Miss New India

4

At exactly nine on Monday morning, just as she had been promised, Anjali received a call from Usha Desai to set up an interview. 'I can see you at eleven A.M. on Thursday. The only other possibility this week would be three P.M. on Friday.' Though Peter's friend's voice was as soothing as it had been at Minnie's gala, her manner was more businesslike. 'I have to be out of town Tuesday and Parvati is busy all day Wednesday.'

'Friday, please. Friday is suiting me better,' she stammered, to give herself time to prepare for the interview.

'Do you know where we are located?'

A wilier student applicant would have done her research and found out not only the CCI street address but how best to get there by bus. Anjali was relieved to hear Usha Desai reel off the information in a nonjudgmental voice before Anjali could mumble no. 'Apartment 3B, Reach for the Galaxy Building, Reach Colony, Ninth Cross, Indira Nagar, Stage 1. If you say 'Reach Colony' to the driver, he'll know. Three P.M. on the dot, please.'

'Thank you, Ms. Desai. I'm much obliged.'

'Much obliged? You couldn't have learned that phrase in Peter's class.'

'No, madam. I mean, Ms. Desai.'

Usha Desai's manner softened. 'Peter broods over you like a mother hen, you know,' she confided before saying goodbye and hanging up.

Asoke appeared in the foyer just as Anjali was slipping out. He tapped the telephone logbook with the ballpoint pen attached to it by a red-and-blue crocheted cord. 'Incoming call. Please to sign.'

Reluctantly Anjali scrawled her initials, the time, and the date on the line Asoke indicated. Minnie might make an exception for calls to and from her 'darling boy,' but obviously not for calls to Anjali from the darling boy's business contacts. Anjali had reverted overnight from being Peter's special friend to just another Bagehot House boarder on permanent probation. But Anjali was no longer the impulsive, naive runaway whom Mr. GG had deposited at Bagehot House's rusty gates. Her father was dead. Dead of shame and heartache. Dead, cremated, ashes scattered in some muddy stream or more likely some ditch, since the ghats of the holy Ganges were too far away. She had murdered her father. She felt grief. Grief for her mother, for Peter, but also for herself. The source of true pity is self-pity. She'd read that. Her father had mistaken ambition for restlessness. Why was it wrong for a daughter to want more than what her father could give her? Why couldn't Baba have let her go instead of forcing her to run away?

NOT OWNING A Bajaj Chetak like Tookie's to zip around town and get to know distances between neighborhoods, Anjali miscalculated the time an auto-rickshaw would need to ferry her from Bagehot House to Indira Nagar. She arrived at the Reach Colony complex of buildings twenty minutes late for her three o'clock interview. At least she was looking head-turning chic, she consoled herself, in the designer shirt-and-slacks outfit she had borrowed without permission from Tookie's closet.

Reach for the Galaxy, a four-story building with aspirations to luxury, stood between two identical blocks, Reach for the Stars and Reach for the Universe. So that explained the colony's name. The apartment facades were painted with black-rimmed rectangles of bold colors: red, yellow, blue, and white. The top floors of all three were still under construction, bristling with bamboo lifters and half-walls of raw brick pocked by window cutouts, with outer walls waiting for their final coats of plaster and paint. The boxy balconies of the lower floors were littered with children's toys and draped with drying laundry. A team of uniformed malis watered a still-scruffy cricket pitch, while a construction crew worked to complete the second floor of a supermarket for the convenience of Reach Colony residents. The billboard map indicated a yet-to-be-built shopping center and Montessori school: the Bangalore dream, a self-contained, self-sufficient city for the affluent.

Usha Desai lived in one of the four apartments that took up the third floor. Galaxy had an elevator shaft, but the elevator had not yet been installed. Even the air was tinged with the smell of wet concrete. Anjali had a flash memory of crumbling Pinky Mahal: she had spent her life amid empty promises and the expectation of decay and dissolution. What must watching glass skyscrapers and shopping malls rise intact from hacked earth and churned rice paddies do to a child? At that strange dinner party of Minnie's, she had intuited the Bangalore spirit and blurted out her longing for it. But now, as she stood before the front door of apartment 3B, she wondered if she had the brashness to gut her Gauripur past. Except that she had already lost it. Peter had flown in just to inform her of that loss. Her father was dead. Her mother and sister had chosen to be dead to her. Moving forward was now her only option. The wooden nameplate on the door bore two names: DESAI DATA SYSTEMS and CONTEMPORARY COMMUNICATIONS INSTITUTE. She rang the bell and was let into the apartment by a maid who was about her own age.

'I hope you didn't have trouble finding the place,' Usha Desai said. Her voice was creamy-smooth, betraying no annoyance at Anjali's lateness. 'I should have told you that I live in a building that looks like a Mondrian.'

Anjali wasn't going to let on that she didn't know what a Mondrian was. She was here for one specific purpose: admission to CCI. Stay focused. 'It's almost like a painting,' Anjali offered.

Usha was wearing a gray salwar-kameez set this time, not an imported couture pantsuit, as she had at the Bagehot House party. A fifty-year-old with a teenager's body: Anjali marveled. She wore her graying hair in a bob and her reading glasses on a silver chain around her neck. Diet, exercise, authority, composure: she radiated self- discipline. And speed: she covered the long, narrow hallway to the parlor as though her legs were motorized. Anjali's mother and maternal aunts were plump, slow-moving women younger than Usha, quick only in perceiving slights.

Usha led Anjali through the parlor into a sunny, spacious room she called her office. It was furnished with a squat glass-topped desk, swivel chairs, filing cabinets, and a colorful Sankhera sofa and armchair set. Lined up, facing the windows, were two large exercise machines, which Anjali had seen advertised in lifestyle magazines that Tookie passed around, and a stationary bicycle. The windows looked out on a part of the Reach Colony that she hadn't noticed from her auto-rickshaw: a partly bulldozed strip of forest, and beyond that, an intact small village. Perhaps the villagers provided the colony's labor; or equally plausible, perhaps they ignored the encroaching urbanization altogether.

Anjali was about to invent excuses for her tardiness-a motorbike had bumped her auto-rickshaw?-but Usha cut her short. 'Let's not waste more time. I have a meeting in Electronic City later this afternoon.'

Parvati Banerji was seated at the desk, a stack of dossiers before her and more stashed in a leather tote bag, on which the letters PB were stamped in gold paint. Two large dogs lounged at her feet. They looked like groomed, pampered versions of pariah dogs. The larger of the two growled at Anjali. 'Chill,' Parvati commanded. She calmed the dog by stroking it behind the ears; then she shot Anjali an amused look. 'You aren't afraid of dogs, are you?'

'No.' She lied, but she didn't approach the desk. Anjali hadn't known anyone in Gauripur who kept dogs as pets. There were packs of stray pariah dogs, which lived off scavenged garbage, and fierce, unleashed German Shepherds owned by rich men to scare burglars off their property.

'How's Mrs. Bagehot?' Usha asked. She checked the large dial of the men's watch she wore on the inside of her wrist, and frowned.

'That was an odd evening, wasn't it?' Parvati added. 'The poor dear hasn't been out of her house in forty years.' She pulled a slim folder from the stack on the desk. Anjali assumed it contained information on her, though she hadn't formally applied to CCI. Probably the letter of introduction Peter had promised to send. Could Desai Data Systems have pieced together her bio?

'We don't want to rush you,' Usha said. 'But traffic's bound to be atrocious.'

Parvati tossed a treat to each of her dogs. 'Mind you, we're not biting the hand that feeds us,' she explained.

Usha checked her cell phone. 'We're all profiting from the boom in Bangalore, but we wish the city fathers would widen the roads!'

'Well, shall we get started?'

Usha flipped shut the lid of her cell phone. 'Hold on a sec. I have to make sure Mother takes her new pills.