Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [71]
Not in that red dress, Anjali thought. Some girls are just made for blue jeans and T-shirts with scooped necks, and some of us can wear expensive silk.
Opal and Minnie were about to come to blows with their hand fans over which man was the guiltier party, "that silly goose" or "that cad, that bounder," when Husseina finally reappeared in the drawing room and announced that Asoke was ready for the party to move to the dining room.
FROM HER PLACE at the head of the table, Minnie tapped her water goblet for attention, and then with some gallant help from Girish Gujral, she heaved herself to her feet. In a deep, firm voice she delivered what sounded like a well-rehearsed speech of welcome to all guests: new visitors, old friends, and residents.
"When I inherited Bagehot House and everything you see tonight and much that you do not, I was still a young, innocent, and impressionable woman. Little more than a girl, actually. When my late husband introduced it to me, I confess I was overwhelmed. So overwhelmed that I felt unworthy of it. I trusted its maintenance to my just and brave husband and his loyal staff. Somehow or other, I was led to believe that the newly independent country of India would honor its responsibility to maintain and even enhance its inherited splendors. Many of your country's founding generation—I need not recite their names—have been entertained at this very table. But my years as a memsahib were tragically cut short. They lasted three years, to be precise. And over the next sixty years, I have learned that she who owns Bagehot House owns a sacred trust. And she owns it alone. She must fight for every drop of paint, every pane of glass, every broken tile. Our honored guest tonight has made that case: Bagehot House ranks with the great estates of Europe, with finest extant architecture of the Portuguese or the Mughals or even the British. I include the vaunted Taj Mahal. For over fifty years, I have provided native girls from good families a sense of the lost India. They have learned from this architecture and from these furnishings, and, I hope, from my personal example, that India was once the home of confident serenity. There was poverty then, of course, there has always been squalor in India, and unspeakable suffering ... when in the history of India has there not been ignorance and superstition and poverty? But the poverty of sixty years ago was borne with the quiet dignity of their race...
Anjali felt the sting of Minnie's words: your country, your leaders. She could have crushed Minnie's water glass into Minnie's fist. She remembered the row of hanged Sikhs, the smiling white soldiers with their boots on the corpses, the old photos that had been carried out of Peter's temporary bedroom.
Peter rose, surprising Minnie in midsentence. He dipped his head in Minnie's direction, smiled, and thanked her for her hospitality, cutting off the rest of her speech on the deliberate mutilation of the glories of the Raj. He then launched into a dinner-table speech of his own. "That is a reading of history I think we recognize. It is very remote from my own experience, but not alien to generations of visitors and respected authorities.
"I've been thinking back to my first visit to Bangalore some thirty years ago, and to this very house. Bangalore was then a neat and tidy city. Its people were, as always, courteous and helpful. I would go to the hall of records and state my request in writing. Then I would be handed a heavy brass medallion inscribed, as I remember, with a number rubbed so smooth it was nearly invisible. Centuries of petitioners had held it. I would take a seat with other petitioners on a long bench. Patience. The patience of India, that's what struck me most. Hours would pass. Perhaps it is another aspect of the dignity that our dear Minnie spoke of. And that smooth brass medallion felt like an