Bharati Mukherjee - Miss New India

Once out of parental range, as he drove down LBS Road past the major intersection of MG Road and Pinky Mahal, past the cheap hotels, where Rabi must have stayed, and the Vasco campus and the apartment block where Peter and Ali lived-a light was on in their window-he finally burst out in English, "What a strain! But that was a very good show you put on back there. Very convincing. Very funny, actually." It was his first lapse from his flowery Bangla. His English was no match for hers.

She'd expected that he would park the car and they would stroll down MG Road to Alps Palace or maybe to the hotel restaurant. She wondered if she should take his arm. She wouldn't mind being seen in public with him. She would tell him Allahabad-no way! She didn't know what young people in the early stage of prenuptial negotiation were supposed to talk about. The photo sessions and letters, the gold and sari shopping, the piles of rejected suitors, had happened in a vacuum. But he acted confident and she was good at picking up cues, and anyway, it was happening to an imaginary girl named Anjali while the real person, Angie, could sit back and watch. Hobbies? Thank God for her minimal talent with the harmonium. Favorite foods? How should she pose-sophisticated and international, pizza perhaps-or sweetly, coyly desi, just an unassuming Bengali girl raised on fish curry and rice?

Subodh had no intention of walking or of stopping for coffee and ice cream. They were out of Gauripur in just a few minutes, across the main highway to Patna, five hours to the west, into the monsoon-lush countryside. It was a sunny afternoon between bouts of rain. Rabi had been out here too, on a bus; she recognized scenes from his photos: the now-glistening, once-dusty vegetation, the red soil, the woven patterns of the thatched roofs, the returning long-legged wading birds in the now-flooded fields, the bright saris of women walking along the side of the road. India was beautiful. The countryside was peaceful.

And she felt comfortable, secure, in Subodh's company. This is how she'd imagined it, driving through the countryside in a red car with a handsome, confident husband. It could work. She felt certain that her mother and her sister had never known such a moment. Mr. Mitra's English might impress in Asansol, or Bangalore, and especially in her parents' house, but she held the upper hand.

"A very good show? What are you implying, Mr. Mitra?"

"You are a total fraud. No one with the name of Anjali Bose could possibly speak Bangla as poorly as you!"

"And is this customary praise for all your lady friends, Mr. Mitra?"

"I am an honest man. I speak my mind. I take what's mine."

At least he didn't deny having lady friends.

"Honesty is a poor substitute for decent manners, Mr. Mitra. My honesty makes me ask what in the hell is Lucknow all about? What modern girl is going to settle in Lucknow or Allahabad?"

"My uncle in Lucknow is Civil Judge, Junior Division. In Allahabad my oldest uncle is manager of the State Bank of India." A few minutes later, he added, "For your information, I have no intention of going to either place."

"I have no interest in Kolkata," she said.

"Good for you. Kolkata is dead and buried. And you'd have to learn the language."

To which, of course, she smiled broadly. She decided he was not really a bad catch. A different Angie might have looked him over and said "He's honest, he's funny, he's certainly handsome, he's shrewd. I could do worse." In English she could be as saucy and seductive as any Bollywood heroine. She turned on him with that smile and asked, ever so sweetly, "So all that business about settling your parents in Kolkata was what… a lie?" Not that it mattered. A certain amount of mutual inflation was built into the marriage negotiation. She was not above the deployment of subterfuge on nearly any level.

"You've got a big mouth, you know," he said.

He turned off the highway. A muddy trail led through a partially cleared forest to a construction site. The place was desolate. Workers' huts lay strewn about, but the various buildings seemed abandoned. Concrete had been poured for the shell of an apartment block, abandoned because of the monsoons or a sudden withdrawal of funding. Rusted iron rods protruded from the stark slabs. Anjali remembered the word: rebars. He stopped the car in a dark grove. This place too was familiar. Rabi had been here; she'd seen the picture. Black and white, to bring out the shadows, he'd said. He'd made it seem a dark and brooding place, ghostly in its abandonment. She opened the car door, prepared to get out and inspect it more closely, to enter the picture, as it were.

"We won't be bothered here," he said.

She turned and asked, "How do you know?"

"I drove in this morning." He'd reverted to Bengali, a language that robbed her of power and nuance. "I had time to find a place."

"A place for what?"

He snorted. "Our marital negotiations."

"What sort of negotiations would that be, Mr. Mitra?"

"Get back inside and close the door," he ordered. "What do you think? You're going to be my wife."

He put his hands over her breasts on the bright green choli under the dhoni-kali sari. "Everyone knows the kind of girl you are."

"Take me home, immediately," she cried.

He smiled that dimpled smile, then laughed. His fingers pulled the end of her sari down. "I don't want to rip your fancy cotton choli," he said. "Unhook it now." She refused, and he popped open the row of hooks, exposing her bra. It was her push-up bra, forced on her for this occasion by her mother. She pulled the loose end of her sari over it. He slapped her hand down and kept it there, on her lap.

"I am within my rights to see what I'm getting," he said. "Just like your American."

Rabi? she thought. I have done nothing with any American-or any Indian, for that matter. This couldn't be happening, not while she was wearing her tasteful sari. Isn't that how he had described her sari in the living room? In a Bollywood movie a savior would arise, the ghost of Nirmal Gupta perhaps, whom she'd laughed at with his goo-goo eyes every time they passed on the street. Just like the movies: the good, faithful, passed-over boy comes to the rescue of the virtuous but slightly too proud and headstrong girl, who allows herself to be compromised, but not fatally. Maybe this was her punishment for not taking Nirmal Gupta seriously enough, for underestimating that little letter he'd tried to write before the poison took over. She would say a prayer, " Ram, Ram, " and Ram in one of his many forms would rescue her. She turned away and stared briefly at the dead slabs of concrete, but Subodh Mitra's hand on her chin pulled her back, hard.

"Look at me when I'm talking!" he commanded. "I asked around. I know about you and your so-called professor."

"You're crazy. Take me home immediately, Mr. Mitra."

"I did my research. We still have ninety minutes, and we've got some negotiating to do first."

"Don't even think-"

She started to speak, but with a flick of his hand, he slapped her. Not hard, but not an idle tap, either. He unhooked the bra and assessed her breasts. She tried again to cover herself, but he pulled her arms down. "Not much there," he said.

She began to cry, but tears wouldn't come. She knew his hands were on her breasts, pulling hard, then weighing them, like small guavas, and she thought of all the girls she'd envied, the mango-breasted, the melon-breasted, and suddenly the stench of decaying mango penetrated the closed windows, and she could see the husks of fallen mangoes all about the abandoned huts and around the car.

A voice that seemed to issue from deep in the forest commanded, "Do me!" and when she came back to her senses, there was Mr. Mitra with his trousers unzipped, and a pale, tapered thing standing up like a candle in his hand, a thing she knew of but had never seen, a long, tan, vaguely reptilian creature with a tiny mouth where its head should be. In her panic she felt a brief wave of compassion for him; this couldn't be the real Mr. Mitra, but the result of some unfortunate invasion; he'd been possessed by a demon-but before she could study it further, Mr. Mitra's spare hand brought her head crashing down upon it, and she could hear him command, "Open that big mouth of yours…" He pulled her head up when she gagged, then down by the hair, pumping her head until she was able to do it herself, and his voice died out into a hum and she had to catch her breath, had to find a way to stop the gagging and the roaring in her ears. When his hand loosened from the back of her head, she was able to roll off and to see what she had done, the mess that was spewing over his pants and her sari, and he grabbed a handful of her sari to wipe himself and the steering wheel, even the window, cursing her all the time for leaving him at just the instant, humiliating him in such a way, ruining his suit, his borrowed car, even her sari. "You bitch, you bitch," he said, along with Bangla words she didn't know.