Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [92]
"I'm dying to find out." Anjali laughed.
Reynaldo left soon after the women returned from the restroom. The oldest of his seven brothers, a pharmacist in Ontario, was sponsoring his application for "landed immigrant" status in Canada, and he had a mountain of documents to put together.
Tookie waved him off with a cheery "Ciao!" Her voice dropped to the low register of girlish intimacy. "I know what you're thinking. What do I see in Reynaldo?"
"It never occurred to me to think that." Anjali lied. She sucked the last noisy sip of her iced coffee through her straw, then with her fingers she fished brownish ice chips one by one out of the glass and laid them on her tongue. Deal with that breach of table manners, Minnie!
"If his visa comes through, I'll marry him and go to Canada. If it doesn't..." She put her helmet on. "Don't turn judgmental on me, girlfriend," she warned, leading the way back to her Bajaj Chetak. "Ready?"
"Ready for what?"
"To find out what turns you on, of course."
They started out at Pubworld, where the big screen featured European videos and sound throbbing to the max. Did Angie see correctly? Was that Panzer Delight? Yes, it was, in a ten-year-old video, confirmed by a little identifier tag at the bottom right. She wanted to scream, "Look at me! I had that T-shirt!" but no one was watching, and no one could hear. Then they went on to Opus, where two crooners took turns singing and where Tookie bid on a bottle of champagne being auctioned off for charity, but was outbid by a glamorous woman with perfect teeth, whom Tookie identified as a TV celebrity. TV? Anjali thought, I haven't seen TV since I got to Bangalore! Who watches it, and who has the time? Their last stop of the night was Glitzworld, where Rajoo tended bar. Rajoo was Mister Too-Much all right: too pomaded, too flashy, too imperious, and too indiscriminately lecherous. With Anjali, however, Rajoo chose to act the gallant. He plucked her right hand off her lap when Tookie introduced them and held it up to his lips. She let her fingers rest on Rajoo's plump, moist lips, savoring a new confidence, wondering what did turn her on.
Young men were pounding the bar for more drinks. He ignored them. A scrawny young busboy brought out two trays of still-dripping glasses from the kitchen and arranged them by highball, beer, and wine. "Lalu!" Rajoo snapped his fingers and pointed to heaps of plates and glasses stashed in plastic bins under the bar. "Idiot." He apologized to Anjali. "What to expect? Your friend Sunita's stupid brother."
Before she could respond—the very idea of Rajoo's hiring Sunita's brother and the possibility that Rajoo, from behind a bar on Brigades Road, controlled an empire of hirings and real estate placement sent her spinning—Rajoo leaned forward simply to stare at her face.
"You've got to say this about Tookie," he said. "She has the prettiest friends in Bangalore."
7
Anjali took advantage of Tookie's new, almost fawning, admiration for her to set up a visit to the campus of Trans-Oceanic Services (TOS), Tookie's all-night home. That way, she reasoned, she would experience a day at a call center, gaining a decided edge over other students at CCI. Except for rare trips to her father's railway building in Gauripur to bring him a file or spectacles or acid reflux pills, she had never been inside a business office. And Bangalore office complexes were vaster, glitzier, scarier than the long dusty room with rows of wobbly wooden chairs and file-cluttered wooden desks in which her father had worked. Tookie acted eager to do Anjali a favor. Security was tight in all downtown glass-tower office buildings, but she would get her "badass beau" Rajoo to call the head security officer of TOS. "I'll switch to a day shift for the next couple of weeks, girlfriend." She even offered Anjali a bonus: she would arrange for Moni, "the Bengali Svengali," to bump into her.
It was available, the world that she, Anjali/Angie, aspired to. She did aspire to it, didn't she? In any case, it was a challenge, and