Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [123]
Madam, by her own admission, was eighty-two years old. Madam's passing, therefore, was not untimely, but, and this is the but that beleaguers Dynamo: Why did she die Friday last? What precipitated the death? Who benefited from it?
If the attending physician is to be believed, Madam's "great heart" gave out. Dynamo counters the physician with a resounding "Poppycock!" Madam is known to have suffered from dyspepsia (both gastronomical and temperamental), but not from a dicky ticker. Dynamo demands an investigation of the factors that induced the shock that induced heart failure. Sources have implied
(1) that Madam's only servant was in the pay of a trustee and facilitated the fatal shock to his employer's inconveniently sturdy heart;or
(2) that the same servant accidentally happened upon Madam's lifeless body and alerted his powerful paymaster, who then instructed his henchmen to wreck the structure and purloin contents under the guise of a spontaneous riot by Bang-a-Buck's underclass.
Madam's death is a sad fact. But the true tragic victim of this incidence of plutocratic greed is the young lady-tenant of Madam, the innocent job-seeking migrant, who was mistakenly ensnared in a London-based terrorist plot—"implicated," in police jargon—and cruelly harassed and humiliated, her spirit scarred permanently. That young lady arrived in Bang-a-Buck to discover, fulfill, and exceed her potential; instead she became collateral damage of countenanced greed. Did "fearful symmetry," which the bard William Blake alerted us to two hundred years ago, require the extraction of such a price?
Dynamo's suspicions are just that: suspicions. By Madam's wishes, which she expressed in writing to the Bagehot Trust, she was to be buried on Bagehot grounds. No resting place is permanent. Her bones will be crushed or bared by developers' crews. But if there's to be a memorial for Madam, let it be this: Bagehot House surrendered its ghosts so that one young lady might break the power of our property triads. In an earlier column, I labeled such ladies "the New Miss Indias." They will transform our country. Dynamo is inflamed by the new species of tyger-lamb. If there is any triumph to be gleaned from this experience, it is that this time the costs of symmetry have been borne by ancient bricks and mortar, not by flesh and blood.
Anjali reread Dynamo's column this time as a love letter. She had mistaken Mr. GG's gallantry for indifference. He hadn't lost his desire for her. He had promoted her from a plaything to an ideal worthy of devotion. She read his "Tyger! Tyger!" again and again.
Clarity came to her with each rereading, especially of the closing paragraph. Dynamo was "inflamed" by her. She resolved to cross back to the colony of the living. In the monstrous evening at the police thana, Rabi had joked about the Peter Champion network. The butterfly effect. How lucky she was to have Parvati, Auro and Rabi for temporary family! Luckier still to have Mr. GG drop by so regularly. She wasn't sure what Dynamo meant by "the new species of tyger-lamb" or why he misspelled tiger, but he was "inflamed" by her. That word made her blush. She felt sexy and slightly dangerous. On the top left-hand corner of the clipping she doodled an ink sketch of a Royal Bengal tiger. It needed a signature. Mona Lisa, but not of the mofussils. Mona Lisa of Dollar Colony. Mr. GG, a second chance? Please?
3
Over the next couple of postdawn walks in the residents-only park and postwalk breakfasts of tea, fruits and yogurt in the garden, Rabi entertained Anjali with anecdotal histories of his mother, Tara Chatterjee, and her sisters, Parvati-Auntie and the oldest, the New York—based gadabout Padma. His mother ("A bit of a flake, you'd like her") was the youngest; Parvati-Auntie was "the responsible middle sister, and don't get me started on the oldest."
But he started with the two house dogs, Ahilya the female and her pathetically enamored littermate, Malhar,