Paul Theroux - The Elephanta Suite - Three Novellas

Solving problems, finding meals, buying new clothes and giving away old ones, getting laundry done, buying tickets, scavenging for cheap hotels, studying maps, being alone but not lonely. It was not about happiness but safety, finding serenity, making discoveries in all this locomotion and an equal serenity when she had a place to roost, like a bird of passage migrating slowly in a sequence of flights. The famous swallows that summered in Siberia, then wintered in the Zambesi Valley: they weren’t taking trips, travel was an aspect of their extraordinary survival; they never lingered anywhere for long, yet the itinerant nature of their lives, their quest for food, had made them strong. The distances they flew were legendary, but their lives were made up of short economical flights to breed and then move on. She wanted to become such a bird.

She smiled, seeing that what had happened by accident to her was a gift, a further ripening of her personality. The jaunts in Europe hadn’t done it, the experience of India had. By degrees she had been moved farther and farther from the life she’d known into a new mode of existence, as though soaring upward and finally, after some buffeting, moving with certainty onward, alone, no longer disturbed, in an orbit of her own, freed from her past, her unreliable friend, even her family, and pleased by the idea that the future would be like this—stimulated by the random lyricism of chance events, of good days and bad days.

Not a journey anymore, not an outing or an interlude, but seeing the world; not taking a trip, not travel with a start and a finish, but living her life. Life was movement.

How had it happened? She guessed that it had come about by being alone, the circumstance Stella had forced upon her. By earning the money she’d needed and, oddly, by being exploited, like most working people on earth. By being disappointed, abandoned, taken for granted. She did not depend on anyone, surely not a man; she had become strong. The elephant was an example—chained because he was powerful, becoming more powerful because he was chained. Released from that chain, he would flap his ears and fly.

Her illnesses had given her heart. Needing a tooth pulled on her way through Turkey, she’d found a woman dentist, and after a period of recovery the problem was solved. She did not tell her family until afterward. The flu she’d picked up in Tblisi, the twisted ankle in Baku, and the bumpy flight to Tashkent, the plane’s germ-laden air, the clammy days in Bukhara, and at last the flight to India—even Stella’s illnesses, which she’d ministered to—all these had given her confidence, because she’d overcome them. You fell sick, you got well, then healthier. You didn’t go home or call Mom because you’d caught a cold. You paused and cured yourself and continued on your way, stronger than before.

This is my life, Alice thought on the train to Chennai, a good life of my own making, and all the decisions are mine. And here is my journey—a five-dollar seat, a ten-dollar hotel, a one-dollar meal. At this rate I can live for a month without working again.

The man with the narrow pushcart sold her lunch: rice, a chapati, some dhal and green beans in a plastic dish, a pot of yogurt, some curried potato—perfect. Thirty rupees, which was seventy-five cents. And eating it, studying her thrift, she smiled and thought, I can go on and on.

She had enough money, the country was poor, the cost of living low. I’ll be fine. She made a mental note to write a postcard home—not a letter but just a few sentences, to say hello and to give no information, to show she did not need them.

This was what travel meant, another way of living your life and being free.

She began to read another Indian novel, much praised, by an Indian woman who lived in the States. Was this merely sentimentality? The book did not speak to her. The problem with it and the others she’d read was that they did not describe the India she had encountered or the people she’d met. Where were these families? The novels described a tidier India, full of ambitions, not the India of pleading beggars or weirdly comic salesmen or people so pompous they were like parodies.

As she was reading, the man in the adjoining seat started a conversation, interrupting her. But he was friendly, a Jain, he said, who would not eat potatoes because they were crawling with living creatures.

“Full of germs and organisms,” he said.

“Not good to eat,” she said, trying to be helpful.

“No—good. But I must not take lives.”

Didn’t want to kill the germs! Where was the book in which he appeared?

“So what do you eat?”

“Pulses. Beans. Curd. Also greens.”

“I get it,” she said.

“And later, when I am a bit older, I shall renounce the world and go hither and thither, barefoot, as my father did in his dotage. Just wandering with no possessions, eschewing the material world.”

“I think I’m doing that now,” Alice said.

The man was corpse-like, almost skeletal, a faster and an abstainer, even now mortifying his flesh. He smiled with too many teeth, a skull’s smile. He didn’t believe her, but that didn’t matter. Another aspect of her freedom was that she didn’t feel a need to explain her life or justify what she’d done.

“My father became a saint,” the man said.

He showed her a snapshot of a gaunt bearded man with a shawl over his narrow shoulders, carrying a walking stick.

“I will do likewise,” he said. “My children will look after my wife.”

Poor woman, Alice thought—why can’t she be a saint? But she smiled and returned to her book, and found that she was unable to hold her head up. The book was a soporific. She was soon asleep in the overheated compartment, the sun pressing through the window, burning one side of her face. She dreamed of sleeping by a fire, the noisy train creating in her dream a rumbling night.

When she woke up the Jain man was gone, and in his place was Amitabh, as strange as if he had been shifted from her dream and was just as shocking and insubstantial.

She made a sound, an involuntary gasp—she couldn’t help it. Amitabh woggled his head with a smile of satisfaction, as though pleased by her discomfort. He sat facing her, looking smug and ludicrous in a white long sleeved shirt and dangling gray necktie.

“How did you get here?”

“Take a guess.” She hated his drawling accent, all the syllables in his nose, and what a nose. “I have friends in lowly places.”

He stared at her with the dumb frankness of a big hungry animal contemplating something tiny and edible. His gaze tugged at her face—she felt it on her cheek—his leer lurking first on her upper body, then her legs, lingering at her feet, flashing upward again at her hair, as though she didn’t know. She kept her attention at the window to count the passing stations. She felt with disgust that he was regarding her with his mouth, his moist parted lips, his prominent teeth, the wet tip of his tongue just showing in a witless way.

At their first meeting on the other train, months before, she’d found his bulky body a big hopeless thing, like a sack he stuffed food into. But now she found it absurdly overlarge, even monstrous, refusing to obey her, obstinate and persistent like those eyes, that mouth.

At last, very softly but with unmistakable firmness, she said, “I want you to go away and leave me alone.”

“I am holding a ticket. This is my assigned seat.”

She caught a glimpse of his mouth again, his tongue bulging against his teeth. He was fatter than when she’d last seen him. His size made him seem smug and immovable.

Alice sighed and prayed for a station and was reproached by what she’d thought earlier about being free—mocked, but glad she hadn’t written it in her journal.