Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [54]
"The thing to keep in mind," said Tookie, "is that Bagehot House is a madhouse. The old lady is crazy. The rules make no sense. The grounds are haunted. The girls who live here aren't what they seem."
Angie could go along with Tookie's cynical theories. In a country that runs on rumor, every event has its own powerful, unofficial motivation. Nothing is as it seems. Everything is run by dark forces. Back in Gauripur, Peter Champion "had to be" a CIA agent. Always, a search was going on for a "larger explanation," but no matter how grand the invention, it was never large enough to explain the failures and disappointments. What else explained Peter's thirty years holed up in Bihar? Who knew what those same voices, the they-saids, "knew" about her? Subodh Mitra had thought he "knew" about her and "her American." Her parents lived in that world, the other side of the great divide.
But in Bagehot House, generations of otherwise discreet and well-mannered girls had constructed an alternative history to explain Minnie Bagehot and passed it on, with new refinements, down the generations. Minnie had poisoned Maxie in order to take over the house and grounds. No, said others, it wasn't poison. It was a stabbing, made to look like the dacoits' doing. It was well known, at least at the time—nearly sixty years ago—that young Minnie and even younger Asoke were having a torrid affair, stumbled into, or over, by the gin-dazed Maxie. Asoke even now only played at being a servant.
Barring mishap, Minnie might go on forever. She'd been a widow for nearly sixty years. Her mind was sharp, but seriously off track, dwelling only on defunct virtues like Shame, Honor, Duty, and Loyalty. ("God," said Tookie, "sounds like something out of the catechism!") Has she told you about the stable of elephants? The Prince of Wales and the rajahs and the nawabs and whatnot? And Rolls-Royces, and dancing guests plucking champagne flutes off gold trays? Just ignore them. The old girl wasn't there. Ever.
Minnie was eighty-two, give or take. She dropped the impression that she and her unnamed first husband, a colonel, had "come out" to India from Dorset when the officer corps of the Indian army was still a recognizable offshoot of Sandhurst, all pukka sahibs in piths and puttees. She suggested he'd died during the Partition riots, protecting British wives and children. In reality, according to the alternative history compiled by decades of Bagehot House Girls, Minnie had entered Maxie Bagehot's life as a twenty-six-year-old divorcee, abandoned by the colonel after Independence and the turnover of the cantonment to the new Indian army. Maybe there had never been an official registry marriage with either man. Minnie was vague and forgetful about the documentary side of her early years.
Minnie and Maxie Bagehot: aka Mini and Maxi, a private joke among generations of Bagehot Girls.
In the Bagehot Girls' snide recitation of their landlady's handeddown life story, Minnie had never been to Dorset or anywhere in England. Minnie Bagehot was the product of the old cantonment culture, the untraceable interaction between an anonymous soldier and a local woman, decades or centuries ago. Minnie was Anglo-Indian, her mother a nanny, her father a stationmaster, and she'd set herself up as a domestic organizer (whatever that meant, but easily guessed, Tookie giggled) for British widowers and bachelors who'd decided to stay on. She'd known her way around the old Bangalore and she showed the proper firmness toward natives and deference to authorities. She knew how things were done and, more important, how to get things done.
She'd made herself indispensable to Maxfield Bagehot and eventually she'd made herself sufficiently irresistible to ensure her proper survival. He'd married her—or at least solidified an arrangement