Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [18]
What girl could refuse?
He guided her to Alps Palace Coffee and Ice Cream Shop for a cooldown. It was a college hangout, but school was not in session and the AC was broken. When Alps Palace had opened, it seemed like the Gauripur equivalent of all the Mumbai Barista and American Starbucks coffee shops she'd read about, something chic and air-conditioned, with uniformed girls behind the counter. Now she saw it for what it was, another sad failure, run down and a little unsanitary. Rabi asked for a moist rag, swabbed down a table, and dried it with a handkerchief. Then he reached into his backpack and took out a folder marked Bihar and set out a row of black-and-white prints, matted under clear plastic. She barely recognized the subjects. Their very familiarity—Nehru Park, the college, Pinky Mahal—was their best disguise. Now she understood about the light. He was truly, as he'd said, a different kind of photographer.
In Rabi's photos, Gauripur was eerie, exotic—even its most familiar monuments. The marble dhoti-folds of the iconic Gandhi statue in Nehru Park were pocked, streaked, and spray-painted. The market crowds looked furtive and haunted. Five kilometers south of town, under a small dark forest of untended mango trees, Rabi had found a MODREN APARTTMENT COMPLEX—according to its signboard—that had been abandoned early in construction with less than one floor completed. A rutted construction road and a row of workers' huts disappeared into a cryptlike darkness. She'd never imagined anything remotely like it so close to Gauripur. He'd focused on rows of rusted iron bars—rebars, he called them—like twisted sentinels bristling from the concrete half-wall, disappearing into the shadows. She imagined cold, dank air, even in the heat of a Bihar May, issuing from its depths.
Rebar: a word to avoid.
It was a relief to anticipate turning to "the most beautiful woman in Gauripur." She expected something cheeky from the boy, cheeky and American. Maybe he'd show her one of the digital photos he'd taken in the studio and come up with some flirtatious opening, like "You want to see beauty? Just look in the mirror." She was prepared to slap him for it, but not too hard. A tapping, gentle rapping, like in the poem. A playful tap, like in the movies.
"Here's the woman I was talking about."
Truly, he had not lied. Angie was staring at film-star beauty, goddess beauty, old-fashioned sari-jewelry-hairstyle beauty, deep, Aishwarya Rai beauty, twice the woman she could ever be. She was the most beautiful woman Anjali had ever seen.
"In Gauripur? I don't believe it."
"And you know her," Rabi said.
"That's a lie."
"Right! Only I think she pronounces it...'Ah-lee.'" He seemed pleased with the wordplay. "I guess you could say that men make the best cooks, and they make the best-looking women."
"But you said 'she.' "
"Exactly," he said.
Over the weeks, with some difficulty, Angie had begun to accommodate to what it must be like, romantically, between Peter and Ali, but this revelation was something new, outside her ability to process. In her reconstruction, Ali had been the abused and grateful village boy, and Peter the all-powerful American who had saved him from a life of squalor. She'd seen it as a variant of a normal Indian marriage between economic unequals. Virtuous and beautiful village girl; spoiled, rich city boy won over by her goodness. She hadn't understood it as profoundly sexual, as it apparently was, because she'd always considered marriage a protection against sexuality—obligation, not adventure.
"That's Ali by night," Rabi was saying. "By day he's a pretty enterprising guy. He started out cutting ladies' hair in Lucknow and then he worked wardrobes and makeup in Bollywood. You watch—some day he'll open up his own beauty parlor."
"But those kind of men—they aren't—"
She started to speak, then paused, remembering swishy Bollywood characters who were in all the films—but they weren't to be taken seriously. You couldn't call them accomplished in any way. They were scared of their shadows. They dropped things;