Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [94]
Without even trying, Anjali slipped into her high-wattage Angie persona. Angie was smart, sexy, and special. Angie's steps had a bouncy lightness, her posture an eye-catching swagger. She took her time crossing the width of the terrace to the railing, from which she could view landscaped lawns ribboned with concrete paths. Early-afternoon shadows cast by neighboring office buildings left dark prison bars on sunlit stretches of pampered grass. Young men and women employees strode the footpaths, chatting, leaning toward one another, but not quite touching. Malis and sweepers manicured the edges. Below her lay the New India: business-efficient, secretively erotic, and servant supported. She felt a rush of sympathy for the high-fiving, head-banging, hard-drinking friends of Tookie she had met on Residency Road and the Brigades. The call-center survivalist inhabits separate yet simultaneous lives. These were the luckiest times to be young, adventurous, and Indian. And the saddest for those like her, who knew she could be anything she wanted to be yet hadn't the foggiest idea of what she wanted.
Over the PA system a self-important voice announced, "Paging Ms. Anjali Bose! Ms. Bose, please meet your party at the espresso machine! Paging Ms. Anjali Bose! Your party is waiting!"
Why was Tookie's team leader allowing her a break this early? Confused, Anjali turned her back on the poster-worthy view of New Millennium India and scanned the employees relaxing around the espresso machine. There were three women, two in color-coordinated salwar-kameezes and one in a snug Versace T-shirt and white capri pants, and two mustached young men in starched shirts and carefully pressed slacks, chatting and sipping, but no Tookie.
"Ms. Anjali Bose, please meet your party!"
A tall, lithe man, likely in his late twenties and definitely handsome, maybe even beautiful, approached the group by the espresso machine. Anjali liked it that he had no mustache. She liked even more the way his shiny black hair flopped over an eyebrow. She started walking to where the PA system was instructing her to "meet her party" and realized that she loved the prominent biceps of the polo-shirted, chino-wearing beautiful man. He was holding a stack of magazines, each as thick as the Gauripur telephone directory, against his chest. The five employees acknowledged his arrival with smiles or nods, but he didn't join their conversation and they didn't make an effort to draw him in. Tookie had told Anjali about "team ethos," and so she assumed that the beautiful man and the chattering five were on different teams of customer-service agents. He stood slightly apart but did not look at all isolated. Anjali guessed that he too was waiting for someone. Why shouldn't that someone be Ms. Anjali Bose? She preened when she caught his body jolt to attention as their eyes met. He immediately headed in her direction. Even with an armful of magazines, he moved like an athlete, a cricketer at the pitch.
"Anjali Bose. Who else could you be but Anjali Bose?"
So this had to be the Bengali Svengali. Tookie D'Mello had set up this meeting, but she hadn't let on what a heartthrob he was. What else hadn't she let on? Not a hint of India in his accent, but he didn't sound American like Rabi Chatterjee or Mr. Champion.
Even before introducing himself, the heartthrob said that finding her was like locating your car in an airport parking lot: the sudden realignment of your steps when you press your smart key and somewhere down a long line of cars the lights go on and the horn beeps.
The analogy of cars in an airport to people meeting in the TOS dining patio—or of her to a car, if that's what he'd meant—sailed over her head. She'd never had a car, Gauripur lacked even a single parking lot, and car keys, in her experience, were far from "smart"; in fact, they were dumb as nails. She took it as more evidence