaving, or why am I giving all of this to you?" She tugged a slinky silk kameez off its hanger. "It's just a little trade, Anjali. My clothes for your clothes. It's a very good deal for you. It's something girlfriends do all the time, isn't it? Your jeans and T-shirts for all this. I'll throw in some underwear too." She scrunched the kameez into a ball and lobbed it into the open suitcase.
"But my things aren't even clean." Why are you doing this? But as in a dream, the words wouldn't come out.
"So? Bobby wants me to wear jeans tonight. Did I ever tell you about Bobby?"
"You're engaged to a cousin in London," said Anjali. "At least that's what you keep saying."
"Bobby is my fiancé."
"He's in Bangalore?"
"Actually he's not my fiancé. We've been married for seven years. He flew in from Bradford last week. He's so British, I barely understand him."
Bradford dimmed the luster of Husseina the Mysterious. Married seven years? But she's my age! This was dream logic.
Husseina flopped on the bed beside the suitcase. "I haven't been entirely honest with everybody. Actually, I've never been partially honest with anybody. But an air of mystery can be useful in a town like Bangalore, can't it? The truth is always more shocking than lies, isn't it?"
Now who was babbling? But Husseina was talking into a vacuum, not expecting answers. "I've noticed," she continued, "you have a touch of mystery about you."
Guile, yes; mystery, absolutely not. "I wouldn't know the first thing about acting mysterious," Anjali mumbled, to which Husseina merely cocked her head and retorted, "Perfect! Appearing innocent is the first step."
Anjali flashed on something Peter had said. Innocence and blindness, something about them, but she couldn't keep them straight.
Husseina finished packing a toiletry kit and threw it into the suitcase. Then she lifted a Gucci purse off the topmost shelf of the almirah and fanned out a fistful of passports. "My father does favors," she said. "People give him things, like free identities. What should I be tonight? American? No, too risky. Canadian? Too cold. Qatari, Aussie, Kiwi, Pakistani, Indian… what-oh-what does poor little Husseina want to be? Where do I want to go? I've got all the damned fucking choices in the world. I've got a million of them." She gestured at Minnie's posters of bland British children playing with pets. "I'm like those fucking little girls up there on the wall. Instead of kittens, I've got passports. That's all I've got."
Tookie, not Husseina, was known for foul language and cursing. Anjali rushed down the hall to her room, plucked her jeans from the clothes tree and her T-shirts and underwear from the hamper, and then hurried back. Husseina had already stripped down to her bra and panties. "Thanks," she said, "just leave them on the bed. You can pick up your loot tomorrow."
Dream logic or not, she was beginning to put things together. Husseina had acted strange the night of the gala. She'd been out on the porch, with her cell phone. And she'd been angry, difficult at breakfast. Husseina's careful façade was chipping.
"Did you give Minnie a month's notice?"
"Fuck the bitch! End of one chapter."
"What should I tell Tookie and Sunita?"
"Tell Tookie anything you want. Be careful with Sunita-she's not as innocent as she seems." Then Husseina launched into a monologue. "I'll go out as an Indian tonight. Maybe I'll be an American tomorrow-that might be fun. Fake identities are very easy when your whole life's been one big fucking fake." She read through the list of Panzer Delight cities before slipping the T-shirt on. "Been there, done that, except maybe Bratislava. Good to know there's still something worth living for." She was shapelier than Anjali. Then the jeans; there too, tighter and less boyish. She tucked her hair under Anjali's most colorful scarf, talking all the while.
"You want to hear something funny? I never told anyone this. When I was in the ninth grade at the American School in Dubai, I got a phone call from my father to go to the airport, pick up a ticket, and fly back to Hyderabad right away. I thought someone had died! When I landed, he showed me a picture and said, 'This is my auntie's grandson. They call him Bobby. He is a good boy, with a scholarship to London. What do you think of him?' As if anyone cared a fig! His next words were 'You will be marrying him tomorrow.' I was only thirteen, and I had a paper due on Hawthorne and I wondered if getting married could be an excuse to pass in the paper late. Of course I couldn't mention it, but no one would believe it anyway. Truth is always more shocking than lies, isn't it? The next morning my new husband left for England and I went back to the ninth grade and no one knew I was married. My husband didn't write to me at school. He didn't write me, period."
None of this made any sense to Anjali. Even Husseina's tone confused her. She was like a spinning top. There was an edge to every word she spat out, as though the next one might come out in a scream.
The mysteries of Hyderabad, explained but not comprehended. Panzer Delight, with all its umlauts, would be out the door and heading back to Europe. And she, Anjali Bose, ghost of Gauripur, would inherit a closet full of expensive silks. No one had ever confided in her, except maybe Peter and Ali. She owed Husseina something heartfelt, or profound, but she was a girl with a bright smile and nothing else. She dredged up Peter's words again, hoping she'd got them right. "Innocence is attractive in a girl," Anjali said. "But I suppose blindness isn't."
Husseina stared. At last she said, "I almost misjudged you. You're not a vulgar little bore like Tookie. Or a cunning little mouse like Sunita. You see through things, don't you? And you keep quiet. It's important to keep quiet."
"I'm just repeating nonsense. Forget anything I say." She didn't like the way Husseina had stared. She didn't like Husseina's tone, the nakedness of her disregard for their fellow Bagehot Girls. Anjali had tried to act smarter than she was, remembering phrases from smarter people, and Husseina had caught on and given her credit and now she knew some kind of uncomfortable secret about Husseina that she shouldn't.
When Husseina spoke again, it was woman to woman, her hand on Anjali's shoulder, her face up close. "Frankly, I don't know where I'm going. Bobby said, 'Trust me and don't tell anyone you're leaving,' but he doesn't trust me. He's sending a car and driver, that's all I know. Life is very strange, isn't it?"
"Nothing is the way it seems," Anjali replied. "It's all light and angles."
"Yes, light and angles. May I quote you?" asked Husseina.
And I must remember truth is more shocking than lies, Anjali counseled herself as she went back to her alcove. That was the only lesson she could extract from Husseina's unforced revelation. She left the door curtains parted slightly and sat cross-legged on her cot in the dark until Husseina-sexy in her T-shirt and jeans, tiptoeing with a suitcase, unlit cigarette in her lips-slipped past.
She couldn't wait for morning to usurp Queen Husseina's room and role in Bagehot House. As soon as she was certain that Husseina had fled, and even imagined a car slowing down and a car door's muffled slamming-one of Minnie Bagehot's fantasy Duesenbergs pulling up to the curb with the lights dimmed-she went into the master bedroom, trying on one luxurious silk kameez after another and admiring her new silk-enhanced curves in the cracked full-length mirror. And then she stretched out, for the first night in her life, alone on a full-size mattress. Husseina's room was dark, private, and silent.
It was accidental that she awoke early, at six A.M.,, in that unfamiliar room. Perhaps Tookie had come back late from work and brushed against the door. Or dogs had barked, crows had cawed, or it was something internal, a sense that something was wrong. Maybe Husseina had never left, no driver had turned up, she was lying, or she was crazy. Women didn't give up a closet of silk for a handful of unwashed cotton. She didn't need an alien rainbow of expensive silks in exchange for her faithful Gauripur T-shirts and well-worn jeans. She would miss the umlauts of Panzer Delight. The umlauts, not a handful of passports, were the true sign of a wider world.
And so she got up, straightened the bed cover, grabbed a white salwar and kameez-the closest thing in the closet to a sleeping suit-and went back to her old room for one last nap. Her old room might be loud and dusty, but at least she'd earned it. Husseina might still come back. It might all have been a dream. She again fell asleep, but almost immediately, it seemed, there came a light shaking of her curtain, and then it opened. Minnie Bagehot invited herself in. It was seven o'clock.
"What are you doing here?" Minnie demanded. "I watched you leave."
"I would certainly have given you proper notice, madam."
"But I distinctly saw you sneak out of the house with bag and baggage in the middle of the night. And smoking a cigarette, no less. Smoking on the public street!"
So, it's true: Minnie never sleeps and never forgets. She marks little demerits on a piece of paper, adding up to a dump. "Madam, I have never smoked a cigarette in my life. It must have been Husseina."
Minnie grabbed Anjali by the shoulders. "You have the audacity to lie to me? You think I'm a blind and cuckoo-in-the head old lady you can cheat? I recognized your clothes. Husseina would never dress like you or that Goanese." She let go of Anjali and shoved her down hard on the cot. "It's a matter of breeding, simple breeding. You are the sad outcome."
Anjali's first impulse was to throttle Mad Minnie and stuff her Raj-era vocabulary back down her gullet. Her fingers itched to circle the scrawny throat, its papery wrinkles caked with pink foundation. Anjali's father died because she had brought dishonor to the family. Guilt reheated itself into rage against everything that Bagehot House stood for.
"Breeding?" She could feel her voice rising. "You want to talk about breeding? You stupid old cow! You are not God. You are not even British-ha! You are one of us, and you are living on Indian goodwill!"
Minnie backed away, perhaps startled by the sudden increase in volume. She lived inside a bubble and had selective hearing. She didn't respond to words, to insult, or to anger. "I haven't the slightest idea of what that little outburst was about. What are you trying to tell me? A rich Mohammedan stole your clothes and ran off without paying her bill?"
Anjali could hear the unspoken implication:stole from the likes of you? "I haven't the p'oggiest notion why, but she wanted to trade clothes."
"Preposterous!" But for the first time, Minnie looked perplexed. She shuffled toward the door curtain. "I'm sure there's a simple explanation."
"Things like that are never simple. It is just a mystery." Let it go at that, for now.
Minnie dismissed complications with a wave of her hand, like a spoiled child. Or like self-appointed royalty with severe memory loss. Her self-confidence bounced back. "Perhaps I misidentified the culprit."
"Culprit, madam? What is the crime? She left without saying good-bye? We pay you a month's rent in advance."
Minnie's voice dropped to a soft, conspiratorial mumble. "Just yesterday, I came to a very difficult decision. It's that prostie, that Goanese. I should never have let her in. I'm sure she's conspiring with dark forces. She has to go." Then Minnie explained that since Anjali was the protégée of that dear boy Peter, she was willing to hold off on collecting rent until she'd found a suitable position. ("I do hope you're looking. There was a time when I could call on governors and ministers for favors, but they've all…") Anjali could pay all that was owed from her first paycheck.
That fabled first paycheck already bore unrealistic burdens, so why not add a few more?
Strange negotiations first with Husseina, next with Mad Minnie, but in both cases Anjali was coming through the winner.
"You don't have to thank me," the landlady continued. "I too was once a young woman of modest means on my own in an unfamiliar town. I too have been the beneficiary of kindness." It was her Christian duty to repay the grace she'd once received.
"Christian duty" was a concept alien to Anjali. Duty meant dharma and a host of caste and social restrictions she'd never seriously observed. Squatting in a cracked, dingy bathtub used by generations of Christians and Muslims, then submitting to Subodh Mitra and not resisting with her life, had wiped the slate clean of any remaining dharmic duties.
"Bangalore's become an evil place. Remember the way it used to be when Maxie and Bunty were in charge?"
Bunty-wasn't that the widow Philpott's husband? Mad Minnie really had lost her marbles. Or was retreating into the past another one of her tricks of survival? "Gone to the dogs," Anjali snickered, in the best All-India Radio news-anchor Britishy accent she could manage. "My Bunty would go bonkers if he were still around."
"There are goondahs resident on the property," Minnie fumed. "I'm a prisoner in my own house. I don't dare shut my eyes in my own bed." From inside the soiled lace glove on her left hand, she extracted a sheer white handkerchief embroidered with a pink B inside a lilac floral ring, and blotted her anxious, watery eyes. "Forces are gathering," she warned. "It's no use, Opal. We're doomed."
Cut the melodrama, Minnie. All you are is a cobweb about to be swept away! One good housecleaning and you're gone!
But Minnie babbled on. "You've seen what the vermin have done to my rose garden. It's a jungle! And to think that the Prince of Wales himself brought me cuttings from England! The vermin have taken over the compound. I see their lights from my window. I call the police, but they do nothing. They won't, or can't, who knows? No good Christian deed goes unpunished. A long time ago Asoke begged me to let some of his village brothers rest up for a night or two. Those peasants were making their way on foot to Madras, walking, can you believe, with their women and children and bundles and body lice and oozy sores. Now they think they own my compound. The Bagehot name doesn't strike terror anymore. Maxie would have had them flogged. They mock me when I catch them with loot. I'm missing a silver goblet, but who cares? What they don't cart off and sell, they destroy. I keep my eyes peeled, what else can I do?"
So, it was true after all that Minnie sat by her window all night and kept watch! What the Bagehot Girls had got wrong was why and whom she was watching. "Vermin!" Minnie repeated. "They're keeping a death watch." So, her clinging to nasty imperial prejudices was another trick of survival. Minnie knew just how powerless she was in Bang-a-Buck Bangalore. Anjali held out a conciliatory hand. "I think I understand, madam," she said, meaning it. She too hailed from the heartland of suspiciousness; she'd spent a lifetime publicly agreeing with, and privately dismissing, the not-dissimilar prejudices of her parents concerning the threat posed by anyone not of their blood. But to understand was not to approve.
The old lady grasped Anjali's hand in both of hers. "You'll be my eyes and ears. I must write your benefactor and thank him for sending you to me all the way from the mofussils. The dear Lord works in mysterious ways."
Minnie inhabited an impenetrable, Minnie-centric universe. Why take offense? Better for Anjali to press her momentary advantage. "I wonder, madam, if I might ask for one more favor?" The old lady seemed receptive. "I wonder… when Husseina left, she said I could take over her room. Would that be possible?"
Minnie's eyes were closed behind her thick glasses-her way of quelling dissent or reaching a decision in her own sweet time. "I don't see why not."
I'm undumpable! It was a high-five moment, with no one to share it. So she could keep a luxury room and have it for next to nothing, so long as Minnie trusted her to spy on the squatters.
End of supplication. End of begging. She was ready to take her place. And not just in Bagehot House.
SHE AWOKE AGAIN at ten o'clock in Husseina's bed, with the feeling that the night before and the early-morning intervention had been dreams of a future, and that today's the day! This day would be different from any other in her nineteen years. She indulged herself with Husseina's imported shampoo and conditioner, lipstick and mascara. She slipped on Husseina's wispy bikini briefs and lifted and separated her breasts with Husseina's expensive black bra. From the full-length mirror, a tall, languid lingerie model smiled back at her. The mirror-woman was definitely Angie, not Anjali. Anjali was an insecure, dumpwary tenant; Angie was an entitled squatter and scavenger.
She suddenly realized why the teenage girl seated in the shed's window frame in firelight had stirred a visceral kinship. From a silver tray on the dressing table, she picked up Husseina's comb and smoothed the tangles from her long, wavy hair. In Gauripur her mother used to massage syrupy red hibiscus-scented hair oil into her scalp every single morning, a pre-bath mother-daughter ritual. A full head of thick, black hair is a woman's wealth, her mother insisted, as she concocted home remedies for all kinds of hair damage: yogurt-rub to cure dandruff, pastes made from oily berries to add luster to frizzy hair, seed-soaked potions to reverse hair loss. At bedtime, her mother had forced her to wrap her braids with thick cotton tape to prevent split ends.
What if the bitter wife and nagging mother had actually been a contented, creative woman? Angie stood at the window in newly acquired underwear and dragged Husseina's comb harshly through her hair. She wouldn't let Gauripur memories ruin this day. Comb vigorously; comb until your scalp hurts; comb all knots of guilt out of your selfish head and prideful hair.
When the comb broke in two in her hands, she moved away from the window. From the magic closet, she selected a slinky pink salwar-kameez set and tried it on. She hadn't looked so good in months-maybe never. Looking great was the shortest cut to feeling great. Add a pair of purple, high-heeled slingbacks and a Chanel purse. Arrogance bled into selfconfidence. She was starting her life over. She was starring in the Bollywood version of her breakout from Gauripur. Bangalore! Bangalore! A chorus of sweaty, spangled dancers circled her. Today's the day! Today's the day! They sang and shimmied. She felt male dancers lift her from the dreary world of Sunita Sampath. She floated free, the spirit of Mr. GG's Bangalore. Mr. GG, the love interest played by Shah Rukh Khan, awaited her in the next scene. She flashed on Ali swaying to a Bollywood soundtrack in Peter Champion's flat. She loved Ali. She loved Peter. She loved her sugar daddy, GG. Most of all, she loved the lithe, saucy, dancecrazy new Angie!
TOOKIE ACCOSTED HER on the stairs late that afternoon as she made her way down to take a stroll in the neighborhood; better still, she wanted to drop in on the super-cool Darrens and Roxies at Barista. It wasn't enough to be seen by squatters and street vendors. She wanted to be envied by total strangers.
"Honey, you look hot!" Tookie exclaimed. "Join me for a cappuccino? I'm meeting Reynaldo in a few." Then, with a wink, she added, "Just don't try to steal him from me."
Anjali, channeling Angie, took a couple of strides back and forth and executed a half-twirl. "Foxy?"
"Talking of stealing, isn't that Husseina's kameez?"
Poor Tookie had no clue that she was about to be dumped. So why take offense at her question. "We traded."
"Well, aren't you the sharp trader!" The working woman checked her imported imitation-ostrich pocketbook to make sure she had her company ID, cigarettes, and credit cards. "Our High and Mighty Miss H must be cracking up! Either that or she's up to hanky-panky with some boy other than that fabled fiancé stuck in London. I heard her go out last night, but I didn't hear her come back in. She's risking a dump."
"I don't think she cares," Anjali said.
"How do you know? Anyway, where has she gone?"
Now it was Anjali's turn to play mysterious. "She said, 'Anywhere.'"
"I'll find out from Rajoo. Nothing happens in town without Rajoo making it happen. I call him the Minister of the Night."
"Your nighttime bad boy Rajoo?"
"If a cappuccino sounds pretty good right now, let's get going. Reynaldo's a punctuality freak."
Reynaldo, short, tubby, and hairy (except for a tawny balding spot on the crown), was on his second iced coffee when the two women arrived at Barista. The tip of the plastic straw was chewed flat, Anjali noticed. He was the fidgety anxious kind of date. No wonder Tookie kept Rajoo on the side. Since Mad Minnie's house rules did not permit partying on the premises, coffee houses and bars were where Tookie met her two men friends. Tookie had her work-and-fun routine down right: get on a shift from ten P.M. to six A.M., and you have plenty of time for hitting the pubs before being picked up at the Bagehot House front gate by the company minivan.
In the restroom, Tookie confided that the best thing about Reynaldo was that he was undemandingly dull. Mister Moderation, she'd nicknamed him. Rajoo was Mister Too-Much. "I have this yin-and-yang thing going with them. How about you? What turns you on?"
"I'm dying to find out." Anjali laughed.
Reynaldo left soon after the women returned from the restroom. The oldest of his seven brothers, a pharmacist in Ontario, was sponsoring his application for "landed immigrant" status in Canada, and he had a mountain of documents to put together.
Tookie waved him off with a cheery "Ciao!" Her voice dropped to the low register of girlish intimacy. "I know what you're thinking. What do I see in Reynaldo?"
"It never occurred to me to think that." Anjali lied. She sucked the last noisy sip of her iced coffee through her straw, then with her fingers she fished brownish ice chips one by one out of the glass and laid them on her tongue. Deal with that breach of table manners, Minnie!
"If his visa comes through, I'll marry him and go to Canada. If it doesn't…" She put her helmet on. "Don't turn judgmental on me, girlfriend," she warned, leading the way back to her Bajaj Chetak. "Ready?"
"Ready for what?"
"To find out what turns you on, of course."
They started out at Pubworld, where the big screen featured European videos and sound throbbing to the max. Did Angie see correctly? Was that Panzer Delight? Yes, it was, in a ten-year-old video, confirmed by a little identifier tag at the bottom right. She wanted to scream, "Look at me! I had that T-shirt!" but no one was watching, and no one could hear. Then they went on to Opus, where two crooners took turns singing and where Tookie bid on a bottle of champagne being auctioned off for charity, but was outbid by a glamorous woman with perfect teeth, whom Tookie identified as a TV celebrity. TV? Anjali thought, I haven't seen TV since I got to Bangalore! Who watches it, and who has the time? Their last stop of the night was Glitzworld, where Rajoo tended bar. Rajoo was Mister Too-Much all right: too pomaded, too flashy, too imperious, and too indiscriminately lecherous. With Anjali, however, Rajoo chose to act the gallant. He plucked her right hand off her lap when Tookie introduced them and held it up to his lips. She let her fingers rest on Rajoo's plump, moist lips, savoring a new confidence, wondering what did turn her on.
Young men were pounding the bar for more drinks. He ignored them. A scrawny young busboy brought out two trays of still-dripping glasses from the kitchen and arranged them by highball, beer, and wine. "Lalu!" Rajoo snapped his fingers and pointed to heaps of plates and glasses stashed in plastic bins under the bar. "Idiot." He apologized to Anjali. "What to expect? Your friend Sunita's stupid brother."
Before she could respond-the very idea of Rajoo's hiring Sunita's brother and the possibility that Rajoo, from behind a bar on Brigades Road, controlled an empire of hirings and real estate placement sent her spinning-Rajoo leaned forward simply to stare at her face.
"You've got to say this about Tookie," he said. "She has the prettiest friends in Bangalore."
Anjali took advantage of Tookie's new, almost fawning, admiration for her to set up a visit to the campus of Trans-Oceanic Services (TOS), Tookie's all-night home. That way, she reasoned, she would experience a day at a call center, gaining a decided edge over other students at CCI. Except for rare trips to her father's railway building in Gauripur to bring him a file or spectacles or acid reflux pills, she had never been inside a business office. And Bangalore office complexes were vaster, glitzier, scarier than the long dusty room with rows of wobbly wooden chairs and file-cluttered wooden desks in which her father had worked. Tookie acted eager to do Anjali a favor. Security was tight in all downtown glass-tower office buildings, but she would get her "badass beau" Rajoo to call the head security officer of TOS. "I'll switch to a day shift for the next couple of weeks, girlfriend." She even offered Anjali a bonus: she would arrange for Moni, "the Bengali Svengali," to bump into her.
It was available, the world that she, Anjali/Angie, aspired to. She did aspire to it, didn't she? In any case, it was a challenge, and challenges turned her on. She had no idea of the entrance requirements, or if she had the skills and the stamina to stick it out. She knew only that she was a young woman with a very slight advantage, and she'd better grab Bangalore and whatever it offered, or else she'd end up living her sister's life.
On the morning of the scheduled visit, Rajoo showed up at Bagehot House to pick up Tookie and Anjali-in a chauffeured Jaguar. "You sure make things happen, Rajoo. I owe you one," Tookie said.
He acknowledged Tookie's compliment with a leer worthy of Bollywood cads. "Give and take, take and give. That's what society is about, no?" Anjali hung back as they bantered. To her, Rajoo, in his indigo silk shirt, tight white slacks, and dyed-blue snakeskin boots, looked more Dubai than Bangalore. She couldn't visualize Mr. GG in such a getup. Squatter kids materialized from the green wilderness of the Bagehot compound to check out the fancy automobile. The chauffeur scrambled out from behind the steering wheel to shoo them off.
But Rajoo intervened. "Like these wheels?" he asked, beaming at them. They moved away from the car and clustered around the flashy stranger, who was extracting a wad of rupees from the back pocket of his snug-fitting pants. "It's a matter of giving and taking," he explained to Tookie, who looked pained as he distributed a one-hundred rupee note to each of the kids. "Not baksheesh," he told them. They rewarded him with worshipful stares. "Make it work for you. I'll be back to collect my cut." Since he was speaking in English, the effect must have been meant for Anjali.
Tookie cut it short. "Some of us working stiffs have cards to punch," she snapped at Rajoo as they strode toward the car. Anjali followed.
"I hope you weren't expecting a Rolls, Miss Bose," Rajoo joked, catching up with the women. "Deep down, this capitalist is a Gandhian."
It was Anjali's first-ever ride in a Jaguar, and she sank into the leather seat, savoring its aroma and its chauffeur's imperious honking, his lane-changing maneuvers, and his way of swearing at slow traffic.
When the Jaguar pulled up in front of the guardhouse of the TOS compound, the chauffeur leaped out and held the car door open for his boss instead of the women. Rajoo speed-dialed his contact in the TOS office tower before helping Anjali out of the Jaguar. Tookie was left to clamber out without help from either her nighttime fun-beau or his chauffeur, and get in place in the employees' line at the guardhouse. Intimidated by the elaborate security procedure, and feeling more Anjali than Angie, she stayed close to Rajoo. He sensed her anxiety and personally escorted her through the security post; informed the uniformed guard that she was not carrying cameras or tape recorders on her person; watched her print her name and address, Anjali Bose, 1 Kew Gardens, as well as sign into the logbook; took her visitor's badge out of the guard's hand; and clipped it to the shoulder strap of her purse. Since Tookie would be working a full shift, he even offered to send his car and driver back in a couple of hours so that she wouldn't have to take crowded buses back to Bagehot House. Give and take, take and give: he was practicing what he preached. He got off on power and gratitude. To show gratitude, she flashed her halogen smile at him, but she declined the ride back. "I'll take a taxi," she said, lying.
THE VISITOR'S PASS allowed Anjali access only to the roof floor cafeteria and the landscaped grounds of the TOS campus. Tookie had just enough time to give her a tour of the roof floor before reporting for her shift-this day, working as "Tess" from Lubbock, Texas-in a monitored bay on the third floor of the tower.
The open-air cafeteria-cum-patio roof floor of the glass and steel tower was crammed with benches and refectory tables under broad, tasseled umbrellas. It looked like a luxury resort floating above a modern city, missing only pull-down screens of Goan beachfront hotels. Agents on break huddled over laptops, white buds in their ears, colas within easy reach. But when she walked past, they invariably looked up from the screen to size her up. They had to know that since she wasn't wearing a TOS employee photo ID around her neck, she wasn't one of them.
Without even trying, Anjali slipped into her high-wattage Angie persona. Angie was smart, sexy, and special. Angie's steps had a bouncy lightness, her posture an eye-catching swagger. She took her time crossing the width of the terrace to the railing, from which she could view landscaped lawns ribboned with concrete paths. Early-afternoon shadows cast by neighboring office buildings left dark prison bars on sunlit stretches of pampered grass. Young men and women employees strode the footpaths, chatting, leaning toward one another, but not quite touching. Malis and sweepers manicured the edges. Below her lay the New India: business-efficient, secretively erotic, and servant supported. She felt a rush of sympathy for the high-fiving, head-banging, hard-drinking friends of Tookie she had met on Residency Road and the Brigades. The call-center survivalist inhabits separate yet simultaneous lives. These were the luckiest times to be young, adventurous, and Indian. And the saddest for those like her, who knew she could be anything she wanted to be yet hadn't the foggiest idea of what she wanted.
Over the PA system a self-important voice announced, "Paging Ms. Anjali Bose! Ms. Bose, please meet your party at the espresso machine! Paging Ms. Anjali Bose! Your party is waiting!"
Why was Tookie's team leader allowing her a break this early? Confused, Anjali turned her back on the poster-worthy view of New Millennium India and scanned the employees relaxing around the espresso machine. There were three women, two in color-coordinated salwar-kameezes and one in a snug Versace T-shirt and white capri pants, and two mustached young men in starched shirts and carefully pressed slacks, chatting and sipping, but no Tookie.
"Ms. Anjali Bose, please meet your party!"
A tall, lithe man, likely in his late twenties and definitely handsome, maybe even beautiful, approached the group by the espresso machine. Anjali liked it that he had no mustache. She liked even more the way his shiny black hair flopped over an eyebrow. She started walking to where the PA system was instructing her to "meet her party" and realized that she loved the prominent biceps of the polo-shirted, chino-wearing beautiful man. He was holding a stack of magazines, each as thick as the Gauripur telephone directory, against his chest. The five employees acknowledged his arrival with smiles or nods, but he didn't join their conversation and they didn't make an effort to draw him in. Tookie had told Anjali about "team ethos," and so she assumed that the beautiful man and the chattering five were on different teams of customer-service agents. He stood slightly apart but did not look at all isolated. Anjali guessed that he too was waiting for someone. Why shouldn't that someone be Ms. Anjali Bose? She preened when she caught his body jolt to attention as their eyes met. He immediately headed in her direction. Even with an armful of magazines, he moved like an athlete, a cricketer at the pitch.
"Anjali Bose. Who else could you be but Anjali Bose?"
So this had to be the Bengali Svengali. Tookie D'Mello had set up this meeting, but she hadn't let on what a heartthrob he was. What else hadn't she let on? Not a hint of India in his accent, but he didn't sound American like Rabi Chatterjee or Mr. Champion.
Even before introducing himself, the heartthrob said that finding her was like locating your car in an airport parking lot: the sudden realignment of your steps when you press your smart key and somewhere down a long line of cars the lights go on and the horn beeps.
The analogy of cars in an airport to people meeting in the TOS dining patio-or of her to a car, if that's what he'd meant-sailed over her head. She'd never had a car, Gauripur lacked even a single parking lot, and car keys, in her experience, were far from "smart"; in fact, they were dumb as nails. She took it as more evidence of her unenlightened state and feared asking what he was talking about. And so she flashed a broad smile of recognition. "But you've never seen me," she said.
"The day I can't spot a pretty Bengali face in a crowd is the day I change my name to Singh." He guided her to a small bistro table and dropped the stack of magazines on it. "You're everything Leila said."
"Leila?"
"She called me as soon as she saw you, remember? But I was working and I couldn't run over."
Ah, Leila the I MUMBAI girl. She'd seen Anjali pass out-did Moni know how desperate she'd been? No one would recognize her now.
Should she be Anjali for this champion of Bengali culture? She peered at the magazine cover on the top of the pile. A pretty girl, identified as "Bengal's Latest Beauty Export to Bangalore" and posed against a modern city skyline, stared back. But the modern Bengali Beauty, like the ladies in fake antique Mughal miniatures sold in Gauripur bazaars, was holding a lotus blossom in her manicured hand and gazing dreamily at a birdlike speck soaring above the geometric tops of office towers. Anjali picked the magazine off the top of the stack and turned it over. On its back cover, perhaps again in parody, the art director had reprinted a British-era map of historical Bengal-including all of Bangladesh and Indian West Bengal, Upper Burma, much of Orissa as far south as Puri, and north as far as Assam and west all the way to Bihar, even the area around Gauripur, the catchments where Anjali's parents' families had been marooned, and labeled it as "The New Bengal-Bangalore Raj." How grand and powerful Bengal had been in her great-greatgrandparents' days!
Moni took out a digital camera and aimed it at her. "Amazing, isn't it?" And before she could ask what, exactly, he gushed, "How big Bengal was! A long, long time ago, my family was in Upper Burma, involved in teak. It's not even on the map. They kept elephants to load the logs, and then they floated the wood downriver; they had family members with sawmills all along the riverbanks and they trained little native boys, Burmese, to walk on the logs with hooks and steer our logs into the mill. Our logs had little flags on them, like branded cattle. Imagine all that!"
"We're from Bihar," she said. Gauripur too was just off the map.
"We were a mighty people." He snapped her picture without asking permission. "Moni Lahiri at your service. But sad to say, no relation of Jhumpa Lahiri, the renowned novelist and Bengali beauty."
She would have responded by saying "We Bengalis are still a mighty people," but she didn't want to be photographed with her lips parted. Two of her teeth were crooked-gaja danta, or elephant tusks, her father had all too often lamented when he had been bridegroom hunting. He should have paid Canada-returned Dr. Haldar, Gauripur's only orthodontist, to align her teeth if they had bothered him so much. She had to stop thinking about her father; she had to keep bitterness and guilt out of her expression for the Bengali Svengali's camera. Try out the cover model's dreamy look but without corny props like bird and lotus.
Moni took a break from his viewfinder. "See that guy serving food over there? Third one in?"
Anjali looked in the direction that Moni had indicated with his chin, a dimpled chin she found irresistible. Four men wearing hairnets and white aprons were lined up behind the long cafeteria counter. The third waiter was unmistakably Bengali; Anjali could tell from his facial structure. She suddenly wondered if Indians born and raised in America, Rabi Chatterjee, for instance, lost that ability to identify ethnicity just by looking at an Indian face.
"His name's Mohammed Chowdhury, from Bangladesh," Moni Lahiri informed her. "I heard him and a couple of other guys speaking Bangla, and his accent and voice were so pure I asked if maybe he also sang. And does he ever! I featured him in a Rabindra-sangeet, and people were amazed. He showed up in a silk kurta, some of his friends played tabla and harmonium… so it was a big Indian bash starring a Muslim from Bangladesh, and he ends up the most perfect Bengali among us. And of course when he was back here serving food the next morning, no one recognized him."
Moni waved in the servers' direction, and Mohammed Chowdhury lifted a hand in response.
"In case you were wondering, my family doesn't consider itself the deep-down, sprung-from-god's-head kind of Brahmins," he said. "The last name might make you think so, but all it means is somewhere along the line we snared a Brahmin male. My father went to Johns Hopkins to study medicine, found work at Mass General in Boston, flew back home for two weeks to get married, settled first in Toronto, moved on to Madison, Wisconsin, and finally to St. Louis, Missouri, where he had two sons and a daughter. One son became an oncologist, the daughter's a biologist. Me, I'm a wastrel wannabe and amateur photographer with an MBA from Wharton. Anyway, if you think I'm babbling, it's to distract you from posing. You have energy. That's what I want to get across on your cover photo. Prettiness I can Photoshop."
The Bengali Svengali was going to put her on the cover of a glossy? That made Anjali self-conscious. She assumed her signature halogen smile but could feel tightness in the muscles around her lips.
"Don't try so hard." He glanced over at the freezer section of the cafeteria line. "Feel like an ice cream? They have sherbets, popsicles, frozen yogurts, everything."
She knew sherbet from Alps Palace in Gauripur. Rabi had photographed her in Alps Palace with his boxy camera. "Sherbet, please," she said.
He brought her two scoops of mango sherbet and a plastic spoon, but nothing for himself. She was relieved to have something to do with her hands and dug the spoon into the orangy-yellow sherbet. It was denser, sweeter than sherbets at the Alps Palace. She hoped Rabi would call her when he returned from his wanderings to his Aunt Parvati's house in Bangalore.
"Do me a favor," Moni Lahiri said, picking up his camera again. "Sit on the table."
She put her dish of sherbet on the chair seat and complied.
"No, no, sit on the table and bring a spoonful of the stuff just to your lips. Desire and promise of gratification. That's it! You'll be Miss Two Scoops. Refreshing as sherbet on a hot day." He handed the dish to her as she rearranged her legs on the tabletop.
"Now raise your left arm halfway up, as though it's around someone's shoulder."
"Whose?" she asked. Yours?
"I'm thinking Queen Victoria's. There's a statue of the old girl in Cubbon Park. I can Photoshop you into her lap."
There was that word again. Photoshop had not appeared in Mr. Champion's workbooks.
"Now, face me and keep your left arm up, as though it's resting on a railing; no, it's on my shoulder. Good. We're getting there. Look at me as though I'm the answer to all your prayers."
"Mr. Lahiri, really." She giggled.
"Concentrate. Give me intensity. Great! Love the set of that steely jaw! How about the eyes? You're in love! That's better. We're nearly there. I'll Photoshop you stepping out of a first-class air-conditioned carriage at the railway station. No, next to that big victory obelisk in Cubbon Park. You're taking in Bangalore for the first time. Or would you prefer Electronic City? I've got a hundred Bangalore backdrops."
"So it's all a matter of light and angles? And backdrops?" She was afraid to ask about obelisks.
"It's a Photoshop world," he said.
So this was the famous Monish Lahiri. It wasn't hard to look headover-heels in love with this handsome man with floppy hair, bulked biceps, and quick hands. She could imagine pouring shampoo on his hair, kneading it over a lavatory sink, and rinsing it off with a pitcher of water. She'd never had such intimate fantasies. She'd never really fantasized touching any part of a man, especially not his hair. And now she found herself imagining other things, and she blushed, avoiding his gaze. Her body was itching, starting from down below. It was embarrassing, a disease perhaps.
"Tookie said you'd be perfect for a cover. She didn't exaggerate." He followed this up with a brief Bangla poem she didn't recognize.
"Isn't it a little early for poetry?" she asked. "Anyway," to discourage further excursions into the thicket of modern literary Bangla, she added, "I'm here to learn better English."
"I can teach you that. St. Louis English anyway. No, make that SoCalspeak, since Santa Monica's my latest home base. Or was." He wriggled his fingers as if to magically conjure up a scene. "Pretend it's nighttime in California," he said. "Actually, it really is. It's about two in the morning. We're on a blanket on a beach in Santa Monica. We have a bottle of nice, light red wine. The moon hides behind a cloud. A slight chill comes off the water. The stars wink in and out. I pour, and we drink. We're watching the planes rising from LAX, or coming in."
She liked this make-believe game about being romanced on a beach with a lilting name by a Bengali-American MBA with a dimpled chin and floppy hair. A chill was an inspired touch. The suitor would offer his jacket, lean close, and drape it over her shoulders.
"Really, Mr. Lahiri," she exclaimed as though he really had done so.
He looked amused. "Really," he repeated. "But you don't need lessons. Your English is good enough."
Only good enough? What did that mean, in the Bangalore world? Good enough for what-some dead-end job talking to Mukky Sharma? Or the sex lines-is that where they put Indian girls who were just good enough? Where an accent is advantageous? She envied Moni Lahiri's ease in both Bangla and English. She envied people blessed with two mother tongues. Her English was good, but it would never be a mother tongue.
He seemed unaware of having hurt her feelings. "I've got a confession," he said, his voice soft with guilt. And he did lean close to her, so close that she was afraid she would impulsively touch his shoulder with hers, or worse, run her fingers through his straight, fine hair. "I'm not really a wastrel. I came back to India because this is where the money is, money and opportunity. I didn't want to be just another unhappy American doctor having to toe the HMO line. Like Baba and Dada."
The country was being overrun with repatriates and immigrants. India had become the land of milk and honey for everyone except young people born and raised in Gauripur. It wasn't fair! Moni Lahiri had seduced her with fantasy games of wine and sand, only to betray her.
"C'mon, Miss Bose, you've got the most expressive face in the world-you're angry at me, but I'm not sure why. Why?"
"Everyone here comes from somewhere else."
"In Bangalore, that might be true. That's the reason for this." He pulled a publication from the middle of the stack. "You'll be the star of the next issue."
"This? "
"It's my baby. The Bangla HotBook of Bangalore." He handled the booklet tenderly. It was the seventh edition of a directory that listed names, phone numbers, and local addresses, plus hometowns, of the three thousand newly arrived Bengalis in Bangalore. "Only singles, of course. And newly singles. I've put my MBA skills to use."
She'd thought it was a book of pictures, shots of models like the girl on the cover. She flipped through the pages. There were sections announcing Bangla "First Date" mixers, and for the straitlaced, puja celebrations; announcements of who had been promoted, who was looking to date, and which Bangla-friendly companies were hiring, along with ads and discounts at restaurants and discos. Then she studied the list of names: two full pages of Boses, even three other Anjali Boses, along with rows and rows of the usual Bangla names, the Banerjees and Chatterjees, the Dases, Duttas, Ghoses, Guhas, and Sens, skipping ahead to the Roys and Sinhas. Then, suddenly anxious, she flipped back a few pages: Mitra, Subodh. Home address: Asansol. So he hadn't been lying; he'd actually worked in Bangalore. And maybe he was still here.
"Something the matter?" Moni asked.
In her most innocent voice she asked, "Who's this Subodh Mitra?"
"Nice guy, but not the sharpest knife, if you get my drift. You know him?"
The thought of Subodh Mitra slicing his way through Bangalore with a dull knife brought back all the terror: the dark mango grove, the rusting rebars, the blood on her sari. She was no longer under an umbrella in sunny Bangalore. "The name sounded a little familiar."
"Tall guy, a little heavy? He left here a couple of months back, off to Bengal to find a wife, he said. Going through hundreds of bridal pictures finally got to him. One day he ran up to me and said, 'Moni! I found her! Miss Perfection!' You had to be happy for the guy. He was gone the next day."
She tried to hide her disappointment. Any friend of Subodh Mitra was no friend of hers. The itching stopped. For no particular reason, except perhaps to press her bona fides, she said, "I might have been that girl"
He dropped the directory on the stack of magazines. "No way. Subodh's a nice enough guy, but no way cool enough for you."
And how cool am I, Mr. Lahiri? But she didn't ask. They sat there for another few minutes. The tables near them filled up. She waited for him to ask her out. Her father would have considered Moni Lahiri, MBA, with homes in America and India, the "perfect boy," but the perfect boy was slipping through her fingers. Was there something she should do, should say? "I have to get back," he said. He handed her the copy of The Bangla HotBook. He didn't ask to see her again. Rabi had given her a phone number, Mr. GG had given her a ride, and Peter Champion had given her money. Moni gave nothing, yet she felt connected somehow.
"Do you have a cell-phone number to list in The HotBook?"
She said she didn't. Bagehot House was the most temporary address in Bangalore. A cell phone was an unimaginable luxury.
He scrawled a number on the back cover of the directory. "Anytime," he said.
She watched him stride to the elevator and hop in just as the door was closing. It was his fault that she felt newly abandoned. She visualized the two of them walking, side by side, on the crisp, green spaces of the TOS compound. She felt his body against her, and her arms, her back were itchy. She wanted someone to scratch them. She wanted to hold her arms out to Moni Lahiri, but he was already gone.
Just like that, a Bangalore legend enters my life, and then he's gone. Like the dancers in a Bollywood movie, a flash of skin, a hint of hidden wonders, then in a second they're gone.
Today's the day, every day's the day: she felt that rush again.
She wasn't so far from the place where she had made her first grand entrance into Bangalore, her lucky spot, the Barista on MG Road. Things that had confused her just a few weeks earlier were starting to clear up. In her red kameez and cream-colored salwar and expensive makeup, and after weeks of fattening up on Minnie's potatoes and mutton stew, she was steadier on her feet. Tookie said she had that Bagehot House greasy glow. At least she wouldn't pass out.
The scene of her Bangalore Grand Entrance was a cheap rickshaw ride away.
The tables were full but the mood was subdued, lacking the high-spirited silliness and cast of characters she had encountered on her first morning in Bangalore: no Mumbai Girl or overly friendly Mike, no Millie the chain smoker or Suzie with the butterfly breasts. Maybe they were on different shifts; maybe they'd moved on to newer IT call-center hubs that were luring away Bangalore veterans with better pay. Out on the fringes of the coffee sippers she spotted Mr. GG hunched over his computer. She bought a small coffee and moved in his direction.
Mr. GG wasn't as dashing a figure as she remembered from the night of Mad Minnie's gala. In just two weeks it seemed he'd aged and softened into a short, squat man, with hair thinning on top. She remembered looking down on Peter Champion's balding head, the mosquitoes landing but not swatted away. There were no mosquitoes in Bangalore, at least not this month. The buttons of Mr. GG's white shirt strained against his belly. Like her pot-bellied father, she thought, and like the young people in Bangalore, getting fat on snacks as they worked through the night, fat on cafeteria food, fat on beer and savories after work, fat on being free and rich and away from home.
"Still in Djakarta, Mr. GG?" Now she was the one standing, his face at her tummy level, and she could read the shock and surprise on his face. She flashed her famous smile, and he hit SAVE and flipped the lid down.
"Miss Bose! You're looking very fit and happy."
I am.
"Very pert and glowing."
"It must be Minnie's mutton stew."
He laughed. "I assumed it was because you are in love."
She bantered back. "I am in love. With Bangalore."
"Why haven't you called?" he asked.
"I don't have a phone."
"Let's get you a mobile, then. You can't not be within reach by voice or text in this town."
"I don't have the money."
"Maybe not today, but you'll have it tomorrow. But only if you carry a mobile in your handbag."
And so, half an hour later, Anjali Bose of 1 Kew Gardens, Bangalore, had a tiny silver cell phone, paid for by Mr. GG. She could call her sister or her mother or anyone in the world as long as she had the person's number, which she didn't, except for that of Moni Lahiri and Usha Desai and, if she thought about it, Rabi Chatterjee and Peter Champion. The phone presented more options than she could possibly master. "Is there a master number I can call for jobs?" she joked, and Mr. GG put his telephone number on speed dial for her. There seemed to be no need in the world that the phone could not satisfy. Owning a cell phone wasn't quite as impressive as inspecting virtual buildings in foreign countries, but on that morning, just having one, even a simple model-an unheard-of extravagance, in her family experience-felt nearly as miraculous. For weeks she'd been watching how everyone on the streets of Bangalore used this remarkable device, even the Muslim ladies in their black burqas: clutching their husbands, holding their children, and chatting on their silvery little phones as they rode on the back of a motorbike. Tookie carried hers in her hand, like a second purse; Husseina's had been stashed in a secret pocket sewn into her custom-tailored salwar. Anjali wondered where Husseina was honeymooning with Bobby of Bradford; she was the first-time owner of a phone, with no one to call.
"Any other numbers?" Mr. GG asked.
"Put in my father's," she said, and gave him the familiar Gauripur number. A sudden image of the heavy black phone, on a stool in the living room, its thick, dust-clogged cord gnawed by mice, appeared in her mind's eye. That number and the house must now belong to a stranger.
"And Usha Desai," she said, then recited the number, which she'd memorized. "And this one"; she read the number from Moni's torn-off slip of paper. "Call it ML."
"That's not a lot of numbers for a popular young lady," Mr. GG said.
"Put in Peter," she said, and gave him the number. She wished she had memorized Rabi's California number. That would have impressed Mr. GG.
"And how are things at Bagehot House?" he asked when he had inputted the numbers.
"The building's still standing."
"I meant the old lady. How's she holding up?"
"Surviving. But her mind is failing."
"Appearances can be deceiving," he said, smiling. "I trust in only the durability of the virtual universe."
Her bargain with Mr. GG went unspoken; in exchange for a few smiles and bright comments, she'd get a lift back to Bagehot House. He bowed to her: "Your Daewoo is waiting, Miss Bose."
The starving, bedraggled, overwhelmed Anjali, the one who, weeks ago, almost had to be carried into the Daewoo, had plumped into a "pert and glowing"-Mr. GG's words-cell-phone-owning HotBook cover girl.
Once again, she was walking to the Daewoo.
Mr. GG held the door open, always the gentleman. Vacation brochures were scattered on the front seat. "You asked about Djakarta," he said, "but we wrapped that up three days ago. Right now"-he put a brochure into her hands-"I'm working here, on a very cool condominium development in Puerto Vallarta."
"A pristine desert lapped by sparkling seas," she read.
"Mexico," he said, obviously amused. Anjali could see that he enjoyed imparting to her his wider knowledge. "Those seas won't be sparkling or lapping for very long without some high-level intervention. The good thing is, we've done oversight in Qatar and Dubai so we know something about heat and sandstorms and what they do to swimming pools and golf courses and yacht basins and how huge the power and sewage and refrigeration problems can be. It's a fun project. It's like building a small country."
A fun project? In her English class, Peter Champion used to warn Anjali about this: "You'll hear fun used as an adjective. Resist it. Fun is a noun, not an adjective." Not to be outdone, or overwhelmed by Mr. GG's worldliness or the strange languages and place names he invoked, she said, "One of the girls in Bagehot House went to an American school in the Gulf." The news seemed to silence him.
A moment later, he completed her thought. "I know. The famous Husseina Shiraz. I think she's no longer in residence-am I right?"
How would he know that?
"Some big changes on the way," he said. "All we can do is stay one step ahead." The city traffic was thinner than it had been that morning, when Rajoo's chauffeur had, cursing and honking, dropped her off at the TOS tower; they were moving along well, too well. She didn't want the ride to be over.
Mr. GG must have noted her reluctance. "I want to show you something new," he said.
Cubbon Park, she hoped. Moni had mentioned Cubbon Park. She was a woman with a phone and a glow from being in love with love.
"We'll stop at my place on the way."
"Where is that?" She knew Kent Town and Indira Nagar; she knew of Dollar Colony because Parvati Banerji lived there and Rabi crashed with the Banerjis when in Bangalore. Mr. GG had to live in an upscale area, something like Dollar Colony. She imagined him pulling up with her in front of a gate guarded by two watchmen; she would walk on a graveled driveway that sliced a flowering garden in two; she would beam at his white-haired parents as they greeted her warmly. Did he have living parents? "I'd love to meet your relatives," she heard herself say.
"I said my place." He had two addresses, he explained, a family residence beyond Kent Town, where he lived with parents, the widowed sister-in-law, and an older brother and his wife and infant nephew-and a private office, with a kitchen and sleeping accommodations close to Vistronics.
Every day is today! The morning had served her well, and now she was ready for whatever the late afternoon might bring.
THE OFFICE-APARTMENT occupied a corner on the top floor of a modern six-story building overlooking the winding paths and gardens of Cubbon Park. Only a few tall, old trees obstructed the hazy view of the city. Those treetops sprawled beneath Anjali like a wild, tufted lawn.
"Tea?" Mr. GG asked. A small kitchen and pantry lay just off the dining area. The familiar splash of water in a kettle, the snapping on of the gas stove: calming, reassuring Indian sounds. She wasn't sure why he had brought her here. A virtual voyage to Puerto Vallarta? To Djakarta? As long as it wasn't Gauripur, Anjali Bose had no fear of him.
This was, after all, her second time in a man's bedroom. This one, unlike Peter Champion's, was orderly, well-appointed, its walls hung with cartoonlike paintings, architecture magazines spread in an arc, like a lady's fan, on the table. She liked what she saw, liked what she saw very much, and she realized she wasn't safe at all. A pleasant itch coursed up her arms, just as it had when Moni Lahiri had snapped her photo for his HotBook. After all, she could tell herself, it's not as though she'd awakened that morning, then coldly decided to visit her personal Barista on MG Road, and then gone over to Mr. GG, rousing him from his work with the intention of seducing him or letting him think he was seducing her. She was incapable of such plotting. Therefore, she was not guilty of planning it or even wishing it.
She could not be held responsible for anything that happened in her life because she was not an initiator of actions. Angie the bold one, the initiator, was beyond blame, or shame. Anjali just watched and let things happen. Things like this: accepting tea from a man standing behind her as she watched the weaving lanes of traffic and the usual mix of strollers and exercisers in the park under the canopy of trees. The man behind her put his hands on her hips, then under her kameez, and began peeling it upward over her bra. She set the teacup on the windowsill and allowed him to continue.
Now he whispered in her ear, nibbling it ever so slightly before he spoke. "What sort of precautions have you taken?"
"What precautions do you mean?" Heavens, she thought, if I took precautions, I wouldn't be here in your apartment, would I?
"You know, devices. The pill?"
She smiled at him shyly. Subodh Mitra hadn't bothered to ask. Things move slowly, like glaciers, until they erupt like tsunamis.
Torn silver foil fluttered through the air. She heard a zipper, and the thud of heavy trousers falling to the floor. Mr. GG's fingers soothed her itch. "I've been thinking of you since we first met," he said.
It seemed that all the strollers in the park and on the footpaths had stopped and were looking up and pointing in her direction. Everyone in Cubbon Park saw the naked girl in the window. The naked girl in the window looked down on Bangalore. She moved from the window, turned, and faced Mr. GG, who was hopping on one foot to free himself from his trousers. His shoes were still on. Coins were dropping from the pockets and rolling across the floor.
"Please to sit down, Mr. GG," she ordered, and he did. For the briefest moment she thought, If I want to get out, this is the time. He reached down to unlace his shoes. "I will do that. Please sit back." As she bent forward, he groped for her bra strap.
Not her bra strap, exactly. It had been Husseina's black silk lift-and-thrust.
"Please," she insisted, this time louder, and he retreated. She made a lightning calculation: If I'm to give myself away, it might as well be to a well-established man who saved me and performed favors and kindnesses. A well-connected man who would owe me. A girl in a fancy black bra and half-discarded salwar, kneeling before a man on a sofa, pulling off his shoes: she's in control.
She remembered a Gauripur ritual, her own father coming home from the office at the same minute every day. Tea would be waiting, he would sit at a chair by the door and hold his feet out, and her mother would kneel and pull his shoes off-dusty or muddy shoes, depending on the season-and Anjali would bring him his indoor chappals and kurta-pajama. He would unbutton his shirt and slip on the kurta, then unbuckle his trousers and cover his shorts with the pajama. Every night of her life she had performed the same little task, as had her mother and her grandmother and probably her sister too. If all those generations could see her now! Except this time, she was on her knees and nearly naked, and the man was, essentially, a stranger. And she remembered the lines of women in Nizambagh crawling over the trucks, ghost women, spidery thin, fighting each other for access to the drivers, and she hated the price of being a woman, and India, and every man she'd ever known.
"Let's see that famous smile," said Mr. GG. And so she smiled.
She got his shoes off, and the socks-such small, soft feet, such hairy toes-then tugged his trousers by the cuffs and draped them over the back of a dining chair. He was a plump, hairy little man in bulging boxer shorts. He probably had not dressed that morning with the thought of being undressed by a lady before lunch. He made himself busy throwing cushions off his sofa, then pulling out a folding bed.
"What are you looking at?" he asked. She flashed a shy smile, which seemed to satisfy his vanity, but in truth she was fascinated by a couch converting into a bed by one pull from a near-naked man with a hairy back. Nor had she ever stood completely naked and alone, even in her own bedroom or bathroom. Back home she had bathed as older women did, in a sari. The important thing was to be able to tell herself that she'd accepted a ride from a friend, thinking she was going to meet his family, and that she'd been abducted and seduced. She'd be able to tell anybody who asked: in Bangalore be careful of friendly men who say they just want to help.
"It happens very quickly, doesn't it?" she said.
"Were you expecting roses?"
She'd meant it as a compliment. She meant how quickly one changes identities. Half an hour ago, I was just trying to get a ride in your car. I was someone entirely different, and now I'll never be that person again. Mr. GG was lying on his bed, pulling off his shorts, and his long, tawny whatsit looked just short of menacing. He rolled the condom over it, just like a villager with a banana in a birth-control film. His arms were open. The springy, curly mat on his chest was waiting for her.
She stepped out of her remaining clothes. She remembered swimming instructions: just jump in, it will feel cold, and you'll think you're going to drown, but you'll get used to it. No shilly-shallying. She was about to learn what every other woman knew, what Tookie and Sonali-di knew, and Mr. GG certainly seemed a more accomplished teacher than Subodh Mitra. All caution flew out the window; the years of good counsel about virtue and modesty, flirting but playing hard to get. She'd never questioned her self-image as a modest, well-brought-up, small-town, middle-class probasi Bengali girl. In a place like Bangalore, where no one was rewarded for being good in quite that way, "good" took on a different meaning. She was grateful for Mr. GG's attention. He'd offered an easy way to pay back his favors and maybe even for Anjali to gain the upper hand.
Just as he said, it was over very quickly. She felt she shouldn't compliment him on the quickness. She shouldn't say a thing, but just smile. Somehow, in the twisting and turning, she'd ended up looking down on him, with his eyes closed. Whatever he'd done had stung a little, but at least the itching was gone.
After catching his breath, he said, "I'd call you a very cool customer, Miss Anjali Bose. Continually surprising, but still sweetly innocent."
She'd expected something like a grade for her efforts, a "best ever" or "a smart, fun girl" or at least "cool," but no matter: she'd passed the test, and Mr. GG had fallen back into drowsy silence. And she'd reduced that ropy, menacing, invincible whatsit to a floppy flap of skin under a sagging condom. After a few minutes he mumbled, "Expect some excitement later today. Maybe tonight."
"How much more excitement can a girl take, Mr. GG?"
He reached out for her hair and let it flow between his fingers. "You're a funny young lady, Miss Bose." After a few more minutes he got up and slipped on his boxer shorts and the same white shirt. Maybe all the men in white shirts she passed on the streets had been doing the same thing a few minutes earlier. Maybe the women too. He shuffled into the cooking alcove, put on the tea water, and punched two slices of bread into the toaster. She took it as her cue and got back into her underwear, then the salwar and kameez. He asked, his voice low and casual, "Miss Shiraz, was she your friend?"
"I'd like to think so."
"Ms. Shiraz's picture made the BBC website," he said.
"Husseina's a celebrity?"
"She wasn't named, but I recognized the face."
"A Bagehot Girl!" Anjali was thrilled. "One of us! Girish, you make Bangalore sound like the center of the world."
"All I'm saying is changes are imminent."
"Now you sound like Minnie Bagehot. 'Evil forces are gathering,' that's her new mantra."
"Well, I don't think I need to worry about you, Miss Bose. You're steps ahead of everyone. May I call you, now that you have your own phone?"
On the drive back, Mr. GG told her what he'd been reading on the BBC website when she interrupted him at Barista. A plot to blow up Heathrow had been disrupted. She had to ask, "What is a heath row?"
"An airport," he said. She knew some names, like Netaji Subhas Bose in Kolkata and Indira Gandhi in New Delhi, and there was Sahar in Mumbai, but she'd never been on an airplane or even in an airport.
"London," he said. "People who travel a lot name the airport, not the city."
"What does that have to do with us?" she asked.
"Butterfly effect," he answered. He launched into a long explanation of how anything that happens anywhere in the world affects Bangalore. She didn't follow his theory and stopped listening to his actual words, cocooning herself instead in the pleasure of his desire for her. He kept reaching for her hand. She wished Kew Gardens was far, very far. She wanted him to keep talking, keep driving, keep lusting. She wanted to love even more than to be loved.
Respecting Minnie's house rules, Mr. GG stopped the car two blocks from Bagehot House. She let herself out the passenger door and walked around to the driver's side. He stayed behind the wheel but didn't drive off. He said, "I want to see you again."
She could tell he wanted to say more, and she wanted him to say more, so she lingered on the sidewalk, tracing invisible circles with a fingertip on his door. Mr. GG didn't bring out the sweet, clean wine-and-moonlight flirtiness that Moni Lahiri had, just a couple of hours before. She couldn't make even make-believe love to Moni in Moni's apartment. Did he live in a rented apartment, or did he own a house? He was a magician, who took Anjali and Angie, waved his wand, and made both disappear, then created an ethereal Miss Two Scoops, the stuff of popular dreams. He Photoshopped her: that was it. But Mr. GG saw through her, and into her. Her attraction to Mr. GG had a rawness and authority that thrilled her.
"Yes?"
He had expected confirmation, not a question. The engine started up. "Take care," he said. The car eased into traffic.
It was three o'clock in the afternoon, a normally quiet time. A light mist was falling, Bangalore's version of the monsoon. Kew Gardens Corner and Bhajot Lane were unusually crowded. Pedestrians-not strollers, but young men running with purpose-had spilled over the sidewalks and into the roadway, throwing traffic into a honking chaos. At three o'clock most houses were usually shuttered and many of the smaller shops were closed.
I'm a woman now, she said to herself. I'm quite a woman. I'm hot, according to Tookie. Secretive and oh so mysterious, according to Husseina. Sherbet-cool, sherbet-refreshing, according to Moni. And funny and fascinating, if I'm reading Mr. GG correctly. All in all, it had been quite a day, and it was still the middle of the afternoon.
The promised day had arrived! Shortly after daybreak, Anjali and eleven other students piled out of the CCI minivan for the first day of the two-week intensive course, itself a preparation for a new life as a salaried, independent career woman. She was glad, in a way, that she had procrastinated about getting in touch with Peter Champion's contacts. Big carp in a small pond is a minnow in a lake. She wasn't the frightened country bumpkin she had been in her first few weeks in Bangalore. She felt cocky as she watched the other eight women and three men take hesitant leaps out of the minivan. They clustered around the newly installed elevator, which could accommodate only four at a time. She chose to walk up the three flights to the door of CCI and Desai Data Systems, the first arrival, and she was rewarded with a special smile from Parvati Banerji, who had stationed herself on the third-floor landing to welcome her students.
The floor plan of DDS and Usha Desai's home office, in which Anjali had been interviewed, were identical, except that all three bedrooms had been turned into classrooms furnished with desks and chairs and equipped with computers, whiteboards, and floor-to-ceiling panels that depicted American life.
Parvati began lessons by dashing off a list of words on the whiteboard: please, deliver, development, circuitry, executive, address, growth, management, garbage, opportunity, hearth, addition, thought. Words that customer-support-service employees would need and would use on every work shift but would very likely mangle.
"Our goal for the intensive sessions," she announced, "is accent enhancement. The regular program offers accent neutralization, not enhancement."
Anjali saw the trembling fingers of the woman at the desk to her left write study gole = hanssment in her notebook. She peered at the lined notebook of the male student to her right. He was sketching her profile, and he was pretty good at it.
A woman's voice from behind Anjali interrupted the instructor. "Ma'am, what is enhancement meaning exactly?"
The instructor was ready for that question. "The U.S. companies that come to us want you to sound acceptably American. That doesn't mean you have to imitate American television accents-it just means they expect you to communicate without any complications. We'll work this morning on softening consonants and crispening vowels."
She had each of her twelve students pronounce the words she had listed on the whiteboard. Please came out as "pliss"; garbage and manage as "garbayje" and "manayje." All twelve had problems with the buried v: "de-well-op," "day-li-wer." Ms. Banerji smiled through the difficulties. "A small problem of muscle memory from your mother tongue," she explained. "Fortunately we have tailor-made solutions for every MTI problem in this room." She must have caught Anjali's blank look, for she quickly added, "Mother-tongue influence problems." She assured her students that after the two-week course, they would be fluent in the language of acronyms. And politics. And sports. And popular culture. Every problem has a solution.
Even problems in personal life? Anjali wondered. Could the teacher include a lesson in optimism enhancement?
Parvati's lesson plan was more formal than Peter's. She dictated which syllable to stress. She instructed the students to press the upper teeth down on the lower lip so that a crisp v didn't dissolve into a whooshy w. She drilled the trainees hard, but not even Anjali got the th in growth, hearth, and thought. So much easier to catch the staked fence of a t and an h approaching and settle on a plump, cozy, softened d.
The next exercise called for each student to recite a poem from a reader that Parvati and the absent Ms. Desai had put together. Twelve trainees, twelve poems. Anjali was assigned "I Heard a Fly Buzz." This lady poet was no Edgar Allan Poe. How could anyone be inspired by flies? Flies deserved swatters, not rhymes. Flies meant that something dead, sweet, or fecal was nearby. Anjali guessed she'd been deliberately selected for Miss Emily's fly poem because f was hard for Bengalis to pronounce. She remembered Peter's admonition: "Foggiest, Angie, not p'oggiest." She owed it to him to get the f sound right in this Bangalore classroom. And she did.
At the lunch break, two students quit. "Shattering. I've lost all my confidence," Ms. Vasudev complained. She intended to ask for her money back. Mr. Shah did not slink away during the break as Ms. Vasudev had. He waited for the instructor to resume classes so he could confront her before storming out. "This is humiliating," he berated Ms. Banerji. "I am a citizen of India. I don't give a damn that Mr. Corporate America doesn't like my accent!" To which Parvati rejoined, "Losing two out of twelve isn't bad. That leaves more attention for everyone else. In fact, two is just the beginning." She had them recite "Quitters never win, and winners never quit," and kept them at it until "vinners" and "k vitters" were wrung from their tongues.
"Let me say one thing to the rest of you," Parvati began, after the first two quitters had left. "Am I disheartened? No. We expect dropouts, and we wish them well. Not everyone is cut out for the things we demand. You'll find that English-language skills are only a part of what we expect, and not even the largest part. Language enhancement is largely mechanical-it's your absorptive capacity, your character, your ability to learn and use new ways of thinking and, of course, new facts, that we're interested in. That's why we interviewed and tested you in the first place."
The two-week prep course actually lasted only twelve days because CCI was closed on Sunday, but three more freshers dropped out at the end of the first week. "Gole = hanssment" was gone. So was the sketch artist. The remainders were at least her equals in English: big city, confident, well educated, and slightly older.
In the training manual two sessions were listed under "Getting to Know the American Client" and subdivided into "Topography" and "Culture." According to the manual, knowing a language without knowing the culture was the same as knowing the words of a song but not the music.
Fifteen minutes into the first of these two sessions, Anjali's head was spinning. Wendy's Burger King McDonald's Jack in the Box Little Caesars Papa John's Pizza Hut Round Table Pizza Domino's Popeyes KFC Waffle House IHOP Taco Bell Chili's TGIF Applebee's Red Lobster PIP Kinko's Staples AAMCO AutoZone Speedy Muffler Maaco Midas Muffler Jiffy Lube United American Delta Continental Circuit City Good Guys Best Buy Office Depot OfficeMax Texaco Chevron Amoco Sunoco Arco Mobil Gulf Radio Shack Record Barn Wal-Mart K-Mart Target Costco GE (electronics) GM (cars) GM (mills) Ford Apple IBM Dell Hewlett-Packard, and every one of them with hundreds of outlets and bottom lines, like a medium-size country itself. Food, electronics, transportation, finance, and fashion: all were familiar, but they were shown to exist on a massive scale that rendered them mysterious. Banks, insurance, brokerages… if they had warranties, returns, or breakdowns, eventually someone in India would have to deal with it. Normal Americans, apparently, could name all those national companies and dozens more but did not have personal contact with any of them.
Parvati assured the students on the first day of classes that for every problem, CCI had a tailor-made solution. But Anjali couldn't imagine a company taking a chance on her.
She asked, "Why all these Shacks, Huts, Barns, Cabins, and Alleys? What self-respecting company would call itself a hut or a shack? Why not Mahals and Palaces?"
Parvati had an answer for that too. "Large corporations are alienating. Calling them shacks and huts is a cheap way of humanizing them. When U.S. consumers hear of a Palace or a Mahal, they only think of a Chinese or an Indian restaurant."
In the "Culture" session, Parvati showed one episode each from three popular TV sitcoms, so her students would be familiar with them in case customers referred to characters in Friends or Seinfeld or Sex and the City. Recognize the clients' references; show appreciation for their notion of humor. Anjali didn't find any of them funny.
The TV episodes depressed her. All the characters were surrounded by friends. Anjali had no friends; she had fellow tenants, contacts, mentors. She'd never had a friend, no one she really liked and could bring to her home, or missed when she was out of town, or wished she could get together with to share secrets, as Elaine Benes and Carrie Bradshaw did. Her only friend had been Sonali-di, up to the time of Sonali-di's wedding. She hated these characters; she envied them. Bright and bouncy Carrie didn't work as hard at her job as Sonali-di did, but she still had enough money to splurge more on silly, strappy high heels in one afternoon than Sonali-di made in half a year. Life in India was so unfair.
Most weeknights she lay in bed, going over assigned chapters from the CCI reader. The chapter she had most trouble with was titled "Specialized Language of the Football Gridiron, the Basketball Court, and the Baseball Diamond." She memorized alien phrases that promised to unlock deep mysteries of American English and the psyche of the American consumer. It wasn't easy to visualize a "full-court press" or, for heaven's sake, a "blitz." Why was "knocking the cover off the ball" a good thing to do? How did "throwing a curveball" indicate "an unexpected degree of difficulty"? Then there was "knocking it out of the park." That too was a good thing. But "Grab some pine!" was not. "Stealing a base" and "painting the corner" were commendable. "Flooding the zone" had nothing to do with monsoons. "The bottom of the ninth" had something to do with desperation. Somehow, "three and two, bottom of the ninth" didn't make her tingle with expectation. How was "being born on third base and thinking he'd hit a triple" a venomous insult? And what on earth did "Grow a pair!" mean? She'd never seen an American game, and the names of great players were irrelevant mysteries (could they be any greater than the best of the Indian cricketers?).
She didn't know a thing about American politics, movies, songs, television, or sports, or the coded references they inspired. They were the music, if not the words, of the American language; they were 20 percent of American speech. She asked in class one day, "How can I learn to communicate to Americans if I've never been to their country?"
Parvati offered encouragement. "You're a bright girl, Anjali," she'd say. "That's what I meant by your absorptive capacity." Parvati usually called on her first, expecting the proper, or at least a provocative, answer.
THE COURSE ENDED with a unit that called for role-playing. Parvati led her students through charades in which she pretended to be an American client calling customer service at a make-believe call center in Bangalore. To graduate, the students had to sound convincingly American when answering the client. As homework, the students had to fabricate American autobiographies.
Janey Busey of Rock City, Stephenson County, Illinois, rose from the ashes of Anjali Bose of Gauripur, Bihar, India. On the CCI computer she Google-Earthed the Rock City street map and even found "her" house; she memorized the population (only 315, she noted with horror; not even the poorest, most isolated Indian village was that insignificant); median age-an elderly 33.5-and 99.7 percent non-Hispanic white, whatever that meant. Median family income, twenty-five thousand dollars, just a quarter-lakh; median house value under one lakh dollars.
Insofar as reality can be composed of raw data, Anjali had created Rock City. The rest of her virtual life was inspired by her own unbounded longings. Janey Busey had grown up in a cheerful, wholesome, Midwestern family of five, headed by a veterinarian father and nurtured by a gift-store-owning mother. She replaced sullen Sonali with two good-hearted, extroverted brothers, Fred and Hank. Fred worked in Rock City's only bank and aspired to become a manager. Hank toiled in the office of the town's only insurance firm, though he dreamed of building boats and sailing to Mexico. Puerto Vallarta, to be exact. Vasco da Gama High School and College morphed into Lincoln High, where kids from Rock City had to hold their own against swaggerers from Chicopee and Davis. Then she got swept off her feet by her fantasies and invented sweet summer experiences of working weekdays in the big Wal-Mart in Freeport and flirting with a stock boy named Karl. She brought herself to tears just thinking of poor, slow, inept Karl shipping out to Iraq with hopes of returning with money enough for college.
For the final exam, Parvati arranged for her group of seven surviving students and herself to be transported in the CCI van to Bangalore's Electronic City offices of GlobalSys, an up-and-coming outsourcer for American and Canadian corporations.
Electronic City, Phase 1, Phase 2! The world was pouring euros, dollars, and sterling into Bangalore! Hewlett-Packard! Citibank! Siemens! GE! Timkins! Birla Group/3M India! Tecnic! Bifora Intercomplex! Dalmia Cement! Wipro! Infosys! Solid, spectacular glass temples built on raw, red clay so freshly cleared, it still bled. The CCI van bore down wide, curving lanes to the edge of the built-up area and disgorged its passengers at the front gate of the GlobalSys complex.
Parvati led her CCI test takers through GlobalSys security and ushered them into a "bay," rows of individual cubicles for teams of customer-support-service employees. She introduced them to two CCI graduates, one male and one female, one-time customer-support agents now elevated to the role of monitors. Neither was much older than Anjali. As was her habit, she studied their clothes and appearance. The boy was tall and thin, with dark-framed glasses, but athletic. He wore a dark suit; his hair was spiked and gelled. And she immediately recognized him: Darren, from her first morning in Bangalore. My God, Bangalore was a fluid world.
"Dharmendra and Rishika will play the parts of callers and monitors," Parvati explained. The monitor's job was to correct every stammer, every mispronunciation, and every error in telephone etiquette. "Don't hate the monitor," she instructed her nervous students. "Please don't take the criticism personally." Anjali remembered her first morning in Bangalore, the muttered references to "the Old Bitch," and another lingering mystery was suddenly solved. "When you turn on your computers, you'll see the credit history and the contracts your caller has signed with our client. Your job will be to scan the contracts as you engage the callers. Don't make them feel as though you're reading their credit history. It's just a chat. You're here to help them. You'll have to learn how to integrate a particular complaint with what you're reading on the screen. Some of the callers might be hostile, but you're not to take personal offense. Nothing here is personal."
And then Darren/Dharmendra took over, in perfect English, crisp and authoritative. To the question "Where are you from, sir?" he responded, "I grew up in Delhi."
"You have a good American accent, sir," the student said.
"No, I have the absence of an Indian accent. Among ourselves, we call it a Droid accent."
Before leaving the bay, Parvati posed one final question to her students. "What's the number-one rule of your profession?"
Anjali ventured a guess. "Phone poise?"
"Right. Don't lose your cool no matter what. You lose your cool, the company loses a client, and you lose a job. Best of luck!"
THE PHONE IN Anjali's cubicle rang even before she had settled into her chair. The caller's name and address popped up on her screen. Thelma Whitehead of Hot Springs, AR. Alaska or Arkansas? An igloo? Cotton fields? And what kind of name was Whitehead? Wa-wa Indian? Thank goodness, the caller was not from an M state, which she'd never have sorted out. MA, ME, MD, MI, MN, MO, MS, MT: that was a nightmare. And no doubt the monitor was listening in.
"Hi, this is Janey. How can I help you, Ms. Whitehead?"
Thelma reeled off her problems, which, if Anjali understood correctly, had to do with not having received her Social Security check, which prevented her from paying her bill on time.
And how exactly, Anjali wondered, am I expected to solve your Social Security problems? "Come again, please?" she said.
"What do you mean, come again? I ain't never bin there yet!" Thelma cried. "You don't understand the first thing I bin sayin', do you! I bet you don't even speak our language! Where the hell y'all setting at right now? India? I used to be on y'all's side, but when I get off the phone I'm fixing to call my congressman."
"Miss Thelma, please to calm down!" Stay calm yourself. You're making mistakes because you're too agitated. No job's worth a heart attack!
Thelma Whitehead hung up after one last, inscrutable imprecation: "This ain't all bin did yet!"-Anjali didn't recognize those words as English. If only she could say "Go to hell!" Her own anger shocked her, as it had that day in Minnie's spare room.
"Well, that didn't go too well, did it?" Rishika the monitor broke in. "Let's see how many gaffes I counted. She's not 'Miss Thelma.' This isn't Gone with the Wind. And where did you pull 'Please to calm down' from? I deliberately threw you a curveball with that thick accent, and you didn't respond very well, did you? You were probably seconds away from correcting her. Remember this: when you're running an open telephone line from America, you're going to get every kind of accent and every level of mangled English. You have to interpret it and laugh along with it or respond to it as if it was perfect English from a textbook. Everyone in America speaks a different English. And then, in Thelma Whitehead's sugary Southern accent, the monitor concluded, "Hon, you bin losing your cool."
The phone calls kept coming. Why was she being picked to deal with the most difficult names? It wasn't fair. Slava from MD. Shun-lien from CA. Tanyssha from TN. Witold from IA. Esmeralda from AZ. Changrae from NJ. Aantwaan from LA. Gyorgy from OK. Weren't there any American-sounding names left in America? Why didn't guys like her goofy brothers, Fred and Hank, call from Rock City, Illinois?
She mustered phone-voice cheeriness for Gyorgy. "Hi, this is Angie, I mean Janey."
"Huh?"
She pictured a large man in a fur coat and knit cap with earflaps, fleeing a pack of wolves in snowy Siberia. "How can I help you this morning, Gee-orr-gee?"
The monitor broke in with an angry "It's not morning for your caller!"
"Sorry."
"And forget how the name's spelled. It's pronounced George. Keep the conversation to the point."
Why wasn't the caller doleful Mukky Sharma of IL instead of Geeorrgee/George of OK? She couldn't afford to flunk out of CCI. She needed a job, she needed paychecks. She had to pay for room and board. Minnie hopped on her desk, a vulture sniffing carrion.
George wanted to know if he could renegotiate the terms of his contract. Of course, these were just practice calls, and she was not expected to know what kind of contract he held or the company he held it with. That wasn't the point. The point was to field a difficult problem and make the client go away happy.
"George, have you contacted your local service representative?"
"I keep getting bounced to you guys. Where are you, India?"
"No, I'm right here in Illinois," she answered perkily. "Good old Rock City, Illinois."
"No shit," said George. "You could have fooled me."
"Why not just tell me your problem."
"I subscribed to one magazine-one magazine, one computer mag-and I get about forty every month and I can't cancel them. Wouldn't you say that's a problem?"
"I certainly would."
Then the call was suddenly terminated, and Parvati herself broke in. "Anjali, what have I told you about agreeing with a caller's complaint?"
"Deflect it," she said.
"Precisely. Do you understand the meaning of deflect? Under these circumstances, does it mean 'I certainly would'? What would be your proper answer?"
In a panic, she riffled through mental notes. Don't agree: deflect. But how to deflect? "I should have said…" She started to explain, but her mind was saturated. All day long she'd been absorbing censure from the monitors. Defend our client, sympathetically if you have to, but never agree with the callers. Maybe once in a hundred calls they'll have a legitimate complaint. The caller already has a grievance; don't encourage it.
She had to admit failure. "I don't know, madam. What should I have said?"
"You might have found a way of exchanging one magazine for another. You might even have found a way of reducing the overall number, maybe by five or ten. And between us, forty is certainly an exaggeration, so you might have asked for a full listing. I doubt that he gets more than five or six."
The phone rang again. "Janey," she mumbled in panic. But this time it was her mobile. Against CCI policy, she'd forgotten to turn it off. She'd barely had time to adjust to having it.
"Janey, aka Miss Bose? Having a bad day?"
Mr. GG! "I could use some cheering up, Mr. GG," she said. At least she'd swatted the Minnie vulture off her desk.
"Dinner tonight?"
"Afraid not."
"Come with me to Mexico?"
She was feeling cocky. "I'll think about it." Miss Anjali Bose didn't have to stay Deadbeat Janey. Not forever. She had options.
Parvati's amused voice came through. "That was your best demonstration of phone poise. Now please put away your mobile, and stay focused. It's the bottom of the ninth."
THE CLASS AND monitors and Parvati met at the end of a very long day. She'd been up since four A.M. It was now three-thirty P.M. She had taken thirty-two calls-a fraction of a normal day's workload for a normal call agent-and now she had to listen, in private, to the monitors' assessments.
She knew from Parvati's body language-a term she'd learned from Peter-that her career was over. "Anjali," Parvati said, "we knew from the beginning that you were going to be different from our usual fresher. We just didn't know how different."
She hung her head.
"You seem to lose your composure under pressure. Your language skills deteriorate."
"Yes, madam."
"I've decided this line of work is not for you."
"I understand." And with this understanding came visions of running out of Peter's money, being kicked out of Bagehot House, and having to go back for good to Gauripur.
"Look me in the eye, Anjali. Customer support is a very demanding and very specialized profession. One of the things it demands is the ability to submerge your personality. No one is interested in you, or your feelings. You are here to serve our client, and the client is the corporation, not the caller. I think you have a great deal of difficulty erasing yourself from the call."
"Yes, madam. I agree."
"I think you can take something positive from this." Parvati passed a file across the table with Anjali's name on it. On it was stamped the word SEPARATED. "Being a call agent requires modesty. It requires submission. We teach you to serve. That's not in your makeup, Anjali."
"I can try to change-"
"Don't even try. I have an investment in you. Just not this one. We'll be in touch."
Whatever that means, she thought as she walked out into the cloudy Bangalore afternoon. Mr. GG's Daewoo was not parked outside. She clutched the folder, keeping the word SEPARATED tight against her silk kameez. The wads of rupees Peter had given her, or lent her, were divided by a hundred in Bangalore. From now on she must take public buses rather than auto-rickshaws. The immediate problem was that she didn't even know the bus route back to Kew Gardens.
Three long bus rides, and on each ride straphangers pressed their sweaty bodies into hers. Their hands patted her bottom. Until that afternoon, Anjali had inhabited a Bangalore as virtual as Mr. GG's Djakarta, a futuristic village instantaneously connected to all time zones on the globe, but segregated from raw life lived out on real roads. She had no certified job skill to peddle; worse, she had shamed the three people who had believed in her. And worst of all, Mr. GG had taken her response seriously and not called back to confirm a dinner date.
The bellicose symphony of dusk-time Bangalore rang in her ears as she got off at the stop closest to Kew Gardens, which was not close at all. She was immediately sucked into a tidal wave of pedestrians. She was disoriented by the coughing, hawking, and throat clearing of anonymous office workers, the pulsating police sirens, and the imperious honking of chauffeurs driving imported sedans. Bhajot Lane had never seemed so loud, so clogged. On guard against pickpockets, she shunned beggars and tightened her grip on her shameful folder and expensive pocketbook-a fancy Gucci with Husseina's initials etched in gilt on leather. Anjali found it hard to shake off a beggar mother cradling a comatose infant. The woman pursued her, listing in Hindi her woes-widowhood, starvation, homelessness, tuberculosis, malaria-and called on heaven to shower blessings on alms givers. Another northern villager, a transient in a tattered, dirty sari: Anjali's own fate, if she couldn't find a way out? Don't you know my fancy silks mean nothing? Getting no response, not even a reprimand, the woman thrust the infant in her face. Anjali shrank from the touch of its hot, grimy cheek, and, swerving sharply from the contact, stepped in a puddle of half-chewed, vomited food. There was no time to stop and wipe the muck off Husseina's fancy sandals because the throng of pedestrians propelled her forward to the end of the long block, then around the corner into Kew Gardens and through the wide-open gates into the Bagehot compound.
Strangers swarmed the grounds, trampling flowerbeds and flattening wide swaths of the overgrown front lawn. Men hauled Minnie's garden statuary-cracked stone cupids and armless nymphs blackish green with moss-out of the jungle behind the house and piled them into trucks in the carport. Women rolled drums of rice and canisters of flour and sugar down the steps of the porch. Everyone smiled; they were laughing, spirits were high. The massive wooden front door had been pried loose from its frame and flung over the porch railing so that wide pieces of furniture, such as credenzas and armoires, could be dragged undamaged out of the house. Among the looters, she spotted Asoke's "villagers." Squatter youths who had helped out at Minnie's gala were now carrying off Minnie's Hepplewhite chairs, card tables and decorative clocks, Satsuma vases and elephant-leg umbrella stands, balancing them on their heads.
A convoy of brightly painted trucks and a white van, all honking, careened into the semicircular driveway and parked under the carport. ALL-KARNATAKA AUCTION HOUSE announced the logo on the van, and standing by its open rear doors was Tookie's bad boy Rajoo, peeling off hundred-rupee notes from a wad, diverting-or was it bribing?-freelance looters into dumping their goods into his vehicles. Rajoo's crew placed the pried-off front door over the crumbling porch steps to use as a ramp, then directed the looters to ease bulky pieces from Minnie's public rooms-cupboards, sofas, dressers, hutches, a grandfather clock, even the dining table-down the angled door, wrap them in quilts and dhurries, and segregate them in numbered lots. Anjali wouldn't have given Rajoo credit for such organizational skills.
Rajoo's organizational skills! She was witnessing a premeditated, methodical dismantling of her only asylum in Bangalore. This was different from the occasional spontaneous looting of shops and the breaking of car windows with cricket bats by jobless young men that she had watched from her balcony in Gauripur. You could guard yourself against such sporadic eruptions of anger; her mother hoarded staple foods in her "just in case" bins; her father pasted a fake Red Cross decal on his bike. Rajoo was dispassionate, efficient. The moment Anjali acknowledged this, she went into a panic. By the time Rajoo finished stripping and wrecking Minnie Bagehot's property, she would be homeless and rupeeless. The little she possessed was inside the red Samsonite suitcase. She had to get to the suitcase before Rajoo's men found the cash Peter had given her.
Determined to salvage what she could of her own possessions, she clawed her way through the delirious throngs of scavengers. Tookie would be on her pre-shift pub crawl, and in any case she didn't own anything worth stealing. She trusted Sunita to be cool-headed enough to barricade herself in her room and call the police on her cell phone. Minnie would fall apart in a crisis, but where was Asoke? If anyone could negotiate safe passage for Minnie and her tenants, it would be Asoke, since everyone seemed to be related, or obligated, to him.
She found Asoke in the foyer, and he was acting more predator than prey. He had climbed halfway up a rickety ladder and was demonstrating to eager squatter kids how to rip Raj-era sconces off the walls without damaging them, so they could be sold by Mr. R's auction house. Farther inside the foyer, men she didn't recognize were dismantling an oversize dusty chandelier. She'd fantasized this scene of vengeful vandalism the afternoon she had discovered Maxie Bagehot's museum of colonial horrors, but now that she was witnessing the stripping of Bagehot House, it brought her little pleasure. Minnie and Maxie had been cantonment Bangalore's spit-and-polish opportunists. In Asoke and the auction house crew she recognized a twenty-first-century update. And what was she? Where could she go? Her best bet was to slip past Asoke and sneak into her room, stuff what she owned into her red Samsonite suitcase, and wait for the police to rescue her.
Asoke spotted Anjali as he was handing down an etched-glass wall bracket to a helper, lost his footing on the ladder, and yelled an obscenity as the glass shattered. She darted into the kitchen to avoid a confrontation. Women from the compound were emptying pantry shelves into plastic bins, buckets and cloth sacks. The squatter girl with the luxuriant hair invited Anjali to join her as she tossed large cans of ham and small tins of Spam and sardines into baskets held steady by two elderly women. Next, the girl turned her attention to rows of bottled olives, gherkins, capers and mayonnaise. The contents of a tiny jar mystified her. Anjali identified it: Marmite, Minnie's favorite sandwich spread. The women feigned disgust, and the girl put the jar back on the pantry shelf. She moved on to the shelves in which Asoke stored sweet-tooth Minnie's cans of condensed milk and packets of jelly-filled cookies.
Then Anjali stepped forward, dropped the jars of Marmite and four packets of cookies into her roomy pocketbook, and rushed out of the kitchen. Did that make her a looter too? No, no, she was a victim surviving on instinct. She could imagine her room already ransacked: clothes, shoes, toiletries, and costume jewelry heaped into a bed sheet and the four corners tightly knotted like a washer man's bundle, and her suitcase in which she kept what was left of Peter's gift of cash, her da Gama certificates, and the silver goblet wheeled away and hidden in a shed in the squatters' village. She bounded up the steps two at a time.
The home invaders were busting bedroom doors with their shoulders and with hammers, broom handles, and chair legs. Anjali's door bore gouge marks from claw hammers, but the heavy old-fashioned padlock was still intact. Sunita's room was open, but there was no trace of the tenant. Anjali dared not extract the key from her pocketbook to let herself in. Safer to pretend she was one of the mob, caught up in greed or revolutionary fervor. And it became easy to pretend. She was among the whooping marauders when they broke down the door to the tenants' bathroom and discovered Minnie.
Minnie Bagehot lay on the tiled floor between the bathtub and toilet, naked except for the wig and the rhinestone tiara on her head. The rioters fell silent, then drew away.
She must have collapsed while pulling on a corset. The stiff, sweat-stained undergarment lay on the floor by her feet. A wasp-waisted, pearl-studded ball gown hung from the showerhead. What vanity! Anjali thought, at first. And then it occurred to her that maybe Minnie had died from some crazy valor, thinking she could appear at the head of the stairs in a mildewed gown from her golden years and wave the rioters away.
Her prophecy about the gathering of evil forces had come to pass. Evil forces were sacking Bagehot House. But now, stung by this vision of its owner, they picked up their hammers and their booty and retreated down the main staircase.
No corpse deserved to be gawked at. Anjali latched the bathroom door and rested her head against it. Too late to call for an ambulance, and even if it had not been too late, she realized with shock that she had no idea what number to dial. In Gauripur, emergencies requiring intervention by police or firemen didn't happen to decent middle-class families. When Mr. GG had surprised her with her very own cell phone and asked her whom she wanted on speed dial, it had not occurred to her to include the police. How naive she had been until now!
What was it that Mr. GG had said about butterfly effects? Minnie's death meant a windfall of profitable antiques for Rajoo of All-Karnataka Auction House, whose crew was still loading Bagehot treasures into trucks. Now Anjali had in effect been dumped, because the house and its owner and everything it stood for had been dumped. She felt more homeless than she had while riding interstate buses from Patna to Bangalore. She punched Mr. GG's number on her cell phone. He didn't pick up, so she left a message: "SOS… Girish, need your help… desperate. Please, please hurry. Bagehot House is under assault, and I'm in the middle of it."
She waited and waited for the call back. Who else could she count on for rescue? I'm sitting on the lid of the toilet in a bathroom in my rooming house, with Minnie's body inches from my toes: she couldn't, she absolutely couldn't spring this on Moni Lahiri. Moni, the beautiful Bengali Svengali, belonged in her life of daydreams and her Photoshopped future. She called Mr. GG again and left another desperate message: "I'm ready for the trip to Mexico. Girish, please, please, come right now!"
Mr. GG would know how to right her upside-down world. He would insist she move into his apartment and his life. What was keeping him from calling her back? To give her hands something to do, she opened the bathroom cabinet and listlessly went through Tookie's and Sunita's toiletries. She dabbed an index finger into a jar of sandalwood face cream and massaged the cool, perfumed goo into her cheeks and forehead. She rubbed gel into her flyaway hair and squirted hairspray to keep every strand in place. She loosened the tiara from Minnie's tangled wig and tried it on. A cartoonish princess frowned back at her from the mirrored medicine cabinet. The tiara looked right on Minnie, so she stuck it back on her head. Minnie may have lived too long to be happy all the time, but she had died maintaining the illusion. Now Minnie was dancing a quadrille in her final durbar while Anjali again sat on the toilet seat, awaiting resolution.
SHE HEARD POLICE sirens, but because the bathroom window looked out on the old Raj-era tennis court, now a desolate stretch of red clay sprouting clumps of weeds, she couldn't see how many cruisers had pulled up under the carport. She hoped the police convoy included a paddy wagon for arrested looters. She heard barked orders and boot soles crunching gravel. Asoke, followed by a tall, paunchy police officer and three constables, strutted into her view. They conferred by the ragged net on the tennis court. Asoke radiated a butler's air of obsequious expertise. From their body language, Anjali guessed that the officer regarded Asoke as a reliable informant and not a vandal.
As wary of the police as her parents and Gauripur neighbors were, she now worried about being discovered alone in the tenants' bathroom with the landlady's naked corpse. She pressed her forehead against the window grille, hoping the cool metal would calm her. Below, police put up barricades to control entrance to the tennis court. Asoke's squatter youths carried a small fussy writing desk, which Minnie had called an escritoire, and a chintz-covered wing chair into the court. Asoke eased the officer into the chair as though the officer was a high-ranking army guest at one of Minnie's cantonment garden parties. He dispatched four of his youths back indoors. They came back with hand fans, a tall glass of limbu-soda, and Minnie's favorite ginger cookies on a plate from Minnie's best china.
Asoke presented the refreshments to the officer before answering, at length and with extravagant hand gestures, the questions the officer snapped at him. Anjali couldn't understand a word of their speech, it being in Kannada. And wasn't that mousy little Sunita Sampath, suddenly resurfaced, helping to serve the food and drinks, talking to the police, and occasionally pointing up to the bathroom? Soon after he had finished interviewing Asoke, the officer sent his three constables back into the house. They returned with a long file of women in their midteens and midtwenties, taken from among the looters and squatters. The girls who had emptied the pantry shelves and sneered at Minnie's hoard of Marmite were at the head of the sullen file. Why weren't the men lined up when their plundering was so spectacularly brazen? "Hi, Girish, it's me again with an SOS!"
The interrogations had gotten well under way before she gave up on Mr. GG, opened the window, and yelled down to the seated officer in English, "Mrs. Bagehot's here! Heart attack!"
"That's her!" An agitated shout from Asoke, this time in English. He pointed at the window. "That's the tenant! There she is!" And Sunita stared as well, smiling but not bothering to point.
Before Anjali could duck, an angry woman, the first to be interrogated, scooped up a fistful of pebbles and flung it at the bathroom window. She inspired her friends. Some squatter men joined in, hurling chunks of concrete loosened from the front wall and broken bricks from the edges of wilted flowerbeds. The window grille, originally installed to deter burglars, repelled the large projectiles. Why had they suddenly turned on her? Anjali's distrust of the police softened into gratitude. Their duty was to protect her; they had no choice. She backed away from the window, crouched on the tiled floor, inches from Minnie's body, and prayed for rescue. When the officer, with a policewoman and two male constables in tow, finally burst through the bathroom door, that's how they found her. Asoke sidled in after them. He didn't shriek or wail at the grotesque sight. Instead, while the policewomen pulled Anjali to her feet and handcuffed her, he covered the naked corpse with the only bath towel, still damp from use, hanging on the towel rack, a servant's small gesture of gallantry.
"You are paying guest of this lady?" the officer demanded, and pointed his baton at Minnie's body. He had the sagging, full lower lip of a heavy smoker and sprayed saliva as he spoke. With her hands cuffed, she couldn't blot; she could only watch patches of spittle land on her silk clothing and spread. Like a Bollywood cop, the man wore oversize, mirrored sunglasses, like a mask, but the accusatory growl in his voice made her feel like a criminal. She'd already been judged. "Please to describe your relationship to the deceased."
"She was dead when I got here," Anjali blurted. "I don't know why all this craziness is happening."
"Please to make response only to question posed." The officer ordered a policewoman to confiscate Anjali's pocketbook, watch and cell phone before continuing his interrogation. "What is nature of connection you are having with deceased aged lady?"
"I had nothing to do with any of this. She must have died of shock. I wasn't here. Goondahs were breaking into her home and stealing all her property."
"You are putting my patience in jeopardy." The officer extracted a pack of cigarettes from one of his many pockets but didn't light up. "I'm asking one more time only. You are residing as tenant in the deceased's lodging, but owing rent money?"
She lowered her gaze from the officer's plump, moist lower lip to his heavy khaki socks and brown ankle boots.
"Yes or no?"
She said nothing. Why would the officer believe that the dead landlady had offered to run a tab for this handcuffed tenant?
"Your good name please?"
"Angie. Anjali Bose." It conferred no identity. She didn't own the name. She could have been anybody.
"Your name is Anjali Bose? Why your purse is saying HS?" He was pointing to the gilt letters on the leather strap.
"I don't know." She lied.
He made a dismissive gesture, a sweeping of his hand, and the two policewomen dragged her down the stairs, across the foyer, down the porch steps cluttered with Bagehot furniture, past the single-minded auction-house representative in the sky-blue suit and the screaming mob and into a police cruiser. Her foot crunched the photo of dead Sikhs, which lay on the ground, stripped of its pewter frame, something new for the trash bin of history. There was no paddy wagon in the police convoy. There was no convoy.
So long as she'd been in Bagehot House, Anjali had felt in control. Surely there was someone around to vouch for her, a Tookie to say "Hi, girlfriend." She was a Bagehot Girl, after all, but in the back of the police car, handcuffed to a grille behind the driver's seat, she realized there was no one in the world she could reach who knew who the hell she was.
In an interview room in the Central Bangalore Police Station, as she sat across a table from a square-jawed, sari-clad policewoman, waiting to be interrogated by a senior detective, Anjali Bose finally broke down. On the ride to the station in the police cruiser, she had acted composed, almost cocky, demanding to know the charges against her. But in that small windowless room, guarded by two uniformed women, one of them about her mother's age, she started to cry, and in crying, started great body-shaking heaves. There were no actual charges, hence nothing to defend herself against. She was being accused of who she was, not what she'd done. The policewoman was someone's wife, since she was wearing a mangalsutra wedding necklace, and probably someone's mother. But in her midriff-covering, four-button khaki-cotton regulation blouse and khaki teri-cotton regulation sari secured on the left shoulder with an Indian Police Service metal badge, she looked merely brutal.
The younger policewoman threatened in broken English to shut Anjali up with "tight slaps." She had a thin, mean face, a stout, muscular body squeezed into a khaki shirt and unpleated khaki pants, and huge, wide feet, judging from the size of her Derby brown leather shoes. Anjali feared the woman was itching to carry out her threat, but she couldn't choke back her dry heaves and grunts, not even when she heard the squeaky leather shoes stride across the room toward her. She steeled herself for the blows. What the policewoman did instead was grab her shoulders in a hold painful enough to make her shriek. Pleased, the policewoman relaxed her grip, thrust her fist down the back of Anjali's kameez, and pulled up its designer label. "Dubai," she sneered. Then in Kannada she launched into what sounded like mocking insults.
She recognized what had unleashed their taunts: her expensive silk salwar-kameez. It didn't seem to matter to her guards that her clothes were wrinkled and sweat-stained from day-long stress. In one day, that day, she had flunked out of CCI, witnessed mob fury, been accused of murder, and hauled off in handcuffs. She read her guards' minds: How did an unemployed working girl afford such a fancy wardrobe? Drugs? Who but loose women flaunt their bosoms and hips in tight, attentiongetting clothes? Whores! She sat as still as she could while the excitable younger policewoman patted her down with palms that felt as large, flat, and hard as Ping-Pong paddles, first up and down the length and width of the back, then over the front. Thick fingers pressed into her collarbone, swatted her breasts, rested on her nipples, and flicked them as though turning light switches off and on and off and on, flic\-flic\, and when they hardened, both policewomen burst into giggles. Without her cell phone, Anjali felt totally cut off. No one knew what was happening to her. Worse, no one would care that she had disappeared. They would assume that she had raced into new adventures. Helpless, hopeless, she prayed for the detective to enter the interview room. He would admit that the police had made a mistake-or a mistake had been made-and let her go. But where could she go when freed? She had no Bagehot House to shelter her, no mother and sister to console her, no lover to embrace her.
The door lock clicked behind her. She knew, from the guards' abrupt halting of their game, that a senior officer had just entered. Finally she felt safe. Her worry that she would just disappear when Bangalore had had its fun with her, that she would be just another anonymous body buried under the building boom, was over. She twisted around in her chair to flash her signature smile at the man come to deliver her. The man was good-looking in a jowly, hirsute way, about the same age as Mr. GG but taller and thinner. He wore a dark suit with a pink shirt and a paisley-patterned silk tie instead of a uniform.
The man took his time approaching the table and taking his seat across from Anjali. He took more time tugging his watch off his wrist and placing it on the table, and still more time lining up two identical ballpoint pens on either side of a notepad and a slim folder. To make room just where he wanted to put his things, he had to push away a cracked plastic tray that held a small glass carafe of stale-looking yellowish water and a plastic glass. When he was finally ready, he announced, "Very-very serious offense, Miss Anjali Bose."
"What offense? I don't know what you're talking about!"
"Very-very serious," he repeated before introducing himself as the detective in charge. She didn't catch his name and dared not ask him to repeat it. Her bright smile had failed her this time. "What are the charges against me?"
"Treason against the Indian state. Terrorism. Abetting mass murder." The detective glanced at the ceiling and turned his head from side to side as if to relieve soreness in his neck. "Murder of Mrs. Minnie Bagehot, autopsy pending," he added.
"Is the charge withholding rent money? We had an arrangement for that."
"Not a joking matter, Miss Bose. Soon you will be weeping."
"What, then?"
He massaged the sides of his neck with his knuckles. "Miss Bose, we are not playing a guessing game." He fingered the knot of his tie. He moved his watch from the right of the notepad to the left, then back again to the right. Finally, without looking at her, he announced, "Let us talk about terrorism, Miss Bose."
"I had no knowledge that goondahs were planning to wreck Bagehot House." The absurdity of his accusation enraged her.
"Truths only, please. Cooperation is a better strategy than prevarication. This is my recommendation to all serious offenders." But he didn't give her time to comprehend, let alone consider, his advice. In a swift, sudden show of anger, he whacked the table so hard with the notebook that she screamed as though he had hit flesh and not wood. "Now," he said, a smile twitching his mustache. "Now please to tell"-he paused to realign the ballpoints that had rolled inches from her case file before he finished his sentence-"current habitation of your friend Miss Husseina Shiraz. I note her initials are on your purse. We can therefore assume you have stolen same. No need to waste time by sending us on wild goose chase to Hyderabad and whatnot."
Husseina? Husseina had been nowhere near Bagehot House. Maybe she'd heard wrong. She could barely understand the detective's southern rhythms, the weird vowels and thudding consonants. In this topsy-turvy world of Bangalore, detectives extracting "truths" from suspects in police stations probably earned less than honey-voiced customer-service agents in sleek call-center offices. She didn't want to risk offending him by asking him to repeat what he had just said. He was playing some kind of interrogation-room version of the cat-and-mouse game. He was poised to trap her in lies.
"What?" This time it was a whispered admission of anxiety, not an exclamation of outrage. One whack of his lathi across her ribs would crush her. One flick of a practiced wrist, directed against her skull, would spill her brains.
"Your good friend Miss Husseina Shiraz. You are being bosom buddies, isn't it? You are exchanging clothes, discussing secrets, and whatnot. Very expensive silk clothes from Gulf." The detective picked at flaking dry skin on his upper lip. Blood beaded where he had gouged rather than picked. The tip of his tongue chased the tawny red beads. "You are being in communication and whatnot with this bosom buddy?"
His questions were baffling. Haughty Husseina would sneer if she heard any of the Bagehot Girls claim her as a bosom buddy. "We roomed and boarded at the same time. We crossed paths in the bathroom, and we chatted at mealtimes. Just small talk, I can't even remember about what." With Minnie dead, it wouldn't be prudent to admit the Bagehot Girls mostly grumbled and gossiped about her.
The detective threw his head back and made loud clucking noises as though he was scratching an itch deep down in his throat. The older policewoman snapped a command, and the younger one poured water from the carafe into the glass. After several noisy gulps of water, the detective returned his attention to Anjali. "Miss Bose, you are committing stupidity. I already have answers to all questions I am asking." He slapped the folder with his right palm. "Commencing again, Miss Bose. What all you are knowing about your good friend's other life?" He flicked the folder open and extracted an Indian passport. "Not informing on terror plot is heinous offense. Conspirator, co-conspirator, abettor, enabler andsoforth. You are understanding that hard-labor category of long jail time is awaiting such criminal acts, no?"
He wet his right index finger, opened the passport to its front page, and shoved it in Anjali's face. She jerked her head back enough to make out a passport headshot of Husseina wearing the Panzer Delight T-shirt she had traded with Husseina. "You are seeing name of holder, isn't it? Your good name but not face?"
How gullible she had been when she had given up her favorite T-shirt! "We could be sisters," Husseina had gushed, and Anjali had been flattered. No wonder Husseina had asked her friendly questions about her birthday and place of birth.
"What place of service she was in when you were her dear friend?"
"I don't know, I can't remember. She talked about house loans. I don't know what you're getting at."
"Your situation is very much compromised. Your stupidity is compounding already compromised situation."
"I think I'm going to throw up, sir. Please, please, I need a bucket."
He totally ignored her. He swatted the top of her head with the open passport. "Why you sell terrorist whore your good name and your clothes? Who is paying you? You will confess everything. Now!"
"Nobody paid me. We swapped clothes!"
"No money changing hands? Then how you are living? Bangalore is eks-pensive city, isn't it? Vhayr you are vark-hing? Per diem how much you are earning?" The older policewoman cracked a joke in Kannada, which broke up the detective. He lowered his voice to a lewd whisper. "Your hourly wage is being how much?"
"I'm still looking for work."
He caressed the passport photo with a pensive thumb. "Your name, but your friend's face. Very professional forgery. How that is happening? Where you are coming?"
Where do I come from? It was the question she most dreaded. He was really asking if she had parents or relatives or powerful friends in Bangalore who might intervene if she disappeared or if they attacked her. Had she really ever been in bed with a rich young man in his luxury apartment overlooking Cubbon Park? Otherwise, she was just another dog on the street. "Kolkata," she said.
"Why you are concealing true facts? You think senior detectives are dunderheads?" He reconsulted her slim case file. "Place of birth and previous residence. Gauripur, Bihar State. Detainee trying to pull wool on senior rank officer! Admit please, POB is Gauripur."
"Yes," she said.
"Name of father?"
"Prafulla Kumar Bose. Recently deceased."
He shuffled his papers. "No record of Anjali Bose. One daughter only, living in Patna."
Anjali tasted bile. She was stuck in the flypaper of her past. He popped his next question. "Why Bihar girl coming to Bangalore?"
"To find work," she said. It sounded lame even to her.
"You paid by mens? You prostitute?" Now he was leering. "I think yes. I think you prostitute."
There were no correct answers in this harrowing game of riddles. Of course not! she wanted to say, but honesty would be a trap. Saying nothing was a trap, as was saying anything. I will not scream. I will not cry. She swallowed back the vomit rising in her throat.
It was not happening to her. This is not happening to me; it is happening to Angie. I am a ghost.
Now the ghost had an answer to Angie's first Bangalore question: Yes, if crores are the new lakhs, a girl can fall ten thousand times faster and deeper than she could in Gauripur. In some new, undefined sense, they were right. She was a prostitute; she was living off men, using skills she didn't know she had in order to manipulate them, and she didn't see any other way of getting what she wanted. Marriage equated to servitude, like her mother's and sister's. But if not in marriage, how did a woman in Bangalore live?
If she'd had access to a radio or a television over the past twelve hours, she would have learned that the London-based husband of a Hyderabad-born Bangalore resident was being sought in Holland, Germany and Malta for plotting a grenade attack on the Heathrow ticket counters of Air-India and five other international airlines all serving Indian cities. The Indian press immediately learned his name and address in Bradford and his wife's in Bangalore. Investigative journalists of two Hindi-language papers, a Kannada paper, and Voice of the South reported that the Hyderabad residence, though deserted, had yielded significant evidence in the form of an abandoned laptop. The wife's supervisor in Citibank's outsourced mortgage-consolidation department confirmed to reporters that she had been questioned by authorities. The employee being investigated, the supervisor stated, had quit work an hour into her shift, complaining of dizziness, and had not reported since. The whereabouts of the missing employee were not known or had not been divulged by authorities. According to several reliable sources, the woman had not returned to her rented room in her Bangalore residence, historic Bagehot House, Number One, Kew Gardens, to collect her personal belongings.
A small-scale riot had broken out at Bagehot House. Aroused youth, Hindu nationalists, common criminals, sacked the ancient landmark and carried off much of its furnishings. The venerable owner, Minnie Bagehot, died in the encounter.
That evening, after Anjali had been booked and then shoved into a crowded, foul-smelling holding cell, she convinced herself that she was being justly punished. Her crime was that of constant, heedless wanting; wanting too much; wanting more of everything, especially happiness. Her greed and restlessness had fatal consequences. Her father had died to protect her.
She dropped to a crouch, back pressed into a wall splotchy with dull red, still-wet stains of paan juice and maybe blood, and hoped she blended into the crowd of drunks and addicts unsteady on their feet. But gaunt-bodied, wily-eyed, bawdy-mouthed women swarmed around her, sizing her up. Several signaled obscene messages to her with their tongues. A half dozen looked so young that they reminded her of the light-fingered boys she had guarded her cash from on interstate buses. A big-boned mannish woman, wearing a gaudy sari hiked halfway up her hairy calves, blew Anjali lewd kisses. Anjali, more terrified in the lockup cell than she had been in the interrogation room, tried to shrink into a tiny ball. Egged on by the large woman with the rubbery lips, others closed around her and poked and prodded her with their grimy sandals. Two of them grabbed her by her armpits and pulled her to her feet. In her new penitential mood, she accepted their slaps and punches.
Only the older detainees who squatted or lay on the grimy floor, some coughing blood, ignored her. This hellhole was where she belonged; the apartment in Gauripur had been a mirage of home. But how had she gotten here? She had been told by the two people she was most eager to believe-Mr. Champion and Rabi Chatterjee-that she was special, and in her mind being special had meant she deserved better, deserved the best. Ambition had ruined her; worse, it had disgraced her family. At least her father had had the self-respect to commit suicide. His obituary in The Gauripur Standard had omitted the cause of death out of respect for him, but Peter had let it slip. Mr. Champion had begged her not to blame herself for her father's death, which meant he blamed her. She had so distanced herself from the innocent hoping and longing of her Gauripur adolescence that she could no longer call him Peter, not even in her thoughts. How had "Railways Bose" taken his own life? She pictured him hanging from the ceiling fan in the front room. She envied the corpse.
To a trust-fund Californian photographer who played at slumming, life in India might be all light and angle, but if you are an overreaching penniless Bihari, the light is murky, the angles knife sharp. Just last night she'd thought herself one of Bangalore's blessed, a Bagehot Girl. Knowledge, even self-knowledge, was cruel. Tookie was a prostie, Husseina a terrorist, and she a felon. She felt herself drifting to sleep, the willful shutting down of where she was and what she had become.
But her father wouldn't let her. He entered the holding cell, stepping over sleeping, moaning bodies as he approached her. He was dressed in the tawny cotton jacket he wore to work every weekday, crusty ridges of dried sweat radiating from the armpits. In place of his only wilted silk tie, he had a bed sheet knotted around his neck. He beamed when he reached her in her corner and, in a ritual gesture of blessing, touched the top of her bowed head.
The touch felt real because it was real. A policewoman was rapping Anjali's head with her knuckles. "Stir yourself and follow me!"
Anjali was escorted out of the lockup cell and into the booking area where, looking conspicuously relaxed among curt constables and manacled prisoners, stood a Hawaiian-shirted Mr. GG. Seated next to Mr. GG on the only bench for visitors and joking with him in what, to Anjali, sounded like Punjabi was the detective who had accused her of "abetting terror." Mr. GG stopped in midlaugh and sprang to his feet as soon as he noticed her shuffling behind her uniformed escort. "Miss Bose, rescuing you is becoming a full-time job!" he exclaimed, his voice upbeat, almost chirpy.
The policewoman shoved her toward the two men, relinquishing her authority to the detective. She peered at the men as though viewing them through dirty glass.
"Miss Bose!" Mr. GG held both his arms out. He would catch her if she fainted, as she had that first time in Barista. "It's all right now. It's over."
But she didn't lean into him. In a low, dry whisper, she said, "Just let me die."
"I have less gloomy plans for your future," Mr. GG bantered, "the most immediate plan being to get you out of the police thana." He patted his briefcase. "Release papers in triplicate."
The detective smiled at Mr. GG. "Gujral-sahib has rendered at length satisfactory explanations," he announced, without looking at her. "Why you are not informing authorities from beginning of your connections and whatnot?"
"Just let me die," she cried.
"I suggest instead that we attend to necessary business at hand." Mr. GG snapped his briefcase open and held it up to her. Her Gucci pocketbook and Movado watch lay on top of a stack of folders, manila envelopes, and forms stamped with official seals.
"Please to verify contents of lady's handbag," the detective urged her. And when she did not do so, he plucked the item from the upheld briefcase and dumped its contents on the visitors' bench. A Shantiniketan leather wallet stamped with a red-and-black paisley pattern; a key ring with a heavy metal key for the padlock on her bedroom door, a small flat key for the safety-deposit drawer in Husseina's almirah, and a smaller, flimsier one for the tiny wooden chest in which she hid what was left of Mr. Champion's cash; a cotton coin-purse; a CCI trainee badge; two Lakmé lipsticks and a tube of "whitening and brightening" face lotion; a comb; a purse-size pack of paper tissues; two ballpoint pens; four safety pins; a strip of aspirin tablets; a couple of green cardamom pods. "Please to report items missing, if any." He flashed a toothy, superior smile to indicate he was daring her to.
Mr. GG scooped the items back into her pocketbook. He snapped the briefcase shut. "We'll just take our leave straightway, sir," he said to the detective, who was still smiling. "No need to waste more of your urgent time chasing this red herring. Thank you very, very much, sir." He hustled Anjali toward the exit, promising to replace any item pilfered or lost.
Her cell phone was missing. Getting a replacement wasn't the same. A replacement will be a copy. All the names on speed dial will be copies. I am just a copy. In that hellhole I wanted to talk to Baba. I wanted to hear Ma's and Mr. Champion's voices.
In the parking lot, Mr. GG announced, "I have a surprise for you."
"No more surprises."
"Okay, I won't spoil the surprise." He gripped her right elbow and guided her toward his car. "You know, until this morning, I never noticed how green your eyes are."
"I hate my eyes."
"That's why Husseina targeted you! She must have taken your picture, then she learned your birthday, but it's your light eyes that did you in."
My sister. My generous benefactor. The mysteries of Hyderabad. The mysteries of Bangalore, the mysteries of everywhere and everyone. You think you're moving forward, you think you're beginning to figure things out, and it's all a trap. My parents were right: everyone is corrupt. There are conspiracies everywhere. But she said only, "I hate everything about me."
"You'll get over it. Time heals all wounds."
"The things that happened, happened to me, don't you understand? My father came to my cell with a bed sheet around his neck, my dead father who killed himself because I ran away to Bangalore. I'm in hell."
He jerked her by the elbow to stop her. "Maybe I don't understand. Maybe I can't. But understand this: You're lucky I have connections with the police. You're lucky I'm not off in Mexico right now. Shit happens, but you are very, very lucky, period. You have friends you don't even know, but you can't just float around Bangalore like a kite-someone will cut the string."
Her kite string had already been slashed. She had no phone and no one to call. Not that she cared. What friends? There was no longer a Bagehot House room to go back to. "Where are you taking me?"
"Patience," he counseled. "You'll find out."
She steeled herself for the next favor Mr. GG was about to bestow. He would insist she move in with him in the flat overlooking Cubbon Park. In the police thana, she had been called a prostitute. What choice did a woman like her, homeless, jobless, skill-less, have? The police were right: she was a prostitute. What other name is there for a young woman without a job or means of support? "All right," she said. "I'm very lucky I know you."
They neared Mr. GG's car. She made out a shape in the back seat. "Don't get ahead of yourself, Miss Bose. You haven't heard me invite you, have you?" He unlocked the trunk of his Daewoo. "Don't take me for granted."
"I'm hallucinating!" she gasped. Her red Samsonite was in the trunk.
The back-seat passenger scrambled out of the car. "Hey! Whazzup?" He grinned. Tall and skinny, his hair grown out and standing on end. He moved the red Samsonite suitcase to make room for the briefcase. Then he gave her a bear hug.
Mr. GG banged the trunk shut. "Let's just say you've completed a reality TV episode."
"And survived the final round," the passenger joked. "Girish activated his local network and the vast Peter Champion network. You can't imagine how many thousands of activists are working night and day for you! Parvati-Auntie's sorry she couldn't come to the thana herself, but her driver's wife's in surgery, so she's keeping vigil in the hospital. Anyway, she said to tell you her home is your home."
"But I've let her down."
"She's an incurable do-gooder. A one-time call agent might not interest her, but an unjustly accused prisoner is right up her alley. But as aunties go, she rocks."
Anjali rested her head on the skinny chest of the young photographer she had met-it seemed incarnations ago-and succumbed to tears of shame.