Miss New India (13 page)

High on the side of one building she could read hand-painted placards:
ENGLISH LESSENS. CALL-CENTRE PLACEMENT. FRESHERS TAKE NOTE. FOREGIN LANGUAGES TAUGHT; FRANCIAS, ESPAGNOL, ITALINO.
She found it reassuring, as though they'd known she was coming and might need a brush-up course, even if Bangalore spelled words differently.

She would like to stay. Barista was comfortable, with a touch of conspicuous luxury and a hint of intrigue. The young people were just like her, open and friendly, and probably held the kind of job she was hoping to get. She'd heard that ten thousand agents a month were hired, and six or seven thousand quit or were let go. What could a girl buy, with fifteen thousand rupees coming in? For one thing, she could stop in a Barista and order cold coffee with ice cream and not think twice. For Angie, a lakh—100,000 rupees—represented a lifetime of scrimping and saving. In Bangalore, she could be earning a lakh, or even two lakhs, every month.

She was swept up in visions of stuffed clothing closets, a scooter, and an apartment of her own. Big-city ambitions; small-town desires. Her poor sister worked her fingers to the bone—fingers and more—for two thousand a month, if that. From a few tables away, a pleasant male voice spoke up. "Kew Gardens is on my way," but Angie was still lost in her future. In a few months, after promotions, before she turned twenty, she'd be earning more than her father, far more than her father.

Those pleasant words from a distant table had been meant for her. Suddenly there he was, in blue jeans, white shirt, and blue blazer, belt buckle at her eye level, dangling his car keys. He seemed slightly older than the others but still young, plump, and round-faced, with glasses: a harmless, even friendly face. "My name is Girish Gujral," he said. "They call me GG. I hear you need a ride to Kew Gardens. My Daewoo is at your service. Don't worry, it's on my way."

He kept on talking, but she couldn't make out the words. His lips were moving, but nothing got through to her. She thought she should stand, get closer, and shake his hand, but as she tried to rise, her legs went numb, then her head filled with light, her knees buckled, and she was falling against him. He threw his arms around her, keeping her half-standing, then let her down to the ground, easily. She saw faces, all the girls and some of the boys she'd been watching, arranged in a semicircle around her. Mr. GG cradled her head in his hand and shouted to the others, "Get toast and juice." Then, to her, he almost whispered, "When did you last eat?"

"This morning." She lied.

"Not to pry, but are you by any chance diabetic?" he asked. She was offended; diabetes was for old people.

"Of course not."

"So it's just my manly charm?"

"Pardon me?"

She didn't know where she was. Lights kept spinning behind Mr. GG's head. Her head was a big, hollow, swaying balloon; her legs and arms were numb. Then she was drinking the juice and tearing off mouthfuls of toast.

A minute later, she was back in her chair. The world had stopped spinning, and Mr. GG was buttering another stack of toast. He said, "You're looking much better." He pushed the platter closer to her. "You seem to have fallen in my lap. What am I to do with you?"

Just like that, she made the lightning calculation: She who hesitates is lost. She who worries over the future or her reputation or skimps on comforts and counts only the rupees in her pocketbook and not the dreams inside her Samsonite, she who dwells on can-it-get-any-worse, and not pie-in-the-sky, cannot compete.

"My name is Angie Bose," she said, introducing herself to him formally. "Thank you for the offer of the ride."

A
COURTLY STRANGER
had offered her a free ride to Kew Gardens, wherever that was, and she'd been in Bangalore not much more than an hour. In Gauripur the only answer would be a polite "Thank you, no." But in Bangalore? "Why not?" was the smart answer.

Besides, she didn't have to own up to anyone at Barista that she had spent all her life in Gauripur. She didn't even have to be Angie Bose; she could invent a flashy Bollywoodish first name, like Dimple or Twinkle or Sprinkle. Why not? No one in Bangalore seemed to be stuck with a discernible identity. She could kill off Angie Bose, and who would know, or care? She could be anything she wanted, a Hindi-speaking girl from Varanasi or a Brahmin from Kolkata. Who do you want to be? Bangalore doesn't care. Bangalore will accommodate any story line. She could eliminate her parents and her sister. No, she couldn't bring herself to do that, but she could make them more solidly, more powerfully middle-class.

The man who'd called himself GG led the way out of Barista to a sleek Daewoo sedan parked at the curb. Let the story line of her life write itself! Like a typical Bollywood heroine—the eternal innocent, the trusting small-town girl placing herself at the mercy of a confident, benevolent older man—she climbed into the stranger's car. She'd seen this movie a hundred times.

Anjali Bose decided she'd already encountered at least one version of every likely male she would ever meet. Not every man was as befuddled as Nirmal Gupta, or a bully like her father, or a rapist like Subodh Mitra, or a lying cheat like Sonali's ex-husband, or an exploiter like Sonali's current boss, or a brutish john like the truck drivers of Nizambagh. Some were kind but twisted, like Peter Champion. All the fifty-odd matrimonial candidates she'd rejected had to belong in one of those categories. Any young man she had recently met, or might in the future, would fit into one of them—everyone except maybe Rabi Chatterjee. It would be interesting to see where Mr. GG and his big silver Daewoo fit in. In broad daylight in a big city she felt she had nothing to fear.

He started off predictably. "Did I hear you were from Kolkata?" Uh-oh. She rummaged through family memories, arranging a few street names and neighborhoods, just in case. Where should she come from? Ballygunj, Tollygunj, north Calcutta? They were just names to her; if anyone asked about addresses, she'd be exposed. Salt Lakes? Too new. Dhakuria Lakes? No longer trendy. Bowbazar? Sealdah? Too poor, crowded, too dingy.
Don't say a thing.
Mr. GG continued. "I've never lived in Bengal myself. People say they're all-talk and airy-fairy, but—"

She cut in. "We have our share of dolts, Mr. Gujral."

"Please call me Girish. Or GG."

He didn't press her to reciprocate. As they passed a five-star hotel, he said, "Three years ago, all this was an old apartment block. They got rid of five hundred families and replaced them with two thousand tourists." He pointed out a new shopping center: "Big black-money operation there. Dubai money." He seemed to know the inside story about every new building they passed. "First mixed-use high-rise in Bangalore. Ground-floor boutiques, middle floors for offices, and top five floors, luxury condos." For the condo owners there were two indoor swimming pools, a spa, a spectacular roof garden, and of course full-time maid service. If you had been lucky enough to get your bid in before construction had begun, you'd bought your condo for two crores. A steal. That was three years ago. "Now you could sell it for eight crore plus."

"I'll have to keep that in mind," she said.

Mr. GG laughed.

She read aloud the passing signboards:
AID'S LATEST PROJECT!

ACT NOW!
LIVE
IN I0-CRORE LUXURY AT ONLY 5-CRORE PRICE! Mr.

GG seemed proud of Indian achievement, and the wealth was breathtaking, yet he also seemed somehow ashamed of it. She understood, in a way: Bangalore excited her, but it left her depressed. All the money made people go slightly crazy. And what was this about AIDS? She'd heard about it, a big problem, but in Bangalore they advertise it? "Isn't AIDS...?"

"AID is All-India Development. People used to joke that you can take medicine for AIDS, but it's AID that will get you in the end."

The morning's "Bang Galore" column, which she had read while sitting on her suitcase at the bus depot, was still fresh in her mind. Dynamo had written, "In Bang Galore, crores are the new lakhs," and now she understood. In her experience, crores were like light-years, signifying numbers too large to comprehend. Crores were reserved for serious occasions with mystical gravity, such as government budgets and projects ("1000-Cr. Barrage Planned for Upper Jumna...") or whole populations ("with India having crossed the hundred-crore threshold and Mumbai's masses now pressing three crore..."). A lakh was a hundred thousand. A crore was a hundred lakhs.

Crores were mentioned everywhere. In that same discarded paper, she'd read of a hundred-crore land deal, converting rice paddies into a gated colony (subscribe now!) with schools and a golf course cum health club and a shopping mall with international designer boutiques inside the compound (no crowds!). She'd read charges that an underlying 4.5-crore bribe paid for the land. But no poor farmer was ever going to profit from it. Farmers were as welcome as their bullocks inside those gates. Someone had already found an ancient title to the farmland, or invented it and paid off a judge. If crores were the new lakhs, was everyone automatically a hundred times bigger and stronger just for being here? Did it also mean that if you failed here, you failed a hundred times faster and fell into a hole a hundred times deeper?

Mr. GG drove her past her first Starbucks, her first Pizza Hut, and then a Radio Shack, all wondrous logos, with expansion plans and corporate cultures that she'd studied back at da Gama. At the end of her corporate management class, Peter Champion had told her, only halfjoking, "Congratulations. You know more about Starbucks than any eighteen-year-old girl in Bihar." Seeing the logo was as miraculous as watching a family of white tigers crossing the road.

Mr. GG had gone to an IIT for civil engineering, then to architecture school in the United States, and after returning to India he had picked up an additional MBA from an IIM. He'd had a job in a place called Pasadena, but his older brother had died in a traffic accident, and Mr. GG had to return home to look after his parents, his widowed sister-in-law, and two nephews. His wife had refused to leave the States. "Was she an American girl?" Angie asked.

And he replied, "She was American by birth and Punjabi by name and background, and her parents were very proud Punjabis, but she was raised over there. I find American-raised Indian girls too independent. They lack true family feeling."

She couldn't let that one pass. "There are many Indian girls who've never left India who lack what you call true family feeling, Mr. GG." Maybe she was American after all. "My sister ran out on my parents. She waited for the middle of the night and left a note saying she would not marry the boy they found for her, and when she was ready she would write them again. We haven't heard from her in the past five years!"

How liberating it felt, creating characters, obliterating oneself, being a composite.

"Well, then, she's probably dead," he said. "Five years is a long time for an Indian girl to be gone. A girl on her own, bad things can happen. My wife had a job. A small job, mind you, office manager in a branch bank, one step up from teller. She could have done much better here."

But Angie was already calculating the benefits of staying behind: why would any self-respecting modern girl come to India when she already had a job in the States? Being an office manager sounded like a worthy goal. Why would any childless wife give up America, safely removed from a nagging mother-in-law? But Mr. GG hadn't gone back to Delhi either. He'd taken off for Bangalore because making it here meant making it anywhere in the world.

"And what did you do in the States, Mr. GG?"

"I inspected buildings."

"Then all this new construction must keep you very busy." And very rich, she supposed. It was common knowledge that inspectors made more money than the builders and the architects because of bribes and kickbacks.

"Putting on a hardhat and pawing through pipes is extremely boring," he said. "It's much nicer staying inside my air-conditioned office, drinking pots of tea. Last night I inspected an enormous project in Djakarta that isn't even built yet. We live in a virtual city, Miss Angie, inside a virtual world."

She couldn't tell if he was serious or just playing with her. The long story came to this: "Forget all the clutter you see—Bangalore is the most advanced city on the planet. Let's say a Danish-Dutch consortium puts up a shopping center and apartment block in Djakarta, designed by a Brazilian architect. Dazzling plans, prize-winning stuff. It's going to be the biggest shopping center in Asia, bigger than anything in Japan or China. But none of those world-class thinkers really, intimately, knows the Indonesian building codes or the reliability of the supply chain or the union rules or a million other little things like plumbing and electrical systems and subsoil drainage. Are you with me so far, Miss Bose?"

She wasn't. She hadn't the foggiest.

"Of course."

"Those are things known only in Bangalore. We have the building codes for every city in the world. We have ecological surveys and subsoil analyses for every square centimeter on the planet. So our back-office architects and engineers sit around their computers, modeling the buildings on special software, scan the blueprints, correct the budget forecasts and the deadlines, and then our financial guys run the numbers and we come up with a tighter figure. We can save our clients up to twenty percent. We don't budget for bribes and kickbacks. We're cleaning up the world, one shopping center at a time."

His architectural consulting company, a Swiss-Canadian collaboration, 50 percent locally financed, was three years old. It had started with five architects who returned from the United States and five engineers, and now it employed three hundred people.

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?"