Bharati Mukherjee - Miss New India

The phone rang again. "Janey," she mumbled in panic. But this time it was her mobile. Against CCI policy, she'd forgotten to turn it off. She'd barely had time to adjust to having it.

"Janey, aka Miss Bose? Having a bad day?"

Mr. GG! "I could use some cheering up, Mr. GG," she said. At least she'd swatted the Minnie vulture off her desk.

"Dinner tonight?"

"Afraid not."

"Come with me to Mexico?"

She was feeling cocky. "I'll think about it." Miss Anjali Bose didn't have to stay Deadbeat Janey. Not forever. She had options.

Parvati's amused voice came through. "That was your best demonstration of phone poise. Now please put away your mobile, and stay focused. It's the bottom of the ninth."

THE CLASS AND monitors and Parvati met at the end of a very long day. She'd been up since four A.M. It was now three-thirty P.M. She had taken thirty-two calls-a fraction of a normal day's workload for a normal call agent-and now she had to listen, in private, to the monitors' assessments.

She knew from Parvati's body language-a term she'd learned from Peter-that her career was over. "Anjali," Parvati said, "we knew from the beginning that you were going to be different from our usual fresher. We just didn't know how different."

She hung her head.

"You seem to lose your composure under pressure. Your language skills deteriorate."

"Yes, madam."

"I've decided this line of work is not for you."

"I understand." And with this understanding came visions of running out of Peter's money, being kicked out of Bagehot House, and having to go back for good to Gauripur.

"Look me in the eye, Anjali. Customer support is a very demanding and very specialized profession. One of the things it demands is the ability to submerge your personality. No one is interested in you, or your feelings. You are here to serve our client, and the client is the corporation, not the caller. I think you have a great deal of difficulty erasing yourself from the call."

"Yes, madam. I agree."

"I think you can take something positive from this." Parvati passed a file across the table with Anjali's name on it. On it was stamped the word SEPARATED. "Being a call agent requires modesty. It requires submission. We teach you to serve. That's not in your makeup, Anjali."

"I can try to change-"

"Don't even try. I have an investment in you. Just not this one. We'll be in touch."

Whatever that means, she thought as she walked out into the cloudy Bangalore afternoon. Mr. GG's Daewoo was not parked outside. She clutched the folder, keeping the word SEPARATED tight against her silk kameez. The wads of rupees Peter had given her, or lent her, were divided by a hundred in Bangalore. From now on she must take public buses rather than auto-rickshaws. The immediate problem was that she didn't even know the bus route back to Kew Gardens.

Three long bus rides, and on each ride straphangers pressed their sweaty bodies into hers. Their hands patted her bottom. Until that afternoon, Anjali had inhabited a Bangalore as virtual as Mr. GG's Djakarta, a futuristic village instantaneously connected to all time zones on the globe, but segregated from raw life lived out on real roads. She had no certified job skill to peddle; worse, she had shamed the three people who had believed in her. And worst of all, Mr. GG had taken her response seriously and not called back to confirm a dinner date.

The bellicose symphony of dusk-time Bangalore rang in her ears as she got off at the stop closest to Kew Gardens, which was not close at all. She was immediately sucked into a tidal wave of pedestrians. She was disoriented by the coughing, hawking, and throat clearing of anonymous office workers, the pulsating police sirens, and the imperious honking of chauffeurs driving imported sedans. Bhajot Lane had never seemed so loud, so clogged. On guard against pickpockets, she shunned beggars and tightened her grip on her shameful folder and expensive pocketbook-a fancy Gucci with Husseina's initials etched in gilt on leather. Anjali found it hard to shake off a beggar mother cradling a comatose infant. The woman pursued her, listing in Hindi her woes-widowhood, starvation, homelessness, tuberculosis, malaria-and called on heaven to shower blessings on alms givers. Another northern villager, a transient in a tattered, dirty sari: Anjali's own fate, if she couldn't find a way out? Don't you know my fancy silks mean nothing? Getting no response, not even a reprimand, the woman thrust the infant in her face. Anjali shrank from the touch of its hot, grimy cheek, and, swerving sharply from the contact, stepped in a puddle of half-chewed, vomited food. There was no time to stop and wipe the muck off Husseina's fancy sandals because the throng of pedestrians propelled her forward to the end of the long block, then around the corner into Kew Gardens and through the wide-open gates into the Bagehot compound.

Strangers swarmed the grounds, trampling flowerbeds and flattening wide swaths of the overgrown front lawn. Men hauled Minnie's garden statuary-cracked stone cupids and armless nymphs blackish green with moss-out of the jungle behind the house and piled them into trucks in the carport. Women rolled drums of rice and canisters of flour and sugar down the steps of the porch. Everyone smiled; they were laughing, spirits were high. The massive wooden front door had been pried loose from its frame and flung over the porch railing so that wide pieces of furniture, such as credenzas and armoires, could be dragged undamaged out of the house. Among the looters, she spotted Asoke's "villagers." Squatter youths who had helped out at Minnie's gala were now carrying off Minnie's Hepplewhite chairs, card tables and decorative clocks, Satsuma vases and elephant-leg umbrella stands, balancing them on their heads.

A convoy of brightly painted trucks and a white van, all honking, careened into the semicircular driveway and parked under the carport. ALL-KARNATAKA AUCTION HOUSE announced the logo on the van, and standing by its open rear doors was Tookie's bad boy Rajoo, peeling off hundred-rupee notes from a wad, diverting-or was it bribing?-freelance looters into dumping their goods into his vehicles. Rajoo's crew placed the pried-off front door over the crumbling porch steps to use as a ramp, then directed the looters to ease bulky pieces from Minnie's public rooms-cupboards, sofas, dressers, hutches, a grandfather clock, even the dining table-down the angled door, wrap them in quilts and dhurries, and segregate them in numbered lots. Anjali wouldn't have given Rajoo credit for such organizational skills.

Rajoo's organizational skills! She was witnessing a premeditated, methodical dismantling of her only asylum in Bangalore. This was different from the occasional spontaneous looting of shops and the breaking of car windows with cricket bats by jobless young men that she had watched from her balcony in Gauripur. You could guard yourself against such sporadic eruptions of anger; her mother hoarded staple foods in her "just in case" bins; her father pasted a fake Red Cross decal on his bike. Rajoo was dispassionate, efficient. The moment Anjali acknowledged this, she went into a panic. By the time Rajoo finished stripping and wrecking Minnie Bagehot's property, she would be homeless and rupeeless. The little she possessed was inside the red Samsonite suitcase. She had to get to the suitcase before Rajoo's men found the cash Peter had given her.

Determined to salvage what she could of her own possessions, she clawed her way through the delirious throngs of scavengers. Tookie would be on her pre-shift pub crawl, and in any case she didn't own anything worth stealing. She trusted Sunita to be cool-headed enough to barricade herself in her room and call the police on her cell phone. Minnie would fall apart in a crisis, but where was Asoke? If anyone could negotiate safe passage for Minnie and her tenants, it would be Asoke, since everyone seemed to be related, or obligated, to him.