Authors: Bharati Mukherjee
In Bollywood films, the coolest stars casually meet in a Barista. Angie felt cool as she trundled her suitcase to the counter indoors. She would splurge on a tall iced coffee with a scoop of ice cream. In fan magazines, actresses were photographed while seductively licking strawberry-pink or saffron-yellow ice cream off a long-handled spoon. Hadn't she just saved maybe ninety rupees on the auto-rickshaw ride to nowhere? But when it was her turn to place her order, she asked for the cheapest, smallest hot coffee listed on the board above the counter. She blamed her Bose family training in frugality for the failure to splurge.
Really, why shouldn't she buy into the self-indulgence on display all around her? She knew her worth, and she had money—okay, borrowed, in a cookie tin in her tote bag. She'd shaken off the dust of Bihar and the mud and jungles in between, and now she was in Bangalore, where the towers are made of blue glass, but they could just as easily be gold. She'd done it entirely on her own. Next time in a Barista, she promised herself, she would order the most expensive coffee on the board.
"New in town?" asked a cappuccino drinker at an adjacent table, glancing down at Angie's Samsonite. She wore an
I
MUMBAI
T-shirt.
"Just got off the train," Angie confessed, flashing her biggest smile. "I got in from Kolkata an hour ago." It's a new life, who's to know?
"Cool," said Mumbai Girl.
Angie put her coffee down on Mumbai Girl's cluttered table. A young man in a black muscle shirt that showcased his biceps gave up his chair for her. "Fresh Off the Train. F-O-T. Cool," he said.
"Now I've got to find Kew Gardens," Angie confided. "Do you know where it is?"
Mumbai Girl shouted over to the next table, "Any of you guys rooming in Kew Gardens?" Her English was perfect, better than Angie's. And the responses from the other tables were also in English: "Hell of a commute!" "Try Kent Town instead." "Isn't your ex looking for a roomie?" "Don't sign a long lease straightaway. Landlords are crooks." "And all landladies are bitches."
"Chill, F-O-T," Mumbai Girl counseled. She got on her cell phone. "Moni," she said, "Lalita here. Barista's, where do you think? Really? She agreed? I'm surprised. No, I'm shocked. Look, there's a new Bangla babe here." She looked up at Angie with a big smile, then winked. "Moni, you'd better get here fast. She's a real cutie. Hot and going fast. You want her in BanglaBazaar before those MeetMate guys snag her."
Cutie?
Angie thought. Cute was something small and soft and dimpled. She was too tall and skinny for cute.
Mumbai Girl put her hand over the phone and whispered, "His name is Monish Lahiri—we call him the Bengali Svengali. Movie handsome, but kind of short. Not short-short, but shortish. He romances all the girls, so he's too busy to concentrate on just one. Anyway, he's minting money on his Facebook ripoff. He has us recruiting all the F-O-T Bangla babes and studs for his directory."
Angie tried to follow it all and came up ... short.
What's a Svengali?
she wondered.
Lifting her hand off the phone, Mumbai Girl said, "I don't know—pretty tall, hundred and seventy-five, hundred and eighty, maybe. Wear your shoe lifts."
"Tell him a hundred and sixty," Angie said.
Lalita continued. "Cool, Moni. Oh, she says a hundred and sixty." She turned to Angie. "Moni started the trend. Now every group in Bangalore, the Gujaratis, the Tamils, the Konkans, the Punjabis—everybody's getting into these Bangalore directories."
Angie's head was spinning, faces popped up like flashbulbs, voices twittered, coming from nowhere, or everywhere, and she couldn't understand a word they were saying. Maybe she'd strained something, hauling her Samsonite up from the sidewalk.
The smart-looking boys working on their laptops made her occasional Gauripur heartthrobs look like cow herders. Her clothes might be sour, and she hadn't been able to comb her hair, and she was pulling a muddy suitcase, but she still had her smile. She was in a Barista on MG Road in Bangalore, the new center of the universe. Her smile was more valuable than any amulet or mantra. But damn, her voice seemed slow and muffled and everyone else's loud and fast.
"Way cool—did I hear the magic words 'new girl in town'?" a bearded, mustached man in Ray-Bans called out. Angie assessed and dismissed: too short and dark, too loud and outgoing, too much laughing and joking, the mustache too full and hairy, and the double strand of gold chains definitely unnecessary. Probably a local boy, she thought, trying to ingratiate himself with cooler, big-city types, pushing too hard. If he'd been in a Bollywood movie, he'd be the hero's comic sidekick, too itchy and impetuous, cracking too many jokes in a too-high-pitched voice, too eager to please, getting the turndown from every girl he meets. He slung his arm around a tubular girl with spiky hair in a very tight T-shirt from which she threatened to spill at any minute.
"Do you have a room yet?"
Javaroomyet?
"Say no, we can squeeze you in." He said his name was Mike and his English was easy and a little coarse. He introduced the others: Millie and Darren. The tubular girl was Suzie. Darren was a handsome boy in a T-shirt and jean jacket, more her type, Punjabi-tall and fair, with none of Mike's strained flash and swagger. Millie was the classic "tall, slim and wheat-complexioned"
girl of the marriage ads, with highlighted hair, twirling her cigarette with practiced ease.
"Can't smoke in the residence. Can't smoke on the job. Gotta get my fix when I can," she said, lighting another.
"I'm Darren. This week, anyway." Darren sniggered. "I think I'm going to kill him off. I fancy myself a Brad."
"You're not cool enough for Brad, lover boy," said Suzie. "He broke up with Jen last year."
"He's a has-been," laughed one of the girls. "He's with Angelina now. She'll spit him out her backside!" The girl looked like a servant; you'd never think she knew a word of English, let alone loud, aggressive American English. She called herself Cindy.
"So let me lay it out for you," Cindy continued. "If you say you're Brad, they'll say where's Angelina? Then what'll you say? Quick, quick, Old Bitch'll be listening in, hears anguished attempt of expendable agent to extricate himself from the deep shit he's gotten himself into ... and you're out on your ass, wasting company time just 'cause you wanted to be Brad Pitt. Not cool, dude."
"I was Jen a few weeks ago," said Millie. "That's all I ever got. 'Where's Brad?' I said, 'Brad? Brad's
so
last week, man. Now what-say we cure your printer blues.'"
"Yeah, well, HP's a little loosey-goosey," said Darren.
"Motorola's a little uptight," said Mike.
"Mine'd shit bricks," said Cindy. "Play by the rules, that's all we ever get. You got a name—stick with it."
"Dudes, dudes, what is this, a bitch session? What'll our new friend think?" said Darren.
What could she think? She was numb with confusion. Brick-shitting was a new one on her.
Shit, piss, fuck, asshole:
so much to learn. And
cool, cool, cool:
everything cool or not cool, but never warm. These must be call-center agents, her competition and would-be colleagues. Her neck hurt from keeping up with the repartee. She felt the way she had on a family visit to Kolkata so many years before, recognizing the Bangla words but missing the meaning. She should know all this, it should all be second nature, this was the currency of her deliverance from Gauripur—but she truly didn't understand 90 percent of it. These people seemed better than she was, even though their vocabulary was minimal and they looked like servants or movie prostitutes, except maybe Darren, who was now pouting because he couldn't play Brad.
"Gotta keep it fresh," said Mike. "Russell Crowe's still good, but there's the bloody accent. Nicole's great. Bill and Hillary. George and Laura, but when you use those names, they might hang up on you. Lots of names out there. What's yours, honey?"
When she said Angie, Millie and Suzie admitted to having been Angies too, on different days. Suzie said, "I stopped being Angie when one American guy said, 'Yeah, you're Angie like I'm Mother Teresa.' They're catching on. Gotta be careful."
"They got 'tudes," said Darren.
"Yeah, but we got game," Mike responded. They high-fived. Angie wanted to cry, so she smiled, and Mike turned to her. "Bitchin' name, Angie. Real cool. Great smile. Love it." Still too enthusiastic,
not cool,
she decided. How could a bitchin' name, if she heard right, be cool? She remembered a favorite Championism:
used-car-salesman friendly.
She felt better.
Angie or Suzie or whatever, leaning across the table with her breasts all but pouring out, and one of them, she saw, with a butterfly tattoo fluttering up from the dark interior, would have caused a riot in Gauripur. And the tall girl with highlighted hair, calling herself Angie on Tuesday and Saturday and Millie on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, who had to smoke on breaks and at the coffee shop, said she was looking for a new roomie at two thousand a month with kitchen privileges. Angie said she hoped she had a room through a relative in Kew Gardens, a statement that caused no dropped silverware, no raised eyes. Two more boys from a neighboring table, a Steve and a Charlie, offered her a ride on their bikes, which, too late, she realized meant motorcycles. They were with girls, a ponytailed one named Gloria and a green-haired one named Roxie, "from Chicago," she said. "Where else?"
Ah, but did they teach you a Chicago accent?
she wondered, remembering Peter.
That'll be five dallers.
"Mukesh Sharma called again last night," Cindy said, "poor fucking loser, I almost feel sorry for him. He calls himself Mickey now, but it's the same old Mukky."
"You can block him," said Mike. "A guy calls support three, four times a week—they'll deal with him. You can say whatever you want to him, even the Old Bitch'll back you."
"Mukesh Sharma is a real Hannibal Lecter. He creeps me out from twelve thousand miles away," said Suzie. "I don't know why they let those guys into the States. University of Illinois used to have some class. I keep hoping I get him—he won't have the balls to call back again."
Mike started singing, "I get no kick from Champagne." He had a surprising voice: deep, American. "Mukky Sharma lives in Champaign."
"Well, no wonder he's crazy," Angie said, "living in Champagne!" Everyone laughed, and she didn't know why what she said was so funny. The sun was so bright, pouring directly into her eyes and boring into her skull. How does a person even manage to live in Champagne? They drink it like crazy in Bollywood movies. What's the word—
flutes?
An actual Indian name like Mukesh Sharma sounded strangely comforting in this ersatz America, with all its Mikes and Steves and Charlies.
"Indian guys in the States," Millie explained. "They're the sickest perverts. They spend all day in the lab, then they spend all night on the Indian marriage sites. They're so fucking horny, they invent computer problems just so they can be patched through to Bangalore and talk to an Indian girl. They don't know we have their name and credit history and previous calls on our screens as soon as they call in."
Cindy was playing to an attentive circle. "He goes, 'Hi, my name is Mickey. What is your good name please?'" She did a good imitation of a certain kind of Indian accent—Angie's father's, for example. "I say, 'Angie.' He goes, 'Am-I-detecting-an-Anjali-under-that-Angie-disguise, Miss Angie?' I nearly said, 'No, but am I detecting some kind of sick shit under Mickey?' What he really wants to know is, what's the weather like in Bangalore today? What's playing at the Galaxy? Do we still hang out at Forum? What about Styx or Pub World? What's your real name and where do you come from and are you married and how old are you and 'Please, Miss Angie, your height in centimeters...' Gawd, I hate this job!"
Darren raised his arms. "Silence, please. Kolkata Cutie needs to hear our tribute to Mukky Sharma." Everyone looked at Angie, raising their coffee cups in her direction, and began singing in what seemed to her nonsense syllables:
I get no kick from Champagne,
Urbana too is a kind of a zoo,
But I know now what has to be true—
There's something sick coming off of you.
"Lyrics by Girish Gujral," said Bombay Girl. "He'll come over soon enough."
Angie knew the meaning of the
words fuck, shit, asshole,
though she'd never used them. Where do young Indians learn to use such language? What frightened her was the simple truth that if a boy from an American college, even a psychopath, had sent in his marital résumé, her father would have lunged at it. Any Indian going to any American school was, by definition, a catch.
"There's always the phone-sex line," Mike said. "You'd be way cool. They actually favor exotic names and Indian accents."
"A girl in our dorm went over to phone sex," said Suzie. "The money's good, but you have to find weird ways of keeping those guys talking."
"Not that you couldn't," said Mike.
"Oh, just shut up," said Suzie. She waited for silence. "You have something more you want to say ... Mahendra? Oh, sorry, Mike."
My God, how a simple name change changes everything!
"Three hundred bucks a night weird, I hear," said Darren.
Who was he in his pre-Bangalore life,
Angie wondered.
Dinesh? Dharmendra?
"Pretty cool."
"One step up from the streets," snorted Roxie.
And you, Roxie: Rupa? Rukhsana?
The women didn't seem jealous or possessive. Most of them were plump and the men already getting stout, like her father. Their friendships didn't seem like lead-ins to marriage. The young people in Bangalore had no parents, no nearby families to appease. No gossip or scandal could compromise them. They had come from all over India to get away from gossip.
It was exciting just to be part of such a flow, even for one morning, and to be carried along like a twig in a flood. She'd been accepted, no questions asked, even if she didn't understand most of what she'd been hearing. It was English, but ... From her perch on the Barista's plaza, she could see the tops of skyscrapers flashing their international names in blue and red neon. She knew those companies: IBM, Canon, Siemens, Daihatsu. None of them existed in Gauripur. A Pizza Hut in Gauripur would automatically become the luxury hangout, the Place to Be Seen, and would draw longer lines than a cinema hall. In Gauripur there was only Alps Palace, a Welcome Group hotel with a vegetarian restaurant and innumerable tea stalls, where men sat or stood, sipping and spitting. For Gauripur's alcoholics there were two back-street liquor stores where bottles were wrapped in straw and newspaper and smuggled out in used plastic sacks with sari shop logos.