The Elephants in My Backyard

by Rajiv Surendra

Avy looked up from the picture of me and Steven and closed her eyes as she delicately pulled her glasses off from the bridge of her nose. She turned to me, still kneeling on the floor, beside the sofa. Again, she looked me in the eyes. And then she said it. “You’re wonderful. I love you. And you’ll definitely be seeing me again.”

  Wait a minute, did you hear that? Let me just give you some space to let it sink in.

  “I love you.”

  She said it! Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-yeaaaaaaaaaah-yaaaaaaaaaay!

  I sat at her feet, reeling from the euphoria of this moment.

  The doors of the uptown subway train were closing just as I went down the stairs into the station at Houston Street. But I didn’t care. “Delay” appeared on the LED screen that listed the subsequent trains, but it didn’t matter to me as I pulled off the striped hoodie and put it into my backpack. I was completely content to just linger on the subway platform, because even though my feet were planted on the cement floor, I was somewhere else entirely. I was floating, and I couldn’t help myself—drifting away, up over the high buildings that lined these city streets, soaring with the clouds on that hot summer’s day.

  When the train finally arrived, packed, I eased in and was pushed and squished to ensure the doors would close, but it didn’t bother me that hundreds of other sweaty commuters were dripping all around me. At Thirty-fourth Street, I remained languid as I was thrust out of the subway car by the flood of the others exiting, and I mindlessly took the elevator to the seventh floor of Macy’s, where I returned the striped hoodie and fifty-six US dollars was credited back to my Visa.

  The hum and whirr of the city continued around me as I leisurely made my way up to Columbus Circle and walked along the western edge of Central Park, where people filled the grassy expanses, sitting or lying in both the bright sun and the shady groves, provided by the huge old trees.

  “She was testing you,” a voice in my head began, “when she asked you what your parents sound like.”

  “Hmmm . . .” the other voice responded, lackadaisically.

  “You didn’t even realize what she was doing. She wanted to hear your Indian accent, and you showed her your stuff. Maybe she didn’t even realize there was a difference between the North Indian Accent and the South Indian one . . .”

  “Uh-huh . . .” the other voice said, obligingly.

  “Maybe she was trying to see whether you have what it takes to be a star—to be put on the spot, asked a bunch of questions, tested. Maybe she was trying to see whether you’d break.”

  “Yeah, maybe . . .” the other voice responded. “Look, can we stop and just be quiet for a bit?” it asked, as I spotted a space on a bench in the shade.

  There was a breeze that ran through the warm, humid air as I slipped the backpack off my shoulders and slouched into the dark green park bench. I stretched out my legs and balanced my heels on the pavement path. I lifted my face to the sky and closed my eyes.

  Land, there, on the horizon.

  “I love you,” she had said, “and you’ll definitely be seeing me again.”

  From: yann_martel1963@yahoo.com

  To: rajivsca@yahoo.ca

  Subject: RE: Beatrice and Virgil

  Date: Sat, 03 Jul 2010 16:03:38

  Hello, Rajiv.

  Yes, the touring is finally over, thank god. I’ve been back in Saskatoon for the last four days, settling in for the summer. Book got very mixed reviews in the US and UK, some positive, but many very negative. The way it goes.

  About Pi the movie, I’ve heard, and it’s not good news for you, I’m afraid. They’ve found a 17 year old boy in India who is, according to the producer, amazing. He’s one of the reasons the gods that be at Fox have opened their wallets. So the project is going ahead, with shooting starting in India in December and then moving to Taiwan six weeks later. So Pi is cast and the die is cast.

  Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. It’s not something I had any control over.

  We will think of you on Theo’s birthday.

  Stay well,

  Yann

  17.

  MY CHEST FELT WEIGHTED down as it rose and fell with every deep breath I took, audibly, reading Yann’s email once again—to make sure this was actually happening.

  No, I hadn’t missed anything. They gave the role to someone else. Some unknown Indian kid.

  Meesha was whining at my feet, telling me she needed to pee. I placed my fingers on the edge of the laptop screen and slowly pulled it down toward the keyboard, until I heard the gentle click as it closed.

  Meesha scurried behind me as I walked downstairs. I knelt down and pulled the harness and leash over the dog’s head and shoulders as she panted and wiggled around impatiently. Then we headed out of the house.

  18.

  SCHOOL WAS FINALLY OVER for good. Done, finished, and I would never, ever have to go back. Audrey sent me a little “congratulations” card in the mail, and had slipped in a crisp, red, fifty-dollar bill—it arrived just two days before commencement.

  Ma and my two sisters took the subway downtown—this was my whole family now, and without my dad, it finally felt complete. Summer was officially in full swing as I joined a thousand other kids in their black caps and gowns to cross the giant lawn of King’s College Circle to Convocation Hall, the impressive round Classical Revival–style building surrounded by Ionic columns. It was a landmark on campus and held a special place in my heart. In my four years of classes, I’d had only one of them in that building, Astronomy 101, and I sat in the cavernous round space with its domed ceiling, along with fifteen hundred other students, looking down at the tiny professor on the stage, with scenes of the universe blown up on the giant screen behind him.

  That screen was the same one that had once featured a math problem of limits on it, and that stage was the same one that I had stood on during my first month of classes at U of T, with Lindsay Lohan, as Tina Fey sat in the front row and looked up at us while we shot our famous mathletes scene for Mean Girls. It seemed fitting that I ceremoniously walk across that stage on my last official day as a University of Toronto student, but the moment was bittersweet—this was where my Pi quest had begun and now it was over, with nothing to show for it.

  My name was called out through the loud speakers, filling the cavernous space. I shook the dean’s hand and made my way down a ramp, where I was photographed with my scroll in front of a neutral backdrop. As I turned and walked away from the photographer’s setup, making way for the next sucker to have his turn, I let out a giant sigh of relief. I now had my little piece of paper, fulfilling the one thing that Ma had ever really asked of me, that I “complete my studies.” She and my sisters were waiting outside, on the front steps. Ma wiped away a few tears and gave me a hug. I leaned down so she could kiss my forehead with her eyes closed, as she had done every night before going to bed, and every morning when we woke up. As Ma, my sisters, and I walked toward the restaurant where we had a reservation for lunch, I took one final look over my shoulder at Convocation Hall and said a few words of thanks in my head. I knew I was lucky to have had the opportunity to be a student here, and I was grateful.

  I was no longer working at Black Creek and was now spending every weekday in rural fields east of the city, wearing a beekeeper’s suit and assisting Russian Mike, the small, soft-spoken, and good-natured beekeeper who needed my help only from July until the end of September. I had always wanted to work with bees as a kid, but once I was actually doing it full-time, I realized that the charm and romance associated with hives and honey lasted for about ten minutes, on the first day—after that, it was brutal, backbreaking hard work. The summer sun beat down on us all day and the cotton suits that covered us, from neck to ankles, were like pristine white body ovens. On my head, I wore a bee veil, and my hands were covered in long, thick leather gloves. Within twenty minutes of working, I could feel the seams of my underwear sopping with sweat. Sweat dripped from my chin, sweat pooled at the corners of my eyes, there was even sweat inside my e
ars. By noon, both Russian Mike and I reeked of body odor, so we both silently excused each other of the stench. He never seemed to get stung, but I did. Every day, despite my determined efforts of tucking my suit legs into my socks or making sure my veil was all the way down to my neck, somehow a bee would find a way to access the tiniest bit of exposed flesh and sting me, giving its own life in an effort to protect the hive.

  I was uneasy, Russian Mike said, and the bees sensed it—that’s why they were stinging me; they felt the nervousness of a predator. I found it hard to believe, but the fact that he was able to handle the hives without wearing gloves, and often even without a veil, made me accept that maybe he was right.

  I would either grow immune to the stinging, Mike said, or develop an allergy and be forced to stay away from bees for good. The stings during the first couple of weeks swelled up and throbbed with pain for days, but the intensity of my symptoms lessened with every subsequent sting.

  It was quiet work. Russian Mike wasn’t a big talker, and his English was horrible, so he’d mumble a few instructions to me, and then we were good to go for a few hours until the task changed, and another couple of words dictated our next move. The only noise that surrounded us was the constant humming, the buzz from the many thousands of bees, and it was so foreign to me early on that I continued to hear it when I’d return home at the end of the day, thrumming in my ears.

  I didn’t think about the Pi movie. I just went to work every day and lifted hives or opened them up and checked on the health of the worker bees. Or I replaced full frames of honey with empty frames that the bees would fill up. Or I’d pull out every frame until I found the queen, checking to make sure she was present, alive, and healthy. It all entailed detailed observation, but didn’t require too much thinking, so I just let my mind sit there silently and listen to the hum. And still, almost every day, I’d get stung.

  Like the bees, focusing on their one assigned task and carrying it out without complaining, I worked quietly all summer. Every so often, I’d catch a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror of Mike’s beekeeping truck, all covered up, and I’d imagine how anyone could be under that suit. It was a strange way of seeing myself.

  With the arrival of the fall, Russian Mike and I moved our work into the honey house, where we brought in the bounty that the bees had worked hard to collect all summer—contained in the white supers that were full of honey and beeswax. The color of the honey was determined by what blossoms the bees were collecting pollen from—clover and dandelion yielding pale golden yellow, whereas buckwheat provided a distinctly dark, almost molasseslike honey.

  In the honey house we’d remove the capping of beeswax from every frame using an electrically heated knife and then we’d insert the frames into the spinner, which extracted the honey through centrifugal force. One of us would fill up the jars with this liquid gold while the other screwed on a lid and slapped on a label.

  The crispness in the air as I left the honey house one night in early September reminded me that I should begin bringing a jacket to work. I had been stung earlier that day while loading the extractor, yet again by a dreary bee that I hadn’t noticed on the edge of a frame of honey.

  I couldn’t bend my thumb as I tried to press down the latch of the front door at home.

  Ma had rice and seven different vegetable curries on the table for dinner when I got back.

  “It’s good, darling?” she asked with concern as I chewed on the first mouthful of food and mixed together the next little mound of rice and curries with my fingertips, awkwardly trying to maneuver my swollen thumb. She was seeking the approval that we customarily offered up without solicitation.

  “Yeah,” I replied dully, looking down at my plate.

  “Good,” she said, mixing the food together on her own plate while craning her neck to make sure I had served myself a bit of each of the curries that she had laid out.

  The TV was on in the adjacent room, tuned in to Sun TV, the Tamil channel that Ma streamed in from South India. An old black-and-white Tamil movie was on, and the characters had broken into song—one that I recognized. Ma hummed along as the two actresses on the screen danced around in saris.

  “Ma?”

  “Yeah, darling?”

  “Remember that part I was trying to get—Life of Pi?” I began, solemnly. I hadn’t told anyone about my failure. In fact, I hadn’t really relayed to any of my friends or family how much I was investing in this goal.

  “Yeah, darling.”

  “Well . . . they gave it to someone else.”

  “Awwww . . . I’m sorry, darling. That’s too bad.” Ma continued eating and momentarily turned her face to the TV screen.

  My confiding in her didn’t give me the consolation I was expecting.

  “Something else will come up,” she said, putting her hand on mine. “Don’t worry, darling.”

  I finished my last morsel of food and got up from the table, heading to the sink to wash my hands.

  “There’s a job at the bank,” Ma said, “in the call center, kanna.”

  The call center at the bank was the entry point into a potential lifelong career behind a melamine desk, dealing with numbers on a computer screen. Many of my cousins worked at “the bank”—my older sister was majoring in fine art at the university when she panicked after her first year, wondering how she’d ever make any money with art, before switching majors to computer science. She worked at the call center during the summers that I spent spinning wool and baking bread, and immediately after graduating had a job in the IT department, one floor above where Ma worked.

  “Shall I . . .” Ma began hesitatingly, “give the manager your résumé?”

  Ma knew my beekeeping job was coming to an end. We hadn’t really discussed what I planned to do afterward. In fact, I hadn’t given it much thought myself, numbly making my way through one day at a time.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said, rinsing off my plate and putting it into the dishwasher.

  I followed the manager of the call center department along a narrow walkway that divided a vast field of cubicles in a huge, windowless, warehouselike space, lit entirely with tubes of fluorescent lightbulbs. The manager was a tall and slender graying man in his early sixties. Each cubicle housed a worker wearing a headset, and as I took in the expression of face after face, soulless and dead, I felt as though I was following Hades himself right up to his throne, where he sat as Lord of the Underworld.

  He held the door of his office open, and closed it behind me as I took a seat in front of his desk.

  “So, you’re Lozani’s son!” he boomed, grinning widely.

  “Yup,” I confirmed, trying to muster up a bit of enthusiasm, so I could just meet him halfway.

  We exchanged mild pleasantries before getting to the matter at hand. He outlined the details of the job—I would work from either 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., or 4 p.m. to midnight, and I’d answer calls, dealing with customers who were primarily phoning in with complaints or debit card issues.

  “Tell me a bit about your customer service skills,” he began, leaning back in his chair.

  “Well, I spent five summers dealing with the public at Black Creek Pioneer Village. I learned to connect and communicate with people of all ages. A lot of those people couldn’t speak English very well . . .” As I continued to babble on, I felt as though a part of me had climbed out of my body and walked to the corner of the room, marveling at the situation from a distance.

  What are you doing here? I wondered, as I made a case for myself to this man.

  “Can you see yourself working in this kind of environment?” he asked.

  “I’m not going to lie to you,” I admitted. “I’m used to working in places with at least a window in it. And usually I can hear sheep bleating or birds singing while I work.”

  He raised his eyebrows, caught off guard.

  “But I will say that I am a hard worker, and if I were given this job,” I sighed, “I’d do my best.”

  He didn�
�t respond, but put down the paper he was holding and picked up my résumé, scanning it briefly.

  “You play the violin?” he asked.

  It took me by surprise that he had noticed a part of my résumé that I had filled with fluff. Under “hobbies,” alongside “pottery,” “painting,” and “beekeeping,” I had added “violin” to give myself a bit of variety—the truth was that I had played the violin for only a couple of years, beginning when I was ten.

  “Yeah, a bit.”

  “I used to play the English horn for the symphony,” he said in a nostalgic tone, and although his eyes were still on my résumé, I could see that he was somewhere far away.

  “Wow, really?” I asked excitedly, sitting upright in my seat, impressed that this man was actually a classically trained musician, good enough to play for one of the city’s few official ensembles. “Do you still play?”

  “No, no,” he shook his head, looking back up at me. “No . . . I realized I couldn’t rely on music to bring in a sustainable income, so I got a job at the bank thirty years ago and . . . well, here I am.”

  Yes, here he was. And here I was. As I sat across from this man, I witnessed the spark in his eye rekindle a period of warmth from his past—a flame that was instantly extinguished when he brought himself back to the reality of his present situation.

  You don’t want to work here, a voice in my head pleaded.

  “Well, thank you for coming in today,” the manager said as he got up from his seat, moving to the door and opening it for me. “You’ll be okay finding your way out?”

  Run, I thought.

  “Yes,” I confirmed, “and thanks for seeing me.”

  I walked out of the manager’s office and once again treaded through the soulless field of cubicles, heading back to the world of the living. Leave this place. Keep your eyes straight ahead, and whatever you do, don’t look back.