Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [30]
Dearest Ma and Baba:
I will not marry any boy selected by anyone but myself, especially not this one. If this leads to a barren life, so be it. As you should plainly see, the boy you selected has dishonored me. He should be sent straightway to jail.
I am leaving this morning for Patna to see my sister, whose name you are reluctant to utter.
When I am settled again, I will write. The process may take many months. I am ready to take my place in the world. I beg you not to try to find me.
Your loving daughter, A.
She was Anjali. She could look down and see poor little Angie whimpering on her bed.
The dark alleys of Gauripur by night were unknown to her. The night air was even warmer than the stillness of the bedroom, and filled with groans and coughs and sharp words and the occasional horn—but many sounds were simply unplaceable, maybe the wings of bats, maybe just the creaking of the earth resting from the day's abuse, the brushing of thick leaves against one another, the urgent business in the bushes of dogs and men, rats and mongooses, the endless grinding of a million small claws and the hot breezes against tree limbs and rocks and movie posters nailed to every lamppost, and she thought then, as she often did, that ghosts explained it all, just as the stars at night or the face on the moon had told stories to our ancestors. Men sleeping on the broken footpath, a cast of nighttime characters invisible by day, playing cards under the streetlamp and making animal noises, calling to her to come for a drink (the last thing they expected to see, a determined young lady pulling a noisy suitcase over the paving stones down the middle of the street). The distance between her house and Nehru Park had never seemed so vast, and the park never so dark and full of trees and tall grass, the town itself never so small, disheveled, and evil smelling.
It was five o'clock, an hour and a half before dawn, as she reckoned it. A few lights were already on, servants perhaps, starting their masters' day. Her mother would rise at dawn and perhaps not even notice the empty bed until she returned a few minutes later, with tea. Then she would see the sari. She would pick it up and hold it to her face, and she would sense what had happened. She would do all this before waking her husband. Maybe she'd even find the letter before waking him. Would she be screaming, or crying, or would she coldly accuse her husband—"You see what you've done? No jamais, and now no daughters!" What would her mother do, what would she say? Anjali couldn't predict.
She stood on the footpath outside Peter's apartment. Five-fifteen. Five-twenty. Along LBS Road, the early risers were on the march: clusters of young men laughing and jostling; a troop of haughty langurs after a night of garden plunder, their tails high and curled, sauntering back to the safety of Nehru Park and a day of mugging for photos and begging for ground nuts; older men in khaki uniforms, on bicycles, pulling carts of empty, rattling milk pails; bedraggled rag-and-paper pickers bent under enormous burlap bundles; and men lifting a corner of their dhoti or setting down a briefcase and unbuttoning their suit pants to relieve themselves against the public walls. Municipal workers dumped cartloads of trash along the gutters, swarmed by dogs and pigs and curious cows and a row of squawking crows perched atop the public walls: the predawn stretching and coughing and nostril clearing of a small Indian city.
In an hour—the hour at which she was normally awake to begin her school day—the roadways would be jammed with all manner of vehicles, the noise level so high she'd abandon all hope of conversation, the sun already high and hot. She, who'd aroused such unwelcome interest an hour earlier, was invisible to everyone now. At five-thirty the