Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [37]
All of this and more she learned during her first half-hour in Bangalore from a single newspaper left folded on a bench. Kids fresh out of college were the new managers. She noted their names, from every region of India. Boys still in their twenties were building apartment blocks. Girls in their twenties were opening lifestyle shops. Hadn't Peter Champion let drop that she could be earning a monthly salary bigger than her father's, and for what—just for exercising her only talents, conversational English proficiency and a pleasing phone voice?
"Need taxi, big sister? I carry your luggage to taxi, no problem, and make sure meter is working."
Angie clutched her backpack even tighter. Her parents had warned her to be wary of Good Samaritans offering help in public places. In her parents' paranoid vision of the world, Good Samaritans were pickpockets working in teams of two. In Gauripur she had rebelled against this crippling cynicism, but not here in this bus depot. The young touts badgering her had been fellow riders on her bus, country boys, but they'd hit the ground running. They kept circling her, inching closer and closer. Then suddenly they melted away into the crowd of embarking and disembarking passengers.
A gang of older youths now menaced her. "Need hotel, big sister? Clean room. Close by bus and train. Concession rate. Bherry, bherry respectable."
She needed to sit tight and look composed while thinking through her immediate questions: How far is Kew Gardens and Minnie Bagehot's house from the bus depot, and could she afford an auto-rickshaw? She'd never been on her own in a real city. In Gauripur she'd always walked between school and home, and except for emergency trips to Dr. Triple-Chin Gupte's storefront clinic in Pinky Mahal (most recently for an excruciating ingrown toenail and before that for a hilsa fishbone stuck in the soft tissue of her throat), where else had she needed to go?
"Mind over matter" was one of her father's favorite adages. "Where there's a will, there's a way." So long as she didn't put all her eggs in one basket and remembered to look before she leaped, she'd be fine. Better than fine. She was not desperate; okay, she'd felt abandoned when the bus that had brought her to Bangalore pulled away from the curb, and, okay, okay, she'd panicked when the vendors and hostel touts had swarmed around her, but she hadn't felt despair. What she felt now ... was guilt. Why had she had to hurt her parents to realize they cared for her, cared too much? Mind over matter, Baba. Silently she begged his forgiveness.
FINALLY A POLICEMAN approached and spoke to her in Kannada. The language sounded so alien, the tone so ambiguous, that she wasn't sure whether he was offering help or ordering her to move on. "Kew Gardens?" she asked.
The policeman shrugged. He tapped her suitcase with his lathi.
"Kew Gardens?" she repeated.
Again he shrugged. He looked her up and down and tapped the side of the suitcase. After a pause, he said, "Majestic." Then he made a sweeping gesture with his baton. "Bus stand, Majestic." He pointed his baton at the line of auto-rickshaws a few yards away. Then he lost interest in her and sauntered toward a knot of boys selling toys from trays suspended around their necks.
Angie slid off the suitcase and pulled it to the auto-rickshaw at the head of the stand. "Kew Gardens," she announced, as though it was the only street in town.
The driver turned his head from side to side and helped her load the big red bag on to the narrow seat beside her. He took off, bobbing and weaving on a thoroughfare that would have been generously wide anywhere in India but here was too narrow for the variety of vehicles. Motorcycles darted in and out of traffic lanes, almost brushing her elbow. Hyundais and Skodas were