Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [73]
Peter moved on to acknowledging his long acquaintance with this young lady from Gauripur, Anjali Bose, as her teacher, and his desire to get to know Girish, the force behind Vistronics.
From the pantry, Asoke sent in the teenage girl with the long hair combed by firelight to remove the soup plates and spoons. Her long black hair was tamed into a lustrous braid and decorated with fragrant gardenias. She had a saucy walk, which, Anjali jealously noted, also seemed to catch Mr. GG's attention.
"The defense of an entire industry has fallen on me." Usha sighed.
"Not at all, Usha," Peter protested.
"Peter, if training young Indians to sound convincingly like young Americans is all we do, or even a fraction of what we do, I'd agree that we'd be performing a disservice to our country. But it's not what we do."
The discussion continued through the fish course, for which Minnie had put out special fish knives. Anjali looked to Husseina for cues as to the appropriate cutlery for each course. She was dexterous with her fingers but clumsy with a fish knife. She had never sat at a dining table laid with formal china, silverware, and glassware. Nor had she ever heard serious arguments delivered with genteel humility. At home, she and her parents ate with their fingers and treated dinnertime as the nightly occasion for the venting of grievances. The same grievances, night after night.
She sensed that Peter was mildly rebuking Mad Minnie and challenging Usha. But hadn't he been the one who had lured Anjali to Bangalore, boosting it as the city of India's future and talking Usha up as the deliverer of liberty and prosperity to ambitious small-town women like her? She glanced at her fellow boarders for some kind of confirmation. But Tookie looked desperate to escape for a cigarette, Sunita seemed bored, and Husseina was distracted.
"I'm saying it could be ephemeral," said Peter. "We're tied to American prosperity. If America goes under, we'll drown."
But isn't that what Peter had been teaching her at Vasco da Gama and in his private classes? American corporate models? Starbucks? Regional U.S. accents? Get out of Gauripur before you stagnate? Maybe Usha Desai and Parvati Banerji caught certain important nuances, but she didn't. Under her glamorous outfit, she was still a sad, stupid bumpkin.
Girish disagreed with Peter. "If you dismiss it as outsourcing, then you're simplifying a complicated reality. Vistronics is a kind of outsourcing—we've drawn on a variety of resources—but no one else in the world is doing what we do. We might have started as an appendage technology, but we've evolved. Now we're outsourcing to Kenya and Bangladesh. And do you know what? I see us, in maybe three years, outsourcing our technology to the United States."
Right then and there Anjali fell in love with Mr. GG. He was so right. And so handsome and rich. Not that Peter was wrong, at least not entirely. But Mr. GG cut through Minnie's veils of nonsensical nostalgia and poor Mr. Champion's middle-aged missionary zeal, and he presented a future she longed to live in.
The discussion became more acrimonious through the meat courses. Husseina hustled Asoke and his helpers through the serving of roast duck, chicken fricassee, and mutton stew because she and Tookie soon had to catch their company vans for the all-night shift at the call centers. But Anjali didn't want the meal to end; she didn't want Mr. GG to leave.
Peter's friend Mizz Desai, Anjali noted, seemed to be on Mr. GG's side. She was saying, "When Parvati and I started CCI, our American corporate clients were adamant that our graduates sound American, think American, and fool American callers into believing their customer-service complaints and queries were being resolved by American workers in American cities. That was just four years ago. Our training program had students studying DVDs of American sitcoms, sporting events—"
"And U.S. politics." Parvati broke in. "State capitals, interstate