The Elephanta Suite (30 page)

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.

"The Sai Baba people don't like you at all," he said.

"That's not true."

"It is a fact. They believe you're selfish."

It stung her, for though she denied it again, she knew there was some truth in what he said.

"You look at India and see people everywhere and it seems like a mob," he said. "But it's not—it's like a family. We know each other. There are no secrets in India. Hey, this isn't China! Everything is known here. And where a
ferringi
is concerned it's all public knowledge." He was smiling at her, then he opened his mouth to laugh and she got a whiff of the hot stink of his breath. "It's funny how people come here from overseas—Americans, like you—and don't realize how we are in constant touch with each other. We're always talking. You have no idea what we're saying. Because we speak English so proficiently, you have no need to learn Hindi. We know what's going on!"

Alice had vowed not to listen to him or to follow his argument, and yet she was intimidated by what he said, understood it in spite of herself.

"Please leave me alone," she said.

"Gimme a chance."

She was so disgusted by his saying
gimme,
she did not reply
.
"I can help you."

She prayed for a station so that she could see how far it was to Chennai.

He read her mind, and that frightened her. He said, "This is Tiruvallur. Twenty more minutes to Chennai. Not far."

She slid out her train ticket, which she'd used as a bookmark, and palmed it. The arrival time was printed on it,
1445.

"See? I'm right." He was smiling again. "And I'm going back with you. You can ignore me, but we'll be sitting right here, day after tomorrow."

She was suddenly angry. She said, "It's against the law for private information to be given out. Your friend at the ticket counter is going to be in big trouble."

"Alice, want to know something? Huh?"

She went hot again with anger. She hated him. She feared she might cry, not from sadness but with frustration at his spoiling something she'd looked forward to, one she paid for. He had no right to force himself on her.

He was still smiling and said, "A lot of people in India think it should be against the law for women to be walking around alone. Wearing shorts! They think it's immoral."

"Then they have a problem," she said, and became self-conscious because she was wearing shorts.

"Alice"—she hated his using her name—"listen, most things that people do in India are against the law. That's how we survive. We're too poor to obey the law. You can bribe anyone, you can do anything if you have money. That's why we hate foreigners. We know they always bend the rules too, just like us, except they always get away with it."

Against her will he had gotten her attention. She had found herself listening to him and was disgusted by his logic and wanted to stop listening.

"Hey, but not me. I don't think like that. I know that foreigners have given us a lotta investment. My job, for one. I'm real grateful. I got so much to be thankful for."

That last sentence, in his American accent, mimicry from one of her own lessons, turned her stomach. She got up and went to the door of the compartment, but when she slid it open, she could not move. A man in a gray uniform was standing inches away from her, the conductor.

"Chennai coming up, madam."

"This man," she said, gesturing at Amitabh, but without turning her head, "this man is pestering me."

"Passenger making nuisance, madam?"

"He is talking to me."

The conductor spoke in Hindi—perhaps Hindi, how was she to know?—and his tone was familiar and almost friendly. Amitabh replied as though bantering, exactly as he had described earlier, like a family member.

"Making unwelcome advances, madam?"

The conductor seemed unconvinced. It was like a conspiracy.

"No. But I wish he were sitting somewhere else."

The conductor beckoned with his hole puncher for Amitabh's ticket, which he examined.

"Passenger is holding valid ticket for this place, madam."

"Never mind," she said. She grabbed her bag and squeezed past him. She made her way to the end of the coach, where the vestibule door was open to the trackside.

The clicking of the tracks slowed, the wall of a culvert was visible, and soon the backs of houses, laundry hanging on poles protruding from windows. She heard the echo of clattering wheels and a sudden muffled rumble as the train drew into the station.

She leaned out the door and hopped off before the train came to a stop, and so she stumbled slightly and almost fell, drawing the attention of the bystanders, mostly porters in red shirts and ragged turbans. She hurried down the platform, following the exit signs, to the front of the station, where she was set upon by frantic men.

"Taxi, madam!"

"Taxi, taxi!"

They struggled with each other to be seen by her. They had hot frenzied eyes and red-stained teeth.

"I'm looking for the bus," she said, pushing through them. "Where going?

"Hotel, hotel!" another man was chanting.

"Bus. Mahabalipuram."

"Take taxi, madam. Special price."

She kept walking through the mob, resolute, yet fearing that someone would touch her.

"Bus is not there," a voice said into her ear, mocking her. "Bus station is Mylapore side. I take you. Taxi just here."

"Oh, God."

She turned to escape this man and saw a crush of men in ragged shirts watching her and blocking the way. The heat here was heavy with humidity. Her clothes clung to her. Her face was already wet with perspiration. She wiped her face with her forearm and was bumped by the man saying "Taxi."

"Fifty rupees, madam."

"Forty," she said.

"Okay, forty-five."

A dollar. He hurried in a new direction while she followed, the other men falling back. He led her into the glare of the sun, a parking lot, and not to a taxi but an auto-rickshaw. It was too late for her to change her mind—she needed to get away from this station immediately.

She was glad for the breeze in her face, but the driver was talking incomprehensibly and sounding his buzzing horn. She was stifled by the fumes of the other vehicles and jostled by the sudden braking. At last he bumped through a gateway where, among food sellers and people with suitcases, she saw rusted and brightly painted buses parked in bays, facing a low building.

"Bus to Mahabalipuram," she said to a man sitting on a crate.

The man was eating peanuts out of a twist of newspaper. His mouth was full, his lips flecked. He pointed to a bus.

"Where buy ticket?"

He swallowed and chewed again and said, "Ticket on bus."

She walked quickly to the bus he had indicated and was relieved when she found a seat. Within minutes—anxious minutes for her—the bus filled with passengers carrying bags, some men with children in their arms, weary-looking women in saris, boys in baseball caps. Sooner than she expected, the bus shuddered and reversed out of its bay, slowly turned, and swayed and banged through the gateway.

The bus was overheated and made of loud metal, and when its sides flapped and clanked it seemed like a big old-fashioned oven with people cooking inside it, too many of them pressed together, sputtering and dripping. Alice's discomfort verged on physical pain, but the sight of pedestrians out the window jostling on the sidewalk, the density of traffic, made her glad she was inside this contraption rather than at risk in the street. All she had to do was relax and practice the yoga breathing she'd learned at the ashram, and before long—a couple of hours, a woman told her—she'd be at the temple by the sea, safe among elephants.

"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.