Miss New India

by Bharati Mukherjee

  Angie found 99 percent of boys simply unappealing. The idea of sleeping in their beds, bearing their children, cooking for them, sitting across from them and watching them eat and burp, and listening to their voices and opinions for a lifetime put the idea of marriage in a category with a life sentence on the Andaman Islands. Thirty boys rejected; none even progressed to the interview stage. "I will decide who is good," Mr. Bose now threatened. "I've left you too much in charge. You are abusing a privilege that was never yours to begin with."

  She rejected the first batch of short-listed candidates on the basis of their photos alone. "Look at those shifty eyes!" she'd say. Or "He's fat as an elephant!" Or "Eeesh, what happened to his teeth? He's wearing dentures." Bald spots, double chins, hairy arms. She automatically rejected boys with fancy mustaches and sideburns, those striving for coolness in blue jeans and sunglasses, and those who appeared too goody-goody, too pretentious or too homespun. No pictures, please, with mommy/daddy or grandparents or household pets. No Man-of-the-People shots with servants. She detested foreign settings ("Here is a snap I have dug up from base of Eiffel Tower"...or "Buckingham Palace"...or "Statue of Liberty"...or "Gate of Forbidden City"...). Those were the easy ones. But if a boy with outstanding prospects or handsomeness actually turned up, she'd make a show of serious scrutiny before complaining, "He thinks too well of himself, he's posing like a fashion model." Or "A boy like that—if he's so perfect, why couldn't they find him a rich girl in Kolkata?"

  "It's your fault." Mrs. Bose charged her husband with this failure, reminding him of all the trouble with "your other daughter," reminding him of all of Sonalis prideful rejections of acceptable boys from reasonably good families. Sonali had imagined their soft, round, bhad-bhada faces aging into double chins, their bristly eyebrows that could only grow untamed ("I'm sure he's already clipping his ear hair!" Sonali had complained). And look at what all her rejections finally got her—a man too handsome for his own good, a man with glorious prospects and no accomplishments, a man who stole her dowry gold and made a mockery of marriage.

  "Two daughters!" Mrs. Bose wailed. "No jamais!"

  After Anjali's final English conversation class—tuning up for interviews, she told her parents; prepping for Bangalore, she told herself—she informed Peter that this visit was to be her last class, her last public appearance in jeans and a T-shirt, her last day as a student. After all, she had a marriage-worthy English proficiency certificate, first class. Peter asked if she was perhaps having a bovine interlude.

  "A what?" she asked, and he stared back.

  "Cowlike," he said. But she'd turned down thirty-five potential suitors, a few of whom under different circumstances might have been worthy of a follow-up; that could hardly be considered cowlike. But Peter showed no interest. She assured him that Bangalore was in her plans; she was only testing the waters, placating her parents.

  He said his offer of help—meaning money as well as contacts, she wondered—for Bangalore was waiting, but it had an expiration date.

  "When?" she wondered aloud.

  "Soon," he said. "All right," Peter said, "one bonus private English lesson before Bangalore. Do you like poetry?"

  She didn't, but she knew the proper answer.

  "I want you to read this, and then recite it."

  Even the title confused her. "What is a rawen?" she asked. How could she read it if she didn't know what it was?

  "A raven is a big black bird like a crow that can get an Indian student hired or fired," he said. "You just said 'ray-wen.' Try again."

  She got it on the second try, and didn't mess up on "weak and weary."

  "Good," Peter said. "You aren't too out of practice, Angie."

  And then she was hopeless on "Quoth the raven, nevermore!" Two th's in a row? Back-to-back middle v's? She could cry. But Peter just kept tapping his pencil like a music teacher, muttering "Again, again" until, exhausted, she got it right.

  TWO DAYS LATER, shopping with her mother for mangoes and oranges, she spotted Peter at the outdoor market. She was about to lift her arm and signal, but no, she couldn't, not in a sari, with jingling gold bracelets. Angie-in-sari was Anjali, a stranger to her student self.

  And she thought, just like a hundred generations of potential brides had thought before her, why all this talk of new sisters and new brothers and a new house in a new city and not a warning about a new mother-in-law to ridicule her while her new husband sits back and criticizes her sloppiness and cooking? Her promised resurrection into the state of marriage would be little different from her mother's and grandmother's, except that she had education and ambition, Bangalore-and Bollywood-size expectations and a wealth of ready-made suspicion, thanks to her sister's fate.

  In the months as a full-time bridal candidate, she finally grasped enough of the world to place Peter and Ali in a kind of murky marital matrix. And to think, not long ago, she'd imagined herself in Ali's role as Peter's beloved. It was all fascinating, and just a little sickening. And with the revelation of Peter and Ali came dozens more complications, as though they'd all been lined up, waiting for her to open the door and see with fresh eyes: new combinations, weird embraces, convoluted sexual dimensions with higher peaks of improbability and deeper, more complicated valleys, like the wrinkly march of the Himalayas across Nepal.

  3

  It took three hours of sitting in a crisp silk sari at Sengupta's Marriage Portrait Studio, WHERE DESIRABLE DAUGHTERS MEET THEIR MATES, Gauripur's center of marital entrapment for the dwindling community of Bengali girls. When old Shaky Sengupta had been a younger, steadier-handed roaming photographer without a back-alley studio, he'd taken Anjali's grandmother's photo, and then her mother's, and even the garlanded marriage photo of her parents that still sat in the middle of the bedroom dresser.

  She was posed at a table in front of a Qantas poster of the Sydney Opera House, which could be replaced by All Nippon Airways pull-down screens of Mount Fuji and the Ginza district in Tokyo for additional shots; finally she was seated at a bistro table, with an unwashed espresso cup, in front of a Toulouse-Lautrec poster. The espresso cup had recently held sweet coffee. A fly struggled to escape the sticky residue. She kept her face a mysterious blank, saw that her silk sari remained uncreased, and allowed herself only five-minute breaks to dab the perspiration from her upper lip.

  A British-era thermometer advertising Pond's cold cream read 121 degrees.

  A tall young assistant lugged lights and reflectors. She tried to radiate allure from an imagined alpine café under a Martini & Rossi umbrella, with the Matterhorn in the background, while Shaky Sengupta, the palsied photographer, patted her face with tissues and tried to tease a dimple from a smile she could barely force.

  "Never mind, I put in dimple when I take out frown," he said, in English. "Dimple very popular."

  Shaky Sengupta and his diminishing breed of Indian marriage photographers shared a total disregard for truth, passion, or integrity. Which is to say they were ideal enablers in the inherent duplicity of the marriage arrangement. Every girl was fetchingly beautiful in a prescribed manner. The camera and its expressive potential worked more like a shovel. The art was in the touch-up: slimming down the dumplings, puffing up the ironing boards, inflating bosoms, enlarging eyes, straightening teeth, and moistening lips.

  The young assistant caught Anjali's attention. He was extremely tall and thin, wearing blue jeans and a plain light-blue T-shirt. He moved with grace and competence, and his Bangla was even worse than hers. It was he who set up the shots, arranged the reflectors, and measured the focus, doing everything that Shaky in his earlier years might have been able to do by himself.

  When he bent down to clean out her espresso cup, he said, "Studio sessions really suck, don't they?" His accent was pure American, without Peter Champion's decades in India to soften it. He had the longest, most delicate fingers she'd ever seen on a man.

  "What did you say?"

  A convincing American accent, easy enough to acquire these day
s in India though not in Gauripur, didn't give him the right to flirt with a paying customer. His major duty was to tell her how beautiful she looked. Instead, he was standing with his hands on his hips, insolently separating her from the pull-down screen of cherry blossoms on snowy Mount Fuji.

  "What are you trying to prove?"

  Now he'd insulted her in her zone of grace, fresh from the beauty parlor, in her uncreased silk. Indignantly, she answered, "I'm not trying to prove anything." She could feel the heat rising. "Just that I'm a worthy bridal candidate."

  "No, you're not. Your heart isn't in it."

  "My heart has nothing to do with it. It's just a marriage photo. You're not wearing a silk sari without a fan. It must be fifty degrees under the lights!"

  She saw him glance at the thermometer. So, she figured, he needed a metric-system equivalence; he might really be American. He stepped behind Mount Fuji and returned with a metal cup of cool water. As she gulped it down, he confronted the mountain. "Everything's so fake, we ought to go with the joke." He tugged down on the screen and the mountain partially rolled up, exposing other rolls of tourist posters, ladders, and chairs behind them. "Voila!" he said. "The Wizard of Oz." She decided on the spot that he was a very kind, very funny boy. Was he available?

  "Everyone knows I'm in a hot little studio and the mountain is just a prop."

  "Exactly! You're sitting like a corpse in a formal sari in front of a fake landscape. So if everyone knows they're fake, you should show you're in on it. A meta-marriage photo! You'd be the coolest, heat or not."

  Shaky Sengupta called, "Restore mountain, please. No talking with subject."

  "A godlike mission, restoring mountains. See you after," the boy said, pressing one long finger against his lips. "My name is Rabi Chatterjee." He squeezed the tips of her fingers. His hand was cold. "I'm a photographer too. Only different."

  Chatterjee? A Brahmin, so marriage to a Bose was effectively out the window. She thought she knew all the Bengali families in Gauripur, especially those with interesting boys, even the Brahmins who these days couldn't always be choosy. She'd seen the ads, "Caste no bar," especially for the poor, less attractive, and less educated Brahmin boys or girls.

  AFTER SHE CHANGED back to her jeans and T-shirt for the short walk home, Rabi was waiting. "Let the fun begin," he said. Before she could pose, there in the chaos of lights and reflectors and cables and halfrolled-up props, he took out a small silver digital camera and shot her, again and again. He promised her that the girl in his pictures was destined for a different fate than marriage, quite the opposite of Shaky Sengupta's girl with a dimple, in uncreased silk.

  When they were walking along LBS Road past Pinky Mahal, he asked if she was really serious about finding a boy. He was the first boy her own age she'd ever walked with in public, alone, not in a student group. And probably the last. She answered hesitantly, wondering, as was her custom, if he was offering himself. He spoke so rapidly that his English sounded like a foreign language in a different cadence. She felt herself growing breathless, just trying to keep up.

  "It's for my parents," she said.

  He stopped, turned, and stared. "You're getting married for your parents? That's crazy."

  "Other people have said the same thing." Of course, that one other person was American. She could get interested in a boy like Rabi, all energy and enthusiasm, with a quick mind, long fingers, and startling English. "You know how it works. I don't have a say in it." Then she wondered, Did he know how India worked? Despite his name and looks, he seemed more foreign than Peter Champion.

  "India's on fire. If you get married now, you'll miss what's happening and you'll be sorry."

  Gauripur, on fire? Peter used to say that, and it still seemed funny. "Bangalore and Mumbai might be on fire, but Gauripur is still in the deep freeze." Then, on a perkier note, "I thought I knew all the Bangla families in Gauripur. So where have you been?" Where have you been hiding? Why haven't you come forward and answered any of the ads? If she had to guess, he was one of those boys from boarding school, from Dehra Dun or Darjeeling, an Indian boy with international connections. Or maybe his parents were diplomats and he'd been raised overseas and gone to American schools.

  "I've been in California all of my life."

  She laughed. "Now that's crazy. Why would anyone from California come to a pokey little town like Gauripur? This is a prison!" She'd slipped into Bangla, just to slow things down. She was a little afraid of making a mistake in his rapid-fire American. His even-shakier Bangla fired her confidence. His long, skinny legs ate up the footpath; she had to run to keep up.

  "You ask what I'm doing here? I'm having fun. When you're taking pictures, every place is interesting ... every face is beautiful ... every day's incredible and every night's an adventure ... When you're looking through a camera, Gauripur's amazing. When I put my eye to the viewfinder, everything changes. I only see things, really see them, when I'm looking through the camera. They rave about painterly light in southern France ... Ha! It's feeble compared to India. What is that thing called—Pinky Mahal? Just look at it! It's magnificent! Better than the Taj! It's your own Rouen cathedral. Monet would go crazy for it."

  Normally she would have nodded and smiled, afraid to show her ignorance. But she trusted the boy; he wouldn't laugh at her. He was the first person, with the slight exception of Peter Champion, who after all was still a teacher and her superior, to understand, even blunder into, her nascent yearning to be respected. "Moray?" she asked. "That's a fish." A fish painted a ruined cathedral?

  "Claude Mo-nay, M-O-N-E-T, the father of impressionism." His tone was offhand, conversational, as though Claude Monet and his weird cathedral in a town in France were the subject of everyone's light-hearted conversation. "I'd call him the father of photography too. He painted the Rouen cathedral at various times of the day, just to show the effect of different angles of light."

  Angles of light! And he's only my age! she thought.

  The pace of his speech was picking up. "Monet changed everything. He ended the tyranny of the subject. The medium became the subject, and the medium was light." Faster, faster.

  Slow down, please, she thought. I can't follow—you speak too fast. Tyranny of the subject? What does that mean? The medium becomes the subject; the medium is light? You walk too fast. You get too excited. You don't know how ignorant I am. "He did the same thing with haystacks in different seasons. Usually I don't work in color, but I came out here yesterday at seven in the morning, then at noon, then at three, and finally at six, and each time the pink was different and the angle of light brought out different fractures and shadows ... it was beautiful. Bihar is beautiful. Nothing in the world is as it seems—it's all a matter of light and angles. Anyway, even if it is a prison, there are lots of good pictures you can take from inside."

  "Not if you're a prisoner," she said. Not if you don't have a camera and no one's ever taught you how to use one. "What were you doing at Shaky's?"

  "Is that what he's called? Shaky? That's cruel. But funny." He had a broad smile, a lilting laugh. "I was learning studio technique, putting in the dimples and taking out the frowns. It's very retro, but there's an art to it: setups, lights and reflectors. And those pull-downs are so cool, I wouldn't mind having a few. I gotta be prepared for anything, right? Maybe I'll end up doing weddings and baby portraits— not. Anyway, I'll be moving on in three days."

  She didn't understand a word, but the news of his leaving cut her like a slap. She was already imagining an inquiry to his parents, his visit to her house. "That's very disappointing"—a bold thing to say. "Why not stay? Why not keep the prisoners happy?"

  "The rest of India's calling. There's Mumbai. There's Bangalore. I came to Gauripur because I heard there was an expat here. I met him, and I shot him—sorry, took his picture. I'm doing India's new expats—not the old Brits—and the gays, and the prostitutes and the druggies. And the villages. And the slums."

  "My teacher is American."

 
; "Yes, I know. We're everywhere, Anjali."

  "Angie," she said.

  They took a few more steps, Angie deep in consternation. What kind of boy was this? Why would an American want to be anywhere near the kind of awful people he shoots? Just thinking about them made her skin crawl.

  "Let me show you something. Would you like to see a picture of the most beautiful woman in Gauripur?"

  "Of course," she said.

  What girl could refuse?

  He guided her to Alps Palace Coffee and Ice Cream Shop for a cooldown. It was a college hangout, but school was not in session and the AC was broken. When Alps Palace had opened, it seemed like the Gauripur equivalent of all the Mumbai Barista and American Starbucks coffee shops she'd read about, something chic and air-conditioned, with uniformed girls behind the counter. Now she saw it for what it was, another sad failure, run down and a little unsanitary. Rabi asked for a moist rag, swabbed down a table, and dried it with a handkerchief. Then he reached into his backpack and took out a folder marked Bihar and set out a row of black-and-white prints, matted under clear plastic. She barely recognized the subjects. Their very familiarity—Nehru Park, the college, Pinky Mahal—was their best disguise. Now she understood about the light. He was truly, as he'd said, a different kind of photographer.

  In Rabi's photos, Gauripur was eerie, exotic—even its most familiar monuments. The marble dhoti-folds of the iconic Gandhi statue in Nehru Park were pocked, streaked, and spray-painted. The market crowds looked furtive and haunted. Five kilometers south of town, under a small dark forest of untended mango trees, Rabi had found a MODREN APARTTMENT COMPLEX—according to its signboard—that had been abandoned early in construction with less than one floor completed. A rutted construction road and a row of workers' huts disappeared into a cryptlike darkness. She'd never imagined anything remotely like it so close to Gauripur. He'd focused on rows of rusted iron bars—rebars, he called them—like twisted sentinels bristling from the concrete half-wall, disappearing into the shadows. She imagined cold, dank air, even in the heat of a Bihar May, issuing from its depths.