Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [9]
Sonali warned that matchmaking might start as a small cloud on the distant horizon, but before it was over, the marital monsoon would break, and no one in the world could hold the floodwaters back. Anjali secretly looked forward to its destructive fury.
THREE MONTHS LATER Anjali was still in Gauripur, making excuses to herself. The pre-monsoon summer was at its zenith. Nothing moved, all was heat and dust, but two thousand kilometers to the south, seasonal low pressure had been sighted. Low pressure meant monsoon. Monsoon meant mud, cooler weather, and a temporary reprieve from mosquitoes—and it meant that the next school year would soon be starting.
A sudden marriage, outside of her control, could certainly occur. Nonetheless, she felt it was only fair to her parents to let them test the marital waters. The possibility of going to Bangalore on her own would be a monumental life-destroying—or liberating—decision. She needed time to plan. She had saved the cash from occasional money orders Sonali had sent her over the years, but it probably wouldn't be enough for train fare. Hiding even the slim stack of bills from a family intolerant of privacy would be a challenge. Maybe she could stash it at the bottom of one of her mother's "just in case" metal drums in which was hoarded a six months' supply of rice, sugar, and lentils. "Just in case" was her mother's mantra. Disasters are waiting; they can't be avoided, and there's no one to trust. Everyone is corrupt, with twisted values. Even Anjali's father came in for scrutiny: "When bad times come again," she'd say as they chopped vegetables, "you think your father can save you? Hah! My father provided for my sisters and me. We never wanted, even in famine time. Five daughters all married, with decent dowry!"
"Buzley?" Did you understand?
"Buzlum." Yes, I understood. This was Bose-family Bengali: an inside joke in an ancient dialect. But on this occasion it was meant to enforce. Do you understand what I am saying, and will you do as I say?
Buzley, buzlum.
The Boses were part of a remnant Bengali community inside a sea of Hindi-speaking Biharis. Angie's parents and three generations of once-prominent Boses had absorbed communal memories of riots and shop burnings, lootings, assassinations, and political scandal and had drawn a lesson from them. "These people..." her parents would complain, sometimes saying nothing more—"with these people, what to say?" These people could be anyone outside of their tight, dying, small-town "probasi" Bengali-Bihar community. Even other Bengalis—those exposed to the temptations of big-city Kolkata—were part of the plot against them. So was anyone not of their caste and general income level, or anyone with fewer than three generations of local roots, not to mention all minorities except maybe Parsis (not that any Parsi had ever stopped in Gauripur and stayed) and everyone from other regions.
"God, what I'd give for a little temptation!" Anjali used to say.
Even in Gauripur she had grown up on the modern side of a great national divide. From the backwater of Gauripur, she'd somehow caught the fever; she was part of the bold new India, an equal to anywhere, a land poised for takeoff. Her parents were irremediably alien, part of a suspicious, impoverished, humiliated India. How could they believe in the things they did and go through life hoarding food, denying themselves comforts, and delaying pleasure? How can you move ahead when all your energy is spent looking over your shoulder? They would never make progress; they were ill equipped for it. How cruel a fate, to be intelligent and ambitious and to crave her share of happiness—and to be denied the opportunity!
With her flawed Bangla language skills and no one to practice on except her parents, she'd always found herself attracted to Hindi movies, Hindi culture, and if it came down to it, Hindi-speaking boys. Bengali boys, like the ones in her ethnically isolated neighborhood, seemed too goody-goody,