Miss New India

middle of the night and left a note saying she would not marry the boy they found for her, and when she was ready she would write them again. We haven't heard from her in the past five years!'

How liberating it felt, creating characters, obliterating oneself, being a composite.

'Well, then, she's probably dead,' he said. 'Five years is a long time for an Indian girl to be gone. A girl on her own, bad things can happen. My wife had a job. A small job, mind you, office manager in a branch bank, one step up from teller. She could have done much better here.'

But Angie was already calculating the benefits of staying behind: why would any self-respecting modern girl come to India when she already had a job in the States? Being an office manager sounded like a worthy goal. Why would any childless wife give up America, safely removed from a nagging mother-in-law? But Mr. GG hadn't gone back to Delhi either. He'd taken off for Bangalore because making it here meant making it anywhere in the world.

'And what did you do in the States, Mr. GG?'

'I inspected buildings.'

'Then all this new construction must keep you very busy.' And very rich, she supposed. It was common knowledge that inspectors made more money than the builders and the architects because of bribes and kickbacks.

'Putting on a hardhat and pawing through pipes is extremely boring,' he said. 'It's much nicer staying inside my air-conditioned office, drinking pots of tea. Last night I inspected an enormous project in Djakarta that isn't even built yet. We live in a virtual city, Miss Angie, inside a virtual world.'

She couldn't tell if he was serious or just playing with her. The long story came to this: 'Forget all the clutter you see-Bangalore is the most advanced city on the planet. Let's say a Danish-Dutch consortium puts up a shopping center and apartment block in Djakarta, designed by a Brazilian architect. Dazzling plans, prize-winning stuff. It's going to be the biggest shopping center in Asia, bigger than anything in Japan or China. But none of those world- class thinkers really, intimately, knows the Indonesian building codes or the reliability of the supply chain or the union rules or a million other little things like plumbing and electrical systems and subsoil drainage. Are you with me so far, Miss Bose?'

She wasn't. She hadn't the foggiest.

'Of course.'

'Those are things known only in Bangalore. We have the building codes for every city in the world. We have ecological surveys and subsoil analyses for every square centimeter on the planet. So our back-office architects and engineers sit around their computers, modeling the buildings on special software, scan the blueprints, correct the budget forecasts and the deadlines, and then our financial guys run the numbers and we come up with a tighter figure. We can save our clients up to twenty percent. We don't budget for bribes and kickbacks. We're cleaning up the world, one shopping center at a time.'

His architectural consulting company, a Swiss-Canadian collaboration, 50 percent locally financed, was three years old. It had started with five architects who returned from the United States and five engineers, and now it employed three hundred people.

So he inspects buildings that aren't there, in cities he's never been to.

'Every business in the world is outsourcing. Without us, the world would collapse. Maybe in a couple of years some version of a Bish Chatterjee will come along and buy us out and we'll sit down and figure out the next big thing.'

Idly, she said, 'I know Bish Chatterjee's son, Rabi. Wouldn't we collapse without them, Mr. GG?'

'Hold on a second. You just said you know the son of Bish Chatterjee? I'm still processing that. How many Chatterjees are there in Bengal? A guess.'

'Crores,' she said.

'How many of them might be named Bishwapriya Chatterjee?'

'Lakhs,' she said.

'And how many Rabi Chatterjees and how many Anjali Boses, would you say?'

'Crores of Anjali Boses.' But maybe only one Rabi Chatterjee, she thought. She flashed a smile.

'Ah-hah! Very cool.' He smiled back. 'So technically speaking, some cognomen of yours has met the cognomen son of some cognomen Bishwapriya Chatterjee. Maybe you should be a lawyer. To answer your other question: yes, we would collapse without international collaborators. For a while, at least. Then they'd collapse without us.'

'You're very sure of yourself, Mr. GG,' she said, and thought, but was afraid to ask, What's a cognomen?

'I'm beginning to think I'm not nearly as brazen as you. That's a compliment, by the way.'

Bangalore was endless! Just when the tall new buildings began to fade, a new center opened up, a new satellite city with even more office towers, car dealerships, dug-up sidewalks, and cranes, with never a letup in traffic. If Mr. GG intended any funny business with her, it would have to be in front of thousands of people. But she couldn't imagine him even trying. He seemed a round-faced jolly sort, not like Subodh Mitra, whose profile reminded her of a long-snouted street dog.

'Have you seen Chinatown?' he asked, and she thought immediately, So that's his little game! That's where he's taking me. Back alleys, and men in pigtails. She'd read about evil Chinatowns, with their opium dens and concubines.

'I like sweet and sour,' she said. Gauripur once had a Chinese restaurant, run by a refugee family from Calcutta's Chinatown. Her parents took her there once and declared the food inedible, although she'd liked it, but it soon went out of business. 'Premature sophistication, misreading of the commercial environment,' Peter would say. Mr. GG was laughing. Apparently she'd said something funny, or else he was making fun of her.

'I was referring to an American movie. It's about how L.A. really got built. It's about power and deals and corruption and a lot of buried bodies. You can rent it some night.'

She remembered the newspaper article from that distant time a few hours ago, at the Bangalore bus station. 'Why should I?'

'Because you said you wanted to know what Bangalore is like. Well, it's a lot like L.A., but it took L.A. a century. They had a movie industry, and we've got hi-tech. We're both virtual and we've both got buried bodies, but we'll be a much bigger city in maybe five years.'

She really didn't understand. She'd used a computer in the da Gama Common Room, but only for games. Virtual was one of those frightening words. 'I have a question. What is an L.A.?' she finally asked.

'Oh, my God-and you say you're from Kolkata? It's Los Angeles. California. U.S.A. Hollywood, the poor man's Bombay.'

In front of pokey little shops where pariah dogs still languished in the sun, rows of posters proclaimed: AID PRESENTS: SITE OF FUTURE FIVE-STAR LUXURY HOTEL and FUTURE HEADQUARTERS OF (fill in the name) MULTINATIONAL CORPORATION, ending in the parenthetical (INDIA, LTD.). Painted signboards featured luxury flats underscored with prompts: SUBSCRIBE NOW! ONLY TWO REMAINING! Artist's renderings of strolling couples in a landscaped garden, flowers and fountains, and flashy cars pulling up-all in a place where nothing had yet been demolished or erected and no trees were standing. Future, future, future! And enough of the future hotels and headquarters had already been built and filled to lend credence to any claim. Every company in the world had to have a Bangalore address, and every modern mogul from India, Korea, Japan and the Middle East had to have a Bangalore condo or mansion.

'Who do you know in Kent Town?' Mr. GG asked. He acted as though she had no right even to know any resident of Kent Town. 'That's old money. The money's so old, it's moldy. It's so old, they still calculate in annas, not rupees.'

She hadn't realized that Kew Gardens was a street in Kent Town. 'I don't know anyone. I have a letter of introduction from my old professor to Mrs. Minnie Bagehot.'

This too amused him. 'A letter from an old professor who knows Minnie Bagehot. So, you've got powerful connections. You want to be a Bagehot Girl, then?'

For the first time, he sounded slightly interested in something she'd said. 'I didn't know there was such a thing. What does it mean-a 'Bagehot Girl'?'

'It means a very proper, upstanding girl from a very good family. Or it can mean someone who does a good