Miss New India Read Online Free PDF Page A

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