Miss New India

by Bharati Mukherjee

  "No, no. Never madam. Unless it's a crone like our Mad Minnie."

  "Hullo, Mrs. Desai. My name is Anjali Bose..."

  "No. No, and again no. How do you know she's married?"

  How could she not be, Anjali thought. The woman is middle-aged and she's prosperous. "I don't," she admitted.

  "Make mizz your default for her. Okay, give it another go. Usha Desai here. Who is speaking?"

  "Good morning, Mizz Desai. My name is Anjali Bose, and I am, I mean I was a student of Mr. Peter Champion in Gauripur, Bihar. He has recommended I enter your training facility."

  "That's very thoughtful of your teacher. Have you applied for admission? What are your qualifications for admission?"

  Anjali dropped her imaginary telephone. Bumpkin, bumpkin, bumpkin!

  "Who is this teacher?" Husseina continued the role-play. "He sounds like a foreigner."

  "Mizz Desai will know him," Anjali protested. "Mr. Champion said she knows him. Everybody knows him."

  Husseina lifted a skeptical eyebrow. "All right, feedback time. Your greeting to her is fine. Introducing the teacher's name and place are also fine. Say what you need to say simply and precisely: Good morning, et cetera, et cetera. My name is et cetera, et cetera. I was a student of et cetera, et cetera, in whatever town, and wait for the contact's reaction. She might go, 'Oh, dear old et cetera, et cetera. How is he?' And then you come back with 'He's hale and hearty, he sends his et ceteras." Is there a wife? If so, don't forget to mention her, so there's no hint of hanky-panky. Go on to 'My teacher said I must call you when I reached Bangalore to see if you could find a place for me in your training school.' After that, you play it by ear. Those classes can be shockingly expensive. Just so you know what expenses you're committing to."

  Husseina's casual aside on fees was the most chilling information yet; Anjali hadn't counted on having to peel off rupees—thousands of them—from Peter's stash for the CCI course.

  ANJALI DIDN'T WASTE her energy cultivating short, bespectacled Sunita Sampath. Sunita had nothing to teach her. She was too familiar a type; a middle-class Hindu girl from a nearby small town, the eldest of five sisters and a brother, with a Second Class Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature. Her brother was in Bangalore, but out of work and estranged from the family. She was working to help her family until her father found her a caste-appropriate bridegroom. "I am not a demanding person," Sunita confessed to the Bagehot Girls, "but I'll nix any candidate who expects a dowry."

  Poor Sunita, thought Angie; as though being short and myopic was not bad enough, she also underplayed the marriage market. What kind of desirable boy thinks so little of himself that he doesn't demand a dowry? And are you of such little value in the eyes of your father or even yourself that any boy with minimal qualifications and no self-assurance can just grab you? Even my father thought I was worth a matched set of golf clubs. And then she thought, almost ashamed to admit it, Yes, Sunita, you are of little value.

  Of the Bagehot Girls, Husseina was the one who could help her most, Anjali decided. But though she tried to corral Husseina in the foyer whenever the other boarders were not around, she couldn't get close to the sophisticated Hyderabadi. Anjali pried, but Husseina Shiraz disclosed next to nothing of her family or her hopes and wants. She deflected Anjali with a wink and a clever phrase: "What happens in Hyderabad stays in Hyderabad." As for her family's fortune, she had a two-word explanation: "Daddy dabbles." Her English was perfect and her voice so low, so appealing, and ultimately so authoritative that Angie conjured her own picture of the Shiraz family: an armada plying between India and Hong Kong, Singapore and the Gulf. Tookie, on the other hand, was compulsively friendly. Instead of "Hullo," she always greeted Anjali with a hearty "Hey, got yourself a guy friend yet? If not, I can set you up."

  Tookie was inscrutable. Maybe all Christians were inscrutable. One of Tookie's sisters was a nun in Mozambique, one brother a priest in Massachusetts, but she declared herself a devotee of guiltless gratification. "I have a thing, you see" she'd explained to Anjali, "for boys, booze, and cash. Lots of cash." She had three sisters and five brothers, with whom she communicated only at Christmas. Her stories about her family were amusing but nasty. Her father hadn't worked in fifteen years, since a bus accident left him unable to sit long hours—except on a stool at a pheni bar. Her mother, who didn't believe in divorce, had chosen instead to go crazy and was living in an asylum.

  Tookie's tales of her dysfunctional family fascinated Anjali. How could a daughter spill shameful secrets about her parents? She herself had been raised to hide unpleasant family failings from nosy outsiders. Tookie could make violent incidents sound hilarious. She had funny nicknames for her brothers who hadn't entered a religious vocation—Brother Sloth, Brother Gluttony, Brother Envy, and Brother Lust—four of the seven deadly sins. If Husseina was an invaluable mentor, Tookie was a pretty good coach for loosening up.

  And today Goan Tookie was greeting Anjali with something more than her usual offer to set her up with a "guy friend." Today she was offering "a Bengali guy hunk."

  Men's names came swimming up from Anjali's first morning in Bangalore, at the Barista. Mumbai Girl and her work buddies. All those high-fiving, caffeine-fired call agents with made-up American names: Darren, Will, Mike, Brad, Tom, Fred, Hank, Paul, Josh, Jeff. And Mukesh/Mickey Sharma, the sicko caller from Champagne. She said to Tookie, "Who would that be ... Monish Lahiri?"

  Tookie dropped her spoon. "What! Tell me again how long you've been in Bangalore?"

  She would have to learn to keep her silence. "Actually..." She groped for other Bengali men's names. "I could come up with other possibilities." No need to mention Mr. GG since he was a Punjabi.

  "Only one important thing to remember, Anjali." Tookie paused to retrieve the spoon from the floor and flick dust mites off it with her napkin. "Check out the date's income. The body parts are interchangeable."

  Anjali couldn't believe that she was seriously considering being set up by Tookie, let alone enjoying Tookie's salacious references to men's body parts. "Girl talk" is how the prim Sunita referred to Tookie's chatter about sex, as in "I have no time for your girl talk and you wouldn't either if you had to send money home."

  "How's your brother doing?" asked Tookie.

  "He's found work," Sunita answered. That wasn't what Tookie was asking.

  The boarders confided in one another mostly over their early lunch. Tookie and Husseina worked all-night shifts—Tookie handled claims for an automobile insurance company, Husseina spelled out mortgage and home-loan options for Citibank customers, and Sunita had a day job, meaning a middle-of-the-night American job, for a home security company called SecurTrix. "You wouldn't believe the number of home break-ins there are in America! Every night I get these 'Help me!' calls, and I have to alert local police to get out to some address I've never seen in some American city ... all this from India!"

  Over lunch, which invariably consisted of rice-clogged mulligatawny soup, a main course of insipid mutton stew, or goat-meat shepherd's pie, and a dessert—Asoke's culinary skills having been honed as an adolescent in that very house and not been challenged since—Anjali did her best to glean information on work-site etiquette at call centers. For instance, Husseina and Tookie lost their temper if anyone addressed them as call-center agents. They were "customer-support service specialists," and don't you dare forget it. She also squirreled away information on the American mentality and economy. From Tookie's insurance perspective, every car on the American road must be a dented wreck and all drivers were the walking wounded. In an exaggerated American accent Tookie would exclaim, "My job's a bitch! I'm burned out, man!" To Husseina, all Americans were heedless borrowers mired in debt, their home ownership hanging by a thread. From a distance, Husseina said, America might seem enticing, but viewed up close it was a scary place to live. Somehow Tookie always managed to steer the dining-table chatter back to nasty gossip about their landlady.

  "You can't trust anything these A
nglo-Indians say. If Minnie's precious viceroy was ever in this house, you know Maxie would have locked her away in the servants' shed." Tookie, like Minnie, was not one to disguise her prejudices, except when she thought Minnie was eavesdropping. Anjali drew a deft lesson from Tookie's version of Mrs. Bagehot's life: obstacles are steppingstones. The unsentimental stay smart. They trade up.

  For her part, Anjali offered up morsels of a mythical Gauripur cast in a lurid, Bollywoodish light. Ali the gay servant was a big hit with Tookie. In Anjali's telling, she passed her old saris along to him. The comedy of Hindu marriage arrangements—she was careful to omit her horrible car ride with Subodh Mitra—was a winner. Rabi Chatterjee was transformed into an old school friend, maybe the suitor she was destined to marry. She fabricated all this in English because English was the only language the Bagehot House boarders had in common. Besides, English was the language of fantasy. Hindi and Bangla brought only dreary reality.

  For the time being at least, Anjali's obstacles were manageable money troubles. She had depleted her stash from Peter Champion (which she now told herself was a merit scholarship and not a loan). To save on expenses, Anjali began to dip into other tenants' bottles of shampoo, squeeze swirls of their toothpaste onto her old brush, scoop dollops of their expensive face creams from squat little jars, and squirt imported cologne from frosted-glass flasks. Gauripur's Anjali had been too timid to experiment with expensive toiletries, and Gauripur's Angie too proud to stoop to stealing. Bangalore's Anjali, a creature of fantasy, considered herself a wily survivor, leveling an uneven playing field.

  Besides, Anjali rationalized, Tookie and Husseina could afford to be stolen from. Not that they bragged about their salaries, but they huddled over which make of motorized scooter they should buy, which area of the city made the most sense for investing in a condo, and which banks were courting them most aggressively with offers of low-interest mortgages and loans. They spoke often of "the bottom line," and "long-term interests." Tookie's paycheck had to be astronomical, since she was a "team leader" in charge of ten or twelve "freshers." What must a constant cash flow be like? She vowed to get it together enough to call Usha Desai's number again. Tomorrow, or the day after.

  ***

  ONE AFTERNOON, WITH all three of her fellow boarders gone to work, Minnie asleep after lunch, and Asoke off to visit the outbuilding squatters, Anjali did some incautious snooping around in the closed but unlocked ballroom, billiards room, conservatory, reception hall, smoking room, and the three ground-floor bedroom suites with attached bathrooms and dressing rooms. The ballroom floor tilted at such an upward angle that she had to catch her breath to simply walk across it. The dressing rooms were twice the size of the room in which she and her mother used to sleep. Two sets of curtains, one thick and one sheer, hung from a velvet-covered pelmet above each window. Sparrows had nested in the sconces and chandeliers, and no one had removed the twigs and twine. Rats had chewed through the brocade upholstery of settees and gnawed on the heavy wooden chaises longues. Geckos darted up and down cracked statues of cherubs.

  She was about to sneak out of the ballroom when a row of photographs along the far wall drew her attention. Unlike the usual commissioned portraits of vanished officers with their banana-skin helmets, these were wide, black-and-white landscapes, seemingly military scenes, framed in pewter. As she drew closer, she began to feel sick. Sari-clad bodies lay strewn along a riverbank. The faces were young, no older than she was. Bodies of Sikhs—you could identify them by their turbans—lay stacked like firewood, and walking among the bodies were uniformed British soldiers, grinning broadly. One had his foot on the head of a dead Sikh, striking the pose of the Great White Hunter. Maybe he was the young Maxfield Bagehot. She hoped he was. If so, all actions and opinions of Maxie and Minnie were unforgivable and all transgressions by Bagehot House boarders heroic. Another painting featured a distant row of hanged men, Sikhs with their hair chopped off, hanging by their turbans, silhouetted against the setting sun. Bagehot House was a museum of horrors.

  She felt herself swelling with rage, then venom. There had to be a reckoning. She wondered if other Bagehot Girls over the years had taken the same secret tour, and how many "dumps" resulted from their quiet acts of deliberate spite. She missed Peter Champion—he could have explained these photos. Maybe she was the first since Peter to invade this warehouse, to touch the objects and feel the blunt insult of history.

  She was tall, and icy. Nothing could touch her. If Minnie had been standing at the door, about to invoke Bagehot House rules, Anjali would have pushed her down and walked over her bones. She slipped a silver goblet under her sweater. In school, she'd never really warmed to the history-book chapters devoted to India's "heroic freedom fighters," and the exalted statues of "martyrs" to Indian independence had left her cold. There were families in Gauripur even today living off the glory of their great-grandparents' arrests and jailings. Now three old pictures had driven home an appreciation she'd never felt.

  I am Indian, she thought. I'm Indian in ways no one else in this house is Indian, except maybe poor little Sunita Sampath. I have no roots anywhere but in India. My ancestors were hated and persecuted by everyone but themselves. I understand Sonali-di, even Baba. Finally, she had a test for authenticity: Which side of this picture are you on? Is your foot on my head, are you a hanged fighter, or were you laughing at the sight of men dangling by their turbans and women's bodies clogging the riverbanks? Everyone in my life has tried to change me, make me want something alien, and make me ashamed that I might not be good enough. Why should I want to change my name and my accent, why should I plead for a chance to be allowed to take calls from people who've spent too much money or driven their cars into a ditch?

  She sauntered back to her bare cubicle in a better mood. At least now she knew she didn't have to be cowering and grateful. Minnie wasn't just the past—she was that thing the newspaper column had described; she was Chinatown, she was the bones under the building boom. Bagehot House was considered a respectable address, a first stop for young working girls. Bagehot House carried its own recommendation. Minnie was admired for running a no-nonsense boarding house that was good training for the corporate world, but there was nothing admirable about it. Anjali, who'd looked on the British period as a long comic opera, felt a sudden connection to all the Indian dead, and the indignities they suffered. She saw her parents still cowering and still recovering from the scars of colonialism and the dazzling new Bangalore as a city of total amnesia. And it was all a lie. House rules did not apply, not when dispensed from a Minnie Bagehot to a young woman like Anjali Bose. She wrapped the silver goblet in a T-shirt and stuffed it inside her Samsonite.

  THE SECOND TIME Anjali tried the Contemporary Communications Institute, she again got the answering machine. But this time the voice on the tape informed callers that the institute's office was closed until the start of the next session, for which there were no vacancies. The answering machine did not accept messages. Anjali wasn't fazed. Usha Desai must have received Peter's letter about her. No way could the "no vacancy" message apply to Peter's best student. In fact, she'd be disappointed in Peter's networking skills if Usha Desai didn't get in touch with her at Bagehot House instead of waiting for a call from her. Just in case the tape allowed it, she launched into an unpremeditated message: "This is Anjali Bose, a student of Peter Champion in Gauripur. He sends his regards and told me to contact you as soon as I got to Bangalore. I am now at Bagehot House. The phone number is—"

  But there was a click, and the dial tone came on.

  THREE WEEKS INTO her stay, Anjali discovered that she was being charged the same rent for her closed-in porch as the other three boarders, even though those three had huge rooms, each with a high ceiling, an overhead fan, and a door that could be bolted and padlocked for extra security. So what if Sunita's sofa smelled of cat pee, or that the gilt-edged mirror in Husseina's room had a crack right down the center, or that bedbugs drove Tookie crazy?

  She as
ked the others if she should confront the landlady.

  "Confrontation is never the way," Husseina advised. "Never tip your hand. A dab of honey is always the answer."

  Tookie jumped in. "Definitely, go with the honey. First few days, you're on probation. The old girl wants to make sure you meet her standards."

  "What standards?"

  "Only the old girl knows. I think it's a low threshold of pain. My first week here a paying guest got kicked out because she picked up her soup bowl and slurped it instead of using the soup spoon. The old girl's a stickler for idiot table manners."

  "But there are dozens of rooms just on this wing. Why can't she open up another one for me?"

  "Get real! Who knows what you'd find? I can't imagine what's behind any door. Snoop around for yourself. But if the old girl catches you, it's a dump for sure."

  "Have you snooped?" she asked.

  Sunita looked up from checking her text messages. "Wouldn't dare!" she exclaimed. "The public rooms are strictly out of bounds. Verboten!" She was learning German from language tapes in hopes of getting an early promotion at her security company, which had just been taken over by a German conglomerate.

  Tookie laughed. "Why risk everything? As far as I'm concerned, the bottom line's all that counts. We may be inmates in a madhouse, but we're paying bargain rates because the old girl's stuck in a time warp. She thinks the rupee is still five to the dollar. In a newer boarding house, we'd be forking out twenty times more cash for pokey rooms shared with three other girls."

  "Actually, I have copped a look," said Husseina. She cast a glance down the long, dark hallway. "We might not be the only roomers in Bagehot House. We're Minnie's only paying guests, yes, but ... I'll let you figure out what I'm getting at."

  "I took a tour," Anjali admitted. "You can't imagine the trash she's got down there."

  "I wouldn't call it trash, exactly," the regal Husseina snapped. "Unsorted, maybe. Like a museum without a curator."