Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [46]
His architectural consulting company, a Swiss-Canadian collaboration, 50 percent locally financed, was three years old. It had started with five architects who returned from the United States and five engineers, and now it employed three hundred people.
So he inspects buildings that aren't there, in cities he's never been to.
"Every business in the world is outsourcing. Without us, the world would collapse. Maybe in a couple of years some version of a Bish Chatterjee will come along and buy us out and we'll sit down and figure out the next big thing."
Idly, she said, "I know Bish Chatterjee's son, Rabi. Wouldn't we collapse without them, Mr. GG?"
"Hold on a second. You just said you know the son of Bish Chatterjee? I'm still processing that. How many Chatterjees are there in Bengal? A guess."
"Crores," she said.
"How many of them might be named Bishwapriya Chatterjee?"
"Lakhs," she said.
"And how many Rabi Chatterjees and how many Anjali Boses, would you say?"
"Crores of Anjali Boses." But maybe only one Rabi Chatterjee, she thought. She flashed a smile.
"Ah-hah! Very cool." He smiled back. "So technically speaking, some cognomen of yours has met the cognomen son of some cognomen Bishwapriya Chatterjee. Maybe you should be a lawyer. To answer your other question: yes, we would collapse without international collaborators. For a while, at least. Then they'd collapse without us."
"You're very sure of yourself, Mr. GG," she said, and thought, but was afraid to ask, What's a cognomen?
"I'm beginning to think I'm not nearly as brazen as you. That's a compliment, by the way."
Bangalore was endless! Just when the tall new buildings began to fade, a new center opened up, a new satellite city with even more office towers, car dealerships, dug-up sidewalks, and cranes, with never a letup in traffic. If Mr. GG intended any funny business with her, it would have to be in front of thousands of people. But she couldn't imagine him even trying. He seemed a round-faced jolly sort, not like Subodh Mitra, whose profile reminded her of a long-snouted street dog.
"Have you seen Chinatown?" he asked, and she thought immediately, So that's his little game! That's where he's taking me. Back alleys, and men in pigtails. She'd read about evil Chinatowns, with their opium dens and concubines.
"I like sweet and sour," she said. Gauripur once had a Chinese restaurant, run by a refugee family from Calcutta's Chinatown. Her parents took her there once and declared the food inedible, although she'd liked it, but it soon went out of business. "Premature sophistication, misreading of the commercial environment," Peter would say. Mr. GG was laughing. Apparently she'd said something funny, or else he was making fun of her.
"I was referring to an American movie. It's about how L.A. really got built. It's about power and deals and corruption and a lot of buried bodies. You can rent it some night."
She remembered the newspaper article from that distant time a few hours ago, at the Bangalore bus station. "Why should I?"
"Because you said you wanted to know what Bangalore is like. Well, it's a lot like L.A., but it took L.A. a century. They had a movie industry, and we've got hi-tech. We're both virtual and we've both got buried bodies, but we'll be a much bigger city in maybe five years."
She really didn't understand. She'd used a computer in the da Gama Common Room, but only for games. Virtual was one of those frightening words. "I have a question. What is an L.A.?" she finally asked.
"Oh, my God—and you say you're from Kolkata? It's Los Angeles. California. U.S.A. Hollywood, the poor man's Bombay."
In front of pokey little shops where pariah dogs still languished in the sun, rows of posters proclaimed: AID PRESENTS: SITE OF FUTURE FIVE-STAR LUXURY HOTEL and FUTURE HEADQUARTERS OF (fill in the name) MULTINATIONAL CORPORATION, ending