Miss New India (35 page)

She read each
Newsweek
and
Time
from cover to cover, including the lists of names of publishers, managing editors, executive editors, editors, deputy editors, editors-at-large, staff writers, reporters and contributing photographers, but she absorbed no information. She was reading for language skills, not content. She was numb to world events. She nurtured her apathy. Wars, fortunes, reputations were won or lost
out there.
She was a ghost floating over alien terrain, as much a ghost as her father.

The clipping from
Voice
was different, though. Like an animal sensing danger in the air, Anjali sniffed peril in the title of Dynamo's latest column, titled "Tyger! Tyger!" She squirreled the clipping away in her room, face-down in her nearly empty lingerie drawer. She kept opening and closing that drawer, running her fingertips over the newsprint until they were smudgy gray and had to be soaped clean. The Mr. GG who paid social calls on the Banerjis and sipped single malt was a polite pillar of Bangalore society; the Girish Gujral who stalked the city as Dynamo was radar capable of registering the slightest stirring. She felt simultaneously excited and anxious. Could ghosts who had crossed over, cross back? Once again, she tugged open the lingerie drawer. She groped under the bras and panties that Parvati had thoughtfully bought for her the morning after she had moved in. That thoughtfulness was another reason to feel ungrateful and to resent Parvati. Her fingers scraped the rough, cheap newsprint. No, she wasn't ready.

AT SIX-THIRTY
one weekday morning, instead of the younger of the two maids, Rabi knocked on Anjali's bedroom door and carried in the tray of toast and bed tea.

"Something wrong?" she asked, startled.

"It's time," he said.

Rabi set the tray down on the bed. He perched, lotus-position, on the quilt by her feet. "Glowing with health, as you can see. You should give jogging a try, Angie." He poured tea for her and for himself, added two lumps of sugar and hot milk from a pitcher to each cup. "You should give something a try. Anything."

"I'm not Angie," she mumbled, scrambling to a half-sitting position. "I guess I never was."
Tell me my name. Don't as\ me, don't as\ me anything.

"Well, Angie wanted to get to Bangalore. I told you you'd get here if you really wanted it. And now you are in Bangalore."

The next-door neighbor was chanting a morning hymn at the top of his voice. "There are mistakes," Anjali mumbled, "but no pardons." She burrowed her head under her pillow.

"At least Mr. Srinivasan has a decent voice. Otherwise, I'd send him a blast of Farka Touré." He shook her hip, which was covered by a blanket. "Hey, Angie, I don't like talking to a pillow."

"Is your auntie worried how much longer I intend to sponge from the family?"

"I told you, she has patience. She can imagine what you've been through. She knows you have issues—repressions, she calls them—and my aunt and uncle want to help. Not only that, they're
able
to help." He sprang off the bed. "Actually, I came up to your room to share, not evict."

"I'm predeceased. I don't even have a name anymore." She could feel his hand on her hip, over the cover.

"Actually, you do. That's what I came up to share. Remember the shot I took of you in the ice cream store, way back when? It's become a gallery sensation. 'Mona Lisa of the Mofussils.' That's you. You've made this photographer famous."

She felt cool fingertips over her warm eyelids. She wanted the moment to last. But Rabi was all energy. Stories about what he called "the Mona Lisa of the Mofussils Phenomenon" tumbled out. When his first set of Indian portraits were exhibited at a chic new gallery in Mumbai, the one that had gathered the most praise was "Small-Town Girl." Reviewers had rhapsodized over the subject's face, a face both beautiful and vulnerable. Why is she sad? Or is she happy? One of the reviewers had christened her 'Mona Lisa of the Mofussils,' and the tag had stuck. An art critic for a Kolkata newspaper had retraced the Indo-American photographer's steps back to Bihar and even tipped a waiter at the Alps Palace to seat him at the table where the Mona Lisa had posed. An emergent class of Indian entrepreneurs had bought out the entire exhibit.

He ended his stories with a plea. "Do me a favor? Join me for a pre-bed-tea run tomorrow? You don't have to run. We can just walk. Please?"

"I don't own running shoes." Her last resort.

He responded, "I guess my next task, then, is to drive you to the mall."

Late that night she steeled herself to read the clipping Mr. GG had given her.

TYGER, TYGER
By Dynamo

Over the years, Dynamo has had the privilege—some would describe it as the challenge, and they would not be unjustified—of knowing Mrs. Maxfield Trevor Douglas Bagehot, who is addressed affectionately by her close friends as Minnie and universally referred to by the respectful as "Madam."

"Madam" passed away in her eponymous Kent Town home under tragic circumstances Friday last. In the spirit of full disclosure, Dynamo acknowledges that he has contributed funds for the upkeep of the Bagehot property, which is comprised of the structure of Bagehot House and its extensive compound. Dynamo further concedes that he may even benefit financially, in light of the undeniable fact that lucrative conversions of cantonment-era ruins by conglomerates have become standard. Dynamo withholds comment on the popular speculation that the majority of such lucrative conversions of dilapidated-beyond-repair single-family habitations are given unstoppable velocity by a select number of conglomerates with underworld connections. As the ditty goes, the times, they are changing. And yet ... Aye, there's the rub for entrepreneurs with conscience.

If Dynamo had his druthers, he would continue his charitable outlays ad infinitum rather than confront the saddest of all urban spectacles: the rape of relics. The ravaging and razing of things unique diminishes us all. And in a city like Bang-a-Buck, where gaudy architecture is spreading like invasive bacteria and choking what little remains of originals, we are losing signposts to our collective past.

Like many who dabble in the alchemic black art of urban architecture in this confused and confusing age of rapturous rupture, Dynamo has long fixed his gaze on Madam's Bagehot House. (Dynamo hastens to clarify to his readers that his interest in Madam's establishment is devoid of popular prurient fascination with the generations of delectable lady-lodgers, those iron-clad frigates known in popular parlance as Bagehot Girls.) It is the academic perfection of the house and its grounds that have merited Dynamo's affectionate admiration (that admiration having been sparked by his reading at an impressionable age of Mr. Peter Champion's
Classic Indian Architecture: Public and Private).

Dynamo has it on irrefutable authority that at the time of Madam's sudden-but-not-precocious expiration, the board members of the Bagehot Trust, each of whom is a Bang-a-Buck VIP (no, make that a VVIP), were engaged in a bitter feud regarding financial plans for the immediate future of the rapidly deteriorating property. Dynamo's source, a trustee who has requested anonymity, has divulged to Dynamo that the trust was set up for the sole purpose of executing a legal contract with Madam, who had for two decades or more been afflicted with deep penury. Per said contract the board of trustees acquired the property deed from Madam in exchange for allowing her (1) to occupy the main residential structure gratis, and (2) to obtain and retain 100 percent of rents she collected from respectable migrant working ladies. As additional incentive they guaranteed the delivery of monthly gifts of provisions and liquor—Madam was partial to brandies. At the time of transfer of deed, the trustees, applying actuarial tables, had counted on Madam "to kick the bucket" within months, if not weeks, and by unanimous vote had nominated a committee to explore lucrative commercial development of the long-neglected property. Thanks to either the medicinal benefits of potent brandies or to the ironic string-pullings of the Big Puppeteer in the Skies, and much to the aggravation of the trustees, Madam bamboozled the actuaries. The consequence of Madam's stubborn longevity was loss of unanimity among the trustees. According to Dynamo's source, last month a minority faction on the board proposed the Bagehot property be designated a city or national historical heritage site, thus qualifying for not-for-profit status and funds for preservation and restoration.

Madam, by her own admission, was eighty-two years old. Madam's passing, therefore, was not untimely, but, and this is
the but
that beleaguers Dynamo:
Why
did she die Friday last?
What
precipitated the death?
Who
benefited from it?

If the attending physician is to be believed, Madam's "great heart" gave out. Dynamo counters the physician with a resounding "Poppycock!" Madam is known to have suffered from dyspepsia (both gastronomical and temperamental), but not from a dicky ticker. Dynamo demands an investigation of the factors that induced the shock that induced heart failure. Sources have implied

(1) that Madam's only servant was in the pay of a trustee and facilitated the fatal shock to his employer's inconveniently sturdy heart;or

(2) that the same servant accidentally happened upon Madam's lifeless body and alerted his powerful paymaster, who then instructed his henchmen to wreck the structure and purloin contents under the guise of a spontaneous riot by Bang-a-Buck's underclass.

Madam's death is a sad fact. But the true tragic victim of this incidence of plutocratic greed is the young lady-tenant of Madam, the innocent job-seeking migrant, who was mistakenly ensnared in a London-based terrorist plot—"implicated," in police jargon—and cruelly harassed and humiliated, her spirit scarred permanently. That young lady arrived in Bang-a-Buck to discover, fulfill, and exceed her potential; instead she became collateral damage of countenanced greed. Did "fearful symmetry," which the bard William Blake alerted us to two hundred years ago, require the extraction of such a price?

Dynamo's suspicions are just that: suspicions. By Madam's wishes, which she expressed in writing to the Bagehot Trust, she was to be buried on Bagehot grounds. No resting place is permanent. Her bones will be crushed or bared by developers' crews. But if there's to be a memorial for Madam, let it be this: Bagehot House surrendered its ghosts so that one young lady might break the power of our property triads. In an earlier column, I labeled such ladies "the New Miss Indias." They will transform our country. Dynamo is inflamed by the new species of tyger-lamb. If there is any triumph to be gleaned from this experience, it is that this time the costs of symmetry have been borne by ancient bricks and mortar, not by flesh and blood.

Anjali reread Dynamo's column this time as a love letter. She had mistaken Mr. GG's gallantry for indifference. He hadn't lost his desire for her. He had promoted her from a plaything to an ideal worthy of devotion. She read his "Tyger! Tyger!" again and again.

Clarity came to her with each rereading, especially of the closing paragraph. Dynamo was "inflamed" by her. She resolved to cross back to the colony of the living. In the monstrous evening at the police thana, Rabi had joked about the Peter Champion network. The butterfly effect. How lucky she was to have Parvati, Auro and Rabi for temporary family! Luckier still to have Mr. GG drop by so regularly. She wasn't sure what Dynamo meant by "the new species of tyger-lamb" or why he misspelled
tiger,
but he was "inflamed" by her. That word made her blush. She felt sexy and slightly dangerous. On the top left-hand corner of the clipping she doodled an ink sketch of a Royal Bengal tiger. It needed a signature. Mona Lisa, but not of the mofussils. Mona Lisa of Dollar Colony.
Mr. GG, a second chance? Please?

Over the next couple of postdawn walks in the residents-only park and postwalk breakfasts of tea, fruits and yogurt in the garden, Rabi entertained Anjali with anecdotal histories of his mother, Tara Chatterjee, and her sisters, Parvati-Auntie and the oldest, the New York—based gadabout Padma. His mother ("A bit of a flake, you'd like her") was the youngest; Parvati-Auntie was "the responsible middle sister, and don't get me started on the oldest."

But he started with the two house dogs, Ahilya the female and her pathetically enamored littermate, Malhar, which had been plucked off the street: pariah pups, raised inside, grown large, strong, and very territorial, very fierce looking, but never at ease, never comfortable. Never knowing where they belonged. Canines, he called them, not really dogs. It would take generations to breed a true dog from India's abundant canines. "That's the kind of woman my Auntie is," he said. "She follows her heart. She believes love is the answer to everything."
Why is he telling me this?
For Anjali, the parallel between her situation and a street dog's was all too obvious.

And then he gave his take on Dollar Colony, where Auro-Uncle had chosen to settle as the CFO of a startup after retiring from the Mumbai branch of a multinational behemoth. "He lived in Hong Kong, Boston, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and he picked Bangalore for building his dream house! What does that say about Bangalore? What does it say about
him?
"

"The only places I know, or maybe I
think
I know, are Gauripur and Rock City, Illinois."

"Not a very high standard, Angie." Rabi scooped out a tiny, slippery black papaya seed the maid had missed when she was preparing the fruit platter.

"Shall I tell you about Rock City?"

"Please, spare me the mysteries of Rock City. I've read the CCI training manual: learn about one little town and you've learned about the whole country. Learn some specialized vocabulary and you'll discover the whole language. Was Rock City all you hoped for?" He flicked the seed at her. "Bottom line, as they like to say, you were right to back out of CCI."

Easy for you to say,
she thought.
You're the richest eighteen-year-old Indian in the world.
"I didn't back out. I screwed up. I
failed.
"