The Elephanta Suite

  The woman, Miss Ghosh, merely stared at her.

  "So I guess I owe you everything and you owe me nothing."

  "May I remind you that this is a company and not a charitable institution. What if everyone did what you are proposing to do?"

  "I don't believe this. Does this mean you're refusing me permission to take a week off?"

  "What it means," Miss Ghosh said, picking up a pencil and tapping its point on her green blotter, "is that because of the precipitate nature of your request for departure, I cannot guarantee that your job slot will still be vacant on your return."

  This was the same grateful woman who had said, You have worked wonders. I think you are being modest about your achievements.

  "What is your purpose in this holiday?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "Where are you going, may I ask, and who with?"

  Alice said with a hoot of triumph, "With all respect, I don't understand how that is any of your business."

  And she knew in saying that, in seeing Miss Ghosh's face darken—the prune-like skin around her sunken eyes, the way Indians revealed their age, and the eyes themselves going cold—that she had burned a bridge.

  Things went no better at the ashram. She did not need to seek permission to leave—after all, she was a paying guest. Yet when she broke the news to Priyanka, who, because she spoke Hindi, held a senior position as a go-between and interpreter with the ashram staff, Priyanka became haughty and said in the affected way she used for scolding, "I am afraid that Swami will not be best pleased."

  "It's only a week."

  "Swami is not happy to see people using his ashram as a hostel, merely coming and going willy-nilly."

  "One week," Alice said, and thought, I have never heard an American utter the phrase "willy-nilly."

  "But you are requesting checkout."

  "I'm not requesting checkout, as you put it. I just don't see any point in my paying for my room and my food if I'm not here."

  Priyanka turned sideways in her chair and faced the window. She said, "If you like, I will submit your request. You will have to apply in writing, in triplicate. I will see that your request is followed up. But I'm not hopeful of a positive result."

  "Well, what's the worst that can happen? I'll leave my backpack in the storeroom and get it when I come back. And I'll hope there's a room available."

  "Ashram cannot assume responsibility for your personal property, as though we are Left Luggage at a station. This is a spiritual community."

  Alice said, "Swami has personal property. People give him money. He has a house. He has a big car. He has another house in Puttaparthi. Are you kidding me?"

  Priyanka pursed her lips and said in a stern and reprimanding way, "Swami is our father and teacher. It is not for us to question him. He is the embodiment of love. He is a vessel of mercy."

  "Then obviously such a paragon of virtue won't have the slightest problem with anything I say or do. He'll forgive me and give me his blessing."

  As soon as she said it, she realized it sounded too much like a satire of Swami. Priyanka fell silent. Alice knew she'd gone too far.

  Another bridge in flames. She went to see her last friend in Bangalore. He looked miserable. His leg dragged at the chain, and then she saw the stain running beneath his eye, gleaming on his rough hide. The mahout, Gopi, clasped his hands and with pitying eyes urged Alice to back away.

  She boarded the Super Express to Chennai in a mood of triumphant farewell. Although Priyanka had said it was impossible for her to leave her bag behind, Alice found a devotee who was willing to lock it in a storeroom. She knew Priyanka was being destructive. Perhaps Priyanka saw that she was being left behind. Whose fault was that? She was the one who refused to travel on Indian Railways. Alice was leaving Bangalore, the ashram, and the job at Electronics City, but she was well aware of her slender resources. Eventually she might have to return and negotiate and be humble, but she hoped not.

  The uncooperative people of the past few days only strengthened her, as Stella had done. I'll show them, she thought. I don't need them.

  Though these Indians were difficult, India was not hostile. It was indifferent, a great, hot, uncaring mob of trampling feet in an enormous and blind landscape, damaged people scrambling on ruins. But why should anyone care about me? The country was so huge and crowded that if anyone seemed to care—to try to sell her something, as the hawkers were doing now in the train—it was because she was a foreigner and probably had money.

  "Nahi chai hai," she had learned to say. Leave me alone.

  She had come to understand what the solitary long-distance traveler learns after months on the road—that in the course of time a trip stops being an interlude of distractions and detours, pursuing sights, looking for pleasures, and becomes a series of disconnections, giving up comfort, abandoning or being abandoned by friends, passing the time in obscure places, inured to the concept of delay, since the trip itself is a succession of delays.

  Solving problems, finding meals, buying new clothes and giving away old ones, getting laundry done, buying tickets, scavenging for cheap hotels, studying maps, being alone but not lonely. It was not about happiness but safety, finding serenity, making discoveries in all this locomotion and an equal serenity when she had a place to roost, like a bird of passage migrating slowly in a sequence of flights. The famous swallows that summered in Siberia, then wintered in the Zambesi Valley: they weren't taking trips, travel was an aspect of their extraordinary survival; they never lingered anywhere for long, yet the itinerant nature of their lives, their quest for food, had made them strong. The distances they flew were legendary, but their lives were made up of short economical flights to breed and then move on. She wanted to become such a bird.

  She smiled, seeing that what had happened by accident to her was a gift, a further ripening of her personality. The jaunts in Europe hadn't done it, the experience of India had. By degrees she had been moved farther and farther from the life she'd known into a new mode of existence, as though soaring upward and finally, after some buffeting, moving with certainty onward, alone, no longer disturbed, in an orbit of her own, freed from her past, her unreliable friend, even her family, and pleased by the idea that the future would be like this—stimulated by the random lyricism of chance events, of good days and bad days.

  Not a journey anymore, not an outing or an interlude, but seeing the world; not taking a trip, not travel with a start and a finish, but living her life. Life was movement.

  How had it happened? She guessed that it had come about by being alone, the circumstance Stella had forced upon her. By earning the money she'd needed and, oddly, by being exploited, like most working people on earth. By being disappointed, abandoned, taken for granted. She did not depend on anyone, surely not a man; she had become strong. The elephant was an example—chained because he was powerful, becoming more powerful because he was chained. Released from that chain, he would flap his ears and fly.

  Her illnesses had given her heart. Needing a tooth pulled on her way through Turkey, she'd found a woman dentist, and after a period of recovery the problem was solved. She did not tell her family until afterward. The flu she'd picked up in Tblisi, the twisted ankle in Baku, and the bumpy flight to Tashkent, the plane's germ-laden air, the clammy days in Bukhara, and at last the flight to India—even Stella's illnesses, which she'd ministered to—all these had given her confidence, because she'd overcome them. You fell sick, you got well, then healthier. You didn't go home or call Mom because you'd caught a cold. You paused and cured yourself and continued on your way, stronger than before.

  This is my life, Alice thought on the train to Chennai, a good life of my own making, and all the decisions are mine. And here is my journey—a five-dollar seat, a ten-dollar hotel, a one-dollar meal. At this rate I can live for a month without working again.

  The man with the narrow pushcart sold her lunch: rice, a chapati, some dhal and green beans in a plastic dish, a pot of yogurt, some curried pot
ato—perfect. Thirty rupees, which was seventy-five cents. And eating it, studying her thrift, she smiled and thought, I can go on and on.

  She had enough money, the country was poor, the cost of living low. I'll be fine. She made a mental note to write a postcard home—not a letter but just a few sentences, to say hello and to give no information, to show she did not need them.

  This was what travel meant, another way of living your life and being free.

  She began to read another Indian novel, much praised, by an Indian woman who lived in the States. Was this merely sentimentality? The book did not speak to her. The problem with it and the others she'd read was that they did not describe the India she had encountered or the people she'd met. Where were these families? The novels described a tidier India, full of ambitions, not the India of pleading beggars or weirdly comic salesmen or people so pompous they were like parodies.

  As she was reading, the man in the adjoining seat started a conversation, interrupting her. But he was friendly, a Jain, he said, who would not eat potatoes because they were crawling with living creatures.

  "Full of germs and organisms," he said.

  "Not good to eat," she said, trying to be helpful.

  "No—good. But I must not take lives."

  Didn't want to kill the germs! Where was the book in which he appeared?

  "So what do you eat?"

  "Pulses. Beans. Curd. Also greens."

  "I get it," she said.

  "And later, when I am a bit older, I shall renounce the world and go hither and thither, barefoot, as my father did in his dotage. Just wandering with no possessions, eschewing the material world."

  "I think I'm doing that now," Alice said.

  The man was corpse-like, almost skeletal, a faster and an abstainer, even now mortifying his flesh. He smiled with too many teeth, a skull's smile. He didn't believe her, but that didn't matter. Another aspect of her freedom was that she didn't feel a need to explain her life or justify what she'd done.

  "My father became a saint," the man said.

  He showed her a snapshot of a gaunt bearded man with a shawl over his narrow shoulders, carrying a walking stick.

  "I will do likewise," he said. "My children will look after my wife."

  Poor woman, Alice thought—why can't she be a saint? But she smiled and returned to her book, and found that she was unable to hold her head up. The book was a soporific. She was soon asleep in the overheated compartment, the sun pressing through the window, burning one side of her face. She dreamed of sleeping by a fire, the noisy train creating in her dream a rumbling night.

  When she woke up the Jain man was gone, and in his place was Amitabh, as strange as if he had been shifted from her dream and was just as shocking and insubstantial.

  She made a sound, an involuntary gasp—she couldn't help it. Amitabh woggled his head with a smile of satisfaction, as though pleased by her discomfort. He sat facing her, looking smug and ludicrous in a white long sleeved shirt and dangling gray necktie.

  "How did you get here?"

  "Take a guess." She hated his drawling accent, all the syllables in his nose, and what a nose. "I have friends in lowly places."

  5

  He stared at her with the dumb frankness of a big hungry animal contemplating something tiny and edible. His gaze tugged at her face—she felt it on her cheek—his leer lurking first on her upper body, then her legs, lingering at her feet, flashing upward again at her hair, as though she didn't know. She kept her attention at the window to count the passing stations. She felt with disgust that he was regarding her with his mouth, his moist parted lips, his prominent teeth, the wet tip of his tongue just showing in a witless way.

  At their first meeting on the other train, months before, she'd found his bulky body a big hopeless thing, like a sack he stuffed food into. But now she found it absurdly overlarge, even monstrous, refusing to obey her, obstinate and persistent like those eyes, that mouth.

  At last, very softly but with unmistakable firmness, she said, "I want you to go away and leave me alone."

  "I am holding a ticket. This is my assigned seat."

  She caught a glimpse of his mouth again, his tongue bulging against his teeth. He was fatter than when she'd last seen him. His size made him seem smug and immovable.

  Alice sighed and prayed for a station and was reproached by what she'd thought earlier about being free—mocked, but glad she hadn't written it in her journal.

  "The Sai Baba people don't like you at all," he said.

  "That's not true."

  "It is a fact. They believe you're selfish."

  It stung her, for though she denied it again, she knew there was some truth in what he said.

  "You look at India and see people everywhere and it seems like a mob," he said. "But it's not—it's like a family. We know each other. There are no secrets in India. Hey, this isn't China! Everything is known here. And where a ferringi is concerned it's all public knowledge." He was smiling at her, then he opened his mouth to laugh and she got a whiff of the hot stink of his breath. "It's funny how people come here from overseas—Americans, like you—and don't realize how we are in constant touch with each other. We're always talking. You have no idea what we're saying. Because we speak English so proficiently, you have no need to learn Hindi. We know what's going on!"

  Alice had vowed not to listen to him or to follow his argument, and yet she was intimidated by what he said, understood it in spite of herself.

  "Please leave me alone," she said.

  "Gimme a chance."

  She was so disgusted by his saying gimme, she did not reply. "I can help you."

  She prayed for a station so that she could see how far it was to Chennai.

  He read her mind, and that frightened her. He said, "This is Tiruvallur. Twenty more minutes to Chennai. Not far."

  She slid out her train ticket, which she'd used as a bookmark, and palmed it. The arrival time was printed on it, 1445.

  "See? I'm right." He was smiling again. "And I'm going back with you. You can ignore me, but we'll be sitting right here, day after tomorrow."

  She was suddenly angry. She said, "It's against the law for private information to be given out. Your friend at the ticket counter is going to be in big trouble."

  "Alice, want to know something? Huh?"

  She went hot again with anger. She hated him. She feared she might cry, not from sadness but with frustration at his spoiling something she'd looked forward to, one she paid for. He had no right to force himself on her.

  He was still smiling and said, "A lot of people in India think it should be against the law for women to be walking around alone. Wearing shorts! They think it's immoral."

  "Then they have a problem," she said, and became self-conscious because she was wearing shorts.

  "Alice"—she hated his using her name—"listen, most things that people do in India are against the law. That's how we survive. We're too poor to obey the law. You can bribe anyone, you can do anything if you have money. That's why we hate foreigners. We know they always bend the rules too, just like us, except they always get away with it."

  Against her will he had gotten her attention. She had found herself listening to him and was disgusted by his logic and wanted to stop listening.

  "Hey, but not me. I don't think like that. I know that foreigners have given us a lotta investment. My job, for one. I'm real grateful. I got so much to be thankful for."

  That last sentence, in his American accent, mimicry from one of her own lessons, turned her stomach. She got up and went to the door of the compartment, but when she slid it open, she could not move. A man in a gray uniform was standing inches away from her, the conductor.

  "Chennai coming up, madam."

  "This man," she said, gesturing at Amitabh, but without turning her head, "this man is pestering me."

  "Passenger making nuisance, madam?"

  "He is talking to me."

  The conductor spoke in Hindi—perhaps Hind
i, how was she to know?—and his tone was familiar and almost friendly. Amitabh replied as though bantering, exactly as he had described earlier, like a family member.

  "Making unwelcome advances, madam?"

  The conductor seemed unconvinced. It was like a conspiracy.

  "No. But I wish he were sitting somewhere else."

  The conductor beckoned with his hole puncher for Amitabh's ticket, which he examined.

  "Passenger is holding valid ticket for this place, madam."

  "Never mind," she said. She grabbed her bag and squeezed past him. She made her way to the end of the coach, where the vestibule door was open to the trackside.

  The clicking of the tracks slowed, the wall of a culvert was visible, and soon the backs of houses, laundry hanging on poles protruding from windows. She heard the echo of clattering wheels and a sudden muffled rumble as the train drew into the station.

  She leaned out the door and hopped off before the train came to a stop, and so she stumbled slightly and almost fell, drawing the attention of the bystanders, mostly porters in red shirts and ragged turbans. She hurried down the platform, following the exit signs, to the front of the station, where she was set upon by frantic men.

  "Taxi, madam!"

  "Taxi, taxi!"

  They struggled with each other to be seen by her. They had hot frenzied eyes and red-stained teeth.

  "I'm looking for the bus," she said, pushing through them. "Where going?

  "Hotel, hotel!" another man was chanting.

  "Bus. Mahabalipuram."

  "Take taxi, madam. Special price."

  She kept walking through the mob, resolute, yet fearing that someone would touch her.

  "Bus is not there," a voice said into her ear, mocking her. "Bus station is Mylapore side. I take you. Taxi just here."

  "Oh, God."

  She turned to escape this man and saw a crush of men in ragged shirts watching her and blocking the way. The heat here was heavy with humidity. Her clothes clung to her. Her face was already wet with perspiration. She wiped her face with her forearm and was bumped by the man saying "Taxi."