Paul Theroux - The Elephanta Suite - Three Novellas

Now she saw the mahout with a hayfork, piling the fodder near the elephant.

“ Namaste,” Alice said, clasping her hands.

The mahout held the hayfork with his knees and returned the greeting. He then beckoned her closer.

Alice said, “I know you have no idea what I’m saying, but thank you. I need a job, I need some money. I am here because I love this elephant.”

The mahout smiled, the elephant smiled, the odor of manure was sweetish, the stable was shadowy, cool with the aromas of drying hay.

Alice held out some roasted chickpeas for the mahout, and he took some, but instead of eating them he poked his hand toward the elephant’s trunk and allowed them to be seized from his hand. The elephant swung his trunk backward and blew the chickpeas into his mouth and then reached for more—not toward the mahout but, in a show of cleverness, lifting his trunk toward Alice and seeming to gesture with his twitching nose holes, wrinkling the pink flesh around them. A faint stink reached her from the holes at the tip of his trunk, a gust of sour breath.

“Here you go, darling.” She held the chickpeas in the flat of her hand and let the elephant scoop them up.

The mahout nodded and went back to forking hay, the elephant to eating it. But she could see that the elephant was looking directly at her with his great round eye.

“Thank you, thank you. Namaste.”

The mahout waved the hayfork and Alice thought, He looks like Gandhi. She returned to the ashram refreshed, at peace, as though she’d visited a holy place.

And the next day she slipped out to meet Amitabh. He was waiting at Vishnu Hotel and Lunch House, seated at a table, holding a cup of tea and studying his cell phone, perhaps reading a number and wondering if he should answer. There was no doubt that it was Amitabh—smiling, fat-bellied, fleshy arms and big brown cheeks and beautiful eyes.

“Hi,” he said. “Take a chair. This is real positive, seeing you.”

The tone of voice belonged to someone else—the words, too. Yet he was smiling as he spoke—this was a novelty. His mouth was set in a grin, and he was open-mouthed as he twanged at her.

“How long has it been? Like six weeks or more?” He was sipping tea, sucking it through his open mouth.

“I don’t even know how long,” Alice said. “I wanted to ask you a few things. Looks like you got the job.”

“The job, yeah”—he said jahb. “I was working when you called. That’s why I gave you my work name.”

“Which is?”

“Shan.”

She said, “Would that be anything like Shawn?”—seeing it as Sean.

“You got it. Shan Harris.”

“You have two names?”

“Don’t you? You sure do! It’s kind of strange. My mother calls me Bapu. It means Dad!”

She said, “Amitabh, why are you talking like this?”

“American accent? That’s my job just now, at the call center. I’m a consultant—working toward being an associate.”

“For a company?”

“We service Home Depot.”

Alice had heard of such jobs, but this was the first time she was seeing an employee at close quarters. She said, “Good news. That’s great.”

Because she was thinking: His accent is grotesque. I can do much better than that—and smiled at the thought of operating a phone at a call center in Bangalore, fielding calls from Rye and Bedford, maybe people she knew, though she didn’t know anyone who shopped at Home Depot.

Amitabh said, “How can I offer you excellent service?”

She almost laughed but thought better of it. She said, “I need a job.”

“Have a cup of tea,” Amitabh said. “Then tell me what you want to do.”

Over tea, Alice explained that she was short of money. She said that she had been an English major but was computer-savvy.

“I’m open to doing anything,” she said.

Amitabh’s face gleamed at this. He savored it, working his mouth, then said, “You got a good attitude. Plus, it’s my day off. Let’s get a taxi.”

Waiting for the taxi, Amitabh made a call on his cell phone. When he used his thumb to end the call, he said, “Plus, you’re real lucky. Miss Ghosh is interviewing today. They have a major manpower need.”

She was glad that there was no delay, that she would not have to report to the ashram and hear “Swami doesn’t approve.” As this thought turned in her mind, Amitabh asked about Swami.

“Sai Baba—is he as great as everyone says?”

“Greater,” Alice said. “He’d be glad I was doing this. Work is worship. Are we going into Bangalore?”

“No. Electronics City. Phase Two.”

He would not shake the accent. He said, Electrahnics Seety.

It was not far, but it took more than half an hour in traffic on a dusty road of two wheelers and auto rickshaws, limping cows and mobs of tramping people. They turned off the main road onto a new empty road of an industrial area where there were tall glass buildings and many more roughed out in concrete, and although these looked like bombed ruins, she saw that they were rising.

“This is InfoTech,” Amitabh said. He showed his pass at the front desk and walked down a side corridor. “I can introduce you to the head of personnel.”

He knocked on an open door and became obsequious, bowing, losing something of the accent, laughing softly as he greeted the woman at the desk.

“Please sit down,” the woman said to Alice. “Amitabh tells me you’re looking for a position.”

“That’s right.”

“Perhaps you could fill up this form and we’ll see if we have anything.” She handed Alice a set of printed sheets. “Please take them outside.”

Alice sat in the corridor and answered the questions, filled in the blanks, and elaborated on her education and previous jobs. When she had finished and handed in the forms, she sat and watched the woman examine them. The woman had a solemn, unimpressed way of reading, pinching the pages with her thumb and forefinger, holding them away from her face.

“I can’t offer you anything permanent, but we could extend something informal. No benefits, no contract. Just a week-to-week arrangement.”

“That would suit me. Is this at the call center?”

The woman smiled. “Not exactly. With your skill sets you could be useful in the classroom. We have lessons most days.”

“To teach …?” She left the question hanging, for a space to be filled in.

“American accent and intonation.”

“I can do that.”

So she had a job, and a secret, and smiling an elephant smile, she discovered that Bangalore was not one place but two.

Alice knew herself to be single-minded, and successful because of it—how else to explain her magna cum laude at Brown, all the loans she had floated to pay tuition, and most recently her ability to overcome Stella’s defection? The face she showed the world was dominant and determined. She was reconciled to living with the personality her body suggested, the one people expected—she was heavy again, with her father’s features—always the pretty girl’s plain friend. She had to be decisive, because she also knew that people like her got no help from anyone. She had had to learn to be the helper, the humorist, to be self-sufficient and ironic, too. She coped with that role, yet she was someone else—sensitive to slights, appreciative of attention, spiritual, even submissive, more sensual than anyone imagined, yet no man had ever touched her.

With the job, her life changed. The inner Alice was released, and she was able to be two different people in the two different parts of Bangalore. That was how it seemed. But really she was the same person using the two sides of her personality, just as perhaps Bangalore was one place with two aspects—indeed, as the elephant god, whom she esteemed rather than worshiped, had two aspects, the spiritual enabler and the fat, jolly, workaday elephant, spiritual and practical, as she believed herself to be.