Miss New India

'We don't find anything wrong with it.' Parvati put Anjali's dossier back in the pile. 'Are you feeling better after that emotional detour?'

'My advice, whether you want it or not, is this: don't launch into a self-indulgent screed during an interview.' Usha extracted a sheet from a loose-leaf binder.

Screed: the day's new word. 'I'm terribly sorry,' Anjali said. 'I don't know why all that gushed out of me. It just happened. I don't mean to make excuses for doing badly.'

Usha handed the sheet to her. It was a photocopy of the poem 'The Raven.' 'Do you know what the title refers to, Angie?'

What a relief! 'A ray-venn?' she asked. 'A large black bird with a big white beak? Like a kite, or a crow?' She was back in Peter's apartment, the pencil in Peter's hand punctuating each word. Again, again, no, again. Without being asked, she began to read the sheet. The 'weak and weary,' the 'quoth the raven,' the 'never-more' all presented themselves fully formed, natural, without a pause.

'Peter prepared you very well.'

Did that mean she was too advanced for the CCI program? 'I still need training, madam.'

'Well, thank you for coming in this afternoon.' Parvati signaled that the interview was at an end.

'We'll call you. And please convey our good wishes to Mrs. Bagehot.'

On cue Kamini came out of the kitchen to show Anjali out. In the hallway, Anjali thought she overheard a soft laugh and something like the words 'Well, definitely not your cookie-cutter…'

5

On the auto-rickshaw ride back from Indira Nagar to Kew Gardens, Anjali went over and over the questions the CCI partners had put to her, how stupidly she had answered them, and how she should have responded. Husseina's prepping hadn't seen her through the actual interview. She was anxious to describe her experience to Tookie and get her feedback before Tookie left for her pre-work-shift bar-hopping ritual.

When she got back to Bagehot House, she changed into her own clothes before knocking on the barely open door to Tookie's room. All three of her fellow boarders were there, giggling and whooping about a column in Voice of the South, which was spread out on Tookie's bed. Sunita had found the paper on the top of the credenza in the breakfast alcove.

'Hey, girlfriend!' Tookie high-fived her. 'Take an eyeful of this! That Dynamo dude's got it right! Totally nailed us!'

Even Sunita managed an air-high-five and made room for Anjali on the bed so she could read Dynamo's column.

THE NEW MISS INDIA

By Dynamo

Dynamo this week is smitten. Congratulations to the New Miss India, Aziza Habib, selected last week in Goa by a panel of Bollywood heavyweights and at least one befuddled Hollywood B-lister, as the next Aishwarya Rai, self- evidently the most beautiful woman in the world. (By national consensus, any Miss India automatically doubles as the world Number One). Once again, the time-tested standard of Indian beauty has been upheld: simpering, doe- eyed, classically trained dancers in traditional attire (until they strip down to Western evening gowns and spike heels) in front of dozens of slobbering producers with checkbooks and film scripts at the ready.

My question: Which of these lovely ladies is more in touch with the soul of modern India?

Every week, Bang-a-lot (or maybe I should call it Bang-amour) receives (not 'welcomes') several thousand young women from every part of this great country. They arrive by plane, by train, even by intercity bus. They come from the great cities and the mofussil towns. From Lucknow and Varodara; from Gauripur and Dhanbad. They represent all religions, all languages. They come bearing school-leaving certificates, letters of reference from old teachers, but most important, bearing hope and energy that is infectious. They don't simper, they don't dance (don't ask them!), and they don't wear saris or evening gowns. They stride in comfortable salwars or in blue jeans, and Bang-amour had better get used to it and be grateful for them. Our torpid institutions-like Bollywood standards of compliance-will try to beat them down, but that train has already left the station.

While the moguls of Mumbai thrust their retro beauties in our faces, these call-center hopefuls manage to attract a smaller but more discriminating cadre of admirers. Bollywood has no use for India's women, apart from ornamentation. Far from Bollywood being India's international calling card, it cynically holds its 'heroines' and their vast male audiences in a stage of infantilism that should cause us great international shame.

Anjali read it through twice before Husseina grabbed the paper from her. Mr. GG had sneaked Gauripur into his column because he had fallen head over heels for her. Husseina said, 'This guy must be dating a customer-service agent.'

'You mean he's having sex with one?' Tookie grinned.

Anjali wasn't ready to let them in on Dynamo's identity-it was her special secret. She snatched the paper back from Husseina and read the column out loud, enunciating each syllable as self-consciously as she used to in dialogue drills in Peter Champion's advanced conversational skills class. How could her friends miss the obvious fact that Dynamo, aka Mr. GG, had penned a love letter to her, and to her alone? 'He says he is smitten,' she protested. 'Smitten, that's how he describes what he is feeling. Smitten's a chivalrous word!'

'He sounds more like an anthropologist to me,' Husseina countered. 'We didn't exist until he discovered us and talked us up. We're his newest tribe.'

Sunita missed Husseina's irony. 'Hip-hip, Dynamo! I'm very okay with being a new breed of working girl.'

'Please, career women.' Tookie corrected her. 'Dynamo's smitten with a harem full of career women.' She refreshed her lipstick and blush. 'Well, got to hit the Brigades so I can get through my shift. Anyone coming along?'

Husseina and Sunita declined, but Anjali eagerly accepted and hopped on behind Tookie on her Chetak. She was in the mood to celebrate Mr. GG's public homage to her. On the night of Minnie's dinner party she had been certain he would call her the next morning. No, she had expected him to surprise her by showing up at the front door of Bagehot House with a bigger bouquet than the one he had brought Minnie. What a sly suitor!

One of Tookie's co-workers bought the first round in the first pub; strangers bought the next several. A secret admirer (of Tookie or of Anjali-it wasn't clear which) bought them second drinks at the second pub; a leering man in a Ralph Lauren shirt bought the next; a plump middle-aged man wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses indoors bought a few more. By this time Tookie began to repeat what she was saying, and Anjali felt more like an Angie. After the third pub, Angie lost count of who paid for what at which club. This was only the second night she had tasted liquor. In Gauripur the fast boys in Peter's American English conversation group went out for beers after class maybe once a month, but they'd never asked her to join them, and if they had, she'd have been genuinely shocked. Women from respectable middle-class Gauripur families didn't drink, period. Her father drank local whiskey in private, as other neighborhood men who could afford to probably did. The really rich-and there were only four or five such families- guzzled, it was said, imported scotch and brandy in the back rooms of the Gauripur Gymkhana; menial laborers soaked up cheap country liquor in remote shacks on the fringes of town and apparently dropped dead on their way home. She'd read in the papers about illicit liquor distillers being jailed.

By eleven-thirty, when the bars were required to stop serving drinks, Angie was throwing up on the sidewalk. She couldn't remember any Bajaj Chetak ride back to Kew Gardens, let alone negotiating the steps from the front door to her room. At the lunch table the next day, Tookie gave her a big vitamin B-50 capsule and a lecture. There were two kinds of call-center boozers: big-city, upper-class practiced hedonists who could hold their liquor, and American-wannabe village bumpkins who got so puking drunk that they missed work. Angie prayed that Mr. GG hadn't witnessed her pub-crawling escapade the night before.

6