Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [35]
Gradually the stops grew more frequent, the towns more closely connected, and the streets busier, even in the dark. Then, a few minutes after sunrise, they joined a long line of buses and pulled into Majestic, the open-air, bowl-shaped Bangalore bus depot.
She hadn't expected to start her new life half-frozen, exhausted, and starving. On the crowded intercity buses, she'd fought sleep all night, every night, guarding her precious cookie tin, which she held with both hands on her numbed lap. All she'd eaten during the week since leaving Patna were greasy samosas and scalding tea, which hawkers passed through the bus windows. Most passengers had either brought home-cooked food in tiffin carriers or gotten off the bus for hearty meals at roadside stalls. The spicy smells had tormented Angie, but she hadn't dared leave her suitcase unprotected in the luggage rack. The hard-sided Samsonite was too heavy to carry on and off the bus for food breaks. Now, as passengers elbowed her aside to lift their baggage out of overhead racks and stepped on her painted toes in their scramble to get off, the arrival in Bangalore seemed like the beginning of another ordeal.
Even from the side of the bus, at seven in the morning, she could see building cranes swivel, scoop up giant vats of concrete and tons of bricks, and reach into the dawn-bright heavens. Mechanical cranes controlled by a single man, not the long lines of women and children tipping their small bowls of concrete. The roads around the depot were already clogged with traffic. This was energy, something palpable that she'd never experienced, and it left her frightened and indecisive. She'd never witnessed "progress" or placed herself in its path.
Angie was finally standing and stretching but she felt unrefreshed; the dull ache of an early morning sun after a cold, wakeful night, the throbbing diesel clouds off a metallic ocean of dented bus roofs, the hundreds of vendors and laborers shouldering their bags and boxes, all with a purpose and a destination, drained her confidence. Unlike Gauripur, Bangalore had built its fancy bus depot far from the city center. This was the first morning of her new life, but it felt like death. Barely seven in the morning, and even villagers were loading their burlap sacks of fruits and vegetables and heading up the roads feeding into the city. All she had was an address on a torn piece of paper: Bagehot House, Kew Gardens.
She'd assumed South India (when she'd considered it at all) to be at least as backward as Gauripur. But Gauripur, and Bihar state in general, were exceptions to the industrious, prosperous north. South Indians were smart in math but too frail and pious to show much initiative. She remembered her Indian literature class, taught by a Keralan priest, in which she'd tried to read a novel by a southern writer named Narayan, set in a village—Malgudi, the writer called it—probably not too far from Bangalore. Father (Dr.) Thomas pronounced its characters the authentic voice of South India, as comforting to him (not even a Hindu) as sweetened rice, as healthy as fruit and yogurt, and as stimulating as thick, rich, steaming traditional coffee. The book offered nothing to her except the revelation that traditional Hinduism, one of the pillars of her parents' lives, was totally irrelevant to the life she wanted to live.
So, who was responsible for something as roaringly capitalistic as Bangalore? Certainly not diminutive vegetarians reciting the Vedas under a banyan tree. While still on the intercity bus, glancing out the window, she'd seen more crosses than she'd ever imagined in India. Christians, then? Certainly not South Indian Christians like Father "Elephant