novel. If Hindus buried their dead instead of cremating them, there'd be more crushed bones under the latest skyscraper than under the Great Wall of China. In fact, it could be said that history is proving to be Bangalore's most profitable industry. Every true Bangalorean is becoming an Arnold Toynbee. Every day in every municipal office, Bangaloreans are lining up to inform themselves of their ancestral stake in every deed transfer of the past two hundred years and how they might profit from it.
She did not relate to Dynamo's allusions to films or literature, but she was stirred by the evocation of reckless, even violent energy. If so many thousands-so many lakhs-had made the same decision she had, to come to Bangalore and start life over, and if she could regain her self-confidence and retain her stamina, then she had nothing to fear. She had good English and a quick smile. She had Peter Champion's two friends to count on. He had promised to write to them about her. From her curbside Samsonite perch, she could see scooters, auto-rickshaws, and bright new cars clogging every roadway, many of them driven by girls her age or younger.
What she knew was simple but profound. Energy and confidence create links between bright new cars, a rising ring of skyscrapers, and busy people clutching shopping bags with fancy logos. She wanted to be one of the people being waited on in upscale shops. She saw girls her age wearing crash helmets and maneuvering their motorcycles between stalled cars and around bullock carts, and she was determined to be one of them. She had nothing to lose, no good name to tarnish. No one knew her parents, and her parents had no idea where she was.
All of this and more she learned during her first half-hour in Bangalore from a single newspaper left folded on a bench. Kids fresh out of college were the new managers. She noted their names, from every region of India. Boys still in their twenties were building apartment blocks. Girls in their twenties were opening lifestyle shops. Hadn't Peter Champion let drop that she could be earning a monthly salary bigger than her father's, and for what-just for exercising her only talents, conversational English proficiency and a pleasing phone voice?
'Need taxi, big sister? I carry your luggage to taxi, no problem, and make sure meter is working.'
Angie clutched her backpack even tighter. Her parents had warned her to be wary of Good Samaritans offering help in public places. In her parents' paranoid vision of the world, Good Samaritans were pickpockets working in teams of two. In Gauripur she had rebelled against this crippling cynicism, but not here in this bus depot. The young touts badgering her had been fellow riders on her bus, country boys, but they'd hit the ground running. They kept circling her, inching closer and closer. Then suddenly they melted away into the crowd of embarking and disembarking passengers.
A gang of older youths now menaced her. 'Need hotel, big sister? Clean room. Close by bus and train. Concession rate. Bherry, bherry respectable.'
She needed to sit tight and look composed while thinking through her immediate questions: How far is Kew Gardens and Minnie Bagehot's house from the bus depot, and could she afford an auto-rickshaw? She'd never been on her own in a real city. In Gauripur she'd always walked between school and home, and except for emergency trips to Dr. Triple-Chin Gupte's storefront clinic in Pinky Mahal (most recently for an excruciating ingrown toenail and before that for a hilsa fishbone stuck in the soft tissue of her throat), where else had she needed to go?
'Mind over matter' was one of her father's favorite adages. 'Where there's a will, there's a way.' So long as she didn't put all her eggs in one basket and remembered to look before she leaped, she'd be fine. Better than fine. She was not desperate; okay, she'd felt abandoned when the bus that had brought her to Bangalore pulled away from the curb, and, okay, okay, she'd panicked when the vendors and hostel touts had swarmed around her, but she hadn't felt despair. What she felt now… was guilt. Why had she had to hurt her parents to realize they cared for her, cared too much? Mind over matter, Baba. Silently she begged his forgiveness.
FINALLY A POLICEMAN approached and spoke to her in Kannada. The language sounded so alien, the tone so ambiguous, that she wasn't sure whether he was offering help or ordering her to move on. 'Kew Gardens?' she asked.
The policeman shrugged. He tapped her suitcase with his lathi.
'Kew Gardens?' she repeated.
Again he shrugged. He looked her up and down and tapped the side of the suitcase. After a pause, he said, 'Majestic.' Then he made a sweeping gesture with his baton. 'Bus stand, Majestic.' He pointed his baton at the line of auto-rickshaws a few yards away. Then he lost interest in her and sauntered toward a knot of boys selling toys from trays suspended around their necks.
Angie slid off the suitcase and pulled it to the auto-rickshaw at the head of the stand. 'Kew Gardens,' she announced, as though it was the only street in town.
The driver turned his head from side to side and helped her load the big red bag on to the narrow seat beside her. He took off, bobbing and weaving on a thoroughfare that would have been generously wide anywhere in India but here was too narrow for the variety of vehicles. Motorcycles darted in and out of traffic lanes, almost brushing her elbow. Hyundais and Skodas were twice the size of anything she'd seen in Gauripur. Mercedes-Benzes, liveried chauffeurs at the wheel, sped past. Huge American cars, many with women drivers, snaked around her auto- rickshaw. To avoid panicking, she concentrated her gaze in the direction of the footpath that had to run alongside the road, but the footpaths-
'How much farther?' she asked the driver in Hindi.
Without turning his head, he answered at length in one of the South Indian languages, extending his arm in an all-encompassing sweep. The only words she understood were 'soon-soon' and 'MG Road.' Another MG Road. Peter Champion once said, 'Every American town has its Main, Oak, and Elm, just like India has its Gandhi-Nehru- Shastri.' But Bangalore retained British place names too, like Kew Gardens and Cubbon Park.
'Hindi?' she asked. 'Don't you understand Hindi?' The auto-rickshaw was moving erratically through fast- moving traffic on a wide artery flanked by office buildings, government offices, and shops.
Finally the rickshaw lurched to a stop by a muddy puddle a couple of feet from the curb. All the buildings on that block were office towers, with street-level showrooms and fancy shops. It was barely eight in the morning and the shops were still shuttered. High-rise office buildings in Bangalore indexed their tenants' names on signboards visible from the street. The tall building immediately in front of the rickshaw boasted corporate logos of companies from twenty different countries, marked by their flags.
'This isn't Kew Gardens,' Angie snapped. 'I'm looking for a house, a private home. Bagehot House.'
'MG Road,' said the driver, smiling shyly.
He got out of his vehicle and gave the back tires vicious kicks. It was clear that the rickshaw had died. He held out his hand for the fare. 'One hundred rupees,' he said, this time in Hindi. She stayed put. He checked the rate card against his meter and asked again for one hundred rupees. It wasn't fair that he was demanding to be paid for dumping her who knew how far from Kew Gardens. A hundred rupees would pay for a month's to-ing and fro-ing in Gauripur. But before she could decide whether to complain or haggle, she got out on the street side, and the driver grabbed her suitcase with both hands and dropped it with a thud into the puddle in the gutter.
She flung a ten-rupee note at him. 'Go to hell!' she screamed in English, startling herself for saying something she would never have said in the old days. The driver's actual competence in Hindi, expressed in fouler words than any movie villain's, came pouring out, but he was quick to scoop the ten-rupee note out of the puddle and dry it on his shirt.
Angie rolled her suitcase past three buildings, wondering if Kew Gardens was anywhere within walking distance. It was not quite eight-thirty in the morning; the sidewalks were still relatively empty. No one to ask for the right way to Kew Gardens. No one who looked Englishor even Hindi-speaking. She'd seen only one major road in the center of old Bangalore, and she began to imagine the sheer extent of the city in every direction.
From the sidewalk she could make out an outdoor coffee bar with patio umbrellas on an elevated plaza between two skyscrapers. A gaggle of voices floated down to her, tinkly voices of hyperconfident break-fasters, chattering in American English. Finally, a language with familiar cadences! She climbed the stairs to the plaza and found herself in a crowded coffee shop. Not just any coffee shop, not another Alps Palace with mold blooming on water-stained walls: this was a Barista. Most of the small round tables were occupied by large groups of noisy patrons her age, dressed, like her, in jeans and T-shirts. Many of the girls were smoking, gesturing wildly, and giggling like schoolgirls. Except for vamps in movies, Angie had never seen women smoke in Gauripur. At the outer
