Paul Theroux - The Elephanta Suite - Three Novellas

“You are going to …?” the same woman asked, in the open-ended way of the Indian question.

“Mahabalipuram,” she said. “Elephants.”

The woman smiled, and Alice was reassured. She was happier among women and here one was beside her, one in front, one squatting in the aisle; she felt their soft maternal bodies as protective. She closed her eyes, inhaled deeply, held her breath for a count of five, exhaled, and breathed in again. The bus stopped and started, toppling each time, the scrape of the brakes, the sucking of the doors opening and closing, smacking the rubber on the frame—all that was like breathing too, the labored breathing of a big overworked machine. More people got on, few got off. The bus grew even hotter and now it was lumbering through a residential district, the dirty windows dazzled by the sun that shot from between the old buildings, honking every few seconds, and still Alice breathed and kept her eyes shut and was aware of the sun from the way it reddened her eyelids, and the warmth on her face gave her a sunbather’s fixed smile.

When the bus began to roll on a straight road, the engine coughing, its tin plates flapping at its sides, somehow this unimpeded stretch induced her to open her eyes. She took another breath, looked up forward, and saw Amitabh. He was holding a clear plastic bottle and swigging from it.

“Wadda?” he said.

Beyond the shock of seeing him, she was insulted and even felt violated by his accent. Now she hated hearing him speak English in that exaggerated American way. The very nuances she hated most were the ones she had taught him. In Bangalore she had learned that the most irritating traits of a person are the imitative ones, especially those you had yourself, when you looked at someone and saw a distorted image of yourself—the misery of teachers.

The bus was full. Amitabh, so topheavy, gasping in his white wilted long-sleeved shirt, could hardly stand, and although he was speaking in his grating accent, his voice was mostly drowned out by the babble of the passengers, two screaming babies, the laboring of the bus’s chugging engine, its oddly bronchial brakes, the banging of its loose metal doors, and somewhere at the back the repeated clatter of a metal flap that made the bus sound like a tin box shaking down the road.

Most of the time Amitabh moved his mouth and smiled, but Alice heard little except the din of the bus, and there was something smothering, deadening to her senses, in the smell of the sweating humans on board.

Now, outside the bus, every bit of the roadside looked safe to her—the shop fronts, the bungalows with their verandas, the rickshaws, the taxis, the fields of wheat. But if she got off at any of these stops—which were less and less frequent—he would get off too, and as long as she stayed on board, so would he.

Protected by the women around her, she briefly drowsed, only to awaken—jerking upright, as though someone had slapped her—as the bus came to a halt, huffing, its abrupt silence as provocative as its noise had been. So soon? Her fears of arrival made her shrink in her seat.

“Are we there?” she asked the woman next to her.

The woman clawed at her long trailing braid and made no reply.

“Pit stop,” Amitabh said.

He was staring at her from between a crush of passengers, his fat face tightened in a smile, his tie rucked up and twisted against a child’s damp head.

Because he was standing in the aisle, he was among the first to get off. Alice waited until everyone else had left and then she did some yoga breathing and stepped out.

A crowd of people were pushing against one another at the counter of a roadside shop, reaching to be served, and some drifted away holding bottles and plastic cups. Alice saw a hunkered-down woman breastfeeding a baby. She envied her concentration, her secure posture close to the ground, and had a great longing to change places with her. The woman had flung the shawl of her sari over her head, so that it covered her and sheltered the baby, and she squatted in this silken tent of serenity, unseen by anyone else.

Alice was afraid to look for Amitabh—she didn’t want to see his face. But nearer the shop, against her will, she got a glimpse of the fat man holding two bottles of brown soda, and she knew that one was for her.

He put them on the counter to rummage in his pocket for money. As soon as he turned aside and took his eyes off her, Alice trotted to the far side of the bus, concealing herself from him.

A man leaning against the bus—this was the shady side—put his face up to hers, startling her. He had wild hair and a torn, fluttering, untucked shirt.

“Taxi?”

“Mahabalipuram,” she said. “How much?”

His face went waxen in calculation, mute yet tremulous, his mouth pressed shut, the numbers vibrant on his tongue. Alice knew that look: an Indian guessing not at the value of something but at what a foreigner would pay.

“Three hundred rupees only,” he said.

“One hundred,” she said.

“Cost of petrol,” the man said, his voice becoming a whine as he bent over, assuming an insincere groveling posture to plead.

“Okay, let’s go,” she said, and thought: I’m stupid, trying to escape and bargain at the same time. The man looked crushed. She said, “Let’s go,” and gestured, and he pointed to his parked car.

The man was wiggling the key and tramping on the accelerator as she got into the back seat. There was more room in front but she wanted some distance from this wild-haired driver. The car stank and the seats were torn; it was a jalopy. She prayed for it to start. After a gargling and clacking hesitation there was a powerful swelling of engine blat, and the man pulled at the steering wheel with his skinny hands.

She did not dare to look back until they were on the road and traveling fast. Then she risked it and saw the shop, the parked bus, the gathering of passengers in a clearing of yellow dust. The road was empty and straight, lined by tufts of discolored grass.

“How far is it?” she asked.

“Far is it,” the man said.

“How many miles—kilometers?”

“Kilometers,” the man said.

He had numbers, he knew “cost of petrol,” but apart from that he had no English. He was simply barking back her own words.

“Mahabalipuram?” she asked.

“Mahabalipuram.”

But the speed made her hopeful, and the clear road, and the fact that she had slipped away from Amitabh. And she did not really need to know the distance. She had tried to speak to the driver mainly to assess his friendliness, sending out a signal, hoping it would resonate.

“You live here?” she asked, trying again.

He did not reply. He was nodding his head, pretending he had understood. She saw a small portrait of Sai Baba fixed to the dashboard, encircled by plastic flowers.

“Sai Baba,” she said. “Me go darshan—Sai Baba—Bangalore.”

Even this broken English didn’t work, and now she saw why. He was talking on a cell phone, holding it against his right ear, seeming to conceal it. He was mumbling in a language she took to be Tamil, rolling, bubbling words, like someone talking under a fizzing spigot in a narrow shower stall.

“Who are you talking to?”

He slipped the phone into his shirt pocket and said confidently, “You talking to.”

He seemed dim but he was driving fast, with conviction. The car was not a taxi, just a rattletrap with ripped seats, but it was moving. The man’s indifference to her, the way he was holding the wheel, caused Alice to consider her options. It would be foolish to continue on the road to Mahabalipuram. Amitabh would find her there. Give up The Penance of Arjuna , she thought. Never mind the elephants, the animals, the grottoes, the temples, the carvings. Only one thing mattered.