Miss New India (30 page)

"London," he said. "People who travel a lot name the airport, not the city."

"What does that have to do with us?" she asked.

"Butterfly effect," he answered. He launched into a long explanation of how anything that happens anywhere in the world affects Bangalore. She didn't follow his theory and stopped listening to his actual words, cocooning herself instead in the pleasure of his desire for her. He kept reaching for her hand. She wished Kew Gardens was far, very far. She wanted him to keep talking, keep driving, keep lusting. She wanted to love even more than to be loved.

Respecting Minnie's house rules, Mr. GG stopped the car two blocks from Bagehot House. She let herself out the passenger door and walked around to the driver's side. He stayed behind the wheel but didn't drive off. He said, "I want to see you again."

She could tell he wanted to say more, and she wanted him to say more, so she lingered on the sidewalk, tracing invisible circles with a fingertip on his door. Mr. GG didn't bring out the sweet, clean wine-and-moonlight flirtiness that Moni Lahiri had, just a couple of hours before. She couldn't make even make-believe love to Moni in Moni's apartment. Did he live in a rented apartment, or did he own a house? He was a magician, who took Anjali and Angie, waved his wand, and made both disappear, then created an ethereal Miss Two Scoops, the stuff of popular dreams. He Photoshopped her: that was it. But Mr. GG saw
through
her, and
into
her. Her attraction to Mr. GG had a rawness and authority that thrilled her.

"Yes?"

He had expected confirmation, not a question. The engine started up. "Take care," he said. The car eased into traffic.

It was three o'clock in the afternoon, a normally quiet time. A light mist was falling, Bangalore's version of the monsoon. Kew Gardens Corner and Bhajot Lane were unusually crowded. Pedestrians—not strollers, but young men running with purpose—had spilled over the sidewalks and into the roadway, throwing traffic into a honking chaos. At three o'clock most houses were usually shuttered and many of the smaller shops were closed.

I'm a woman now,
she said to herself.
I'm quite a woman. I'm hot, according to Tookie. Secretive and oh so mysterious, according to Husseina. Sherbet-cool, sherbet-refreshing, according to Moni. And funny and fascinating, if I'm reading Mr. GG correctly.
All in all, it had been quite a day, and it was still the middle of the afternoon.

The promised day had arrived! Shortly after daybreak, Anjali and eleven other students piled out of the CCI minivan for the first day of the two-week intensive course, itself a preparation for a new life as a salaried, independent career woman. She was glad, in a way, that she had procrastinated about getting in touch with Peter Champion's contacts. Big carp in a small pond is a minnow in a lake. She wasn't the frightened country bumpkin she had been in her first few weeks in Bangalore. She felt cocky as she watched the other eight women and three men take hesitant leaps out of the minivan. They clustered around the newly installed elevator, which could accommodate only four at a time. She chose to walk up the three flights to the door of CCI and Desai Data Systems, the first arrival, and she was rewarded with a special smile from Parvati Banerji, who had stationed herself on the third-floor landing to welcome her students.

The floor plan of DDS and Usha Desai's home office, in which Anjali had been interviewed, were identical, except that all three bedrooms had been turned into classrooms furnished with desks and chairs and equipped with computers, whiteboards, and floor-to-ceiling panels that depicted American life.

Parvati began lessons by dashing off a list of words on the whiteboard:
please, deliver, development, circuitry, executive, address, growth, management, garbage, opportunity, hearth, addition, thought.
Words that customer-support-service employees would need and would use on every work shift but would very likely mangle.

"Our goal for the intensive sessions," she announced, "is accent enhancement. The regular program offers accent neutralization, not enhancement."

Anjali saw the trembling fingers of the woman at the desk to her left write
study gole = hanssment
in her notebook. She peered at the lined notebook of the male student to her right. He was sketching her profile, and he was pretty good at it.

A woman's voice from behind Anjali interrupted the instructor. "Ma'am, what is
enhancement
meaning exactly?"

The instructor was ready for that question. "The U.S. companies that come to us want you to sound acceptably American. That doesn't mean you have to imitate American television accents—it just means they expect you to communicate without any complications. We'll work this morning on softening consonants and crispening vowels."

She had each of her twelve students pronounce the words she had listed on the whiteboard.
Please
came out as "pliss";
garbage
and
manage
as "garbayje" and "manayje." All twelve had problems with the buried
v:
"de-well-op," "day-li-wer." Ms. Banerji smiled through the difficulties. "A small problem of muscle memory from your mother tongue," she explained. "Fortunately we have tailor-made solutions for every MTI problem in this room." She must have caught Anjali's blank look, for she quickly added, "Mother-tongue influence problems." She assured her students that after the two-week course, they would be fluent in the language of acronyms. And politics. And sports. And popular culture. Every problem has a solution.

Even problems in personal life?
Anjali wondered. Could the teacher include a lesson in optimism enhancement?

Parvati's lesson plan was more formal than Peter's. She dictated which syllable to stress. She instructed the students to press the upper teeth down on the lower lip so that a crisp
v
didn't dissolve into a whooshy
w.
She drilled the trainees hard, but not even Anjali got the
th
in
growth, hearth,
and
thought.
So much easier to catch the staked fence of a
t
and an
h
approaching and settle on a plump, cozy, softened
d.

The next exercise called for each student to recite a poem from a reader that Parvati and the absent Ms. Desai had put together. Twelve trainees, twelve poems. Anjali was assigned "I Heard a Fly Buzz." This lady poet was no Edgar Allan Poe. How could anyone be inspired by flies? Flies deserved swatters, not rhymes. Flies meant that something dead, sweet, or fecal was nearby. Anjali guessed she'd been deliberately selected for Miss Emily's fly poem because
f
was hard for Bengalis to pronounce. She remembered Peter's admonition: "Foggiest, Angie, not p'oggiest." She owed it to him to get the
f
sound right in this Bangalore classroom. And she did.

At the lunch break, two students quit. "Shattering. I've lost all my confidence," Ms. Vasudev complained. She intended to ask for her money back. Mr. Shah did not slink away during the break as Ms. Vasudev had. He waited for the instructor to resume classes so he could confront her before storming out. "This is humiliating," he berated Ms. Banerji. "I am a citizen of India. I don't give a damn that Mr. Corporate America doesn't like my accent!" To which Parvati rejoined, "Losing two out of twelve isn't bad. That leaves more attention for everyone else. In fact, two is just the beginning." She had them recite "Quitters never win, and winners never quit," and kept them at it until "vinners" and "k vitters" were wrung from their tongues.

"Let me say one thing to the rest of you," Parvati began, after the first two quitters had left. "Am I disheartened? No. We expect dropouts, and we wish them well. Not everyone is cut out for the things we demand. You'll find that English-language skills are only a part of what we expect, and not even the largest part. Language enhancement is largely mechanical—it's your absorptive capacity, your character, your ability to learn and use new ways of thinking and, of course, new facts, that we're interested in. That's why we interviewed and tested you in the first place."

The two-week prep course actually lasted only twelve days because CCI was closed on Sunday, but three more freshers dropped out at the end of the first week. "Gole = hanssment" was gone. So was the sketch artist. The remainders were at least her equals in English: big city, confident, well educated, and slightly older.

In the training manual two sessions were listed under "Getting to Know the American Client" and subdivided into "Topography" and "Culture." According to the manual, knowing a language without knowing the culture was the same as knowing the words of a song but not the music.

Fifteen minutes into the first of these two sessions, Anjali's head was spinning. Wendy's Burger King McDonald's Jack in the Box Little Caesars Papa John's Pizza Hut Round Table Pizza Domino's Popeyes KFC Waffle House IHOP Taco Bell Chili's TGIF Applebee's Red Lobster PIP Kinko's Staples AAMCO AutoZone Speedy Muffler Maaco Midas Muffler Jiffy Lube United American Delta Continental Circuit City Good Guys Best Buy Office Depot OfficeMax Texaco Chevron Amoco Sunoco Arco Mobil Gulf Radio Shack Record Barn Wal-Mart K-Mart Target Costco GE (electronics) GM (cars) GM (mills) Ford Apple IBM Dell Hewlett-Packard, and every one of them with hundreds of outlets and bottom lines, like a medium-size country itself. Food, electronics, transportation, finance, and fashion: all were familiar, but they were shown to exist on a massive scale that rendered them mysterious. Banks, insurance, brokerages ... if they had warranties, returns, or breakdowns, eventually someone in India would have to deal with it. Normal Americans, apparently, could name all those national companies and dozens more but did not have personal contact with any of them.

Parvati assured the students on the first day of classes that for every problem, CCI had a tailor-made solution. But Anjali couldn't imagine a company taking a chance on her.

She asked, "Why all these Shacks, Huts, Barns, Cabins, and Alleys? What self-respecting company would call itself a hut or a shack? Why not Mahals and Palaces?"

Parvati had an answer for that too. "Large corporations are alienating. Calling them shacks and huts is a cheap way of humanizing them. When U.S. consumers hear of a Palace or a Mahal, they only think of a Chinese or an Indian restaurant."

In the "Culture" session, Parvati showed one episode each from three popular TV sitcoms, so her students would be familiar with them in case customers referred to characters in
Friends
or
Seinfeld
or
Sex and the City.
Recognize the clients' references; show appreciation for their notion of humor. Anjali didn't find any of them funny.

The TV episodes depressed her. All the characters were surrounded by friends. Anjali had no friends; she had fellow tenants, contacts, mentors. She'd never had a friend, no one she really liked and could bring to her home, or missed when she was out of town, or wished she could get together with to share secrets, as Elaine Benes and Carrie Bradshaw did. Her only friend had been Sonali-di, up to the time of Sonali-di's wedding. She hated these characters; she envied them. Bright and bouncy Carrie didn't work as hard at her job as Sonali-di did, but she still had enough money to splurge more on silly, strappy high heels in one afternoon than Sonali-di made in half a year. Life in India was so unfair.

Most weeknights she lay in bed, going over assigned chapters from the CCI reader. The chapter she had most trouble with was titled "Specialized Language of the Football Gridiron, the Basketball Court, and the Baseball Diamond." She memorized alien phrases that promised to unlock deep mysteries of American English and the psyche of the American consumer. It wasn't easy to visualize a "full-court press" or, for heaven's sake, a "blitz." Why was "knocking the cover off the ball" a good thing to do? How did "throwing a curveball" indicate "an unexpected degree of difficulty"? Then there was "knocking it out of the park." That too was a good thing. But "Grab some pine!" was not. "Stealing a base" and "painting the corner" were commendable. "Flooding the zone" had nothing to do with monsoons. "The bottom of the ninth" had something to do with desperation. Somehow, "three and two, bottom of the ninth" didn't make her tingle with expectation. How was "being born on third base and thinking he'd hit a triple" a venomous insult? And what on earth did "Grow a pair!" mean? She'd never seen an American game, and the names of great players were irrelevant mysteries (could they be any greater than the best of the Indian cricketers?).

She didn't know a thing about American politics, movies, songs, television, or sports, or the coded references they inspired. They were the music, if not the words, of the American language; they were 20 percent of American speech. She asked in class one day, "How can I learn to communicate to Americans if I've never been to their country?"

Parvati offered encouragement. "You're a bright girl, Anjali," she'd say. "That's what I meant by your absorptive capacity." Parvati usually called on her first, expecting the proper, or at least a provocative, answer.

THE COURSE ENDED
with a unit that called for role-playing. Parvati led her students through charades in which she pretended to be an American client calling customer service at a make-believe call center in Bangalore. To graduate, the students had to sound convincingly American when answering the client. As homework, the students had to fabricate American autobiographies.

Janey Busey of Rock City, Stephenson County, Illinois, rose from the ashes of Anjali Bose of Gauripur, Bihar, India. On the CCI computer she Google-Earthed the Rock City street map and even found "her" house; she memorized the population (only 315, she noted with horror; not even the poorest, most isolated Indian village was that insignificant); median age—an elderly 33.5—and 99.7 percent non-Hispanic white, whatever that meant. Median family income, twenty-five thousand dollars, just a quarter-lakh; median house value under one lakh dollars.

Insofar as reality can be composed of raw data, Anjali had created Rock City. The rest of her virtual life was inspired by her own unbounded longings. Janey Busey had grown up in a cheerful, wholesome, Midwestern family of five, headed by a veterinarian father and nurtured by a gift-store-owning mother. She replaced sullen Sonali with two good-hearted, extroverted brothers, Fred and Hank. Fred worked in Rock City's only bank and aspired to become a manager. Hank toiled in the office of the town's only insurance firm, though he dreamed of building boats and sailing to Mexico. Puerto Vallarta, to be exact. Vasco da Gama High School and College morphed into Lincoln High, where kids from Rock City had to hold their own against swaggerers from Chicopee and Davis. Then she got swept off her feet by her fantasies and invented sweet summer experiences of working weekdays in the big Wal-Mart in Freeport and flirting with a stock boy named Karl. She brought herself to tears just thinking of poor, slow, inept Karl shipping out to Iraq with hopes of returning with money enough for college.