Miss New India

by Bharati Mukherjee

  "Minnie Bagehot will put you up in Bangalore if I ask her to." He handed both sheets to her. "And Usha Desai can help you work on your job skills. I'm cashing in these chips because I want to be proved right. About you."

  So, if she married, she'd be lost to Peter. If she didn't marry, she'd be dead to her father. How very odd it was, taking tea in her teacher's room, as she had on so many occasions over the years, and now watching Peter and Ali from the corner of her eye, the way Rabi's picture had captured them: Peter up close, Ali in the background, then Peter walking over and placing his hand on Ali's bare shoulder and whispering something, which caused Ali to smile. He's treating me like an adult, she thought. He's forcing adulthood on me. This is what the adult world is like; this is how adults interact. I'm seeing it, but I shouldn't react to it in any way. It seems odd, but also familiar. Was that a little kiss on his ear? I've passed through an invisible wall and I can't go back. Maybe I'm a ghost.

  And for the first time, she was able to articulate it, at least to herself: Maybe I'm not here. Maybe I'm not seeing any of this. Maybe "Anjali" is seeing it. "Angie" is somewhere else. Splitting herself in two was a comfort.

  ***

  ANGIE WAS CRUSHED that Peter hated the picture, but Anjali was drifting above it with a smile, trying to show her the way. As she walked the familiar path home, LBS Road past Vasco da Gama High School and College and Pinky Mahal to MG Road, along the fence of Jawaharlal Nehru Park, she noticed a light on in the Vasco Common Room.

  The college was officially not in session. It was mid-June. School was closed until the monsoon broke and cooled things off, ending the days of crippling heat and the nightly reign of mosquitoes. But the peak hour had passed. It was the quiet time when windows were shut and everyone tried to sleep before bathing—if there was water—and then went out to shop for the evening meal. Once the rains started, the fruits and vegetables would begin to rot, and the open markets would close.

  In the Common Room someone had pulled the shades: premature darkness in the late afternoon of an Indian summer day. Without turning on a light, Anjali made her way to the computer room and stood at the door. From deep inside she heard the clacking of computer keys. As her eyes adjusted, she could make out a single illuminated monitor and a shape in front of it, the bulky form and reflective glasses of that harmless neighborhood boy, the computer genius Nirmal Gupta.

  Her mother would have called it auspicious. She had her photo. She was alone with Nirmal. And Peter Champion had just crushed Angie's confidence. But Anjali had plans.

  Sure-Bet-IIT Gupta had the keys to the Common Room; he ran the computer center, all six units. He was one of the few boys in the college she could talk to, largely because she didn't consider him an eligible bridegroom candidate. And it was easy to guess what might have brought a lonely, computer-savvy boy to the computer room on a dormant campus: the marriage sites, and the hundreds of photos of hopeful girls just like her.

  "Don't mind me," she said. "I saw a light."

  But he did mind. He'd practically tipped over the computer, trying to hide the pictures of eligible girls. She'd wanted to say, "That's all right. Bengaliweddings.com?" But she asked, "See anyone interesting?"

  "The screen..." He started babbling; the screen was already blank. He tried to excuse himself. Someone else, some other Bengali, must have been using it.

  "I didn't know you were looking for someone," she said. "I thought you were going off to an IIT."

  He looked up at her with big moist eyes, like a beaten dog.

  "Please, big sister, don't tell anyone. I did not receive admittance," he said.

  What else could a bright boy in science do but go to a technical college? "It's all crooked," she said, repeating what she'd heard from her father and others. But she had a favor to ask, and if a bit of sympathy helped, what did it cost her? And so she asked, "Where will you be next year?"—a bold question, but he'd been straightforward himself.

  "I have no prospects," he said.

  "You'll find something, I'm sure. You're the best science student. Maybe not IIT, but there are so many others." Actually, she couldn't name any.

  He thanked her. She smiled and asked, "Would you do me a favor?"

  "Of course," he answered, a mite too quickly. "Anything you ask."

  That's when she suspected he had special feelings for her, not that she could have predicted how far he would take it. It might have been love, but at the time it was merely a chit she could cash in. "If I gave you a new photo, could you take the old one off and put this one on the Internet?"

  "What kind of photo?"

  She showed him Shaky's portrait, the plump and dimpled Anjali at an alpine resort. "Can you put it on Bengaliweddings.com?"

  All he said was "If you want me to." He took the picture, remarking only that "The portrait is very beautiful, is it of you?" And when she admitted that it was, just maybe a little deceptive, he said, "No, no. No deception. It does you justice," and within a day it was plastered across five continents.

  As often happens to those who dither, waiting for that moment when all doubt and indecision would be suddenly resolved, that moment arrived in an unexpected way. The English-language ads had marginally improved the candidate pool; so had the original posting on the Internet. Fifty candidates had been rejected.

  More to the point, Anjali had begun to educate herself in the secret ways of the heart. After the new Internet posting, she began receiving flattering inquiries from desirable countries on every continent. There were intriguing dimensions beyond her experience, and the movies she'd watched, and they were all open to her. There were men like Peter, without his complications. There were boys like Rabi and his hijras and prostitutes and gay bars. If she could hold out for a few more months, and if she could learn to value herself above what her untraditional looks and humble economic standing warranted, she might win the marriage lottery. In those months, while conforming to the predictable behavior of a bridal candidate and submitting to all the indignities of daughterhood, she clung to an indefensible belief in her own exceptionality.

  THE FINAL EVENT followed the posting of her picture. Two weeks after Nirmal Gupta had put her formal portrait on the web, he'd gone to his bedroom with her picture and drunk a canister of bug spray. He began writing a long declaration of his lifelong devotion to a goddess he'd been too shy to approach, but he'd started the letter after drinking the spray and wasn't able to finish it.

  The Gupta parents set their son's framed photo on an altar surrounded by flowers and brass deities. "He was always going to those cinema halls," his mother cried. "He was in love with a screen goddess."

  They didn't recognize the portrait as Anjali's.

  "The boy lost perspective," his father said. "These boys today, what to say, what to do?"

  Buzley, buzlum. Anjali wondered, Did he even tell his parents he'd failed his entrance exams to an IIT?

  SHE TOLD HERSELF, I owe it to poor Nirmal Gupta. I owe it to Baba and Sonali. I'll give them one last chance. She agreed to meet the next acceptable boy: number seventy-five. He turned out to be Subodh Mitra, the first boy to be brought to the house for inspection. His letter alluded to a distant connection to Angie's mother's sister-in-law in Asansol, a grimy steel-making center on the western edge of Bengal. "Yes, I remember the Mitras," her mother exclaimed. "Very respectable. Very well connected!" He was twenty-four years old, tall enough for a girl like Angie, clean-shaven and handsome enough to charm mothers and turn any girl's head. He held an undistinguished engineering degree from a prestigious school, but, according to his posted résumé, he had also earned a First-Class MBA degree from a business college in Kolkata. He'd worked a year in Bangalore at a call center ("customer-support agent," it read), but now he'd returned from the South, ready to marry and settle down. With family power behind him and connections in government, he would never be unemployed. If everything checked out, he would be a catch.

  Even Angie could not manufacture serious objections. She'd
exhausted every possible reason, both objective and whimsical, for rejecting a boy. Probably her most heartfelt one, in the case of Mr. Mitra, could not even be voiced in the family: she simply could not imagine carrying on civilized discourse with anyone from Asansol. But in the Bose family—just look at her parents—failure to engage in civilized discourse was not grounds for marital disbarment. She remembered Asansol quite well. When the train passed through it, she'd had to secure the coach windows against the coke ovens' soot and sulfur fumes, but the toxic stench still drifted through. Men would breathe through moistened handkerchiefs; women pulled their saris across their nose. Asansol was a place even Gauripur could look down on. Subodh Mitra's place of origin was his only prominent demerit.

  Her father tried to read between the lines of Subodh Mitra's CV. "The boy did engineering to please his father, but his heart wasn't in it. When he got a chance to study business, he shone like the sun!"

  Anjali had never heard of his Kolkata business school. Probably hundreds of "business schools" and "colleges" were run out of the back rooms of hot little apartments, all advertising First-Class MBA degrees the equivalent of those from Delhi, LSE, and Wharton. She was tempted to argue but kept her silence.

  "This is a golden boy." Her father persisted. "His parents are very reasonable. They want this marriage as much as we do. I have counteroffered more than they asked."

  Subodh Mitra, the intended, the all-but-fiancé, arrived from Asansol in a red Suzuki, an eight-hour drive on the clogged, narrow national highway, in the first week of the monsoon rains. A red Suzuki! Mr. Bose still negotiated the streets of Gauripur by scooter, just as he had in college—another humiliation for which Anjali and her mother and sister were somehow to blame.

  The young man swept into their apartment, bearing flowers and sweets. The photo hadn't lied: he was tall, athletic, and handsome, with real dimples. He was attentive to both parents and showed the proper deference to Mr. Bose. He barely looked at Anjali, fulfilling the etiquette demands of the marriage market.

  "Oh, and this must be your daughter, the lovely Anjali. I was enjoying our conversation so much, I nearly forgot..." Anjali then allowed herself to be pushed into the conversation.

  He complimented her on her white cotton dhoni-khali sari, with its yellow and green stripes: "A very nice selection for the occasion." He went on. "I must compliment the feminine sensibility of the Bose household. Unexpectedly simple, not a showy tangail or fussy kanjeevaram."

  She was impressed; a man who knows his sari styles is refined indeed.

  He must have been through many such interviews, Angie thought. She had worn her lone kanjeevaram for the day in Shaky's studio. She would wear a red brocaded Benarasi for the actual wedding.

  "Anjali is very artistic," said Mr. Bose.

  "I can see that. Taste is a rare quality these days. Taste in such matters speaks well of her parents' example."

  "Our daughter has graduated from Vasco da Gama, with honors..."

  The "boy" had to feign surprise and interest, as if he hadn't known all along, and Anjali had to deny, modestly, any great intelligence or motivation. He declared himself passionately devoted to his parents in Asansol, but his ambition was to move to Kolkata and convince his parents to settle nearby. Even Gauripur was preferable to Asansol, Subodh readily admitted. He spoke in elegant Sanskritized Bangla, the pinnacle of decorum. "Mr. Bose, I am myself looking for a post in international communications, hopefully in Kolkata, but failing that, I look with favor on Lucknow or Allahabad."

  Lucknow? Angie thought, with horror. Allahabad? What modern girl would chain herself to a dreary place like that?

  Her parents were impressed by his chaste, mellifluous Bangla, with no infiltration of Hindi, and they strained to meet its standard. This offered Angie the perfect out. She stumbled so badly in the language, half deliberately, that the unruffled, indulgent Subodh continually asked her to please repeat her questions. Then the young couple were allowed an afternoon alone to get to know each other, with the unstated assumption that to know Anjali, despite shortcomings, was to fall madly in love with her.

  Once out of parental range, as he drove down LBS Road past the major intersection of MG Road and Pinky Mahal, past the cheap hotels, where Rabi must have stayed, and the Vasco campus and the apartment block where Peter and Ali lived—a light was on in their window—he finally burst out in English, "What a strain! But that was a very good show you put on back there. Very convincing. Very funny, actually." It was his first lapse from his flowery Bangla. His English was no match for hers.

  She'd expected that he would park the car and they would stroll down MG Road to Alps Palace or maybe to the hotel restaurant. She wondered if she should take his arm. She wouldn't mind being seen in public with him. She would tell him Allahabad—no way! She didn't know what young people in the early stage of prenuptial negotiation were supposed to talk about. The photo sessions and letters, the gold and sari shopping, the piles of rejected suitors, had happened in a vacuum. But he acted confident and she was good at picking up cues, and anyway, it was happening to an imaginary girl named Anjali while the real person, Angie, could sit back and watch. Hobbies? Thank God for her minimal talent with the harmonium. Favorite foods? How should she pose—sophisticated and international, pizza perhaps—or sweetly, coyly desi, just an unassuming Bengali girl raised on fish curry and rice?

  Subodh had no intention of walking or of stopping for coffee and ice cream. They were out of Gauripur in just a few minutes, across the main highway to Patna, five hours to the west, into the monsoon-lush countryside. It was a sunny afternoon between bouts of rain. Rabi had been out here too, on a bus; she recognized scenes from his photos: the now-glistening, once-dusty vegetation, the red soil, the woven patterns of the thatched roofs, the returning long-legged wading birds in the now-flooded fields, the bright saris of women walking along the side of the road. India was beautiful. The countryside was peaceful.

  And she felt comfortable, secure, in Subodh's company. This is how she'd imagined it, driving through the countryside in a red car with a handsome, confident husband. It could work. She felt certain that her mother and her sister had never known such a moment. Mr. Mitra's English might impress in Asansol, or Bangalore, and especially in her parents' house, but she held the upper hand.

  "A very good show? What are you implying, Mr. Mitra?"

  "You are a total fraud. No one with the name of Anjali Bose could possibly speak Bangla as poorly as you!"

  "And is this customary praise for all your lady friends, Mr. Mitra?"

  "I am an honest man. I speak my mind. I take what's mine."

  At least he didn't deny having lady friends.

  "Honesty is a poor substitute for decent manners, Mr. Mitra. My honesty makes me ask what in the hell is Lucknow all about? What modern girl is going to settle in Lucknow or Allahabad?"

  "My uncle in Lucknow is Civil Judge, Junior Division. In Allahabad my oldest uncle is manager of the State Bank of India." A few minutes later, he added, "For your information, I have no intention of going to either place."

  "I have no interest in Kolkata," she said.

  "Good for you. Kolkata is dead and buried. And you'd have to learn the language."

  To which, of course, she smiled broadly. She decided he was not really a bad catch. A different Angie might have looked him over and said "He's honest, he's funny, he's certainly handsome, he's shrewd. I could do worse." In English she could be as saucy and seductive as any Bollywood heroine. She turned on him with that smile and asked, ever so sweetly, "So all that business about settling your parents in Kolkata was what ... a lie?" Not that it mattered. A certain amount of mutual inflation was built into the marriage negotiation. She was not above the deployment of subterfuge on nearly any level.

  "You've got a big mouth, you know," he said.

  He turned off the highway. A muddy trail led through a partially cleared forest to a construction site. The place was desolate. Workers' huts lay strewn about,
but the various buildings seemed abandoned. Concrete had been poured for the shell of an apartment block, abandoned because of the monsoons or a sudden withdrawal of funding. Rusted iron rods protruded from the stark slabs. Anjali remembered the word: rebars. He stopped the car in a dark grove. This place too was familiar. Rabi had been here; she'd seen the picture. Black and white, to bring out the shadows, he'd said. He'd made it seem a dark and brooding place, ghostly in its abandonment. She opened the car door, prepared to get out and inspect it more closely, to enter the picture, as it were.

  "We won't be bothered here," he said.

  She turned and asked, "How do you know?"

  "I drove in this morning." He'd reverted to Bengali, a language that robbed her of power and nuance. "I had time to find a place."

  "A place for what?"

  He snorted. "Our marital negotiations."

  "What sort of negotiations would that be, Mr. Mitra?"

  "Get back inside and close the door," he ordered. "What do you think? You're going to be my wife."

  He put his hands over her breasts on the bright green choli under the dhoni-kali sari. "Everyone knows the kind of girl you are."

  "Take me home, immediately," she cried.

  He smiled that dimpled smile, then laughed. His fingers pulled the end of her sari down. "I don't want to rip your fancy cotton choli," he said. "Unhook it now." She refused, and he popped open the row of hooks, exposing her bra. It was her push-up bra, forced on her for this occasion by her mother. She pulled the loose end of her sari over it. He slapped her hand down and kept it there, on her lap.

  "I am within my rights to see what I'm getting," he said. "Just like your American."

  Rabi? she thought. I have done nothing with any American—or any Indian, for that matter. This couldn't be happening, not while she was wearing her tasteful sari. Isn't that how he had described her sari in the living room? In a Bollywood movie a savior would arise, the ghost of Nirmal Gupta perhaps, whom she'd laughed at with his goo-goo eyes every time they passed on the street. Just like the movies: the good, faithful, passed-over boy comes to the rescue of the virtuous but slightly too proud and headstrong girl, who allows herself to be compromised, but not fatally. Maybe this was her punishment for not taking Nirmal Gupta seriously enough, for underestimating that little letter he'd tried to write before the poison took over. She would say a prayer, "Ram, Ram," and Ram in one of his many forms would rescue her. She turned away and stared briefly at the dead slabs of concrete, but Subodh Mitra's hand on her chin pulled her back, hard.