Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [55]
The old Brits like Maxie Bagehot knew that so long as their former underlings and aides-de-camp, the proud remnants of a once mighty army, were in charge, they'd be shielded from the rabid majority. Throw in a Gurkha or two and you'd have a functioning country. Everyone knew that India needed the bracing authority and esprit de corps of a military dictatorship, with some democracy around the edges. And just look at what we've been left with today. People dare to call it progress.
When Minnie moved into Maxie's house, he had been a widower with no reason to return to England. His grown children had decamped to Rhodesia and Australia, never to write or visit. A fine house, a loyal and underpaid staff like the adolescent Asoke, a coven of old friends like himself, early tee times, and a British army pension went a long way in those days. So long as the imported whiskey holds out, they used to joke. And Bangalore? Well, Bangalore was a splendid place, so long as the natives kept their filthy hands off it. Bangalore's weather, a year-round seventy-five degrees, with no bloody monsoon and no mosquitoes, was the clincher. No finer place in the Empire, they agreed, not that an empire in the expansive sense of the word still existed.
And so, as a Bagehot-Girl-in-training, Anjali took to heart her first set of instructions: nothing is quite as it seems. There are unbendable rules, but no one really knows what they are. "Bringing shame" can mean anything the Old Dame wants it to mean at any given time. In fact, Anjali's little alcove room had been let to a girl from Mangalore named Mira, a "fun girl" (Tookie's highest compliment) who got "dumped" (the Bagehot House word for sudden eviction) for having come back from work at two in the morning. Nothing strange about that—but her mode of approach sealed her fate: she was on a motorcycle, clinging to a boy.
"My question to you is," said Tookie, "who's watching at two in the morning? Is the Old Dame an insomniac who sits by the window in the dark to catch rule breakers? Or does she force poor, overworked old Asoke to spy on us all night? Even the walls have ears here, so play it cool and close to the vest."
4
In her first three days in Bangalore, Anjali calculated that half of her mission had already been accomplished. Maybe even more than half: she'd escaped Gauripur, crossed India, gotten to Bangalore, met a "boy," as her father would label Mr. GG, and secured a desirable room. Well, maybe more like a miserable half-room in a moldering but fabled residence. But when she wrote her first letter to Sonali, she didn't want to frighten her sister with tales of what she had witnessed in interstate bus stops on the long odyssey or sound superior about having a room to herself in a mansion and being served by a servant in livery, or having smitten Mr. GG, so she wrote instead that she had arrived safely; that Mr. Champion's friend, who owned a huge house, had rented a prettily furnished room to her; that she expected to meet Mr. Champion's other friend, who ran a job-training school, soon; that, once she had found her way around Bangalore, she would send little Piyali a typically Karnatakan toy. Then she added, as a P.S., the questions that burdened her most: "Have Baba and Ma forgiven me? Have they asked about me?"
She could take time to get settled, rest, fatten up. I was starving! I could have died! Winning a place in Usha Desai's training center and then finding a job seemed a snap-of-the-finger inevitability (she ran