Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [19]
Rabi stared back. "What about them?" he asked. "What aren't they?"
"They aren't servants," she said. Servants don't suddenly open their own business.
Rabi was fiddling with a larger camera. "And he's not a servant."
In the next few moments, the true education of Anjali Bose began. Many seconds elapsed. She thought she was going to be sick. Many questions couldn't quite form themselves and went unasked. She was reassessing probability, rewinding the spool of her experience and discovering that she knew nothing. Something treacherous had entered her life.
"Oh, my God," she said. "I know him."
"I know you do."
The next picture on the tabletop was of Peter Champion, Peter the expatriate scholar reading an Indian paper in his dingy little room, with a blurred Ali in his servant's attire of lungi and undershirt behind him, washing dishes. Peter, whatever else he was, was a serious man. He'd devoted his life to things in India that were disappearing. He couldn't be laughed at. But as she kept looking, Ali came into focus. It was as though he'd taken a step or two forward. He wasn't washing plates—he was staring at Peter.
"I got real lucky. I came to Gauripur to shoot an expat, and I get a gay and a tranny at the same time. Who'd have figured, in a town like this?"
She could accept it. It even restored Peter's mysterious edge. Being homosexual—did Rabi say "gay"?—was more exciting than being CIA, which is what the smart boys in her class assumed the American was. Tranny? She was afraid to ask. This tall, skinny Rabi with all his photos, the first boy she'd felt comfortable with, what was he? If all this intrigue was happening under her nose in a boring little town like Gauripur, where nothing was strange and nothing held surprises, among the people she thought she knew the best, then what was the rest of India like? Bangalore? Mumbai? She felt the terror of the unprepared, as though she'd been pushed onto a stage without a script.
What if, in the larger world, no one held true? What if everyone was two people at least, like Ali, like Peter?
What could she do but cry? It was involuntary. She wasn't sad or frightened. It was as if she'd missed a step in the dark and knew she was going to fall and hurt herself badly, but at that precise moment she was still suspended between here and there, between now and then, and Rabi snapped the picture. Years later, people would say that it made a beautiful composition, enigmatic, Mona Lisa—like.
When Rabi asked her why she was crying, she said, "I've seen more in the past two minutes than I have in nineteen years."
He said, "I'm eighteen. Photography teaches you everything."
She didn't have the foggiest idea of what he meant.
Nevertheless, that was the moment that sealed their friendship.
"When you look at great photos, you see the whole world in a context. The whole world may only be five by seven inches, and it might last only a five-hundredth of a second, but within that time and space it's all true, and it's the best we've got."
Angie Bose had lived nineteen years in Gauripur and was a year and a half from graduating with a degree from the best school in town, and no one had ever spoken to her about the nature of truth or art, or assumed she cared or knew anything about it. She knew there were plenty of pretty shots of the Taj Mahal—hard to mess that one up—and the Himalayas and animals and famous faces, but she'd never thought of them as plotted except in a Shaky Sengupta sort of way. Truth? Context? Composition? She'd never had a serious discussion about anything. She was the second daughter of a railway clerk; she was supposed to go to school, obey teachers and parents, graduate and get married, obey her husband, and have children. Truth was what the community, teachers, parents, and eventual husband said it was. Truths were handed down from the beginning of time and they held true forever, not