LEARN TO DANCE
$5 AN HOUR
When they reached the barn, Molly peeked in at Norma Jean. “Oh, what a beauty,” she said. “Aren’t you a lovely elephant. You sweetheart.”
“Shall we take her for a spin?” Rudy asked.
“Fantastic.”
Rudy wanted to show off a little, but Molly upped the ante. Why walk when you could ride? “I’ve been riding Champaa almost every day,” she said. “There’s nothing to it.”
“By yourself?”
“With Amma—Nandini—or with Punchi—the mahout. But they don’t do anything, they just walk along beside. You don’t have to worry, Papa. All we have to do is put a rope around her neck. Something to hang on to.”
But Rudy wasn’t worried. He was excited. “I know the commands,” he said. “I just haven’t ridden on her, that’s all.”
There was a coil of heavy rope on the wall behind the tractor, next to a six-foot tow chain. Molly looped the rope around Norma Jean’s neck.
“How are you supposed to get up on her back?” Rudy asked. “Do we need a blanket or a pad?”
“I never use one,” she said. She was already in Norma Jeans stall. She tossed the rope over Norma Jeans head and tied it under her chin while Norma Jean checked Rudy’s pockets for sweets.
“Buy toe,” Molly said loudly. “That’s the command for ‘kneel.’ “ Molly repeated the command several times, but Norma Jean ignored her.
“Never mind,” Molly said, climbing up the side of the stall and scrambling onto Norma Jean’s back.
“Do we need the ankus?” Rudy held the ankus up so Molly could see it.
“You can bring it along, Papa, but don’t worry. I know what I’m doing.” She kicked her shoes off and put her feet behind Norma Jean’s ears.
Rudy opened the stall door and climbed up the side of the stall and onto Norma Jean’s back behind Molly There was nothing to hang on to except Molly, who started giving commands: Agit, agit. Norma Jean shuddered and moved out of the stall. Norma Jean was like Ernie, his grandfather’s draft horse, but bigger. They left the barn and stopped for a while in the warm sun. Norma Jean looked around, raised her trunk and sniffed the air.
“Where do you want to go?” Molly asked.
Rudy tried to get comfortable. Norma Jean’s back looked like a nice broad space, big enough for a picnic, but it felt more like straddling a rail fence. Norma Jean pawed, or footed, the gravel in the drive, and then she headed toward Rudy’s garden by the garage, where she stopped to snack on a couple of tomatoes.
“Let’s go up to the house,” Molly said.
“Agit,” they both said at once, and laughed.
Norma Jean started toward the house.”You steer her,” Molly said, “by commands and by pushing your heel on the soft spot behind her ears and by flicking your toes. Left foot for left; right foot for right. It’s hard on your toes at first, but I’m used to it.”
“I know about the commands,” Rudy said. “But she’s wandering all over the place.”
Molly may have been used to riding an elephant, but she didn’t have very good control, and neither she nor Rudy could stop Norma Jean from lumbering on past the house and investigating the chinaberry trees that Creaky had planted along the farm-to-market road, like a row of beach umbrellas. Norma Jean tasted some of the yellow berries but then spit them out. She wandered all the way to the pump house, where water from the lateral canal was lifted up into the upper grove, and then reversed her course and headed back across the open courtyard toward the upper grove. The farm-to-market road and the pump house were familiar territory, but Rudy’d never taken her into the grove itself.
As Norma Jean was about to enter the upper grove, Rudy heard a car in the drive, and then a second car.
Norma Jean heard it too—at least she trumpeted. “Chai ghoom,” Molly shouted, “chai ghoom,” but Norma Jean didn’t change direction.
Molly continued to shout out different commands—chai ghoom, chai ghoom, chai ghoom, chi, chi, chi, dhuth, dhuth, dhuth, dhuth, dhuth—but Norma Jean didn’t pay any attention to her. Rudy started shouting too: dhuth, dhuth, dhuth, dhuth. But Norma Jean ignored him as well, and they disappeared into the grove. The trees were covered with green globes, thicker than ornaments on a Christmas tree.
“African elephants have two fingers,” Molly said, as if she were a docent at a zoo, “on the tip of their trunk. Indian elephants have only one.”
“That’s what the Russian told me,” Rudy said, looking down at the ground. Norma Jean was not a large elephant, as elephants go—standing on tiptoe Rudy could reach the top of her head—but they seemed to be pretty high up.
“And the ears of Indian elephants are shaped like India,” she said.
“Before or after partition?”
“She likes avocados,” Molly said, ignoring his question.
“They’re not ripe yet,” Rudy said. “I mean, they don’t ripen on the tree. You’ve got to pick them first.”
“Norma Jean doesn’t seem to mind.”
Rudy minded, though. The full sun was beating down through the trees, and neither one of them had thought to wear a hat. Rudy’s legs were cramping. But the thing that bothered him most was the loss of control. His will counted for nothing. His ship was rudderless. He didn’t know what to do. He’d been too arrogant and now he was going to pay the price, about to make a fool of himself—brutta figura.
Finally they heard a shout. Rudy recognized Medardo’s voice. Better Medardo than Uncle Siva.
“What do we do now?” Rudy said to Molly. “Shall I try the ankus?”
“I hear them coming,” Molly said. “TJ will kill me.”
Rudy turned and caught his first glimpse of Nandini, in a sari the same shade of green as the avocados, coming down the row between the trees behind Medardo. When she got closer he could see that her face was the color of walnuts, or dark tea. Her features were like her brother’s, but she was animated rather than handsome or beautiful, and her hair was not really red, but it had a slight reddish cast, as Siva said. She raised her arms and took a deep breath, as if she were about to sing an aria, but then he saw that she was laughing.
“I think you are finding yourselves in maximum difficulty,” she shouted. Siva was wearing a broad smile, but TJ, standing behind his mother, wearing a University of Michigan baseball cap, was not amused. “What are you doing?” he shouted. Nandini touched him.
“We’re just going for a ride, “Molly said.
“Norma Jean stopped for some breakfast,” Rudy explained.
Norma Jean stretched out her trunk to reach a particularly large avocado, high up. Molly was pushed back against Rudy and her short skirt rode up to her waist. The men glanced up at her legs and looked away. She pulled it down without saying anything and kept on shouting commands at Norma Jean, who pretended not to hear her. The avocado she wanted was so large she couldn’t get a purchase on it with the tip of her trunk, so she grabbed the branch and snapped it off the tree.
Nandini reached up and touched Mollys leg, squeezing herself between Norma Jean and the branches of an avocado tree, heavy with fruit. She whispered something in Norma Jean’s ear. She adjusted her sari with one hand and held out the other hand to Norma Jean, who greeted her with her trunk, though she didn’t put Nandini’s hand in her mouth. “Utha, utha,” she said. Her voice was softer and more musical than the Russian’s sharp barks, but Norma Jean understood her perfectly and raised her right front leg. “You can come down, Molly,” Nandini said.
Molly held on to the elephant’s big ear, swung her legs over the elephants back, and stepped down onto the raised knee. The leg went down slowly, like an elevator, and Molly stepped off. “Thank you, Amma,” Molly said, and then she introduced them: “Papa, this is Nandini. Amma, I’d like you to meet my father, Rudy.”
TJ was still upset, embarrassed: “How could you do this?” he said. “Go off with someone else’s elephant? It’s like stealing a car…In India…”
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sp; “It’s my fault,” Rudy started to say, but this was between Molly and TJ.
“Don’t scold me, TJ,” Molly said. “Maybe in one of your parallel universes I’ll be your pativrata, but not in this one.” She walked off, back toward the house, through the burgeoning trees. TJ hesitated for a moment. Nandini said something to him in Hindi, and then he followed Molly.
This was exactly the kind of situation that Rudy’d been afraid of. He understood TJ’s embarrassment. But he knew something that TJ didn’t know—he knew you shouldn’t scold Molly, though in fact he could never stop himself from scolding her.
“Lord Ganesh,” Rudy said, looking down from Norma Jean’s back, “removes all obstacles.”
Nandini put her hands over her head and raised her shoulders and let out a long sigh. “I am happy to hear you remind me so,” she said. “Lord Ganesh is surely the most accommodating of all the gods. Utha, utha,” she said, speaking directly to Norma Jean. And then to Rudy: “Now you must climb down, following the example of your expert daughter.”
Medardo and Uncle Siva headed back to the house. Rudy and Nandini led Norma Jean up the slope toward the end of the row, about the length of a football field, where they’d have room to turn around. Nandini carried the ankus, but she didn’t use it.
“I’m sorry my son is becoming upset,” she said.
“Molly sometimes has that effect on people,” Rudy said.
“They both have nerves. It’s such a very big step.”
“Do you think they’ll be all right?”
“ ‘It is easier to control a wild elephant than this girl,’ “ she said, laughing. “An old folk song. I think Lord Ganesh will remove all obstacles. But you already are telling me this. You know, we always say our first prayer to Lord Ganesh, at our morning puja.”
“Lord Ganesh sounds like a very nice god.”
“He is the maximum best god, Mr. ‘arrington. Everyone in India will tell you so.”
On the way back to the barn she asked questions about avocados. Polite conversation, Rudy assumed at first, but she seemed genuinely interested in everything. In the irrigation system, for example, not just in Rudy’s grove but in the entire valley. Her father-in-law had established a similar system of canals in Punjab, she said, and she’d like to see the pumping station in Hidalgo. He explained that the agricultural extension agent advised stripping all the trees in November, but that Medardo preferred to spread the harvest out till the end of February or even mid-March.
All the trees had been grafted, he explained, because avocados don’t come true from seed. “You don’t know what you’re going to get if you plant a seed, so you take the scions from the stumps of cut-back trees and graft them onto the rootstock. These avocados, Lulas, are a West Indian-Guatemalan hybrid, vigorous, uniform, salt tolerant, disease resistant.” He pulled off a leaf, rubbed it between his fingers, and held it to her nose. “Anise,” he said. “Or fennel. A little bit.”
“Ajwain,” she said, breathing in deeply. “Saunf.”
“All avocado trees have two series of flowers,” he went on. “The two series open at different times during a two-day cycle, once as females and once as pollen-bearing males.”
“Then you must need to plant two different kalam,” she said. “I don’t know the word in English, when you make a variety by choosing breeding.”
“Cultivar,” he said. “You do in California, but not in Texas, because with Lulas—the kind of avocados we grow here—the cycles overlap.”
“Most convenient! And how many trees per hectare?”
He couldn’t answer because he didn’t know how big a hectare was. So he couldn’t estimate the size of her tea garden either.
“Tea is just the opposite of avocado,” she said. “It is in March that the cropping begins.”
He pulled a medium-sized avocado off the tree and cut it open with his pocket knife to expose the three concentric layers. The drama that had been unfolding under his nose now unfolded a second time in his memory: the scales separating to reveal the tiny buds, so irresistibly soft that he’d rolled them back and forth, absentmindedly, between thumb and forefinger, and touched them to his lips; the buds plumping and turning into flowers; the bees humming as they did the work of pollinating the flowers; the flowers that contained in their ovaries the germs of hard seed and soft, buttery flesh; and now the clawlike hands of the trees holding the set fruits in magician’s fingers. He’d been buying and selling avocados for thirty years: squatty green Fuertes with flat bottoms; knobby, dark-skinned Hasses; pear-shaped Zutanos; long-necked Jims; smooth, oily Pinkertons; handsome, shiny Texas Lulas; but now he felt that for the first time he was waking up to the mystery.
“Most of the edible flesh,” he said, pointing with the tip of his knife, “is in this middle layer, the endocarp. It’s got more starch and more oil than the outer layer, the mesocarp—you see this greenish yellow band under the skin. But the mesocarp is good too. We’ll take a couple back and leave them in the kitchen. If they soften up in a week or so, then we’ll know they’re ripe. I don’t think these are quite ready yet, though.” He picked two large avocados and carried one in each hand.
She wanted to know how many kilograms to expect from a single tree; how much it cost to irrigate; how many men he employed and how much he paid them. When he got home, he looked up hectare in a dictionary, and then he did the conversions: hectares to acres and acres to hectares, kilograms to pounds and pounds to kilograms. A tea garden of 1,500 hectares would be 1,500 x 2.47 = 3,705 acres. An avocado grove of 29.5 acres would be only 11.943 hectares. It didn’t occur to him till later that she’d been asking questions like a prospective buyer, and he wondered if her brother had suggested to her that he, Rudy, might be a prospective seller.
The Bath
In the morning, Rudy and Nandini walked to the river to see if Rudy’s little cove might be a suitable spot for giving Norma Jean a bath. The Russian hadn’t returned on Sunday night and Rudy was starting to worry, but Nandini seemed to have a perfect understanding of Norma Jean, and Norma Jean seemed to have a perfect understanding of Nandini. When they came out into the open at the end of the last row of avocados, they could see the river through the feathery leaves of the mesquite trees. Rudy wanted to surprise Nandini, just as he had been surprised when he first visited.
“Look, Mr. ‘arrington, wild suar.”
“Pigs?”
“Yes, that’s the word. Pigs.”
A herd of javelinas was feeding on prickly pear.
“These are javelinas. They’re not really pigs.”
“They look like pigs to me.”
“They have four toes instead of three on their hind feet.”
She held up four fingers. “How does that make them not pigs?”
“Well, they’re different from domestic pigs, anyway.”
“I thought pigs have hoofs. Can you have toes and hoofs at the same time?”
“Hooves are toes,” Rudy said. “They smell pretty bad—the javelinas. Like polecat.”
“What is polecat?”
Rudy tried to explain that too. A kingfisher rose from the water with a fish in its beak. The kingfisher she recognized, and the green heron fishing in the little cove, and the hoarse chuckle of a yellow-billed cuckoo—ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-kow-kow-kowp, kowp, kowp.
“Is maximum beautiful, Mr. ‘arrington. You must be very happy here.”
He didn’t answer that question, but he did explain some of the “obstacles” that remained to be removed: the disagreement or misunderstanding over the menu with the manager of the Taj Mahal, the pandit’s insistence that the wedding be postponed because September 9 was an inauspicious day. And he’d learned from Father Russell that the deadline for applying for a wedding license had passed. Something would have to be done on Monday.
Rudy picked up a stone and threw it at the javelinas, which scattered and disappeared. “They scatter in all directions,” Rudy said, “so usually one of them seems to be chasing you.”
“But this time, no,” she said. “So we are safe to walk to the river.”
They walked down to the river, to Rudy’s little cove. “I’ve cut back some of the chaparral,” he said, “the rough brush along here. There ought to be room for her to get through, and the drop-off here is only about a foot.”
“Elephants can’t jump, you know,” she said, “but a foot is less than one half meter, right? So she should be able to manage this step.”
“Right. About a third of a meter.”
They walked back up the slope. When they reached the top they paused and looked back.
“I don’t know about the wedding permission,” Nandini said, “but there is always something that can be done, and my brother can deal with the restaurant manager and the pandit. He is very good at these things.”
“He told me that you were the one who was good at these things.” She laughed, and seeing that she was not as worried as she ought to be about these obstacles, Rudy put his own worries aside for the moment. They turned and headed back to the barn. Nandini’s attitude toward Norma Jean was puzzling. On the one hand, she seemed to regard her as a god—a manifestation of Lord Ganesh—but on the other she talked about her as if she were an old draft horse, not something set apart from ordinary life, but at the heart of it. Rudy supposed this was like his feelings about avocados. On the one hand, they’re a good, nourishing fruit—the source of his livelihood for many years, and of his daughters’ science projects too. On the other, many people regard them as exotic, weird, something for foreigners. He tried to explain this to Nandini. “When I was growing up,” he said, “no one ate avocados. Avocados were for Mexicans. People thought they made you…well…hot-blooded. The name comes from an Indian word for testicle—ahuacatl.”
“An Indian word?” she asked. “I have never heard of this word before.”