Bharati Mukherjee - Miss New India

Tookie laughed. "Tipsy is the only way I can take the old cow."

"Where is the guest of honor?" Mr. GG pursued the point.

She hadn't the foggiest. He had not been in touch since the call from Gauripur. Flight delays? For all she knew, he had changed his mind about deserting Ali for a whole weekend. In any case, she was enjoying the princely GG's undivided attention.

"Patience, GG," Husseina said.

Anjali envied Husseina's easy grace. "Patience," she repeated. "Peter never breaks his promise."

And Peter Champion, toting a large khaki duffel bag and a cloth book bag, entered the drawing room as though on cue. He wasn't alone. He was flanked by two Indian women in their midforties.

"My dear, dear Minnie." He greeted Minnie with an affectionate kiss on each powdered cheek. "You don't look a day older than you were the last time I saw you!" He handed her a bottle of imported brandy.

"Rubbish, transparent rubbish! But gratefully accepted." Minnie rang a small bell hanging by a silk cord from an arm of her chair, to summon Asoke. "Asoke is becoming a dunderhead! How come he hasn't relieved our guest of his baggage?"

Anjali hung back with Mr. GG in a corner of the drawing room. The Mr. Champion she had known in Gauripur was tall and balding and often wore his thinning hair drawn back in a limp ponytail. The Gauripur Peter rode an ancient scooter, wore a kurta and blue jeans, and shunned the company of women. The Bangalore Peter was shorter than she remembered, wore a dark suit, white shirt, and red tie, and acted chummy with the two beautiful women, one in a tailored silk pantsuit and the other in an embroidered silk sari.

Peter introduced the two women to the hostess as his friends Miss Usha Desai and Mrs. Parvati Banerji. "Where's my brightest-ever student?" he asked, looking around the room. When he spotted the glamorous young woman in a pistachio gharara and realized that she was Angie, he bounded up to her, swept her up in a movie-like hug, complimented her on her big-city transformation, then whispered in her ear, "We have some serious business to discuss tomorrow. Tonight, though, is Minnie's night." Then he introduced her to pantsuited Usha Desai and sari-wrapped Parvati Banerji, adding that Parvati Banerji was Rabi Chatterjee's maternal aunt. He had gone directly from the airport to CCI, he explained, because he had business to discuss with the CCI board.

"Parvati and Usha are partners," he added.

It made sense, coming from Peter, but she would never have guessed.

Usha must have noted her confusion. She smiled and said, "I think Peter means a partnership. Parvati and I are CCI's cofounders." She promised to call Anjali on Monday to set up an admissions interview.

At least Usha Desai spoke English with a slight Indian accent. That made her less threatening. Anjali turned to Rabi's aunt. "I love listening to Rabi," she gushed. "He's so brilliant."

"Around Rabi all you can do is listen." Parvati laughed. Perfect American accent. California, Anjali decided. "He's my only nephew, his mother's the youngest of us three sisters and lives in San Francisco. Tara-that's my sister-was expecting him home for his dad's fiftyfifth birthday, but you know Rabi! He's gallivanting all over India, places I've never been to."

"Will he be visiting you?"

There was no mistaking the pleasure Parvati took in Anjali's admiration of her nephew. "Right now Rabi's somewhere in Kerala on a nature photography kick." She gave Anjali's cheek an affectionate pat. "I feel I know you a little bit. Do you mind my saying that? I don't mean know you, other than from a photo of you in Gauripur. Rabi left it with us before he rushed south. He was into portrait photography when you met him. We-that's my husband and me-loved his Cartier-Bresson phase, but he's over that."

"If he comes back…" Anjali stopped herself, embarrassed. How could she be so forward as to beg for an invitation? She knew what drew her to Rabi, but to his aunt? The spontaneity of her offer of friendship to a stranger about whose background she knew nothing? She envied Parvati's capacity for trust.

"Oh, Rabi will be back. He's in no hurry to return to America."

Mr. GG sidled toward Anjali's group, bearing a plate of savories and a freshened flute of champagne. Anjali had never handled social niceties like introductions. Was it man to woman? Younger to older? How much biography was appropriate? She let Mr. GG hover at the edges of the group to find his own conversational opening.

The CCI partners eased the awkwardness by taking the lead. Hands thrust out, firm shakes, their names. They seemed to recognize Mr. GG's name when he introduced himself. So Mr. GG had to be a celebrity of some sort in Bangalore. Anjali found her voice. "And Girish, I'd like you to meet my teacher, Peter Champion. Peter, Girish Gujral."

The four guests drifted into esoteric conversation about virtual construction and the projects under development by Girish Gujral's firm, Vistronics. Opal Philpott and Minnie Bagehot, stuck in their chairs, were engaged in a loud debate about what precise incident at the Gymkhana had led to the ferocious enmity between Ruby Thistlethwaite and Opal. Husseina was either still in the kitchen, supervising the squatter women's cooking and plating, or was on the empty front porch talking to her fiancé in London on her cell phone.

With the hostess and guests temporarily occupied, Tookie and Sunita huddled with Anjali.

"Isn't he too old for you?" Sunita sounded worried.

Tookie asked, "So have you fixed a date yet? And where have you been hiding this Girish guy? Girl, you've got more secrets and more angles than a Delhi politician. When you're finished with him, can you set me up?"

Not in that red dress, Anjali thought. Some girls are just made for blue jeans and T-shirts with scooped necks, and some of us can wear expensive silk.

Opal and Minnie were about to come to blows with their hand fans over which man was the guiltier party, "that silly goose" or "that cad, that bounder," when Husseina finally reappeared in the drawing room and announced that Asoke was ready for the party to move to the dining room.

FROM HER PLACE at the head of the table, Minnie tapped her water goblet for attention, and then with some gallant help from Girish Gujral, she heaved herself to her feet. In a deep, firm voice she delivered what sounded like a well-rehearsed speech of welcome to all guests: new visitors, old friends, and residents.

"When I inherited Bagehot House and everything you see tonight and much that you do not, I was still a young, innocent, and impressionable woman. Little more than a girl, actually. When my late husband introduced it to me, I confess I was overwhelmed. So overwhelmed that I felt unworthy of it. I trusted its maintenance to my just and brave husband and his loyal staff. Somehow or other, I was led to believe that the newly independent country of India would honor its responsibility to maintain and even enhance its inherited splendors. Many of your country's founding generation-I need not recite their names-have been entertained at this very table. But my years as a memsahib were tragically cut short. They lasted three years, to be precise. And over the next sixty years, I have learned that she who owns Bagehot House owns a sacred trust. And she owns it alone. She must fight for every drop of paint, every pane of glass, every broken tile. Our honored guest tonight has made that case: Bagehot House ranks with the great estates of Europe, with finest extant architecture of the Portuguese or the Mughals or even the British. I include the vaunted Taj Mahal. For over fifty years, I have provided native girls from good families a sense of the lost India. They have learned from this architecture and from these furnishings, and, I hope, from my personal example, that India was once the home of confident serenity. There was poverty then, of course, there has always been squalor in India, and unspeakable suffering… when in the history of India has there not been ignorance and superstition and poverty? But the poverty of sixty years ago was borne with the quiet dignity of their race…