Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [116]
He wet his right index finger, opened the passport to its front page, and shoved it in Anjali's face. She jerked her head back enough to make out a passport headshot of Husseina wearing the Panzer Delight T-shirt she had traded with Husseina. "You are seeing name of holder, isn't it? Your good name but not face?"
How gullible she had been when she had given up her favorite T-shirt! "We could be sisters," Husseina had gushed, and Anjali had been flattered. No wonder Husseina had asked her friendly questions about her birthday and place of birth.
"What place of service she was in when you were her dear friend?"
"I don't know, I can't remember. She talked about house loans. I don't know what you're getting at."
"Your situation is very much compromised. Your stupidity is compounding already compromised situation."
"I think I'm going to throw up, sir. Please, please, I need a bucket."
He totally ignored her. He swatted the top of her head with the open passport. "Why you sell terrorist whore your good name and your clothes? Who is paying you? You will confess everything. Now!"
"Nobody paid me. We swapped clothes!"
"No money changing hands? Then how you are living? Bangalore is eks-pensive city, isn't it? Vhayr you are vark-hing? Per diem how much you are earning?" The older policewoman cracked a joke in Kannada, which broke up the detective. He lowered his voice to a lewd whisper. "Your hourly wage is being how much?"
"I'm still looking for work."
He caressed the passport photo with a pensive thumb. "Your name, but your friend's face. Very professional forgery. How that is happening? Where you are coming?"
Where do I come from? It was the question she most dreaded. He was really asking if she had parents or relatives or powerful friends in Bangalore who might intervene if she disappeared or if they attacked her. Had she really ever been in bed with a rich young man in his luxury apartment overlooking Cubbon Park? Otherwise, she was just another dog on the street. "Kolkata," she said.
"Why you are concealing true facts? You think senior detectives are dunderheads?" He reconsulted her slim case file. "Place of birth and previous residence. Gauripur, Bihar State. Detainee trying to pull wool on senior rank officer! Admit please, POB is Gauripur."
"Yes," she said.
"Name of father?"
"Prafulla Kumar Bose. Recently deceased."
He shuffled his papers. "No record of Anjali Bose. One daughter only, living in Patna."
Anjali tasted bile. She was stuck in the flypaper of her past. He popped his next question. "Why Bihar girl coming to Bangalore?"
"To find work," she said. It sounded lame even to her.
"You paid by mens? You prostitute?" Now he was leering. "I think yes. I think you prostitute."
There were no correct answers in this harrowing game of riddles. Of course not! she wanted to say, but honesty would be a trap. Saying nothing was a trap, as was saying anything. I will not scream. I will not cry. She swallowed back the vomit rising in her throat.
It was not happening to her. This is not happening to me; it is happening to Angie. I am a ghost.
Now the ghost had an answer to Angie's first Bangalore question: Yes, if crores are the new lakhs, a girl can fall ten thousand times faster and deeper than she could in Gauripur. In some new, undefined sense, they were right. She was a prostitute; she was living off men, using skills she didn't know she had in order to manipulate them, and she didn't see any other way of getting what she wanted. Marriage equated to servitude, like her mother's and sister's. But if not in marriage, how did a woman in Bangalore live?
If she'd had access to a radio or a television over the past twelve hours, she would have learned that the London-based husband of a Hyderabad-born Bangalore resident was being sought in Holland, Germany and Malta for plotting a grenade attack on the Heathrow ticket counters of Air-India and five other international airlines all serving Indian cities. The Indian press immediately learned his name