Bharati Mukherjee - Miss New India

In Rabi's photos, Gauripur was eerie, exotic-even its most familiar monuments. The marble dhoti-folds of the iconic Gandhi statue in Nehru Park were pocked, streaked, and spray-painted. The market crowds looked furtive and haunted. Five kilometers south of town, under a small dark forest of untended mango trees, Rabi had found a MODREN APARTTMENT COMPLEX-according to its signboard-that had been abandoned early in construction with less than one floor completed. A rutted construction road and a row of workers' huts disappeared into a cryptlike darkness. She'd never imagined anything remotely like it so close to Gauripur. He'd focused on rows of rusted iron bars-rebars, he called them-like twisted sentinels bristling from the concrete half-wall, disappearing into the shadows. She imagined cold, dank air, even in the heat of a Bihar May, issuing from its depths.

Rebar: a word to avoid.

It was a relief to anticipate turning to "the most beautiful woman in Gauripur." She expected something cheeky from the boy, cheeky and American. Maybe he'd show her one of the digital photos he'd taken in the studio and come up with some flirtatious opening, like "You want to see beauty? Just look in the mirror." She was prepared to slap him for it, but not too hard. A tapping, gentle rapping, like in the poem. A playful tap, like in the movies.

"Here's the woman I was talking about."

Truly, he had not lied. Angie was staring at film-star beauty, goddess beauty, old-fashioned sari-jewelry-hairstyle beauty, deep, Aishwarya Rai beauty, twice the woman she could ever be. She was the most beautiful woman Anjali had ever seen.

"In Gauripur? I don't believe it."

"And you know her," Rabi said.

"That's a lie."

"Right! Only I think she pronounces it…'Ah-lee.'" He seemed pleased with the wordplay. "I guess you could say that men make the best cooks, and they make the best-looking women."

"But you said 'she.' "

"Exactly," he said.

Over the weeks, with some difficulty, Angie had begun to accommodate to what it must be like, romantically, between Peter and Ali, but this revelation was something new, outside her ability to process. In her reconstruction, Ali had been the abused and grateful village boy, and Peter the all-powerful American who had saved him from a life of squalor. She'd seen it as a variant of a normal Indian marriage between economic unequals. Virtuous and beautiful village girl; spoiled, rich city boy won over by her goodness. She hadn't understood it as profoundly sexual, as it apparently was, because she'd always considered marriage a protection against sexuality-obligation, not adventure.

"That's Ali by night," Rabi was saying. "By day he's a pretty enterprising guy. He started out cutting ladies' hair in Lucknow and then he worked wardrobes and makeup in Bollywood. You watch-some day he'll open up his own beauty parlor."

"But those kind of men-they aren't-"

She started to speak, then paused, remembering swishy Bollywood characters who were in all the films-but they weren't to be taken seriously. You couldn't call them accomplished in any way. They were scared of their shadows. They dropped things; they were clumsy. They screamed when they saw a mouse, rolled their eyes and flapped their wrists and ran away from fights. They were put in the films in order to be laughed at.

Rabi stared back. "What about them?" he asked. " What aren't they?"

"They aren't servants," she said. Servants don't suddenly open their own business.

Rabi was fiddling with a larger camera. "And he's not a servant."

In the next few moments, the true education of Anjali Bose began. Many seconds elapsed. She thought she was going to be sick. Many questions couldn't quite form themselves and went unasked. She was reassessing probability, rewinding the spool of her experience and discovering that she knew nothing. Something treacherous had entered her life.

"Oh, my God," she said. "I know him."

"I know you do."

The next picture on the tabletop was of Peter Champion, Peter the expatriate scholar reading an Indian paper in his dingy little room, with a blurred Ali in his servant's attire of lungi and undershirt behind him, washing dishes. Peter, whatever else he was, was a serious man. He'd devoted his life to things in India that were disappearing. He couldn't be laughed at. But as she kept looking, Ali came into focus. It was as though he'd taken a step or two forward. He wasn't washing plates-he was staring at Peter.

"I got real lucky. I came to Gauripur to shoot an expat, and I get a gay and a tranny at the same time. Who'd have figured, in a town like this?"

She could accept it. It even restored Peter's mysterious edge. Being homosexual-did Rabi say "gay"?-was more exciting than being CIA, which is what the smart boys in her class assumed the American was. Tranny? She was afraid to ask. This tall, skinny Rabi with all his photos, the first boy she'd felt comfortable with, what was he? If all this intrigue was happening under her nose in a boring little town like Gauripur, where nothing was strange and nothing held surprises, among the people she thought she knew the best, then what was the rest of India like? Bangalore? Mumbai? She felt the terror of the unprepared, as though she'd been pushed onto a stage without a script.

What if, in the larger world, no one held true? What if everyone was two people at least, like Ali, like Peter?

What could she do but cry? It was involuntary. She wasn't sad or frightened. It was as if she'd missed a step in the dark and knew she was going to fall and hurt herself badly, but at that precise moment she was still suspended between here and there, between now and then, and Rabi snapped the picture. Years later, people would say that it made a beautiful composition, enigmatic, Mona Lisa-like.

When Rabi asked her why she was crying, she said, "I've seen more in the past two minutes than I have in nineteen years."

He said, "I'm eighteen. Photography teaches you everything."

She didn't have the foggiest idea of what he meant.

Nevertheless, that was the moment that sealed their friendship.

"When you look at great photos, you see the whole world in a context. The whole world may only be five by seven inches, and it might last only a five-hundredth of a second, but within that time and space it's all true, and it's the best we've got."

Angie Bose had lived nineteen years in Gauripur and was a year and a half from graduating with a degree from the best school in town, and no one had ever spoken to her about the nature of truth or art, or assumed she cared or knew anything about it. She knew there were plenty of pretty shots of the Taj Mahal-hard to mess that one up-and the Himalayas and animals and famous faces, but she'd never thought of them as plotted except in a Shaky Sengupta sort of way. Truth? Context? Composition? She'd never had a serious discussion about anything. She was the second daughter of a railway clerk; she was supposed to go to school, obey teachers and parents, graduate and get married, obey her husband, and have children. Truth was what the community, teachers, parents, and eventual husband said it was. Truths were handed down from the beginning of time and they held true forever, not for one five-hundredth of a second. The thought that things were not as they appeared to be, or that people were not what she thought they were, left her with a feeling akin to nausea.

She knew, vaguely, that worlds existed beyond the assigned books and lectures-Peter Champion would occasionally depart from scripted discussions in his corporate cultures class to sprinkle in asides on literature and history and politics, little moments no one paid attention to because they would not appear on examinations. She had learned a Russian word, Chekhovian, from something he'd said about the Indian social and political structure. But the idea that a mere child, someone even younger than she was, could show off such knowledge as well was unimaginable.