Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [114]
The younger policewoman threatened in broken English to shut Anjali up with "tight slaps." She had a thin, mean face, a stout, muscular body squeezed into a khaki shirt and unpleated khaki pants, and huge, wide feet, judging from the size of her Derby brown leather shoes. Anjali feared the woman was itching to carry out her threat, but she couldn't choke back her dry heaves and grunts, not even when she heard the squeaky leather shoes stride across the room toward her. She steeled herself for the blows. What the policewoman did instead was grab her shoulders in a hold painful enough to make her shriek. Pleased, the policewoman relaxed her grip, thrust her fist down the back of Anjali's kameez, and pulled up its designer label. "Dubai," she sneered. Then in Kannada she launched into what sounded like mocking insults.
She recognized what had unleashed their taunts: her expensive silk salwar-kameez. It didn't seem to matter to her guards that her clothes were wrinkled and sweat-stained from day-long stress. In one day, that day, she had flunked out of CCI, witnessed mob fury, been accused of murder, and hauled off in handcuffs. She read her guards' minds: How did an unemployed working girl afford such a fancy wardrobe? Drugs? Who but loose women flaunt their bosoms and hips in tight, attentiongetting clothes? Whores! She sat as still as she could while the excitable younger policewoman patted her down with palms that felt as large, flat, and hard as Ping-Pong paddles, first up and down the length and width of the back, then over the front. Thick fingers pressed into her collarbone, swatted her breasts, rested on her nipples, and flicked them as though turning light switches off and on and off and on, flic\-flic\, and when they hardened, both policewomen burst into giggles. Without her cell phone, Anjali felt totally cut off. No one knew what was happening to her. Worse, no one would care that she had disappeared. They would assume that she had raced into new adventures. Helpless, hopeless, she prayed for the detective to enter the interview room. He would admit that the police had made a mistake—or a mistake had been made—and let her go. But where could she go when freed? She had no Bagehot House to shelter her, no mother and sister to console her, no lover to embrace her.
The door lock clicked behind her. She knew, from the guards' abrupt halting of their game, that a senior officer had just entered. Finally she felt safe. Her worry that she would just disappear when Bangalore had had its fun with her, that she would be just another anonymous body buried under the building boom, was over. She twisted around in her chair to flash her signature smile at the man come to deliver her. The man was good-looking in a jowly, hirsute way, about the same age as Mr. GG but taller and thinner. He wore a dark suit with a pink shirt and a paisley-patterned silk tie instead of a uniform.
The man took his time approaching the table and taking his seat across from Anjali. He took more time tugging his watch off his wrist and placing it on the table, and still more time lining up two identical ballpoint pens on either side of a notepad and a slim folder. To make room just where he wanted to put his things, he had to push away a cracked plastic tray that held a small glass carafe of stale-looking yellowish water and a plastic glass. When he was finally ready, he announced, "Very-very serious offense, Miss Anjali Bose."
"What offense? I don't know what you're talking about!"
"Very-very serious," he repeated before introducing himself as the detective in