Paul Theroux - The Elephanta Suite - Three Novellas

Miss Ghosh’s Indian English and her dated Anglicisms reminded Alice of how the students had once sounded. The archaic and plodding language made Miss Ghosh seem trustworthy and sensible.

“Block Four, I am thinking of,” Alice said. And she was seeing in her mind this rather shy but intelligent roomful of bright young people had become a crowd of noisy Americans.

“You have worked wonders with them. They have developed a high success rate. We have taken them off Home Depot and put them on call lists to obtain service agreements for contractors to sign up with mortgage companies in southern California. The percentage of sign-ups has been phenomenal.”

“I’ve been finding them familiar.”

“That worries you?”

“The rudeness does. Overfamiliar, I mean.”

Miss Ghosh’s head wagged back and forth. “Rudeness will not be tolerated in any manner.”

“Some of them, the men especially, seem presumptuous.”

“How so?”

“The way they talk to me.”

“Not Mr. Amitabh. He has come on very well as your protégé.”

“He’s one of them.”

“He is scheduled for promotion. You would enjoin me to initiate action?”

Alice was turning shed-jeweled over in her mind. “Not really. I can take care of myself.”

Miss Ghosh said, “I think you are being modest about your achievements. I want to show you the results of your efforts.”

No one was allowed to enter the inner part of InfoTech without a pass—a plastic card that was swiped on a magnetic strip beside the doors. Miss Ghosh got a pass for Alice and took her, swiping her way through a succession of doors, to the call center where her class worked, all thirty-seven of them, in cubicles, sitting before computer screens, most of them on the phone.

Alice had never seen the callers at work. The sight was not surprising. Most business offices looked like this: people talking on the phone, tapping on keyboards, watching monitors. The workers all wore headphones and hands-free mikes that made them insectile in appearance—bulgy heads, antennae, a proboscis. But that was a passing thought.

What astonished her, overwhelmed her, and even physically assaulted her were the voices, the jangle of American accents, inquiring, pleading, importuning, apologizing.

“This is Jahn. Jahn Marris. May I speak to the homeowner?”

“Let me repeat that information …”

“I’m gonna need the serial number …”

“The mahdel number. I said, the mahdel number.”

“Are you sure this is our prahduct?”

They sounded like a flock of contending birds. Even the room had a cage-like quality, the employees roosting in their narrow cubicles like squawkers in a hen house. Their sounds were strangely similar in harshness, as though they were all the same species of bird, not hens at all but a roomful of macaws, the teeth and smiles of American voices but hardly human.

Miss Ghosh said, “Why are you smiling?”

“I’m thinking of that line about a dog walking on its hind legs. You don’t care that it’s done well—you’re amazed that it’s done at all.”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” Miss Ghosh said, pursing her lips—she was offended. “But this is your accomplishment.”

Miss Ghosh seemed to mean it as praise, but Alice construed it as sarcasm.

The ashram was a retreat from the ambition and worldliness of Electronics City. Electronics City was a refuge from the selfish spiritualism and escapism of the ashram. In his stable on the side street, the elephant was balanced between them, sometimes swaying like a prisoner, now and then the whole of its head and trunk painted in colored chalk, designs of whorls and flowers. One day the elephant wore a brass bell on a heavy cord. When the mahout encouraged Alice to ring it, the elephant nodded and lifted his great head and stamped his feet, his leg as thick as a tree. He knows me, Alice told herself.

And her trips from Swami to elephant to InfoTech, in a taxi or an auto-rickshaw, were a weird reminder of another India, of traffic and skinny cows vying with cars, and people, thousands of them, walking in the road carrying bundles. The whole of it lay in a dust cloud during the day and was eerily lighted at night, the dust-glow like the soft edges of an incomplete dream, lovely to look at, but at times it gagged her.

Hers was a divided life, but shuttling among these places, she thought of the original idea of keeping the ashram as a base and traveling from there to the nearer cities of Mysore and Chennai, just to see the sights. That had been the plan she’d made with Stella. Without Stella, Alice felt that a trip to the coast to see Mahabalipuram would be a pleasure, especially now that she’d found a friend in the elephant. Her only hesitation was that Amitabh had reminded her of it. It annoyed her that he knew of her desire to see the temple by the sea—she was cross with herself for having mentioned it. Probably she had casually said something to someone in the class: “You’re from Chennai? I’ve always wanted to go to Mahabalipuram.” But that was unlike her, because she made a point of never telling anyone the things she yearned for, since those were the very things that must never be revealed; speaking about them was the surest way of destroying them.

This irritated memory convinced her that she must go. She asked Priyanka and Prithi if they wanted to take the trip.

“I’ve never been on an Indian train and I don’t intend to start now,” Priyanka said.

In the same reprimanding tone, Prithi said, “We feel our place is here with Swami.”

That was another disturbing aspect of the ashram, the notion that the female devotees were like old-fashioned wives of Swami.

“I see this trip as a kind of pilgrimage,” Alice said, appealing to their venerating side.

“Isn’t this enough for you?” Prithi said.

“This is your home,” Priyanka said.

Alice said, “I’ll find my own way of going.”

That remark was one she went on regretting, because its brash-ness, she feared, would attract bad luck or misinterpretation, as overconfidence often seemed to. And why? Because such confident certainty helped people remember your words and want to hold them against you.

For reassurance, she paid the elephant a visit, and in the course of fifteen or twenty minutes she emptied a big bag of cashews into the pink nostrils of his trunk, contracting and inquiring and vacuuming the nuts from her hand. He was a marvel, and he gave her strength. No wonder the first Central Asians worshiped great gilded bulls, and the earliest Hindus the smiling elephant Ganesh. A powerful animal was a glory of the natural world and suggested such strength and innocence, such a godlike presence, it seemed to link heaven and earth.

Instead of going to Bangalore Cantonment Station, which was near the ashram, Alice took a taxi to Bangalore City, so as to keep her plans secret. When she showed her passport as an ID at the booking hall, the clerk asked her if she was paying in American dollars.

“I could.”

“Upstairs. International booking for foreigners.”

“What’s the advantage?”

“Quota is there.”

A better seat, in other words. Alice went upstairs, where she found a young bearded man bent over a low table, filling out a form. His backpack was propped against a pillar.

“Do I have to fill out one of those?”

“A docket, yeah.”

Australian, or perhaps a kiwi—she could not tell them apart, though they could identify each other in an instant. She found a form, filled it in with as much information as she could muster, then brought it to the ticket window.

“Me go Chennai in a week or so. One person only.”

“We have four trains daily. Super Express is fastest day train. Which day had you in mind?”