Miss New India (7 page)

While her parents were fretting over the caste purity and social standing of interested probasi Bengalis with twenty-something sons, vowing this time they'd wipe out the stigma of their other daughter's divorce, Anjali was imagining herself in the real world behind Shaky Sengupta's pull-down screens. The beaches of Australia were beckoning, the Ginza, the Great Wall, why not? Even in Gauripur a girl could dream, especially a reasonably attractive girl with good English, a dimple and cleavage, and an adventurous nature.

The girl/woman in the portrait had nothing to fear from an uncertain marriage market. She would definitely find a husband. She could imagine the crashing of teacups around the world as thousands of bachelor engineers, the loose network of longing that had thus far yielded nearly fifty interested inquiries from half a dozen countries, checked out the new photo on Bengaliweddings.com. She feared having to go through with the Bangalore alternative. When Peter first proposed it, Bangalore had seemed the answer to all her fears and all her anger. Bangalore was a great game, a way of profitably using her English, avenging Sonali, and becoming independent, while picking and choosing among thousands of boys with good English and the same ambition.

But that was an innocent Anjali and a different Peter. That was before she got swept up in the marriage current and before her vanity was engaged. The Bangalore commitment meant packing a bag and sneaking out and admitting she wasn't desirable enough to overcome the stigma of coming from nowhere, and her parents' poverty. Her parents could live with another failed marriage. They could tolerate her misery so long as they felt they'd done their duty. But they would not survive the shame of a second daughter's act of defiance and insubordination.

She wanted to—no, she
needed
to talk to Peter about the photograph of Ali that Rabi Chatterjee had shown her. But she didn't dare; so one day Shaky Sengupta's bridal portrait in hand, faking jauntiness, she showed up—as she now thought of it—at Peter and Ali's. This was a forbidden visit, according to her father's newest rules, but at least she was in a sari. She presented Shaky's marriage portrait and waited for the response. "Well ... would you marry this girl?" she asked.

Peter frowned and then passed it on to Ali.

He checked it twice and gave it back.

"Who is she?" Ali asked in Hindi.

Peter said, "I think this picture is a monstrosity. So what kind of monster is it supposed to attract?"

He'd approved of everything she'd ever done. She was the model by which he judged all his students. She could only answer, "It was my mother's idea."

Peter stiffened. "Your mother, God help us. You're not a little girl anymore, Angie. If you get married—and I don't care how good he looks or what his prospects are—if you get married based on a picture like this, you'll get exactly the treatment you deserve."

She smiled, putting on that big halogen beam that always came to her rescue. "I met Rabi Chatterjee. He showed me pictures he'd taken of you. And Ali."

Peter frowned and looked away. He nodded at the mention of the photos but said nothing. No one was the person she thought she knew.

"Rabi Chatterjee is a serious young man. He has an indestructible ego—that's a good thing. I had one too. It means he's got the inner strength to stand up to convention. And he brings you along, into his wildest plans. He could be going to any college he wanted, so what is he doing? Walking to villages and taking buses and third-class trains. He reminds me of a younger me. He said, 'You can't take pictures of India through a limousine window.' His father happens to be Bish Chatterjee, and Bish Chatterjee happens to be the richest Bengali in the world, one of the ten richest overall—I mentioned him in B. Comm. Honors, but I never expected his son would be sitting in my rooms taking my picture—he speeded up the way computer networks communicate. The world is small, but Gauripur is huge: remember that. Every cell phone uses CHATTY technology. Some day that boy who took your picture will be even richer. And I don't imagine he told you any of that."

"He said his father owns a telephone company, and his mother writes books about India for American ladies." Why would he lie to her? Sleeping in buses and servants' hotels was the least impressive thing she could imagine. She didn't understand this American behavior. Impressive people looked and acted prosperous and confident, or else what's the use? "Maybe he's looking for a wife?"

"I'd be
very
surprised. But we talked about you. He said you have a quality."

"And what did you say to that?"

"I told him there was a struggle going on for your soul. He said he took a picture of that." She started to smile, but he was serious. "If you get married here, you'll be lost to me."

"If I get married, you won't lose money sending me to Bangalore," she said.

"It's never about money. You'd be surprised how many women in Gauripur were girls I once taught. Girls with good grades and good minds, with curiosity about life outside of this town. Ambitious girls, not just daydreamers. And we talked then just as you and I are talking now, and that was before India took off, before there were real opportunities in this country and you didn't have to fill your head with nonsense dreams of England or America. And I see those women in Gauripur today, in the market with their husbands and children, and when we cross paths, they bow their head, afraid I'll call them by name. They never left; they never got a proper education. These are girls who wanted to be doctors and teachers, not flight attendants. Their fathers pulled them out of school as soon as they got their high school certificates and had them married off within the month." Peter changed to a mocking, local Hindi: "What if I end up with an unmarriageable daughter, what if she becomes too smart for any local boy? What if some eligible boy will say 'Don't you think I can support her? You think I am sending my wife off to work?'" And then in English: "The money isn't my investment
in
you. My investment
is
you, Anjali Bose."

After a pause, he added, "I don't even blame the fathers or the mothers or the girls or their husbands. We talked about all of this in class. Companies fail when they keep making the same product in the same way, even when the customer base is changing. Well, the base—that's India today—is changing and the old ways are dead ways. This marriage portrait is a wasted effort. Hoping there's someone out there who'll answer your dreams in an ad, that's death. I don't want to lecture you because I don't think you, above all, need it. Don't prove me wrong."

But he
was
lecturing her. He wasn't
talking
to her as he did to students in the classroom. He was telling her in the plainest terms that both the bride-to-be-Anjali of the studio portrait and the gutsy-rebel-Angie who had ridden on the back seat of his scooter were frauds. He had become a dangerous mentor, sowing longings and at the same time planting self-doubt.

"Carpe diem," he said, almost to himself.

"Carpey what?" What did carp have to do with her situation?

"I can't make you take the big step. All I can do is cushion the footfall." He took a couple of deep, wheezy breaths, and asked Ali to please bring him a glass of water. Ali delivered the water on a tarnished silver tray, and with it, a small pill. Peter Champion gulped them both down before tearing two sheets off a notebook he carried in his kurta pocket.

Malaria pill? Aspirin because she'd given him a major headache? Hypertension? Cholesterol? Was he dying? Feeling a new urgency, she watched him scribble a name and address on each of the two sheets.

"Minnie Bagehot will put you up in Bangalore if I ask her to." He handed both sheets to her. "And Usha Desai can help you work on your job skills. I'm cashing in these chips because I want to be proved right. About you."

So, if she married, she'd be lost to Peter. If she didn't marry, she'd be dead to her father. How very odd it was, taking tea in her teacher's room, as she had on so many occasions over the years, and now watching Peter and Ali from the corner of her eye, the way Rabi's picture had captured them: Peter up close, Ali in the background, then Peter walking over and placing his hand on Ali's bare shoulder and whispering something, which caused Ali to smile.
He's treating me like an adult,
she thought.
He's forcing adulthood on me. This is what the adult world is like; this is how adults interact. I'm seeing it, but I shouldn't react to it in any way. It seems odd, but also familiar. Was that a little kiss on his ear? I've passed through an invisible wall and I can't go back. Maybe I'm a ghost.

And for the first time, she was able to articulate it, at least to herself:
Maybe I'm not here. Maybe I'm not seeing any of this. Maybe "Anjali" is seeing it. "Angie" is somewhere else.
Splitting herself in two was a comfort.

***

ANGIE WAS CRUSHED
that Peter hated the picture, but Anjali was drifting above it with a smile, trying to show her the way. As she walked the familiar path home, LBS Road past Vasco da Gama High School and College and Pinky Mahal to MG Road, along the fence of Jawaharlal Nehru Park, she noticed a light on in the Vasco Common Room.

The college was officially not in session. It was mid-June. School was closed until the monsoon broke and cooled things off, ending the days of crippling heat and the nightly reign of mosquitoes. But the peak hour had passed. It was the quiet time when windows were shut and everyone tried to sleep before bathing—if there was water—and then went out to shop for the evening meal. Once the rains started, the fruits and vegetables would begin to rot, and the open markets would close.

In the Common Room someone had pulled the shades: premature darkness in the late afternoon of an Indian summer day. Without turning on a light, Anjali made her way to the computer room and stood at the door. From deep inside she heard the clacking of computer keys. As her eyes adjusted, she could make out a single illuminated monitor and a shape in front of it, the bulky form and reflective glasses of that harmless neighborhood boy, the computer genius Nirmal Gupta.

Her mother would have called it auspicious. She had her photo. She was alone with Nirmal. And Peter Champion had just crushed Angie's confidence. But Anjali had plans.

Sure-Bet-IIT Gupta had the keys to the Common Room; he ran the computer center, all six units. He was one of the few boys in the college she could talk to, largely because she didn't consider him an eligible bridegroom candidate. And it was easy to guess what might have brought a lonely, computer-savvy boy to the computer room on a dormant campus: the marriage sites, and the hundreds of photos of hopeful girls just like her.

"Don't mind me," she said. "I saw a light."

But he did mind. He'd practically tipped over the computer, trying to hide the pictures of eligible girls. She'd wanted to say, "That's all right. Bengaliweddings.com?" But she asked, "See anyone interesting?"

"The screen..." He started babbling; the screen was already blank. He tried to excuse himself. Someone else, some other Bengali, must have been using it.

"I didn't know you were looking for someone," she said. "I thought you were going off to an IIT."

He looked up at her with big moist eyes, like a beaten dog.

"Please, big sister, don't tell anyone. I did not receive admittance," he said.

What else could a bright boy in science do but go to a technical college? "It's all crooked," she said, repeating what she'd heard from her father and others. But she had a favor to ask, and if a bit of sympathy helped, what did it cost her? And so she asked, "Where will you be next year?"—a bold question, but he'd been straightforward himself.

"I have no prospects," he said.

"You'll find something, I'm sure. You're the best science student. Maybe not IIT, but there are so many others." Actually, she couldn't name any.

He thanked her. She smiled and asked, "Would you do me a favor?"

"Of course," he answered, a mite too quickly. "Anything you ask."

That's when she suspected he had special feelings for her, not that she could have predicted how far he would take it. It might have been love, but at the time it was merely a chit she could cash in. "If I gave you a new photo, could you take the old one off and put this one on the Internet?"

"What kind of photo?"

She showed him Shaky's portrait, the plump and dimpled Anjali at an alpine resort. "Can you put it on Bengaliweddings.com?"

All he said was "If you want me to." He took the picture, remarking only that "The portrait is very beautiful, is it of you?" And when she admitted that it was, just maybe a little deceptive, he said, "No, no. No deception. It does you justice," and within a day it was plastered across five continents.

As often happens to those who dither, waiting for that moment when all doubt and indecision would be suddenly resolved, that moment arrived in an unexpected way. The English-language ads had marginally improved the candidate pool; so had the original posting on the Internet. Fifty candidates had been rejected.

More to the point, Anjali had begun to educate herself in the secret ways of the heart. After the new Internet posting, she began receiving flattering inquiries from desirable countries on every continent. There were intriguing dimensions beyond her experience, and the movies she'd watched, and they were all open to her. There were men like Peter, without his complications. There were boys like Rabi and his hijras and prostitutes and gay bars. If she could hold out for a few more months, and if she could learn to value herself above what her untraditional looks and humble economic standing warranted, she might win the marriage lottery. In those months, while conforming to the predictable behavior of a bridal candidate and submitting to all the indignities of daughterhood, she clung to an indefensible belief in her own exceptionality.

THE FINAL EVENT
followed the posting of her picture. Two weeks after Nirmal Gupta had put her formal portrait on the web, he'd gone to his bedroom with her picture and drunk a canister of bug spray. He began writing a long declaration of his lifelong devotion to a goddess he'd been too shy to approach, but he'd started the letter after drinking the spray and wasn't able to finish it.