Bharati Mukherjee - Miss New India

He started off predictably. "Did I hear you were from Kolkata?" Uh-oh. She rummaged through family memories, arranging a few street names and neighborhoods, just in case. Where should she come from? Ballygunj, Tollygunj, north Calcutta? They were just names to her; if anyone asked about addresses, she'd be exposed. Salt Lakes? Too new. Dhakuria Lakes? No longer trendy. Bowbazar? Sealdah? Too poor, crowded, too dingy. Don't say a thing. Mr. GG continued. "I've never lived in Bengal myself. People say they're all-talk and airy-fairy, but-"

She cut in. "We have our share of dolts, Mr. Gujral."

"Please call me Girish. Or GG."

He didn't press her to reciprocate. As they passed a five-star hotel, he said, "Three years ago, all this was an old apartment block. They got rid of five hundred families and replaced them with two thousand tourists." He pointed out a new shopping center: "Big black-money operation there. Dubai money." He seemed to know the inside story about every new building they passed. "First mixed-use high-rise in Bangalore. Ground-floor boutiques, middle floors for offices, and top five floors, luxury condos." For the condo owners there were two indoor swimming pools, a spa, a spectacular roof garden, and of course full-time maid service. If you had been lucky enough to get your bid in before construction had begun, you'd bought your condo for two crores. A steal. That was three years ago. "Now you could sell it for eight crore plus."

"I'll have to keep that in mind," she said.

Mr. GG laughed.

She read aloud the passing signboards: AID'S LATEST PROJECT!

ACT NOW! LIVE IN I0-CRORE LUXURY AT ONLY 5-CRORE PRICE! Mr.

GG seemed proud of Indian achievement, and the wealth was breathtaking, yet he also seemed somehow ashamed of it. She understood, in a way: Bangalore excited her, but it left her depressed. All the money made people go slightly crazy. And what was this about AIDS? She'd heard about it, a big problem, but in Bangalore they advertise it? "Isn't AIDS…?"

"AID is All-India Development. People used to joke that you can take medicine for AIDS, but it's AID that will get you in the end."

The morning's "Bang Galore" column, which she had read while sitting on her suitcase at the bus depot, was still fresh in her mind. Dynamo had written, "In Bang Galore, crores are the new lakhs," and now she understood. In her experience, crores were like light-years, signifying numbers too large to comprehend. Crores were reserved for serious occasions with mystical gravity, such as government budgets and projects ("1000-Cr. Barrage Planned for Upper Jumna…") or whole populations ("with India having crossed the hundred-crore threshold and Mumbai's masses now pressing three crore…"). A lakh was a hundred thousand. A crore was a hundred lakhs.

Crores were mentioned everywhere. In that same discarded paper, she'd read of a hundred-crore land deal, converting rice paddies into a gated colony (subscribe now!) with schools and a golf course cum health club and a shopping mall with international designer boutiques inside the compound (no crowds!). She'd read charges that an underlying 4.5-crore bribe paid for the land. But no poor farmer was ever going to profit from it. Farmers were as welcome as their bullocks inside those gates. Someone had already found an ancient title to the farmland, or invented it and paid off a judge. If crores were the new lakhs, was everyone automatically a hundred times bigger and stronger just for being here? Did it also mean that if you failed here, you failed a hundred times faster and fell into a hole a hundred times deeper?

Mr. GG drove her past her first Starbucks, her first Pizza Hut, and then a Radio Shack, all wondrous logos, with expansion plans and corporate cultures that she'd studied back at da Gama. At the end of her corporate management class, Peter Champion had told her, only halfjoking, "Congratulations. You know more about Starbucks than any eighteen-year-old girl in Bihar." Seeing the logo was as miraculous as watching a family of white tigers crossing the road.

Mr. GG had gone to an IIT for civil engineering, then to architecture school in the United States, and after returning to India he had picked up an additional MBA from an IIM. He'd had a job in a place called Pasadena, but his older brother had died in a traffic accident, and Mr. GG had to return home to look after his parents, his widowed sister-in-law, and two nephews. His wife had refused to leave the States. "Was she an American girl?" Angie asked.

And he replied, "She was American by birth and Punjabi by name and background, and her parents were very proud Punjabis, but she was raised over there. I find American-raised Indian girls too independent. They lack true family feeling."

She couldn't let that one pass. "There are many Indian girls who've never left India who lack what you call true family feeling, Mr. GG." Maybe she was American after all. "My sister ran out on my parents. She waited for the middle of the night and left a note saying she would not marry the boy they found for her, and when she was ready she would write them again. We haven't heard from her in the past five years!"

How liberating it felt, creating characters, obliterating oneself, being a composite.

"Well, then, she's probably dead," he said. "Five years is a long time for an Indian girl to be gone. A girl on her own, bad things can happen. My wife had a job. A small job, mind you, office manager in a branch bank, one step up from teller. She could have done much better here."

But Angie was already calculating the benefits of staying behind: why would any self-respecting modern girl come to India when she already had a job in the States? Being an office manager sounded like a worthy goal. Why would any childless wife give up America, safely removed from a nagging mother-in-law? But Mr. GG hadn't gone back to Delhi either. He'd taken off for Bangalore because making it here meant making it anywhere in the world.

"And what did you do in the States, Mr. GG?"

"I inspected buildings."

"Then all this new construction must keep you very busy." And very rich, she supposed. It was common knowledge that inspectors made more money than the builders and the architects because of bribes and kickbacks.

"Putting on a hardhat and pawing through pipes is extremely boring," he said. "It's much nicer staying inside my air-conditioned office, drinking pots of tea. Last night I inspected an enormous project in Djakarta that isn't even built yet. We live in a virtual city, Miss Angie, inside a virtual world."

She couldn't tell if he was serious or just playing with her. The long story came to this: "Forget all the clutter you see-Bangalore is the most advanced city on the planet. Let's say a Danish-Dutch consortium puts up a shopping center and apartment block in Djakarta, designed by a Brazilian architect. Dazzling plans, prize-winning stuff. It's going to be the biggest shopping center in Asia, bigger than anything in Japan or China. But none of those world-class thinkers really, intimately, knows the Indonesian building codes or the reliability of the supply chain or the union rules or a million other little things like plumbing and electrical systems and subsoil drainage. Are you with me so far, Miss Bose?"

She wasn't. She hadn't the foggiest.

"Of course."

"Those are things known only in Bangalore. We have the building codes for every city in the world. We have ecological surveys and subsoil analyses for every square centimeter on the planet. So our back-office architects and engineers sit around their computers, modeling the buildings on special software, scan the blueprints, correct the budget forecasts and the deadlines, and then our financial guys run the numbers and we come up with a tighter figure. We can save our clients up to twenty percent. We don't budget for bribes and kickbacks. We're cleaning up the world, one shopping center at a time."