Miss New India

Anjali reminded her mother that Sonali's long-lashed black eyes had fetched a lecherous cad who paid no child support and no alimony.

To marry her off was her father's Hindu duty: Anjali accepted that. Given her willful personality, he was eager to marry her off before she sullied her reputation and disgraced the whole family: she understood that too. She couldn't talk about her wants and fears with her parents, but she knew when to humor and when to defy them.

The matchmaking campaign began casually. Her father might come home from the office saying, 'Took tea with Mr. Pradip Sen this afternoon. He's looking for someone for his son.' Meaningful pause. 'Anjali, you remember the Sens, no?' And she might drop what she was doing, which couldn't be much, since she was fairly useless in the kitchen, and say, 'I trust you're not talking of Buck Tooth Sen. Good luck!' Little tests like that, easily deflected. And her father would shoot back, 'Sen is good family. Everyone is remembering Mr. Pradip Sen's maternal grandmother's brother, just a boy, was hanged by damn Britishers on Andaman Islands.' The formalities of matchmaking were conducted in English in the Bose household. Over breakfast Mr. Bose might linger on the page of marriage ads in the local Bangla paper, checking out the boys. 'Promising lad, engineering, awaiting U.S. Green Card.' The newspaper photo was reduced from a visa-size, visa-posed grainy black-and-white, rather insulting to her estimation of her prospects. She thought, They actually think this clerk-in-waiting is worthy of me? 'Shall I drop this young chap a line?' her father would ask, and Anjali, feeling more like Angie, would reply, 'You do that and I'm out the door, thank you very much.' They sparred and chuckled. Their girl had self-respect, which the parents considered a good thing; she was also a little willful, which was not.

Angie wrote to Sonali that things at home were much as usual. Grumbling, threats, entreaties, criticism, and promises: the whole parent-unmarried daughter bag of tricks. Nothing she couldn't handle.

Sonali warned that matchmaking might start as a small cloud on the distant horizon, but before it was over, the marital monsoon would break, and no one in the world could hold the floodwaters back. Anjali secretly looked forward to its destructive fury.

THREE MONTHS LATER Anjali was still in Gauripur, making excuses to herself. The pre-monsoon summer was at its zenith. Nothing moved, all was heat and dust, but two thousand kilometers to the south, seasonal low pressure had been sighted. Low pressure meant monsoon. Monsoon meant mud, cooler weather, and a temporary reprieve from mosquitoes-and it meant that the next school year would soon be starting.

A sudden marriage, outside of her control, could certainly occur. Nonetheless, she felt it was only fair to her parents to let them test the marital waters. The possibility of going to Bangalore on her own would be a monumental life-destroying-or liberating-decision. She needed time to plan. She had saved the cash from occasional money orders Sonali had sent her over the years, but it probably wouldn't be enough for train fare. Hiding even the slim stack of bills from a family intolerant of privacy would be a challenge. Maybe she could stash it at the bottom of one of her mother's 'just in case' metal drums in which was hoarded a six months' supply of rice, sugar, and lentils. 'Just in case' was her mother's mantra. Disasters are waiting; they can't be avoided, and there's no one to trust. Everyone is corrupt, with twisted values. Even Anjali's father came in for scrutiny: 'When bad times come again,' she'd say as they chopped vegetables, 'you think your father can save you? Hah! My father provided for my sisters and me. We never wanted, even in famine time. Five daughters all married, with decent dowry!'

'Buzley?' Did you understand?

'Buzlum.' Yes, I understood. This was Bose-family Bengali: an inside joke in an ancient dialect. But on this occasion it was meant to enforce. Do you understand what I am saying, and will you do as I say?

Buzley, buzlum.

The Boses were part of a remnant Bengali community inside a sea of Hindi-speaking Biharis. Angie's parents and three generations of once-prominent Boses had absorbed communal memories of riots and shop burnings, lootings, assassinations, and political scandal and had drawn a lesson from them. 'These people…' her parents would complain, sometimes saying nothing more-'with these people, what to say?' These people could be anyone outside of their tight, dying, small-town 'probasi' Bengali-Bihar community. Even other Bengalis-those exposed to the temptations of big-city Kolkata-were part of the plot against them. So was anyone not of their caste and general income level, or anyone with fewer than three generations of local roots, not to mention all minorities except maybe Parsis (not that any Parsi had ever stopped in Gauripur and stayed) and everyone from other regions.

'God, what I'd give for a little temptation!' Anjali used to say.

Even in Gauripur she had grown up on the modern side of a great national divide. From the backwater of Gauripur, she'd somehow caught the fever; she was part of the bold new India, an equal to anywhere, a land poised for takeoff. Her parents were irremediably alien, part of a suspicious, impoverished, humiliated India. How could they believe in the things they did and go through life hoarding food, denying themselves comforts, and delaying pleasure? How can you move ahead when all your energy is spent looking over your shoulder? They would never make progress; they were ill equipped for it. How cruel a fate, to be intelligent and ambitious and to crave her share of happiness-and to be denied the opportunity!

With her flawed Bangla language skills and no one to practice on except her parents, she'd always found herself attracted to Hindi movies, Hindi culture, and if it came down to it, Hindi-speaking boys. Bengali boys, like the ones in her ethnically isolated neighborhood, seemed too goody-goody, too cow-eyed. But given cultural patterns and long-nurtured prejudices, Mr. Bose would not consider non-Bengali applicants.

'No need to rush,' Anjali would say. What if there was a perfect boy out there? Didn't she owe it to herself to give it a shot? She still had time to see if her father could find him, the Perfect Him, a Lord Ram with a trim mustache in modern dress. She doubted he could. His imagination was limited to boys who would grow into men like himself, boys in white shirts with secure prospects in a moribund bureaucracy. She'd be fair to her father. She'd give him another six months. If it looked hopeless, if he couldn't come through with a fancy catch, then she would definitely sneak out of the house, go to Peter, and wheedle a counterdowry out of him, and send a postcard from Bangalore. Peter had made out Bangalore to be an asylum for bright, driven women from hellhole towns. Gauripur was a hellhole, but she didn't know if she met Peter's high standard for brightness, or desperation.

In the meantime, she could enjoy something new, the buzz of desirability, being the center of attention. Until the young Lord Ram was found, nothing that could enhance her beauty would be denied her. No new sari would be held back. There would be trips to the gold store, to Calendar Girl Hair-and-Nails Salon, even to the fancy hotel restaurant, just to be put on public display with her parents. She might even win the marriage raffle: get money and good-looking children from a sweet-tempered and handsome husband with loving in-laws. Then again, she'd never heard of such a marriage.

But a girl could dream, couldn't she? She could believe that she was still in control and that the orchestrated tsunami of marriage preparation could be reversed, that she had the power to call it off.

Now that it was time to marry her off, her parents reversed nineteen years of harsh assessments and suddenly expressed guarded approval. She could be advertised as modest and pliable, a flawless embodiment of Bengali virtue. Of course, she couldn't cook, dance, sing, or recite Tagore's poetry. But at least she wasn't a modern, citified, selfish materialist girl. Bihar was a sanitized bubble, far from the debilitating distractions of modern city life. Until the marital ax fell, severing her from all of life's promise, she would be the center of everyone's attention.

The monsoon was building, growing ever closer.

Her parents mandated that jeans and T-shirts could be worn only inside the house, early in the morning. After lunch and a beauty nap and bath, she was to appear decorous in a freshly starched sari, hair braided and decorated with flowers, eyes emphasized with eyeliner, face whitened with powder, in expectation of unannounced visits. After all-in the mutual ambush of marriage negotiation-a boy's parents might drop by, ostensibly to view the goods but also to assess the general character of the family, the quality of housekeeping, the mother's modesty, the father's authority, the spontaneous hospitality, the obsequiousness of the staff, the absence of ostentation. Certainly there was very little ostentation to worry about, and no staff to speak of, except a woman who came every morning to sweep the floors and scrub the cooking utensils used the night before and a boy who cleaned the toilet every afternoon. At dinner, Anjali's chapatis would be smeared with extra ghee to enhance her radiance, and sweetmeats (such as raabri, rasmalai, rajbhog, expensive treats the Boses would buy only when they had guests) heaped on her plate in the hope that she would add a little more weight in all the right places.