Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [24]
"Of course," he answered, a mite too quickly. "Anything you ask."
That's when she suspected he had special feelings for her, not that she could have predicted how far he would take it. It might have been love, but at the time it was merely a chit she could cash in. "If I gave you a new photo, could you take the old one off and put this one on the Internet?"
"What kind of photo?"
She showed him Shaky's portrait, the plump and dimpled Anjali at an alpine resort. "Can you put it on Bengaliweddings.com?"
All he said was "If you want me to." He took the picture, remarking only that "The portrait is very beautiful, is it of you?" And when she admitted that it was, just maybe a little deceptive, he said, "No, no. No deception. It does you justice," and within a day it was plastered across five continents.
As often happens to those who dither, waiting for that moment when all doubt and indecision would be suddenly resolved, that moment arrived in an unexpected way. The English-language ads had marginally improved the candidate pool; so had the original posting on the Internet. Fifty candidates had been rejected.
More to the point, Anjali had begun to educate herself in the secret ways of the heart. After the new Internet posting, she began receiving flattering inquiries from desirable countries on every continent. There were intriguing dimensions beyond her experience, and the movies she'd watched, and they were all open to her. There were men like Peter, without his complications. There were boys like Rabi and his hijras and prostitutes and gay bars. If she could hold out for a few more months, and if she could learn to value herself above what her untraditional looks and humble economic standing warranted, she might win the marriage lottery. In those months, while conforming to the predictable behavior of a bridal candidate and submitting to all the indignities of daughterhood, she clung to an indefensible belief in her own exceptionality.
THE FINAL EVENT followed the posting of her picture. Two weeks after Nirmal Gupta had put her formal portrait on the web, he'd gone to his bedroom with her picture and drunk a canister of bug spray. He began writing a long declaration of his lifelong devotion to a goddess he'd been too shy to approach, but he'd started the letter after drinking the spray and wasn't able to finish it.
The Gupta parents set their son's framed photo on an altar surrounded by flowers and brass deities. "He was always going to those cinema halls," his mother cried. "He was in love with a screen goddess."
They didn't recognize the portrait as Anjali's.
"The boy lost perspective," his father said. "These boys today, what to say, what to do?"
Buzley, buzlum. Anjali wondered, Did he even tell his parents he'd failed his entrance exams to an IIT?
SHE TOLD HERSELF, I owe it to poor Nirmal Gupta. I owe it to Baba and Sonali. I'll give them one last chance. She agreed to meet the next acceptable boy: number seventy-five. He turned out to be Subodh Mitra, the first boy to be brought to the house for inspection. His letter alluded to a distant connection to Angie's mother's sister-in-law in Asansol, a grimy steel-making center on the western edge of Bengal. "Yes, I remember the Mitras," her mother exclaimed. "Very respectable. Very well connected!" He was twenty-four years old, tall enough for a girl like Angie, clean-shaven and handsome enough to charm mothers and turn any girl's head. He held an undistinguished engineering degree from a prestigious school, but, according to his posted résumé, he had also earned a First-Class MBA degree from a business college in Kolkata. He'd worked a year in Bangalore at a call center ("customer-support agent," it read), but now he'd returned from the South, ready to marry and settle down. With family power behind him and connections in government, he would never be unemployed. If everything checked out, he would be a catch.
Even Angie could not manufacture serious objections. She'd exhausted every possible reason, both