Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [98]
"Tall guy, a little heavy? He left here a couple of months back, off to Bengal to find a wife, he said. Going through hundreds of bridal pictures finally got to him. One day he ran up to me and said, 'Moni! I found her! Miss Perfection!' You had to be happy for the guy. He was gone the next day."
She tried to hide her disappointment. Any friend of Subodh Mitra was no friend of hers. The itching stopped. For no particular reason, except perhaps to press her bona fides, she said, "I might have been that girl"
He dropped the directory on the stack of magazines. "No way. Subodh's a nice enough guy, but no way cool enough for you."
And how cool am I, Mr. Lahiri? But she didn't ask. They sat there for another few minutes. The tables near them filled up. She waited for him to ask her out. Her father would have considered Moni Lahiri, MBA, with homes in America and India, the "perfect boy," but the perfect boy was slipping through her fingers. Was there something she should do, should say? "I have to get back," he said. He handed her the copy of The Bangla HotBook. He didn't ask to see her again. Rabi had given her a phone number, Mr. GG had given her a ride, and Peter Champion had given her money. Moni gave nothing, yet she felt connected somehow.
"Do you have a cell-phone number to list in The HotBook?"
She said she didn't. Bagehot House was the most temporary address in Bangalore. A cell phone was an unimaginable luxury.
He scrawled a number on the back cover of the directory. "Anytime," he said.
She watched him stride to the elevator and hop in just as the door was closing. It was his fault that she felt newly abandoned. She visualized the two of them walking, side by side, on the crisp, green spaces of the TOS compound. She felt his body against her, and her arms, her back were itchy. She wanted someone to scratch them. She wanted to hold her arms out to Moni Lahiri, but he was already gone.
Just like that, a Bangalore legend enters my life, and then he's gone. Like the dancers in a Bollywood movie, a flash of skin, a hint of hidden wonders, then in a second they're gone.
8
Today's the day, every day's the day: she felt that rush again.
She wasn't so far from the place where she had made her first grand entrance into Bangalore, her lucky spot, the Barista on MG Road. Things that had confused her just a few weeks earlier were starting to clear up. In her red kameez and cream-colored salwar and expensive makeup, and after weeks of fattening up on Minnie's potatoes and mutton stew, she was steadier on her feet. Tookie said she had that Bagehot House greasy glow. At least she wouldn't pass out.
The scene of her Bangalore Grand Entrance was a cheap rickshaw ride away.
The tables were full but the mood was subdued, lacking the high-spirited silliness and cast of characters she had encountered on her first morning in Bangalore: no Mumbai Girl or overly friendly Mike, no Millie the chain smoker or Suzie with the butterfly breasts. Maybe they were on different shifts; maybe they'd moved on to newer IT call-center hubs that were luring away Bangalore veterans with better pay. Out on the fringes of the coffee sippers she spotted Mr. GG hunched over his computer. She bought a small coffee and moved in his direction.
Mr. GG wasn't as dashing a figure as she remembered from the night of Mad Minnie's gala. In just two weeks it seemed he'd aged and softened into a short, squat man, with hair thinning on top. She remembered looking down on Peter Champion's balding head, the mosquitoes landing but not swatted away. There were no mosquitoes in Bangalore, at least not this month. The buttons of Mr. GG's white shirt strained against his belly. Like her pot-bellied father, she thought, and like the young people in Bangalore, getting fat on snacks as they worked through the night, fat on cafeteria food, fat on beer