Miss New India (6 page)

Slow down, please,
she thought.
I can't follow—you speak too fast. Tyranny of the subject? What does that mean? The medium becomes the subject; the medium is light? You walk too fast. You get too excited. You don't know how ignorant I am.
"He did the same thing with haystacks in different seasons. Usually I don't work in color, but I came out here yesterday at seven in the morning, then at noon, then at three, and finally at six, and each time the pink was different and the angle of light brought out different fractures and shadows ... it was beautiful. Bihar is beautiful. Nothing in the world is as it seems—it's all a matter of light and angles. Anyway, even if it is a prison, there are lots of good pictures you can take from inside."

"Not if you're a prisoner," she said. Not if you don't have a camera and no one's ever taught you how to use one. "What were you doing at Shaky's?"

"Is that what he's called? Shaky? That's cruel. But funny." He had a broad smile, a lilting laugh. "I was learning studio technique, putting in the dimples and taking out the frowns. It's very retro, but there's an art to it: setups, lights and reflectors. And those pull-downs are so cool, I wouldn't mind having a few. I gotta be prepared for anything, right? Maybe I'll end up doing weddings and baby portraits—
not.
Anyway, I'll be moving on in three days."

She didn't understand a word, but the news of his leaving cut her like a slap. She was already imagining an inquiry to his parents, his visit to her house. "That's very disappointing"—a bold thing to say. "Why not stay? Why not keep the prisoners happy?"

"The rest of India's calling. There's Mumbai. There's Bangalore. I came to Gauripur because I heard there was an expat here. I met him, and I shot him—sorry, took his picture. I'm doing India's new expats—not the old Brits—and the gays, and the prostitutes and the druggies. And the villages. And the slums."

"My teacher is American."

"Yes, I know. We're everywhere, Anjali."

"Angie," she said.

They took a few more steps, Angie deep in consternation. What kind of boy was this? Why would an American want to be anywhere near the kind of awful people he shoots? Just thinking about them made her skin crawl.

"Let me show you something. Would you like to see a picture of the most beautiful woman in Gauripur?"

"Of course," she said.

What girl could refuse?

He guided her to Alps Palace Coffee and Ice Cream Shop for a cooldown. It was a college hangout, but school was not in session and the AC was broken. When Alps Palace had opened, it seemed like the Gauripur equivalent of all the Mumbai Barista and American Starbucks coffee shops she'd read about, something chic and air-conditioned, with uniformed girls behind the counter. Now she saw it for what it was, another sad failure, run down and a little unsanitary. Rabi asked for a moist rag, swabbed down a table, and dried it with a handkerchief. Then he reached into his backpack and took out a folder marked
Bihar
and set out a row of black-and-white prints, matted under clear plastic. She barely recognized the subjects. Their very familiarity—Nehru Park, the college, Pinky Mahal—was their best disguise. Now she understood about the light. He was truly, as he'd said, a different kind of photographer.

In Rabi's photos, Gauripur was eerie, exotic—even its most familiar monuments. The marble dhoti-folds of the iconic Gandhi statue in Nehru Park were pocked, streaked, and spray-painted. The market crowds looked furtive and haunted. Five kilometers south of town, under a small dark forest of untended mango trees, Rabi had found a
MODREN APARTTMENT COMPLEX
—according to its signboard—that had been abandoned early in construction with less than one floor completed. A rutted construction road and a row of workers' huts disappeared into a cryptlike darkness. She'd never imagined anything remotely like it so close to Gauripur. He'd focused on rows of rusted iron bars—rebars, he called them—like twisted sentinels bristling from the concrete half-wall, disappearing into the shadows. She imagined cold, dank air, even in the heat of a Bihar May, issuing from its depths.

Rebar:
a word to avoid.

It was a relief to anticipate turning to "the most beautiful woman in Gauripur." She expected something cheeky from the boy, cheeky and American. Maybe he'd show her one of the digital photos he'd taken in the studio and come up with some flirtatious opening, like "You want to see beauty? Just look in the mirror." She was prepared to slap him for it, but not too hard. A tapping, gentle rapping, like in the poem. A playful tap, like in the movies.

"Here's the woman I was talking about."

Truly, he had not lied. Angie was staring at film-star beauty, goddess beauty, old-fashioned sari-jewelry-hairstyle beauty, deep, Aishwarya Rai beauty, twice the woman she could ever be. She
was
the most beautiful woman Anjali had ever seen.

"In Gauripur? I don't believe it."

"And you know her," Rabi said.

"That's a lie."

"Right! Only I think she pronounces it...'Ah-lee.'" He seemed pleased with the wordplay. "I guess you could say that men make the best cooks,
and
they make the best-looking women."

"But you said 'she.' "

"Exactly," he said.

Over the weeks, with some difficulty, Angie had begun to accommodate to what it must be like, romantically, between Peter and Ali, but this revelation was something new, outside her ability to process. In her reconstruction, Ali had been the abused and grateful village boy, and Peter the all-powerful American who had saved him from a life of squalor. She'd seen it as a variant of a normal Indian marriage between economic unequals. Virtuous and beautiful village girl; spoiled, rich city boy won over by her goodness. She hadn't understood it as profoundly sexual, as it apparently was, because she'd always considered marriage a protection against sexuality—obligation, not adventure.

"That's Ali by night," Rabi was saying. "By day he's a pretty enterprising guy. He started out cutting ladies' hair in Lucknow and then he worked wardrobes and makeup in Bollywood. You watch—some day he'll open up his own beauty parlor."

"But those kind of men—they aren't—"

She started to speak, then paused, remembering swishy Bollywood characters who were in all the films—but they weren't to be taken seriously. You couldn't call them accomplished in any way. They were scared of their shadows. They dropped things; they were clumsy. They screamed when they saw a mouse, rolled their eyes and flapped their wrists and ran away from fights. They were put in the films in order to be laughed at.

Rabi stared back. "What about them?" he asked. "
What
aren't they?"

"They aren't servants," she said. Servants don't suddenly open their own business.

Rabi was fiddling with a larger camera. "And he's not a servant."

In the next few moments, the true education of Anjali Bose began. Many seconds elapsed. She thought she was going to be sick. Many questions couldn't quite form themselves and went unasked. She was reassessing probability, rewinding the spool of her experience and discovering that she knew nothing. Something treacherous had entered her life.

"Oh, my God," she said. "I know him."

"I know you do."

The next picture on the tabletop was of Peter Champion, Peter the expatriate scholar reading an Indian paper in his dingy little room, with a blurred Ali in his servant's attire of lungi and undershirt behind him, washing dishes. Peter, whatever else he was, was a serious man. He'd devoted his life to things in India that were disappearing. He couldn't be laughed at. But as she kept looking, Ali came into focus. It was as though he'd taken a step or two forward. He wasn't washing plates—he was staring at Peter.

"I got real lucky. I came to Gauripur to shoot an expat,
and
I get a gay and a tranny at the same time. Who'd have figured, in a town like this?"

She could accept it. It even restored Peter's mysterious edge. Being homosexual—did Rabi say "gay"?—was more exciting than being CIA, which is what the smart boys in her class assumed the American was. Tranny? She was afraid to ask. This tall, skinny Rabi with all his photos, the first boy she'd felt comfortable with, what was he? If all this intrigue was happening under her nose in a boring little town like Gauripur, where nothing was strange and nothing held surprises, among the people she thought she knew the best, then what was the rest of India like? Bangalore? Mumbai? She felt the terror of the unprepared, as though she'd been pushed onto a stage without a script.

What if, in the larger world, no one held true? What if everyone was two people at least, like Ali, like Peter?

What could she do but cry? It was involuntary. She wasn't sad or frightened. It was as if she'd missed a step in the dark and knew she was going to fall and hurt herself badly, but at that precise moment she was still suspended between here and there, between now and then, and Rabi snapped the picture. Years later, people would say that it made a beautiful composition, enigmatic,
Mona
Lisa—like.

When Rabi asked her why she was crying, she said, "I've seen more in the past two minutes than I have in nineteen years."

He said, "I'm eighteen. Photography teaches you everything."

She didn't have the foggiest idea of what he meant.

Nevertheless, that was the moment that sealed their friendship.

"When you look at great photos, you see the whole world in a context. The whole world may only be five by seven inches, and it might last only a five-hundredth of a second, but within that time and space it's all true, and it's the best we've got."

Angie Bose had lived nineteen years in Gauripur and was a year and a half from graduating with a degree from the best school in town, and no one had ever spoken to her about the nature of truth or art, or assumed she cared or knew anything about it. She knew there were plenty of pretty shots of the Taj Mahal—hard to mess that one up—and the Himalayas and animals and famous faces, but she'd never thought of them as plotted except in a Shaky Sengupta sort of way. Truth? Context? Composition? She'd never had a serious discussion about anything. She was the second daughter of a railway clerk; she was supposed to go to school, obey teachers and parents, graduate and get married, obey her husband, and have children. Truth was what the community, teachers, parents, and eventual husband said it was. Truths were handed down from the beginning of time and they held true forever, not for one five-hundredth of a second. The thought that things were not as they appeared to be, or that people were not what she thought they were, left her with a feeling akin to nausea.

She knew, vaguely, that worlds existed beyond the assigned books and lectures—Peter Champion would occasionally depart from scripted discussions in his corporate cultures class to sprinkle in asides on literature and history and politics, little moments no one paid attention to because they would not appear on examinations. She had learned a Russian word,
Chekhovian,
from something he'd said about the Indian social and political structure. But the idea that a mere child, someone even younger than she was, could show off such knowledge as well was unimaginable.

When she listened to her parents at dinner, she wanted to scream, "Life isn't like that! Nobody cares! It doesn't matter! Nothing matters!" Like any American teenager, she wanted to scream at her parents, "You don't know a thing!" But every day the same food was bought and every night it was cooked and served in the same way, and the same rumors and gossip were chewed over, the same questions asked, with the same answers given, and everything was meaningless.

"Did you have to fight your parents in order to come to India?"

From the way he laughed, she could tell she must have said something funny. "Why would they stop me? I've got an auntie in Bangalore, and I was with my mother's parents in Rishikesh until they died,
and
I've got my father's folks in Kolkata and cousins everywhere. The only hard part is finding a way of avoiding them. A billion people in this country, and it feels like half of them are relatives! Just imagine how helpful they'd be in tracking down gay bars and whorehouses! I went out with a bunch of hijras—a blast! Natural performers." What he referred to as a "gay bar" sounded like a happy place, but she wondered how a Brahmin boy from a good family would be admitted to a whorehouse, and when she thought of hijras and their leering made-up faces and men-in-women's-clothing and flowers in their oily hair, she felt sick. Performers? They were perversions!

They talked a bit about their parents, how hers were so loving and concerned, how supportive they were. Lies, lies!
Ask me, and I'll tell the truth,
but he didn't. He said he hadn't talked to his parents in weeks but sent them emails of some of his photos. She made her father into a bank manager, hoping that would impress; he said his father ran a kind of telephone company, but the man was housebound and partially crippled, and his mother wrote novels about India for American women. In their mutual inventions, they weren't so far apart.

"I was just thinking," he said, as he tore out a sheet from a pocket notebook. "My mother would
love
to sit down with you!"
Why?
she wondered.
I'm nothing special.
She was about to ask why when he announced, as if in explanation, "She is Tara Chatterjee." The name meant nothing to Angie except that Tara was a common enough first name and Chatterjee one of the few Bengali Brahmin surnames, all of which meant that there were probably a dozen Tara Chatterjees of varying ages even in Gauripur. He took in her blank look and laughed. "The Tara Chatterjee who writes, that's my mom. You mean you haven't read her stories? Anyway, here's my San Francisco phone number. And let me give you my auntie's Bangalore number. I stay with her when I am there." He scribbled a telephone number on the back of his San Francisco card. "You'll get there if you really want to," he said.

Bangalore? How did he guess?

***

THE GIRL
in Shaky Sengupta's formal glossies was definitely not Angie. Not even a version of Anjali. In fact, as Rabi had said, there was no one there, and that, of course, triggered a new wave of interest. The nature of Shaky's art was to drain personality from the frame and replace it with fantasy. She'd always seen herself as too tall and thin, made for T-shirts and jeans, her narrow dimensions lost inside a sari. But Shaky's magic had managed the impossible, implying cleavage and billowy wonders under the sari, along with the smudgy dimple. She was luminous and mysterious, a synthetic bonbon of indeterminate age. Shaky was a master of light and shadow.