Miss New India

But he did mind. He'd practically tipped over the computer, trying to hide the pictures of eligible girls. She'd wanted to say, 'That's all right. Bengaliweddings.com?' But she asked, 'See anyone interesting?'

'The screen…' He started babbling; the screen was already blank. He tried to excuse himself. Someone else, some other Bengali, must have been using it.

'I didn't know you were looking for someone,' she said. 'I thought you were going off to an IIT.'

He looked up at her with big moist eyes, like a beaten dog.

'Please, big sister, don't tell anyone. I did not receive admittance,' he said.

What else could a bright boy in science do but go to a technical college? 'It's all crooked,' she said, repeating what she'd heard from her father and others. But she had a favor to ask, and if a bit of sympathy helped, what did it cost her? And so she asked, 'Where will you be next year?'-a bold question, but he'd been straightforward himself.

'I have no prospects,' he said.

'You'll find something, I'm sure. You're the best science student. Maybe not IIT, but there are so many others.' Actually, she couldn't name any.

He thanked her. She smiled and asked, 'Would you do me a favor?'

'Of course,' he answered, a mite too quickly. 'Anything you ask.'

That's when she suspected he had special feelings for her, not that she could have predicted how far he would take it. It might have been love, but at the time it was merely a chit she could cash in. 'If I gave you a new photo, could you take the old one off and put this one on the Internet?'

'What kind of photo?'

She showed him Shaky's portrait, the plump and dimpled Anjali at an alpine resort. 'Can you put it on Bengaliweddings.com?'

All he said was 'If you want me to.' He took the picture, remarking only that 'The portrait is very beautiful, is it of you?' And when she admitted that it was, just maybe a little deceptive, he said, 'No, no. No deception. It does you justice,' and within a day it was plastered across five continents.

As often happens to those who dither, waiting for that moment when all doubt and indecision would be suddenly resolved, that moment arrived in an unexpected way. The English-language ads had marginally improved the candidate pool; so had the original posting on the Internet. Fifty candidates had been rejected.

More to the point, Anjali had begun to educate herself in the secret ways of the heart. After the new Internet posting, she began receiving flattering inquiries from desirable countries on every continent. There were intriguing dimensions beyond her experience, and the movies she'd watched, and they were all open to her. There were men like Peter, without his complications. There were boys like Rabi and his hijras and prostitutes and gay bars. If she could hold out for a few more months, and if she could learn to value herself above what her untraditional looks and humble economic standing warranted, she might win the marriage lottery. In those months, while conforming to the predictable behavior of a bridal candidate and submitting to all the indignities of daughterhood, she clung to an indefensible belief in her own exceptionality.

THE FINAL EVENT followed the posting of her picture. Two weeks after Nirmal Gupta had put her formal portrait on the web, he'd gone to his bedroom with her picture and drunk a canister of bug spray. He began writing a long declaration of his lifelong devotion to a goddess he'd been too shy to approach, but he'd started the letter after drinking the spray and wasn't able to finish it.

The Gupta parents set their son's framed photo on an altar surrounded by flowers and brass deities. 'He was always going to those cinema halls,' his mother cried. 'He was in love with a screen goddess.'

They didn't recognize the portrait as Anjali's.

'The boy lost perspective,' his father said. 'These boys today, what to say, what to do?'

Buzley, buzlum. Anjali wondered, Did he even tell his parents he'd failed his entrance exams to an IIT?

SHE TOLD HERSELF, I owe it to poor Nirmal Gupta. I owe it to Baba and Sonali. I'll give them one last chance. She agreed to meet the next acceptable boy: number seventy-five. He turned out to be Subodh Mitra, the first boy to be brought to the house for inspection. His letter alluded to a distant connection to Angie's mother's sister-in-law in Asansol, a grimy steel-making center on the western edge of Bengal. 'Yes, I remember the Mitras,' her mother exclaimed. 'Very respectable. Very well connected!' He was twenty-four years old, tall enough for a girl like Angie, clean-shaven and handsome enough to charm mothers and turn any girl's head. He held an undistinguished engineering degree from a prestigious school, but, according to his posted resume, he had also earned a First-Class MBA degree from a business college in Kolkata. He'd worked a year in Bangalore at a call center ('customer-support agent,' it read), but now he'd returned from the South, ready to marry and settle down. With family power behind him and connections in government, he would never be unemployed. If everything checked out, he would be a catch.

Even Angie could not manufacture serious objections. She'd exhausted every possible reason, both objective and whimsical, for rejecting a boy. Probably her most heartfelt one, in the case of Mr. Mitra, could not even be voiced in the family: she simply could not imagine carrying on civilized discourse with anyone from Asansol. But in the Bose family-just look at her parents-failure to engage in civilized discourse was not grounds for marital disbarment. She remembered Asansol quite well. When the train passed through it, she'd had to secure the coach windows against the coke ovens' soot and sulfur fumes, but the toxic stench still drifted through. Men would breathe through moistened handkerchiefs; women pulled their saris across their nose. Asansol was a place even Gauripur could look down on. Subodh Mitra's place of origin was his only prominent demerit.

Her father tried to read between the lines of Subodh Mitra's CV. 'The boy did engineering to please his father, but his heart wasn't in it. When he got a chance to study business, he shone like the sun!'

Anjali had never heard of his Kolkata business school. Probably hundreds of 'business schools' and 'colleges' were run out of the back rooms of hot little apartments, all advertising First-Class MBA degrees the equivalent of those from Delhi, LSE, and Wharton. She was tempted to argue but kept her silence.

'This is a golden boy.' Her father persisted. 'His parents are very reasonable. They want this marriage as much as we do. I have counteroffered more than they asked.'

Subodh Mitra, the intended, the all-but-fiance, arrived from Asansol in a red Suzuki, an eight-hour drive on the clogged, narrow national highway, in the first week of the monsoon rains. A red Suzuki! Mr. Bose still negotiated the streets of Gauripur by scooter, just as he had in college-another humiliation for which Anjali and her mother and sister were somehow to blame.

The young man swept into their apartment, bearing flowers and sweets. The photo hadn't lied: he was tall, athletic, and handsome, with real dimples. He was attentive to both parents and showed the proper deference to Mr. Bose. He barely looked at Anjali, fulfilling the etiquette demands of the marriage market.

'Oh, and this must be your daughter, the lovely Anjali. I was enjoying our conversation so much, I nearly forgot…' Anjali then allowed herself to be pushed into the conversation.

He complimented her on her white cotton dhoni-khali sari, with its yellow and green stripes: 'A very nice selection for the occasion.' He went on. 'I must compliment the feminine sensibility of the Bose household. Unexpectedly simple, not a showy tangail or fussy kanjeevaram.'

She was impressed; a man who knows his sari styles is refined indeed.

He must have been through many such interviews, Angie thought. She had worn her lone kanjeevaram for the day in Shaky's studio. She would wear a red brocaded Benarasi for the actual wedding.

'Anjali is very artistic,' said Mr. Bose.

'I can see that. Taste is a rare quality these days. Taste in such matters speaks well of her parents' example.'

'Our daughter has graduated from Vasco da Gama, with honors…'

The 'boy' had to feign surprise and interest, as if he hadn't known all along, and Anjali had to deny, modestly, any great intelligence or motivation. He declared himself passionately devoted to his parents in Asansol, but his ambition was to move to Kolkata and convince his parents to settle nearby. Even Gauripur was preferable to Asansol, Subodh readily admitted. He spoke in elegant Sanskritized Bangla, the pinnacle of decorum. 'Mr. Bose, I am myself looking for a post in international communications, hopefully in Kolkata, but failing that, I look with favor