Miss New India by Bharati Mukherjee Page B

She and Sonali, lying side by side, had imagined ghostly faces beyond the lone high, unopened bedroom window. They'd filled the long nights with made-up names and the reasons for their reappearance. Any deceased relative could pop up unexpectedly. Family ghosts were always on a mission of vengeance. Their grievances—and she knew all of them, all the stories of rivalry and cheating, the bitterness and unkept promises, the favoritism, the thievery, the poverty, all the infidelities, the dead babies, the deserted wives, the cruel mothers-in-law—could transcend a single lifetime. Fifty years was too brief to avenge all of the indignities of a lifetime. They had to keep coming back. That was her father's excuse: his fate was cursed. A fortuneteller had once warned him he had a jealous uncle, long-long dead, who had blocked every male Bose's path to wealth and happiness. That was her mother's excuse: I must have the same name as a distant auntie; I must be paying for her misdeeds.
    And now she knew the old stories were true. There were monsters, and innocent children were their victims, and no one, especially not her parents, could save her from them.
    She slipped off the bed and walked through the house, staring down at her parents in their oblivious helplessness. She wandered like a ghost. She dropped her stained sari in a corner of the bathroom. Let her mother discover the traces of her glorious jamai. Nothing had changed in her house, but the world was different. She took Sonali's old red Samsonite from the cupboard and threw her two best saris and all her T-shirts and jeans into it. She stuffed her backpack with underwear and toiletries. She could have turned on the lights, banged shut the lid of the suitcase, dragged it across the stone floor, and neither of her snoring, dreaming parents would have noticed.
    She took out her old Vasco da Gama exercise book, flipped through the dozens of pages of perfect schoolgirl handwriting, the meticulous notes she'd taken—
all useless, useless!
—and tore out two clean pages. On her last day in Gauripur, she went to the little table on the cramped balcony where she'd always done her assignments and read her books, and began writing. By the wan streetlight she composed a note and left it in her mother's "just in case" lentils jar.
Dearest Ma and Baba:
    I will not marry any boy selected by anyone but myself, especially not this one. If this leads to a barren life, so be it. As you should plainly see, the boy you selected has dishonored me. He should be sent straightway to jail.
    I am leaving this morning for Patna to see my sister, whose name you are reluctant to utter.
    When I am settled again, I will write. The process may take many months. I am ready to take my place in the world. I beg you not to try to find me.
    Your loving daughter, A.
    She was Anjali. She could look down and see poor little Angie whimpering on her bed.
    The dark alleys of Gauripur by night were unknown to her. The night air was even warmer than the stillness of the bedroom, and filled with groans and coughs and sharp words and the occasional horn—but many sounds were simply unplaceable, maybe the wings of bats, maybe just the creaking of the earth resting from the day's abuse, the brushing of thick leaves against one another, the urgent business in the bushes of dogs and men, rats and mongooses, the endless grinding of a million small claws and the hot breezes against tree limbs and rocks and movie posters nailed to every lamppost, and she thought then, as she often did, that ghosts explained it all, just as the stars at night or the face on the moon had told stories to our ancestors. Men sleeping on the broken footpath, a cast of nighttime characters invisible by day, playing cards under the streetlamp and making animal noises, calling to her to come for a drink (the last thing they expected to see, a determined young lady pulling a noisy suitcase over the paving stones down the middle of the street). The