The Elephanta Suite

by Paul Theroux

  "Sai Baba—is he as great as everyone says?"

  "Greater," Alice said. "He'd be glad I was doing this. Work is worship. Are we going into Bangalore?"

  "No. Electronics City. Phase Two."

  He would not shake the accent. He said, Electrahnics Seety.

  It was not far, but it took more than half an hour in traffic on a dusty road of two wheelers and auto rickshaws, limping cows and mobs of tramping people. They turned off the main road onto a new empty road of an industrial area where there were tall glass buildings and many more roughed out in concrete, and although these looked like bombed ruins, she saw that they were rising.

  "This is InfoTech," Amitabh said. He showed his pass at the front desk and walked down a side corridor. "I can introduce you to the head of personnel."

  He knocked on an open door and became obsequious, bowing, losing something of the accent, laughing softly as he greeted the woman at the desk.

  "Please sit down," the woman said to Alice. "Amitabh tells me you're looking for a position."

  "That's right."

  "Perhaps you could fill up this form and we'll see if we have anything." She handed Alice a set of printed sheets. "Please take them outside."

  Alice sat in the corridor and answered the questions, filled in the blanks, and elaborated on her education and previous jobs. When she had finished and handed in the forms, she sat and watched the woman examine them. The woman had a solemn, unimpressed way of reading, pinching the pages with her thumb and forefinger, holding them away from her face.

  "I can't offer you anything permanent, but we could extend something informal. No benefits, no contract. Just a week-to-week arrangement."

  "That would suit me. Is this at the call center?"

  The woman smiled. "Not exactly. With your skill sets you could be useful in the classroom. We have lessons most days."

  "To teach...?" She left the question hanging, for a space to be filled in.

  "American accent and intonation."

  "I can do that."

  So she had a job, and a secret, and smiling an elephant smile, she discovered that Bangalore was not one place but two.

  3

  Alice knew herself to be single-minded, and successful because of it—how else to explain her magna cum laude at Brown, all the loans she had floated to pay tuition, and most recently her ability to overcome Stella's defection? The face she showed the world was dominant and determined. She was reconciled to living with the personality her body suggested, the one people expected— she was heavy again, with her father's features—always the pretty girl's plain friend. She had to be decisive, because she also knew that people like her got no help from anyone. She had had to learn to be the helper, the humorist, to be self-sufficient and ironic, too. She coped with that role, yet she was someone else—sensitive to slights, appreciative of attention, spiritual, even submissive, more sensual than anyone imagined, yet no man had ever touched her.

  With the job, her life changed. The inner Alice was released, and she was able to be two different people in the two different parts of Bangalore. That was how it seemed. But really she was the same person using the two sides of her personality, just as perhaps Bangalore was one place with two aspects—indeed, as the elephant god, whom she esteemed rather than worshiped, had two aspects, the spiritual enabler and the fat, jolly, workaday elephant, spiritual and practical, as she believed herself to be.

  She had made the traveler's most important discovery. You went away from home and moved among strangers. No one knew your history or who you were: you started afresh, a kind of rebirth. Being whoever you wished to be, whoever you claimed to be, was a liberation. She wrote the thought in her diary and ended, So now I know why people go away.

  And in between the ashram and Electronics City was the stable where the elephant was chained and the mahout lived. The elephant was more eloquent than the mahout: the elephant smiled more, was more responsive, hungrier—and hunger said so much. She visited at least once a week, mostly on her way home from Electronics City. She paid the taxi driver and then lingered to feed the elephant, or just watched, and afterward she walked back to the ashram in a better mood.

  This elephant also had two personalities. Usually the mahout welcomed Alice—in his way, with a downward flap of his hand, meaning "Come closer," or by cupping his hand to indicate "Feed him." But one day he made an unmistakable "Keep away" gesture, pressing his palms at her, pushing them toward her face.

  And he said an Indian word that Alice recognized, because it existed in English too. Pointing at his eye, he said, "Musth."

  She peered at the elephant's eye and saw that it was leaking brownish fluid, staining its coarse skin, like rusty water dripping from an old pipe. The elephant's eye was glowing, his chain clanked, he looked trapped and agitated.

  "Musth, musth," Alice said. Of course, the elephant was half demented with frustrated desire, chained against venting it, lust and anger mingled in his big body and leaking out of his eye. For the first time she heard that fury in the elephant's trumpeting, and the sound of it made her step back.

  The mahout was relieved. He too gave the elephant room, and he forked the grass and branches very carefully into a pile that was at the limit of the elephant's reach. That the mahout with all his knowledge, and what she guessed to be his history with this animal, was so cautious, and even perhaps fearful, impressed her greatly.

  That very evening she knelt and prayed to Ganesh and chanted, Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey Gajaanana, reminding herself of what she had seen at the stable, the explosive elephant chained to a post.

  In the morning, as always, she attended Swami's daily darshan, and later she was a cleaner, a menial, a mopper, an acolyte, an arranger of flowers, and a collector of rupees, her hands clasped before her.

  She sat with Priyanka and helped weave garlands of marigolds to drape before the big statue of Saraswati at the edge of the pavilion.

  "My personal favorite," Priyanka said, smiling at Saraswati holding the sitar. "Making beautiful music."

  Was it because Alice smiled that Priyanka asked her whom she prayed to?

  She did not say the elephant god, Ganesh. She needed her secret. She said, "They're all related, the Indian gods—fathers and daughters, sons and mothers, avatars and incarnations. It's a family, isn't it? I pray to the family."

  Priyanka had a way of twisting her head, contorting herself in a way that said, I don't believe you. And she assumed this posture of disbelief now, looking sideways, perhaps because the answer had come so neatly. But Alice's was an Indian reply—indisputable and yet untruthful, too well rehearsed, a little too elaborate, a little too general, not to be hiding the truth. She had been hearing such replies since arriving in India.

  She was well aware that Priyanka was suspicious of her. But that was all right. Alice was used to the Indian habit of inventing the person others supposed you to be, assigning you particular traits. Alice was American, middle class, good school, funny about food, careful with money, always with her nose in a book, a bit too quick to point out that some Indians were poor, not quick enough to venerate Swami, with a deplorable tendency to treat him as a fallible human, because Americans made a point, didn't they, of being hard to please.

  And for Alice, a lot of these devotees at the ashram were little more than cultists, even though Swami rejected any idea of its being a cult. But they had come from rigid, structured backgrounds—good families like Priyanka's and Prithi's; they were well brought up, had lived sheltered lives, and could say with wide-open eyes to an American, "I had no idea there were poor people in India!"

  Alice had read the books. In their adulthood, such people needed an authority figure, needed to be with like-minded companions, needed moral certainties, needed a path—no, they needed the path. Sai Baba was a power figure, and the ashram was the center of their world. They would have sat all day knitting shawls for him and been blissfully happy.

  Or, if not a cult, pretty close to one.

&nb
sp; "As for me, I'm just curious," Alice told herself, and she was glad she was not much like them, nor much like Stella—worldly, selfish Stella.

  And she had another life on the far side of Bangalore, in Electronics City. From this vantage point she was able to keep her life at the ashram in perspective.

  She had taken the job because she needed money, but she saw it was about more than money: the job kept her clear-sighted. As for her notion that the devotees at the ashram resembled cultists, that insight came to her one night at InfoTech as she saw the employees—her students—making their way from the company cafeteria. They were laughing and talking, comparing notes, whispering among themselves, one or two making calls on their cell phones, all dressed differently, all of them young, all free. They were doing what they wanted. They were independent, being paid, and hoping to get to the next level. They had supervisors, but none of these bosses was an authority figure in any solemn sense. They followed company rules and protocol, but they had no path except their own. They had not forsaken anything—far from it; they were embracing the world and pressing their smiling faces against it, hoping it would smile back.

  Alice's sari worked in both places. It was the perfect disguise. She liked slipping out of the ashram and becoming anonymous on the busy sidewalk, then hailing a taxi. She liked moving from the comfortable decrepitude of Whitefield to the unfinished modernity of Electronics City, which sometimes seemed to her a city already glittering in decay: so many buildings were under construction, the place looked like an elaborate ruin. Often in India you could not tell whether a building was going up or falling down, and the construction sites were a mess, but with tall buildings here and there, the fragments of a crystal city.

  And then to InfoTech, which was a compound behind a high wall: the glass tower with tall palm trees in the lobby, and the annex behind it where her classroom was located, and the ugly power plant.

  "Good evening, madam. How was your day?"

  Yesterday's lesson had included that catch phrase, as well as the words "catch phrase."

  Some of the others repeated it. They were confident. The quality of poise that Alice had seen in Amitabh when they'd met on the train was a trait that all of them shared. Speaking Hindi, they bowed their heads, they were deferential, they sounded elaborate and oblique and evasive. In Basic English they were direct, even blunt, certainly unsubtle. Basic English was a good telephone language: its edges had been knocked off; it was informal yet helpfully intrusive, demanding a reply.

  Amitabh had proven to be the best student, the quickest learner. Any word or phrase he heard became part of his permanent vocabulary.

  "It takes very little brains to learn a language," Alice had told the students. They seemed to resent her saying this, but she insisted on it. "Anyone can do it. Children do it. You just have to make the right noises. But what you say—that's a different story. So you can be fluent and have nothing to say. I can't teach you to be good salespeople, but I can give you the tools."

  All of them were altered by speaking American English, given new personalities, but Amitabh was changed the most. On the train he had been a strange figure, with his obsolescent words. India clung to the past, and so for all the new buildings and new money, nothing changed very much. These were the words the East India Company had brought from England hundreds of years before, and still they were spoken and written, however musty they seemed. Perhaps Indians used these archaic words to give themselves dignity, power, or presence, but the effect was comic.

  Yet saying "We can ramp up a solution," Amitabh underwent a personality change. "Or we could go another rowt," he might add, "depending on whether you have the in-surance. Pick up a pin and make a note of this, or with one click of your mouse we could have a done deal."

  Alice smiled to think that it was all her doing. She herself said "root," not "rowt," for "route." "Ramp up" made her laugh. "Insurance," and "pin" for "pen," were southern but spreading. Why not hand them all over, to give these callers credibility? They often dealt with mechanical objects—nuts and bolts, metal sleeves, tubes, and rods—toobs and rahds.

  "I'd so appreciate it if you'd share the serial number of your appliance with me. You'll find it on the underside—that is the bottom of the appliance, stamped on a metal plate. Thank you much."

  And after they'd rehearsed this in a classroom chorus, Alice would say, "The bahdum of the appliance."

  "The bahdum of the appliance!"

  "Thank you so very much," she said.

  "Thank you so very much!"

  The expression made her laugh, but it was American.

  These students, who were known as sales and technical associates, worked for a company that retailed home appliances and power tools. Manning the phones, they needed information from the person on the other end, an American, so that they could find solutions in the user's manual. Once they found the specific model and the serial number, they would try to solve the problem. They needed polite but exact ways to ask for information.

  "And, plus, I'd be very grateful for your attention at this point in time. Kindly turn the appliance so that the power cord is facing away from you. You will be looking at the head of the appliance, which is green in color."

  "And, plus, I'd be very grateful for your attention at this point in time!" they repeated, twanging the words.

  Alice surprised herself in finding pleasure teaching informal American English—not essay phrases but telephonic American. "What I'm hearing is that your product might be defective" and "Let's focus in on the digital messages you see on the screen" and "Have you remembered to activate the On switch?"

  Speaking in this way, with Alice's urging, the students were, after just a few weeks, slightly different people—more confident, like Amitabh, but also friendlier and funnier, more casual, more direct. Alice smiled to think that in teaching American English she was giving them magic formulas to utter: they were getting results on the phone, helping customers, becoming efficient trouble-shooters.

  And Miss Ghosh was complimentary, adding more hours to Alice's schedule and reporting that the employees at the call center were more effective on their jobs.

  "We can perhaps revise your contract to reflect a month-to-month contingency," Miss Ghosh said. "We're chalking that in."

  Alice agreed. The money helped. Now she was paying her way at the ashram, though they asked for very little. How odd to pass from InfoTech to Sai Baba, from Electronics City to Whitefield, yet had it not been for the elephant in between, she would have been lost.

  "Musth?" she inquired of the mahout a week after the visit when she had seen the agitated elephant beating his chained leg against the post, his eye leaking.

  The mahout smiled and shook his head, and he gave her to understand—waving his open hand in the air—that he had been wrong, that it had not been musth. Another gesture, pointing ahead—the musth would come later. He welcomed her into the courtyard. The elephant nodded, seeing her, and when she gave him a handful of peanuts, which he crushed and shelled with his trunk, blowing the nuts into his mouth and expelling the husks, she knew he associated her with food, and she brought more and more. She found he especially liked cashews. They had no shells. She brought bags of them, and fed the grateful animal, and felt she had a friend.

  The elephant calmed her, kept her centered—another expression she delighted in teaching the employees, who called themselves InfoTechies.

  "Aapka naam ke hai?" she asked the mahout one day, having found the sentence in a Hindi phrase book.

  "Gopi," the mahout said.

  Alice pointed to the elephant and said, "Aapka naam?"

  With a smile, perhaps at the absurdity of the question, the mahout said, "Hathi." Alice knew that this was the word "elephant," for Hathi Pol was the Elephant Gate at the Red Fort in Delhi.

  But she was glad that the animal had no name, that he was Elephant, a designation that made him seem a superior example, as though he represented all elephants.

  At the ashram
, wobbling her head in a knowing way, Priyanka said, "You're proving to be a dark one."

  Alice stared at her until Priyanka smiled. All she meant, apparently, was that Alice had a secret.

  "I'm working," Alice said. "I don't want to be a parasite here. And as Swami says, work is worship."

  "There is work, and there is work," Prithi said, at Priyanka's side.

  She was trying to be mysterious, but Alice knew she disapproved of her leaving the ashram to go to an unnamed job.

  "Have you ever had a job?" Alice asked, and when they smiled at the thought of such an absurdity—their families were wealthy: why would they ever need to work?—Alice said, "I've had plenty."

  Alice did not say where she worked, but when she hinted that it was in education, this suggestion of uplift and intellect reassured the two women, and they left her alone.

  She did not reveal that she passed from the world of speculation and the spirit, and Swami's talk of dignity and destiny, to the other world of Bangalore, of tech support and skill sets and her students, who dealt with cold calling, hot leads, and diagnostic parameters.

  "How can I resolve your issues today?" was a sentence she drilled at InfoTech but not one that Swami would ever have spoken.

  "Hey, guess what?" Amitabh said to her as she was going into the class. He did not wait for her to reply. "I've been made team leader. They bumped up my pay! Thank you so very much."

  He was so different she hardly recognized him. She was well aware that in having taught Amitabh a new language she had altered his personality. At first she thought he'd changed "in many ways," and then she came to see that the alteration was profound. When speaking American he was someone else. He bore no resemblance to the awkward, slightly comic, rather oblique, and old-fashioned job seeker she'd met on the train. He was radically changed from the mimic she'd met at Vishnu Hotel and Lunch House, who'd said, This is real positive, seeing you. He was a new man.

  Saying, "Hey, can you spare a minute?" he was no longer the fogy. He was a big importuning brute, hovering over her and demanding an answer.