Miss New India

Angles of light! And he's only my age! she thought.

The pace of his speech was picking up. 'Monet changed everything. He ended the tyranny of the subject. The medium became the subject, and the medium was light.' Faster, faster.

Slow down, please, she thought. I can't follow-you speak too fast. Tyranny of the subject? What does that mean? The medium becomes the subject; the medium is light? You walk too fast. You get too excited. You don't know how ignorant I am. 'He did the same thing with haystacks in different seasons. Usually I don't work in color, but I came out here yesterday at seven in the morning, then at noon, then at three, and finally at six, and each time the pink was different and the angle of light brought out different fractures and shadows… it was beautiful. Bihar is beautiful. Nothing in the world is as it seems-it's all a matter of light and angles. Anyway, even if it is a prison, there are lots of good pictures you can take from inside.'

'Not if you're a prisoner,' she said. Not if you don't have a camera and no one's ever taught you how to use one. 'What were you doing at Shaky's?'

'Is that what he's called? Shaky? That's cruel. But funny.' He had a broad smile, a lilting laugh. 'I was learning studio technique, putting in the dimples and taking out the frowns. It's very retro, but there's an art to it: setups, lights and reflectors. And those pull-downs are so cool, I wouldn't mind having a few. I gotta be prepared for anything, right? Maybe I'll end up doing weddings and baby portraits- not. Anyway, I'll be moving on in three days.'

She didn't understand a word, but the news of his leaving cut her like a slap. She was already imagining an inquiry to his parents, his visit to her house. 'That's very disappointing'-a bold thing to say. 'Why not stay? Why not keep the prisoners happy?'

'The rest of India's calling. There's Mumbai. There's Bangalore. I came to Gauripur because I heard there was an expat here. I met him, and I shot him-sorry, took his picture. I'm doing India's new expats-not the old Brits-and the gays, and the prostitutes and the druggies. And the villages. And the slums.'

'My teacher is American.'

'Yes, I know. We're everywhere, Anjali.'

'Angie,' she said.

They took a few more steps, Angie deep in consternation. What kind of boy was this? Why would an American want to be anywhere near the kind of awful people he shoots? Just thinking about them made her skin crawl.

'Let me show you something. Would you like to see a picture of the most beautiful woman in Gauripur?'

'Of course,' she said.

What girl could refuse?

He guided her to Alps Palace Coffee and Ice Cream Shop for a cooldown. It was a college hangout, but school was not in session and the AC was broken. When Alps Palace had opened, it seemed like the Gauripur equivalent of all the Mumbai Barista and American Starbucks coffee shops she'd read about, something chic and air-conditioned, with uniformed girls behind the counter. Now she saw it for what it was, another sad failure, run down and a little unsanitary. Rabi asked for a moist rag, swabbed down a table, and dried it with a handkerchief. Then he reached into his backpack and took out a folder marked Bihar and set out a row of black-and-white prints, matted under clear plastic. She barely recognized the subjects. Their very familiarity-Nehru Park, the college, Pinky Mahal-was their best disguise. Now she understood about the light. He was truly, as he'd said, a different kind of photographer.

In Rabi's photos, Gauripur was eerie, exotic-even its most familiar monuments. The marble dhoti-folds of the iconic Gandhi statue in Nehru Park were pocked, streaked, and spray-painted. The market crowds looked furtive and haunted. Five kilometers south of town, under a small dark forest of untended mango trees, Rabi had found a MODREN APARTTMENT COMPLEX-according to its signboard-that had been abandoned early in construction with less than one floor completed. A rutted construction road and a row of workers' huts disappeared into a cryptlike darkness. She'd never imagined anything remotely like it so close to Gauripur. He'd focused on rows of rusted iron bars-rebars, he called them-like twisted sentinels bristling from the concrete half-wall, disappearing into the shadows. She imagined cold, dank air, even in the heat of a Bihar May, issuing from its depths.

Rebar: a word to avoid.

It was a relief to anticipate turning to 'the most beautiful woman in Gauripur.' She expected something cheeky from the boy, cheeky and American. Maybe he'd show her one of the digital photos he'd taken in the studio and come up with some flirtatious opening, like 'You want to see beauty? Just look in the mirror.' She was prepared to slap him for it, but not too hard. A tapping, gentle rapping, like in the poem. A playful tap, like in the movies.

'Here's the woman I was talking about.'

Truly, he had not lied. Angie was staring at film-star beauty, goddess beauty, old-fashioned sari-jewelry- hairstyle beauty, deep, Aishwarya Rai beauty, twice the woman she could ever be. She was the most beautiful woman Anjali had ever seen.

'In Gauripur? I don't believe it.'

'And you know her,' Rabi said.

'That's a lie.'

'Right! Only I think she pronounces it…'Ah-lee.'' He seemed pleased with the wordplay. 'I guess you could say that men make the best cooks, and they make the best-looking women.'

'But you said 'she.' '

'Exactly,' he said.

Over the weeks, with some difficulty, Angie had begun to accommodate to what it must be like, romantically, between Peter and Ali, but this revelation was something new, outside her ability to process. In her reconstruction, Ali had been the abused and grateful village boy, and Peter the all-powerful American who had saved him from a life of squalor. She'd seen it as a variant of a normal Indian marriage between economic unequals. Virtuous and beautiful village girl; spoiled, rich city boy won over by her goodness. She hadn't understood it as profoundly sexual, as it apparently was, because she'd always considered marriage a protection against sexuality-obligation, not adventure.

'That's Ali by night,' Rabi was saying. 'By day he's a pretty enterprising guy. He started out cutting ladies' hair in Lucknow and then he worked wardrobes and makeup in Bollywood. You watch-some day he'll open up his own beauty parlor.'

'But those kind of men-they aren't-'

She started to speak, then paused, remembering swishy Bollywood characters who were in all the films-but they weren't to be taken seriously. You couldn't call them accomplished in any way. They were scared of their shadows. They dropped things; they were clumsy. They screamed when they saw a mouse, rolled their eyes and flapped their wrists and ran away from fights. They were put in the films in order to be laughed at.

Rabi stared back. 'What about them?' he asked. 'What aren't they?'

'They aren't servants,' she said. Servants don't suddenly open their own business.

Rabi was fiddling with a larger camera. 'And he's not a servant.'

In the next few moments, the true education of Anjali Bose began. Many seconds elapsed. She thought she was going to be sick. Many questions couldn't quite form themselves and went unasked. She was reassessing probability, rewinding the spool of her experience and discovering that she knew nothing. Something treacherous had entered her life.

'Oh, my God,' she said. 'I know him.'

'I know you do.'

The next picture on the tabletop was of Peter Champion, Peter the expatriate scholar reading an Indian paper in his dingy little room, with a blurred Ali in his servant's attire of lungi and undershirt behind him, washing dishes. Peter, whatever else he was, was a serious man. He'd devoted his life to things in India that were disappearing. He couldn't be laughed at. But as she kept looking, Ali came into focus. It was as though he'd taken a step or two forward. He wasn't washing plates-he was staring at Peter.

'I got real lucky. I came to Gauripur to shoot an expat, and I get a gay and a tranny at the same time. Who'd have figured, in a town like this?'

She could accept it. It even restored Peter's mysterious edge. Being homosexual-did Rabi say 'gay'?-was more exciting than being CIA, which is what the smart boys in her class assumed the American was. Tranny? She was afraid to ask. This tall, skinny Rabi with all his photos, the first boy she'd felt comfortable with, what was he? If all