Miss New India by Bharati Mukherjee Read Free Book Online Page A

hiding? Why haven't you come forward and answered any of the ads?
If she had to guess, he was one of those boys from boarding school, from Dehra Dun or Darjeeling, an Indian boy with international connections. Or maybe his parents were diplomats and he'd been raised overseas and gone to American schools.
    "I've been in California all of my life."
    She laughed. "Now
that's
crazy. Why would anyone from California come to a pokey little town like Gauripur? This is a prison!" She'd slipped into Bangla, just to slow things down. She was a little afraid of making a mistake in his rapid-fire American. His even-shakier Bangla fired her confidence. His long, skinny legs ate up the footpath; she had to run to keep up.
    "You ask what I'm doing here? I'm having fun. When you're taking pictures, every place is interesting ... every face is beautiful ... every day's incredible and every night's an adventure ... When you're looking through a camera, Gauripur's amazing. When I put my eye to the viewfinder, everything changes. I only see things, really see them, when I'm looking through the camera. They rave about painterly light in southern France ... Ha! It's feeble compared to India. What is that thing called—Pinky Mahal? Just look at it! It's magnificent! Better than the Taj! It's your own Rouen cathedral. Monet would go crazy for it."
    Normally she would have nodded and smiled, afraid to show her ignorance. But she trusted the boy; he wouldn't laugh at her. He was the first person, with the slight exception of Peter Champion, who after all was still a teacher and her superior, to understand, even blunder into, her nascent yearning to be respected. "Moray?" she asked. "That's a fish." A fish painted a ruined cathedral?
    "Claude Mo-nay, M-O-N-E-T, the father of impressionism." His tone was offhand, conversational, as though Claude Monet and his weird cathedral in a town in France were the subject of everyone's light-hearted conversation. "I'd call him the father of photography too. He painted the Rouen cathedral at various times of the day, just to show the effect of different angles of light."
    Angles of light! And he's only my age!
she thought.
    The pace of his speech was picking up. "Monet changed everything. He ended the tyranny of the subject. The medium became the subject, and the medium was light." Faster, faster.
    Slow down, please,
she thought.
I can't follow—you speak too fast. Tyranny of the subject? What does that mean? The medium becomes the subject; the medium is light? You walk too fast. You get too excited. You don't know how ignorant I am.
"He did the same thing with haystacks in different seasons. Usually I don't work in color, but I came out here yesterday at seven in the morning, then at noon, then at three, and finally at six, and each time the pink was different and the angle of light brought out different fractures and shadows ... it was beautiful. Bihar is beautiful. Nothing in the world is as it seems—it's all a matter of light and angles. Anyway, even if it is a prison, there are lots of good pictures you can take from inside."
    "Not if you're a prisoner," she said. Not if you don't have a camera and no one's ever taught you how to use one. "What were you doing at Shaky's?"
    "Is that what he's called? Shaky? That's cruel. But funny." He had a broad smile, a lilting laugh. "I was learning studio technique, putting in the dimples and taking out the frowns. It's very retro, but there's an art to it: setups, lights and reflectors. And those pull-downs are so cool, I wouldn't mind having a few. I gotta be prepared for anything, right? Maybe I'll end up doing weddings and baby portraits—
not.
Anyway, I'll be moving on in three days."
    She didn't understand a word, but the news of his leaving cut her like a slap. She was already imagining an inquiry to his parents, his visit to her house. "That's very disappointing"—a bold thing to say. "Why not stay? Why not keep the prisoners happy?"
    "The rest of India's