Miss New India

by Bharati Mukherjee

  So he inspects buildings that aren't there, in cities he's never been to.

  "Every business in the world is outsourcing. Without us, the world would collapse. Maybe in a couple of years some version of a Bish Chatterjee will come along and buy us out and we'll sit down and figure out the next big thing."

  Idly, she said, "I know Bish Chatterjee's son, Rabi. Wouldn't we collapse without them, Mr. GG?"

  "Hold on a second. You just said you know the son of Bish Chatterjee? I'm still processing that. How many Chatterjees are there in Bengal? A guess."

  "Crores," she said.

  "How many of them might be named Bishwapriya Chatterjee?"

  "Lakhs," she said.

  "And how many Rabi Chatterjees and how many Anjali Boses, would you say?"

  "Crores of Anjali Boses." But maybe only one Rabi Chatterjee, she thought. She flashed a smile.

  "Ah-hah! Very cool." He smiled back. "So technically speaking, some cognomen of yours has met the cognomen son of some cognomen Bishwapriya Chatterjee. Maybe you should be a lawyer. To answer your other question: yes, we would collapse without international collaborators. For a while, at least. Then they'd collapse without us."

  "You're very sure of yourself, Mr. GG," she said, and thought, but was afraid to ask, What's a cognomen?

  "I'm beginning to think I'm not nearly as brazen as you. That's a compliment, by the way."

  Bangalore was endless! Just when the tall new buildings began to fade, a new center opened up, a new satellite city with even more office towers, car dealerships, dug-up sidewalks, and cranes, with never a letup in traffic. If Mr. GG intended any funny business with her, it would have to be in front of thousands of people. But she couldn't imagine him even trying. He seemed a round-faced jolly sort, not like Subodh Mitra, whose profile reminded her of a long-snouted street dog.

  "Have you seen Chinatown?" he asked, and she thought immediately, So that's his little game! That's where he's taking me. Back alleys, and men in pigtails. She'd read about evil Chinatowns, with their opium dens and concubines.

  "I like sweet and sour," she said. Gauripur once had a Chinese restaurant, run by a refugee family from Calcutta's Chinatown. Her parents took her there once and declared the food inedible, although she'd liked it, but it soon went out of business. "Premature sophistication, misreading of the commercial environment," Peter would say. Mr. GG was laughing. Apparently she'd said something funny, or else he was making fun of her.

  "I was referring to an American movie. It's about how L.A. really got built. It's about power and deals and corruption and a lot of buried bodies. You can rent it some night."

  She remembered the newspaper article from that distant time a few hours ago, at the Bangalore bus station. "Why should I?"

  "Because you said you wanted to know what Bangalore is like. Well, it's a lot like L.A., but it took L.A. a century. They had a movie industry, and we've got hi-tech. We're both virtual and we've both got buried bodies, but we'll be a much bigger city in maybe five years."

  She really didn't understand. She'd used a computer in the da Gama Common Room, but only for games. Virtual was one of those frightening words. "I have a question. What is an L.A.?" she finally asked.

  "Oh, my God—and you say you're from Kolkata? It's Los Angeles. California. U.S.A. Hollywood, the poor man's Bombay."

  In front of pokey little shops where pariah dogs still languished in the sun, rows of posters proclaimed: AID PRESENTS: SITE OF FUTURE FIVE-STAR LUXURY HOTEL and FUTURE HEADQUARTERS OF (fill in the name) MULTINATIONAL CORPORATION, ending in the parenthetical (INDIA, LTD.). Painted signboards featured luxury flats underscored with prompts: SUBSCRIBE NOW! ONLY TWO REMAINING! Artist's renderings of strolling couples in a landscaped garden, flowers and fountains, and flashy cars pulling up—all in a place where nothing had yet been demolished or erected and no trees were standing. Future, future, future! And enough of the future hotels and headquarters had already been built and filled to lend credence to any claim. Every company in the world had to have a Bangalore address, and every modern mogul from India, Korea, Japan and the Middle East had to have a Bangalore condo or mansion.

  "Who do you know in Kent Town?" Mr. GG asked. He acted as though she had no right even to know any resident of Kent Town. "That's old money. The money's so old, it's moldy. It's so old, they still calculate in annas, not rupees."

  She hadn't realized that Kew Gardens was a street in Kent Town. "I don't know anyone. I have a letter of introduction from my old professor to Mrs. Minnie Bagehot."

  This too amused him. "A letter from an old professor who knows Minnie Bagehot. So, you've got powerful connections. You want to be a Bagehot Girl, then?"

  For the first time, he sounded slightly interested in something she'd said. "I didn't know there was such a thing. What does it mean—a 'Bagehot Girl'?"

  "It means a very proper, upstanding girl from a very good family. Or it can mean someone who does a good imitation of being a proper, upstanding girl from a very good family."

  "And am I special enough to be a Bagehot Girl, Mr. GG?"

  "I detect possibilities."

  "You have software for that too? Detecting possibilities?"

  "You have a certain style. Even without software I predict that you'll do fine. You'll get a job, no problem."

  "Why do you say that? You don't know a thing about me. Maybe I'm a total fraud. Maybe I'm a dolt and I'll flub my interviews." Of course, she was fishing for compliments—you're fresh air, you're radiant, and your English is perfect.

  "Your English is decent and you've got a pulse. In Bangalore that means you'll find a job. And if you feel your highest calling is to know the difference between NH and NC or MS and MD or maybe even AK and AR, you'll do fine."

  She had no idea. Strange monsters dwelt in the linguistic interstices of the English language. All things were possible. Morays could paint French cathedrals, but at least she already knew the difference between medical doctors and multiple sclerosis, thank you very much.

  And then for some reason, perhaps to clear the air of her misrepre-sentations, she confessed, "Back at that Barista, everyone was friendly, but I didn't understand a word of what they were saying."

  "It's just Bangalore babble," he said. "It's not meant to mean anything. Just that they're here and have jobs and with it comes the freedom to talk nonsense. They're like locusts—in six weeks they'll be moving on. Chennai and Hyderabad beckon."

  "Will I be moving on?"

  "I don't think so. I think you'll stick in Bangalore. I hope so, at least."

  Chennai or Hyderabad would be unacceptable. She saw herself as a high-quality individual, destined for the best job in the top place, and according to what she'd heard and what she could see, that was Bangalore. If she needed a job, why not start at the top? Why not use her only "contact," as the business world put it? She pulled out some old questions from Peter Champion's class. "What is your corporate culture, Mr. GG? Are you hiring?"

  "My 'corporate culture'?" He seemed amused. "I've never been asked a question like that. Offhand I'd say it's making the most money with the fewest people in the shortest time. And yes, absolutely, we're hiring. If you have an architect's or engineer's license from an IIT or an overseas equivalent."

  "Now you're being mean. You must be needing someone to answer your telephones. I have a high school—leaving cert and two years of college, B. Comm. with English proficiency, first class."

  "Very nice," he said. "Now let me tell you something. Three years ago they called us a 'scrappy little startup.' Now we're 'worldwide leaders of a new industry.' You're just like Bangalore, Miss Bose. Today you're a scrappy, starving little startup. So what's your corporate culture? What's your plan? If you play it right, in three or four years you'll have your own corner office. And by the way, we don't use telephones."

  They were finally in a proper residential suburb. Many of the houses were old Anglo-Indian-style one-story bungalows, crumbling and partly demolished, hidden behin
d towering trees and overgrown vegetation. They had names, and she read some of them aloud: THE HEATHER, SNOW-DROP LODGE, PRIMROSE PALACE, and HYACINTH GLORY. Names right out of British poetry, she remarked. His explanation was that the original builders and later occupiers had refused to believe—or perhaps had known only too well—that they would never see England again. The street names had undergone orthographic decolonization: CHARLESS WRIHGT ROAD and KENT TOWN, or KENTT or KHENNTAON; words changed their spellings block by block.

  She'd been noticing the impatient march of gleaming new mansions, built on tiny plots, and three- and four-story luxury apartment buildings with doctors' clinics and fabric shops on the ground floor, wedging their way between the remaining bungalows. Every old mansion that died had given birth to half a dozen offspring.

  Every block seemed to contain a small church, an old house converted to that purpose, with a signboard announcing its name and denomination and times of services. Farther on, an immense white mosque occupied an entire block. On the streets around the mosque, on the back seats of scooters and motorcycles, clinging to their husbands and holding their children, were Muslim women clad head to toe in black and looking at the world through thin eye slits. Where had all the Hindus gone?

  "This little area is called Bagehot camp," Mr. GG announced. "We're coming up on Bagehot Alley and Kew Gardens Road." The street sign read BHAJOT.

  "And there..." He paused for effect. "There in all its glory stands—well, leans—Bagehot House. Every architect in Bangalore has dreamed of getting his hands on that property. There's even a book about it."

  Of course, had Angie Bose been intellectually curious (or had Peter Champion bragged even a little about his accomplishments in those months before she'd left), or had she even thought to ask GG, "Oh, who wrote that book on Bagehot House?"—and if the answer had come back, "Some American guy, Champion's his name, if that means anything," Angie's resulting gasp might have forced GG to slam on the brakes. Had she known to drop the name of her benefactor, GG might have corrected his tone of mild condescension and begun treating her as a fellow sophisticate. He might have asked, "You know Peter Champion, that gypsy-scholar who wrote Classic Indian Architecture: Public and Private?" Or "Peter Champion? Don't tell me he's still alive!" But of course she was not intellectually curious, at least not about the realm of books.

  In a neighborhood of old mansions, Bagehot House was the largest. It was dark and sprawling, its grounds untended. The outer wall, topped with glass shards, had lost most of its stucco; the old bricks were crumbling, and parts of the wall were worn down to shoulder level. Even from the car she could see holes in the roofs of the larger outbuildings. Other houses at least maintained a pretense of serviceability, with uniformed chowkidars seated outside the gates and pots of flowers lining the driveway. Bagehot House looked abandoned.

  "Well, you wanted Bagehot House, and now you've got it." He pulled to a stop around the corner and across the street, facing what had once been the front gates and lawn. "The old biddy is sure to be inside, but it'll take a while for her to hobble to the door. Every developer in Bangalore is praying for her to pop off."

  Anjali visualized the developers as vultures circling a dying cow.

  No room for sentimentality in this city, she realized.

  The house was daunting enough, but she wondered what she owed Mr. GG or what he might try to extract from her. He was the first real man, the first settled, unattached professional man she'd ever met. He'd traveled, been married, and he'd taken an interest in her. In just one morning, three hours into her new life, she'd been lifted from Gauripur into a new city, into a new century and a new currency, where crores were the new lakhs, lakhs the new rupees. She would have gone anywhere with Mr. GG, done anything he asked. Next to Mr. GG, Peter Champion seemed flimsy and Rabi Chatterjee a mere child. All that remained was making a first move, a sign of interest or intent, and she didn't know if she should make it, or even if he would recognize it. And so she just waited.

  "You're wondering what comes next, isn't it, Miss Bose?"

  He could read her mind. "I am a little frightened," she admitted. "I haven't slept in a bed or eaten a meal since I left." Oops, that was getting too close to the truth. And I haven't bathed and my clothes are filthy and I can still smell the privies and see women and girls climbing into trucks while drivers lifted their lungis... Mr. GG's concerned face drew a little closer, and he took out a handkerchief and daubed her eyes.

  "If things get really bad, you can always go back to Kolkata."

  How to tell him she'd been to Kolkata three times in her life, and she couldn't even go back to Bihar? Banned from Bihar: that had to be the pits. Bangalore was it, the beginning and the end. What was it that Rabi Chatterjee had told her? She repeated it. "It's all a matter of light and angles, isn't that so?" she said.

  That seemed to stun him. "I suppose you could say so." He studied her face; she flashed him a full-wattage smile. He relaxed.

  "A girl like you won't be lonely for long."

  A girl like me? What did it mean, and who or what, exactly, am I like? Why does he hope I'll stay? And so she voiced the question. "A girl like me, Mr. GG?" He seemed to know her better, or thought he did, than she knew herself. He did reach out for her hand and gave it a squeeze and she drew closer, expecting at least to give or to receive a hug or maybe a kiss, but Mr. GG was the perfect gentleman, which left her even more confused.

  "What I meant is a girl like you is full of surprises. Next time we meet, I might not even recognize you. But I'm sure we'll meet again," he said.

  She replied, "I'd like that."

  "Unassailably genteel, but no mod cons." He thrust a hand out the driver's window and gestured toward the derelict mansion that was to be her new home. "You must be wondering why I haven't directed you to more modern lodgings. Or at least offered you temporary hospitality in my house." It hadn't crossed her mind. "With my parents and my sister-in-law and her children visiting, spontaneity is a burden."

  Why is he telling me these things? she wondered.

  He squirmed a bit in the driver's seat, and she prepared herself for whatever was to come, but he only released his seat belt, got out, and took her muddy, battered Samsonite from the trunk. Then he opened her door and took her hand to help her to the curb. He handed her his business card. "You're wondering how you can thank me, aren't you, Miss Bose? Not to worry, let's just forget it for today." He scribbled a cell-phone number on the card. "That's for when Mad Minnie makes life inside hell."

  With a mock salute, he strode back to the Daewoo. Angie tried to reconcile Peter Champion's Mrs. Bagehot with Mr. GG's Mad Minnie. She was glad, she decided, that she had his private phone number. No shame in accepting help from people willing, even eager, to assist her. A job is the key to happiness, she calculated. A job brings respect and power. Money brings transformation. Stagnation creates doubt and tyranny. Money transforms a girl from Gauripur into a woman from Bangalore.

  3

  Anjali waited by the curb until twelve o'clock. No one had entered or departed the property. Two goats wandered through the untended gate and soon lost themselves in the undergrowth. Finally, she followed the goats, dragging her bag behind her. The carved iron door knocker, surely an original relic, had lost its matching plate. A single horn of the brass ram's head thumped into the door's soft, bare wood like a woodsman's ax into a rotting stump.

  A stooped old man with stubbly cheeks and chin opened the door. He wore a frayed service jacket like a railroad porter's, but with the name BAGEHOT stitched over an unmended pocket. The elbows were torn and the jacket was not clean.

  "I would like to give this to Madam Bagehot," she said in Hindi. The old man, whose first name she later learned was Asoke, silently accepted the torn-off sheet on which Peter Champion had handwritten Minnie Bagehot's name and address and then signed it. He shuffled back inside, leaving the front door slightly open. She took this as permission to enter but then wondered if she should stand and wait o
n the threshold or take a seat on the long teak bench in the foyer. She stood stiffly by a round hall table with a cracked marble top, keeping her backpack and mud-streaked suitcase close to her for some minutes; then she tiptoed to the bench so she could peek into the hallways and rooms that led off the foyer. The corridors were cluttered with bulky armoires, chests and tall-backed chairs and seemed to stretch endlessly in every direction. She made out a main sitting room and a formal dining room with chandelier. The light was dim and filtered through sun-bleached velvet curtains. A broad stairwell descended from upper floors.

  From what she could determine from the foyer, Bagehot House was a storage barn, more a warehouse for unusable possessions than an active residence. In the sitting room a hundred years of carved wood furniture and worn upholstery lay piled in a jumble. The walls were filled with portraits of women in ball gowns and bearded men in belted and braided military uniforms, shoulder pads with tassels and pointed helmets topped with what appeared at a distance to be upside-down banana peels. All available horizontal surfaces had been taken over by silver trays piled with dishes and ivory-handled cutlery. Everything seemed secondhand, even the air. Yet she sensed that every object had once held immense value. For some reason she was suddenly reminded of Peter Champion's words: every note a symphony.

  She was hesitant to wander too far indoors. There were probably house rules against curiosity, and she didn't want to ruin her chances even before getting started. After twenty minutes, however, she wondered if she was not being tested, if Minnie Bagehot was not watching from behind a crack in the door just to see how many liberties she would take if she thought herself unobserved.

  At twelve-thirty she heard voices from the second floor. She stood at the bottom of the stairs and smiled broadly. Three girls her own age, two of them dressed more or less as she was, in T-shirts and jeans, the other in a green salwar-kameez, were chattering in English as they came down the stairs. Anjali heard a breathless "I told him no way!" and a passionate rejoinder, "They should fire him on the spot!" They were nearly upon her before she was noticed.