Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [81]
Usha was wearing a gray salwar-kameez set this time, not an imported couture pantsuit, as she had at the Bagehot House party. A fifty-year-old with a teenager's body: Anjali marveled. She wore her graying hair in a bob and her reading glasses on a silver chain around her neck. Diet, exercise, authority, composure: she radiated self-discipline. And speed: she covered the long, narrow hallway to the parlor as though her legs were motorized. Anjali's mother and maternal aunts were plump, slow-moving women younger than Usha, quick only in perceiving slights.
Usha led Anjali through the parlor into a sunny, spacious room she called her office. It was furnished with a squat glass-topped desk, swivel chairs, filing cabinets, and a colorful Sankhera sofa and armchair set. Lined up, facing the windows, were two large exercise machines, which Anjali had seen advertised in lifestyle magazines that Tookie passed around, and a stationary bicycle. The windows looked out on a part of the Reach Colony that she hadn't noticed from her auto-rickshaw: a partly bulldozed strip of forest, and beyond that, an intact small village. Perhaps the villagers provided the colony's labor; or equally plausible, perhaps they ignored the encroaching urbanization altogether.
Anjali was about to invent excuses for her tardiness—a motorbike had bumped her auto-rickshaw?—but Usha cut her short. "Let's not waste more time. I have a meeting in Electronic City later this afternoon."
Parvati Banerji was seated at the desk, a stack of dossiers before her and more stashed in a leather tote bag, on which the letters PB were stamped in gold paint. Two large dogs lounged at her feet. They looked like groomed, pampered versions of pariah dogs. The larger of the two growled at Anjali. "Chill," Parvati commanded. She calmed the dog by stroking it behind the ears; then she shot Anjali an amused look. "You aren't afraid of dogs, are you?"
"No." She lied, but she didn't approach the desk. Anjali hadn't known anyone in Gauripur who kept dogs as pets. There were packs of stray pariah dogs, which lived off scavenged garbage, and fierce, unleashed German Shepherds owned by rich men to scare burglars off their property.
"How's Mrs. Bagehot?" Usha asked. She checked the large dial of the men's watch she wore on the inside of her wrist, and frowned.
"That was an odd evening, wasn't it?" Parvati added. "The poor dear hasn't been out of her house in forty years." She pulled a slim folder from the stack on the desk. Anjali assumed it contained information on her, though she hadn't formally applied to CCI. Probably the letter of introduction Peter had promised to send. Could Desai Data Systems have pieced together her bio?
"We don't want to rush you," Usha said. "But traffic's bound to be atrocious."
Parvati tossed a treat to each of her dogs. "Mind you, we're not biting the hand that feeds us," she explained.
Usha checked her cell phone. "We're all profiting from the boom in Bangalore, but we wish the city fathers would widen the roads!"
"Well, shall we get started?"
Usha flipped shut the lid of her cell phone. "Hold on a sec. I have to make sure Mother takes her new pills. She's hidden them again, but I think I know where." She darted back into the hallway.
Anjali was grateful for the delay. The thought of being interviewed by two women powerful enough to open doors flustered her. She was confident that she could charm or tease favors from men in positions to help her once she figured out their vanities and weaknesses, but she had honed no strategy for getting what she needed from women.
Parvati swiveled in her chair, pointed to the sofa and chair, and asked Anjali to please sit down. "Make yourself at home. Usha won't be long. She knows all her mother's hiding places." Then she went back to reading dossiers and making notes. Anjali sank into the low-footed Sankhera chair, which turned out to be an uncomfortable choice for a long-legged candidate with frazzled