Paul Theroux - The Elephanta Suite - Three Novellas

Alice was never late, and she knew what that implied about her, but she told herself she didn’t care. They had been friends at Brown, but not close. She had been the pretty girl’s plain friend, a protector, to be patronized. Now, as this was not Providence, Rhode Island, but the world, over the weeks of their traveling together Alice had begun to see Stella in a new way. She pitied her for her egotism, her passivity, her abrupt changes of mind. Pretty girls had a free pass, they could do anything, especially get away with a childlike sort of helplessness. Alice wanted to say, “Someday it will be your undoing.”

Having to search for Stella in the crowded station made Alice conspicuous and meant her having to stare at the people pushing, or the ones quarreling or sleeping in heaps on rectangles of cloth by the wall. Beaky old women sat abjectly in front of dishes of coins, exhibiting their misery. A mother with a limp baby made “give me food” gestures—her fingers fluttering to her mouth, presenting the baby as the object of suffering. Was the baby dead?

The Indian novels she’d read in the States had not prepared her for what she saw here. Where were the big fruitful families from these novels? Where were the jokes, the love affairs, the lavish marriage ceremonies, the solemn pieties, the virtuous peasants, the environmentalists, the musicians, the magic, the plausible young men? They seemed concocted to her now, and besieged in up-close India, all she thought of was Hieronymus Bosch, turtle-faced crones, stumpy men, deformed children.

“Yes?” It was someone else from Bosch, a dark brown man with dyed orange hair and red eyes. He pressed close to her and stroked her hair with a lizard-like hand. He held a tattered canvas bag in his other hand.

“Please leave me alone,” Alice said.

The man looked gleeful. He said, “There are more than one billion people in India. You will never be alone.”

A furious-faced mustached man in a khaki woolen uniform, with a truncheon under his arm, demanded to see Alice’s ticket. Roosterish and aggressive, he was not in any of the novels. The first man backed away, still smiling.

“What do you want?” She had been told that some of these people wanted bribes.

“Security. Where going?”

“Going Bangalore.”

“Flatporm pyve.”

“Me waiting friend,” Alice said, and smiled, hearing herself.

“Prend coming?”

“Friend coming just now.”

The man left her, and there she waited, as though abandoned, feeling scrutinized, assaulted by people’s stares. But what could she do? They had agreed to meet at the front of the station platform for the trip. Alice had not gotten used to Stella’s lateness, and she thought, Why should I? But the late person always seemed to think that after many instances of being late, she was understood and pardoned and the waiter was habituated to it. But the opposite was the case—the blame grew.

When, finally, Alice saw Stella approaching through the throng, she knew her friend had something on her mind. Mental conflict showed in the way she walked. They’d been traveling for three weeks, and in that time Alice saw how obvious Stella was, how easily she could be read. She touched her right eye when she was being untruthful; she jogged her left leg when she was impatient; she quickly agreed to anything Alice might say when she wanted to talk. And then she talked and talked, as a way to prevent Alice from asking any questions, talked in order to dominate and conceal. She had talked a lot lately, and ever since arriving in Mumbai Stella’s pretty-girl presumptions had been obnoxious. She was used to being treated as someone special; she was passive; she needed only to smile to attract notice.

The most obvious thing about Stella today Alice did not see until they were next to each other. She had no bag. She wasn’t coming.

They had set off from Delhi with much too big rucksacks. Stella’s had a teddy bear dangling from it, another of her affectations. (“Teddy doesn’t want to see the temple.”) Without the rucksack she looked smaller and straighter and a little devious.

“Where’s your pack?”

“Long story. I left it at the hotel.” Stella’s hand flew up and she touched her right eye.

Before she said anything more, Alice knew that Stella was trying to find the right words to say that she wasn’t coming to Bangalore —would not be traveling with Alice, after they had spent every day together since leaving the States on the graduation trip that they’d planned since last January. Alice knew that from Stella’s wan smile and her now contorted posture, digging her toe into the platform where someone had spat. She was staying behind—but why?

“I’ve been thinking really hard about us traveling together,” Stella said. “How really fun it’s been.”

Alice said, “So you’re bailing.”

“Don’t say it like that.” Stella was shocked. She disliked Alice’s bluntness. “You make it sound like I don’t care.”

“The plan was to take the train to Bangalore. To visit Sai Baba. He’s there at the moment. There’s a darshan this week. We have beds reserved at the ashram. And the trip to Chennai to see the temple. That was the plan, right?”

“I know, but—oh, gosh, I’m so confused. I don’t know what to do.”

“That was the plan,” Alice insisted. “And this is the train. It’s leaving in twenty minutes.”

“I’m really sorry, Allie.”

“So you really are bailing?”

“You make it sound like I’m betraying you.”

It was not at all what Alice meant, but now she realized that it was what Stella was doing. She had guiltily uttered the exact word that she was denying, another of her traits, as “It’s the truth, Allie” was always a lie.

“Bombay’s a zoo. That’s what you said. So why are you staying here?”

“I don’t know. It’s a long story.”

But her expression, and especially her unreliable eyes, indicated that she knew. Well, of course she did. She was an only child. She always did what she wanted, and if there was a better deal, she took it, even if it meant breaking her word.

Alice had given up any hope of Stella’s coming along, but she hated being lied to, and she was genuinely curious as to why a weak, spoiled girl like Stella had changed her mind and was staying in a city she said she disliked for its noise and its crowds and its smelly sidewalks.

“This is like a scene in one of those great movies when the characters have this painful farewell on a railway platform.”

“No, it’s not,” Alice said. “In the movies it’s always lovers. We weren’t even roommates.”

“It’s like a farewell, though.”

“It’s not painful.”

“It’s painful for me,” Stella said.

She’s going to cry, Alice thought, seeing Stella’s pretty mouth crumple, so she said, “You’re the one who’s bailing. So why is it painful for you?”

Stella started to cry, but managed to say, “You’re being really harsh.”

“If you cared so much, you’d be coming along. And what I don’t get at all is why you’re deciding to stay in Bombay alone.”

As soon as she said the word “alone,” Alice knew why. Stella would never travel alone, never stay alone; she had met someone else—she was with that person. The fact that Alice had only just realized this made her feel foolish—obtuse, anyway. But who was it? Where had they met?

“You’re staying with that hippie chick from Bennington we met at the bazaar.”

“God, no. She was so gross, like she flossed her teeth in that restaurant,” Stella said, in such an outburst Alice was sure she was telling the truth.

But she knew that Stella had teamed up with someone else. She said, “Don’t be enigmatic, Stell. We’re supposed to be friends. Who’s the guy?”