Paul Theroux - The Elephanta Suite - Three Novellas

“Thought in head becoming utterance.”

Now “utterance” was one of those words, like “miscreants,” “audacious,” “thrice,” “ample,” and “jocundity,” that some Indians used in casual conversation and Indian writers used in sentences, in the same way that out the window the Indian farmers were using antique sharp-nosed hand plows pulled by yoked oxen and women carried water jars on their heads. India was a country of usable antiques.

Alice kept a list of these Indian English words in her notebook. Comparative linguistics was a subject she had thought of pursuing in grad school—what else could an English major do?—but first she wanted to take this year off after graduation, the trip with Stella—who had slipped into thin air, just bailed, selfish bitch. But Alice smiled to think that here she was, enjoying herself in this adventure to Bangalore, while Stella and Zack were sneering at Mumbai and discovering how shallow each other was. It gives me no pleasure to think that you’re unhappy, Alice thought, and smiled, because it did.

“You are ruminative,” the young man said.

“Ruminative,” Alice said, thinking, Write that down. “That’s me.”

“Cudgeling your mind.”

“The expression is ‘cudgeling your brains,’ only I’m not.”

“You are indeed thinking out loud.”

“You learn fast,” Alice said. “Where are you going?”

“Bangalore,” he said.

He was going the whole way in this sleeping compartment?

“Job interview,” he said. “Eye Tee. Bee Pee Oh.”

“A call center?”

“Can be call center or tech-support center. Voice based or computer driven. Wish me luck.”

Alice was touched by the fat young man’s saying that. She said, “I really do wish you luck. I hope you get the job. Maybe I’ll call the tech support line someday and you can help me fix my computer.”

“It would be my pleasure. You are smiling.”

“Because we’re in this train. India out there, rolling along. It’s so Merchant-Ivory.”

When Alice glanced out the window, she saw that dusk had fallen and they were pulling into a station. It was Gurgaon. Many people got on, and just as the train started again, a woman entered the compartment with two suitcases. She did not offer a greeting but instead concentrated on chaining her luggage to a stanchion by the door. Then, muttering, she claimed the lower berth and sent the young man to the upper berth and out of sight. It was as though a chaperone had intervened, for he was at once both obedient and less familiar. While he appeared to read—Alice heard the rattling of magazine pages—the woman made her bed and lay down to sleep. Alice was reassured by the woman, whom she saw as not an intrusion at all but a typically bossy Indian woman who would keep order.

A man came by with a tray of food—dhal, rice, two puris, a pot of yogurt, the sort of meal that Stella had begun to call “the slimy special,” but Alice found delicious. And after she ate it and the tray was collected, she lay down and read a Sai Baba pamphlet, “The Meaning of Love,” in preparation for the ashram, but had hardly turned a page when she fell asleep, rocked by the train.

In the morning a coffee seller came by. She bought a paper cup of coffee, and some bananas from a woman with bunches of them in a basket, and she sat in the sunshine, feeling on this lovely morning that a new phase of her life was beginning.

“Can you please inform me, what is your good name, madam?”

She looked up and saw the tubby young man smiling at her, sitting in a lotus posture. She had forgotten him.

“Sure thing. Alice—Alice Durand.”

He was now leaning over, his arm extended. “My card. May I obtain yours?”

“I don’t actually have a business card,” Alice said. “But I’m sure I’ll see you around. We’re both getting off at Bangalore.”

“No. You must be getting off at Cantonment, for Whitefield.”

“How do you know that?”

“Sai Baba Center. You have been perusing pamphlet.”

Anyone’s watchfulness slightly unnerved her, but she also admired this man’s. He was a fast learner. He would get the job.

“We are sitting on eight o’clock. Cantonment is coming up.”

“And what is your good name?”

“Amitabh. On the card. Also mobile number and Hotmail account. Also pager. You will find me accessible.”

He was still sitting, wide in his solid posture, when Alice hoisted her topheavy rucksack and struggled off the train to face the squawking, reaching auto-rickshaw drivers, who seemed to know exactly where she was going.

The passage of time was not easily calculable in the ashram. You didn’t count hours or days, but rather months, maybe years. A month had gone by, though time meant nothing here, even with the routine: up at four or so to queue for a place at the hall for the darshan and a chance to hear Swami at six-thirty; then bhajans until eight or so, and breakfast; then chores and food prep and more queuing until more of Swami at two and more bhajans, of which Alice’s favorite began,

Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey Gajaanana

Gajaanana Hey Gajavadana …

(Victory to Gajaanana,

The elephant-faced God …)

“Work is worship,” Swami said, and “Hands that help are better than lips that pray,” and “Start the day with love, spend the day with love, fill the day with love, end the day with love. That is the way to God.”

Alice’s days spilled one into the other, full and fluid, guided by Swami. And the passage of time was a consoling liquefaction of weeks in which she was gently turned, as though tumbled downstream, without any effort, feeling the buoyancy of happiness chanted into her ears.

Swami was smaller, slighter, older than his photographs suggested, the hair a less symmetrical frizz-ball, his smile more fatigued than impish. But he was eighty. His direct confrontation, his practical advice, his refusal to preach—the essential Swami appealed to her. He seemed to single her out at the daily darshan and to hold her gaze, and while seeming to preach, said, “I am not here to preach. Only to listen. Only to make suggestions. I tell you”—and here Alice felt the warmth of his attention—“if you are Christian, be the best Christian you can be.”

“He will leave his body at ninety-six,” Alice’s roommate Priyanka said. “And after some eight years, the third and last incarnation will be born. Prema Sai. I wish to observe this.”

Priyanka and her friend Prithi had gotten robes for Alice and allowed her to share their room, claiming they were spiritual sisters, since single women were discouraged from applying for rooms. The room was spartan and clean—well, Alice cleaned it, after bhajans. She was glad that Stella was not here to distract her. Stella would have hated the food, made a fuss about the flies or the heat, or else said, as she had at the temple at Muttra, “I don’t see why I should take off my shoes here, since the floor is a heck of a lot dirtier than my feet.”

Alice loved the simplicity of the place, the strict routine, the plain food, the safety of the perimeter wall, the knowledge that Swami was right next door, beyond the gate in his funky yellow house. It was like a nunnery, and yet there were no vows. She could leave any time she wanted. But the routine suited her, and the city—what she had seen of it—seemed pleasant enough. Too much traffic, though; too many people; honks, shouts, the crackle of music, new stinks.

Against Priyanka’s advice—“Swami doesn’t like us dibble-dabbling in the town”—Alice took a bus to Lalbagh Gardens and lost herself among the giant trees, the first real trees she’d seen in India, big old ones that spoke of space and order, that provided damp shade and coolness. Indian families roamed in the gardens, lapping at ice creams, and Alice regarded these people wandering among the great trees as worshipers of the most devout sort, without dogma, lovers of the natural world, as Swami was.