by Paul Theroux
The rest of the class, thirty-seven of them, women and men, had undergone a similar transformation, and she marveled at the changes.
"'Scuse me" was not the same as "I'm sorry," and "Huh?" or "What?" was not the same as "Pardon?"
It seemed to Alice that Indians were much ruder speaking American. They sounded more impatient. Naturally confrontational, these Indians now had a language to bolster that tendency and no longer had to rely on the subtleties of Hindi. The obliqueness of Indian English, with its goofy charm that created distance, was a thing of the past. The students were without doubt more familiar, even obnoxious in American. Can you please inform me, what is your good name, madam? had become So who am I talking to?
And she was the teacher, the cause of it all!
She had succeeded, because they needed to be direct, with a certain bossy control of language, as techies in the call center. They were effective on the phone only if they were listened to.
If you'd just let me finish was another rasping way of dominating a conversation that Alice had given them.
But Alice was regretful, for in acquiring the new language they had made a weird adaptation: they had become the sort of American that Alice thought she'd left behind back in the States. And Amitabh, the quickest learner, was the best of them, which was to say the worst—her personal creation, a big blorting babu with a salesman's patter. He was full of gestures—the chopping hand, the wagging finger, even backslapping. In a country where people never touched each other in public, he was all hands—that also was part of speaking American.
"I gotta talk to you," Amitabh said to Alice one day after the classroom drills. She winced at the way he said it, and she cringed when he tapped her on the shoulder.
The lesson that day was concerned with useful Americanisms for "I don't understand." She had drilled them with Sorry, I don't follow you and You've lost me and Mind repeating that? and I'm still in the dark.
Amitabh she knew to be a fundamentally patient and polite young man, but in his American accent, using colloquialisms, he sounded blunt and impatient. Speaking Indian English, he allowed an evasion, but his American always sounded like a non-negotiable demand. It worked on the phone—well, that was the point—but in person it was just boorish.
Now Amitabh was saying, "How about it?"
Alice smiled at his effrontery, the liberty he was taking with her, his teacher; but inwardly she groaned, knowing that she was the one who had given him this language, this new personality.
She said, "It just occurred to me that I don't think I've spent enough time on 'please' and 'thank you.'"
"Hey, whatever," Amitabh said, flinging his cupped hands in the air.
"No, really, Amitabh. I'm pretty busy."
She had hoped to stop and feed the elephant—she was sure the elephant was expecting her—but she was overdue at the ashram. She didn't want anyone to notice her lateness. The devotees, with all the time in the world, were punctual—often pointlessly early, making the twiddling of their thumbs into a virtue, almost a yoga position, as though to abase themselves to Swami, to please him with the obedient surrender of their will.
"There's one or two things I want to go over," Amitabh said.
"And you want to do it now?"
"That's about the size of it," Amitabh said.
"Maybe someone else can help you."
"Nope. I'm focusing on yourself."
"Not 'yourself.' 'I'm focusing on you.'"
"I'm focusing on you."
"Better. But I wish you wouldn't."
It seemed that whenever she was in a hurry or had a deadline in India, she encountered an obstruction: a traffic jam, or the sidewalk was mobbed and slowed her, or someone wanted money, or the office was closed. Or, like today, she wanted to feed the elephant and rush back to the ashram, and here was Amitabh, in her face with a question. But she had given him the convincing accent, and with it, an attitude.
"The thing is," Amitabh said with the heavy-lidded gaze and torpid smile he affected at his most American, "you said you were kind of interested in seeing the gods at Mahabalipuram."
He said kinda and gahds.
"Did I say that?"
"You mentioned the elephants on The Penance of Arjuna and the Ganesh temple."
"I think I said Ganesh seemed the most dependable, maybe the most lovable. And the carvings of elephants there—"
Interrupting her, Amitabh said, "I'll take that as a yes."
Alice began to laugh. Had she taught him that? No, but as with other phrases he knew, she might have used it in conversation. He remembered everything.
Using her laughter as a chance to interrupt again, Amitabh said, "I know somebody who knows somebody who got me a couple of tickets on the so-called Super Express to Chennai. You haven't been there, am I right?"
"Not yet."
"I figured as much," he said. "So this is your chance to see the whole thing."
How did he know that? Perhaps she had mentioned the elephant carvings at Mahabalipuram during one of her classes. She and Stella had spoken about visiting the shrine. One of the attractions of the ashram in Bangalore was that it was half a day by train to Chennai and the coastal temple, the famous bas relief called The Penance of Arjuna, the temples called the Raths, one dedicated to Ganesh, all of it at the edge of the great hot Indian Ocean. That's on the list, they had said. This was before Zack entered the picture.
"How about a trip there some weekend?"
Alice smiled at his presumption and squirmed away from his reaching hand.
"Sorry."
"What's the problem?"
"The problem is that I'm a teacher and you're a student, and it's against the rules."
Wagging his finger and opening his mouth wide to speak, he said, "We're both employees of InfoTech. I'm team leader, full time, and you're an associate instructor, part time. Hey, you owe me—I got them to kick some work your way."
"Listen, I got this job on my own merits, and don't you forget it."
"It's not about that," he said, and shrugged. "It's about the tickets."
"If I wanted to go to Chennai I'd pay my own way."
She did want to go—he was reminding her of what she had planned to do. But she objected to big smiling Amitabh's insisting that she go with him.
She said, "Find someone else, please. I'm pretty busy."
When she got to the stable and indicated to the mahout that she had brought some cashews for the elephant, she could tell that he was preoccupied: he had already fed the elephant, was just humoring her by allowing her to give the animal some nuts. But the elephant at least was grateful—forgiving, glad to see her, still smiling.
She was so late arriving at the ashram that she replayed the whole delaying conversation with Amitabh and began to hate him for his insolence. How about a trip there some weekend? and Got them to kick some work your way infuriated her. He now seemed to her a monster of presumption, without any grace. That night she sat in her room, ignored by Priyanka and Prithi, hating herself.
Two days later at InfoTech, she went to Miss Ghosh to tell her how she felt. Not just her misgivings about the emphasis on the American accent, but her suspicion that with these fast learners, taking on so much language and accent, they were losing something important—some subtlety, an Indian obliqueness and charm, a fundamental courtesy.
Feeling that she was rambling, she then said, "I'm starting to wonder whether I'm any good at this."
Miss Ghosh said, "I can sincerely offer assurance that you have been a resounding success."
"I can see I've made a difference."
"It is chalk and cheese, for which I am duly grateful."
Miss Ghosh's Indian English and her dated Anglicisms reminded Alice of how the students had once sounded. The archaic and plodding language made Miss Ghosh seem trustworthy and sensible.
"Block Four, I am thinking of," Alice said. And she was seeing in her mind this rather shy but intelligent roomful of bright young people had becom
e a crowd of noisy Americans.
"You have worked wonders with them. They have developed a high success rate. We have taken them off Home Depot and put them on call lists to obtain service agreements for contractors to sign up with mortgage companies in southern California. The percentage of sign-ups has been phenomenal."
"'I've been finding them familiar."
"That worries you?"
"The rudeness does. Overfamiliar, I mean." Miss Ghosh's head wagged back and forth. "Rudeness will not be tolerated in any manner."
"Some of them, the men especially, seem presumptuous."
"How so?"
"The way they talk to me."
"Not Mr. Amitabh. He has come on very well as your protégé."
"He's one of them."
"He is scheduled for promotion. You would enjoin me to initiate action?"
Alice was turning shed-jeweled over in her mind. "Not really. I can take care of myself."
Miss Ghosh said, "I think you are being modest about your achievements. I want to show you the results of your efforts."
No one was allowed to enter the inner part of InfoTech without a pass—a plastic card that was swiped on a magnetic strip beside the doors. Miss Ghosh got a pass for Alice and took her, swiping her way through a succession of doors, to the call center where her class worked, all thirty-seven of them, in cubicles, sitting before computer screens, most of them on the phone.
Alice had never seen the callers at work. The sight was not surprising. Most business offices looked like this: people talking on the phone, tapping on keyboards, watching monitors. The workers all wore headphones and hands-free mikes that made them insectile in appearance—bulgy heads, antennae, a proboscis. But that was a passing thought.
What astonished her, overwhelmed her, and even physically assaulted her were the voices, the jangle of American accents, inquiring, pleading, importuning, apologizing.
"This is Jahn. Jahn Marris. May I speak to the homeowner?"
"Let me repeat that information..."
"I'm gonna need the serial number..."
"The mahdel number. I said, the mahdel number."
"Are you sure this is our prahduct?"
They sounded like a flock of contending birds. Even the room had a cage-like quality, the employees roosting in their narrow cubicles like squawkers in a hen house. Their sounds were strangely similar in harshness, as though they were all the same species of bird, not hens at all but a roomful of macaws, the teeth and smiles of American voices but hardly human.
Miss Ghosh said, "Why are you smiling?"
"I'm thinking of that line about a dog walking on its hind legs. You don't care that it's done well—you're amazed that it's done at all."
"I'm not sure what you mean," Miss Ghosh said, pursing her lips—she was offended. "But this is your accomplishment."
Miss Ghosh seemed to mean it as praise, but Alice construed it as sarcasm.
4
The ashram was a retreat from the ambition and worldliness of Electronics City. Electronics City was a refuge from the selfish spiritualism and escapism of the ashram. In his stable on the side street, the elephant was balanced between them, sometimes swaying like a prisoner, now and then the whole of its head and trunk painted in colored chalk, designs of whorls and flowers. One day the elephant wore a brass bell on a heavy cord. When the mahout encouraged Alice to ring it, the elephant nodded and lifted his great head and stamped his feet, his leg as thick as a tree. He knows me, Alice told herself.
And her trips from Swami to elephant to InfoTech, in a taxi or an auto-rickshaw, were a weird reminder of another India, of traffic and skinny cows vying with cars, and people, thousands of them, walking in the road carrying bundles. The whole of it lay in a dust cloud during the day and was eerily lighted at night, the dust-glow like the soft edges of an incomplete dream, lovely to look at, but at times it gagged her.
Hers was a divided life, but shuttling among these places, she thought of the original idea of keeping the ashram as a base and traveling from there to the nearer cities of Mysore and Chennai, just to see the sights. That had been the plan she'd made with Stella. Without Stella, Alice felt that a trip to the coast to see Mahabalipuram would be a pleasure, especially now that she'd found a friend in the elephant. Her only hesitation was that Amitabh had reminded her of it. It annoyed her that he knew of her desire to see the temple by the sea—she was cross with herself for having mentioned it. Probably she had casually said something to someone in the class: "You're from Chennai? I've always wanted to go to Mahabalipuram." But that was unlike her, because she made a point of never telling anyone the things she yearned for, since those were the very things that must never be revealed; speaking about them was the surest way of destroying them.
This irritated memory convinced her that she must go. She asked Priyanka and Prithi if they wanted to take the trip.
"I've never been on an Indian train and I don't intend to start now," Priyanka said.
In the same reprimanding tone, Prithi said, "We feel our place is here with Swami."
That was another disturbing aspect of the ashram, the notion that the female devotees were like old-fashioned wives of Swami.
"I see this trip as a kind of pilgrimage," Alice said, appealing to their venerating side.
"Isn't this enough for you?" Prithi said.
"This is your home," Priyanka said.
Alice said, "I'll find my own way of going."
That remark was one she went on regretting, because its brashness, she feared, would attract bad luck or misinterpretation, as overconfidence often seemed to. And why? Because such confident certainty helped people remember your words and want to hold them against you.
For reassurance, she paid the elephant a visit, and in the course of fifteen or twenty minutes she emptied a big bag of cashews into the pink nostrils of his trunk, contracting and inquiring and vacuuming the nuts from her hand. He was a marvel, and he gave her strength. No wonder the first Central Asians worshiped great gilded bulls, and the earliest Hindus the smiling elephant Ganesh. A powerful animal was a glory of the natural world and suggested such strength and innocence, such a godlike presence, it seemed to link heaven and earth.
Instead of going to Bangalore Cantonment Station, which was near the ashram, Alice took a taxi to Bangalore City, so as to keep her plans secret. When she showed her passport as an ID at the booking hall, the clerk asked her if she was paying in American dollars.
"I could."
"Upstairs. International booking for foreigners."
"What's the advantage?"
"Quota is there."
A better seat, in other words. Alice went upstairs, where she found a young bearded man bent over a low table, filling out a form. His backpack was propped against a pillar.
"Do I have to fill out one of those?"
"A docket, yeah."
Australian, or perhaps a kiwi—she could not tell them apart, though they could identify each other in an instant. She found a form, filled it in with as much information as she could muster, then brought it to the ticket window.
"Me go Chennai in a week or so. One person only."
"We have four trains daily. Super Express is fastest day train. Which day had you in mind?"
The man's fluent reply was a reproach to her clumsy and patronizing attempt at broken English.
"Say the twenty-ninth."
The man tapped his computer and peered at the screen.
"Down-train, departure is seven-thirty in the morning, arrival Chennai Central at two P.M., give or take. What currency are you proferring?"
Alice paid in dollars, a little more than five, which she counted into the man's hand. She received her change in rupees, with a freshly printed ticket.
"Have a nice day," the man said.
She smiled at him, grateful for his efficiency, his effort to please, the accent even, which seemed like a favor to her, the man being himself.
But it wasn't a pleasure trip to the coa
st, as it had probably seemed to the clerk. She had told Priyanka and Prithi that the journey to Mahabalipuram was more in the nature of a pilgrimage, and so it was. The elephant carvings on the wall and the great rocks at The Penance of Arjuna awaited her. It was not a comfortable summer-camp-like place, protecting her, as the ashram was—Swami in charge, the devotees like cultists and counselors—but rather a quest. She was not looking for shelter and ease; she sought revelation and inner peace. Stella had found an easy option with Zack. The devotees at the ashram were complacent in their piety, as the workers at InfoTech were boringly ambitious. And as for their mimicry—putting their education and achievement to use by making phone calls to the United States, something American housewives and college students had done as part-time workers in the past—these InfoTechies were making a career.
It is not my career, Alice vowed. She was sad that the employees were satisfied with so little, but of course if they asked for more, if they demanded to be fairly paid, they would not have jobs.
She told Miss Ghosh that she would be taking a week off.
Miss Ghosh made an astonished face, her lovely dark eyebrows shooting up. "You have applied for leave?"
"I guess you could say that's what I'm doing now."
"This is rather sudden. We must have ample notification."
Alice smiled at her, gladdened that Miss Ghosh was confounded.
"I am a casual worker, as you said. I can be dropped from the roster at any time, without prior notice. I have no medical benefits. I'm not even paid very well." She smiled again, to allow what she said to sink in. "And you tell me that I am obliged to give you ample notification?"
"We take a dim view of irregular shed-jeweling practices."
"It's called a vacation. I haven't had one."
The woman had spoken to her in the tone of a headmistress, and it was odd how quickly the tone had changed from the other day. Just when you thought you had a friend in India, you looked up and saw a rival.
"The normal procedure is that one builds up leave over time."
"But I'm casual labor, and on the lowest pay scale."