Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [83]
Parvati intervened in a soothing voice. "We're interested in you as a person. We want to know what makes you tick, what makes you leave family and hometown, what sports you play or follow, that sort of thing."
"You want I should recite my job qualifications? Highest marks in first-year B. Comm. course in statistics, certificate in advanced conversational English, diploma in American English..." She let her voice trail off because Usha was playing impatiently with a tiny bronze trophy in the shape of a woman golfer on the neat desk. Move on to sports and hobbies. "Forward on the da Gama women's field hockey team..." Should she brag about having been a mean ball flicker? Ma and Baba had been ashamed of her unwomanly stick-wielding skill. "Silver cup in inter-missionary-schools girls' Ping-Pong tournament..."
Usha Desai held up her hand, signaling Anjali to stop.
You want I should? Ping-Pong? You loser! But Parvati was trying to be kind. "Would you describe yourself as a people person? Or are you a loner who likes to be by herself and read a book?"
Okay, she had an ally in Rabi Chatterjee's aunt. Good cop, bad cop?
Parvati's roller-ball pen hovered over boxes to be checked off on the form. "Do you consider yourself a logical thinker or a go-with-the-flow, roll-with-the-punches type?"
She hadn't read a single novel since graduating from high school. "People person," she admitted. Not that she wasn't a reader, but what she pored over were fanzines about Bollywood hunks. She was a movie groupie, not a bookworm. Ask me about Shah Rukh Khan or Akshay Kumar, go on, she silently challenged the two middle-aged women.
"How about logic versus intuition?" Usha asked.
"I'm a very logical person." Anjali craned her neck to read the upside-down words listed on Parvati's form: perfectionist; pliant; cautious; argumentative; compromiser; team worker; leader; secretive; loyal; competitive; manipulative; tough negotiator; diplomatic; impulsive; stubborn; plodder; methodical; serious; solemn; critical; fun loving; fun to be with.
She had wants, she had longings and terrifying yearnings, oh, she had so, so many passions and obsessions, but none was named on Parvati Banerji's official interview form! You're failing! Suddenly a dam gave way inside her. "Do you want an honest answer? You want to know why I left Gauripur?"
"I'm told it's the best policy," Usha said evenly.
Instead of the pithy, sanitized answers she had prepared for likely questions, she heard herself offering these composed and cosmopolitan career women crazy fragments of Gauripur life, which made up the story of her own half-formed life. She unburdened on them Sonali's bitter compromises, Nirmal's fatal humiliations, Peter's hazardous generosity to her and his pained love for a young man (oh, my God, I've exposed him), her father's fatal despair, the criminal selected for her to marry: the injustice, the indignity, the powerlessness. Her happiest memory was walking in Gauripur with Rabi.
"What can you know of people like Sonali and me and Nirmal? I had to get out before I died like Nirmal. You ask me what motivated me to come to Bangalore. I didn't have a life in Gauripur, like Peter has. I had to go. I am here to dictate the terms of my happiness."
"Well, I'm glad Peter is dictating his," Usha remarked. She handed Anjali a tissue from a packet in the pocket of her kameez.
It was only then that Anjali felt tears welling. She panicked. "I didn't mean to expose him." There was no taking back the confidences she had unleashed. Then, defensively, she explained, "I'm not the only one who knows. Rabi took some pictures. He described Ali as the most beautiful woman in Gauripur."
"We don't find anything wrong with it." Parvati put Anjali's dossier back in the pile. "Are you feeling better after that emotional detour?"
"My advice, whether you want it or not, is this: don't launch into a self-indulgent screed during an interview." Usha extracted a sheet from a loose-leaf binder.
Screed: the day's new word. "I'm terribly sorry," Anjali said. "I don't know