Miss New India

Bagehot's crackpot tests, she would ace very-new-millennium Usha Desai's. So long as Peter's rupees held out, she could tell herself that she deserved some downtime to escape the tyrannical gentility of Minnie's boarding house and explore the city, window-shop in the newest mall where Tookie bought her designer T-shirts, find her way back to the Barista on MG Road and this time order iced coffee with a scoop of ice cream, try Continental cuisine or sushi in a restaurant inside a five-star hotel. She wouldn't be procrastinating; she would be developing the composure and confidence that make for professional success. Her goal was to be relaxed, not just appear relaxed, when she presented herself to Mr. Champion's job-training contact.

Contact: noun. She remembered contact and mentor as loaded words in the most popular of the da Gama first-year B. Comm. courses. An adjunct professor, a recent graduate of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, had taught the popular course. He wore white three-piece suits and drove an imported Prius. According to his business card, which he distributed to his students on the first day of classes, he was the CEO and the CFO of CommunicationsFutures, Inc., which had headquarters in Gauripur and branch offices in Bradford, U.K.,and Hoboken, U.S.A., but he described himself as an iconoclast. 'Break your feudal habit of revering masters and elders,' he harangued his spellbound students.

Early in the academic year, he'd brought Peter Champion in to guestlecture on developing contacts and networking. 'Don't even think of tackling the job market until you have contacts with connections': that had been Peter's mantra. As a diligent student she had memorized the lecture's bulleted points, but until now she hadn't worried about whether they made sense. She hadn't needed to, because she was never going to be in the job market, Baba having already shunted her into the arranged-marriage market. Now she would have to put Peter's business counsel to a sink-or-swim test.

In the curtained privacy of her alcove, she lounged in a silk kimono that Mrs. Bagehot had lent her until she had time to go shopping, and she scribbled contact, mentor, neutral acquaintance, and personal friend as column headings in a new notebook she had bought at a variety store on the corner of Kew Gardens. Ms. Desai and Mrs. Bagehot were contacts. The Bagehot Girls were acquaintances for the moment, but they-at least Tookie and Husseina-might slither into other categories. She invented another classification: informal mentor. Rabi Chatterjee was a reach for any column in her book, since she hoped, but couldn't be sure, that their paths would converge again. She had known him for only a few hours, but she felt close to him, closer than she did to Sonali-di, because he had talked to her as though she was his equal in intelligence and experience. He had opened her eyes to the color and light shimmering under Gauripur's grit. She entered him in both the informal mentor and the personal friend columns.

She kept Mr. GG as her final entry. She savored going over and over again their chance meeting in the MG Road Barista, his offer of a ride to Kew Gardens, the long trip, and every word he had spoken during it… Was he nothing more than a transient acquaintance doing his impersonal Good Samaritan deed of the day? Could she get away with entering him as a contact with international business connections? In the best of all possible scenarios, he was a well-connected, deep-pocketed suitor. Why not? She created a skinny new column: suitor.

Peter would be appalled if he could see how she had expanded on his networking theory. His provocative critiques of Indian business models would have been hard for any student to ignore or forget. Peter didn't pull punches: historically, Indian society wasn't structured around networking and contacts, but rather around family and community. In backward places like Bihar, allegiance to family and hometown and religion and language group and even caste counts more than competence. Peter's lesson of a year and a half ago became a fresh revelation. He could have been talking about Baba. Even in Bihar, Baba's only friends were Bihar-born Bengalis. Everyone else was deemed slightly, or grossly, untrustworthy. Baba couldn't escape the community that he, and the three generations of Gauripur-born Boses, had known. But with his two daughters, even in Bihar, he'd failed.

So that was the secret of Mumbai's and Bangalore's great success. You work at KFC or Starbucks or Barista, and the person working next to you, and your boss, and the people you serve have absolutely no interest in your community or where you came from.

Like at Bagehot House. Before Tookie, Anjali had never been friends with a Goan. In fact, not with a Christian either. Her impression of Goans had been based on the teacher-priests at Vasco da Gama-dull, pious rule enforcers or rule followers, afraid of their shadows. And what of that mysterious group she'd always called 'the minority community'? Some of the workers in her father's office were Muslim. Back stabbers, her father called them-traitors and terrorists. Her father complained of their laziness, their four wives and twenty children. 'They don't work on our holy holidays. They don't work on their holy holidays. Next they'll demand time off for Christmas and Easter.'

Now she was sharing a bathroom with a Muslim and a Christian.

At their first lunch, Tookie had advised Angie to keep two boyfriends: one for the workplace, offering convenient rides and innocent companionship, and a fun-time boyfriend. Tookie's job-site-and-Barista beau was named Reynaldo da Costa, a goody-goody Goan who wanted to marry her before sleeping with her ('What a bore, no?'). Her fun-time guy was Rajoo, a local bartender ('A badass, but what a trip, man').

'How about you, Husseina?' Angie had asked.

'Oh, I have a fiance, in London.'

'Muslim girls-what to say?' Tookie teased. 'How do you know this fiance of yours isn't raising a big English family with a fat blond floozy?'

'I don't.' Husseina said that with a smile.

Buzley, buzlum.

***

USHA DESAI, Mr. Champion's friend, was Anjali's only reliable 'contact,' but Anjali held off calling her because… she was ashamed to admit it even to herself… she hoped Mr. GG would call and suggest a more exciting career option or spring her from the dull boarding house and fly her off to a foreign city for a surprise vacation: all that was possible in the Bollywood version of her life. She didn't call Mr. GG, of course-what sort of young woman, except a Tookie, initiates contact?-but she found the thought of calling him and flirtatiously playing the damsel in distress very pleasing. She knew she should be grateful that Peter had sent a letter of introduction to Usha Desai, which meant she was assured admission into this woman's prestigious career-training academy and, on completion of the training, a job that paid better than Baba's or Sonali's. But calling Peter's contact and setting that process in motion meant banging the door shut on all that could be, all that might happen if given a chance. Network, or trust intuition?

Anjali promised herself that she would call Usha Desai soon but procrastinated, her excuse being that she wasn't yet savvy about big-city office etiquette. She needed Tookie's and Husseina's mentoring before she made the call. She needed more time in Bangalore. She needed to study Tookie and Husseina closely so that she could pick up their ways of sounding self-confident, or at least professionally competent. She had made a little bit of progress, but not enough.

In Gauripur, she'd slept between Sonali-di and Ma, and after Sonali-di's wedding, just with Ma. In Bangalore, the dark, musty mansion was empty most nights, but for Mad Minnie and arthritic Asoke, because the resident girls were at work; sleeping here, surrounded by noises coming from the untended, overgrown grounds, terrified Anjali. Ghosts and monsters circled her. An angry Baba and a tearful Ma clawed the thin cotton quilt she pulled over her head. She needed time to overcome her fears.

Gauripur memories collided with Bagehot House nightmares. Smothering memories: the same neighborhood noises at the same time, day and night. Chopping the same vegetables from the same vendor at the same market, spicing them and frying them in precisely the same manner, eating at the same hour after her father's nightly three pegs, then piling the dirty cooking pots in the sink for the part-time maid to clean the next morning, putting away the leftovers, and going to bed by ten o'clock at her father's command of 'Lights out!' You could run away from home, but not from the rituals of family.

Some sleepless nights she looked down through the shutters at the grounds, now a jungle, but once the setting for croquet hoops and badminton nets. In modern Bangalore terms, it embraced just one city block, a few crores of value, but somehow it engaged the whole soul of India. Anjali heard the nighttime coughing and throat clearing of rural India inside the Bagehot compound. She saw cooking fires in the second floor of the broken-roofed garage that