Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [132]
It may have been an unconscious gesture, but with her left hand Parvati protected her throat. Twenty-two-karat gold glimmered between her splayed fingers. Anjali fled upstairs to her room in shame.
6
Early the next morning, a peon from Mr. GG's office arrived in a noisy auto-rickshaw with a letter and a bouquet of tiger lilies for Parvati. When Anjali heard the rickshaw brake to a stop, she assumed the passenger was Parvati's tailor, a bespectacled, professorial-looking Sikh gentleman who could no longer ride his bicycle to his clients' homes because of cataracts in both eyes. He stopped by once a week to drop off orders completed and to pick up lengths of fabric and sketches for new clothes. Auro kept him busy making dark suits for the office, linen leisure suits for dress-down Fridays, and colorful kurtas for evenings and weekends. For Parvati, who wore saris, he sewed choli blouses, coolweather capes, and caftans for family-only evenings at home. Anjali snapped up Parvati's invitation to let him sew a replacement wardrobe for everything she'd lost in the Bagehot House riot.
The earnest old man with milky irises copied avant-garde slacks, vests, jackets, and peignoir sets from fashion magazines. The frugal era of mall prowling and drooling over designer outfits on mannequins was over, at least for as long as she kept on the good side of Auro and Parvati. She was teaching herself a new two-step of Desire and Fulfillment. The tailor needed work to feed his family; Parvati, a compulsive benefactor, needed feel-good projects. Why couldn't the Dollar Colony matrons see that she was compulsively dispensing happiness?
But there were clouds on the horizon. The warnings from Dr. Ghosh. Parvati might wave them away, in her goodness, but Anjali couldn't. Objective outsiders saw her as something unsavory. Not just a small-town usurper, but someone with bad connections.
When the dog walker ushered Mr. GG's peon into the glassed-in breakfast patio, Anjali and Parvati were finishing their second round of Assam tea. Auro had switched to drinking strong Karnataka coffee since moving to Bangalore, but Parvati remained a tea snob. Anjali would have welcomed a huge caffeine hit that morning. She associated the smell and taste of brewed coffee with her first Barista cup during her first hour in Bangalore.
A heart-to-heart aimed at encouraging her to move out was inevitable, though Parvati, ever gracious, would deliver the "dump" notice obliquely. Anjali was waiting for the subtle questions: Your family must miss you so. Don't you miss your mother and sister? But Parvati procrastinated. She fed scraps of chapati to Ahilya and Malhar, who were sprawled on the dhurrie by her feet.
Ahilya stood, stretched, then laid her muzzle on Anjali's thigh. Do I pet her, rub her ears? Would she bite if I touched her? It was Anjali's first doggy moment.
Parvati launched into a monologue that sprinted from topic to topic, including her CCI lesson plans for the day, Usha Desai's mother's improving health, her fear that Dinesh was getting seriously involved with an international student from Norway, and the importance of getting fish oil and magnesium into people's diets, especially that of poor people. Her heavy briefcase was on the floor by the dogs, propped against a chair leg, ready for the driver to carry to the car.
Every few days she fed CCI questions to Anjali. "Keeping you on your toes," she'd say. Somehow, according to Parvati, whatever future she had would be attached to her ease with the English language.
The dogs made low growling noises when the peon, his terrified eyes fixed on them, approached Parvati. The peon backed away and took cover behind the dog walker. Anjali noted the dog walker's smug grin as he took officious custody of the envelope and bouquet, and laid the envelope on the bistro table. Parvati rubbed Malhar's broad bottom until his growl stopped. Anjali boldly scratched Ahilya's ears. "With these brave