Philosophy Made Simple

  “My expert daughter didn’t do so well the last time we went for a ride,” Rudy said. “And I made a fool of myself.”

  “It requires you to have more experiences, but you have to start at some time. You don’t just drive a car once and then they give you your driving permission. Now please remove your shoes and stockings.”

  Rudy took off his shoes and socks.

  Nandini looped the tow rope around Norma Jean’s neck and said something to her, and she lowered her trunk. Nandini placed her bare foot on the center of the trunk and took hold of Norma Jean’s ears, and Norma Jean hoisted her up and over her head and Nandini swung one leg over the elephants back.

  “You see how I am doing this, Mr. Rudy?”

  “It happened too fast.”

  “Maybe we try something simpler the first time.”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  “Utha, utha,” she said, and Norma Jean raised her front leg. “Take hold of her ear and step up on her leg. It is like an elevator for you.”

  Rudy grasped Norma Jean’s left ear and stepped up on her raised knee, and Norma Jean lifted him up so he could scramble over her head and onto her back.

  “Shouldn’t you be in front?” he said to Nandini.

  “I sit in back seat,” she said, “for your first driving lesson.”

  Rudy touched his bottle of nitroglycerin pills, but he’d already taken one pill that evening.

  “Keep your back straight,” Nandini said.

  It seemed to Rudy that Norma Jean was vibrating with excitement, but it might have been his own nervousness.

  “Flick your toes under her ears,” Nandini said.

  Rudy flicked his toes, but Norma Jean didn’t move.

  “Harder.”

  Rudy flicked harder, and this time the elephant started to move forward, out of her stall, like a great ship moving away from the pier. They both had to duck as they left the barn.

  “Keep flicking your toes.”

  “It hurts.”

  “You’ll have to become accustomed to it.”

  “Her ears are rough.”

  It was dark, but there was enough moonlight to find their way around Father Russell’s Pontiac. Rudy could hear voices laughing on the veranda. Nandini was hanging on to him, holding on to his upper arms with her hands.

  “Push with your left foot,” she said. “Put your heel right on her head where you feel it is soft. Push hard.”

  Rudy pushed, and Norma Jean veered slowly to the left, up the tractor path and into the upper grove.

  Norma Jean wandered from side to side, picking avocados at random and tossing them into her mouth.

  “Dig with your heels again, into her head,” Nandini said. “She is loving elephant, but you have to maintain control. Tell her to stop shilly-shallying and move on.”

  Rudy dug his heels into her head and said firmly, “Agit, agit.”

  Norma Jean started to move and then stopped again.

  “Louder.” Nandini tightened her grip on Rudy’s upper arms.

  “AGIT,AGIT.”

  “This is better.”

  By the time they reached the crest of the hill Rudy’s legs were cramping and his toes were bleeding, but he was absurdly happy He’d ridden his grandfather’s draft horse; he’d driven one of Harry Beckers semis nonstop from Gainesville, Florida, to Chicago; he’d ridden in a steam locomotive with his uncle, an engineer for the CB&Q, when he was a boy, and as a young man he’d made the game-winning free throw in a championship basketball game. But this was better.

  “Tell her to stop,” Nandini whispered in his ear. “Tell her dhuth.”

  “DHUTH,” he shouted. “DHUTH,” and Norma Jean stopped.

  “Good. She can smell the river now. It’s good you can make her stop.” They were at the spot where they’d seen the javelinas that morning. Now there was only the river and the night sounds—the weird cries of the nightjars and the swish of big brown bats screening the air. Sphinx moths fluttered their wings in the moonlight. A great horned owl hooted in the distance.

  “My wife adopted a chicken once,” Rudy said, turning to look over his shoulder at Nandini. “She saw it down in one of the neighbors’ yard one day and then a couple of days later it was walking around on top of a car across the street. There were some kids standing around the car and one of them asked, ‘Is this your chicken, ma’am?’ She brought the chicken home and put it in the side yard, which was fenced in. It must have been somebody’s pet, because it was very tame. It was a lovely chicken and my wife liked to hold it in her arms and talk to it, and the chicken would talk back. It liked music too, and would always come to the porch window when I played my guitar.”

  Nandini laughed till she started to hiccup. “And how are you saying this chicken is like an elephant?” She took one of her hands off his upper arms to strike her chest. “Ha ha ha. Now you tell her to turn around—left, and left again.” It was more like turning a boat around in choppy water than like turning a car on firm ground, but Rudy managed to get Norma Jean turned around and they started back toward the barn.

  “I’ll tell you,” he said. That chicken was no end of trouble. We put ads in the paper to find the owner, and my wife made announcements on the radio. In the winter I had to build a little house for it on the side porch, and I had to put a heating pad under the floor of the house so it wouldn’t be too cold, and then I had to build a little door and a little window, and put up a little mirror so she could admire herself; and then I had to build a little perch for her on top of her little house, and we had to put a sheet over her at night and buy straw and then clean out the straw once a week and make sure we found all her eggs. The chicken poop ate through the paint on the floor of the porch. She pecked holes in the screens in the summer, she ate all the grass seed we put out.”

  “I’m thinking your wife have a very good heart,” Nandini said.

  “She had a very big heart, Nandini. But if a chicken can be so much trouble, what about an elephant? That’s what I’m saying.”

  “I think maybe you are turning things upside down, Mr. Rudy. You’re always thinking about how much you have to do to take care of this elephant, but you are not thinking of all this elephant must do to take care of you, to keep you from being lonely, to keep your spirits up if you are sad. I think she has much work to do in this arena.”

  Rudy thought he heard in her voice an invitation to join her on a deeper emotional level, but he didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything.

  “Molly is telling me this is a big change in your life, coming here to Texas.” She wasn’t holding his arms now. He missed her touch. He wanted to turn to face her, but he was afraid he’d fall off if he tried to turn around.

  “I made a big change,” he said, “that’s right. Yes. A very big change. And you? I understand you may be making a change too.”

  “It’s very frightening, but exciting too,” she said, her voice in his ear. “I am going to Detroit Auntie, then Ann Arbor, and then to New York City to stay with my brother before he go to Paris. Like you, I am waiting for a sign.”

  “I don’t know how seriously you should take signs.”

  “But you believed your signs were most serious. Like the special knowledge of migrating birds.”

  “Do you really think Norma Jean is a good sign?”

  “Oh, Mr. Rudy, Norma Jean is not a sign, she is the thing itself.”

  “I’d like to believe that.”

  When they got to the barn Nandini said, “Tell Norma Jean to put her leg up.” She touched Rudy again and whispered the command in his ear: “Utha, utha.”

  “Utha, utha,” Rudy said, and Norma Jean raised her right front leg.

  “Now hold her ears and climb onto her elevator leg.”

  Rudy did as he was told and swung himself onto Norma Jean’s knee and then onto the ground. His legs were so cramped he could hardly stand.

  Nandini whispered something to Norma Jean, and the elephant raised her trunk and lowere
d Nandini to the ground so swiftly Rudy couldn’t see how it happened. Norma Jean picked up a twig from the floor of her stall and began to draw something in the dirt.

  “Look,” Nandini said. “Norma Jean is drawing a picture for you.”

  It was too dark to see if she was actually drawing something. “This is a sign too,” she said. “This is the sign you are looking for. A maximum good sign.”

  That night, lying on the Russians cot in the barn, Rudy couldn’t sleep. He turned on the Russians radio and listened to Bob and Helen, never a smart thing to do.

  People were calling in with accounts of how God had intervened in their lives to give them a sense of direction, and Bob and Helen were supplying the biblical framework: God has a plan for each and every one of us. We need to find the plan. One man, for example, called in to say that he’d been struck by lightning on the golf course, on a Sunday morning. The lightning had knocked a nine-iron right out of his hands on the fifth hole, but it hadn’t harmed him. He never took up his clubs again. Didn’t even pick up the club that had been knocked out of his hand. Just left it lying on the fairway. He went on to become a successful preacher.

  Rudy started to roll his eyes in the dark, but then he realized that he was no different from the man with the golf club.

  Everything Means Something

  There was lots to be done before Siva and Nandini left to visit Detroit Auntie. Father Russell took Molly and TJ into town to see what could be done about getting a marriage license at short notice and to look at the empty seminary, which the priest had offered to place at their disposal. Most of their friends would be staying there, and a few of the Indian relatives too, and some Harringtons from Michigan. Rudy called Maria at the floristería to see if her art dealer would be interested in looking at Norma Jean’s paintings. And Norma jean, directed by Nandini, nudged the old outhouse at the edge of the lower grove back onto its foundation, and then she cleared some mesquite trees that had sprung up in the open strip that divided the upper and lower groves.

  “You can’t get rid of them,” Rudy explained. “You can’t poison them, and if you prune them, they just get thicker; if you cut them down, they grow back as thorn bushes.” But Norma Jean wrapped her trunk around the small trees, one after another, and tore them out of the ground.

  “You see, Rudy,” Nandini said. “Lord Ganesh is removing obstacles, one by one. And now is time for her lunch.” A slight smile at the corners of her lips expressed her satisfaction.

  Norma Jean lunched in her stall. Rudy and Siva and Nandini went to eat at the Taj Mahal. Nandini and the manager argued back and forth in Hindi while Rudy and Siva drank tea. Rudy was convinced that the matter was hopeless, but in the end everything was settled amicably. The menu had been completely revised. More expensive north-Indian dishes had been substituted for less expensive south-Indian ones, and at the price Rudy and the manager had originally agreed upon.

  In the afternoon, Norma Jean took a little nap and then painted six pictures instead of her usual four.

  The next day, Rudy and Nandini and Siva met with the pandit to clear up the matter of the inauspicious day. Rudy offered to drive out to the ashram, thinking that on the way back they might stop at the bird sanctuary at Bentsen State Park, but the pandit preferred to meet in town at El Zarate, where he’d met with Rudy before. Siva, steering his rented Mercedes with one hand, dismissed the pandit with the other as a superstitious old fool and ridiculed the idea of an “inauspicious day.” Nandini warned her brother to let her do the talking.

  Siva parked across the street from the cafe and they got out of the car. Nandini was wearing her green sari; Siva was dressed in a lightweight shimmering silk suit; Rudy wore jeans and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. According to the thermometer on the bank it was ninety-six degrees, but the cafe was air-conditioned.

  “Namaskaar.” Nandini and Siva greeted the pandit, who was waiting for them in a booth, dressed in his saffron robe. The pan dit nodded at them. He was a tougher customer than the manager of the Taj Mahal. Rudy wanted to leave things to Siva and Nandini, but the pandit, who was sitting across from him on the inside of the booth, next to Nandini, spoke directly to him. There was no escape from his piercing gaze.

  “Do you believe in chance, Mr. Harrington?”

  Rudy hesitated.

  “This is not a trick question, Mr. Harrington. What I’m asking is this: do you think it is an accident that the four of us are sitting here in this cafe, drinking tea?”

  “No, I don’t think it’s an accident,” Rudy said. “I called you up and we agreed to meet here.”

  “And before that?”

  “Before that…Before that I called you up and we met here in June.”

  “And before that?”

  “Before that…I don’t know I went to the Taj Mahal, the manager gave me your card…How far back do you want me to go?”

  “As far as you wish, but however far back you go you will find all experiences linked by slender threads. I don’t believe in chance, Mr. Harrington. In India we have a clearer understanding of these things.”

  Siva was getting impatient. “The question is,” he said, “whether you’re going to perform the ceremony or not. If you’re not, then I’m sure we can find another pandit, even if we have to go to Houston or San Antonio. I’m not sure we need a pandit anyway.” Nandini, who was sitting next to Rudy, reached across the table and put her hand on her brother’s arm.

  “Permit me,” the pandit said, looking at each of them in turn and then focusing his gaze on Rudy. “You seldom see radiance in the face of a middle-aged man. But that is what I saw in your face, Mr. Harrington, when you first consulted me in this very cafe. Radiance. I’m not sure you were even aware of it, but it is what attracted me to you. You were radiant that your daughter was marrying; you were radiant that she was coming to your home here in Texas; you wanted to express your conviction that the coming together of these two young people was not simply a matter of observing certain social proprieties but something holy, something grounded in the fundamental nature of things, in the Sivaloka, even though I cautioned you against a love match. Am I right?”

  “Yes,” Rudy said.

  “And you wished me to arrange matters so that they would unfold not just in a psychological mode but also in harmony with this fundamental nature? Is that correct?”

  “Right,” Rudy said, “but you have to see that it’s impossible to change the date of the wedding now I sent out the invitations six weeks ago. People have made travel plans, plane reservations, hotel reservations, my son-in-law’s got to get back to Ann Arbor for the beginning of the semester.”

  The pandit sighed. “You mean inconvenient, not impossible.”

  “All right, then, inconvenient.”

  “Exactly. You understand then that fundamental reality is not always convenient. I want to make sure there is no misunderstanding on this point.”

  “I understand,” Rudy said.

  “Very well, then,” the pandit said, “as long as you understand. I will perform the ceremony, a ceremony, but I cannot take responsibility for an inauspicious outcome. You can only hope that Lord Ganesh will take that responsibility upon himself.”

  Nandini, Siva, and the pandit began to discuss the details of the ceremony, first in English, then in Hindi. Rudy drank his tea. He didn’t understand everything, but what he did understand was this: for the pandit, everything meant something; for Siva, nothing meant anything. He and Nandini, he thought, were somewhere in between. He said as much on the way home.

  Siva was driving; Rudy was riding shotgun; Nandini was sitting between them and Rudy was very conscious of the points at which their bodies touched.

  Siva laughed. “But don’t you see, Rudy?” he said. “At the end of the day it all comes down to the same thing.”

  On Thursday morning, Siva and Nandini flew to Detroit. Rudy drove them to the airport in McAllen.

  “You may have a rival in Detroit,” Siva told Rudy, light
ing a cigar despite the NO SMOKING signs. He held the cigar out at arm’s length and looked at it. Nandini was in the restroom.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Rudy asked. “Its none of my business anyway.”

  “No, of course not, but I thought you ought to know.”

  “It’s none of my business,” Rudy said, repeating himself.

  “Yes, I understand, but you should not give up hope. I thought you ought to know that too.”

  “Please,” Rudy said. “What you’re saying doesn’t concern me in the least. There’s no need to talk about it.”

  But by the time he sat down to dinner that night with Molly and TJ, he knew he was in love. He knew it the way he knew when he was coming down with the flu. He hoped that maybe if he just kept moving and drank plenty of liquids, the symptoms, which weren’t really bad yet, would disappear. But at the same time he knew they wouldn’t. He knew that he’d known her for less than a week, but now that she was gone he was continually probing his feelings for her, the way he might probe a sore tooth with his tongue, engaging her in imaginary conversations, imag ining her saying such delightful things. He was perfectly aware of the difference between these fantasies and an encounter with a real person, whose words would be dictated by her own interests, not by his—perfectly well aware that the woman in his imagination probably bore only the slightest relationship to the real woman, who had landed in Detroit at 1:24 that afternoon and was now no doubt sitting down to an Indian dinner at her aunt’s house in Royal Oak. She wasn’t beautiful, but she was full of life and high spirits, and in her presence he too felt this way: full of life and high spirits. She had taken him by surprise, ambushed him from inside the walls, and he found himself replaying in his mind Uncle Siva’s remarks about her position: a widow whose life in a remote part of India was troubled by dacoits and by unrest among the native tribes. He was powerless to resist the fantasies that came crowding in, fantasies in which he saved her from being carried away by the current, in which he carried her in his arms up through the little cove to firm ground, even though she was a strong swimmer.