Miss New India (37 page)

She'd never felt so comfortable with a boy.
Why can't we get what we most want in the world?
When he came back, she asked, "When we met in Gauripur, did you think I didn't really want Bangalore?"

"Did I sound skeptical? I didn't mean to. You were looking for a way out. Peter convinced you Bangalore was that."
Click! Click! Click!
A chameleon scuttled over the velvety grass.

"I've gotten over wanting life enhancement. A job that pays for basic needs, that's my goal now."

"Don't sell yourself short." He aimed his lens at a stray kitten circling the birdfeeder. "I happen to be one of a large chorus who think Anjali Bose is a child of destiny." He dodged the dripping straw she tossed at him. "Seriously."

"Don't you dare stress me out with the destiny stuff!"

"Sorry. No, I'm not really sorry. Anyway, changing subjects, have you found anybody yet? You can tell me."

"I wouldn't want to make you jealous."

"I'm jealous of anyone in love. Even more jealous of anyone loved back." He seemed about to confide in her.

"If you think there's something going on between..."

But Rabi wasn't listening. "Actually I met a guy in Mumbai—Christ, 'A Guy from Mumbai' sounds like a Noel Coward song." He did a fancy two-step. Then glided into a wicker chaise longue near her canvas chair.

"Now
I
am jealous, Rabi."

"Anyway, I met this Rutgers senior. He was visiting his grandparents. The last thing he expected was finding another Indo-American who ... what was cool was that we met in the gallery exhibiting my photos."

Gauripur images flooded her, not the dreary small town of her memories, but the Gauripur she had glimpsed through Rabi's restless lens.

"When you create things, like my mother with her books or a lowly photographer like me, or even origami like Auro-Uncle, you still dream of meeting someone who's fallen in love with you for something you've written or painted, something you've created. Well, he fell in love with my photos of Ali and Peter and you, Mona Lisa. That's how I knew we could be ... serious. Terrible word,
serious,
why can't we say what we mean? Serious is the last thing in the world ... never mind. Then he had to go back to Rutgers. Dum-diddle-dee, dum-diddle-day, they always go back to school, don't they? That's more Cole Porter than Coward, right?"

Anjali didn't know those names, but she knew he needed her to agree. "Right," she whispered. No matter how brief their conversation, he would always leave her feeling inadequate; not humiliatingly inadequate, but eager for gaps to be filled in.

"This time I'm a nature photographer, Angie," he announced. New mood, new tone of voice, new intensity, snappier delivery. "I'm going down to a nature preserve a week from Saturday. On the Kaveri again, near Mysore. Big crocs, little crocs. Bats, you love bats, right? The funky kind called flying foxes. Bugs by the ton. I'm staying overnight, maybe a couple of nights." He had reserved a cabin. "Want to give Nature a try? You could be my assistant. Hey, if there's someone you want to bring along, you'd have me as chaperone."

"You mean, just call up someone I'd want to ... I couldn't do that, Rabi."

"Send a message by carrier pigeon?"

"Well, since it's all fantasy talk, there
is
a Bengali guy I wouldn't mind inviting." She still nurtured a crush on the Bengali Svengali. He hadn't called her since that one magical meeting in the rooftop cafeteria of Tookie D'Mello's office building. Without confessing to the crush, she gushed about her Photoshopped picture on the cover of the latest issue of his directory.

"Oh, I can't tell you how much I adore Photoshop!" Rabi snickered. "It's revolutionized my art!" Then, conspiratorially, "We could always arrange his drowning. The crocs know their business."

She leaned down and punched his shoulder lightly. There, in the lush heart of Parvati's garden, they shared their stories. Did Shaky Sengupta's bridal photo work out? Yes, she admitted, I think it did. But in a roundabout way.

A "high tea" for Anjali's friends was Parvati's idea. "You should spend more time with people your age," she said. Anjali suspected that Rabi had put the party idea into his aunt's head so that he could reunite Anjali and the Bengali Svengali under respectable chaperonage. Parvati asked Anjali to draw up a guest list. Anjali couldn't come up with any youngish friend's name other than Tookie D'Mello, who had been "dumped" by Minnie before Rajoo had sacked Bagehot House. Tookie wasn't the most appropriate ex—Bagehot Girl to introduce to the Banerjis; still, Anjali tracked her down at her work site. Tookie snapped up the invitation to Dollar Colony. "That 'Gay India' photographer guy will be there? What a hoot! He's a YouTube sensation! Girlfriend, you landed on your feet, all right. Of course, we knew you would. All I can say is that the Bagehot bitch had it coming!" Tookie didn't explain who she meant by "we." It didn't include Reynaldo, since
that
relationship was in deep freeze for the moment. "Can I bring a friend or two?" Anjali shuddered; she didn't want Rajoo inside the Banerjis' home, where she was regaining her balance. But Tookie didn't mention Rajoo by name, not once. She went on and on instead about the two party-beast girlfriends she had started to hang out with.

Parvati helped plump up the list by inviting two Dollar Colony families, and Rabi added two sets of recent acquaintances: the "faux-scruffy" and the "jock dilettante." Parvati translated the terms for Anjali as Rabi's artsy gallery friends and sport-fishing friends. She added Usha Desai's name, with the penciled note "depends on Mrs. Desai's health that
P.M.
" Auro insisted on including Girish Gujral. "Forget the tea part of 'high tea,'" he announced. "Girish and I will hole up with our drinks in my office and talk politics."

"No holing up," Parvati snapped. "We have opinions too."

THE GUESTS DEVOURED
platter after platter of hot, cold, tart, sweet-sour, spicy finger foods prepared all day by the kitchen sisters, and they sipped Assam or Darjeeling tea out of bone china cups, but the "high tea" didn't accomplish Parvati's goal of widening Anjali's network of friends.

The idea was that everyone bring their eligible sons and their eligible daughters. Between them, Anjali should bond with one or two.

The two Dollar Colony families arrived in a convoy of a Combi and two Marutis. The Ghoshes were a family of five: Kolkata-born parents in their midfifties, two of three Calgary-born daughters in their twenties, the third in her last year of high school. Mrs. Khanna, the recent widow of a World Bank executive, brought her two sons on break from Georgetown, and the sons' three American friends. Anjali wasn't sure how much of her Bagehot House drama Parvati had disclosed to the Drs. Ghosh and Mrs. Khanna. The Drs. Ghosh asked the usual polite questions about where she had grown up, what company her late father had worked for, where her married sister had settled. Anjali, for once, told the absolute truth, and that ended the potential Ghosh connection. The older Ghosh daughters, who had master of social work degrees from the University of Calgary and who had set up a nonprofit organization that rescued at-risk urban children, didn't hide their contempt for migrants who invaded Bangalore with the dead-end goal of answering phones all night at call centers.

Mrs. Khanna corralled Parvati and Dr. (Mrs.) Ghosh—all three were collectors of contemporary Indian art—to lament how, after Mr. Khanna's death, she dared not squander any savings on the painters she admired. Anjali hovered near them so she wouldn't look and feel a party-pariah. They strolled from painting to painting, praising Parvati's eye and investment smarts. Anjali had lived with the paintings all these weeks but had never looked at them closely, never peered at the artists' signatures. Even now the names meant nothing to her. Anjolie Ela Menon. Arpita Singh. Rini Dhumal. In her old Gauripur bedroom there had been a browning studio portrait of her paternal grandfather, with a dusty sandalwood garland around it. Anjolie? That was a spelling she intended to try out.

"You're such a feminist, Parvati," Dr. (Mrs.) Ghosh pronounced. "No male artists at all?"

"Not only a feminist. Mrs. Banerji is a Bengali chauvinist!" Mrs. Khanna countered.

So Menon, Singh, Dhumal were Bengali women who had married non-Bengalis! Anjolie Gujral?
She sidled toward the front door, waiting for Mr. GG to show up. The dog walker was on front-door duty for the night, which meant he stood on the shallow porch step, helped guests heave themselves out of their cars, led them past the foot-high brass statue of Ganesh seated on a fluffy, fragrant bed of petals, held open the heavy, ornately carved wooden front door, and showed them into the marble vestibule. Since the two house dogs were hostile to visitors—"Poor, dear things," Parvati had said—she shut them in the absent Dinesh's suite for the night.

The Khanna sons and their American houseguests had drifted upstairs to Rabi's suite, where the "scruffies" and the "jocks" were listening to Rabi's cache of African and Brazilian music. Anjali could hear their excited voices. "Dude, check this out!" "Hey, my older brother knows the guys at Wesleyan who started the Modiba label!" "
Legends of the Preacher?
No shit!" It wasn't her kind of music. Actually, except for her excruciating exercises on the old harmonium, she had no favorite music.
Can't sing, can't dance, can't cook, that's me.
She stayed put in the vestibule, just inside the doorway, and was almost knocked down when Tookie and her two friends, all three motorcycle-helmeted, shoved the door open with their shoulders before the dog walker could do his job.

"Angie darling!" Tookie shouted at Anjali, as she unfastened the chin strap, "you won't believe what we've just been through!" She pulled off her helmet and lobbed it to the dog walker. Anjali noticed Tookie's changed hair—cropped at the back, skinny bangs dyed indigo and pink—before she took note of the swelling bruise on one side of her face.

"Eesh! I knew those machines were dangerous! Tookie, you could have died!" A word Anjali had recently learned from Auro suddenly floated off her tongue. "Poor infrastructure, that's the problem. We're stuck with Bagehot-era roads and Tookie-era traffic."

Tookie shrugged her leather jacket off her shoulders. The dog walker was just behind her to catch it. "Girlfriend, this kitty still has six lives left." She introduced her two companions as "gal pals" Dalia and Rosie; no last names. They too burdened the dog walker with their jackets. Both were model-tall, their legs encased in white stretch jeans, their bra lines visible under halter tops, bruises tattooing the bared flesh of shoulders and forearms. The dog walker was too entranced to go back to front-door duty.

"What happened to you!" Mrs. Khanna cried. She and Dr. (Mrs.) Ghosh had just finished their tour of Parvati's art collection and were crossing the hallway on their way to the origami display in Auro's office.

Parvati took charge at once. She shouted to the kitchen sisters to bring a bowl of ice cubes to the powder room. "Any broken bones, do you think? Concussion? Our driver is here, he can get you to the hospital for x-rays. Too many bikes, too many accidents. No, don't sit down. Oh, dear, are you feeling drowsy?" She ordered the dog walker to alert the chauffeur.

"Can you get her to chill?" Tookie mouthed the words to Anjali.

"Ice pack," Dr. (Mrs.) Ghosh said. "Anjali, take them to the bathroom and apply an ice pack to the swellings straightaway."

Once inside the bathroom Tookie asked, "How can you stand to be around these crisis freaks?"

"Mrs. Banerji means well."

"I heard good things about her painting collection. Where is it?"

Boys-and-Booze Tookie, an art lover? "I'll take you," she said, and tried to remember the names of the lady painters. There was an Anjolie. Dalia dumped the bowlful of ice cubes into the sink. She traced the edges of the largest bruise on her forearm with a loving fingertip. "Medal of war. Sidewalks have become war zones."

"Fucking fundamentalists! We're talking Bangalore, IT capital for God's sake, not the fucking Swat Valley!"

Rosie let loose a war cry. "Bring it on, assholes!"

"You didn't crash? You got beat up?"

"Yeah. Boys with chains and cricket bats, looking for girls coming out of bars. Where do you stand? You can't be a civilian anymore."

Dalia unlocked the door and poked her head out. "All clear! What's that thumpy music? What's upstairs? Action central?" She didn't wait for Anjali's answer.

Rosie and Tookie followed Dalia up the stairs to Rabi's suite. Anjali stood behind them as they peered into the crowded room. Rabi's party was in full swing. Large emptied bottles of Indian beer. Low lights and loud beat. Just-met acquaintances forging cosmic connections. Anjali felt like an alien in Rabi's universe.

Tookie didn't hide her disappointment. "Dude, so not-our-scene," she grumbled as she led her posse back down the stairs. "Give us a ring when you need a pub run on Residency. Ciao!"

Tookie had judged Anjali unfit to be one of Tookie's "gal pals." It brought a closure of sorts. Minnie was dead, the Bagehot Girls disbanded, Husseina an international miscreant, Bagehot House wrecked, and the jungle cleared for Jacaranda Estates, advertised by the development company as "a self-sufficient, ultra-luxurious lifestyle complex for the ultra-affluent." The first phase of her Big Bangalore Adventure was over. What next, and where?
The forces of evil had amassed.

Tookie's apocalyptic vision and Rosie's war slogan didn't inspire the same urgency that Peter's exhortations to get out of Gauripur had. Anjali lingered on the threshold of Rabi's suite, reluctant to crash, unwilling to leave. The older Khanna son, lean, and looking leaner in a black muscle shirt and black jeans, waved at her with his beer bottle. She smiled back. He was on the fringes of a knot of Scandinavians whom Rabi had fished with in Bheemswari. The Khanna brothers, their American college friends, and the Scandinavians seemed so
in the moment.
The past held her in a headlock. She could step over the threshold; she could fake having a blast; why not? Both the Bengali Svengali and Mr. GG had stood her up; so what?