Miss New India

whom Tookie identified as a TV celebrity. TV? Anjali thought, I haven't seen TV since I got to Bangalore! Who watches it, and who has the time? Their last stop of the night was Glitzworld, where Rajoo tended bar. Rajoo was Mister Too-Much all right: too pomaded, too flashy, too imperious, and too indiscriminately lecherous. With Anjali, however, Rajoo chose to act the gallant. He plucked her right hand off her lap when Tookie introduced them and held it up to his lips. She let her fingers rest on Rajoo's plump, moist lips, savoring a new confidence, wondering what did turn her on.

Young men were pounding the bar for more drinks. He ignored them. A scrawny young busboy brought out two trays of still-dripping glasses from the kitchen and arranged them by highball, beer, and wine. 'Lalu!' Rajoo snapped his fingers and pointed to heaps of plates and glasses stashed in plastic bins under the bar. 'Idiot.' He apologized to Anjali. 'What to expect? Your friend Sunita's stupid brother.'

Before she could respond-the very idea of Rajoo's hiring Sunita's brother and the possibility that Rajoo, from behind a bar on Brigades Road, controlled an empire of hirings and real estate placement sent her spinning-Rajoo leaned forward simply to stare at her face.

'You've got to say this about Tookie,' he said. 'She has the prettiest friends in Bangalore.'

7

Anjali took advantage of Tookie's new, almost fawning, admiration for her to set up a visit to the campus of Trans-Oceanic Services (TOS), Tookie's all-night home. That way, she reasoned, she would experience a day at a call center, gaining a decided edge over other students at CCI. Except for rare trips to her father's railway building in Gauripur to bring him a file or spectacles or acid reflux pills, she had never been inside a business office. And Bangalore office complexes were vaster, glitzier, scarier than the long dusty room with rows of wobbly wooden chairs and file-cluttered wooden desks in which her father had worked. Tookie acted eager to do Anjali a favor. Security was tight in all downtown glass-tower office buildings, but she would get her 'badass beau' Rajoo to call the head security officer of TOS. 'I'll switch to a day shift for the next couple of weeks, girlfriend.' She even offered Anjali a bonus: she would arrange for Moni, 'the Bengali Svengali,' to bump into her.

It was available, the world that she, Anjali/Angie, aspired to. She did aspire to it, didn't she? In any case, it was a challenge, and challenges turned her on. She had no idea of the entrance requirements, or if she had the skills and the stamina to stick it out. She knew only that she was a young woman with a very slight advantage, and she'd better grab Bangalore and whatever it offered, or else she'd end up living her sister's life.

On the morning of the scheduled visit, Rajoo showed up at Bagehot House to pick up Tookie and Anjali-in a chauffeured Jaguar. 'You sure make things happen, Rajoo. I owe you one,' Tookie said.

He acknowledged Tookie's compliment with a leer worthy of Bollywood cads. 'Give and take, take and give. That's what society is about, no?' Anjali hung back as they bantered. To her, Rajoo, in his indigo silk shirt, tight white slacks, and dyed-blue snakeskin boots, looked more Dubai than Bangalore. She couldn't visualize Mr. GG in such a getup. Squatter kids materialized from the green wilderness of the Bagehot compound to check out the fancy automobile. The chauffeur scrambled out from behind the steering wheel to shoo them off.

But Rajoo intervened. 'Like these wheels?' he asked, beaming at them. They moved away from the car and clustered around the flashy stranger, who was extracting a wad of rupees from the back pocket of his snug-fitting pants. 'It's a matter of giving and taking,' he explained to Tookie, who looked pained as he distributed a one- hundred rupee note to each of the kids. 'Not baksheesh,' he told them. They rewarded him with worshipful stares. 'Make it work for you. I'll be back to collect my cut.' Since he was speaking in English, the effect must have been meant for Anjali.

Tookie cut it short. 'Some of us working stiffs have cards to punch,' she snapped at Rajoo as they strode toward the car. Anjali followed.

'I hope you weren't expecting a Rolls, Miss Bose,' Rajoo joked, catching up with the women. 'Deep down, this capitalist is a Gandhian.'

It was Anjali's first-ever ride in a Jaguar, and she sank into the leather seat, savoring its aroma and its chauffeur's imperious honking, his lane-changing maneuvers, and his way of swearing at slow traffic.

When the Jaguar pulled up in front of the guardhouse of the TOS compound, the chauffeur leaped out and held the car door open for his boss instead of the women. Rajoo speed-dialed his contact in the TOS office tower before helping Anjali out of the Jaguar. Tookie was left to clamber out without help from either her nighttime fun-beau or his chauffeur, and get in place in the employees' line at the guardhouse. Intimidated by the elaborate security procedure, and feeling more Anjali than Angie, she stayed close to Rajoo. He sensed her anxiety and personally escorted her through the security post; informed the uniformed guard that she was not carrying cameras or tape recorders on her person; watched her print her name and address, Anjali Bose, 1 Kew Gardens, as well as sign into the logbook; took her visitor's badge out of the guard's hand; and clipped it to the shoulder strap of her purse. Since Tookie would be working a full shift, he even offered to send his car and driver back in a couple of hours so that she wouldn't have to take crowded buses back to Bagehot House. Give and take, take and give: he was practicing what he preached. He got off on power and gratitude. To show gratitude, she flashed her halogen smile at him, but she declined the ride back. 'I'll take a taxi,' she said, lying.

THE VISITOR'S PASS allowed Anjali access only to the roof floor cafeteria and the landscaped grounds of the TOS campus. Tookie had just enough time to give her a tour of the roof floor before reporting for her shift-this day, working as 'Tess' from Lubbock, Texas-in a monitored bay on the third floor of the tower.

The open-air cafeteria-cum-patio roof floor of the glass and steel tower was crammed with benches and refectory tables under broad, tasseled umbrellas. It looked like a luxury resort floating above a modern city, missing only pull-down screens of Goan beachfront hotels. Agents on break huddled over laptops, white buds in their ears, colas within easy reach. But when she walked past, they invariably looked up from the screen to size her up. They had to know that since she wasn't wearing a TOS employee photo ID around her neck, she wasn't one of them.

Without even trying, Anjali slipped into her high-wattage Angie persona. Angie was smart, sexy, and special. Angie's steps had a bouncy lightness, her posture an eye-catching swagger. She took her time crossing the width of the terrace to the railing, from which she could view landscaped lawns ribboned with concrete paths. Early- afternoon shadows cast by neighboring office buildings left dark prison bars on sunlit stretches of pampered grass. Young men and women employees strode the footpaths, chatting, leaning toward one another, but not quite touching. Malis and sweepers manicured the edges. Below her lay the New India: business-efficient, secretively erotic, and servant supported. She felt a rush of sympathy for the high-fiving, head-banging, hard-drinking friends of Tookie she had met on Residency Road and the Brigades. The call-center survivalist inhabits separate yet simultaneous lives. These were the luckiest times to be young, adventurous, and Indian. And the saddest for those like her, who knew she could be anything she wanted to be yet hadn't the foggiest idea of what she wanted.

Over the PA system a self-important voice announced, 'Paging Ms. Anjali Bose! Ms. Bose, please meet your party at the espresso machine! Paging Ms. Anjali Bose! Your party is waiting!'

Why was Tookie's team leader allowing her a break this early? Confused, Anjali turned her back on the poster-worthy view of New Millennium India and scanned the employees relaxing around the espresso machine. There were three women, two in color-coordinated salwar-kameezes and one in a snug Versace T-shirt and white capri pants, and two mustached young men in starched shirts and carefully pressed slacks, chatting and sipping, but no Tookie.

'Ms. Anjali Bose, please meet your party!'

A tall, lithe man, likely in his late twenties and definitely handsome, maybe even beautiful, approached the group by the espresso machine. Anjali liked it that he had no mustache. She liked even more the way his shiny black hair flopped over an eyebrow. She started walking to where the PA system was instructing her to 'meet her party' and realized that she loved the prominent biceps of the polo-shirted, chino-wearing beautiful man. He was holding a stack of magazines, each as thick as the Gauripur telephone directory, against his chest. The five employees acknowledged his arrival with smiles or nods, but he didn't join their conversation and they didn't make an effort to