Miss New India

by Bharati Mukherjee

  Rebar: a word to avoid.

  It was a relief to anticipate turning to "the most beautiful woman in Gauripur." She expected something cheeky from the boy, cheeky and American. Maybe he'd show her one of the digital photos he'd taken in the studio and come up with some flirtatious opening, like "You want to see beauty? Just look in the mirror." She was prepared to slap him for it, but not too hard. A tapping, gentle rapping, like in the poem. A playful tap, like in the movies.

  "Here's the woman I was talking about."

  Truly, he had not lied. Angie was staring at film-star beauty, goddess beauty, old-fashioned sari-jewelry-hairstyle beauty, deep, Aishwarya Rai beauty, twice the woman she could ever be. She was the most beautiful woman Anjali had ever seen.

  "In Gauripur? I don't believe it."

  "And you know her," Rabi said.

  "That's a lie."

  "Right! Only I think she pronounces it...'Ah-lee.'" He seemed pleased with the wordplay. "I guess you could say that men make the best cooks, and they make the best-looking women."

  "But you said 'she.' "

  "Exactly," he said.

  Over the weeks, with some difficulty, Angie had begun to accommodate to what it must be like, romantically, between Peter and Ali, but this revelation was something new, outside her ability to process. In her reconstruction, Ali had been the abused and grateful village boy, and Peter the all-powerful American who had saved him from a life of squalor. She'd seen it as a variant of a normal Indian marriage between economic unequals. Virtuous and beautiful village girl; spoiled, rich city boy won over by her goodness. She hadn't understood it as profoundly sexual, as it apparently was, because she'd always considered marriage a protection against sexuality—obligation, not adventure.

  "That's Ali by night," Rabi was saying. "By day he's a pretty enterprising guy. He started out cutting ladies' hair in Lucknow and then he worked wardrobes and makeup in Bollywood. You watch—some day he'll open up his own beauty parlor."

  "But those kind of men—they aren't—"

  She started to speak, then paused, remembering swishy Bollywood characters who were in all the films—but they weren't to be taken seriously. You couldn't call them accomplished in any way. They were scared of their shadows. They dropped things; they were clumsy. They screamed when they saw a mouse, rolled their eyes and flapped their wrists and ran away from fights. They were put in the films in order to be laughed at.

  Rabi stared back. "What about them?" he asked. "What aren't they?"

  "They aren't servants," she said. Servants don't suddenly open their own business.

  Rabi was fiddling with a larger camera. "And he's not a servant."

  In the next few moments, the true education of Anjali Bose began. Many seconds elapsed. She thought she was going to be sick. Many questions couldn't quite form themselves and went unasked. She was reassessing probability, rewinding the spool of her experience and discovering that she knew nothing. Something treacherous had entered her life.

  "Oh, my God," she said. "I know him."

  "I know you do."

  The next picture on the tabletop was of Peter Champion, Peter the expatriate scholar reading an Indian paper in his dingy little room, with a blurred Ali in his servant's attire of lungi and undershirt behind him, washing dishes. Peter, whatever else he was, was a serious man. He'd devoted his life to things in India that were disappearing. He couldn't be laughed at. But as she kept looking, Ali came into focus. It was as though he'd taken a step or two forward. He wasn't washing plates—he was staring at Peter.

  "I got real lucky. I came to Gauripur to shoot an expat, and I get a gay and a tranny at the same time. Who'd have figured, in a town like this?"

  She could accept it. It even restored Peter's mysterious edge. Being homosexual—did Rabi say "gay"?—was more exciting than being CIA, which is what the smart boys in her class assumed the American was. Tranny? She was afraid to ask. This tall, skinny Rabi with all his photos, the first boy she'd felt comfortable with, what was he? If all this intrigue was happening under her nose in a boring little town like Gauripur, where nothing was strange and nothing held surprises, among the people she thought she knew the best, then what was the rest of India like? Bangalore? Mumbai? She felt the terror of the unprepared, as though she'd been pushed onto a stage without a script.

  What if, in the larger world, no one held true? What if everyone was two people at least, like Ali, like Peter?

  What could she do but cry? It was involuntary. She wasn't sad or frightened. It was as if she'd missed a step in the dark and knew she was going to fall and hurt herself badly, but at that precise moment she was still suspended between here and there, between now and then, and Rabi snapped the picture. Years later, people would say that it made a beautiful composition, enigmatic, Mona Lisa—like.

  When Rabi asked her why she was crying, she said, "I've seen more in the past two minutes than I have in nineteen years."

  He said, "I'm eighteen. Photography teaches you everything."

  She didn't have the foggiest idea of what he meant.

  Nevertheless, that was the moment that sealed their friendship.

  "When you look at great photos, you see the whole world in a context. The whole world may only be five by seven inches, and it might last only a five-hundredth of a second, but within that time and space it's all true, and it's the best we've got."

  Angie Bose had lived nineteen years in Gauripur and was a year and a half from graduating with a degree from the best school in town, and no one had ever spoken to her about the nature of truth or art, or assumed she cared or knew anything about it. She knew there were plenty of pretty shots of the Taj Mahal—hard to mess that one up—and the Himalayas and animals and famous faces, but she'd never thought of them as plotted except in a Shaky Sengupta sort of way. Truth? Context? Composition? She'd never had a serious discussion about anything. She was the second daughter of a railway clerk; she was supposed to go to school, obey teachers and parents, graduate and get married, obey her husband, and have children. Truth was what the community, teachers, parents, and eventual husband said it was. Truths were handed down from the beginning of time and they held true forever, not for one five-hundredth of a second. The thought that things were not as they appeared to be, or that people were not what she thought they were, left her with a feeling akin to nausea.

  She knew, vaguely, that worlds existed beyond the assigned books and lectures—Peter Champion would occasionally depart from scripted discussions in his corporate cultures class to sprinkle in asides on literature and history and politics, little moments no one paid attention to because they would not appear on examinations. She had learned a Russian word, Chekhovian, from something he'd said about the Indian social and political structure. But the idea that a mere child, someone even younger than she was, could show off such knowledge as well was unimaginable.

  When she listened to her parents at dinner, she wanted to scream, "Life isn't like that! Nobody cares! It doesn't matter! Nothing matters!" Like any American teenager, she wanted to scream at her parents, "You don't know a thing!" But every day the same food was bought and every night it was cooked and served in the same way, and the same rumors and gossip were chewed over, the same questions asked, with the same answers given, and everything was meaningless.

  "Did you have to fight your parents in order to come to India?"

  From the way he laughed, she could tell she must have said something funny. "Why would they stop me? I've got an auntie in Bangalore, and I was with my mother's parents in Rishikesh until they died, and I've got my father's folks in Kolkata and cousins everywhere. The only hard part is finding a way of avoiding them. A billion people in this country, and it feels like half of them are relatives! Just imagine how helpful they'd be in tracking down gay bars and whorehouses! I went out with a bunch of hijras—a blast! Natural performers." What he referred to as a "gay bar" sounded like a happy place, but she wondered how a Brahmin boy from a good family would be admitted
to a whorehouse, and when she thought of hijras and their leering made-up faces and men-in-women's-clothing and flowers in their oily hair, she felt sick. Performers? They were perversions!

  They talked a bit about their parents, how hers were so loving and concerned, how supportive they were. Lies, lies! Ask me, and I'll tell the truth, but he didn't. He said he hadn't talked to his parents in weeks but sent them emails of some of his photos. She made her father into a bank manager, hoping that would impress; he said his father ran a kind of telephone company, but the man was housebound and partially crippled, and his mother wrote novels about India for American women. In their mutual inventions, they weren't so far apart.

  "I was just thinking," he said, as he tore out a sheet from a pocket notebook. "My mother would love to sit down with you!" Why? she wondered. I'm nothing special. She was about to ask why when he announced, as if in explanation, "She is Tara Chatterjee." The name meant nothing to Angie except that Tara was a common enough first name and Chatterjee one of the few Bengali Brahmin surnames, all of which meant that there were probably a dozen Tara Chatterjees of varying ages even in Gauripur. He took in her blank look and laughed. "The Tara Chatterjee who writes, that's my mom. You mean you haven't read her stories? Anyway, here's my San Francisco phone number. And let me give you my auntie's Bangalore number. I stay with her when I am there." He scribbled a telephone number on the back of his San Francisco card. "You'll get there if you really want to," he said.

  Bangalore? How did he guess?

  ***

  THE GIRL in Shaky Sengupta's formal glossies was definitely not Angie. Not even a version of Anjali. In fact, as Rabi had said, there was no one there, and that, of course, triggered a new wave of interest. The nature of Shaky's art was to drain personality from the frame and replace it with fantasy. She'd always seen herself as too tall and thin, made for T-shirts and jeans, her narrow dimensions lost inside a sari. But Shaky's magic had managed the impossible, implying cleavage and billowy wonders under the sari, along with the smudgy dimple. She was luminous and mysterious, a synthetic bonbon of indeterminate age. Shaky was a master of light and shadow.

  While her parents were fretting over the caste purity and social standing of interested probasi Bengalis with twenty-something sons, vowing this time they'd wipe out the stigma of their other daughter's divorce, Anjali was imagining herself in the real world behind Shaky Sengupta's pull-down screens. The beaches of Australia were beckoning, the Ginza, the Great Wall, why not? Even in Gauripur a girl could dream, especially a reasonably attractive girl with good English, a dimple and cleavage, and an adventurous nature.

  The girl/woman in the portrait had nothing to fear from an uncertain marriage market. She would definitely find a husband. She could imagine the crashing of teacups around the world as thousands of bachelor engineers, the loose network of longing that had thus far yielded nearly fifty interested inquiries from half a dozen countries, checked out the new photo on Bengaliweddings.com. She feared having to go through with the Bangalore alternative. When Peter first proposed it, Bangalore had seemed the answer to all her fears and all her anger. Bangalore was a great game, a way of profitably using her English, avenging Sonali, and becoming independent, while picking and choosing among thousands of boys with good English and the same ambition.

  But that was an innocent Anjali and a different Peter. That was before she got swept up in the marriage current and before her vanity was engaged. The Bangalore commitment meant packing a bag and sneaking out and admitting she wasn't desirable enough to overcome the stigma of coming from nowhere, and her parents' poverty. Her parents could live with another failed marriage. They could tolerate her misery so long as they felt they'd done their duty. But they would not survive the shame of a second daughter's act of defiance and insubordination.

  4

  She wanted to—no, she needed to talk to Peter about the photograph of Ali that Rabi Chatterjee had shown her. But she didn't dare; so one day Shaky Sengupta's bridal portrait in hand, faking jauntiness, she showed up—as she now thought of it—at Peter and Ali's. This was a forbidden visit, according to her father's newest rules, but at least she was in a sari. She presented Shaky's marriage portrait and waited for the response. "Well ... would you marry this girl?" she asked.

  Peter frowned and then passed it on to Ali.

  He checked it twice and gave it back.

  "Who is she?" Ali asked in Hindi.

  Peter said, "I think this picture is a monstrosity. So what kind of monster is it supposed to attract?"

  He'd approved of everything she'd ever done. She was the model by which he judged all his students. She could only answer, "It was my mother's idea."

  Peter stiffened. "Your mother, God help us. You're not a little girl anymore, Angie. If you get married—and I don't care how good he looks or what his prospects are—if you get married based on a picture like this, you'll get exactly the treatment you deserve."

  She smiled, putting on that big halogen beam that always came to her rescue. "I met Rabi Chatterjee. He showed me pictures he'd taken of you. And Ali."

  Peter frowned and looked away. He nodded at the mention of the photos but said nothing. No one was the person she thought she knew.

  "Rabi Chatterjee is a serious young man. He has an indestructible ego—that's a good thing. I had one too. It means he's got the inner strength to stand up to convention. And he brings you along, into his wildest plans. He could be going to any college he wanted, so what is he doing? Walking to villages and taking buses and third-class trains. He reminds me of a younger me. He said, 'You can't take pictures of India through a limousine window.' His father happens to be Bish Chatterjee, and Bish Chatterjee happens to be the richest Bengali in the world, one of the ten richest overall—I mentioned him in B. Comm. Honors, but I never expected his son would be sitting in my rooms taking my picture—he speeded up the way computer networks communicate. The world is small, but Gauripur is huge: remember that. Every cell phone uses CHATTY technology. Some day that boy who took your picture will be even richer. And I don't imagine he told you any of that."

  "He said his father owns a telephone company, and his mother writes books about India for American ladies." Why would he lie to her? Sleeping in buses and servants' hotels was the least impressive thing she could imagine. She didn't understand this American behavior. Impressive people looked and acted prosperous and confident, or else what's the use? "Maybe he's looking for a wife?"

  "I'd be very surprised. But we talked about you. He said you have a quality."

  "And what did you say to that?"

  "I told him there was a struggle going on for your soul. He said he took a picture of that." She started to smile, but he was serious. "If you get married here, you'll be lost to me."

  "If I get married, you won't lose money sending me to Bangalore," she said.

  "It's never about money. You'd be surprised how many women in Gauripur were girls I once taught. Girls with good grades and good minds, with curiosity about life outside of this town. Ambitious girls, not just daydreamers. And we talked then just as you and I are talking now, and that was before India took off, before there were real opportunities in this country and you didn't have to fill your head with nonsense dreams of England or America. And I see those women in Gauripur today, in the market with their husbands and children, and when we cross paths, they bow their head, afraid I'll call them by name. They never left; they never got a proper education. These are girls who wanted to be doctors and teachers, not flight attendants. Their fathers pulled them out of school as soon as they got their high school certificates and had them married off within the month." Peter changed to a mocking, local Hindi: "What if I end up with an unmarriageable daughter, what if she becomes too smart for any local boy? What if some eligible boy will say 'Don't you think I can support her? You think I am sending my wife off to work?'" And then in English: "The money isn't my investment in you. My investment is you, Anjali Bose."

  After a pause, h
e added, "I don't even blame the fathers or the mothers or the girls or their husbands. We talked about all of this in class. Companies fail when they keep making the same product in the same way, even when the customer base is changing. Well, the base—that's India today—is changing and the old ways are dead ways. This marriage portrait is a wasted effort. Hoping there's someone out there who'll answer your dreams in an ad, that's death. I don't want to lecture you because I don't think you, above all, need it. Don't prove me wrong."

  But he was lecturing her. He wasn't talking to her as he did to students in the classroom. He was telling her in the plainest terms that both the bride-to-be-Anjali of the studio portrait and the gutsy-rebel-Angie who had ridden on the back seat of his scooter were frauds. He had become a dangerous mentor, sowing longings and at the same time planting self-doubt.

  "Carpe diem," he said, almost to himself.

  "Carpey what?" What did carp have to do with her situation?

  "I can't make you take the big step. All I can do is cushion the footfall." He took a couple of deep, wheezy breaths, and asked Ali to please bring him a glass of water. Ali delivered the water on a tarnished silver tray, and with it, a small pill. Peter Champion gulped them both down before tearing two sheets off a notebook he carried in his kurta pocket.

  Malaria pill? Aspirin because she'd given him a major headache? Hypertension? Cholesterol? Was he dying? Feeling a new urgency, she watched him scribble a name and address on each of the two sheets.