Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [85]
Anjali read it through twice before Husseina grabbed the paper from her. Mr. GG had sneaked Gauripur into his column because he had fallen head over heels for her. Husseina said, "This guy must be dating a customer-service agent."
"You mean he's having sex with one?" Tookie grinned.
Anjali wasn't ready to let them in on Dynamo's identity—it was her special secret. She snatched the paper back from Husseina and read the column out loud, enunciating each syllable as self-consciously as she used to in dialogue drills in Peter Champion's advanced conversational skills class. How could her friends miss the obvious fact that Dynamo, aka Mr. GG, had penned a love letter to her, and to her alone? "He says he is smitten," she protested. "Smitten, that's how he describes what he is feeling. Smitten's a chivalrous word!"
"He sounds more like an anthropologist to me," Husseina countered. "We didn't exist until he discovered us and talked us up. We're his newest tribe."
Sunita missed Husseina's irony. "Hip-hip, Dynamo! I'm very okay with being a new breed of working girl."
"Please, career women." Tookie corrected her. "Dynamo's smitten with a harem full of career women." She refreshed her lipstick and blush. "Well, got to hit the Brigades so I can get through my shift. Anyone coming along?"
Husseina and Sunita declined, but Anjali eagerly accepted and hopped on behind Tookie on her Chetak. She was in the mood to celebrate Mr. GG's public homage to her. On the night of Minnie's dinner party she had been certain he would call her the next morning. No, she had expected him to surprise her by showing up at the front door of Bagehot House with a bigger bouquet than the one he had brought Minnie. What a sly suitor!
One of Tookie's co-workers bought the first round in the first pub; strangers bought the next several. A secret admirer (of Tookie or of Anjali—it wasn't clear which) bought them second drinks at the second pub; a leering man in a Ralph Lauren shirt bought the next; a plump middle-aged man wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses indoors bought a few more. By this time Tookie began to repeat what she was saying, and Anjali felt more like an Angie. After the third pub, Angie lost count of who paid for what at which club. This was only the second night she had tasted liquor. In Gauripur the fast boys in Peter's American English conversation group went out for beers after class maybe once a month, but they'd never asked her to join them, and if they had, she'd have been genuinely shocked. Women from respectable middle-class Gauripur families didn't drink, period. Her father drank local whiskey in private, as other neighborhood men who could afford to probably did. The really rich—and there were only four or five such families—guzzled, it was said, imported scotch and brandy in the back rooms of the Gauripur Gymkhana; menial laborers soaked up cheap country liquor in remote shacks on the fringes of town and apparently dropped dead on their way home. She'd read in the papers about illicit liquor distillers being jailed.
By eleven-thirty, when the bars were required to stop serving drinks, Angie was throwing up on the sidewalk. She couldn't remember any Bajaj Chetak ride back to Kew Gardens, let alone negotiating the steps from the front door to her room. At the lunch table the next day, Tookie gave her a big vitamin B-50 capsule and a lecture. There were two kinds of call-center boozers: big-city, upper-class practiced hedonists who could hold their liquor, and American-wannabe village bumpkins who got so puking drunk that they missed work. Angie prayed that Mr. GG hadn't witnessed her pub-crawling escapade the night before.
6
It was Parvati Banerji who called Anjali with the news that she had been admitted to CCI's two-week cram course and that she was expected at eight o'clock in the morning of the following Monday for the first class, which would be held in Reach for the Galaxy 3A, the apartment adjoining Usha's residence.
"Usha usually runs the accelerated