Paul Theroux - The Elephanta Suite - Three Novellas

She had made the traveler’s most important discovery. You went away from home and moved among strangers. No one knew your history or who you were: you started afresh, a kind of rebirth. Being whoever you wished to be, whoever you claimed to be, was a liberation. She wrote the thought in her diary and ended, So now I know why people go away.

And in between the ashram and Electronics City was the stable where the elephant was chained and the mahout lived. The elephant was more eloquent than the mahout: the elephant smiled more, was more responsive, hungrier—and hunger said so much. She visited at least once a week, mostly on her way home from Electronics City. She paid the taxi driver and then lingered to feed the elephant, or just watched, and afterward she walked back to the ashram in a better mood.

This elephant also had two personalities. Usually the mahout welcomed Alice—in his way, with a downward flap of his hand, meaning “Come closer,” or by cupping his hand to indicate “Feed him.” But one day he made an unmistakable “Keep away” gesture, pressing his palms at her, pushing them toward her face.

And he said an Indian word that Alice recognized, because it existed in English too. Pointing at his eye, he said, “Musth.”

She peered at the elephant’s eye and saw that it was leaking brownish fluid, staining its coarse skin, like rusty water dripping from an old pipe. The elephant’s eye was glowing, his chain clanked, he looked trapped and agitated.

“Musth, musth,” Alice said. Of course, the elephant was half demented with frustrated desire, chained against venting it, lust and anger mingled in his big body and leaking out of his eye. For the first time she heard that fury in the elephant’s trumpeting, and the sound of it made her step back.

The mahout was relieved. He too gave the elephant room, and he forked the grass and branches very carefully into a pile that was at the limit of the elephant’s reach. That the mahout with all his knowledge, and what she guessed to be his history with this animal, was so cautious, and even perhaps fearful, impressed her greatly.

That very evening she knelt and prayed to Ganesh and chanted, Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey Gajaanana , reminding herself of what she had seen at the stable, the explosive elephant chained to a post.

In the morning, as always, she attended Swami’s daily darshan, and later she was a cleaner, a menial, a mopper, an acolyte, an arranger of flowers, and a collector of rupees, her hands clasped before her.

She sat with Priyanka and helped weave garlands of marigolds to drape before the big statue of Saraswati at the edge of the pavilion.

“My personal favorite,” Priyanka said, smiling at Saraswati holding the sitar. “Making beautiful music.”

Was it because Alice smiled that Priyanka asked her whom she prayed to?

She did not say the elephant god, Ganesh. She needed her secret. She said, “They’re all related, the Indian gods—fathers and daughters, sons and mothers, avatars and incarnations. It’s a family, isn’t it? I pray to the family.”

Priyanka had a way of twisting her head, contorting herself in a way that said, I don’t believe you. And she assumed this posture of disbelief now, looking sideways, perhaps because the answer had come so neatly. But Alice’s was an Indian reply—indisputable and yet untruthful, too well rehearsed, a little too elaborate, a little too general, not to be hiding the truth. She had been hearing such replies since arriving in India.

She was well aware that Priyanka was suspicious of her. But that was all right. Alice was used to the Indian habit of inventing the person others supposed you to be, assigning you particular traits. Alice was American, middle class, good school, funny about food, careful with money, always with her nose in a book, a bit too quick to point out that some Indians were poor, not quick enough to venerate Swami, with a deplorable tendency to treat him as a fallible human, because Americans made a point, didn’t they, of being hard to please.

And for Alice, a lot of these devotees at the ashram were little more than cultists, even though Swami rejected any idea of its being a cult. But they had come from rigid, structured backgrounds—good families like Priyanka’s and Prithi’s; they were well brought up, had lived sheltered lives, and could say with wide-open eyes to an American, “I had no idea there were poor people in India!”

Alice had read the books. In their adulthood, such people needed an authority figure, needed to be with like-minded companions, needed moral certainties, needed a path—no, they needed the path. Sai Baba was a power figure, and the ashram was the center of their world. They would have sat all day knitting shawls for him and been blissfully happy.

Or, if not a cult, pretty close to one.

“As for me, I’m just curious,” Alice told herself, and she was glad she was not much like them, nor much like Stella—worldly, selfish Stella.

And she had another life on the far side of Bangalore, in Electronics City. From this vantage point she was able to keep her life at the ashram in perspective.

She had taken the job because she needed money, but she saw it was about more than money: the job kept her clear-sighted. As for her notion that the devotees at the ashram resembled cultists, that insight came to her one night at InfoTech as she saw the employees—her students—making their way from the company cafeteria. They were laughing and talking, comparing notes, whispering among themselves, one or two making calls on their cell phones, all dressed differently, all of them young, all free. They were doing what they wanted. They were independent, being paid, and hoping to get to the next level. They had supervisors, but none of these bosses was an authority figure in any solemn sense. They followed company rules and protocol, but they had no path except their own. They had not forsaken anything—far from it; they were embracing the world and pressing their smiling faces against it, hoping it would smile back.

Alice’s sari worked in both places. It was the perfect disguise. She liked slipping out of the ashram and becoming anonymous on the busy sidewalk, then hailing a taxi. She liked moving from the comfortable decrepitude of Whitefield to the unfinished modernity of Electronics City, which sometimes seemed to her a city already glittering in decay: so many buildings were under construction, the place looked like an elaborate ruin. Often in India you could not tell whether a building was going up or falling down, and the construction sites were a mess, but with tall buildings here and there, the fragments of a crystal city.

And then to InfoTech, which was a compound behind a high wall: the glass tower with tall palm trees in the lobby, and the annex behind it where her classroom was located, and the ugly power plant.

“Good evening, madam. How was your day?”

Yesterday’s lesson had included that catch phrase, as well as the words “catch phrase.”

Some of the others repeated it. They were confident. The quality of poise that Alice had seen in Amitabh when they’d met on the train was a trait that all of them shared. Speaking Hindi, they bowed their heads, they were deferential, they sounded elaborate and oblique and evasive. In Basic English they were direct, even blunt, certainly unsubtle. Basic English was a good telephone language: its edges had been knocked off; it was informal yet helpfully intrusive, demanding a reply.

Amitabh had proven to be the best student, the quickest learner. Any word or phrase he heard became part of his permanent vocabulary.

“It takes very little brains to learn a language,” Alice had told the students. They seemed to resent her saying this, but she insisted on it. “Anyone can do it. Children do it. You just have to make the right noises. But what you say—that’s a different story. So you can be fluent and have nothing to say. I can’t teach you to be good salespeople, but I can give you the tools.”