Anjali didn't know what the house rules were because Minnie deployed them according to her whim. The only rule she spelled out, in a cross-stitched sampler that hung above the bookcase containing her collection of hardcover romance novels was
ALL GLORY TO THE BAGEHOT NAME
MAY IT NEVER BE DARKENED BY SHAME
Fortunately Tookie D'Mello knew everything and loved to share it.
On Anjali's second day in Bagehot House, Tookie said, 'We'll have to go out to Glitzworld some night. I know the bartender. That's my advice to all freshers in Bangalore. Get to know the bartenders.'
Everything in the old days had a white version and a black one. It was understood, by Tookie at least, that Minnie could afford the low rents and the weekly arrival of fresh mutton and brandy because of a secret agreement with certain local interests. Rolling off Tookie's tongue, 'interests' took on a sinister sibilance. These interests paid a monthly stipend (as long as Minnie lived and not a second beyond) in return for exclusive rights to the deed to the entire Bagehot compound, including the main house. The interests were patient; they apparently had many irons in many fires.
'The thing to keep in mind,' said Tookie, 'is that Bagehot House is a madhouse. The old lady is crazy. The rules make no sense. The grounds are haunted. The girls who live here aren't what they seem.'
Angie could go along with Tookie's cynical theories. In a country that runs on rumor, every event has its own powerful, unofficial motivation. Nothing is as it seems. Everything is run by dark forces. Back in Gauripur, Peter Champion 'had to be' a CIA agent. Always, a search was going on for a 'larger explanation,' but no matter how grand the invention, it was never large enough to explain the failures and disappointments. What else explained Peter's thirty years holed up in Bihar? Who knew what those same voices, the they-saids, 'knew' about her? Subodh Mitra had thought he 'knew' about her and 'her American.' Her parents lived in that world, the other side of the great divide.
But in Bagehot House, generations of otherwise discreet and well-mannered girls had constructed an alternative history to explain Minnie Bagehot and passed it on, with new refinements, down the generations. Minnie had poisoned Maxie in order to take over the house and grounds. No, said others, it wasn't poison. It was a stabbing, made to look like the dacoits' doing. It was well known, at least at the time-nearly sixty years ago-that young Minnie and even younger Asoke were having a torrid affair, stumbled into, or over, by the gin-dazed Maxie. Asoke even now only played at being a servant.
Barring mishap, Minnie might go on forever. She'd been a widow for nearly sixty years. Her mind was sharp, but seriously off track, dwelling only on defunct virtues like Shame, Honor, Duty, and Loyalty. ('God,' said Tookie, 'sounds like something out of the catechism!') Has she told you about the stable of elephants? The Prince of Wales and the rajahs and the nawabs and whatnot? And Rolls-Royces, and dancing guests plucking champagne flutes off gold trays? Just ignore them. The old girl wasn't there. Ever.
Minnie was eighty-two, give or take. She dropped the impression that she and her unnamed first husband, a colonel, had 'come out' to India from Dorset when the officer corps of the Indian army was still a recognizable offshoot of Sandhurst, all pukka sahibs in piths and puttees. She suggested he'd died during the Partition riots, protecting British wives and children. In reality, according to the alternative history compiled by decades of Bagehot House Girls, Minnie had entered Maxie Bagehot's life as a twenty-six-year-old divorcee, abandoned by the colonel after Independence and the turnover of the cantonment to the new Indian army. Maybe there had never been an official registry marriage with either man. Minnie was vague and forgetful about the documentary side of her early years.
Minnie and Maxie Bagehot: aka Mini and Maxi, a private joke among generations of Bagehot Girls.
In the Bagehot Girls' snide recitation of their landlady's handeddown life story, Minnie had never been to Dorset or anywhere in England. Minnie Bagehot was the product of the old cantonment culture, the untraceable interaction between an anonymous soldier and a local woman, decades or centuries ago. Minnie was Anglo-Indian, her mother a nanny, her father a stationmaster, and she'd set herself up as a domestic organizer (whatever that meant, but easily guessed, Tookie giggled) for British widowers and bachelors who'd decided to stay on. She'd known her way around the old Bangalore and she showed the proper firmness toward natives and deference to authorities. She knew how things were done and, more important, how to get things done.
She'd made herself indispensable to Maxfield Bagehot and eventually she'd made herself sufficiently irresistible to ensure her proper survival. He'd married her-or at least solidified an arrangement of some sort-sometime in the early 1950s, when he was in his seventies, with not many years or months left on his clock, and she in her late twenties. The champagne days of durbars and decorated elephants, foreign and domestic royalty, were long in the past, long before Minnie, old as she is, had arrived on the scene. At best, she might have sipped tea with the new Indian officer corps. Tookie could do a fair imitation of Minnie. 'Sikhs and Mohammedans, the martial races, loyal as mastiffs, not to forget those nearly white chaps, the Parsis and the Anglo-Indians.'
The old Brits like Maxie Bagehot knew that so long as their former underlings and aides-de-camp, the proud remnants of a once mighty army, were in charge, they'd be shielded from the rabid majority. Throw in a Gurkha or two and you'd have a functioning country. Everyone knew that India needed the bracing authority and esprit de corps of a military dictatorship, with some democracy around the edges. And just look at what we've been left with today. People
When Minnie moved into Maxie's house, he had been a widower with no reason to return to England. His grown children had decamped to Rhodesia and Australia, never to write or visit. A fine house, a loyal and underpaid staff like the adolescent Asoke, a coven of old friends like himself, early tee times, and a British army pension went a long way in those days. So long as the imported whiskey holds out, they used to joke. And Bangalore? Well, Bangalore was a splendid place, so long as the natives kept their filthy hands off it. Bangalore's weather, a year- round seventy-five degrees, with no bloody monsoon and no mosquitoes, was the clincher. No finer place in the Empire, they agreed, not that an empire in the expansive sense of the word still existed.
And so, as a Bagehot-Girl-in-training, Anjali took to heart her first set of instructions: nothing is quite as it seems. There are unbendable rules, but no one really knows what they are. 'Bringing shame' can mean anything the Old Dame wants it to mean at any given time. In fact, Anjali's little alcove room had been let to a girl from Mangalore named Mira, a 'fun girl' (Tookie's highest compliment) who got 'dumped' (the Bagehot House word for sudden eviction) for having come back from work at two in the morning. Nothing strange about that-but her mode of approach sealed her fate: she was on a motorcycle, clinging to a boy.
'My question to you is,' said Tookie, 'who's watching at two in the morning? Is the Old Dame an insomniac who sits by the window in the dark to catch rule breakers? Or does she force poor, overworked old Asoke to spy on us all night? Even the walls have ears here, so play it cool and close to the vest.'
4
In her first three days in Bangalore, Anjali calculated that half of her mission had already been accomplished. Maybe even more than half: she'd escaped Gauripur, crossed India, gotten to Bangalore, met a 'boy,' as her father would label Mr. GG, and secured a desirable room. Well, maybe more like a miserable half-room in a moldering but fabled residence. But when she wrote her first letter to Sonali, she didn't want to frighten her sister with tales of what she had witnessed in interstate bus stops on the long odyssey or sound superior about having a room to herself in a mansion and being served by a servant in livery, or having smitten Mr. GG, so she wrote instead that she had arrived safely; that Mr. Champion's friend, who owned a huge house, had rented a prettily furnished room to her; that she expected to meet Mr. Champion's other friend, who ran a job-training school, soon; that, once she had found her way around Bangalore, she would send little Piyali a typically Karnatakan toy. Then she added, as a P.S., the questions that burdened her most: 'Have Baba and Ma forgiven me? Have they asked about me?'
She could take time to get settled, rest, fatten up.
