Miss New India

'What place of service she was in when you were her dear friend?'

'I don't know, I can't remember. She talked about house loans. I don't know what you're getting at.'

'Your situation is very much compromised. Your stupidity is compounding already compromised situation.'

'I think I'm going to throw up, sir. Please, please, I need a bucket.'

He totally ignored her. He swatted the top of her head with the open passport. 'Why you sell terrorist whore your good name and your clothes? Who is paying you? You will confess everything. Now!'

'Nobody paid me. We swapped clothes!'

'No money changing hands? Then how you are living? Bangalore is eks-pensive city, isn't it? Vhayr you are vark-hing? Per diem how much you are earning?' The older policewoman cracked a joke in Kannada, which broke up the detective. He lowered his voice to a lewd whisper. 'Your hourly wage is being how much?'

'I'm still looking for work.'

He caressed the passport photo with a pensive thumb. 'Your name, but your friend's face. Very professional forgery. How that is happening? Where you are coming?'

Where do I come from? It was the question she most dreaded. He was really asking if she had parents or relatives or powerful friends in Bangalore who might intervene if she disappeared or if they attacked her. Had she really ever been in bed with a rich young man in his luxury apartment overlooking Cubbon Park? Otherwise, she was just another dog on the street. 'Kolkata,' she said.

'Why you are concealing true facts? You think senior detectives are dunderheads?' He reconsulted her slim case file. 'Place of birth and previous residence. Gauripur, Bihar State. Detainee trying to pull wool on senior rank officer! Admit please, POB is Gauripur.'

'Yes,' she said.

'Name of father?'

'Prafulla Kumar Bose. Recently deceased.'

He shuffled his papers. 'No record of Anjali Bose. One daughter only, living in Patna.'

Anjali tasted bile. She was stuck in the flypaper of her past. He popped his next question. 'Why Bihar girl coming to Bangalore?'

'To find work,' she said. It sounded lame even to her.

'You paid by mens? You prostitute?' Now he was leering. 'I think yes. I think you prostitute.'

There were no correct answers in this harrowing game of riddles. Of course not! she wanted to say, but honesty would be a trap. Saying nothing was a trap, as was saying anything. I will not scream. I will not cry. She swallowed back the vomit rising in her throat.

It was not happening to her. This is not happening to me; it is happening to Angie. I am a ghost.

Now the ghost had an answer to Angie's first Bangalore question: Yes, if crores are the new lakhs, a girl can fall ten thousand times faster and deeper than she could in Gauripur. In some new, undefined sense, they were right. She was a prostitute; she was living off men, using skills she didn't know she had in order to manipulate them, and she didn't see any other way of getting what she wanted. Marriage equated to servitude, like her mother's and sister's. But if not in marriage, how did a woman in Bangalore live?

If she'd had access to a radio or a television over the past twelve hours, she would have learned that the London-based husband of a Hyderabad-born Bangalore resident was being sought in Holland, Germany and Malta for plotting a grenade attack on the Heathrow ticket counters of Air-India and five other international airlines all serving Indian cities. The Indian press immediately learned his name and address in Bradford and his wife's in Bangalore. Investigative journalists of two Hindi-language papers, a Kannada paper, and Voice of the South reported that the Hyderabad residence, though deserted, had yielded significant evidence in the form of an abandoned laptop. The wife's supervisor in Citibank's outsourced mortgage-consolidation department confirmed to reporters that she had been questioned by authorities. The employee being investigated, the supervisor stated, had quit work an hour into her shift, complaining of dizziness, and had not reported since. The whereabouts of the missing employee were not known or had not been divulged by authorities. According to several reliable sources, the woman had not returned to her rented room in her Bangalore residence, historic Bagehot House, Number One, Kew Gardens, to collect her personal belongings.

A small-scale riot had broken out at Bagehot House. Aroused youth, Hindu nationalists, common criminals, sacked the ancient landmark and carried off much of its furnishings. The venerable owner, Minnie Bagehot, died in the encounter.

That evening, after Anjali had been booked and then shoved into a crowded, foul-smelling holding cell, she convinced herself that she was being justly punished. Her crime was that of constant, heedless wanting; wanting too much; wanting more of everything, especially happiness. Her greed and restlessness had fatal consequences. Her father had died to protect her.

She dropped to a crouch, back pressed into a wall splotchy with dull red, still-wet stains of paan juice and maybe blood, and hoped she blended into the crowd of drunks and addicts unsteady on their feet. But gaunt-bodied, wily-eyed, bawdy-mouthed women swarmed around her, sizing her up. Several signaled obscene messages to her with their tongues. A half dozen looked so young that they reminded her of the light-fingered boys she had guarded her cash from on interstate buses. A big-boned mannish woman, wearing a gaudy sari hiked halfway up her hairy calves, blew Anjali lewd kisses. Anjali, more terrified in the lockup cell than she had been in the interrogation room, tried to shrink into a tiny ball. Egged on by the large woman with the rubbery lips, others closed around her and poked and prodded her with their grimy sandals. Two of them grabbed her by her armpits and pulled her to her feet. In her new penitential mood, she accepted their slaps and punches.

Only the older detainees who squatted or lay on the grimy floor, some coughing blood, ignored her. This hellhole was where she belonged; the apartment in Gauripur had been a mirage of home. But how had she gotten here? She had been told by the two people she was most eager to believe-Mr. Champion and Rabi Chatterjee-that she was special, and in her mind being special had meant she deserved better, deserved the best. Ambition had ruined her; worse, it had disgraced her family. At least her father had had the self-respect to commit suicide. His obituary in The Gauripur Standard had omitted the cause of death out of respect for him, but Peter had let it slip. Mr. Champion had begged her not to blame herself for her father's death, which meant he blamed her. She had so distanced herself from the innocent hoping and longing of her Gauripur adolescence that she could no longer call him Peter, not even in her thoughts. How had 'Railways Bose' taken his own life? She pictured him hanging from the ceiling fan in the front room. She envied the corpse.

To a trust-fund Californian photographer who played at slumming, life in India might be all light and angle, but if you are an overreaching penniless Bihari, the light is murky, the angles knife sharp. Just last night she'd thought herself one of Bangalore's blessed, a Bagehot Girl. Knowledge, even self-knowledge, was cruel. Tookie was a prostie, Husseina a terrorist, and she a felon. She felt herself drifting to sleep, the willful shutting down of where she was and what she had become.

But her father wouldn't let her. He entered the holding cell, stepping over sleeping, moaning bodies as he approached her. He was dressed in the tawny cotton jacket he wore to work every weekday, crusty ridges of dried sweat radiating from the armpits. In place of his only wilted silk tie, he had a bed sheet knotted around his neck. He beamed when he reached her in her corner and, in a ritual gesture of blessing, touched the top of her bowed head.

The touch felt real because it was real. A policewoman was rapping Anjali's head with her knuckles. 'Stir yourself and follow me!'

12

Anjali was escorted out of the lockup cell and into the booking area where, looking conspicuously relaxed among curt constables and manacled prisoners, stood a Hawaiian-shirted Mr. GG. Seated next to Mr. GG on the only bench for visitors and joking with him in what, to Anjali, sounded like Punjabi was the detective who had accused her of 'abetting terror.' Mr. GG stopped in midlaugh and sprang to his feet as soon as he noticed her shuffling behind her uniformed escort. 'Miss Bose, rescuing you is becoming a full-time job!' he exclaimed, his voice upbeat,