Miss New India Page 3

  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, too cow-eyed. But given cultural patterns and long-nurtured prejudices, Mr. Bose would not consider non-Bengali applicants.

  "No need to rush," Anjali would say. What if there was a perfect boy out there? Didn't she owe it to herself to give it a shot? She still had time to see if her father could find him, the Perfect Him, a Lord Ram with a trim mustache in modern dress. She doubted he could. His imagination was limited to boys who would grow into men like himself, boys in white shirts with secure prospects in a moribund bureaucracy. She'd be fair to her father. She'd give him another six months. If it looked hopeless, if he couldn't come through with a fancy catch, then she would definitely sneak out of the house, go to Peter, and wheedle a counterdowry out of him, and send a postcard from Bangalore. Peter had made out Bangalore to be an asylum for bright, driven women from hellhole towns. Gauripur was a hellhole, but she didn't know if she met Peter's high standard for brightness, or desperation.

  In the meantime, she could enjoy something new, the buzz of desirability, being the center of attention. Until the young Lord Ram was found, nothing that could enhance her beauty would be denied her. No new sari would be held back. There would be trips to the gold store, to Calendar Girl Hair-and-Nails Salon, even to the fancy hotel restaurant, just to be put on public display with her parents. She might even win the marriage raffle: get money and good-looking children from a sweet-tempered and handsome husband with loving in-laws. Then again, she'd never heard of such a marriage.

  But a girl could dream, couldn't she? She could believe that she was still in control and that the orchestrated tsunami of marriage preparation could be reversed, that she had the power to call it off.

  Now that it was time to marry her off, her parents reversed nineteen years of harsh assessments and suddenly expressed guarded approval. She could be advertised as modest and pliable, a flawless embodiment of Bengali virtue. Of course, she couldn't cook, dance, sing, or recite Tagore's poetry. But at least she wasn't a modern, citified, selfish materialist girl. Bihar was a sanitized bubble, far from the debilitating distractions of modern city life. Until the marital ax fell, severing her from all of life's promise, she would be the center of everyone's attention.

  The monsoon was building, growing ever closer.

  Her parents mandated that jeans and T-shirts could be worn only inside the house, early in the morning. After lunch and a beauty nap and bath, she was to appear decorous in a freshly starched sari, hair braided and decorated with flowers, eyes emphasized with eyeliner, face whitened with powder, in expectation of unannounced visits. After all—in the mutual ambush of marriage negotiation—a boy's parents might drop by, ostensibly to view the goods but also to assess the general character of the family, the quality of housekeeping, the mother's modesty, the father's authority, the spontaneous hospitality, the obsequiousness of the staff, the absence of ostentation. Certainly there was very little ostentation to worry about, and no staff to speak of, except a woman who came every morning to sweep the floors and scrub the cooking utensils used the night before and a boy who cleaned the toilet every afternoon. At dinner, Anjali's chapatis would be smeared with extra ghee to enhance her radiance, and sweetmeats (such as raabri, rasmalai, rajbhog, expensive treats the Boses would buy only when they had guests) heaped on her plate in the hope that she would add a little more weight in all the right places.

  Most evenings, in the quiet hour when her father sat in the only comfortable rattan chair in the front room of their rented apartment, drinking his three pegs of local whiskey before dinner, and she and her mother sat on the floor, her mother darning frayed shirt collars and cuffs and Anjali tapping out hit Bollywood songs on the family's heavy harmonium, with its chipped keys and scuffed bellows, the dreams were almost enough.

  "I shall find a good boy this time," Mr. Bose promised his wife regularly. "Your father wore out the soles of his sandals looking and looking before he found me. I am prepared to do the same."

  He answered scores of matrimonial ads in the two Bangla-language papers. Angie didn't expect him to snare a single worthwhile candidate—he was a railway clerk, after all, not even a regional director—and the fact that he was still restricting his attention to a tiny fraction of available boys was just fine; her back-door escape plan was not in jeopardy. A
ll the same, some siesta hours while her mother snored in bed next to her, she allowed herself to daydream that maybe a Bollywood hunk, a Shah Rukh Kahn or Akshay Kumar, would find her irresistible during the marriage interview and would deposit her in Mumbai, Canada, or America. In daydreams, even Dubai seemed bearable.

  Everything about the Bose flat, especially the front room, where any interview would have to take place, depressed her. This room, the larger of the two, was furnished with a mattress-covered wooden chowki, which served as seating for visitors and as a bed for her father, a glassfronted bookcase, and two wooden office chairs with uneven legs. A grimy, rolled-up tent of mosquito netting was suspended above the chowki by its four loops from nails hammered into the plaster walls. The only wall hangings were two calendars, a current one with a flashy picture of Goddess Durga astride a lion, and a useless but auspicious one from ten years earlier, which had been current in the year her father had received his last promotion.

  Her parents' continual squabbling made it hard for her to improvise bouncy Bollywood beats on the old harmonium. It was her lone feminine grace, hence, important.

  "I'm not despairing yet of finding a decent jamai," Mr. Bose kept saying between sips of whiskey. "If your father could find someone like me, I can find someone equally good."

  The silence was deafening.

  "My father received many, many decent proposals," Mrs. Bose protested. "From day one. I could have married an actuary and lived in a big house in Patna."

  "No actuaries," Anjali declared. "No dentists, no professors either."

  "Who asked you?" Mrs. Bose shouted.

  "And nobody from an armpit town like Patna!"

  Mr. Bose made a menacing gesture, slipping the sandal off his left foot and holding it up as though he meant to strike her. "You think you can give ultimatums to your elders? Maybe I should marry you off to a village schoolteacher—would you approve of that? Iron his dhoti under a banyan tree every morning?"

  "She's an obedient girl. She'll do what you tell her."

  "You think my family and my salary are not good enough for an actuary or a tooth puller?"

  "She is a Vasco graduate."

  "Useless." Mr. Bose snorted.

  "Drunk," said Mrs. Bose.

  "Why only Bangla ads?" Angie demanded. "Why not English papers? I'm too good for any guy taking out ads in any Gauripur paper."

  "You see what state you've reduced me to, woman, by not bearing sons? All my brothers are fathers of sons. But me? Two donkeys for daughters." He would never own a house, not with two daughters, two dowries, the larger one already wasted.

  "Ill luck is ill luck." Mrs. Bose clutched at her throat. It was not the proper time for Anjali to bring up the known fact that sex determination is male-linked. "But this one isn't donkey-headed like..."

  Mr. Bose was on a roll. "Donkey for wife, donkeys for daughters!"

  "You're not wearing out your sandals, you're wearing out your tongue!"

  She took hope from her father's proven incompetence. One failed marriage in the family, although her father took no blame for it, had weakened his authority.

  For Anjali, he could no longer muster the pinnacle moment, the operatic ultimatum that he had risen to with her sister. She remembered the cold precision of that final night, after weeks of shouts and slammed doors: "I have told his father you will marry this boy. Astrologer has spoken, horoscopes are compatible. I am printing the invitations. There is no more to be said!" Her sister had run to her room to cry; her groans had filled the house.

  "Give me a knife! Give me poison!" she'd screamed.

  Then she emerged two hours later, pale, dry-eyed, and submissive.

  "You are right, Father," she said. "I have been behaving badly." She'd dressed herself in a new brocade sari and raided the stash of dowry gold. Arms heavy with bangles, earrings brushing her bare shoulders, necklaces and chokers disappearing under the sari-fold into her bosom, she said, "Just as you see me now, so will you see me when I am dead."

  Anjali remembered the chaos of the marriage ceremony itself. Invitations had been delivered to every Bengali family in Gauripur, but the presents were tawdry—outdated saris, cheap purses, re-gifted lemonade sets, an electric table fan, and nine flat envelopes, each containing 101 rupees in cash. Because Angie had a neat hand, her parents had assigned her the duty of keeping an accurate record of the wedding gifts. The food had run short, drawing churlish comments from the bride groom's party. The priest had abbreviated the marriage rites and afterward complained about the poor quality of the silk dhoti-punjabi he had received from the bride's stingy family. A troop of hijras had shown up in their gaudy saris, with flower wreaths, plastic baubles, and bright lipstick on their leering male faces. They extorted money for their stumbling dances, frightening the children and even Anjali with their lewd sexual gestures, their deep voices, their braided hair and spreading bald spots. Her wedding, Anjali vowed, would have glamour and dignity.

  And so it went, with variations, night after night in the Bose household. But during the day, with Mr. Bose away in the office, Mrs. Bose hatched new plans. "In six months," her mother practically chirped, "you will be a married woman." She reeled off common Kayastha-caste surnames: a Mrs. Das, Mrs. Ghosh, Mrs. Dasgupta, Mrs. Mitter, Mrs. De, Mrs. Sen, Mrs. Sinha, Mrs. Bhowmick. "You will have a new house in a new city with a new family of brothers, sisters, and parents. You'll become a whole different person." As appealing as a new family might sound in the abstract, it surely meant future entombment.

  Mr. Bose didn't have access to a computer at work and did not know how to use the Internet. He asked around for help, for anyone's son or daughter who might have a computer to come to his rescue, but the computers were in the college and the college was on summer break until the monsoons started. Neighbors suggested names, everyone recommended Bengaliweddings.com as the most reliable website with the widest distribution. There was a boy in the neighborhood, Nirmal Gupta, called Sure-Bet-IIT Gupta, a classmate of Anjali's and a genius with computers. Go to Nirmal, the Boses were told. Truly, it takes a village to marry off a daughter. Mr. Bose sent the word to distant relatives in Kolkata and alerted managerial-level colleagues at work that he was on the lookout for a jamai for his number-two daughter.

  All of the adult mysteries were about to unfold, her mother told Anjali. One's secret fate, hidden behind the stars, would suddenly burst forth like a seed in fertile soil, nurtured by sun and rain. The One True Mate whose destiny had been waiting for this glorious conjunction since the beginning of time would materialize in all his worshipful strength and beauty.

  This was parent-talk from the other side of the great modern divide. Mrs. Bose was silent on what Sonali, in her first month as wife, saucily confided to Anjali about men's "animal nature." The sisters had giggled over Sonali's graphic descriptions of marriage-bed drama. Angie doubted that her father, even in his youth, had been endowed with animal nature. Her mother could not possibly have ever expected, let alone experienced, conjugal delirium with her father. Angie wished she could ask her mother what shape her dreams of married life had taken before Mr. Bose had become her bridegroom. Her mother had married at seventeen. The senior Mrs. Bose, her mother-in-law, did not want a vain, ambitious, educated woman in the family, so she had demanded that the girl drop out of school just a month before graduation. Anjali's mother had hoarded that grievance, polished and buffed it to radiance over the years, and brought it out to great effect during domestic squabbles. For her father, marriage was a sacred duty; for her mother it was an accumulation of insults and an avenging of hurts.

  But for Sonali, as Sonali explained to Anjali on their rare secret reunions, successful marrying off of one's offspring was neither an art nor a science. Horoscopes might correctly calculate astral compatibility. But marital happiness? That was in the hands of fate.

  The volume of response to the new ads was overwhelming. Along with thirty responses from India, three letters arrived from Dubai, two from Kenya, one from Canada
, and one from Mauritius: a village of Bengali bachelors strung around the world, working their computers. The long list selected by Mr. Bose was so promising that Mrs. Bose, in high spirits, secreted a slim wad of rupees and instructed Anjali to go to Calendar Girl in Pinky Mahal. "Best to stay prepared for short-notice interviews," she explained. "They use bleaching creams and whatnot that last for weeks."

  While her mother prayed to the household gods, Mr. Bose shifted into high gear, even reading English ads and reopening old school contacts. ("Remember the Dasguptas in Ranchi? They had a boy, I'm sure. Anil, isn't it? I will write Deepak Dasgupta and ask after Anil...") and so on it went, letters sent out, responses coming back ... the promising, the disappointing. Deepak Dasgupta wrote back, "Our boy Anil is finishing MBA in Maryland-USA. I regret to say he intends to make his own match in the so-called modern manner."

  Which means he's already living with an American girl, thought Angie.

  "I will spread the word in Ranchi about your lovely daughter whose picture is very simple and pleasing..."

  The mailman too began to take an interest as he left off envelopes thick with bios and photos. "Word is getting around, Big Sister," he would say with an ingratiating grin as he handed Mrs. Bose manila envelopes with foreign postage. "God willing, we'll be celebrating with sweetmeats soon."

  "That man is just interested in getting his baksheesh for delivering the right application," Mr. Bose complained. "These people want something for nothing."

  All of her life, Anjali had been made aware of the ways in which a prospective bride could lose her footing. In the Snakes and Ladders game of marital negotiation, a girl has a hundred ways of disappointing, then it's tumble, tumble down a hole or worse, like Alice in Wonderland. Leaving aside questions of incompatible horoscopes, rejected dowry proffers, ancestral scandals, and caste irregularities, a girl could lose points on the desirability scale for being too short or too tall, too dark or too fair, too buxom or too flatty-flatty, with eyes too small or too light, hair too frizzy, a personal manner too outspoken or too repressed, school grades too high (potentially showing too much personal ambition) or too low (indicating a potential hazard as breeding stock). Of course, a decent dowry can always smooth the edges. Needless to say, her father could not provide it.