Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [0]
Bharati Mukherjee
Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
...
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part One
1
2
3
4
5
Part Two
1
2
3
4
5
Part Three
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Part Four
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Epilogue
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT
BOSTON • NEW YORK
2011
Copyright © 2011 by Bharati Mukherjee
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mukherjee, Bharati.
Miss new India / Bharati Mukherjee.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-618-64653-1
1. Young women—India—Fiction. 2. Arranged marriage—Fiction.
3. Self-actualization (Psychology) in women—Fiction.
4. Bangalore (India)—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9499.3.M77M56 2011
813'.54—dc22 2010025569
Book design by Victoria Hartman
Printed in the United States of America
DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Priya Xue Agnes Blaise
Which of us is happy in this world?
Which of us has his desire?
—WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY,Vanity Fair
Prologue
In the second half of the past century, young Americans—the disillusioned, the reckless, and the hopeful—began streaming into India. They came overland in painted vans, on dust-choked, diesel-spouting buses, and on the hard benches of third-class railroad cars, wearing Indian clothes, eating Indian street food and drinking the people's water. The disaffected children of American affluence: college dropouts, draft dodgers, romantics, druggies, and common criminals; musicians, hedonists, and starry-eyed self-discoverers. These weren't the aloof and scornful British administrators or the roustabout traders of earlier centuries. You could see them at dawn or dusk, pounding out their kurtas on flat stones along the riverbank like any dhobi or housemaid. These rich Westerners—the Aussies, the Canadians, the Germans, the Finns, but especially the Americans—the ones who stayed a few months, then years—lived like poor villagers; these rich Western kids sometimes re-sorted to begging and got sick, and others died from beggars' diseases.
Among them, one in a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, became reborn, with no interest in returning home. They settled down in towns and villages, learned the languages, and lived Indian lives. They took modest jobs with foundations and charities. They taught English and took to the countryside to collect music and folktales, arts and crafts. They married local girls or stayed celibate, and identified themselves with Indian needs and aspirations. Until connecting with India, their lives had seemed without purpose. Their real lives began in India—for all its bribery, assassinations, race riots and corruption. America had been wiped from their memory at precisely the time that young Indians were fantasizing about the West, wanting schools and jobs that promised money and freedom. We were hungry for America, but they were sated with it. They professed no interest in American wars, but when India stumbled, they mourned. They loved us more than we loved ourselves.
We thought Peter Champion was strange. In our tradition, professors carry their lectures typed on foolscap tucked inside dossiers tied with silk cord, and dictate them to students in a monotone, without looking up. Generations of students learned to rank their teachers by levels of flatulence: "elephant farts" for our Goan and South Indian priests, down to "mouse farts," a little gas that left a pellet of knowledge behind, even some wisdom. The two lay senior professors boasted of medals they'd won in college and alluded to grants that had taken them on epic mental journeys, in their relative youth, to universities in England or Scotland, where they had sat at the feet of Sir Somebody-or-other. They never let us forget that a chasm separated their legendary achievements from our wan potential.
But Mr. Champion joked about his average grades