Miss New India (3 page)

She knew nothing of Bangalore, a southern city as alien to her as the snows of Kashmir. Mr. Champion was back in teaching mode. He explained that for two hundred years Bangalore had been a British army base, a cantonment, and the Britishers had left a few scars—golf courses and racetracks and private gymkhanas—that moneyed Indians adopted a little too enthusiastically. But now it's a hopping place. And he had contacts in Bangalore, people who would listen to his recommendations. The call centers, luring thousands of young people from all over the country, people like her, the new people.

Ali returned with a box of sweets.

"In Bangalore," Mr. Champion said, "if you've got the talent, there's a market."

This time she asked the question that was always on her mind. "And what is my talent, Mr. Champion?"

"Peter, please. Don't you know what your talent is?"

"I haven't the p'oggiest."

"
Foggiest,
Angie. Initial f-sound, not
p.
Initial w-sound, not
v,
and vice versa.
Wedding,
not
vedding. Vagaries,
not
wagaries.
Not
wice wersa. Develop,
not
dewellup.
Keep practicing."

She could cry. They'll always find you out.

"Your talent, Angie? You have the passion. You're not satisfied. But you're still very innocent. Innocence is appealing in a young girl, but not blindness, not ignorance. Look at us." She smiled at his way of including her, but then he said,—"Look closely at
us,
Angie, take a long look at Ali and me."

At the mention of his name, Ali smiled and began to dance. The boy was a good dancer; he must have seen a hundred movies. And then Peter stood and put his arm over Ali's shoulder, and Ali nestled his head against Peter's cheek.

A clash of emotions met the dawn of consciousness: she could have screamed, but instead she whimpered, barely above a breath, "Oh."

Peter went on about places in Bangalore where she could stay. He knew old women from the British days who let out rooms in old mansions in the middle of the city, houses that could have been sold for crores of rupees (and leveled, their tangled gardens hacked down for parking lots and swimming pools), but where would the old women go? Old Anglo-Indian women whose children had fled to Australia or Canada, whose grandchildren would never see India, dotty old women whose sense of decorum reached back to pre-Independence days and who ("Believe me!" he laughed) would never be sympathetic to India's freedom fighters and Independence, but who nevertheless offered rooms and breakfasts of tea and toast and suppers of mutton stew at 1970s prices. Much was forgivable in such women. A place in Kew Gardens or Kent Town, that's what Angie needed. And he knew the women who ran the new money-spinning call centers were always looking for girls with good English and soothing voices who could fool American callers (I
can do that?
she was about to ask.
I'm good enough to fool Americans?)
into thinking they're talking to a girl in Boston or Chicago.

"Finally, a chance to use those regional accents I taught you," he said. "You're very good, Angie, you're the best student I ever had."

"That'll be five
dallars,
" she said, remembering.

Chicago o's sound like a's. So do Boston r's.

"I told you at graduation you had to leave this place before you got trapped in a rotten marriage. I'm telling you again, let that happen and you're as good as dead."

Why do they say as
good
as dead? Why not as
bad?
But this was not the time to ask. He seemed about to put his hand on her arm and she felt excited. "I have dreams for you. You get married to some boy from here, and the dream dies. You'll never see the world." He studied her T-shirt. "No ... Dortmund, no Bratislava. You'll have kids and a husband who's jealous of your intelligence and your English and won't let you out of the house, and that would break my heart." This time, he did put his hand on her arm—"You understand?"

Ali snapped up the plate of sweet crumbs as though it was crawling with ants and noisily dumped it into a bowl of soapy water. He was jealous of her! He was just a child. He lifted his dripping fingers to eye level and glared at a chip on a painted fingernail.

"All I've done is give you a start. The rest is up to you."

In the movies, there was a moment of accounting. She wouldn't be allowed to leave her benefactor's house, not without a favor, or worse.
The rest is up to me?
The door would be blocked. He'd reach for her hand, then close in on it, like a trap. But Peter was her teacher and a teacher's help had purity and noble intentions behind it. It came from his heart because she had earned it honorably. Peter was smiling and even Ali was smiling, and Peter held out his hand to her and said, "Good luck, Angie."

She took his hand. Ali thrust out his, which confused her: shake a servant's hand? Up close, she could see a fine line of kohl limning his eyes. In that moment of confusion she saw Peter's arm reach around Ali's waist and pull him close. "I hope you'll find happiness too," he said.

More words followed, in Urdu, and Ali laughed and said in English, "Good luck, Anjali."

Then he walked her to the bus stop.

If a girl is sufficiently motivated, she can distill ten years' worth of Western dating experience—though maybe not all the sex and heartbreak—from a few months of dedicated attention to the photos, backgrounds, and brief meetings with the "boys" her father selects. She can enjoy the illusion of popularity, glamour, and sophistication. She can fabricate "relationships" and fantasize about new cities, new families, and new worlds opening up, without the terror of leaving home and sneaking off to Bangalore. Even in the heavily chaperoned world of the arranged marriage market, a girl can fabricate passion and lose her innocence. Anjali was tuned in to her culture's consolations for the denial of autonomy.

She was nearly twenty, a few months into her bachelor of commerce studies. But why, her father wanted to know, delay groom-hunting for two more years until she received her B. Comm.? It was therefore decided that while he wore himself out in search of a worthy "boy," she was to resume attending the English conversation classes the American held in his apartment on weekends. Good English equals good match. He was willing to dig into his savings to pay the American's fees because if any misfortune was to befall her mythical husband, she could help out by tutoring school pupils. English-language skills would always be in demand.

"What husband, Baba?" Anjali protested, though she was pleased to have his blessing to attend the weekend classes. "You haven't even started looking, and you're worrying he'll be disabled or destitute!" This was as close as her father could come to admitting the horrible mistake he had made in hand-picking Sonali's husband. In the Bose family, a married woman forced by circumstances to hold a job to make ends meet was a tragedy. A divorced single mother supporting herself and her four-year-old daughter by working long days as an office typist was a catastrophe.

Mr. Bose went back to his nightly pegs of whiskey, ignoring her. Anjali toted up her assets and liabilities in the marriage market. Unlike Sonali, she was tall and slim, and under favorable light and clothing, pleasant looking—no, make that passably good looking. On the minus side, she lacked accomplishments such as singing, dancing, and sewing, traditionally expected of bridal candidates. She was also stubborn, headstrong, and impulsive, and by middle-class Gauripur standards, inappropriately outgoing. Those were correctible or at least concealable failures. The one flaw that couldn't be overcome was her eye color: greenish hazel. Her mother prayed for her pale eyes to turn black. Black hair, black eyes, fair complexion, sharp nose, and thin lips were unassailable proof of ethnic purity, whereas brownish hair and light eyes hinted at hanky-panky with a European in some long-ago time and place. Anjali reminded her mother that Sonali's long-lashed black eyes had fetched a lecherous cad who paid no child support and no alimony.

To marry her off was her father's Hindu duty: Anjali accepted that. Given her willful personality, he was eager to marry her off before she sullied her reputation and disgraced the whole family: she understood that too. She couldn't talk about her wants and fears with her parents, but she knew when to humor and when to defy them.

The matchmaking campaign began casually. Her father might come home from the office saying, "Took tea with Mr. Pradip Sen this afternoon. He's looking for someone for his son." Meaningful pause. "Anjali, you remember the Sens, no?" And she might drop what she was doing, which couldn't be much, since she was fairly useless in the kitchen, and say, "I trust you're not talking of Buck Tooth Sen. Good luck!" Little tests like that, easily deflected. And her father would shoot back, "Sen is good family. Everyone is remembering Mr. Pradip Sen's maternal grandmother's brother, just a boy, was hanged by damn Britishers on Andaman Islands." The formalities of matchmaking were conducted in English in the Bose household. Over breakfast Mr. Bose might linger on the page of marriage ads in the local Bangla paper, checking out the boys. "Promising lad, engineering, awaiting U.S. Green Card." The newspaper photo was reduced from a visa-size, visa-posed grainy black-and-white, rather insulting to her estimation of her prospects. She thought,
They actually think this clerk-in-waiting is worthy of me?
"Shall I drop this young chap a line?" her father would ask, and Anjali, feeling more like Angie, would reply, "You do that and I'm out the door, thank you very much." They sparred and chuckled. Their girl had self-respect, which the parents considered a good thing; she was also a little willful, which was not.

Angie wrote to Sonali that things at home were much as usual. Grumbling, threats, entreaties, criticism, and promises: the whole parent—unmarried daughter bag of tricks. Nothing she couldn't handle.

Sonali warned that matchmaking might start as a small cloud on the distant horizon, but before it was over, the marital monsoon would break, and no one in the world could hold the floodwaters back. Anjali secretly looked forward to its destructive fury.

THREE MONTHS LATER
Anjali was still in Gauripur, making excuses to herself. The pre-monsoon summer was at its zenith. Nothing moved, all was heat and dust, but two thousand kilometers to the south, seasonal low pressure had been sighted. Low pressure meant monsoon. Monsoon meant mud, cooler weather, and a temporary reprieve from mosquitoes—and it meant that the next school year would soon be starting.

A sudden marriage, outside of her control, could certainly occur. Nonetheless, she felt it was only fair to her parents to let them test the marital waters. The possibility of going to Bangalore on her own would be a monumental life-destroying—or liberating—decision. She needed time to plan. She had saved the cash from occasional money orders Sonali had sent her over the years, but it probably wouldn't be enough for train fare. Hiding even the slim stack of bills from a family intolerant of privacy would be a challenge. Maybe she could stash it at the bottom of one of her mother's "just in case" metal drums in which was hoarded a six months' supply of rice, sugar, and lentils. "Just in case" was her mother's mantra. Disasters are waiting; they can't be avoided, and there's no one to trust. Everyone is corrupt, with twisted values. Even Anjali's father came in for scrutiny: "When bad times come again," she'd say as they chopped vegetables, "you think your father can save you? Hah!
My
father provided for my sisters and me. We never wanted, even in famine time. Five daughters all married, with decent dowry!"

"
Buzley?
" Did you understand?

"
Buzlum.
" Yes, I understood. This was Bose-family Bengali: an inside joke in an ancient dialect. But on this occasion it was meant to enforce. Do you understand what I am saying, and will you do as I say?

Buzley, buzlum.

The Boses were part of a remnant Bengali community inside a sea of Hindi-speaking Biharis. Angie's parents and three generations of once-prominent Boses had absorbed communal memories of riots and shop burnings, lootings, assassinations, and political scandal and had drawn a lesson from them. "These people..." her parents would complain, sometimes saying nothing more—"with these people, what to say?"
These people
could be anyone outside of their tight, dying, small-town "probasi" Bengali-Bihar community. Even other Bengalis—those exposed to the temptations of big-city Kolkata—were part of the plot against them. So was anyone not of their caste and general income level, or anyone with fewer than three generations of local roots, not to mention all minorities except maybe Parsis (not that any Parsi had ever stopped in Gauripur and stayed) and everyone from other regions.

"God, what I'd give for a little temptation!" Anjali used to say.

Even in Gauripur she had grown up on the modern side of a great national divide. From the backwater of Gauripur, she'd somehow caught the fever; she was part of the bold new India, an equal to anywhere, a land poised for takeoff. Her parents were irremediably alien, part of a suspicious, impoverished, humiliated India. How could they believe in the things they did and go through life hoarding food, denying themselves comforts, and delaying pleasure? How can you move ahead when all your energy is spent looking over your shoulder? They would never make progress; they were ill equipped for it. How cruel a fate, to be intelligent and ambitious and to crave her share of happiness—and to be denied the opportunity!

With her flawed Bangla language skills and no one to practice on except her parents, she'd always found herself attracted to Hindi movies, Hindi culture, and if it came down to it, Hindi-speaking boys. Bengali boys, like the ones in her ethnically isolated neighborhood, seemed too goody-goody, too cow-eyed. But given cultural patterns and long-nurtured prejudices, Mr. Bose would not consider non-Bengali applicants.

"No need to rush," Anjali would say. What if there was a perfect boy out there? Didn't she owe it to herself to give it a shot? She still had time to see if her father could find him, the Perfect Him, a Lord Ram with a trim mustache in modern dress. She doubted he could. His imagination was limited to boys who would grow into men like himself, boys in white shirts with secure prospects in a moribund bureaucracy. She'd be fair to her father. She'd give him another six months. If it looked hopeless, if he couldn't come through with a fancy catch, then she would definitely sneak out of the house, go to Peter, and wheedle a counterdowry out of him, and send a postcard from Bangalore. Peter had made out Bangalore to be an asylum for bright, driven women from hellhole towns. Gauripur was a hellhole, but she didn't know if she met Peter's high standard for brightness, or desperation.