Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [27]
He turned off the highway. A muddy trail led through a partially cleared forest to a construction site. The place was desolate. Workers' huts lay strewn about, but the various buildings seemed abandoned. Concrete had been poured for the shell of an apartment block, abandoned because of the monsoons or a sudden withdrawal of funding. Rusted iron rods protruded from the stark slabs. Anjali remembered the word: rebars. He stopped the car in a dark grove. This place too was familiar. Rabi had been here; she'd seen the picture. Black and white, to bring out the shadows, he'd said. He'd made it seem a dark and brooding place, ghostly in its abandonment. She opened the car door, prepared to get out and inspect it more closely, to enter the picture, as it were.
"We won't be bothered here," he said.
She turned and asked, "How do you know?"
"I drove in this morning." He'd reverted to Bengali, a language that robbed her of power and nuance. "I had time to find a place."
"A place for what?"
He snorted. "Our marital negotiations."
"What sort of negotiations would that be, Mr. Mitra?"
"Get back inside and close the door," he ordered. "What do you think? You're going to be my wife."
He put his hands over her breasts on the bright green choli under the dhoni-kali sari. "Everyone knows the kind of girl you are."
"Take me home, immediately," she cried.
He smiled that dimpled smile, then laughed. His fingers pulled the end of her sari down. "I don't want to rip your fancy cotton choli," he said. "Unhook it now." She refused, and he popped open the row of hooks, exposing her bra. It was her push-up bra, forced on her for this occasion by her mother. She pulled the loose end of her sari over it. He slapped her hand down and kept it there, on her lap.
"I am within my rights to see what I'm getting," he said. "Just like your American."
Rabi? she thought. I have done nothing with any American—or any Indian, for that matter. This couldn't be happening, not while she was wearing her tasteful sari. Isn't that how he had described her sari in the living room? In a Bollywood movie a savior would arise, the ghost of Nirmal Gupta perhaps, whom she'd laughed at with his goo-goo eyes every time they passed on the street. Just like the movies: the good, faithful, passed-over boy comes to the rescue of the virtuous but slightly too proud and headstrong girl, who allows herself to be compromised, but not fatally. Maybe this was her punishment for not taking Nirmal Gupta seriously enough, for underestimating that little letter he'd tried to write before the poison took over. She would say a prayer, "Ram, Ram," and Ram in one of his many forms would rescue her. She turned away and stared briefly at the dead slabs of concrete, but Subodh Mitra's hand on her chin pulled her back, hard.
"Look at me when I'm talking!" he commanded. "I asked around. I know about you and your so-called professor."
"You're crazy. Take me home immediately, Mr. Mitra."
"I did my research. We still have ninety minutes, and we've got some negotiating to do first."
"Don't even think—"
She started to speak, but with a flick of his hand, he slapped her. Not hard, but not an idle tap, either. He unhooked the bra and assessed her breasts. She tried again to cover herself, but he pulled her arms down. "Not much there," he said.
She began to cry, but tears wouldn't come. She knew his hands were on her breasts, pulling hard, then weighing them, like small guavas, and she thought of all the girls she'd envied, the mango-breasted, the melon-breasted, and suddenly the stench of decaying mango penetrated the closed windows, and she could see the husks of fallen mangoes all about the abandoned huts and around the car.
A voice that seemed to issue from deep in the forest commanded, "Do me!" and when she came back to her senses, there was Mr. Mitra with his trousers unzipped, and a pale, tapered thing standing up like a candle in his hand, a thing she knew of but had never seen, a long, tan, vaguely reptilian creature with a tiny mouth where its head should