Miss New India (21 page)

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...

Anjali felt the sting of Minnie's words:
your
country,
your
leaders. She could have crushed Minnie's water glass into Minnie's fist. She remembered the row of hanged Sikhs, the smiling white soldiers with their boots on the corpses, the old photos that had been carried out of Peter's temporary bedroom.

Peter rose, surprising Minnie in midsentence. He dipped his head in Minnie's direction, smiled, and thanked her for her hospitality, cutting off the rest of her speech on the deliberate mutilation of the glories of the Raj. He then launched into a dinner-table speech of his own. "That is a reading of history I think we recognize. It is very remote from my own experience, but not alien to generations of visitors and respected authorities.

"I've been thinking back to my first visit to Bangalore some thirty years ago, and to this very house. Bangalore was then a neat and tidy city. Its people were, as always, courteous and helpful. I would go to the hall of records and state my request in writing. Then I would be handed a heavy brass medallion inscribed, as I remember, with a number rubbed so smooth it was nearly invisible. Centuries of petitioners had held it. I would take a seat with other petitioners on a long bench. Patience. The patience of India, that's what struck me most. Hours would pass. Perhaps it is another aspect of the dignity that our dear Minnie spoke of. And that smooth brass medallion felt like an egg entrusted to me for hatching."

He turned to Asoke, who was serving the soup course, and asked him in Hindi, "Where are they now, I wonder? Do they simply vanish? I hope some museum is hoarding them. Perhaps our gracious hostess has stored one or two on the premises."

Asoke put his tray of soup plates on the sideboard and limped toward the pantry.

"In any event, after a few minutes, or a few hours, a gentleman would emerge from the inner sanctum, call my number, and usher me into his chamber. Tea would be ordered. And there, rolled up on his desk, would be the original specifications for any residence or official building that I wished to study. And, strange to report, those elderly officers took an interest in my research. They added suggestions. They were extraordinary public servants. They wrote poetry. They were passionate patriots.

"Of course, such access today is impossible. Original documents confer legal advantage, and modern Bangalore is all about lawyers fighting for advantage."

"Hear, hear!" Girish Gujral interjected.

Asoke returned from the pantry, bearing a brass medallion on a small silver platter, placed the platter on the sideboard, and resumed serving the soup course.

"Well, I'd expect nothing less," Peter said. "An echo of times when both Asoke and I had dark hair on our heads."

Where was Peter going with this nostalgic prelude?
Anjali wondered anxiously.

Peter paused for a long sip of water, then, his eyes on Girish Gujral, he continued. "But I'm also a child from overseas, and it was in India that I found my soul. My first Indian home was a village in the hills of Uttar Pradesh. I had been given training in basic Hindi—Bollywood Hindi, I called it—but in my village they spoke a tribal language that had never been recorded. So I was supposed to start teaching public hygiene, but before I could teach anything I had to learn the language my students spoke. I count that as a blessing. If those villagers were to learn anything from me, I first of all had to learn from them. Those two years set me on a course. It set the stage for what I've been doing all my life.

"When I was a young man, I traveled all over India in search of something that was missing. I guess we called it purpose. It even brought me to Bangalore and to this house."

At Peter's mention of her house, Minnie perked up. Opal was preoccupied with gumming some vegetable slivers from her soup.

"I was able to take measurements and inventories and go through city documents. The book I wrote could not be written today. I would not be allowed official access. And for me, this is the most worrisome aspect of modern India—the disappearance of trust. I look at modern Bangalore, and at Delhi and Bombay, and I wonder, what are we creating? Not in our private sector, but in the public? Can we keep that old patience—dignity, as our hostess calls it—and the passion? Have we lost our sense of civic morality forever? The newfound prosperity in this city is breathtaking, and I don't mean to disparage it. Prosperity is a good thing. But I'm not so sure of the wealth that comes from outsourcing. I wish the prosperity was rooted to something. I wish it built something beyond glass monuments. It seems as flimsy as a kite or a balloon. What comes drifting in with the winds might just as easily drift away."

Husseina signaled Asoke with her eyes: it was time to bring in the next course.

"Fortunately, we have experts with us tonight. I've come back to Bangalore to learn, not to teach. I hope my suspicions and my doubts can be laid to rest. Usha I've known since her doctoral studies in Delhi. If anyone can persuade me that outsourcing is healthy, it is Usha Desai. I met Parvati for the first time this afternoon in the CCI office, but I know her nephew, and of course, the world is familiar with achievements of her brother-in-law, Bishwapriya Chatterjee."

Girish Gujral glanced at Anjali with new awe. So, it was
that
Bishwapriya Chatterjee, the legend. Anjali could almost hear the wheels turning: how is it possible for one innocent teenage girl from small-town Bihar to know the legend's family, and to know Peter Champion? She tried to keep a blank expression on her face.

Peter moved on to acknowledging his long acquaintance with this young lady from Gauripur, Anjali Bose, as her teacher, and his desire to get to know Girish, the force behind Vistronics.

From the pantry, Asoke sent in the teenage girl with the long hair combed by firelight to remove the soup plates and spoons. Her long black hair was tamed into a lustrous braid and decorated with fragrant gardenias. She had a saucy walk, which, Anjali jealously noted, also seemed to catch Mr. GG's attention.

"The defense of an entire industry has fallen on me." Usha sighed.

"Not at all, Usha," Peter protested.

"Peter, if training young Indians to sound convincingly like young Americans is all we do, or even a fraction of what we do, I'd agree that we'd be performing a disservice to our country. But it's not what we do."

The discussion continued through the fish course, for which Minnie had put out special fish knives. Anjali looked to Husseina for cues as to the appropriate cutlery for each course. She was dexterous with her fingers but clumsy with a fish knife. She had never sat at a dining table laid with formal china, silverware, and glassware. Nor had she ever heard serious arguments delivered with genteel humility. At home, she and her parents ate with their fingers and treated dinnertime as the nightly occasion for the venting of grievances. The same grievances, night after night.

She sensed that Peter was mildly rebuking Mad Minnie and challenging Usha. But hadn't he been the one who had lured Anjali to Bangalore, boosting it as the city of India's future and talking Usha up as the deliverer of liberty and prosperity to ambitious small-town women like her? She glanced at her fellow boarders for some kind of confirmation. But Tookie looked desperate to escape for a cigarette, Sunita seemed bored, and Husseina was distracted.

"I'm saying it could be ephemeral," said Peter. "We're tied to American prosperity. If America goes under, we'll drown."

But isn't that what Peter had been teaching her at Vasco da Gama and in his private classes? American corporate models? Starbucks? Regional U.S. accents? Get out of Gauripur before you stagnate? Maybe Usha Desai and Parvati Banerji caught certain important nuances, but she didn't. Under her glamorous outfit, she was still a sad, stupid bumpkin.

Girish disagreed with Peter. "If you dismiss it as outsourcing, then you're simplifying a complicated reality. Vistronics is a kind of outsourcing—we've drawn on a variety of resources—but no one else in the world is doing what we do. We might have started as an appendage technology, but we've evolved. Now we're outsourcing to Kenya and Bangladesh. And do you know what? I see us, in maybe three years, outsourcing our technology to the United States."

Right then and there Anjali fell in love with Mr. GG. He was so right. And so handsome and rich. Not that Peter was wrong, at least not entirely. But Mr. GG cut through Minnie's veils of nonsensical nostalgia and poor Mr. Champion's middle-aged missionary zeal, and he presented a future she longed to live in.

The discussion became more acrimonious through the meat courses. Husseina hustled Asoke and his helpers through the serving of roast duck, chicken fricassee, and mutton stew because she and Tookie soon had to catch their company vans for the all-night shift at the call centers. But Anjali didn't want the meal to end; she didn't want Mr. GG to leave.

Peter's friend Mizz Desai, Anjali noted, seemed to be on Mr. GG's side. She was saying, "When Parvati and I started CCI, our American corporate clients were adamant that our graduates sound American, think American, and fool American callers into believing their customer-service complaints and queries were being resolved by American workers in American cities. That was just four years ago. Our training program had students studying DVDs of American sitcoms, sporting events—"

"And U.S. politics." Parvati broke in. "State capitals, interstate highway numbers, pop stars, rock stars. We had the students study
Star
magazine. Pathetic, except that it's pretty funny."

"India was déclassé, and Indian-accented English laughed at," Usha continued. "So what does that do to a well-prepared, intelligent, motivated young agent who's mocked as soon as she opens her mouth? That's what we told our corporate clients. Do you want a human answering tape, or do you want a proactive, efficient employee?"

"Some of them came around," Parvati said. "They said just make sure our customers can understand the English that the agents speak." Her own accent was eerily perfect American. She spoke of having trained young women from mofussil towns and villages to handle complicated questions on insurance claims. Women who might have remained illiterate and dependent were now earning decent paychecks. "The point Usha and I have made is that the Indian accent is a sign of competence."

They were the experts, with their professional degrees and their years of experience with comparative business models and communications systems, but they just didn't get it: to a Gauripur runaway like her, Bangalore wasn't about global economics. It was an emotional and moral tsunami; it washed away old beliefs and traditions, the comforting ones together with the crippling, and if you survived, you knew you had the spunk and the grit to rebuild. "Excuse me, madam," Anjali interjected, and she suddenly found herself standing, the focus of everyone's attention. "It's more."

If Usha Desai was irritated at being interrupted, she didn't show it. "Please, Miss Bose, continue," she said, smiling; then she sat down.

Anjali had meant just to listen, just to absorb ideas, but now she was on her feet. And there was Mr. GG, also on his feet, raising his goblet of water in a toast.

Everyone at the table turned to Mr. GG, though none of them lifted their glasses. "Let's hear from the young women themselves," he urged, but his eyes were fastened on unemployed Anjali.

"Go on," Tookie urged Anjali. "You start."

The debaters stared at Anjali. She had their full attention. There was no backing away now.

"Hear, hear!" Mr. GG beamed at her. "Speech, please. We're all ears.

Let words tumble off my tongue,
she prayed. "I have been in Bangalore only three weeks. I have no job, no paycheck, and no family here. But I have seen more and learned more in Bangalore than I have from twenty years in Gauripur. Here I
feel
I can do anything. I feel I can change my life if that's what
I
want!"

"Brava!" Tookie applauded.

Even shy Sunita dared to speak. "And I
do
change lives. It's not glamorous work, my life hasn't changed, but every day I save lives of people I'll never see. I work for a company that reports break-ins and medical emergencies of older people living alone, people who can't get up when they fall down. If I wasn't in my cubicle answering calls, American houses would be vandalized and senior citizens would starve to death on the bedroom floor."