Miss New India

sandaled feet out of the car. Porch light glinted off the silver anklets.

'Be my-'

Then Mr. GG stopped himself. His face was so pleading, so pained, she almost got back inside. 'No,' he said, 'that came out wrong. Be whatever you want to be. If you don't want Mexico, fine. There's Indonesia. There's America. There's the world… I want you with me.'

What a sad, pathetic thing it is, a man's cry for what? Favors? Companionship? His private little prostitute?

She felt a surge of power. Glad she had the night watchman and the dog walker as witnesses, she kissed Mr. GG on the mouth. 'You'll be back,' she whispered, stepping out of the Daewoo. She was careful not to slam the door.

8

Sometime late that night, in the hours when Anjali never slept, she was startled by a sudden, piercing whine. One of the advantages of Dollar Colony was the silence of the dark hours: no cars, no rickshaw horns, no bicycle bells, no cowherd flicking a stick on buffalo flanks. She ran to her window, the one that looked out over the narrow lane, but saw no one. Then she realized the watchman wasn't at his post. He must have gone to the servants' bathroom behind the main house. And the dog walker? Of course: he was with Swati. He'd left the house unguarded.

And then she identified the source of the whine. By moonlight and dim streetlamp she could make out the shape of Ahilya lying on her back, her legs straight up. Anjali had never seen a dog in such a posture, and as she watched-and watched-Ahilya didn't move.

A white van prowled the lane at bicycle speed, then parked, blocking the driveway. Two men in dark, hooded sweatshirts descended from the van and silently opened the heavy iron gate just wide enough to squeeze through. In Dollar Colony, no commercial vans circulated at night. No one was on foot at two A.M.

Ahilya was dead.

Anjali's instinct was to lock herself in the bedroom. How could two men break into the house? There were many windows on the ground floor, the living room was a wall of windows looking out to the garden, but shattering them would make a noise. Parvati trusted her dogs to sound the alarm, but one of them was already dead, and Malhar, despite his bulk, teeth, muzzle, and perpetual growling, was innately timid.

She knew it was up to her to take the initiative. Auro and Parvati were asleep in their ground-floor suite. Even if burglars had driven a truck into the living room and begun demolishing the walls with hammers, Auro's snoring would muffle the noise. Anjali and Rabi shared the second floor, separated by a second living room, but she couldn't bring herself to open his door and enter, as he so jauntily did with hers. And what good would he be in a crisis? He'd want to take a picture. She opened her own door and listened with a kind of attention she'd never exercised, because the last thing in the world she expected was a stranger in the house.

And another thing: she knew, almost immediately, that she was to blame. If she had disappeared from everyone's life after the hours in jail, they'd all be safe. If she hadn't come to Bangalore, none of this would have happened. She had brought destruction on her own home, and on Minnie and Husseina and even poor Ahilya, and now the same thing was about to happen to Parvati and Auro.

It was Tookie, of course, and her new friends, and her Rajoo. Bang-a-Buck had got to her.

Anjali could hear the distant, muffled sounds of movement. She could picture the two men somehow cracking open the rear door, or cutting the window and not letting it fall to the floor to waken the house. She could imagine them now in the kitchen, perhaps with flashlights, then moving into the living room and clearing the tables of anything valuable… but when she ran a mental inventory of the downstairs tabletops, there were no valuables worth the effort of breaking in. They weren't like Minnie's tables, laden with 'priceless' silver trays, 'irreplaceable plates,' heavy sterling silver that had once graced the mouth of a king, and thinner-than-thin 'historical' crystal goblets and champagne flutes.

And then it came to her: the only valuables were the paintings, by the Bangla women artists. She had no sense of their value, but she remembered what Parvati's friends had said: the paintings were nice, of course, but such brilliant investments.

In the end it was an easy decision. I owe my life to Parvati, and my life is worthless anyway. Anjali lifted Dinesh's hockey stick from its place on the wall. It floated like a feather in her hands. The stairs were just outside her bedroom door, and as she slowly descended, barefoot, the noises, even the male voices, grew more distinct. They were in the downstairs living room. Why didn't Auro wake up? But of course, he snored too loudly. Some nights, she could hear him all the way upstairs.

No lights were on, but moonlight was pouring through the windows. The burglars had lifted two paintings off their brackets and leaned them against the wall, and with their backs to her, they were working on the next. They were laughing and talking loud enough to be understood, had she spoken Kannada, as though they'd been assured the house was empty. She knew the location of every chair and table in the living room; she could negotiate the passage to the far wall with her eyes closed.

The men half-turned, facing each other, in order to lift the painting off its hooks. And that's when one of the men must have seen her from the corner of his eye; he gave a shout and dropped his end of the painting, and their eyes met and she remembered his face, and that's when Anjali aimed for his head and let the hockey stick fly. It caught him between the eyes, across the bridge of the nose, and he screamed as a plume of blood shot straight out; then he staggered and fell. The second goondah dropped his end of the painting, and it flopped toward her, separating her from him as he frantically turned his head in every direction. He was cursing loudly, and she screamed back at him, in Hindi, threatening to kill him as she had his partner. But he kept the painting between them and she couldn't squeeze her way around it and the sofa it had glanced off. Please, Auro, she prayed, wake up, call the police, but the bedroom door remained partially closed. And so she screamed again, 'Thieves! Thieves!' in English, Bangla, and Hindi, and out of nowhere, from the darkened hallway behind him, Malhar leaped upon the man's shoulders, the low growl no longer a warning but a prelude to full attack. The thief fell, hands across the face, and the dog fastened on one wrist and shook it till the man's arm broke.

It was over in seconds. Both men lay in blood, moaning, and the bedroom door opened and Parvati, still tying the sash of her nightdress, cried, 'Anjali! What have you done?' Malhar was dragging his trophy by the wrist down to his hiding place at the end of the hall. And then Parvati saw for herself the damage, the paintings, the man at Anjali's feet, and heard the screams of the second goondah as Malhar pulled him into the shadows like a lamb bone to be gnawed over in the dark.

Parvati screamed. Auro shouted, 'Wha?' And upstairs Anjali heard a door close.

THEY HAD THEIR breakfast, or at least their tea and granola with yogurt, at four A.M. The medical vans had taken away the burglars. Swati and her sister had swabbed the floors.

Inspector Raja Venkatesh, known socially to Auro and Parvati, was on the scene. By Anjali's standards he was the perfect Bollywood police inspector: an aging heartthrob, efficient, trim, mustached, with epaulettes, graying temples, and perfect English. Even at four in the morning his starched trouser creases were knife-sharp, and his polished shoes reflected the kitchen spotlights.

'These guys are known miscreants,' he said. The second thief had been carried away, sobbing and trembling, as Malhar shadowed him to the door. The first goondah was in a coma from a fractured skull and had been carried out on a litter. 'No legal jeopardy attaches to your action, sir,' he said to Auro. 'Warranted self-defense.'

With her recent police history, better that Anjali not be a part of it.

'I trust the same immunity extends to my brave watchdog,' Auro laughed. He patted Malhar's broad bottom.

'Of course, sir. And my condolences for the other dog. Poisoned, no doubt.' He sipped his tea. 'I had no idea of your proficiency with a hockey stick, Mr. Banerji. Maybe we should be looking for you on the club tennis court?'

'Hardly.' He chuckled. 'Schoolboy skills.'

'So brave,' said Parvati. 'But I do hope the poor boy pulls through.'