Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [21]
While her parents were fretting over the caste purity and social standing of interested probasi Bengalis with twenty-something sons, vowing this time they'd wipe out the stigma of their other daughter's divorce, Anjali was imagining herself in the real world behind Shaky Sengupta's pull-down screens. The beaches of Australia were beckoning, the Ginza, the Great Wall, why not? Even in Gauripur a girl could dream, especially a reasonably attractive girl with good English, a dimple and cleavage, and an adventurous nature.
The girl/woman in the portrait had nothing to fear from an uncertain marriage market. She would definitely find a husband. She could imagine the crashing of teacups around the world as thousands of bachelor engineers, the loose network of longing that had thus far yielded nearly fifty interested inquiries from half a dozen countries, checked out the new photo on Bengaliweddings.com. She feared having to go through with the Bangalore alternative. When Peter first proposed it, Bangalore had seemed the answer to all her fears and all her anger. Bangalore was a great game, a way of profitably using her English, avenging Sonali, and becoming independent, while picking and choosing among thousands of boys with good English and the same ambition.
But that was an innocent Anjali and a different Peter. That was before she got swept up in the marriage current and before her vanity was engaged. The Bangalore commitment meant packing a bag and sneaking out and admitting she wasn't desirable enough to overcome the stigma of coming from nowhere, and her parents' poverty. Her parents could live with another failed marriage. They could tolerate her misery so long as they felt they'd done their duty. But they would not survive the shame of a second daughter's act of defiance and insubordination.
4
She wanted to—no, she needed to talk to Peter about the photograph of Ali that Rabi Chatterjee had shown her. But she didn't dare; so one day Shaky Sengupta's bridal portrait in hand, faking jauntiness, she showed up—as she now thought of it—at Peter and Ali's. This was a forbidden visit, according to her father's newest rules, but at least she was in a sari. She presented Shaky's marriage portrait and waited for the response. "Well ... would you marry this girl?" she asked.
Peter frowned and then passed it on to Ali.
He checked it twice and gave it back.
"Who is she?" Ali asked in Hindi.
Peter said, "I think this picture is a monstrosity. So what kind of monster is it supposed to attract?"
He'd approved of everything she'd ever done. She was the model by which he judged all his students. She could only answer, "It was my mother's idea."
Peter stiffened. "Your mother, God help us. You're not a little girl anymore, Angie. If you get married—and I don't care how good he looks or what his prospects are—if you get married based on a picture like this, you'll get exactly the treatment you deserve."
She smiled, putting on that big halogen beam that always came to her rescue. "I met Rabi Chatterjee. He showed me pictures he'd taken of you. And Ali."
Peter frowned and looked away. He nodded at the mention of the photos but said nothing. No one was the person she thought she knew.
"Rabi Chatterjee is a serious young man. He has an indestructible ego—that's a good thing. I had one too. It means he's got the inner strength to stand up to convention. And he brings you along, into his wildest plans. He could be going to any college he wanted, so what is he doing? Walking to villages and taking buses and third-class trains. He reminds me of a younger me. He said, 'You can't take pictures of India through a limousine window.' His father happens to be Bish Chatterjee, and Bish Chatterjee happens to be the richest Bengali in the world, one of the ten richest overall—I mentioned him in B. Comm. Honors, but I never expected his son would be sitting in my rooms taking