Paul Theroux - The Elephanta Suite - Three Novellas

All of them were altered by speaking American English, given new personalities, but Amitabh was changed the most. On the train he had been a strange figure, with his obsolescent words. India clung to the past, and so for all the new buildings and new money, nothing changed very much. These were the words the East India Company had brought from England hundreds of years before, and still they were spoken and written, however musty they seemed. Perhaps Indians used these archaic words to give themselves dignity, power, or presence, but the effect was comic.

Yet saying “We can ramp up a solution,” Amitabh underwent a personality change. “Or we could go another rowt,” he might add, “depending on whether you have the in-surance. Pick up a pin and make a note of this, or with one click of your mouse we could have a done deal.”

Alice smiled to think that it was all her doing. She herself said “root,” not “rowt,” for “route.” “Ramp up” made her laugh. “Insurance,” and “pin” for “pen,” were southern but spreading. Why not hand them all over, to give these callers credibility? They often dealt with mechanical objects—nuts and bolts, metal sleeves, tubes, and rods— toobs and rahds.

“I’d so appreciate it if you’d share the serial number of your appliance with me. You’ll find it on the underside—that is the bottom of the appliance, stamped on a metal plate. Thank you much.”

And after they’d rehearsed this in a classroom chorus, Alice would say, “The bahdum of the appliance.”

“The bahdum of the appliance!”

“Thank you so very much,” she said.

“Thank you so very much!”

The expression made her laugh, but it was American.

These students, who were known as sales and technical associates, worked for a company that retailed home appliances and power tools. Manning the phones, they needed information from the person on the other end, an American, so that they could find solutions in the user’s manual. Once they found the specific model and the serial number, they would try to solve the problem. They needed polite but exact ways to ask for information.

“And, plus, I’d be very grateful for your attention at this point in time. Kindly turn the appliance so that the power cord is facing away from you. You will be looking at the head of the appliance, which is green in color.”

“And, plus, I’d be very grateful for your attention at this point in time!” they repeated, twanging the words.

Alice surprised herself in finding pleasure teaching informal American English—not essay phrases but telephonic American. “What I’m hearing is that your product might be defective” and “Let’s focus in on the digital messages you see on the screen” and “Have you remembered to activate the On switch?”

Speaking in this way, with Alice’s urging, the students were, after just a few weeks, slightly different people—more confident, like Amitabh, but also friendlier and funnier, more casual, more direct. Alice smiled to think that in teaching American English she was giving them magic formulas to utter: they were getting results on the phone, helping customers, becoming efficient trouble-shooters.

And Miss Ghosh was complimentary, adding more hours to Alice’s schedule and reporting that the employees at the call center were more effective on their jobs.

“We can perhaps revise your contract to reflect a month-to-month contingency,” Miss Ghosh said. “We’re chalking that in.”

Alice agreed. The money helped. Now she was paying her way at the ashram, though they asked for very little. How odd to pass from InfoTech to Sai Baba, from Electronics City to Whitefield, yet had it not been for the elephant in between, she would have been lost.

“Musth?” she inquired of the mahout a week after the visit when she had seen the agitated elephant beating his chained leg against the post, his eye leaking.

The mahout smiled and shook his head, and he gave her to understand—waving his open hand in the air—that he had been wrong, that it had not been musth. Another gesture, pointing ahead—the musth would come later. He welcomed her into the courtyard. The elephant nodded, seeing her, and when she gave him a handful of peanuts, which he crushed and shelled with his trunk, blowing the nuts into his mouth and expelling the husks, she knew he associated her with food, and she brought more and more. She found he especially liked cashews. They had no shells. She brought bags of them, and fed the grateful animal, and felt she had a friend.

The elephant calmed her, kept her centered—another expression she delighted in teaching the employees, who called themselves InfoTechies.

“Aapka naam ke hai?” she asked the mahout one day, having found the sentence in a Hindi phrase book.

“Gopi,” the mahout said.

Alice pointed to the elephant and said, “Aapka naam?”

With a smile, perhaps at the absurdity of the question, the ma hout said, “Hathi.” Alice knew that this was the word “elephant,” for Hathi Pol was the Elephant Gate at the Red Fort in Delhi.

But she was glad that the animal had no name, that he was Elephant, a designation that made him seem a superior example, as though he represented all elephants.

At the ashram, wobbling her head in a knowing way, Priyanka said, “You’re proving to be a dark one.”

Alice stared at her until Priyanka smiled. All she meant, apparently, was that Alice had a secret.

“I’m working,” Alice said. “I don’t want to be a parasite here. And as Swami says, work is worship.”

“There is work, and there is work,” Prithi said, at Priyanka’s side.

She was trying to be mysterious, but Alice knew she disapproved of her leaving the ashram to go to an unnamed job.

“Have you ever had a job?” Alice asked, and when they smiled at the thought of such an absurdity—their families were wealthy: why would they ever need to work?—Alice said, “I’ve had plenty.”

Alice did not say where she worked, but when she hinted that it was in education, this suggestion of uplift and intellect reassured the two women, and they left her alone.

She did not reveal that she passed from the world of speculation and the spirit, and Swami’s talk of dignity and destiny, to the other world of Bangalore, of tech support and skill sets and her students, who dealt with cold calling, hot leads, and diagnostic parameters.

“How can I resolve your issues today?” was a sentence she drilled at InfoTech but not one that Swami would ever have spoken.

“Hey, guess what?” Amitabh said to her as she was going into the class. He did not wait for her to reply. “I’ve been made team leader. They bumped up my pay! Thank you so very much.”

He was so different she hardly recognized him. She was well aware that in having taught Amitabh a new language she had altered his personality. At first she thought he’d changed “in many ways,” and then she came to see that the alteration was profound. When speaking American he was someone else. He bore no resemblance to the awkward, slightly comic, rather oblique, and old-fashioned job seeker she’d met on the train. He was radically changed from the mimic she’d met at Vishnu Hotel and Lunch House, who’d said, This is real positive, seeing you. He was a new man.

Saying, “Hey, can you spare a minute?” he was no longer the fogy. He was a big importuning brute, hovering over her and demanding an answer.

The rest of the class, thirty-seven of them, women and men, had undergone a similar transformation, and she marveled at the changes.

“’Scuse me” was not the same as “I’m sorry,” and “Huh?” or “What?” was not the same as “Pardon?”