Miss New India

by Bharati Mukherjee

  And so, as a Bagehot-Girl-in-training, Anjali took to heart her first set of instructions: nothing is quite as it seems. There are unbendable rules, but no one really knows what they are. "Bringing shame" can mean anything the Old Dame wants it to mean at any given time. In fact, Anjali's little alcove room had been let to a girl from Mangalore named Mira, a "fun girl" (Tookie's highest compliment) who got "dumped" (the Bagehot House word for sudden eviction) for having come back from work at two in the morning. Nothing strange about that—but her mode of approach sealed her fate: she was on a motorcycle, clinging to a boy.

  "My question to you is," said Tookie, "who's watching at two in the morning? Is the Old Dame an insomniac who sits by the window in the dark to catch rule breakers? Or does she force poor, overworked old Asoke to spy on us all night? Even the walls have ears here, so play it cool and close to the vest."

  4

  In her first three days in Bangalore, Anjali calculated that half of her mission had already been accomplished. Maybe even more than half: she'd escaped Gauripur, crossed India, gotten to Bangalore, met a "boy," as her father would label Mr. GG, and secured a desirable room. Well, maybe more like a miserable half-room in a moldering but fabled residence. But when she wrote her first letter to Sonali, she didn't want to frighten her sister with tales of what she had witnessed in interstate bus stops on the long odyssey or sound superior about having a room to herself in a mansion and being served by a servant in livery, or having smitten Mr. GG, so she wrote instead that she had arrived safely; that Mr. Champion's friend, who owned a huge house, had rented a prettily furnished room to her; that she expected to meet Mr. Champion's other friend, who ran a job-training school, soon; that, once she had found her way around Bangalore, she would send little Piyali a typically Karnatakan toy. Then she added, as a P.S., the questions that burdened her most: "Have Baba and Ma forgiven me? Have they asked about me?"

  She could take time to get settled, rest, fatten up. I was starving! I could have died! Winning a place in Usha Desai's training center and then finding a job seemed a snap-of-the-finger inevitability (she ran through the list of acceptable synonyms: a walk on the beach, a cinch, a piece of cake, a picnic, just to convince herself she wasn't losing it). If she could pass stuck-in-the-Raj Minnie Bagehot's crackpot tests, she would ace very-new-millennium Usha Desai's. So long as Peter's rupees held out, she could tell herself that she deserved some downtime to escape the tyrannical gentility of Minnie's boarding house and explore the city, window-shop in the newest mall where Tookie bought her designer T-shirts, find her way back to the Barista on MG Road and this time order iced coffee with a scoop of ice cream, try Continental cuisine or sushi in a restaurant inside a five-star hotel. She wouldn't be procrastinating; she would be developing the composure and confidence that make for professional success. Her goal was to be relaxed, not just appear relaxed, when she presented herself to Mr. Champion's job-training contact.

  Contact: noun. She remembered contact and mentor as loaded words in the most popular of the da Gama first-year B. Comm. courses. An adjunct professor, a recent graduate of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, had taught the popular course. He wore white three-piece suits and drove an imported Prius. According to his business card, which he distributed to his students on the first day of classes, he was the CEO and the CFO of CommunicationsFutures, Inc., which had headquarters in Gauripur and branch offices in Bradford, U.K.,and Hoboken, U.S.A., but he described himself as an iconoclast. "Break your feudal habit of revering masters and elders," he harangued his spellbound students.

  Early in the academic year, he'd brought Peter Champion in to guestlecture on developing contacts and networking. "Don't even think of tackling the job market until you have contacts with connections": that had been Peter's mantra. As a diligent student she had memorized the lecture's bulleted points, but until now she hadn't worried about whether they made sense. She hadn't needed to, because she was never going to be in the job market, Baba having already shunted her into the arranged-marriage market. Now she would have to put Peter's business counsel to a sink-or-swim test.

  In the curtained privacy of her alcove, she lounged in a silk kimono that Mrs. Bagehot had lent her until she had time to go shopping, and she scribbled contact, mentor, neutral acquaintance, and personal friend as column headings in a new notebook she had bought at a variety store on the corner of Kew Gardens. Ms. Desai and Mrs. Bagehot were contacts. The Bagehot Girls were acquaintances for the moment, but they—at least Tookie and Husseina—might slither into other categories. She invented another classification: informal mentor. Rabi Chatterjee was a reach for any column in her book, since she hoped, but couldn't be sure, that their paths would converge again. She had known him for only a few hours, but she felt close to him, closer than she did to Sonali-di, because he had talked to her as though she was his equal in intelligence and experience. He had opened her eyes to the color and light shimmering under Gauripur's grit. She entered him in both the informal mentor and the personal friend columns.

  She kept Mr. GG as her final entry. She savored going over and over again their chance meeting in the MG Road Barista, his offer of a ride to Kew Gardens, the long trip, and every word he had spoken during it ... Was he nothing more than a transient acquaintance doing his impersonal Good Samaritan deed of the day? Could she get away with entering him as a contact with international business connections? In the best of all possible scenarios, he was a well-connected, deep-pocketed suitor. Why not? She created a skinny new column: suitor.

  Peter would be appalled if he could see how she had expanded on his networking theory. His provocative critiques of Indian business models would have been hard for any student to ignore or forget. Peter didn't pull punches: historically, Indian society wasn't structured around networking and contacts, but rather around family and community. In backward places like Bihar, allegiance to family and hometown and religion and language group and even caste counts more than competence. Peter's lesson of a year and a half ago became a fresh revelation. He could have been talking about Baba. Even in Bihar, Baba's only friends were Bihar-born Bengalis. Everyone else was deemed slightly, or grossly, untrustworthy. Baba couldn't escape the community that he, and the three generations of Gauripur-born Boses, had known. But with his two daughters, even in Bihar, he'd failed.

  So that was the secret of Mumbai's and Bangalore's great success. You work at KFC or Starbucks or Barista, and the person working next to you, and your boss, and the people you serve have absolutely no interest in your community or where you came from.

  Like at Bagehot House. Before Tookie, Anjali had never been friends with a Goan. In fact, not with a Christian either. Her impression of Goans had been based on the teacher-priests at Vasco da Gama—dull, pious rule enforcers or rule followers, afraid of their shadows. And what of that mysterious group she'd always called "the minority community"? Some of the workers in her father's office were Muslim. Back stabbers, her father called them—traitors and terrorists. Her father complained of their laziness, their four wives and twenty children. "They don't work on our holy holidays. They don't work on their holy holidays. Next they'll demand time off for Christmas and Easter."

  Now she was sharing a bathroom with a Muslim and a Christian.

  At their first lunch, Tookie had advised Angie to keep two boyfriends: one for the workplace, offering convenient rides and innocent companionship, and a fun-time boyfriend. Tookie's job-site-and-Barista beau was named Reynaldo da Costa, a goody-goody Goan who wanted to marry her before sleeping with her ("What a bore, no?"). Her fun-time guy was Rajoo, a local bartender ("A badass, but what a trip, man").

  "How about you, Husseina?" Angie had asked.

  "Oh, I have a fiancé, in London."

  "Muslim girls—what to say?" Tookie teased. "How do you know this fiancé of yours isn't raising a big English family with a fat blond floozy?"

  "I don't." Husseina said that with a smile.

  Buzley, buzlum.

&n
bsp; ***

  USHA DESAI, Mr. Champion's friend, was Anjali's only reliable "contact," but Anjali held off calling her because ... she was ashamed to admit it even to herself ... she hoped Mr. GG would call and suggest a more exciting career option or spring her from the dull boarding house and fly her off to a foreign city for a surprise vacation: all that was possible in the Bollywood version of her life. She didn't call Mr. GG, of course—what sort of young woman, except a Tookie, initiates contact?—but she found the thought of calling him and flirtatiously playing the damsel in distress very pleasing. She knew she should be grateful that Peter had sent a letter of introduction to Usha Desai, which meant she was assured admission into this woman's prestigious career-training academy and, on completion of the training, a job that paid better than Baba's or Sonali's. But calling Peter's contact and setting that process in motion meant banging the door shut on all that could be, all that might happen if given a chance. Network, or trust intuition?

  Anjali promised herself that she would call Usha Desai soon but procrastinated, her excuse being that she wasn't yet savvy about big-city office etiquette. She needed Tookie's and Husseina's mentoring before she made the call. She needed more time in Bangalore. She needed to study Tookie and Husseina closely so that she could pick up their ways of sounding self-confident, or at least professionally competent. She had made a little bit of progress, but not enough.

  In Gauripur, she'd slept between Sonali-di and Ma, and after Sonali-di's wedding, just with Ma. In Bangalore, the dark, musty mansion was empty most nights, but for Mad Minnie and arthritic Asoke, because the resident girls were at work; sleeping here, surrounded by noises coming from the untended, overgrown grounds, terrified Anjali. Ghosts and monsters circled her. An angry Baba and a tearful Ma clawed the thin cotton quilt she pulled over her head. She needed time to overcome her fears.

  Gauripur memories collided with Bagehot House nightmares. Smothering memories: the same neighborhood noises at the same time, day and night. Chopping the same vegetables from the same vendor at the same market, spicing them and frying them in precisely the same manner, eating at the same hour after her father's nightly three pegs, then piling the dirty cooking pots in the sink for the part-time maid to clean the next morning, putting away the leftovers, and going to bed by ten o'clock at her father's command of "Lights out!" You could run away from home, but not from the rituals of family.

  Some sleepless nights she looked down through the shutters at the grounds, now a jungle, but once the setting for croquet hoops and badminton nets. In modern Bangalore terms, it embraced just one city block, a few crores of value, but somehow it engaged the whole soul of India. Anjali heard the nighttime coughing and throat clearing of rural India inside the Bagehot compound. She saw cooking fires in the second floor of the broken-roofed garage that had stored Maxie's fancy cars; the building's windows were long gone. Old Asoke, recognizable because of his white livery jacket, flitted ghostlike in and out of patchy moonlight, carrying trays of food to the shadowy villagers who inhabited this dilapidated realm. Perhaps Minnie's retinue—their children and grandchildren—had never left, though they now bore no connection or obligation to the owner of the main house. More likely, they were invaders from the countryside; like her, they were both refugees and squatters. Staring down at that night world of Indian survival, of rural life in the middle of a thriving city, Anjali asked herself, What makes me more special? Why would Usha Desai accept me as a trainee and help place me in some American company that pays salaries as fat as Tookies and Husseina's?

  A girl of fifteen or so, backlit by a cooking fire, straddled the ledge of a window frame, combing out her hair. Oh, Rabi, Angie thought, if you were here now, you'd make a picture of this. Every minute in Bagehot House, day or night, is a portrait in contrasts, lights and angles, old and new, and this strange, indescribable present moment in history. I could be your scout. You might have gone to all those terrible places, the whorehouses and gay haunts, but I can find you scenes you haven't dreamed of! I could carry your cameras and lenses and lights. I'm smart, I notice things, I can learn.

  For a week Anjali put off calling Usha Desai. Bagehot House had only one phone, an old-fashioned, heavy black instrument with a short frayed cord. Minnie kept it, together with a bound logbook for recording all incoming and outgoing calls and a wind-up clock, on a card table in the foyer. The rules and rates for its use by boarders were listed in red ink on a piece of cardboard taped to the wall above the table. Only Minnie and Asoke were permitted to pick up the receiver when the phone rang. Boarders were charged for receiving calls as well as for making them; they paid an additional surcharge for calls that lasted more than five minutes. Since Tookie, Husseina, and even Sunita had their cell phones, Anjali was the only one affected by Minnie's rules. She thought the rates unfairly steep. Fortunately, except for Usha Desai and Mr. GG, she knew no one to call in Bangalore, and she invented new excuses hourly for delaying that career-building call.

  On the eighth day into her new life, worried that Peter would get wind of her procrastination and write her off as a bad investment, she steeled herself to dial the number for Usha Desai. To use the phone free, which meant without Minnie's and Asoke's knowledge, she had to loiter in the foyer until Minnie retired to her bedroom for her midafternoon nap and Asoke slipped off to the "village" on the Bagehot compound. After two rings a taped message came on, informing callers that they had reached the Contemporary Communications Institute, the location of the institute, and the instruction to leave name, phone number, and a brief message after the beep. Anjali had never spoken to a tape. By the time she started to say her name, the dial tone came on, and she hung up, flustered. Such a bumpkin!

  She would be prepared for the answering machine the next time she dialed the Contemporary Communications Institute. She knew she should mention Peter's name with her first breath—that would set her call apart from other supplicants—but should she refer to him as Mr. Champion or as Peter, and should she mimic a regional American accent ("Five dallars!") to show off her aptitude?

  At lunch the next day, with Tookie pub-hopping with friends and Sunita away at her job, Anjali took advantage of being alone with Husseina, Queen of Cool. She asked, "If you closed your eyes and heard me for the first time, would you guess I'm Indian?"

  Without a second's hesitation, Husseina answered, "Of course. How else could you sound?"

  Was Husseina assuring her that an Indian accent wasn't necessarily a demerit for a future call-center agent? Anjali decided Husseina intended her remark as a pat on the head, a well-grounded opinion that a non-desi English accent was seriously overrated. She pursued the point: "How did you come to sound so American?"

  Husseina stripped forkfuls of mashed potato off the top of the wedge of shepherd's pie on her plate. "If you really want to know," she said finally, "I had no choice. My parents sent me to the American School in Dubai."

  What was the point in Anjali's even trying to compete with the rich, cosmopolitan Husseinas of Bangalore? She didn't stand a chance of getting a job here. Why had she bothered to run away from Gauripur, and run away so melodramatically at that? It was unfair that the Husseinas led charmed lives. Her hands curled in rage around her napkin ring. All of those call-center workers at Barista, who had so dazzled her during her first hour in Bangalore—were they also graduates of expensive foreign schools, getting reacquainted with their parents' homeland?

  Asoke shuffled around the dining table, removing plates and the cruet stand. Husseina gulped down a full glass of water. "If I'd had a say in the matter, I'd never have left India." It seemed a startling confession, coming from Her Serene Highness, the never-ruffled Husseina Shiraz. "The American School was a very great mistake. My parents were clueless! Not that anything can be corrected now." Her words were bitter but delivered lightly, and with a smile. "Spilled milk, water under the bridge, sleeping dogs, et cetera, et cetera."

  Anjali was dying to ask Husseina about growing up in glamorous Dubai and, if
she dared, what Husseina meant by "mistake." She waited until Asoke finished serving dessert, which as always, except on Sundays, was a gelatinous blob that Minnie called blancmange. "I wish we could talk some more."

  "We shall," Husseina said.

  "I have a favor to ask." Anjali ignored Husseina's frown. "I have a contact in town, a lady who runs a job-training academy of some sort. If I phoned her, do you think she would reject ... is my accent, you know..."

  "Miss Husseina, Miss Anjali, Nescafé?" Asoke interrupted them. Minnie charged extra for after-dessert instant coffee. Asoke removed the matching sugar bowl and creamer and their coffee spoons without waiting for them to answer. "Sweet course finished, miss?" He clearly meant to hurry them out of the dining room so that he could lock up the dining-kitchen-pantry area and disappear into the village of squatters for the rest of the early afternoon.

  Husseina waved him away with an imperious hand. Her blancmange remained untouched in its glass dish. "Let's do a little rehearsal," she said, turning to Anjali. "Pretend I'm that contact. Say what comes into your head when I ask questions. You've just rung me, the contact lady. I'm picking up the phone. What's the contact's name?"

  "Usha. Usha Desai." She heard Asoke pace the hallway.

  "All right, I've picked up the receiver after four rings," Husseina said. "Usha Desai here." She modulated her voice, making it sound middle-aged and slightly stuffy. "To whom am I speaking? Please state your name and business clearly."

  "Hullo, madam..."