Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [57]
So that was the secret of Mumbai's and Bangalore's great success. You work at KFC or Starbucks or Barista, and the person working next to you, and your boss, and the people you serve have absolutely no interest in your community or where you came from.
Like at Bagehot House. Before Tookie, Anjali had never been friends with a Goan. In fact, not with a Christian either. Her impression of Goans had been based on the teacher-priests at Vasco da Gama—dull, pious rule enforcers or rule followers, afraid of their shadows. And what of that mysterious group she'd always called "the minority community"? Some of the workers in her father's office were Muslim. Back stabbers, her father called them—traitors and terrorists. Her father complained of their laziness, their four wives and twenty children. "They don't work on our holy holidays. They don't work on their holy holidays. Next they'll demand time off for Christmas and Easter."
Now she was sharing a bathroom with a Muslim and a Christian.
At their first lunch, Tookie had advised Angie to keep two boyfriends: one for the workplace, offering convenient rides and innocent companionship, and a fun-time boyfriend. Tookie's job-site-and-Barista beau was named Reynaldo da Costa, a goody-goody Goan who wanted to marry her before sleeping with her ("What a bore, no?"). Her fun-time guy was Rajoo, a local bartender ("A badass, but what a trip, man").
"How about you, Husseina?" Angie had asked.
"Oh, I have a fiancé, in London."
"Muslim girls—what to say?" Tookie teased. "How do you know this fiancé of yours isn't raising a big English family with a fat blond floozy?"
"I don't." Husseina said that with a smile.
Buzley, buzlum.
***
USHA DESAI, Mr. Champion's friend, was Anjali's only reliable "contact," but Anjali held off calling her because ... she was ashamed to admit it even to herself ... she hoped Mr. GG would call and suggest a more exciting career option or spring her from the dull boarding house and fly her off to a foreign city for a surprise vacation: all that was possible in the Bollywood version of her life. She didn't call Mr. GG, of course—what sort of young woman, except a Tookie, initiates contact?—but she found the thought of calling him and flirtatiously playing the damsel in distress very pleasing. She knew she should be grateful that Peter had sent a letter of introduction to Usha Desai, which meant she was assured admission into this woman's prestigious career-training academy and, on completion of the training, a job that paid better than Baba's or Sonali's. But calling Peter's contact and setting that process in motion meant banging the door shut on all that could be, all that might happen if given a chance. Network, or trust intuition?
Anjali promised herself that she would call Usha Desai soon but procrastinated, her excuse being that she wasn't yet savvy about big-city office etiquette. She needed Tookie's and Husseina's mentoring before she made the call. She needed more time in Bangalore. She needed to study Tookie and Husseina closely so that she could pick up their ways of sounding self-confident, or at least professionally competent. She had made a little bit of progress, but not enough.
In Gauripur, she'd slept between Sonali-di and Ma, and after Sonali-di's wedding, just with Ma. In Bangalore, the dark, musty mansion was empty most nights, but for Mad Minnie and arthritic Asoke, because the resident girls were at work; sleeping here, surrounded by noises coming from the untended, overgrown grounds,