Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [36]
Everyone but Angie Bose was on the move. She sat on her red Samsonite at the curb, dazed, hungry and confused. In her nearly twenty years, until meeting up with Subodh Mitra, she'd never felt overmatched. She'd made a joke of any challenge. But in less than a week she'd moved from the passive duties of childhood, waiting for marriage and adult life to begin, into something not quite like womanhood, without instruction. The immense journey and the enormous implications of her impetuousness remained. What-have-I-done? What-was-I-thinking? Nothing in her earlier life could guide her. Nothing was relevant.
Here and there, middle-class youths much like her—although most had alighted from express trains and had not sat cramped and halfstarved all night in a freezing bus, crossing deserts or steaming jungles—presentable young men in business suits and attractive young women with soft hands and letters of introduction and hearts set on making it in Silicon City, wheeled their bags directly to the taxi stands, around the burlap-covered mounds of produce and the jumble of cars and cycles, and through the crack-of-dawn mayhem caused by rural India assaulting the city.
Still sitting on her suitcase by the curb, Angie picked up a tattered English-language Bangalore newspaper and started reading. From the scowls and mutters of porters and passengers, she assumed she was being cursed for being in the way, but since they were speaking in Kannada or Tamil, she chose to ignore them.
She scanned the stories, none of them particularly relevant to her but all of them interesting and frightening, and she settled on an op-ed column by the paper's resident wit, "Dynamo." He declared that it was wrong to think of Bangalore as all "heartless materialism, lacking a proper respect for history." Dynamo claimed there was more passion—even knife play and gangs of hired thugs—behind every deed transfer in Bangalore than in Chinatown or The Godfather; more twisted connections between families than Faulkner ever dreamed of; more convolutions and memorable characters than in a Dickens novel. If Hindus buried their dead instead of cremating them, there'd be more crushed bones under the latest skyscraper than under the Great Wall of China. In fact, it could be said that history is proving to be Bangalore's most profitable industry. Every true Bangalorean is becoming an Arnold Toynbee. Every day in every municipal office, Bangaloreans are lining up to inform themselves of their ancestral stake in every deed transfer of the past two hundred years and how they might profit from it.
She did not relate to Dynamo's allusions to films or literature, but she was stirred by the evocation of reckless, even violent energy. If so many thousands—so many lakhs—had made the same decision she had, to come to Bangalore and start life over, and if she could regain her self-confidence and retain her stamina, then she had nothing to fear. She had good English and a quick smile. She had Peter Champion's two friends to count on. He had promised to write to them about her. From her curbside Samsonite perch, she could see scooters, auto-rickshaws, and bright new cars clogging every roadway, many of them driven by girls her age or younger.
What she knew was simple but profound. Energy and confidence create links between bright new cars, a rising ring of skyscrapers, and busy people clutching shopping bags with fancy logos. She wanted to be one of the people being waited on in upscale shops. She