Miss New India

girls. When old Shaky Sengupta had been a younger, steadier-handed roaming photographer without a back-alley studio, he'd taken Anjali's grandmother's photo, and then her mother's, and even the garlanded marriage photo of her parents that still sat in the middle of the bedroom dresser.

She was posed at a table in front of a Qantas poster of the Sydney Opera House, which could be replaced by All Nippon Airways pull-down screens of Mount Fuji and the Ginza district in Tokyo for additional shots; finally she was seated at a bistro table, with an unwashed espresso cup, in front of a Toulouse-Lautrec poster. The espresso cup had recently held sweet coffee. A fly struggled to escape the sticky residue. She kept her face a mysterious blank, saw that her silk sari remained uncreased, and allowed herself only five-minute breaks to dab the perspiration from her upper lip.

A British-era thermometer advertising Pond's cold cream read 121 degrees.

A tall young assistant lugged lights and reflectors. She tried to radiate allure from an imagined alpine cafe under a Martini & Rossi umbrella, with the Matterhorn in the background, while Shaky Sengupta, the palsied photographer, patted her face with tissues and tried to tease a dimple from a smile she could barely force.

'Never mind, I put in dimple when I take out frown,' he said, in English. 'Dimple very popular.'

Shaky Sengupta and his diminishing breed of Indian marriage photographers shared a total disregard for truth, passion, or integrity. Which is to say they were ideal enablers in the inherent duplicity of the marriage arrangement. Every girl was fetchingly beautiful in a prescribed manner. The camera and its expressive potential worked more like a shovel. The art was in the touch-up: slimming down the dumplings, puffing up the ironing boards, inflating bosoms, enlarging eyes, straightening teeth, and moistening lips.

The young assistant caught Anjali's attention. He was extremely tall and thin, wearing blue jeans and a plain light-blue T-shirt. He moved with grace and competence, and his Bangla was even worse than hers. It was he who set up the shots, arranged the reflectors, and measured the focus, doing everything that Shaky in his earlier years might have been able to do by himself.

When he bent down to clean out her espresso cup, he said, 'Studio sessions really suck, don't they?' His accent was pure American, without Peter Champion's decades in India to soften it. He had the longest, most delicate fingers she'd ever seen on a man.

'What did you say?'

A convincing American accent, easy enough to acquire these days in India though not in Gauripur, didn't give him the right to flirt with a paying customer. His major duty was to tell her how beautiful she looked. Instead, he was standing with his hands on his hips, insolently separating her from the pull-down screen of cherry blossoms on snowy Mount Fuji.

'What are you trying to prove?'

Now he'd insulted her in her zone of grace, fresh from the beauty parlor, in her uncreased silk. Indignantly, she answered, 'I'm not trying to prove anything.' She could feel the heat rising. 'Just that I'm a worthy bridal candidate.'

'No, you're not. Your heart isn't in it.'

'My heart has nothing to do with it. It's just a marriage photo. You're not wearing a silk sari without a fan. It must be fifty degrees under the lights!'

She saw him glance at the thermometer. So, she figured, he needed a metric-system equivalence; he might really be American. He stepped behind Mount Fuji and returned with a metal cup of cool water. As she gulped it down, he confronted the mountain. 'Everything's so fake, we ought to go with the joke.' He tugged down on the screen and the mountain partially rolled up, exposing other rolls of tourist posters, ladders, and chairs behind them. 'Voila!' he said. 'The Wizard of Oz.' She decided on the spot that he was a very kind, very funny boy. Was he available?

'Everyone knows I'm in a hot little studio and the mountain is just a prop.'

'Exactly! You're sitting like a corpse in a formal sari in front of a fake landscape. So if everyone knows they're fake, you should show you're in on it. A meta-marriage photo! You'd be the coolest, heat or not.'

Shaky Sengupta called, 'Restore mountain, please. No talking with subject.'

'A godlike mission, restoring mountains. See you after,' the boy said, pressing one long finger against his lips. 'My name is Rabi Chatterjee.' He squeezed the tips of her fingers. His hand was cold. 'I'm a photographer too. Only different.'

Chatterjee? A Brahmin, so marriage to a Bose was effectively out the window. She thought she knew all the Bengali families in Gauripur, especially those with interesting boys, even the Brahmins who these days couldn't always be choosy. She'd seen the ads, 'Caste no bar,' especially for the poor, less attractive, and less educated Brahmin boys or girls.

AFTER SHE CHANGED back to her jeans and T-shirt for the short walk home, Rabi was waiting. 'Let the fun begin,' he said. Before she could pose, there in the chaos of lights and reflectors and cables and halfrolled-up props, he took out a small silver digital camera and shot her, again and again. He promised her that the girl in his pictures was destined for a different fate than marriage, quite the opposite of Shaky Sengupta's girl with a dimple, in uncreased silk.

When they were walking along LBS Road past Pinky Mahal, he asked if she was really serious about finding a boy. He was the first boy her own age she'd ever walked with in public, alone, not in a student group. And probably the last. She answered hesitantly, wondering, as was her custom, if he was offering himself. He spoke so rapidly that his English sounded like a foreign language in a different cadence. She felt herself growing breathless, just trying to keep up.

'It's for my parents,' she said.

He stopped, turned, and stared. 'You're getting married for your parents? That's crazy.'

'Other people have said the same thing.' Of course, that one other person was American. She could get interested in a boy like Rabi, all energy and enthusiasm, with a quick mind, long fingers, and startling English. 'You know how it works. I don't have a say in it.' Then she wondered, Did he know how India worked? Despite his name and looks, he seemed more foreign than Peter Champion.

'India's on fire. If you get married now, you'll miss what's happening and you'll be sorry.'

Gauripur, on fire? Peter used to say that, and it still seemed funny. 'Bangalore and Mumbai might be on fire, but Gauripur is still in the deep freeze.' Then, on a perkier note, 'I thought I knew all the Bangla families in Gauripur. So where have you been?' Where have you been hiding? Why haven't you come forward and answered any of the ads? If she had to guess, he was one of those boys from boarding school, from Dehra Dun or Darjeeling, an Indian boy with international connections. Or maybe his parents were diplomats and he'd been raised overseas and gone to American schools.

'I've been in California all of my life.'

She laughed. 'Now that's crazy. Why would anyone from California come to a pokey little town like Gauripur? This is a prison!' She'd slipped into Bangla, just to slow things down. She was a little afraid of making a mistake in his rapid-fire American. His even-shakier Bangla fired her confidence. His long, skinny legs ate up the footpath; she had to run to keep up.

'You ask what I'm doing here? I'm having fun. When you're taking pictures, every place is interesting… every face is beautiful… every day's incredible and every night's an adventure… When you're looking through a camera, Gauripur's amazing. When I put my eye to the viewfinder, everything changes. I only see things, really see them, when I'm looking through the camera. They rave about painterly light in southern France… Ha! It's feeble compared to India. What is that thing called-Pinky Mahal? Just look at it! It's magnificent! Better than the Taj! It's your own Rouen cathedral. Monet would go crazy for it.'

Normally she would have nodded and smiled, afraid to show her ignorance. But she trusted the boy; he wouldn't laugh at her. He was the first person, with the slight exception of Peter Champion, who after all was still a teacher and her superior, to understand, even blunder into, her nascent yearning to be respected. 'Moray?' she asked. 'That's a fish.' A fish painted a ruined cathedral?

'Claude Mo-nay, M-O-N-E-T, the father of impressionism.' His tone was offhand, conversational, as though Claude Monet and his weird cathedral in a town in France were the subject of everyone's light-hearted conversation. 'I'd call him the father of photography too. He painted the Rouen cathedral at various times of the day, just to show the effect of different angles of light.'