Follow the Elephant

by Beryl Young

  “Dhana—ya—wada,” Ben repeated.

  Gran smiled at Ben’s efforts and asked the two men, “Could you please take us to the central registry office?”

  “That is no problem for us, memsahib. We are knowing all the government offices.” Padam bowed again and gestured toward the taxi. He closed the door after them and hopped in beside Madhu, turning around every two minutes to giggle at Gran and Ben, who were mopping their faces in the sweltering car. “Good golly, this is so exciting to be going to your most important office. Yes-yes, most important.”

  Ben could see that Madhu and Padam each had a role. Madhu was the serious driver and Padam, the talker with the giggle.

  As the taxi headed up a wide boulevard divided by a row of trees, Ben saw strange shapes crumpled on the side of the road. As they drove closer he realized the shapes were people. The bodies were as motionless as a pile of rags; you couldn’t tell if they were men or women.

  “They’re not dead, are they?” Ben said.

  “It is possible,” Madhu said, “but perhaps they are simply sleeping.”

  “I think that’s terrible,” Gran said.

  “We have homeless people sleeping on the streets in the day in Vancouver, too,” Ben said.

  “You’re right, we do,” Gran replied.

  Ben wondered. Madhu had said it was possible the people were dead. If they were dead … Ben pulled down the curtain in his mind that could shut out anything to do with death.

  He looked out the car window, made himself guess who lived in the large houses they were passing, noting growing crowds of people rushing along the sidewalks as the taxi approached the centre of Delhi.

  After a short ride, Madhu drove into a circular plaza, stopping the taxi in front of a tall building with a plaque that said CENTRAL REGISTRY OFFICE OF INDIA.

  Gran counted out some bills and passed them to Padam. “I’m a little confused by the money here. Is this enough?”

  “Oh, yes, memsahib,” the men said together. “Most generous.”

  It was hard to tell from their faces if Gran had paid them too much or too little. He’d have to find out. She didn’t seem to have a clue.

  Inside the registry office, they hesitated. People sat on all sides of the room facing a woman at a centre desk whose heavy black eyebrows made her seem important. She listened to Gran’s request, nodded and passed across some papers. “You must take a number and complete these forms. When it is your turn you will be called.”

  Gran and Ben sat down on the hard chairs and Gran ruffled through the forms. “All I can fill in here is Shanti’s first and last name and the year she was supposed to marry, 1955.” When she’d finished, all the other spaces on the form were empty.

  “They want to know the names of Shanti’s parents, their address and their occupations. I don’t know any of that.” Gran’s lips were pressed tight. “With all these people, we’ll be here a long time.”

  Ben saw his chance. “Gran, while we’re waiting, you’ve got to let me show you about the money. I saw the exchange rates at the airport and you know I’m good at math.”

  Gran took a handful of pale red bills and some coins from her fanny pack and handed them to Ben.

  “Look,” Ben said. “These coins are paise and they are worth small amounts, like a quarter of a cent.” He took one of the bills. “This ten-rupee bill is worth about twenty-five cents. Go figure. A bill for twenty-five cents!”

  All the bills were the same colour and on every one there was a picture of a man with a bald head, round black eyes and wire-rimmed glasses. Ben sorted them by denomination.

  “Okay, so four of these hundred-rupee bills will be worth ten dollars. Seems like a lot of bills to be handing out, but I think I’ve got it.”

  “It’s confusing,” Gran said, peering at them.

  “I could take care of the money, Gran.”

  “No, I can handle it, Ben.” Gran zipped up the money in her fanny pack.

  Why wouldn’t she let him do it? He was old enough. He’d be faster than she would at figuring it out. It made him feel that she didn’t trust him.

  Ben studied the room. Everyone else was Indian, the men in neatly pressed shirts and shorts, the women wearing colourful saris, with their long hair tied at the back of their heads. Every now and then Ben could feel himself being inspected. Around the room, people seemed curious about Gran too. Their light skin must seem very strange to the other people in the room. Next to Gran sat a woman with a small boy almost hidden in the folds of her coral-coloured sari. She had her hand on her child’s back and waited patiently.

  Ben watched the boy. He was about three or four years old and was sneaking peeks at Ben. The boy’s serious brown eyes signalled that he thought Ben could be a creature from outer space. Ben winked at the boy, who buried his face shyly in his mother’s lap. A minute later the boy lifted his head and peered at Ben again, this time with a small grin.

  Ben smiled at the boy, who thought for a minute, then came out cautiously from behind his mother’s sari. Ben made the namaste greeting. To his delight, the boy returned the greeting with a little sideways nod of his head, his small hands folded perfectly.

  Before long the boy was leaning his elbows on Ben’s knees as Ben showed him a clapping game he used to play with Lauren. By the time the boy was trying on Ben’s baseball cap, Ben knew his name was Harish and had learned that even four-year-olds in India could speak English.

  I must be really bored to be playing with a little kid, thought Ben, but almost two hours had gone by and he had to do something. The number of people ahead of them was diminishing, but slowly, and for every seat vacated, more people arrived at the door to keep the rows filled. For the tenth time that morning he thought of his PlayStation sitting out of power in the hotel room.

  “So long we must be waiting here,” said the boy’s mother, who had introduced herself as Mrs. Rau. “And all because I must have a copy of my parents’ marriage certificate for an estate settlement.”

  Gran told Mrs. Rau about her search for Shanti. “I wrote down everything I know on the forms, but it’s probably not enough. The only other thing I know is that Shanti attended the Calcutta Senior Girls’ School.”

  Mrs. Rau said, “You know, I also attended a girls’ school. It was in the north in Darjeeling. Our school has an alumni site where we can contact fellow students. Perhaps you could use the internet to learn if your friend’s Calcutta school has such a site.”

  “Ben could do that, he’s the computer expert. But I think it might be a waste of time. The school no longer exists,” Gran said.

  Ben unwound Harish’s arms from his legs. He could try to find Shanti on a school website. He’d do a search on the hotel computer as soon as they got back.

  Ben gave Harish the loonie he still had in his pocket. Harish stared at it in amazement, tossing it from hand to hand.

  Just before noon, the receptionist called Mrs. Rau’s name. Harish walked backwards behind his mother, making the namaste sign to Ben all the way.

  Shortly afterwards, Gran’s number was called and they were directed into an office. A man in a blue shirt and shorts took Gran’s form. He flipped over the empty pages and shook his head. “This is all the information you have for us to find this Shanti Mukherjee person?”

  Gran nodded. “It is, and we’ve come all the way from Canada to find her.”

  “I welcome you to our country, Mrs. Leeson. We will search our records and do our best for you, but I am not hopeful. Please come back tomorrow afternoon.” He put the paper on top of a pile on his desk and called the next number.

  Maybe Uncle Bob had been right. Maybe this was like trying to find a camel’s hair in the desert.

  Outside the building, Padam and Madhu, all smiles, were waiting beside the car.

  “Our hotel is not far up this main street,” Ben said to Gran. “Let’s walk.”

  “This heat is too much for me,” Gran replied. “Let’s have Padam and Madhu drive us.” She headed
for the taxi.

  “You go. I’ll get back myself,” Ben said.

  “No, I won’t let you go alone! I’ll come with you,” she said, hurrying along the narrow sidewalk to catch up to Ben.

  Padam called after them, “Goodbye for now. We will be at your hotel tomorrow to take you to the famous Red Fort. You will be liking.”

  “Good idea. I’d like to see a fort,” Ben said to Gran as they walked. “We can’t go back to the registry office until the afternoon anyway.”

  At the next corner, Gran and Ben were quickly surrounded by a crowd of shoving women and children. The women’s saris were old and torn, their hair matted and dirty. Bedraggled, whining children who could hardly toddle clung to their mothers’ skirts. One little girl had blackened teeth and big sores on her lips. The beggars stretched out their palms, calling baksheesh, baksheesh. They mimed hunger by raising their hands to their mouths, moaning and pleading with their eyes. An old woman put her face so close to Ben that her sour breath made him wince. “Give them some money, Gran!”

  Gran ignored him and pushed to get away, but the group followed, wailing louder, grabbing at her skirt. She stumbled and Ben grabbed her arm, leading her down the sidewalk. He looked behind. They were the poorest people he’d ever seen. So much thinner and more wretched than the people who asked for money on the streets in Vancouver.

  “Why didn’t you give them money?” Ben asked Gran, dropping her arm. “You have lots of it.”

  Gran was red in the face. “I don’t know what is right here. If I give rupees to some, they’ll all want money.”

  “So what? They’re poor.” He turned and saw that the beggars were swamping the next couple coming along the street.

  “I was frightened to be in the middle of that, Ben. I just wanted to get away. And I’ve heard that sometimes beggars will deliberately mutilate children and send them out to beg.”

  Ben followed her down the street. It was confusing and he felt uncomfortable. Maybe it was true that if you gave people money, it encouraged them to keep begging. How would you know?

  Just then he heard the strange call again, the loud wavering cry he’d heard at the hotel early in the morning. It was an inhuman noise that filled the air for minutes, then stopped abruptly. Everything was weird in India.

  Ahead, a wide street intersected with the road they were on and Ben saw a procession of chanting, cymbal-clashing men in orange gowns moving toward them. He was astounded to see a huge grey elephant in the middle of the crowd. The animal’s ears flapped like dirty curtains, its thick trunk, criss-crossed with wrinkles, waved grandly in the air. The elephant’s leathery face was painted in curlicue patterns of white and orange, and it had only one tusk, long and curved, and broken at the tip. With each giant step, looped ropes of coloured tassels swung back and forth over its humped forehead.

  Without thinking, Ben moved closer to the elephant, into the middle of the noisy crowd. Orange cloth swirled around him, floating over his arms and his face, pulling him into the centre, nearer to the towering elephant. He was so close he could see grey hairs sprouting on the elephant’s face. The elephant grunted and the deep reverberation travelled through Ben’s body. He lifted his head to look into the beast’s unblinking eyes that seemed black at first, then when Ben looked again, he saw they were the dark wet brown of thick chocolate syrup. Ancient eyes, intelligent eyes that saw right into you. Ben breathed in the strong animal smell, inhaled deeper and deeper until the rawness filled his head.

  The chanting of the crowd grew louder, keeping time with the clashing cymbals, drowning out everything but the elephant. Ben stayed close beside the elephant’s legs. They were like enormous grey tree trunks with huge yellowing toenails. Ben matched his footsteps to the rhythm of the elephant’s lumbering steps, his ears ringing with the jangle of the bells looped around the elephant’s ankles. Deep in the frenzied centre of the procession, Ben felt his mind spinning in an overpowering exhilaration.

  The sharp jerk on his elbow startled Ben. He turned to see his grandmother’s face. “What a crazy thing to do, Benjamin!” she was shouting.

  As though from a distance, Ben called back. “Come with us!”

  “Benjamin Thomas Leeson, you’ve completely lost your senses!”

  He was grabbed and pulled onto the sidewalk. He didn’t know his grandmother was so strong.

  Ben shook his arm free. Why was Gran spoiling this for him? Why was she so angry?

  His grandmother’s voice was so shrill it hurt his ears. “What’s the matter with you? You can’t go wandering off like that. I need to know where you are.”

  “I was right here. I was safe.” He watched the elephant and the orange-robed crowd continue on down the street.

  “I could barely see you. You were buried in the crowd. Come on. We’ve got to get back to our hotel right now.”

  Ben trudged behind her, his face flushed, his head reeling. “I would have found my way back to the hotel, Gran.”

  Gran stormed along the pavement. “That’s a stupid thing to say. I’m responsible for you, and you have to stay with me.” She turned and glared at him. “Got it, Ben?”

  Ben shrugged. It was horrible to be stuck with someone who had to have her own way about everything. And calling him stupid. She was the stupid old lady, always worrying about something. How many times in your life would you have a chance to walk in a procession beside a live elephant?

  In some mysterious way Ben couldn’t understand, that elephant had willed him to follow. In the middle of the crowd, being so close to the giant beast, he had forgotten where he was. Maybe it had been dumb to wander off, but he’d been completely safe.

  Ben was jolted out of his thoughts. “Take off your baseball cap, Ben,” Gran said as they went through the door to the hotel.

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “I don’t like to see a hat worn inside. It’s a silly thing to do.”

  Ben rolled his eyes as he snapped off his hat and followed his grandmother into the restaurant.

  The friendly Gita was still on duty, and she suggested they might like to try pakoras. As he ate the delicious deep-fried vegetables, Ben asked Gita about the orange-gowned people and the elephant. She explained that it was a religious procession of worshippers going to a temple. “Sometimes they have an elephant with them. One of our most popular gods, Ganesh, is half-elephant and half-boy, so everyone in India loves elephants.”

  “There’s something powerful about them,” Ben said. It was hard to say what it was. Those chocolate-coloured eyes that felt as though they could see inside you? The elephants’ enormous size? They were majestic.

  Gran interrupted his thoughts. “I’m beat. Let’s go to our room, Ben.”

  Upstairs, Ben plopped himself down in a chair in front of the black-and-white television.

  Gran gave a big sigh. “Do you have to put your runners on the table, Ben? It’s rude.”

  Great. Now he was rude, as well as silly for wearing his baseball cap backwards, stupid for wanting to give money to beggars, and crazy for being interested in elephants. Hadn’t anyone told Gran not to use labels?

  Day Three

  AGAIN THE STRANGE, vibrating call woke Ben. What kind of a thing could make that noise? Now Ben thought it sounded like a goat or a cow being tortured, which made him feel weird. He got dressed and went downstairs.

  The desk clerk nodded cheerfully as Ben went into the computer room.

  Dear Mum and Lauren

  Yesterday I saw bodies on the street and was right beside a live elephant. It’s starting to bug me that Gran won’t let me out of her sight.

  Ben

  PS. Gran snores. LOL

  Then, without a pause, Ben Googled the Calcutta Senior Girls’ School. He clicked on the top hit that came up, glanced over the school’s home page and found the place where he could leave a message for former students. Alumni, they were called. He typed in

  To: Calcutta Senior Girls’ School

  My grandmother,
Mrs. Norah Leeson, has come from Canada to find her pen pal Shanti Mukherjee who graduated in 1952. My grandmother’s name was Norah Turner when she wrote the letters. If any former students know Shanti Mukherjee, please leave a message.

  Thank you.

  Ben Leeson

  Just as he finished, Gran popped her head into the room, telling Ben it was time for breakfast. Gita chatted with them as they ate, then wished them good luck as they headed to the entrance of the hotel. Like the day before, going through the door was like pushing through the blast from an open oven. You wanted to turn around and go back inside.

  “So hot!” Gran said. “And it’s only early morning.”

  “Look who’s over there,” Ben said, pointing to the shade at one side of the entrance where Madhu was leaning against the taxi and Padam was polishing the hood of the car. Ben was not surprised to see them. When they’d said “we are belonging to you,” it was probably more like “you are belonging to us.” It didn’t matter, they were such nice guys.

  “Good morning, memsahib and sahib,” said Madhu, coming up to them.

  “Why not call me Ben?” Ben answered.

  “And call me Norah,” Gran said, adjusting her fanny pack. “Memsahib makes me feel like British royalty.”

  “Oh, we couldn’t do that, memsahib,” said Padam. “You are being so very old and both of you are being our honoured guests.”

  Madhu said, “We will call you Norah memsahib and Ben sahib.” Padam nodded enthusiastically with a high-pitched giggle. “Today, we will be seeing the Red Fort. You must hop-hop into our so-shiny vehicle!”

  It must have rained during the night. The dust on the road was hard-packed, and the smell, harsh and musky in Ben’s nose. He leaned forward as they drove. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Of course, Ben sahib,” the men answered together.

  “There’s a loud call I keep hearing. Usually in the mornings, but yesterday I heard it in the day too. Sort of like a wailing. Do you know what it is?”

  “Indeed, yes, we do,” Madhu answered. “It will be the muezzins calling Muslim people to prayer at the mosques. Five times a day they call.”