Bharati Mukherjee - Miss New India

"The day I can't spot a pretty Bengali face in a crowd is the day I change my name to Singh." He guided her to a small bistro table and dropped the stack of magazines on it. "You're everything Leila said."

"Leila?"

"She called me as soon as she saw you, remember? But I was working and I couldn't run over."

Ah, Leila the I MUMBAI girl. She'd seen Anjali pass out-did Moni know how desperate she'd been? No one would recognize her now.

Should she be Anjali for this champion of Bengali culture? She peered at the magazine cover on the top of the pile. A pretty girl, identified as "Bengal's Latest Beauty Export to Bangalore" and posed against a modern city skyline, stared back. But the modern Bengali Beauty, like the ladies in fake antique Mughal miniatures sold in Gauripur bazaars, was holding a lotus blossom in her manicured hand and gazing dreamily at a birdlike speck soaring above the geometric tops of office towers. Anjali picked the magazine off the top of the stack and turned it over. On its back cover, perhaps again in parody, the art director had reprinted a British-era map of historical Bengal-including all of Bangladesh and Indian West Bengal, Upper Burma, much of Orissa as far south as Puri, and north as far as Assam and west all the way to Bihar, even the area around Gauripur, the catchments where Anjali's parents' families had been marooned, and labeled it as "The New Bengal-Bangalore Raj." How grand and powerful Bengal had been in her great-greatgrandparents' days!

Moni took out a digital camera and aimed it at her. "Amazing, isn't it?" And before she could ask what, exactly, he gushed, "How big Bengal was! A long, long time ago, my family was in Upper Burma, involved in teak. It's not even on the map. They kept elephants to load the logs, and then they floated the wood downriver; they had family members with sawmills all along the riverbanks and they trained little native boys, Burmese, to walk on the logs with hooks and steer our logs into the mill. Our logs had little flags on them, like branded cattle. Imagine all that!"

"We're from Bihar," she said. Gauripur too was just off the map.

"We were a mighty people." He snapped her picture without asking permission. "Moni Lahiri at your service. But sad to say, no relation of Jhumpa Lahiri, the renowned novelist and Bengali beauty."

She would have responded by saying "We Bengalis are still a mighty people," but she didn't want to be photographed with her lips parted. Two of her teeth were crooked-gaja danta, or elephant tusks, her father had all too often lamented when he had been bridegroom hunting. He should have paid Canada-returned Dr. Haldar, Gauripur's only orthodontist, to align her teeth if they had bothered him so much. She had to stop thinking about her father; she had to keep bitterness and guilt out of her expression for the Bengali Svengali's camera. Try out the cover model's dreamy look but without corny props like bird and lotus.

Moni took a break from his viewfinder. "See that guy serving food over there? Third one in?"

Anjali looked in the direction that Moni had indicated with his chin, a dimpled chin she found irresistible. Four men wearing hairnets and white aprons were lined up behind the long cafeteria counter. The third waiter was unmistakably Bengali; Anjali could tell from his facial structure. She suddenly wondered if Indians born and raised in America, Rabi Chatterjee, for instance, lost that ability to identify ethnicity just by looking at an Indian face.

"His name's Mohammed Chowdhury, from Bangladesh," Moni Lahiri informed her. "I heard him and a couple of other guys speaking Bangla, and his accent and voice were so pure I asked if maybe he also sang. And does he ever! I featured him in a Rabindra-sangeet, and people were amazed. He showed up in a silk kurta, some of his friends played tabla and harmonium… so it was a big Indian bash starring a Muslim from Bangladesh, and he ends up the most perfect Bengali among us. And of course when he was back here serving food the next morning, no one recognized him."

Moni waved in the servers' direction, and Mohammed Chowdhury lifted a hand in response.

"In case you were wondering, my family doesn't consider itself the deep-down, sprung-from-god's-head kind of Brahmins," he said. "The last name might make you think so, but all it means is somewhere along the line we snared a Brahmin male. My father went to Johns Hopkins to study medicine, found work at Mass General in Boston, flew back home for two weeks to get married, settled first in Toronto, moved on to Madison, Wisconsin, and finally to St. Louis, Missouri, where he had two sons and a daughter. One son became an oncologist, the daughter's a biologist. Me, I'm a wastrel wannabe and amateur photographer with an MBA from Wharton. Anyway, if you think I'm babbling, it's to distract you from posing. You have energy. That's what I want to get across on your cover photo. Prettiness I can Photoshop."

The Bengali Svengali was going to put her on the cover of a glossy? That made Anjali self-conscious. She assumed her signature halogen smile but could feel tightness in the muscles around her lips.

"Don't try so hard." He glanced over at the freezer section of the cafeteria line. "Feel like an ice cream? They have sherbets, popsicles, frozen yogurts, everything."

She knew sherbet from Alps Palace in Gauripur. Rabi had photographed her in Alps Palace with his boxy camera. "Sherbet, please," she said.

He brought her two scoops of mango sherbet and a plastic spoon, but nothing for himself. She was relieved to have something to do with her hands and dug the spoon into the orangy-yellow sherbet. It was denser, sweeter than sherbets at the Alps Palace. She hoped Rabi would call her when he returned from his wanderings to his Aunt Parvati's house in Bangalore.

"Do me a favor," Moni Lahiri said, picking up his camera again. "Sit on the table."

She put her dish of sherbet on the chair seat and complied.

"No, no, sit on the table and bring a spoonful of the stuff just to your lips. Desire and promise of gratification. That's it! You'll be Miss Two Scoops. Refreshing as sherbet on a hot day." He handed the dish to her as she rearranged her legs on the tabletop.

"Now raise your left arm halfway up, as though it's around someone's shoulder."

"Whose?" she asked. Yours?

"I'm thinking Queen Victoria's. There's a statue of the old girl in Cubbon Park. I can Photoshop you into her lap."

There was that word again. Photoshop had not appeared in Mr. Champion's workbooks.

"Now, face me and keep your left arm up, as though it's resting on a railing; no, it's on my shoulder. Good. We're getting there. Look at me as though I'm the answer to all your prayers."

"Mr. Lahiri, really." She giggled.

"Concentrate. Give me intensity. Great! Love the set of that steely jaw! How about the eyes? You're in love! That's better. We're nearly there. I'll Photoshop you stepping out of a first-class air-conditioned carriage at the railway station. No, next to that big victory obelisk in Cubbon Park. You're taking in Bangalore for the first time. Or would you prefer Electronic City? I've got a hundred Bangalore backdrops."

"So it's all a matter of light and angles? And backdrops?" She was afraid to ask about obelisks.

"It's a Photoshop world," he said.

So this was the famous Monish Lahiri. It wasn't hard to look headover-heels in love with this handsome man with floppy hair, bulked biceps, and quick hands. She could imagine pouring shampoo on his hair, kneading it over a lavatory sink, and rinsing it off with a pitcher of water. She'd never had such intimate fantasies. She'd never really fantasized touching any part of a man, especially not his hair. And now she found herself imagining other things, and she blushed, avoiding his gaze. Her body was itching, starting from down below. It was embarrassing, a disease perhaps.