Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [80]
Reluctantly Anjali scrawled her initials, the time, and the date on the line Asoke indicated. Minnie might make an exception for calls to and from her "darling boy," but obviously not for calls to Anjali from the darling boy's business contacts. Anjali had reverted overnight from being Peter's special friend to just another Bagehot House boarder on permanent probation. But Anjali was no longer the impulsive, naive runaway whom Mr. GG had deposited at Bagehot House's rusty gates. Her father was dead. Dead of shame and heartache. Dead, cremated, ashes scattered in some muddy stream or more likely some ditch, since the ghats of the holy Ganges were too far away. She had murdered her father. She felt grief. Grief for her mother, for Peter, but also for herself. The source of true pity is self-pity. She'd read that. Her father had mistaken ambition for restlessness. Why was it wrong for a daughter to want more than what her father could give her? Why couldn't Baba have let her go instead of forcing her to run away?
NOT OWNING A Bajaj Chetak like Tookie's to zip around town and get to know distances between neighborhoods, Anjali miscalculated the time an auto-rickshaw would need to ferry her from Bagehot House to Indira Nagar. She arrived at the Reach Colony complex of buildings twenty minutes late for her three o'clock interview. At least she was looking head-turning chic, she consoled herself, in the designer shirt-and-slacks outfit she had borrowed without permission from Tookie's closet.
Reach for the Galaxy, a four-story building with aspirations to luxury, stood between two identical blocks, Reach for the Stars and Reach for the Universe. So that explained the colony's name. The apartment façades were painted with black-rimmed rectangles of bold colors: red, yellow, blue, and white. The top floors of all three were still under construction, bristling with bamboo lifters and half-walls of raw brick pocked by window cutouts, with outer walls waiting for their final coats of plaster and paint. The boxy balconies of the lower floors were littered with children's toys and draped with drying laundry. A team of uniformed malis watered a still-scruffy cricket pitch, while a construction crew worked to complete the second floor of a supermarket for the convenience of Reach Colony residents. The billboard map indicated a yet-to-be-built shopping center and Montessori school: the Bangalore dream, a self-contained, self-sufficient city for the affluent.
Usha Desai lived in one of the four apartments that took up the third floor. Galaxy had an elevator shaft, but the elevator had not yet been installed. Even the air was tinged with the smell of wet concrete. Anjali had a flash memory of crumbling Pinky Mahal: she had spent her life amid empty promises and the expectation of decay and dissolution. What must watching glass skyscrapers and shopping malls rise intact from hacked earth and churned rice paddies do to a child? At that strange dinner party of Minnie's, she had intuited the Bangalore spirit and blurted out her longing for it. But now, as she stood before the front door of apartment 3B, she wondered if she had the brashness to gut her Gauripur past. Except that she had already lost it. Peter had flown in just to inform her of that loss. Her father was dead. Her mother and sister had chosen to be dead to her. Moving forward was now her only option. The wooden nameplate on the door bore two names: DESAI DATA SYSTEMS and CONTEMPORARY COMMUNICATIONS INSTITUTE. She rang the bell and was let into the apartment by a maid who was about her own age.
"I hope you didn't have trouble finding the place," Usha Desai said. Her voice was creamy-smooth, betraying no annoyance at Anjali's lateness. "I should have told you that I live in a building that looks like a Mondrian."
Anjali wasn't going to let on that she didn't know what a Mondrian was. She was