Miss New India

chewed through the brocade upholstery of settees and gnawed on the heavy wooden chaises longues. Geckos darted up and down cracked statues of cherubs.

She was about to sneak out of the ballroom when a row of photographs along the far wall drew her attention. Unlike the usual commissioned portraits of vanished officers with their banana-skin helmets, these were wide, black-and-white landscapes, seemingly military scenes, framed in pewter. As she drew closer, she began to feel sick. Sari-clad bodies lay strewn along a riverbank. The faces were young, no older than she was. Bodies of Sikhs- you could identify them by their turbans-lay stacked like firewood, and walking among the bodies were uniformed British soldiers, grinning broadly. One had his foot on the head of a dead Sikh, striking the pose of the Great White Hunter. Maybe he was the young Maxfield Bagehot. She hoped he was. If so, all actions and opinions of Maxie and Minnie were unforgivable and all transgressions by Bagehot House boarders heroic. Another painting featured a distant row of hanged men, Sikhs with their hair chopped off, hanging by their turbans, silhouetted against the setting sun. Bagehot House was a museum of horrors.

She felt herself swelling with rage, then venom. There had to be a reckoning. She wondered if other Bagehot Girls over the years had taken the same secret tour, and how many 'dumps' resulted from their quiet acts of deliberate spite. She missed Peter Champion-he could have explained these photos. Maybe she was the first since Peter to invade this warehouse, to touch the objects and feel the blunt insult of history.

She was tall, and icy. Nothing could touch her. If Minnie had been standing at the door, about to invoke Bagehot House rules, Anjali would have pushed her down and walked over her bones. She slipped a silver goblet under her sweater. In school, she'd never really warmed to the history-book chapters devoted to India's 'heroic freedom fighters,' and the exalted statues of 'martyrs' to Indian independence had left her cold. There were families in Gauripur even today living off the glory of their great-grandparents' arrests and jailings. Now three old pictures had driven home an appreciation she'd never felt.

I am Indian, she thought. I'm Indian in ways no one else in this house is Indian, except maybe poor little Sunita Sampath. I have no roots anywhere but in India. My ancestors were hated and persecuted by everyone but themselves. I understand Sonali-di, even Baba. Finally, she had a test for authenticity: Which side of this picture are you on? Is your foot on my head, are you a hanged fighter, or were you laughing at the sight of men dangling by their turbans and women's bodies clogging the riverbanks? Everyone in my life has tried to change me, make me want something alien, and make me ashamed that I might not be good enough. Why should I want to change my name and my accent, why should I plead for a chance to be allowed to take calls from people who've spent too much money or driven their cars into a ditch?

She sauntered back to her bare cubicle in a better mood. At least now she knew she didn't have to be cowering and grateful. Minnie wasn't just the past-she was that thing the newspaper column had described; she was Chinatown, she was the bones under the building boom. Bagehot House was considered a respectable address, a first stop for young working girls. Bagehot House carried its own recommendation. Minnie was admired for running a no-nonsense boarding house that was good training for the corporate world, but there was nothing admirable about it. Anjali, who'd looked on the British period as a long comic opera, felt a sudden connection to all the Indian dead, and the indignities they suffered. She saw her parents still cowering and still recovering from the scars of colonialism and the dazzling new Bangalore as a city of total amnesia. And it was all a lie. House rules did not apply, not when dispensed from a Minnie Bagehot to a young woman like Anjali Bose. She wrapped the silver goblet in a T-shirt and stuffed it inside her Samsonite.

THE SECOND TIME Anjali tried the Contemporary Communications Institute, she again got the answering machine. But this time the voice on the tape informed callers that the institute's office was closed until the start of the next session, for which there were no vacancies. The answering machine did not accept messages. Anjali wasn't fazed. Usha Desai must have received Peter's letter about her. No way could the 'no vacancy' message apply to Peter's best student. In fact, she'd be disappointed in Peter's networking skills if Usha Desai didn't get in touch with her at Bagehot House instead of waiting for a call from her. Just in case the tape allowed it, she launched into an unpremeditated message: 'This is Anjali Bose, a student of Peter Champion in Gauripur. He sends his regards and told me to contact you as soon as I got to Bangalore. I am now at Bagehot House. The phone number is-'

But there was a click, and the dial tone came on.

THREE WEEKS INTO her stay, Anjali discovered that she was being charged the same rent for her closed-in porch as the other three boarders, even though those three had huge rooms, each with a high ceiling, an overhead fan, and a door that could be bolted and padlocked for extra security. So what if Sunita's sofa smelled of cat pee, or that the gilt-edged mirror in Husseina's room had a crack right down the center, or that bedbugs drove Tookie crazy?

She asked the others if she should confront the landlady.

'Confrontation is never the way,' Husseina advised. 'Never tip your hand. A dab of honey is always the answer.'

Tookie jumped in. 'Definitely, go with the honey. First few days, you're on probation. The old girl wants to make sure you meet her standards.'

'What standards?'

'Only the old girl knows. I think it's a low threshold of pain. My first week here a paying guest got kicked out because she picked up her soup bowl and slurped it instead of using the soup spoon. The old girl's a stickler for idiot table manners.'

'But there are dozens of rooms just on this wing. Why can't she open up another one for me?'

'Get real! Who knows what you'd find? I can't imagine what's behind any door. Snoop around for yourself. But if the old girl catches you, it's a dump for sure.'

'Have you snooped?' she asked.

Sunita looked up from checking her text messages. 'Wouldn't dare!' she exclaimed. 'The public rooms are strictly out of bounds. Verboten!' She was learning German from language tapes in hopes of getting an early promotion at her security company, which had just been taken over by a German conglomerate.

Tookie laughed. 'Why risk everything? As far as I'm concerned, the bottom line's all that counts. We may be inmates in a madhouse, but we're paying bargain rates because the old girl's stuck in a time warp. She thinks the rupee is still five to the dollar. In a newer boarding house, we'd be forking out twenty times more cash for pokey rooms shared with three other girls.'

'Actually, I have copped a look,' said Husseina. She cast a glance down the long, dark hallway. 'We might not be the only roomers in Bagehot House. We're Minnie's only paying guests, yes, but… I'll let you figure out what I'm getting at.'

'I took a tour,' Anjali admitted. 'You can't imagine the trash she's got down there.'

'I wouldn't call it trash, exactly,' the regal Husseina snapped. 'Unsorted, maybe. Like a museum without a curator.'

A museum of unsorted, uncurated horrors, Anjali thought.

They left the decision to Anjali with this final reminder: taking the risk of confronting Minnie might mean getting dumped, which was bad for the pocketbook, temporarily at least. But expulsion from the airless Bagehot House, with its cloistered secrets and ornate rules, promised a release into Bangalore's special freedoms-love and adventure. Minnie provided clean rooms cheap and a touch of the Old Bangalore prestige, but at a cost to one's self-image as a modern, quick-on-her-feet, funloving Indian girl.

5

Shh-she's talking to Maxie's ghost!'

The Bagehot House Girls had gathered at the top of the stairs at twelve noon, waiting for Asoke to sound the gong announcing tiffin, which was Minnie's term for the lunch-hour meal that she had Asoke serve them in an