Miss New India by Bharati Mukherjee Read Free Book Online

beautiful she looked. Instead, he was standing with his hands on his hips, insolently separating her from the pull-down screen of cherry blossoms on snowy Mount Fuji.
    "What are you trying to prove?"
    Now he'd insulted her in her zone of grace, fresh from the beauty parlor, in her uncreased silk. Indignantly, she answered, "I'm not trying to
prove
anything." She could feel the heat rising. "Just that I'm a worthy bridal candidate."
    "No, you're not. Your heart isn't in it."
    "My heart has nothing to do with it. It's just a marriage photo. You're not wearing a silk sari without a fan. It must be fifty degrees under the lights!"
    She saw him glance at the thermometer. So, she figured, he needed a metric-system equivalence; he might really be American. He stepped behind Mount Fuji and returned with a metal cup of cool water. As she gulped it down, he confronted the mountain. "Everything's so fake, we ought to go with the joke." He tugged down on the screen and the mountain partially rolled up, exposing other rolls of tourist posters, ladders, and chairs behind them. "Voila!" he said. "The Wizard of Oz." She decided on the spot that he was a very kind, very funny boy. Was he available?
    "Everyone knows I'm in a hot little studio and the mountain is just a prop."
    "
Exactly!
You're sitting like a corpse in a formal sari in front of a fake landscape. So if everyone knows they're fake, you should show you're in on it. A meta-marriage photo! You'd be the coolest, heat or not."
    Shaky Sengupta called, "Restore mountain, please. No talking with subject."
    "A godlike mission, restoring mountains. See you after," the boy said, pressing one long finger against his lips. "My name is Rabi Chatterjee." He squeezed the tips of her fingers. His hand was cold. "I'm a photographer too. Only different."
    Chatterjee? A Brahmin, so marriage to a Bose was effectively out the window. She thought she knew all the Bengali families in Gauripur, especially those with interesting boys, even the Brahmins who these days couldn't always be choosy. She'd seen the ads, "Caste no bar," especially for the poor, less attractive, and less educated Brahmin boys or girls.

    AFTER SHE CHANGED back to her jeans and T-shirt for the short walk home, Rabi was waiting. "Let the fun begin," he said. Before she could pose, there in the chaos of lights and reflectors and cables and halfrolled-up props, he took out a small silver digital camera and shot her, again and again. He promised her that the girl in his pictures was destined for a different fate than marriage, quite the opposite of Shaky Sengupta's girl with a dimple, in uncreased silk.
    When they were walking along LBS Road past Pinky Mahal, he asked if she was really serious about finding a boy. He was the first boy her own age she'd ever walked with in public, alone, not in a student group. And probably the last. She answered hesitantly, wondering, as was her custom, if he was offering himself. He spoke so rapidly that his English sounded like a foreign language in a different cadence. She felt herself growing breathless, just trying to keep up.
    "It's for my parents," she said.
    He stopped, turned, and stared. "You're getting married for your parents? That's crazy."
    "Other people have said the same thing." Of course, that one other person was American. She could get interested in a boy like Rabi, all energy and enthusiasm, with a quick mind, long fingers, and startling English. "You know how it works. I don't have a say in it." Then she wondered,
Did
he know how India worked? Despite his name and looks, he seemed more foreign than Peter Champion.
    "India's on fire. If you get married now, you'll miss what's happening and you'll be sorry."
    Gauripur, on fire? Peter used to say that, and it still seemed funny. "Bangalore and Mumbai might be on fire, but Gauripur is still in the deep freeze." Then, on a perkier note, "I thought I knew all the Bangla families in Gauripur. So where have you been?"
Where have you been