Miss New India (24 page)

"Well, shall we get started?"

Usha flipped shut the lid of her cell phone. "Hold on a sec. I have to make sure Mother takes her new pills. She's hidden them again, but I think I know where." She darted back into the hallway.

Anjali was grateful for the delay. The thought of being interviewed by two women powerful enough to open doors flustered her. She was confident that she could charm or tease favors from men in positions to help her once she figured out their vanities and weaknesses, but she had honed no strategy for getting what she needed from women.

Parvati swiveled in her chair, pointed to the sofa and chair, and asked Anjali to please sit down. "Make yourself at home. Usha won't be long. She knows all her mother's hiding places." Then she went back to reading dossiers and making notes. Anjali sank into the low-footed Sankhera chair, which turned out to be an uncomfortable choice for a long-legged candidate with frazzled nerves. Newspapers in English, Hindi, and Gujarati lay in a basket on the floor within easy reach, and glossy business weeklies were displayed on the matching Sankhera coffee table. What would more impress Parvati: pretend to be engrossed in a periodical or pretend to be lost in rich inner resources?

"Usha's a saint," Parvati sighed. She wheeled her desk chair closer to Anjali. "When Urmila-behn—that's her mother—took ill, Usha re-signed her job. She'd headed HR—that's the human resources office—at a huge textile company, so building up CCI
and
being a dutiful daughter was a breeze for her. Her sister and brother had no time for their mother. The brother said flat out that he wasn't about to relocate from Australia. The sister flew in from Canada for two weeks, then flew right back, saying that her husband and children needed her more than her mother did."

Dutiful daughter. Anjali squirmed in shame. How was she to respond when she herself had chosen personal fulfillment over her parents' welfare? "Why is it that Indian women become so selfish when they leave India?" Parvati continued. Anjali's face felt hot. She inferred that her forehead was probably visibly perspiring when Parvati called out to the maid to bring a glass of chilled water for the guest.

"Mr. Champion speaks very highly of her too," Anjali managed to say, but
very
came out as "wery."

"Of course we have to face the same kind of ethical crisis within India. My parents spent their last years in Rishikesh while I was in Bombay with my husband and sons. We have to go where the jobs are."

The maid carried in three glasses of water on a tray and a plate of cookies. She was wearing a pretty purple salwar-kameez with a beadfringed dupatta. In Bangalore, you couldn't tell who was a student and who a servant.

"In my own case, I left home for the possibility of securing employment that I could be good at," Anjali mumbled in self-defense.
At which
I can be good? Avoid complicated constructions. Keep your mouth shut until the formal interview starts.

PARVATI WAS STILL
going through the pile of dossiers and Anjali still unfolding her legs, crossing them alternatively at the knees and at the ankles, when Usha reappeared. "Well, at least you two have had a chance to get acquainted. Would you like a cup of tea, Anjali? Coffee is doable too. Kamini doesn't have to get to her computer classes for another couple of hours."

In Bangalore, even servants took computer lessons! In Bangalore, even servants were in competition! Soon Bangaloreans would be importing their domestic staff from Gauripur! Anjali declined the offer of tea or coffee.

"Maybe we could start by having you tell us a bit about your background," Usha suggested.

Don't get rattled. Live up to the image you cut in Husseina's and Tookies clothes. Fake coolness under pressure.
"P'hine, madam!"
She saw right away how her saying "P'hine" had jolted both interviewers.
"My name is Angie Bose." She rattled off her rehearsed self-introduction. "We're Bengalis, but my family settled in Bihar long ago. My Hindi is better than my Bangla, and my English is better than both—"

Parvati interrupted her. "So we should call you Angie?" She checked off something on one of the forms in front of her. "Angie, not Anjali. Fine. The last name's still Bose?"

"Did you catch the difference, Angie?" Usha asked. "
Fine,
not
p'hine.
Efff.
Flower, frost, forest, fever, full, fool, fluff, fish, fat, fell, fast, five, fair, far, farther, further
...for want of one right consonant sound, et cetera?"

She had failed the interview even before it had begun! For want of the correct
fff
sound, her future might be lost. Peter's gift of money wouldn't last forever.

"Excuse my nervousness.
Fine.
"

Parvati consulted the form again. "Angie, what are your career goals?"

"You are asking for my job goals, madam?" She had prepared for this question. "My ambition is to be a call-center agent. It is my vocation."

"Call-center agent!" Usha snapped. "Please. Customer-support specialist. U.S.companies are very uncomfortable with any term that smacks of outsourcing."

Parvati intervened in a soothing voice. "We're interested in you as a person. We want to know what makes you tick, what makes you leave family and hometown, what sports you play or follow, that sort of thing."

"You want I should recite my job qualifications? Highest marks in first-year B. Comm. course in statistics, certificate in advanced conversational English, diploma in American English..." She let her voice trail off because Usha was playing impatiently with a tiny bronze trophy in the shape of a woman golfer on the neat desk.
Move on to sports and hobbies.
"Forward on the da Gama women's field hockey team..." Should she brag about having been a mean ball flicker? Ma and Baba had been ashamed of her unwomanly stick-wielding skill. "Silver cup in inter-missionary-schools girls' Ping-Pong tournament..."

Usha Desai held up her hand, signaling Anjali to stop.

You want I should? Ping-Pong? You loser!
But Parvati was trying to be kind. "Would you describe yourself as a people person? Or are you a loner who likes to be by herself and read a book?"

Okay, she had an ally in Rabi Chatterjee's aunt. Good cop, bad cop?

Parvati's roller-ball pen hovered over boxes to be checked off on the form. "Do you consider yourself a logical thinker or a go-with-the-flow, roll-with-the-punches type?"

She hadn't read a single novel since graduating from high school. "People person," she admitted. Not that she wasn't a reader, but what she pored over were fanzines about Bollywood hunks. She was a movie groupie, not a bookworm.
Ask me about Shah Rukh Khan or Akshay Kumar, go on
, she silently challenged the two middle-aged women.

"How about logic versus intuition?" Usha asked.

"I'm a very logical person." Anjali craned her neck to read the upside-down words listed on Parvati's form:
perfectionist; pliant; cautious; argumentative; compromiser; team worker; leader; secretive; loyal; competitive; manipulative; tough negotiator; diplomatic; impulsive; stubborn; plodder; methodical; serious; solemn; critical; fun loving; fun to be with.

She had wants, she had longings and terrifying yearnings, oh, she had so, so many passions and obsessions, but none was named on Parvati Banerji's official interview form!
You're failing!
Suddenly a dam gave way inside her. "Do you want an honest answer? You want to know why I left Gauripur?"

"I'm told it's the best policy," Usha said evenly.

Instead of the pithy, sanitized answers she had prepared for likely questions, she heard herself offering these composed and cosmopolitan career women crazy fragments of Gauripur life, which made up the story of her own half-formed life. She unburdened on them Sonali's bitter compromises, Nirmal's fatal humiliations, Peter's hazardous generosity to her and his pained love for a young man
(oh, my God, I've exposed him),
her father's fatal despair, the criminal selected for her to marry: the injustice, the indignity, the powerlessness. Her happiest memory was walking in Gauripur with Rabi.

"What can you know of people like Sonali and me and Nirmal? I had to get out before I died like Nirmal. You ask me what motivated me to come to Bangalore. I didn't have a life in Gauripur, like Peter has. I had to go. I am here to dictate the terms of my happiness."

"Well, I'm glad Peter is dictating his," Usha remarked. She handed Anjali a tissue from a packet in the pocket of her kameez.

It was only then that Anjali felt tears welling. She panicked. "I didn't mean to expose him." There was no taking back the confidences she had unleashed. Then, defensively, she explained, "I'm not the only one who knows. Rabi took some pictures. He described Ali as the most beautiful woman in Gauripur."

"We don't find anything wrong with it." Parvati put Anjali's dossier back in the pile. "Are you feeling better after that emotional detour?"

"My advice, whether you want it or not, is this: don't launch into a self-indulgent screed during an interview." Usha extracted a sheet from a loose-leaf binder.

Screed:
the day's new word. "I'm terribly sorry," Anjali said. "I don't know why all that gushed out of me. It just happened. I don't mean to make excuses for doing badly."

Usha handed the sheet to her. It was a photocopy of the poem "The Raven." "Do you know what the title refers to, Angie?"

What a relief! "A ray-venn?" she asked. "A large black bird with a big white beak? Like a kite, or a crow?" She was back in Peter's apartment, the pencil in Peter's hand punctuating each word.
Again, again, no, again.
Without being asked, she began to read the sheet. The "weak and weary," the "quoth the raven," the "never-more" all presented themselves fully formed, natural, without a pause.

"Peter prepared you very well."

Did that mean she was too advanced for the CCI program? "I still need training, madam."

"Well, thank you for coming in this afternoon." Parvati signaled that the interview was at an end.

"We'll call you. And please convey our good wishes to Mrs. Bagehot."

On cue Kamini came out of the kitchen to show Anjali out. In the hallway, Anjali thought she overheard a soft laugh and something like the words "Well, definitely not your cookie-cutter..."

On the auto-rickshaw ride back from Indira Nagar to Kew Gardens, Anjali went over and over the questions the CCI partners had put to her, how stupidly she had answered them, and how she
should
have responded. Husseina's prepping hadn't seen her through the actual interview. She was anxious to describe her experience to Tookie and get her feedback before Tookie left for her pre-work-shift bar-hopping ritual.

When she got back to Bagehot House, she changed into her own clothes before knocking on the barely open door to Tookie's room. All three of her fellow boarders were there, giggling and whooping about a column in
Voice of the South,
which was spread out on Tookie's bed. Sunita had found the paper on the top of the credenza in the breakfast alcove.

"Hey, girlfriend!" Tookie high-fived her. "Take an eyeful of this! That Dynamo dude's got it right! Totally nailed us!"

Even Sunita managed an air-high-five and made room for Anjali on the bed so she could read Dynamo's column.

THE NEW MISS INDIA
By Dynamo

Dynamo this week is smitten. Congratulations to the New Miss India, Aziza Habib, selected last week in Goa by a panel of Bollywood heavyweights and at least one befuddled Hollywood B-lister, as the next Aishwarya Rai, self-evidently the most beautiful woman in the world. (By national consensus, any Miss India automatically doubles as the world Number One). Once again, the time-tested standard of Indian beauty has been upheld: simpering, doe-eyed, classically trained dancers in traditional attire (until they strip down to Western evening gowns and spike heels) in front of dozens of slobbering producers with checkbooks and film scripts at the ready.

My question: Which of these lovely ladies is more in touch with the soul of modern India?

Every week, Bang-a-lot (or maybe I should call it Bang-amour) receives (not "welcomes") several thousand young women from every part of this great country. They arrive by plane, by train, even by intercity bus. They come from the great cities and the mofussil towns. From Lucknow and Varodara; from Gauripur and Dhanbad. They represent all religions, all languages. They come bearing school-leaving certificates, letters of reference from old teachers, but most important, bearing hope and energy that is infectious. They don't simper, they don't dance (don't ask them!), and they don't wear saris or evening gowns. They stride in comfortable salwars or in blue jeans, and Bang-amour had better get used to it and be grateful for them. Our torpid institutions—like Bollywood standards of compliance—will try to beat them down, but that train has already left the station.

While the moguls of Mumbai thrust their retro beauties in our faces, these call-center hopefuls manage to attract a smaller but more discriminating cadre of admirers. Bollywood has no use for India's women, apart from ornamentation. Far from Bollywood being India's international calling card, it cynically holds its "heroines" and their vast male audiences in a stage of infantilism that should cause us great international shame.

Anjali read it through twice before Husseina grabbed the paper from her. Mr. GG had sneaked Gauripur into his column because he had fallen head over heels for her. Husseina said, "This guy must be dating a customer-service agent."

"You mean he's having sex with one?" Tookie grinned.

Anjali wasn't ready to let them in on Dynamo's identity—it was her special secret. She snatched the paper back from Husseina and read the column out loud, enunciating each syllable as self-consciously as she used to in dialogue drills in Peter Champion's advanced conversational skills class. How could her friends miss the obvious fact that Dynamo, aka Mr. GG, had penned a love letter to her, and to her alone? "He says he is smitten," she protested. "Smitten, that's how he describes what he is feeling.
Smitten
's a chivalrous word!"