Miss New India (11 page)

Even from the side of the bus, at seven in the morning, she could see building cranes swivel, scoop up giant vats of concrete and tons of bricks, and reach into the dawn-bright heavens. Mechanical cranes controlled by a single man, not the long lines of women and children tipping their small bowls of concrete. The roads around the depot were already clogged with traffic. This was energy, something palpable that she'd never experienced, and it left her frightened and indecisive. She'd never witnessed "progress" or placed herself in its path.

Angie was finally standing and stretching but she felt unrefreshed; the dull ache of an early morning sun after a cold, wakeful night, the throbbing diesel clouds off a metallic ocean of dented bus roofs, the hundreds of vendors and laborers shouldering their bags and boxes, all with a purpose and a destination, drained her confidence. Unlike Gauripur, Bangalore had built its fancy bus depot far from the city center. This was the first morning of her new life, but it felt like death. Barely seven in the morning, and even villagers were loading their burlap sacks of fruits and vegetables and heading up the roads feeding into the city. All she had was an address on a torn piece of paper: Bagehot House, Kew Gardens.

She'd assumed South India (when she'd considered it at all) to be at least as backward as Gauripur. But Gauripur, and Bihar state in general, were exceptions to the industrious, prosperous north. South Indians were smart in math but too frail and pious to show much initiative. She remembered her Indian literature class, taught by a Keralan priest, in which she'd tried to read a novel by a southern writer named Narayan, set in a village—Malgudi, the writer called it—probably not too far from Bangalore. Father (Dr.) Thomas pronounced its characters the authentic voice of South India, as comforting to him (not even a Hindu) as sweetened rice, as healthy as fruit and yogurt, and as stimulating as thick, rich, steaming traditional coffee. The book offered nothing to her except the revelation that traditional Hinduism, one of the pillars of her parents' lives, was totally irrelevant to the life she wanted to live.

So, who was responsible for something as roaringly capitalistic as Bangalore? Certainly not diminutive vegetarians reciting the Vedas under a banyan tree. While still on the intercity bus, glancing out the window, she'd seen more crosses than she'd ever imagined in India. Christians, then? Certainly not South Indian Christians like Father "Elephant Fart" Thomas. Who supplied the energy, the go-for-broke, rule-bending, forget-about-yesterday, and let's-blow-it-all confidence for this transformation? Foreigners like Peter Champion? Internal migrants, displaced northerners like her? Peter had once talked of accident and propinquity in the rise of capital; if Bombay is oversubscribed, overpriced, where can new capital go? It went farther south. If she ever ran into Rabi Chatterjee again, she'd ask him to take a picture of the Bangalore bus depot and send it back to Father (Dr.) Thomas. Where's your tiny, tranquil Malgudi now? He'd die!

Everyone but Angie Bose was on the move. She sat on her red Samsonite at the curb, dazed, hungry and confused. In her nearly twenty years, until meeting up with Subodh Mitra, she'd never felt overmatched. She'd made a joke of any challenge. But in less than a week she'd moved from the passive duties of childhood, waiting for marriage and adult life to begin, into something not quite like womanhood, without instruction. The immense journey and the enormous implications of her impetuousness remained.
What-have-I-done? What-was-I-thinking?
Nothing in her earlier life could guide her. Nothing was relevant.

Here and there, middle-class youths much like her—although most had alighted from express trains and had not sat cramped and halfstarved all night in a freezing bus, crossing deserts or steaming jungles—presentable young men in business suits and attractive young women with soft hands and letters of introduction and hearts set on making it in Silicon City, wheeled their bags directly to the taxi stands, around the burlap-covered mounds of produce and the jumble of cars and cycles, and through the crack-of-dawn mayhem caused by rural India assaulting the city.

Still sitting on her suitcase by the curb, Angie picked up a tattered English-language Bangalore newspaper and started reading. From the scowls and mutters of porters and passengers, she assumed she was being cursed for being in the way, but since they were speaking in Kannada or Tamil, she chose to ignore them.

She scanned the stories, none of them particularly relevant to her but all of them interesting and frightening, and she settled on an op-ed column by the paper's resident wit, "Dynamo." He declared that it was wrong to think of Bangalore as all "heartless materialism, lacking a proper respect for history." Dynamo claimed there was more passion—even knife play and gangs of hired thugs—behind every deed transfer in Bangalore than in
Chinatown
or
The Godfather;
more twisted connections between families than Faulkner ever dreamed of; more convolutions and memorable characters than in a Dickens novel. If Hindus buried their dead instead of cremating them, there'd be more crushed bones under the latest skyscraper than under the Great Wall of China. In fact, it could be said that history is proving to be Bangalore's most profitable industry. Every true Bangalorean is becoming an Arnold Toynbee. Every day in every municipal office, Bangaloreans are lining up to inform themselves of their ancestral stake in every deed transfer of the past two hundred years and how they might profit from it.

She did not relate to Dynamo's allusions to films or literature, but she was stirred by the evocation of reckless, even violent energy. If so many thousands—so many lakhs—had made the same decision she had, to come to Bangalore and start life over, and if she could regain her self-confidence and retain her stamina, then she had nothing to fear. She had good English and a quick smile. She had Peter Champion's two friends to count on. He had promised to write to them about her. From her curbside Samsonite perch, she could see scooters, auto-rickshaws, and bright new cars clogging every roadway, many of them driven by girls her age or younger.

What she knew was simple but profound. Energy and confidence create links between bright new cars, a rising ring of skyscrapers, and busy people clutching shopping bags with fancy logos. She wanted to be one of the people being waited on in upscale shops. She saw girls her age wearing crash helmets and maneuvering their motorcycles between stalled cars and around bullock carts, and she was determined to be one of them. She had nothing to lose, no good name to tarnish. No one knew her parents, and her parents had no idea where she was.

All of this and more she learned during her first half-hour in Bangalore from a single newspaper left folded on a bench. Kids fresh out of college were the new managers. She noted their names, from every region of India. Boys still in their twenties were building apartment blocks. Girls in their twenties were opening lifestyle shops. Hadn't Peter Champion let drop that she could be earning a monthly salary bigger than her father's, and for what—just for exercising her only talents, conversational English proficiency and a pleasing phone voice?

"Need taxi, big sister? I carry your luggage to taxi, no problem, and make sure meter is working."

Angie clutched her backpack even tighter. Her parents had warned her to be wary of Good Samaritans offering help in public places. In her parents' paranoid vision of the world, Good Samaritans were pickpockets working in teams of two. In Gauripur she had rebelled against this crippling cynicism, but not here in this bus depot. The young touts badgering her had been fellow riders on her bus, country boys, but they'd hit the ground running. They kept circling her, inching closer and closer. Then suddenly they melted away into the crowd of embarking and disembarking passengers.

A gang of older youths now menaced her. "Need hotel, big sister? Clean room. Close by bus and train. Concession rate. Bherry, bherry respectable."

She needed to sit tight and look composed while thinking through her immediate questions: How far is Kew Gardens and Minnie Bagehot's house from the bus depot, and could she afford an auto-rickshaw? She'd never been on her own in a real city. In Gauripur she'd always walked between school and home, and except for emergency trips to Dr. Triple-Chin Gupte's storefront clinic in Pinky Mahal (most recently for an excruciating ingrown toenail and before that for a hilsa fishbone stuck in the soft tissue of her throat), where else had she needed to go?

"Mind over matter" was one of her father's favorite adages. "Where there's a will, there's a way." So long as she didn't put all her eggs in one basket and remembered to look before she leaped, she'd be fine. Better than fine. She was not desperate; okay, she'd felt abandoned when the bus that had brought her to Bangalore pulled away from the curb, and, okay, okay, she'd panicked when the vendors and hostel touts had swarmed around her, but she hadn't felt despair. What she felt now ... was guilt. Why had she had to hurt her parents to realize they cared for her, cared too much? Mind over matter, Baba. Silently she begged his forgiveness.

FINALLY A POLICEMAN
approached and spoke to her in Kannada. The language sounded so alien, the tone so ambiguous, that she wasn't sure whether he was offering help or ordering her to move on. "Kew Gardens?" she asked.

The policeman shrugged. He tapped her suitcase with his lathi.

"Kew Gardens?" she repeated.

Again he shrugged. He looked her up and down and tapped the side of the suitcase. After a pause, he said, "Majestic." Then he made a sweeping gesture with his baton. "Bus stand, Majestic." He pointed his baton at the line of auto-rickshaws a few yards away. Then he lost interest in her and sauntered toward a knot of boys selling toys from trays suspended around their necks.

Angie slid off the suitcase and pulled it to the auto-rickshaw at the head of the stand. "Kew Gardens," she announced, as though it was the only street in town.

The driver turned his head from side to side and helped her load the big red bag on to the narrow seat beside her. He took off, bobbing and weaving on a thoroughfare that would have been generously wide anywhere in India but here was too narrow for the variety of vehicles. Motorcycles darted in and out of traffic lanes, almost brushing her elbow. Hyundais and Skodas were twice the size of anything she'd seen in Gauripur. Mercedes-Benzes, liveried chauffeurs at the wheel, sped past. Huge American cars, many with women drivers, snaked around her auto-rickshaw. To avoid panicking, she concentrated her gaze in the direction of the footpath that had to run alongside the road, but the footpaths—
Sidewalk,
she told herself,
think American
—had been torn up to make way for new sewers. She shut her eyes and kept them shut for a long time. When she opened them again, the road was wider, the trees shadier, the older buildings statelier, and the newer buildings taller and fancier. Towers of blue glass reflected the perfect blue sky. Bangalore had been built by a race of giants.

"How much farther?" she asked the driver in Hindi.

Without turning his head, he answered at length in one of the South Indian languages, extending his arm in an all-encompassing sweep. The only words she understood were "soon-soon" and "MG Road." Another MG Road. Peter Champion once said, "Every American town has its Main, Oak, and Elm, just like India has its Gandhi-Nehru-Shastri." But Bangalore retained British place names too, like Kew Gardens and Cubbon Park.

"Hindi?" she asked. "Don't you understand Hindi?" The auto-rickshaw was moving erratically through fast-moving traffic on a wide artery flanked by office buildings, government offices, and shops.

Finally the rickshaw lurched to a stop by a muddy puddle a couple of feet from the curb. All the buildings on that block were office towers, with street-level showrooms and fancy shops. It was barely eight in the morning and the shops were still shuttered. High-rise office buildings in Bangalore indexed their tenants' names on signboards visible from the street. The tall building immediately in front of the rickshaw boasted corporate logos of companies from twenty different countries, marked by their flags.

"This isn't Kew Gardens," Angie snapped. "I'm looking for a house, a private home. Bagehot House."

"MG Road," said the driver, smiling shyly.

He got out of his vehicle and gave the back tires vicious kicks. It was clear that the rickshaw had died. He held out his hand for the fare. "One hundred rupees," he said, this time in Hindi. She stayed put. He checked the rate card against his meter and asked again for one hundred rupees. It wasn't fair that he was demanding to be paid for dumping her who knew how far from Kew Gardens. A hundred rupees would pay for a month's to-ing and fro-ing in Gauripur. But before she could decide whether to complain or haggle, she got out on the street side, and the driver grabbed her suitcase with both hands and dropped it with a thud into the puddle in the gutter.

She flung a ten-rupee note at him. "Go to hell!" she screamed in English, startling herself for saying something she would never have said in the old days. The driver's actual competence in Hindi, expressed in fouler words than any movie villain's, came pouring out, but he was quick to scoop the ten-rupee note out of the puddle and dry it on his shirt.

Angie rolled her suitcase past three buildings, wondering if Kew Gardens was anywhere within walking distance. It was not quite eight-thirty in the morning; the sidewalks were still relatively empty. No one to ask for the right way to Kew Gardens. No one who looked Englishor even Hindi-speaking. She'd seen only one major road in the center of old Bangalore, and she began to imagine the sheer extent of the city in every direction.

From the sidewalk she could make out an outdoor coffee bar with patio umbrellas on an elevated plaza between two skyscrapers. A gaggle of voices floated down to her, tinkly voices of hyperconfident break-fasters, chattering in American English. Finally, a language with familiar cadences! She climbed the stairs to the plaza and found herself in a crowded coffee shop. Not just any coffee shop, not another Alps Palace with mold blooming on water-stained walls: this was a Barista. Most of the small round tables were occupied by large groups of noisy patrons her age, dressed, like her, in jeans and T-shirts. Many of the girls were smoking, gesturing wildly, and giggling like schoolgirls. Except for vamps in movies, Angie had never seen women smoke in Gauripur. At the outer fringes of the plaza, young men and women were plugging away, doing work on laptops.