Miss New India

offspring was neither an art nor a science. Horoscopes might correctly calculate astral compatibility. But marital happiness? That was in the hands of fate.

The volume of response to the new ads was overwhelming. Along with thirty responses from India, three letters arrived from Dubai, two from Kenya, one from Canada, and one from Mauritius: a village of Bengali bachelors strung around the world, working their computers. The long list selected by Mr. Bose was so promising that Mrs. Bose, in high spirits, secreted a slim wad of rupees and instructed Anjali to go to Calendar Girl in Pinky Mahal. 'Best to stay prepared for short-notice interviews,' she explained. 'They use bleaching creams and whatnot that last for weeks.'

While her mother prayed to the household gods, Mr. Bose shifted into high gear, even reading English ads and reopening old school contacts. ('Remember the Dasguptas in Ranchi? They had a boy, I'm sure. Anil, isn't it? I will write Deepak Dasgupta and ask after Anil…') and so on it went, letters sent out, responses coming back… the promising, the disappointing. Deepak Dasgupta wrote back, 'Our boy Anil is finishing MBA in Maryland-USA. I regret to say he intends to make his own match in the so-called modern manner.'

Which means he's already living with an American girl, thought Angie.

'I will spread the word in Ranchi about your lovely daughter whose picture is very simple and pleasing…'

The mailman too began to take an interest as he left off envelopes thick with bios and photos. 'Word is getting around, Big Sister,' he would say with an ingratiating grin as he handed Mrs. Bose manila envelopes with foreign postage. 'God willing, we'll be celebrating with sweetmeats soon.'

'That man is just interested in getting his baksheesh for delivering the right application,' Mr. Bose complained. 'These people want something for nothing.'

All of her life, Anjali had been made aware of the ways in which a prospective bride could lose her footing. In the Snakes and Ladders game of marital negotiation, a girl has a hundred ways of disappointing, then it's tumble, tumble down a hole or worse, like Alice in Wonderland. Leaving aside questions of incompatible horoscopes, rejected dowry proffers, ancestral scandals, and caste irregularities, a girl could lose points on the desirability scale for being too short or too tall, too dark or too fair, too buxom or too flatty-flatty, with eyes too small or too light, hair too frizzy, a personal manner too outspoken or too repressed, school grades too high (potentially showing too much personal ambition) or too low (indicating a potential hazard as breeding stock). Of course, a decent dowry can always smooth the edges. Needless to say, her father could not provide it.

Angie found 99 percent of boys simply unappealing. The idea of sleeping in their beds, bearing their children, cooking for them, sitting across from them and watching them eat and burp, and listening to their voices and opinions for a lifetime put the idea of marriage in a category with a life sentence on the Andaman Islands. Thirty boys rejected; none even progressed to the interview stage. 'I will decide who is good,' Mr. Bose now threatened. 'I've left you too much in charge. You are abusing a privilege that was never yours to begin with.'

She rejected the first batch of short-listed candidates on the basis of their photos alone. 'Look at those shifty eyes!' she'd say. Or 'He's fat as an elephant!' Or 'Eeesh, what happened to his teeth? He's wearing dentures.' Bald spots, double chins, hairy arms. She automatically rejected boys with fancy mustaches and sideburns, those striving for coolness in blue jeans and sunglasses, and those who appeared too goody-goody, too pretentious or too homespun. No pictures, please, with mommy/daddy or grandparents or household pets. No Man-of-the-People shots with servants. She detested foreign settings ('Here is a snap I have dug up from base of Eiffel Tower'…or 'Buckingham Palace'…or 'Statue of Liberty'…or 'Gate of Forbidden City'…). Those were the easy ones. But if a boy with outstanding prospects or handsomeness actually turned up, she'd make a show of serious scrutiny before complaining, 'He thinks too well of himself, he's posing like a fashion model.' Or 'A boy like that-if he's so perfect, why couldn't they find him a rich girl in Kolkata?'

'It's your fault.' Mrs. Bose charged her husband with this failure, reminding him of all the trouble with 'your other daughter,' reminding him of all of Sonalis prideful rejections of acceptable boys from reasonably good families. Sonali had imagined their soft, round, bhad-bhada faces aging into double chins, their bristly eyebrows that could only grow untamed ('I'm sure he's already clipping his ear hair!' Sonali had complained). And look at what all her rejections finally got her-a man too handsome for his own good, a man with glorious prospects and no accomplishments, a man who stole her dowry gold and made a mockery of marriage.

'Two daughters!' Mrs. Bose wailed. 'No jamais!'

After Anjali's final English conversation class-tuning up for interviews, she told her parents; prepping for Bangalore, she told herself-she informed Peter that this visit was to be her last class, her last public appearance in jeans and a T-shirt, her last day as a student. After all, she had a marriage-worthy English proficiency certificate, first class. Peter asked if she was perhaps having a bovine interlude.

'A what?' she asked, and he stared back.

'Cowlike,' he said. But she'd turned down thirty-five potential suitors, a few of whom under different circumstances might have been worthy of a follow-up; that could hardly be considered cowlike. But Peter showed no interest. She assured him that Bangalore was in her plans; she was only testing the waters, placating her parents.

He said his offer of help-meaning money as well as contacts, she wondered-for Bangalore was waiting, but it had an expiration date.

'When?' she wondered aloud.

'Soon,' he said. 'All right,' Peter said, 'one bonus private English lesson before Bangalore. Do you like poetry?'

She didn't, but she knew the proper answer.

'I want you to read this, and then recite it.'

Even the title confused her. 'What is a rawen?' she asked. How could she read it if she didn't know what it was?

'A raven is a big black bird like a crow that can get an Indian student hired or fired,' he said. 'You just said 'ray-wen.' Try again.'

She got it on the second try, and didn't mess up on 'weak and weary.'

'Good,' Peter said. 'You aren't too out of practice, Angie.'

And then she was hopeless on 'Quoth the raven, nevermore!' Two th's in a row? Back-to-back middle v's? She could cry. But Peter just kept tapping his pencil like a music teacher, muttering 'Again, again' until, exhausted, she got it right.

TWO DAYS LATER, shopping with her mother for mangoes and oranges, she spotted Peter at the outdoor market. She was about to lift her arm and signal, but no, she couldn't, not in a sari, with jingling gold bracelets. Angie-in-sari was Anjali, a stranger to her student self.

And she thought, just like a hundred generations of potential brides had thought before her, why all this talk of new sisters and new brothers and a new house in a new city and not a warning about a new mother-in-law to ridicule her while her new husband sits back and criticizes her sloppiness and cooking? Her promised resurrection into the state of marriage would be little different from her mother's and grandmother's, except that she had education and ambition, Bangalore-and Bollywood-size expectations and a wealth of ready-made suspicion, thanks to her sister's fate.

In the months as a full-time bridal candidate, she finally grasped enough of the world to place Peter and Ali in a kind of murky marital matrix. And to think, not long ago, she'd imagined herself in Ali's role as Peter's beloved. It was all fascinating, and just a little sickening. And with the revelation of Peter and Ali came dozens more complications, as though they'd all been lined up, waiting for her to open the door and see with fresh eyes: new combinations, weird embraces, convoluted sexual dimensions with higher peaks of improbability and deeper, more complicated valleys, like the wrinkly march of the Himalayas across Nepal.

3

It took three hours of sitting in a crisp silk sari at Sengupta's Marriage Portrait Studio, WHERE DESIRABLE DAUGHTERS MEET THEIR MATES, Gauripur's center of marital entrapment for the dwindling community of Bengali