Miss New India (8 page)

The Gupta parents set their son's framed photo on an altar surrounded by flowers and brass deities. "He was always going to those cinema halls," his mother cried. "He was in love with a screen goddess."

They didn't recognize the portrait as Anjali's.

"The boy lost perspective," his father said. "These boys today, what to say, what to do?"

Buzley, buzlum.
Anjali wondered,
Did he even tell his parents he'd failed his entrance exams to an IIT?

SHE TOLD HERSELF,
I owe it to poor Nirmal Gupta. I owe it to Baba and Sonali. I'll give them one last chance.
She agreed to meet the next acceptable boy: number seventy-five. He turned out to be Subodh Mitra, the first boy to be brought to the house for inspection. His letter alluded to a distant connection to Angie's mother's sister-in-law in Asansol, a grimy steel-making center on the western edge of Bengal. "Yes, I remember the Mitras," her mother exclaimed. "Very respectable. Very well connected!" He was twenty-four years old, tall enough for a girl like Angie, clean-shaven and handsome enough to charm mothers and turn any girl's head. He held an undistinguished engineering degree from a prestigious school, but, according to his posted résumé, he had also earned a First-Class MBA degree from a business college in Kolkata. He'd worked a year in Bangalore at a call center ("customer-support agent," it read), but now he'd returned from the South, ready to marry and settle down. With family power behind him and connections in government, he would never be unemployed. If everything checked out, he would be a catch.

Even Angie could not manufacture serious objections. She'd exhausted every possible reason, both objective and whimsical, for rejecting a boy. Probably her most heartfelt one, in the case of Mr. Mitra, could not even be voiced in the family: she simply could not imagine carrying on civilized discourse with anyone from Asansol. But in the Bose family—just look at her parents—failure to engage in civilized discourse was not grounds for marital disbarment. She remembered Asansol quite well. When the train passed through it, she'd had to secure the coach windows against the coke ovens' soot and sulfur fumes, but the toxic stench still drifted through. Men would breathe through moistened handkerchiefs; women pulled their saris across their nose. Asansol was a place even Gauripur could look down on. Subodh Mitra's place of origin was his only prominent demerit.

Her father tried to read between the lines of Subodh Mitra's CV. "The boy did engineering to please his father, but his heart wasn't in it. When he got a chance to study business, he shone like the sun!"

Anjali had never heard of his Kolkata business school. Probably hundreds of "business schools" and "colleges" were run out of the back rooms of hot little apartments, all advertising First-Class MBA degrees the equivalent of those from Delhi, LSE, and Wharton. She was tempted to argue but kept her silence.

"This is a golden boy." Her father persisted. "His parents are very reasonable. They want this marriage as much as we do. I have counteroffered more than they asked."

Subodh Mitra, the intended, the all-but-fiancé, arrived from Asansol in a red Suzuki, an eight-hour drive on the clogged, narrow national highway, in the first week of the monsoon rains. A red Suzuki! Mr. Bose still negotiated the streets of Gauripur by scooter, just as he had in college—another humiliation for which Anjali and her mother and sister were somehow to blame.

The young man swept into their apartment, bearing flowers and sweets. The photo hadn't lied: he was tall, athletic, and handsome, with real dimples. He was attentive to both parents and showed the proper deference to Mr. Bose. He barely looked at Anjali, fulfilling the etiquette demands of the marriage market.

"Oh, and this must be your daughter, the lovely Anjali. I was enjoying our conversation so much, I nearly forgot..." Anjali then allowed herself to be pushed into the conversation.

He complimented her on her white cotton dhoni-khali sari, with its yellow and green stripes: "A very nice selection for the occasion." He went on. "I must compliment the feminine sensibility of the Bose household. Unexpectedly simple, not a showy tangail or fussy kanjeevaram."

She was impressed; a man who knows his sari styles is refined indeed.

He must have been through many such interviews,
Angie thought. She had worn her lone kanjeevaram for the day in Shaky's studio. She would wear a red brocaded Benarasi for the actual wedding.

"Anjali is very artistic," said Mr. Bose.

"I can see that. Taste is a rare quality these days. Taste in such matters speaks well of her parents' example."

"Our daughter has graduated from Vasco da Gama, with honors..."

The "boy" had to feign surprise and interest, as if he hadn't known all along, and Anjali had to deny, modestly, any great intelligence or motivation. He declared himself passionately devoted to his parents in Asansol, but his ambition was to move to Kolkata and convince his parents to settle nearby. Even Gauripur was preferable to Asansol, Subodh readily admitted. He spoke in elegant Sanskritized Bangla, the pinnacle of decorum. "Mr. Bose, I am myself looking for a post in international communications, hopefully in Kolkata, but failing that, I look with favor on Lucknow or Allahabad."

Lucknow?
Angie thought, with horror.
Allahabad?
What modern girl would chain herself to a dreary place like that?

Her parents were impressed by his chaste, mellifluous Bangla, with no infiltration of Hindi, and they strained to meet its standard. This offered Angie the perfect out. She stumbled so badly in the language, half deliberately, that the unruffled, indulgent Subodh continually asked her to please repeat her questions. Then the young couple were allowed an afternoon alone to get to know each other, with the unstated assumption that to know Anjali, despite shortcomings, was to fall madly in love with her.

Once out of parental range, as he drove down LBS Road past the major intersection of MG Road and Pinky Mahal, past the cheap hotels, where Rabi must have stayed, and the Vasco campus and the apartment block where Peter and Ali lived—a light was on in their window—he finally burst out in English, "What a strain! But that was a very good show you put on back there. Very convincing. Very funny, actually." It was his first lapse from his flowery Bangla. His English was no match for hers.

She'd expected that he would park the car and they would stroll down MG Road to Alps Palace or maybe to the hotel restaurant. She wondered if she should take his arm. She wouldn't mind being seen in public with him. She would tell him Allahabad—no way! She didn't know what young people in the early stage of prenuptial negotiation were supposed to talk about. The photo sessions and letters, the gold and sari shopping, the piles of rejected suitors, had happened in a vacuum. But he acted confident and she was good at picking up cues, and anyway, it was happening to an imaginary girl named Anjali while the real person, Angie, could sit back and watch. Hobbies? Thank God for her minimal talent with the harmonium. Favorite foods? How should she pose—sophisticated and international, pizza perhaps—or sweetly, coyly desi, just an unassuming Bengali girl raised on fish curry and rice?

Subodh had no intention of walking or of stopping for coffee and ice cream. They were out of Gauripur in just a few minutes, across the main highway to Patna, five hours to the west, into the monsoon-lush countryside. It was a sunny afternoon between bouts of rain. Rabi had been out here too, on a bus; she recognized scenes from his photos: the now-glistening, once-dusty vegetation, the red soil, the woven patterns of the thatched roofs, the returning long-legged wading birds in the now-flooded fields, the bright saris of women walking along the side of the road. India was beautiful. The countryside was peaceful.

And she felt comfortable, secure, in Subodh's company. This is how she'd imagined it, driving through the countryside in a red car with a handsome, confident husband. It could work. She felt certain that her mother and her sister had never known such a moment. Mr. Mitra's English might impress in Asansol, or Bangalore, and especially in her parents' house, but she held the upper hand.

"A very good show? What are you implying, Mr. Mitra?"

"You are a total fraud. No one with the name of Anjali Bose could possibly speak Bangla as poorly as you!"

"And is this customary praise for all your lady friends, Mr. Mitra?"

"I am an honest man. I speak my mind. I take what's mine."

At least he didn't deny having lady friends.

"Honesty is a poor substitute for decent manners, Mr. Mitra. My honesty makes me ask what in the hell is Lucknow all about? What modern girl is going to settle in Lucknow or Allahabad?"

"My uncle in Lucknow is Civil Judge, Junior Division. In Allahabad my oldest uncle is manager of the State Bank of India." A few minutes later, he added, "For your information, I have no intention of going to either place."

"I have no interest in Kolkata," she said.

"Good for you. Kolkata is dead and buried. And you'd have to learn the language."

To which, of course, she smiled broadly. She decided he was not really a bad catch. A different Angie might have looked him over and said "He's honest, he's funny, he's certainly handsome, he's shrewd. I could do worse." In English she could be as saucy and seductive as any Bollywood heroine. She turned on him with that smile and asked, ever so sweetly, "So all that business about settling your parents in Kolkata was what ... a lie?" Not that it mattered. A certain amount of mutual inflation was built into the marriage negotiation. She was not above the deployment of subterfuge on nearly any level.

"You've got a big mouth, you know," he said.

He turned off the highway. A muddy trail led through a partially cleared forest to a construction site. The place was desolate. Workers' huts lay strewn about, but the various buildings seemed abandoned. Concrete had been poured for the shell of an apartment block, abandoned because of the monsoons or a sudden withdrawal of funding. Rusted iron rods protruded from the stark slabs. Anjali remembered the word:
rebars.
He stopped the car in a dark grove. This place too was familiar. Rabi had been here; she'd seen the picture. Black and white, to bring out the shadows, he'd said. He'd made it seem a dark and brooding place, ghostly in its abandonment. She opened the car door, prepared to get out and inspect it more closely, to enter the picture, as it were.

"We won't be bothered here," he said.

She turned and asked, "How do you know?"

"I drove in this morning." He'd reverted to Bengali, a language that robbed her of power and nuance. "I had time to find a place."

"A place for what?"

He snorted. "Our marital negotiations."

"What sort of negotiations would that be, Mr. Mitra?"

"Get back inside and close the door," he ordered. "What do you think? You're going to be my wife."

He put his hands over her breasts on the bright green choli under the dhoni-kali sari. "Everyone knows the kind of girl you are."

"Take me home, immediately," she cried.

He smiled that dimpled smile, then laughed. His fingers pulled the end of her sari down. "I don't want to rip your fancy cotton choli," he said. "Unhook it now." She refused, and he popped open the row of hooks, exposing her bra. It was her push-up bra, forced on her for this occasion by her mother. She pulled the loose end of her sari over it. He slapped her hand down and kept it there, on her lap.

"I am within my rights to see what I'm getting," he said. "Just like your American."

Rabi?
she thought.
I have done nothing with any American—or any Indian, for that matter.
This couldn't be happening, not while she was wearing her tasteful sari. Isn't that how he had described her sari in the living room? In a Bollywood movie a savior would arise, the ghost of Nirmal Gupta perhaps, whom she'd laughed at with his goo-goo eyes every time they passed on the street. Just like the movies: the good, faithful, passed-over boy comes to the rescue of the virtuous but slightly too proud and headstrong girl, who allows herself to be compromised, but not fatally. Maybe this was her punishment for not taking Nirmal Gupta seriously enough, for underestimating that little letter he'd tried to write before the poison took over. She would say a prayer, "
Ram, Ram,
" and Ram in one of his many forms would rescue her. She turned away and stared briefly at the dead slabs of concrete, but Subodh Mitra's hand on her chin pulled her back, hard.

"Look at me when I'm talking!" he commanded. "I asked around. I know about you and your so-called professor."

"You're crazy. Take me home immediately, Mr. Mitra."

"I did my research. We still have ninety minutes, and we've got some negotiating to do first."

"Don't even think—"

She started to speak, but with a flick of his hand, he slapped her. Not hard, but not an idle tap, either. He unhooked the bra and assessed her breasts. She tried again to cover herself, but he pulled her arms down. "Not much there," he said.

She began to cry, but tears wouldn't come. She knew his hands were on her breasts, pulling hard, then weighing them, like small guavas, and she thought of all the girls she'd envied, the mango-breasted, the melon-breasted, and suddenly the stench of decaying mango penetrated the closed windows, and she could see the husks of fallen mangoes all about the abandoned huts and around the car.

A voice that seemed to issue from deep in the forest commanded, "Do me!" and when she came back to her senses, there was Mr. Mitra with his trousers unzipped, and a pale, tapered thing standing up like a candle in his hand, a thing she knew of but had never seen, a long, tan, vaguely reptilian creature with a tiny mouth where its head should be. In her panic she felt a brief wave of compassion for him; this couldn't be the real Mr. Mitra, but the result of some unfortunate invasion; he'd been possessed by a demon—but before she could study it further, Mr. Mitra's spare hand brought her head crashing down upon it, and she could hear him command, "Open that big mouth of yours..." He pulled her head up when she gagged, then down by the hair, pumping her head until she was able to do it herself, and his voice died out into a hum and she had to catch her breath, had to find a way to stop the gagging and the roaring in her ears. When his hand loosened from the back of her head, she was able to roll off and to see what she had done, the mess that was spewing over his pants and her sari, and he grabbed a handful of her sari to wipe himself and the steering wheel, even the window, cursing her all the time for leaving him at just the instant, humiliating him in such a way, ruining his suit, his borrowed car, even her sari. "You bitch, you bitch," he said, along with Bangla words she didn't know.