Miss New India (41 page)

"I guess that Hindu NRI corpse-disposal scheme didn't get off the ground," Auro laughed. He too volunteered to help Anjali get interview-ready. "If you're going to be dealing with Sindhis, how about we watch some episodes of
The Sopranos
?"

After dinner the next night, he sat Anjali and Parvati down on either side of him on the widest sofa in the living room and started playing the first of three seasons of
The Sopranos.
Dozens whacked, or were whacked. Young whacked old, brothers whacked brothers, cousins whacked cousins, bag guys whacked debtors, enforcers whacked snitches.

"Who needs the mafia," Auro joked, "when you've got an Indian extended family?"

"Is that a dig at the Bhattacharjees?" Parvati demanded. "Let me tell you, Anjali, Tony's mother reminds me of Auro's mother."

"That's totally out of bounds!" Auro fumed.

"Okay, okay, mother-in-law jokes are funny only on TV."

Anjali went to bed at dawn and dreamed of ducks bobbing in the swimming pool. It didn't matter that Anjali didn't know how to swim because in her dream she was Meadow Soprano.

RABI CUT SHORT
his scouting trip for his next photo assignment by three days. "Orders from Baba, Parvati Auntie," he announced. "Ma, Baba, and Kallie will be here in two weeks, and I'm supposed to line up properties for Baba to view."

Auro faked exasperation. "Oh, oh, you know what that means, Anjali, don't you? Less time for us. Much less time for Carmela and Tony. Once the two sisters start their adda, there's no stopping. I'll need a vacation from them!"

Adda. Bangla talk-talk over endless tea. Or, in Dollar Colony, over white wine.

The comfort zone of make-believe family in the Banerjis' home collapsed suddenly. She wasn't Parvati's and Auro's daughter; she wasn't even their houseguest; she was their rescue project, like a street dog. Parvati's excitement swirled around her. "Rabi, do you think I should put your mother and the baby in Bhupesh's suite?" "Auro, remember to lay in a lot of beer. Bish likes his Kingfisher, but not warm the way we drink it." "I'll get the mali's wife to come in once a day and take care of the extra laundry." "Oh, I can't wait to have a baby in the house. It's a first for your graying auntie!"

Anjali didn't want to share Parvati and Auro. She begrudged Tara and her baby girl the sweet simplicity of Parvati's love for them. Parvati's sister-love had not been dipped in bile. Parvati hadn't killed her father nor predeceased him. Bitterness soured into dread. The brief, impossible friendship she had forged with Rabi in Gauripur was at stake. Monet, moray, light and angle. Restore mountain, please. But there were only a half-dozen pull-down props, and the Banerjis' living room was not among them. She would have to move on, again.

PARVATI SETTLED INTO
a deck chair under a jasmine-covered pergola and waved to Anjali to join her. "Come, sit by me," she insisted when Anjali hesitated. "I need a break from this stuff." She pointed to the screen of her laptop. "Not quite Napa, but Doddaballapur will get there. Farmland to vineyard, thanks to Bish, who loves wine and wine lovers like his wife and sister-in-law." She put her glass of chardonnay on a stack of real estate brochures by her feet.

Anjali squatted on the grass, envying Parvati, envying most of all her trust in strangers. Even when a well-meaning stranger could open the gates to monsters. Money made for that kind of self-confidence. Money was the safety net of women like Parvati and Rabi's mother. Money made possible ayurvedic spa-pampered skin and radiant hair. They had never been homeless, never starved, they'd never stolen, never had to seduce a potential benefactor.

She had left Gauripur believing in the world of Peter Champion. Poverty was virtuous. Knowledge was protection enough. Love, at long last, would come her way. Nothing would change, year after year, except the names of students. And look at what Bangalore had done to her in just a few months. She had dared to reach above her station, she'd reached for happiness, and all she'd done was bring a shelf of bricks down on her head.

"It's selfish of me, but I'm glad Tara will be settling here. She's been through too much. Not like you, of course, but traumatizing nonetheless. Has Rabi told you about their house fire three years ago? A firebombing, not careless cooking. We still don't know why. The police think international gangs, because Bish is so important. He was badly burned; his feet sort of melted away. He used to have a wicked serve in his Saint Xavier's days in Kolkata; now he walks supported by canes. Tara's afraid of coming back, but I keep telling her that living in Palm Meadows is more or less the same as living in Atherton before she divorced Bish. Oh, you didn't know? She's the only one of us three sisters who did what Daddy wanted, which meant she married the boy Daddy selected, and Bish didn't come from big money, but Daddy said he saw a spark of genius in him—that was Daddy's exact phrase—and she arrived in Palo Alto twenty years old, already the bride of a computer science graduate student and pregnant with Rabi. She divorced him ten years later and lived on her own with Rabi. Well, not exactly on her own, as she'll be the first to admit. She wrote her books. Bish and she got together again and remarried just before Kallie was born. But she's had her years as a single mother and even as a scarlet woman. You know the phrase? Red herrings, scarlet women—they're lost phrases now. She thinks she's lost touch with India in the twenty-plus years she's lived in California. Of course, she visited twice a year while Mummy and Daddy were alive. She reads and clips and Googles all she can, but she says that makes her feel even more an outsider. She says she's tired of our generation of aging Kolkata beauties, and I've told her they bore me too, but your generation of women, Anjali, they're unknowable to me even though I teach them. I sometimes feel that I'm shouting at them across a huge canyon, but they can't hear me, or they're not listening. I can't begin to enter your lives. But I'm curious, not frightened like her."

"What do you find so mysterious about me?" Anjali blurted out.
Tell me who I am, please. Tell me because I haven't the foggiest, other than the fact that I seethe with envy and rage.

Startled, Parvati rubbed a fingertip up and down the cool stem of her wineglass. Condensation left a stain on the glossy brochure. She blotted it with a monogrammed cloth cocktail napkin. "You know what you can get in Palm Meadows that we couldn't get when we bought in Dollar Colony? Vaastu compliance. Forget feng shui. Hot new builders have created a buzz for ancient Hindu rules and orders. Vaastu compliance for spiritual equilibrium and a temperature-controlled wine cellar for gustatory gratification. I know I'm babbling." She picked up her glass and pushed the brochure away. "The short answer is, I don't know, Anjali, I really don't. The best I can come up with is you're like a reflecting pool. You give back wavy clues to what
we
are or what we're going to be."

The Kaveri cuts broad and shallow from the ghats down to the sea, but the preserve is nestled on a bend in the river where the gradient falls and the jungle intrudes to the banks, and a few islands break the navigational flow. On the islands, most days, crocodiles sun themselves and the taller trees are black with hanging bats. Rabi, with his commission from
Discovery India,
has been assigned the assistant deputy's lodge, where the staff keeps an eye on him ("So young!" he heard them say), providing food and drinks for the young lady and the other man.

They paddled their own canoe to the island, Anjali in the middle in a sun hat and dark glasses, feeling very Euro-glam and, as Moni said, the subject of both men's attention and their professional lenses. She stayed in the anchored boat as the two men waded ashore on one of the larger islands and set up cameras and remote releases in front of a few dead fish. Then they reanchored themselves in the deeper channel, still close enough to watch and trip the shutter release. It didn't take long for smaller crocs to come out from hiding.
They'd been just a few feet away! Those boys were messing with the smelly fish and the stubby tripods and there were crocodiles watching them from the bushes!

"My heroes!" she sighed, a line she remembered from
Seinfeld,
when the first of the crocs came out. The fish was half the croc's size and it raised itself on its hind legs to get full extension, the full effect of gravity to help slide the fish down its gullet—a great subject for a photograph.

The boys wished something larger would come out of the water, something canoe-long and twice as wide, but what bait would suffice, except maybe Anjali, tied to a stake? She was agreeable; can't cook, doesn't sew, won't row. Bait's good. "A girl's got to pull her weight," she said.

Rabi suggested, "We could let her twist in the sun for a while, and then when we spot the really big one, we deftly remove the rope..."

"...and hope we can reel her back to the boat in time," said Moni.

"It's a plan," said Anjali.

The Deputy Assistant Manager's Assistant ("Sounds like a name from
Catch-22
" said Moni; Anjali drew a blank but kept smiling) swore there were some big fellows in the river, but usually not on the islands. They sunned themselves on the banks but they favored the slower, warmer waters downstream, where the bigger fishes and otters swam. They'll go for birds too. And sometimes the bats—some trees harbor thousands of bats in the afternoon, and some of the younger ones get pushed off their perches and fall in the water. Sometimes they don't even hit the water before a big croc snaps them up.

That would be a picture. "Make it so, Number One," said Rabi.

In the manager's bungalow there were photos from the old British days, showing crocs attacking tigers. Rabi called it, with an eye to Anjali, "Big-time debt recovery. These guys didn't mess around." Tigers and chitals, crocs and boars. No tigers now, maybe some leopards, but no competition with the crocs. Crocs are at the top of the food chain, except maybe below bats. In gross tonnage per annum, one little bat probably out-eats a croc. Nothing tops a bat.

"Who knew?" said Anjali.

Rabi started to reminisce. "When I was a little boy back in San Francisco, I'd spend weekends with my father. We'd go for long walks on Ocean Beach, or sometimes down past Candlestick. The old Italians would be sitting there in folding chairs with five or six poles stuck in the sand, sipping a beer or maybe their homemade wine, eyes half closed, waiting for the bell at the tip of their pole to tinkle. They'd give it a jerk. Like clicking a shutter release. It was magic."

"I know," said Moni. "My parents had a summer place in British Columbia. I used to jig for rock cod on Galiano Island. I'd stretch out on the dock and wrap the line around two fingers and just lower it into the rocks. If I didn't get a fish, I'd get a crab or a lobster. You stare long enough into dancing water and you think you're in there with the fish, like you've sprouted gills."

Rabi's ego was so vast, it encompassed the world. Anjali felt herself a part of it.

"Watch out for Moni," said Rabi. "He'll Photoshop a pair of nesting pterodactyls."

It's a Photoshop world,
she thought.

"We've all been Photoshopped," said Moni. "I know I've been."

She had no memories. Her memories were only starting now. Her life was starting now.

The boys drank beer; she had a soda. Three small crocs were exploring the tripods; like kittens or puppies they were trying to climb them and bite the cameras. Rabi kept clicking away.

"Um, Rabi, old man," Moni whispered. "Turn around very, very slowly."

Not five feet off the bow, two eyes and a pair of nostrils floated, unattached, it seemed, to anything underwater. Except that far away downstream the water eddied at the base of an armored tail. And to think, just seconds before, Anjali had been swirling her hands in the water to clean them of fish slime.

Click!.

The rest of the day was devoted to birds and bats. Overripe fruit, halved watermelons, spotted mangoes, and guavas were spread at the base of a rookery tree, the tripods set, cameras loaded and guano hoods attached, remotes set. A few flying fox bats dropped down from the trees despite the daylight hour. It was never too bright in the forest. They moved over the moldering fruits like stooped old men in heavy capes. They reminded Anjali of the priests at Vasco da Gama, with their long coats and bent posture. "The weight of the world," Father Thomas used to say. But in the zoom lens their true nature appeared, and their name held true: foxes. Sharp-faced, intelligent dogs, with wings.

Then the three paddled upriver and drifted back down, Anjali consulting the bird guide, pointing "There, there," and Moni and Rabi taking turns paddling and taking pictures till the light began to fail and the foxes lifted off from their trees for a night of pillaging.

THEY SAT IN
three slack, ground-grazing sling chairs, just a small step up from hammocks, swirling dal and chapatis with their fingers, sipping beer, looking out over the water. In their sun hats and full sleeves against the mosquitoes, they could have been nineteenth-century British planters surveying God's handiwork, with full satisfaction.
My boys,
Anjali thought.
My brave, funny boys.

In the last minutes of sunlight, the smooth river was pocked by leaping fish, swooping birds, and drifting logs—floating eyes and nostrils—that weren't logs at all. The clear, peach-colored sky was sooty with funnels of bats lifting off from the trees.

She had a sudden thought:
Nothing bad can come of this.

I'm down to one iron in the fire. Debt-recovery agent. If anything is to come of this night, or the future,
she thought before turning in,
I owe it to bats and crocodiles. How to explain the wonders of this world?

It was a winter's day when the air was cool and the sunlight was wan and the mosquitoes were out in their post-monsoon exuberance. We were told to expect a visit by a da Gama alumna who had left Gauripur, found a job, and succeeded in ways our teachers always told us we could too. Her name was Anjali Bose, and many of us remembered her as a tall, outgoing girl, one of the Bengalis in the Hindi-speaking heartland of Bihar. She'd gone to fabled Bangalore and worked hard and found a modest position, then risen within it. Our teacher knew her well. He said she had "the spark," and thanks to her and millions like her, India was on fire. Even Gauripur was on fire. He was our fomenter of hope. She didn't bring the fire all by herself, but she was a "collateral beneficiary."