ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR
WHITE DANCING ELEPHANTS
“The seventeen stories in this debut collection take place around the world, exploring queer and interracial love, extramarital affairs, and grief over the disappearances of loved ones. The book provocatively probes the aftermath—the aftermath of death, of grim diagnoses, of abandonment, of monumental errors in judgment. Passages jump back and forth in time to dissect how the consequences of a fraught event shape and unravel the lives of innocent casualties....An exuberant collection.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“This enthralling, vivid debut collection...provides powerful glimpses into experiences of grief, violence, and betrayal.”
—Southern Living
“Bhuvaneswar’s daring mix of ancient, contemporary, and dystopic stories carries us to the heart of rarely exposed longing, loss, and the politics of violence and endurance in remarkable, elegant, heart-stopping prose.”
—Jimin Han, author of A Small Revolution
“Reading Bhuvaneswar is like receiving Lasik via literature—the world you return to is a little clearer and sharper for the time you’ve spent in her pages. She is a formidable talent, formally accomplished and intellectually alive.”
—Anthony Marra, author of The Constellation of Vital Phenomena
“These stories show impressive dexterity and range. The prose can be rich and intricate one moment, then shifts registers into sharp humor; Bhuvaneswar’s ability to take on larger topics and to locate and intensify their complexity within individuals is amazingly fine.”
—Peter Rock, author of My Abandonment
“Filled with dark music, nuance, and intelligence, White Dancing Elephants takes readers on a thrilling journey. This unforgettable collection will hold its readers captive to the very last page.”
—Diana Abu-Jaber, author of Life Without a Recipe
“Bhuvaneswar is a master of literary stealth. Authentic, fearless, and wholly original, White Dancing Elephants is a knockout collection.”
—Jillian Medoff, author of This Could Hurt
“A timely stunner, a wild collection that touches on everything from motherhood, race, and privilege to Rachael Ray and Jay Z....This is one of those rare books that refuses to look away.”
—Kelly Luce, Electric Literature
“Books open up people, books open up the world, books open up history to us—but it’s very rare that a book does all three. Bhuvaneswar’s debut is a remarkably written, insightful book, wise and wide as the world.”
—Amber Sparks, author of The Unfinished World
“Bhuvaneswar has the gift of precision, the ability to fit whole novels into her stories. This is fiction as unafraid of the intimate—pulsing and tender—as it is of the big questions of life and death, love and betrayal, belonging and dislocation.”
—Allegra Hyde, author of Of This New World
“So rich and full of rage and beauty...incredibly well written and so brave.”
—Courtney Maum, author of I Am Having So Much Fun
Here Without You
“Bhuvaneswar’s stories reveal a rare sensitivity to the strange and complicated acrobatics of the human heart. Astonishing, urgent portraits of people trying to see the world for what it is and what it might be.”
—Emily Geminder, author of Dead Girls and Other Stories
“Bhuvaneswar writes with a clear eye, precise hand, and a compassionate heart. This is a collection of stories that reward the reader’s mind and spirit.”
—Dohra Ahmad, author of Rotten English
“White Dancing Elephants dazzles from the start. Readers are treated to deep characters, mesmerizing language, and a story that propels forward across a city and the landscape of a mind effortlessly. This is a new, gifted voice in contemporary literature, and we are so lucky to have it!”
—Victoria Chang, author of Barbie Chang
“Bhuvaneswar’s deft and poignant stories bring the whole damned world into clearer focus. A pure pleasure to read, White Dancing Elephants is a remarkable book that will stay with me for a long time.”
—Skip Horack, author of The Other Joseph
“Bhuvaneswar’s stories are as insightful as they are ineffable and as devastating as they are delightful. As I read these important and hilarious tales about the lives of queer people of color, I kept asking myself, you can do this in writing?”
—Emma Eisenberg, author of The Third Rainbow Girl
“Radical and searing, the stories of White Dancing Elephants demand and warrant an attentive, listening audience.”
—Foreword Reviews
WHITE DANCING
ELEPHANTS
WHITE
DANCING
ELEPHANTS
-STORIES-
CHAYA BHUVANESWAR
5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd.
Ann Arbor, MI 48103
www.dzancbooks.org
WHITE DANCING ELEPHANTS. Copyright © 2018, text by Chaya Bhuvaneswar. All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Dzanc Books, 5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48103.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bhuvaneswar, Chaya, 1971- author.
Title: White dancing elephants : stories / Chaya Bhuvaneswar.
Description: Ann Arbor, MI : Dzanc Books, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018005798 | ISBN 9781945814617
Classification: LCC PS3602.H54 A6 2018 | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018005798
First US edition: October 2018
Interior design by Leslie Vedder
Stories in this collection appeared, sometimes in different form, in the following publications: “White Dancing Elephants” in Asian American Literary Review; “The Story of the Woman Who Fell in Love with Death” in Bangalore Review; “Talinda” in Narrative Magazine; “A Shaker Chair” in Story South; “Jagatishwaran” in Nimrod; “The Bang Bang” in Michigan Quarterly Review; “Neela: Bhopal, 1984” in Narrative Northeast; “Newberry” in The Write Launch; “Asha in Allston” in r.k.v.r.y. quarterly; “The Life You Save Isn’t Your Own ” in aaduna; “The Orphan Handler” in Ellipsis; “In Allegheny” in Santa Fe Writers Project; “The Goddess of Beauty Goes Bowling” in Chattahoochee Review; and “Adristakama” in Del Sol Review.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
WHITE DANCING ELEPHANTS
THE STORY OF THE WOMAN WHO FELL IN LOVE WITH DEATH
TALINDA
A SHAKER CHAIR
JAGATISHWARAN
THE BANG BANG
ORANGE POPSICLES
NEELA: BHOPAL, 1984
CHRONICLE OF A MARRIAGE, FORETOLD
HEITOR
NEWBERRY
ASHA IN ALLSTON
THE LIFE YOU SAVE ISN’T YOUR OWN
THE ORPHAN HANDLER
IN ALLEGHENY
THE GODDESS OF BEAUTY GOES BOWLING
ADRISTAKAMA
who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.
—Seamus Heaney, “Punishment”
WHITE DANCING ELEPHANTS
I WALK OUT TO THE LOBBY, wanting to prolong my dream of you, thinking that I’ll gain some control by staying awake. Impossible— I’m too aware that people are staring at me. The lobby is tiny, compact but cool as glass. I walk with my hands loose, hair disheveled, my pajamas covered by a trench coat. Someone glides out from behi
nd a front desk and presses an umbrella on me because it’s pouring. The rain is tropical. It’s June in central London, financial district, the back of Deutsche Bank, the first building I walk past, with its gargoyles and angelic flourishes so unlike its German-constructed, super-efficient front façade. I’m half a block away from the hotel when, shivering, I open the umbrella. The rain makes it possible to wipe my face and have people think that I was caught in a downpour. I hate metaphors of rain, fecundity, gushing water from a hidden space. There wasn’t anything macabre in your passing—no rush of blood, no horrifying trickle down my legs. Just two clear stains, understated, as quiet and undemanding as your whole life had been; only enough blood for me to know.
When I was younger, in my early twenties, and couldn’t imagine having a child, I would stare at myself as I jogged past office buildings, appreciating the slim reflection and promising myself to stay that way. Now I don’t look. The curve of my belly is meaningless— indulgence, fat, no longer where I’m carrying you. But all the signs are still there, superfluous: the fuller breasts—not tender anymore the young skin, the shiny hair that were all gifts from you.
“You all right then, luv?” A cabbie leans out his window when I stop for the light and he sees my tearful face. I nod, then make an unintended turn and keep on walking.
Without realizing it, I’ve reached a subterranean sort of Euromall. Octagon Arcade, it’s called, though looking at the glossy bus-shelter type of walls gives me too much of a headache to bother counting to see if they’re eight. Things are never named reliably, I understand. Boots is not a shop where shoes are sold; Monsoon has nothing to do with India. W.H. Smith isn’t a person but a generic chain of newsstands selling cheap sandwiches and tabloid rags and things called “health foods,” like tiger balm, which isn’t made from tigers at all. (If we were only in the forest together, we wouldn’t sleep. We would stay up. You would nestle against my breast, picking it up and stroking it and arranging it under your ear like a pillow, and eventually you would say, “Mama,” though not right away. Before you could speak you would make sounds, and because the sounds would tell me you were listening, I would kiss your head and tell you stories, stories within stories, stories of elephants in the forest, stories of tigers.)
I go down the steps into the mall, heading into the pharmacy. I need pads. The first day, the way I mopped up blood was cautious, hopeful, as if by showing that it could be quickly absorbed, I was collecting proof that you were still alive. After that I stopped measuring. Only one moment caught me unawares, like getting soaked by rain—the moment that, smiling, thinking of something else from long ago, I actually saw you on the pad. Your flesh was hard, less darkly bloody than the rest of it, more than just a part of me. Your hardness froze my smile. You had existed, formed; I could see light outlines, the shape of limbs. You were hard enough to have formed bone, if you had lived more than an inch.
The English pharmacy is impossibly friendly and bright.
“You all right then, miss?” inquires a security guard. I look away from him, my attention fixed on the bellies of women gathering into a line. The line of them divides between the self-pay registers and the one or two cashiers who stand, bored, only as polite as required. The women’s bellies divide into flat, obese, and then the one in front of me, a petite woman with long dark hair, pregnant, I recognize, maybe even in the final trimester. She looks perfect. I turn away from her and find the one who is obese. Perhaps she’s never been pregnant, I think, and she’s just fat—until the woman’s three children follow in her wake, sullen and palely beautiful the way dark-haired English children are, their lips a thin and natural red, their eyes pale blue. She’s probably my age, I realize suddenly, early forties, but she has not spent her life on mistakes. My eyes can’t leave her or her three growing daughters. The same security guard who talked to me just before comes up and gently accosts me.
“You all right then? You know what you’re looking for? D’you need a basket or something?” and I nod my head, “Yes,” letting him put a shopping basket in my hand, even though, my darling, I have accepted nothing.
You could be alive. The hard thing could be from inside of me. A piece of a fibroid, a tumor from inside my uterus that my body was smart enough to get rid of to make room for you. The ultrasound could have been blocked by bowel, air, artifact, ignorance, an act of God, because you weren’t meant to be seen. (How much more clearly I would see it all, if I could only rest under a tree with you kicking me awake in my belly.)
In the hotel, I change my pad again but try to get some rest, really try, the way I would if I knew beyond a doubt that you’re alive, so that I would take care of us. I churn the sheets around my heated limbs, taking off clothes and putting them on again, remembering how my younger sister told me she couldn’t sleep before her son was born.
“Where can I go where there’s green space?” I find myself asking via telephone, pressing “0” in the dark and conquering my jetlag with high-heeled boots. Still holding the phone, I put them on, as if I might go out dancing, the way my sister and I did when we were young. Now my younger sister has a son and a daughter and, before she knew that I’d lost you, my lucky sister confided in me that she is trying for another one. (I’d never give you to her, my darling. I’d never even let her wish for you.)
Then a grey cab with the caption “Radio Cell”—modern and sleek, nothing like the battered yellow cabs in Manhattan or even the quaint-looking, black, old-fashioned London cabs—pulls up in front of the hotel and lets me slip inside, and with the side windows open and the dust of the city rushing in, I finally fall asleep. Years from now, my sweet love, I imagine you will be a man, and you will crane your neck to look at things your driver tells you to ignore. The thought of you seeing all of it opens my eyes. The Gold Shop with the sign, “We can melt down anything”; the gleaming Tesco with the two homeless men, too tired to stand up while they wait for it to be noon on a Sunday so they can buy cheap wine; a beautiful brown prostitute at the edge of the pavement, almost in traffic, talking to a man leaning out of a van. Her skin’s identical to mine. She has one hand on her hip and the other on the handle of a baby’s pram, its front wheel alarmingly close to a red double-decker bus. My taxi stops near enough for me to see her painted but young face when she steps back; I see her shaking her head at the driver of the black van; she will have other babies, I am sure of it, and they will live even though she smokes, exhaling blankly while she pokes the milk bottle into her baby’s face. Crushed beer cans come flying out of the van window, aimed at her, but she sidesteps and laughs, looking around, not moving the bottle from where her covered-up baby must be sucking for dear life. She’s seen all of this before. When you come here, you will not stop the car to talk to her. But you will watch her pushing the baby, like I do.
“Primrose Hill?” the driver asks suddenly, reminding me of what I told him. Before I know it, I’m standing outside in a wet meadow abutting a suburb. I walk deeper into this corner of green, smelling the cars parked outside the park’s small fence, seeing a rectangular sign with directions right at the entrance. The sign is blurred from the rain; I ignore it. (But if you were here, I would have hoisted you up to look at it; I would have taught you how to locate yourself on a map.)
You would have played right here. Not would have—will. You will play here, through my sheer will, and years from now it’s possible that you will have a child who loves this park. I can hear a three-year-old’s laughter at finding a big enough stick to shake at an adult. Grandson. That child will run to the fence that separates the grass from the curb, where cars are squeezed into makeshift parking spaces, and stick his face through it, hoping a pretty girl will talk to him. Then he will turn his little face to look in the direction of a sound—the tinny melody coming from a truck selling ice cream. He will beg for some, but turn his face away from the ice cream when you give in. You will lift your smart boy in the air, throw him up, catch him. Each second he laughs will be exquisite joy, if you would
only stay with him, my love.
The blood has stopped; my underpants feel dry. No one has been inside my womb and actually seen you, checked your eyelids, passed a hand under your mouth, to catch you breathing. Everyone has sympathy, but no one really knows. (In the forest, no one can stop us from dreaming. The rustling of leaves could be elephants unfolding and folding back their ears; the ground shifting could be armies of tigers lying down to sleep. The sound of a motor could be the enormous animals’ rumbling snores. The soft breeze you feel on your face could be a beauty’s breath or even her hesitation before she kisses you; she could be one of the invisible girls who live in heaven, dancing while celestial musicians endlessly perform. One of those girls could be your bride.)
I walk faster, ignoring how my high heels tear at the lawn. The path I follow cuts across the park, and on either side, there are great swaths of uncut grass interrupted by patches of clover, by dandelion stems with puffs blown off. At the end of this littered, broken path, with its deflated and discarded rubber balls, its trash, its posters for farmers’ markets and festivals and radical meetings, are two walkways, one next to an expensive-looking running track. A left turn leads to London Zoo.
Years ago, before I conceived of you, I went inside. In the first cages, monkeys bait the onlookers, sitting in branches high beyond their view and swinging their tails, then suddenly flinging their bodies hard against the glass for one instant, before retreating into the leaves. There are two jungle gyms, each sized for each sized for children of different ages, and low-slung exhibits where small hands can press buttons and run their fingers against tactile squares, one with a lizard’s skin, another with a fox’s fur.
I can’t make it into the zoo. My feet slow in the mud outside the main entrance, where crowds will line up in a few hours to buy tickets. The zoo is closed. All I get is a glimpse of an office—“The London Zoological Society”—that looks like it’s been there for hundreds of imperial years, since back when it might have been a hoot to go see Hottentots and Pygmies, tribesmen of India, captured gypsies who were locked up, exhibited, meticulously caged and labeled. (The doctor had said: “If you pass tissue, bring it in for us to analyze,” but I will not, my darling love, I would never give up any part of you.) I stand, uncertain of the time but clear that it must be before eight, waiting for a compassionate employee to arrive and slowly realizing no one is coming.
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