Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [61]
Tookie was inscrutable. Maybe all Christians were inscrutable. One of Tookie's sisters was a nun in Mozambique, one brother a priest in Massachusetts, but she declared herself a devotee of guiltless gratification. "I have a thing, you see" she'd explained to Anjali, "for boys, booze, and cash. Lots of cash." She had three sisters and five brothers, with whom she communicated only at Christmas. Her stories about her family were amusing but nasty. Her father hadn't worked in fifteen years, since a bus accident left him unable to sit long hours—except on a stool at a pheni bar. Her mother, who didn't believe in divorce, had chosen instead to go crazy and was living in an asylum.
Tookie's tales of her dysfunctional family fascinated Anjali. How could a daughter spill shameful secrets about her parents? She herself had been raised to hide unpleasant family failings from nosy outsiders. Tookie could make violent incidents sound hilarious. She had funny nicknames for her brothers who hadn't entered a religious vocation—Brother Sloth, Brother Gluttony, Brother Envy, and Brother Lust—four of the seven deadly sins. If Husseina was an invaluable mentor, Tookie was a pretty good coach for loosening up.
And today Goan Tookie was greeting Anjali with something more than her usual offer to set her up with a "guy friend." Today she was offering "a Bengali guy hunk."
Men's names came swimming up from Anjali's first morning in Bangalore, at the Barista. Mumbai Girl and her work buddies. All those high-fiving, caffeine-fired call agents with made-up American names: Darren, Will, Mike, Brad, Tom, Fred, Hank, Paul, Josh, Jeff. And Mukesh/Mickey Sharma, the sicko caller from Champagne. She said to Tookie, "Who would that be ... Monish Lahiri?"
Tookie dropped her spoon. "What! Tell me again how long you've been in Bangalore?"
She would have to learn to keep her silence. "Actually..." She groped for other Bengali men's names. "I could come up with other possibilities." No need to mention Mr. GG since he was a Punjabi.
"Only one important thing to remember, Anjali." Tookie paused to retrieve the spoon from the floor and flick dust mites off it with her napkin. "Check out the date's income. The body parts are interchangeable."
Anjali couldn't believe that she was seriously considering being set up by Tookie, let alone enjoying Tookie's salacious references to men's body parts. "Girl talk" is how the prim Sunita referred to Tookie's chatter about sex, as in "I have no time for your girl talk and you wouldn't either if you had to send money home."
"How's your brother doing?" asked Tookie.
"He's found work," Sunita answered. That wasn't what Tookie was asking.
The boarders confided in one another mostly over their early lunch. Tookie and Husseina worked all-night shifts—Tookie handled claims for an automobile insurance company, Husseina spelled out mortgage and home-loan options for Citibank customers, and Sunita had a day job, meaning a middle-of-the-night American job, for a home security company called SecurTrix. "You wouldn't believe the number of home break-ins there are in America! Every night I get these 'Help me!' calls, and I have to alert local police to get out to some address I've never seen in some American city ... all this from India!"
Over lunch, which invariably consisted of rice-clogged mulligatawny soup, a main course of insipid mutton stew, or goat-meat shepherd's pie, and a dessert—Asoke's culinary skills having been honed as an adolescent in that very house and not been challenged since—Anjali did her best to glean information on work-site etiquette at call centers. For instance, Husseina and Tookie lost their temper if anyone addressed them as call-center agents. They were "customer-support service specialists," and don't you dare forget it. She also squirreled away information on the American mentality and economy. From Tookie's insurance perspective, every car on the American road must be a dented wreck