Miss New India

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.

While her parents were fretting over the caste purity and social standing of interested probasi Bengalis with twenty-something sons, vowing this time they'd wipe out the stigma of their other daughter's divorce, Anjali was imagining herself in the real world behind Shaky Sengupta's pull-down screens. The beaches of Australia were beckoning, the Ginza, the Great Wall, why not? Even in Gauripur a girl could dream, especially a reasonably attractive girl with good English, a dimple and cleavage, and an adventurous nature.

The girl/woman in the portrait had nothing to fear from an uncertain marriage market. She would definitely find a husband. She could imagine the crashing of teacups around the world as thousands of bachelor engineers, the loose network of longing that had thus far yielded nearly fifty interested inquiries from half a dozen countries, checked out the new photo on Bengaliweddings.com. She feared having to go through with the Bangalore alternative. When Peter first proposed it, Bangalore had seemed the answer to all her fears and all her anger. Bangalore was a great game, a way of profitably using her English, avenging Sonali, and becoming independent, while picking and choosing among thousands of boys with good English and the same ambition.

But that was an innocent Anjali and a different Peter. That was before she got swept up in the marriage current and before her vanity was engaged. The Bangalore commitment meant packing a bag and sneaking out and admitting she wasn't desirable enough to overcome the stigma of coming from nowhere, and her parents' poverty. Her parents could live with another failed marriage. They could tolerate her misery so long as they felt they'd done their duty. But they would not survive the shame of a second daughter's act of defiance and insubordination.

4

She wanted to-no, she needed to talk to Peter about the photograph of Ali that Rabi Chatterjee had shown her. But she didn't dare; so one day Shaky Sengupta's bridal portrait in hand, faking jauntiness, she showed up-as she now thought of it-at Peter and Ali's. This was a forbidden visit, according to her