Miss New India

by Bharati Mukherjee

  What she knew was simple but profound. Energy and confidence create links between bright new cars, a rising ring of skyscrapers, and busy people clutching shopping bags with fancy logos. She wanted to be one of the people being waited on in upscale shops. She saw girls her age wearing crash helmets and maneuvering their motorcycles between stalled cars and around bullock carts, and she was determined to be one of them. She had nothing to lose, no good name to tarnish. No one knew her parents, and her parents had no idea where she was.

  All of this and more she learned during her first half-hour in Bangalore from a single newspaper left folded on a bench. Kids fresh out of college were the new managers. She noted their names, from every region of India. Boys still in their twenties were building apartment blocks. Girls in their twenties were opening lifestyle shops. Hadn't Peter Champion let drop that she could be earning a monthly salary bigger than her father's, and for what—just for exercising her only talents, conversational English proficiency and a pleasing phone voice?

  "Need taxi, big sister? I carry your luggage to taxi, no problem, and make sure meter is working."

  Angie clutched her backpack even tighter. Her parents had warned her to be wary of Good Samaritans offering help in public places. In her parents' paranoid vision of the world, Good Samaritans were pickpockets working in teams of two. In Gauripur she had rebelled against this crippling cynicism, but not here in this bus depot. The young touts badgering her had been fellow riders on her bus, country boys, but they'd hit the ground running. They kept circling her, inching closer and closer. Then suddenly they melted away into the crowd of embarking and disembarking passengers.

  A gang of older youths now menaced her. "Need hotel, big sister? Clean room. Close by bus and train. Concession rate. Bherry, bherry respectable."

  She needed to sit tight and look composed while thinking through her immediate questions: How far is Kew Gardens and Minnie Bagehot's house from the bus depot, and could she afford an auto-rickshaw? She'd never been on her own in a real city. In Gauripur she'd always walked between school and home, and except for emergency trips to Dr. Triple-Chin Gupte's storefront clinic in Pinky Mahal (most recently for an excruciating ingrown toenail and before that for a hilsa fishbone stuck in the soft tissue of her throat), where else had she needed to go?

  "Mind over matter" was one of her father's favorite adages. "Where there's a will, there's a way." So long as she didn't put all her eggs in one basket and remembered to look before she leaped, she'd be fine. Better than fine. She was not desperate; okay, she'd felt abandoned when the bus that had brought her to Bangalore pulled away from the curb, and, okay, okay, she'd panicked when the vendors and hostel touts had swarmed around her, but she hadn't felt despair. What she felt now ... was guilt. Why had she had to hurt her parents to realize they cared for her, cared too much? Mind over matter, Baba. Silently she begged his forgiveness.

  FINALLY A POLICEMAN approached and spoke to her in Kannada. The language sounded so alien, the tone so ambiguous, that she wasn't sure whether he was offering help or ordering her to move on. "Kew Gardens?" she asked.

  The policeman shrugged. He tapped her suitcase with his lathi.

  "Kew Gardens?" she repeated.

  Again he shrugged. He looked her up and down and tapped the side of the suitcase. After a pause, he said, "Majestic." Then he made a sweeping gesture with his baton. "Bus stand, Majestic." He pointed his baton at the line of auto-rickshaws a few yards away. Then he lost interest in her and sauntered toward a knot of boys selling toys from trays suspended around their necks.

  Angie slid off the suitcase and pulled it to the auto-rickshaw at the head of the stand. "Kew Gardens," she announced, as though it was the only street in town.

  The driver turned his head from side to side and helped her load the big red bag on to the narrow seat beside her. He took off, bobbing and weaving on a thoroughfare that would have been generously wide anywhere in India but here was too narrow for the variety of vehicles. Motorcycles darted in and out of traffic lanes, almost brushing her elbow. Hyundais and Skodas were twice the size of anything she'd seen in Gauripur. Mercedes-Benzes, liveried chauffeurs at the wheel, sped past. Huge American cars, many with women drivers, snaked around her auto-rickshaw. To avoid panicking, she concentrated her gaze in the direction of the footpath that had to run alongside the road, but the footpaths—Sidewalk, she told herself, think American —had been torn up to make way for new sewers. She shut her eyes and kept them shut for a long time. When she opened them again, the road was wider, the trees shadier, the older buildings statelier, and the newer buildings taller and fancier. Towers of blue glass reflected the perfect blue sky. Bangalore had been built by a race of giants.

  "How much farther?" she asked the driver in Hindi.

  Without turning his head, he answered at length in one of the South Indian languages, extending his arm in an all-encompassing sweep. The only words she understood were "soon-soon" and "MG Road." Another MG Road. Peter Champion once said, "Every American town has its Main, Oak, and Elm, just like India has its Gandhi-Nehru-Shastri." But Bangalore retained British place names too, like Kew Gardens and Cubbon Park.

  "Hindi?" she asked. "Don't you understand Hindi?" The auto-rickshaw was moving erratically through fast-moving traffic on a wide artery flanked by office buildings, government offices, and shops.

  Finally the rickshaw lurched to a stop by a muddy puddle a couple of feet from the curb. All the buildings on that block were office towers, with street-level showrooms and fancy shops. It was barely eight in the morning and the shops were still shuttered. High-rise office buildings in Bangalore indexed their tenants' names on signboards visible from the street. The tall building immediately in front of the rickshaw boasted corporate logos of companies from twenty different countries, marked by their flags.

  "This isn't Kew Gardens," Angie snapped. "I'm looking for a house, a private home. Bagehot House."

  "MG Road," said the driver, smiling shyly.

  He got out of his vehicle and gave the back tires vicious kicks. It was clear that the rickshaw had died. He held out his hand for the fare. "One hundred rupees," he said, this time in Hindi. She stayed put. He checked the rate card against his meter and asked again for one hundred rupees. It wasn't fair that he was demanding to be paid for dumping her who knew how far from Kew Gardens. A hundred rupees would pay for a month's to-ing and fro-ing in Gauripur. But before she could decide whether to complain or haggle, she got out on the street side, and the driver grabbed her suitcase with both hands and dropped it with a thud into the puddle in the gutter.

  She flung a ten-rupee note at him. "Go to hell!" she screamed in English, startling herself for saying something she would never have said in the old days. The driver's actual competence in Hindi, expressed in fouler words than any movie villain's, came pouring out, but he was quick to scoop the ten-rupee note out of the puddle and dry it on his shirt.

  Angie rolled her suitcase past three buildings, wondering if Kew Gardens was anywhere within walking distance. It was not quite eight-thirty in the morning; the sidewalks were still relatively empty. No one to ask for the right way to Kew Gardens. No one who looked Englishor even Hindi-speaking. She'd seen only one major road in the center of old Bangalore, and she began to imagine the sheer extent of the city in every direction.

  From the sidewalk she could make out an outdoor coffee bar with patio umbrellas on an elevated plaza between two skyscrapers. A gaggle of voices floated down to her, tinkly voices of hyperconfident break-fasters, chattering in American English. Finally, a language with familiar cadences! She climbed the stairs to the plaza and found herself in a crowded coffee shop. Not just any coffee shop, not another Alps Palace with mold blooming on water-stained walls: this was a Barista. Most of the small round tables were occupied by large groups of noisy patrons her age, dressed, like her, in jeans and T-shirts. Many of the girls were smoking, gesturing wildly, and giggling like schoolgirls. Except for vamps in movies, Angie had never
seen women smoke in Gauripur. At the outer fringes of the plaza, young men and women were plugging away, doing work on laptops.

  In Bollywood films, the coolest stars casually meet in a Barista. Angie felt cool as she trundled her suitcase to the counter indoors. She would splurge on a tall iced coffee with a scoop of ice cream. In fan magazines, actresses were photographed while seductively licking strawberry-pink or saffron-yellow ice cream off a long-handled spoon. Hadn't she just saved maybe ninety rupees on the auto-rickshaw ride to nowhere? But when it was her turn to place her order, she asked for the cheapest, smallest hot coffee listed on the board above the counter. She blamed her Bose family training in frugality for the failure to splurge.

  Really, why shouldn't she buy into the self-indulgence on display all around her? She knew her worth, and she had money—okay, borrowed, in a cookie tin in her tote bag. She'd shaken off the dust of Bihar and the mud and jungles in between, and now she was in Bangalore, where the towers are made of blue glass, but they could just as easily be gold. She'd done it entirely on her own. Next time in a Barista, she promised herself, she would order the most expensive coffee on the board.

  "New in town?" asked a cappuccino drinker at an adjacent table, glancing down at Angie's Samsonite. She wore an I MUMBAI T-shirt.

  "Just got off the train," Angie confessed, flashing her biggest smile. "I got in from Kolkata an hour ago." It's a new life, who's to know?

  "Cool," said Mumbai Girl.

  Angie put her coffee down on Mumbai Girl's cluttered table. A young man in a black muscle shirt that showcased his biceps gave up his chair for her. "Fresh Off the Train. F-O-T. Cool," he said.

  "Now I've got to find Kew Gardens," Angie confided. "Do you know where it is?"

  Mumbai Girl shouted over to the next table, "Any of you guys rooming in Kew Gardens?" Her English was perfect, better than Angie's. And the responses from the other tables were also in English: "Hell of a commute!" "Try Kent Town instead." "Isn't your ex looking for a roomie?" "Don't sign a long lease straightaway. Landlords are crooks." "And all landladies are bitches."

  "Chill, F-O-T," Mumbai Girl counseled. She got on her cell phone. "Moni," she said, "Lalita here. Barista's, where do you think? Really? She agreed? I'm surprised. No, I'm shocked. Look, there's a new Bangla babe here." She looked up at Angie with a big smile, then winked. "Moni, you'd better get here fast. She's a real cutie. Hot and going fast. You want her in BanglaBazaar before those MeetMate guys snag her."

  Cutie? Angie thought. Cute was something small and soft and dimpled. She was too tall and skinny for cute.

  Mumbai Girl put her hand over the phone and whispered, "His name is Monish Lahiri—we call him the Bengali Svengali. Movie handsome, but kind of short. Not short-short, but shortish. He romances all the girls, so he's too busy to concentrate on just one. Anyway, he's minting money on his Facebook ripoff. He has us recruiting all the F-O-T Bangla babes and studs for his directory."

  Angie tried to follow it all and came up ... short. What's a Svengali? she wondered.

  Lifting her hand off the phone, Mumbai Girl said, "I don't know—pretty tall, hundred and seventy-five, hundred and eighty, maybe. Wear your shoe lifts."

  "Tell him a hundred and sixty," Angie said.

  Lalita continued. "Cool, Moni. Oh, she says a hundred and sixty." She turned to Angie. "Moni started the trend. Now every group in Bangalore, the Gujaratis, the Tamils, the Konkans, the Punjabis—everybody's getting into these Bangalore directories."

  Angie's head was spinning, faces popped up like flashbulbs, voices twittered, coming from nowhere, or everywhere, and she couldn't understand a word they were saying. Maybe she'd strained something, hauling her Samsonite up from the sidewalk.

  The smart-looking boys working on their laptops made her occasional Gauripur heartthrobs look like cow herders. Her clothes might be sour, and she hadn't been able to comb her hair, and she was pulling a muddy suitcase, but she still had her smile. She was in a Barista on MG Road in Bangalore, the new center of the universe. Her smile was more valuable than any amulet or mantra. But damn, her voice seemed slow and muffled and everyone else's loud and fast.

  "Way cool—did I hear the magic words 'new girl in town'?" a bearded, mustached man in Ray-Bans called out. Angie assessed and dismissed: too short and dark, too loud and outgoing, too much laughing and joking, the mustache too full and hairy, and the double strand of gold chains definitely unnecessary. Probably a local boy, she thought, trying to ingratiate himself with cooler, big-city types, pushing too hard. If he'd been in a Bollywood movie, he'd be the hero's comic sidekick, too itchy and impetuous, cracking too many jokes in a too-high-pitched voice, too eager to please, getting the turndown from every girl he meets. He slung his arm around a tubular girl with spiky hair in a very tight T-shirt from which she threatened to spill at any minute.

  "Do you have a room yet?" Javaroomyet? "Say no, we can squeeze you in." He said his name was Mike and his English was easy and a little coarse. He introduced the others: Millie and Darren. The tubular girl was Suzie. Darren was a handsome boy in a T-shirt and jean jacket, more her type, Punjabi-tall and fair, with none of Mike's strained flash and swagger. Millie was the classic "tall, slim and wheat-complexioned" girl of the marriage ads, with highlighted hair, twirling her cigarette with practiced ease.

  "Can't smoke in the residence. Can't smoke on the job. Gotta get my fix when I can," she said, lighting another.

  "I'm Darren. This week, anyway." Darren sniggered. "I think I'm going to kill him off. I fancy myself a Brad."

  "You're not cool enough for Brad, lover boy," said Suzie. "He broke up with Jen last year."

  "He's a has-been," laughed one of the girls. "He's with Angelina now. She'll spit him out her backside!" The girl looked like a servant; you'd never think she knew a word of English, let alone loud, aggressive American English. She called herself Cindy.

  "So let me lay it out for you," Cindy continued. "If you say you're Brad, they'll say where's Angelina? Then what'll you say? Quick, quick, Old Bitch'll be listening in, hears anguished attempt of expendable agent to extricate himself from the deep shit he's gotten himself into ... and you're out on your ass, wasting company time just 'cause you wanted to be Brad Pitt. Not cool, dude."

  "I was Jen a few weeks ago," said Millie. "That's all I ever got. 'Where's Brad?' I said, 'Brad? Brad's so last week, man. Now what-say we cure your printer blues.'"

  "Yeah, well, HP's a little loosey-goosey," said Darren.

  "Motorola's a little uptight," said Mike.

  "Mine'd shit bricks," said Cindy. "Play by the rules, that's all we ever get. You got a name—stick with it."

  "Dudes, dudes, what is this, a bitch session? What'll our new friend think?" said Darren.

  What could she think? She was numb with confusion. Brick-shitting was a new one on her. Shit, piss, fuck, asshole: so much to learn. And cool, cool, cool: everything cool or not cool, but never warm. These must be call-center agents, her competition and would-be colleagues. Her neck hurt from keeping up with the repartee. She felt the way she had on a family visit to Kolkata so many years before, recognizing the Bangla words but missing the meaning. She should know all this, it should all be second nature, this was the currency of her deliverance from Gauripur—but she truly didn't understand 90 percent of it. These people seemed better than she was, even though their vocabulary was minimal and they looked like servants or movie prostitutes, except maybe Darren, who was now pouting because he couldn't play Brad.

  "Gotta keep it fresh," said Mike. "Russell Crowe's still good, but there's the bloody accent. Nicole's great. Bill and Hillary. George and Laura, but when you use those names, they might hang up on you. Lots of names out there. What's yours, honey?"

  When she said Angie, Millie and Suzie admitted to having been Angies too, on different days. Suzie said, "I stopped being Angie when one American guy said, 'Yeah, you're Angie like I'm Mother Teresa.' They're catching on. Gotta be careful."

  "They got 'tudes,"
said Darren.

  "Yeah, but we got game," Mike responded. They high-fived. Angie wanted to cry, so she smiled, and Mike turned to her. "Bitchin' name, Angie. Real cool. Great smile. Love it." Still too enthusiastic, not cool, she decided. How could a bitchin' name, if she heard right, be cool? She remembered a favorite Championism: used-car-salesman friendly. She felt better.

  Angie or Suzie or whatever, leaning across the table with her breasts all but pouring out, and one of them, she saw, with a butterfly tattoo fluttering up from the dark interior, would have caused a riot in Gauripur. And the tall girl with highlighted hair, calling herself Angie on Tuesday and Saturday and Millie on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, who had to smoke on breaks and at the coffee shop, said she was looking for a new roomie at two thousand a month with kitchen privileges. Angie said she hoped she had a room through a relative in Kew Gardens, a statement that caused no dropped silverware, no raised eyes. Two more boys from a neighboring table, a Steve and a Charlie, offered her a ride on their bikes, which, too late, she realized meant motorcycles. They were with girls, a ponytailed one named Gloria and a green-haired one named Roxie, "from Chicago," she said. "Where else?"

  Ah, but did they teach you a Chicago accent? she wondered, remembering Peter. That'll be five dallers.

  "Mukesh Sharma called again last night," Cindy said, "poor fucking loser, I almost feel sorry for him. He calls himself Mickey now, but it's the same old Mukky."