Miss New India Read Online Free PDF

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. All 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