Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [64]
But there was a click, and the dial tone came on.
THREE WEEKS INTO her stay, Anjali discovered that she was being charged the same rent for her closed-in porch as the other three boarders, even though those three had huge rooms, each with a high ceiling, an overhead fan, and a door that could be bolted and padlocked for extra security. So what if Sunita's sofa smelled of cat pee, or that the gilt-edged mirror in Husseina's room had a crack right down the center, or that bedbugs drove Tookie crazy?
She asked the others if she should confront the landlady.
"Confrontation is never the way," Husseina advised. "Never tip your hand. A dab of honey is always the answer."
Tookie jumped in. "Definitely, go with the honey. First few days, you're on probation. The old girl wants to make sure you meet her standards."
"What standards?"
"Only the old girl knows. I think it's a low threshold of pain. My first week here a paying guest got kicked out because she picked up her soup bowl and slurped it instead of using the soup spoon. The old girl's a stickler for idiot table manners."
"But there are dozens of rooms just on this wing. Why can't she open up another one for me?"
"Get real! Who knows what you'd find? I can't imagine what's behind any door. Snoop around for yourself. But if the old girl catches you, it's a dump for sure."
"Have you snooped?" she asked.
Sunita looked up from checking her text messages. "Wouldn't dare!" she exclaimed. "The public rooms are strictly out of bounds. Verboten!" She was learning German from language tapes in hopes of getting an early promotion at her security company, which had just been taken over by a German conglomerate.
Tookie laughed. "Why risk everything? As far as I'm concerned, the bottom line's all that counts. We may be inmates in a madhouse, but we're paying bargain rates because the old girl's stuck in a time warp. She thinks the rupee is still five to the dollar. In a newer boarding house, we'd be forking out twenty times more cash for pokey rooms shared with three other girls."
"Actually, I have copped a look," said Husseina. She cast a glance down the long, dark hallway. "We might not be the only roomers in Bagehot House. We're Minnie's only paying guests, yes, but ... I'll let you figure out what I'm getting at."
"I took a tour," Anjali admitted. "You can't imagine the trash she's got down there."
"I wouldn't call it trash, exactly," the regal Husseina snapped. "Unsorted, maybe. Like a museum without a curator."
A museum of unsorted, uncurated horrors, Anjali thought.
They left the decision to Anjali with this final reminder: taking the risk of confronting Minnie might mean getting dumped, which was bad for the pocketbook, temporarily at least. But expulsion from the airless Bagehot House, with its cloistered secrets and ornate rules, promised a release into Bangalore's special freedoms—love and adventure. Minnie provided clean rooms cheap and a touch of the Old Bangalore prestige, but at a cost to one's self-image as a modern, quick-on-her-feet, funloving Indian girl.
5
Shh—she's talking to Maxie's ghost!"
The Bagehot House Girls had gathered at the top of the stairs at twelve noon, waiting for Asoke to sound the gong announcing tiffin, which was Minnie's term for the lunch-hour meal that she had Asoke serve them in an alcove off the padlocked formal dining room. But Minnie was in the foyer, speaking on the telephone. Her back was arched forward as she cupped the heavy receiver with both hands against her left cheek; her voice was louder than