Miss New India

But going all the way across India by local buses-anything beyond Varanasi-was like voluntarily entering a black hole, especially the black hole of central India called Madhya Pradesh, with its jungles and tribals, and hoping to come out the other end somehow intact. A distant relative of her mother's, the family's lone adventurer, had once made it all the way to Jabalpur, the equivalent of the place where ancient mariners assumed they would fall off the edge of the world. Central Madhya Pradesh still had places where even the police were afraid to go. And Jabalpur was not even a third of the way to Bangalore.

On the four-hour trip to Patna, she could still smell the mud and the decayed mangoes, the taste and rubbery feel of something terrible in her mouth, the searing pain, and even more, the transformation of a handsome boy, dimples and all, into a monster. Walking out of her house as a confident, desirable bride-to-be in a flashy sari, in a red Suzuki, wondering, Coffee or a sandwich? And running back sick, her sari wet with blood and men's stuff she never knew about. Jism. On the bus, an old man who boarded late and could have sat anywhere took the aisle seat next to her and almost immediately put his hand over her breast, as though he owned it, as though it was something he'd bought along with his ticket and paan, even as the outskirts of Gauripur were passing by. He was looking straight ahead, and she stared at his unshaven white stubble, his dirty white kurta, and his jaws working mightily on his betel leaf. Then she stared down until he removed his hand. He got up and chose another seat.

SONALI'S TWO ROOMS were not far from the bus station. s.Das, the buzzer panel read.

'I couldn't call, Sonali-di,' Anjali apologized as soon as Sonali unlocked her front door. They spoke in Hindi, as was their custom. 'It was all so sudden.'

'Do they know you're here?' Sonali asked that with a smile. 'Anyway, come in.' She eased the knapsack off Anjali's shoulder and carried it indoors. 'It isn't much, but we aren't complaining.'

Sonali and her little girl slept in the back room, much in the way Anjali and her mother shared a bed in Gauripur. Sonali had gained ten kilos since the divorce. At twenty-four she looked more like a younger aunt than an older sister.

It wasn't late, barely past seven o'clock, but little Piyali was already asleep on the chowki in the bedroom, a bony leg nestling a bolster and an elbow shading her eyes from the ceiling light. In a way, Piyali was lucky. Her father had dropped out of her life. No visits, no checks, no harassments, no disappointments. Anjali reached out and stroked the child's hair.

In the tiny kitchen alcove, Sonali put the kettle on the gas stove and spread salty crackers on a chipped plate. 'So, what now, Anjali?'

'I had to, didi,' Anjali said, 'I had to leave.' Anjali longed to talk woman-to-woman, for the first time in her life. As Sonali slurped down tea, Anjali recounted the assault by Subodh Mitra. 'He was so charming,' she cried. 'And they were going to marry me off to him.' The brute, the monster. She thought-but couldn't say, of course- it would have been just lie your marriage, except that he showed his true nature even before the ceremony. She expected sympathy and finally support from her sister, but something was holding Sonali back. If I can't confide in Sonali-di, who's been through it all, whom can I talk to? Sonali-di had to understand; she wouldn't tolerate Baba making the same mistake again.

'So I ran away, when they were asleep. What else could I do, Sonali-di? I had to.'

'You want to know what you could have done? With your Vasco degree and your wonderful English? You could have made Ma and Baba happy and married him. And if it didn't work out, you'd still get a better job than me.'

Marry him? My sister hates me!

Sonali opened the steel trunk that had once contained her dowry of saris, bedding, and kitchen utensils. It was nearly empty. Like their mother, she preferred neem leaves to mothballs. Sonali handed a small pillow to Anjali. It reeked more of mildew than neem. 'You can stay the night,' she said.

'Thank you,' Anjali mumbled, shocked. 'I intend to be gone in the morning.' Not exactly her initial plan, but now her only choice.

'In fact I'm glad you stopped by,' said Sonali. And before Anjali could smile, she added, 'I have to go out a little later. I don't expect Piyali to wake up, but if she does, you'll be here.'

'Go out where?' Anjali asked, but from the look on her sister's face, she knew.

'Just an hour. Maybe less, maybe more,' she said.

'What are you doing, Sonali-di? Seeing a man, isn't it?'

'You think a secretary is just a secretary?' Sonali asked. 'You're such a child still.' She gave the pillow a whack with her palm before slipping a pillowcase over it. 'Men are men, they're all the same. You don't have to lead them on, it's in their nature.' Piyali whimpered in her sleep, and Sonali immediately lowered her voice. 'Look at us,' she muttered, 'take a good look at Piyali and me, do you really think I'm better off being divorced? Do you have any idea what the word divorced means to any man? It means 'Take it, it's free.' Wouldn't I be better off married, no matter what?'

'You had no choice, Sonali-di! He practically moved those women into your flat!'

'What do you know? Nothing, you know nothing, and you come to my house and lecture me? This handsome Mr. Mitra of yours thought-no, he was positive-that he was Baba's choice of jamai. What he does to you before the wedding or after, does it matter that much? Does it matter enough to ruin other people's lives? Four lives, in my case. Baba's and Ma's, Piyali's and mine?'

And so the great divide was not just the thirty years that separated Anjali from her parents-that wasn't a divide, it was a chasm-but the five years between her and her sister. Five years ago, Sonali had capitulated to her parents' demands. Five years ago, it would have been impossible for Sonali to have resisted, and fled. A wife might conceivably leave her properly arranged husband and move back in with her parents, even divorce him for cruelty or drunkenness, but never for the laughable motive of personal happiness.

'But you sent me money, didi,' Angie said. 'You're the one who told me not to cripple myself.' Every few months, Sonali had sent her small money orders and inland air-letters, care of an unmarried, club-footed girlfriend she had gone to Hindi medium school with.

'That was for clothes and whatnot,' she said. 'It wasn't meant to heap more shame on the family.'

That night, lying with her niece on the chowki while her sister 'stepped out,' Anjali thought about how the world had gone mad. Sonali was jealous of her sister's still-open future, Anjali decided, because she could do what Sonali hadn't. In just a day, India had gone from something green and lush and beautiful to something barren and hideous. Her sister had deserted her, and her parents were prepared to marry her off to a monster whose father demanded a set of golf clubs.

THERE ARE WAYS of crossing India by overnight buses, short-haul trains, even by flagging down truck drivers, but very few that single young women would ever try. The discomfort, especially at night, as cold air and rain blasted through the open windows and men relieved themselves anywhere, then crawled about, feigning sleep in order to grope the sari-bundled women: intolerable. If she spoke to no one and answered no questions and requested no favors-posed, in fact, as a tourist on the model of an Indo-American like Rabi-she prayed no one would dare bother her.

At a crossroads village south of Nagpur in eastern Maharashtra, near the Andhra Pradesh border-really just a cluster of tea stalls and a petrol pump called Nizambagh-prostitutes and their children, and maybe just desperate women fleeing their villages for work in cities, swarmed the parked row of long-haul trucks. The women were lined up, holding their babies, and the drivers lifted their lungis and the women climbed onto the running boards and performed their services. It was not a view of India from behind a limousine window. Anjali walked like a ghost past the trucks; nothing shocked her, nothing disgusted her. She could see herself armed with a knife or a gun, walking down the row of trucks parked at night and executing every single driver and his helper. If hell and all the citizens of damnation had an Indian address, it was here. If she ever saw Rabi again, she'd have something to tell him. Had he been here? Had he caught this picture?

Somewhere down south in Bangalore, drawing closer every hour, a luxurious neighborhood called Kew Gardens and an old lady named Minnie Bagehot waited with a room for her, she prayed, and an Usha Desai to give her a job bigger than her father's.

On a hand-painted signboard, she saw the arrows: west for Mumbai and south for Hyderabad, which she knew to be in the direction of Bangalore. It was a crossroads for her as well, two possible fates, different buses. She