Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [20]
She knew, vaguely, that worlds existed beyond the assigned books and lectures—Peter Champion would occasionally depart from scripted discussions in his corporate cultures class to sprinkle in asides on literature and history and politics, little moments no one paid attention to because they would not appear on examinations. She had learned a Russian word, Chekhovian, from something he'd said about the Indian social and political structure. But the idea that a mere child, someone even younger than she was, could show off such knowledge as well was unimaginable.
When she listened to her parents at dinner, she wanted to scream, "Life isn't like that! Nobody cares! It doesn't matter! Nothing matters!" Like any American teenager, she wanted to scream at her parents, "You don't know a thing!" But every day the same food was bought and every night it was cooked and served in the same way, and the same rumors and gossip were chewed over, the same questions asked, with the same answers given, and everything was meaningless.
"Did you have to fight your parents in order to come to India?"
From the way he laughed, she could tell she must have said something funny. "Why would they stop me? I've got an auntie in Bangalore, and I was with my mother's parents in Rishikesh until they died, and I've got my father's folks in Kolkata and cousins everywhere. The only hard part is finding a way of avoiding them. A billion people in this country, and it feels like half of them are relatives! Just imagine how helpful they'd be in tracking down gay bars and whorehouses! I went out with a bunch of hijras—a blast! Natural performers." What he referred to as a "gay bar" sounded like a happy place, but she wondered how a Brahmin boy from a good family would be admitted to a whorehouse, and when she thought of hijras and their leering made-up faces and men-in-women's-clothing and flowers in their oily hair, she felt sick. Performers? They were perversions!
They talked a bit about their parents, how hers were so loving and concerned, how supportive they were. Lies, lies! Ask me, and I'll tell the truth, but he didn't. He said he hadn't talked to his parents in weeks but sent them emails of some of his photos. She made her father into a bank manager, hoping that would impress; he said his father ran a kind of telephone company, but the man was housebound and partially crippled, and his mother wrote novels about India for American women. In their mutual inventions, they weren't so far apart.
"I was just thinking," he said, as he tore out a sheet from a pocket notebook. "My mother would love to sit down with you!" Why? she wondered. I'm nothing special. She was about to ask why when he announced, as if in explanation, "She is Tara Chatterjee." The name meant nothing to Angie except that Tara was a common enough first name and Chatterjee one of the few Bengali Brahmin surnames, all of which meant that there were probably a dozen Tara Chatterjees of varying ages even in Gauripur. He took in her blank look and laughed. "The Tara Chatterjee who writes, that's my mom. You mean you haven't read her stories? Anyway, here's my San Francisco phone number. And let me give you my auntie's Bangalore number. I stay with her when I am there." He scribbled a telephone number on the back of his San Francisco card. "You'll get there if you really want to," he said.
Bangalore? How did he guess?
***
THE GIRL in Shaky Sengupta's formal glossies was definitely not Angie. Not even a version of Anjali. In fact, as Rabi had said, there was no one there, and that, of course, triggered a new wave of interest. The nature of Shaky's art was to drain personality from the frame and replace it with fantasy. She'd always seen herself as too tall and thin, made for T-shirts and jeans, her narrow dimensions lost inside a sari. But Shaky's magic had managed the impossible, implying cleavage and billowy