White Dancing Elephants

by Chaya Bhuvaneswar

  Finally, a taxi whizzes by, empty, pausing inquisitively, and I signal, get in and mumble my destination, then sleep until Oxford. Long before I thought of having you, that’s where I lived. I hated the town, and I hated myself for parts I loved—the sanctity of the libraries, their vastness and capacity. The hushed and exquisite museum, laden with things I thought They shouldn’t have, like the Diamond Sutra scrolls, sixteen feet long, stolen from a Buddhist Cave; the “They” from Lenin’s angry description of tourist monuments to Trotsky when the two men visited Europe. But the coldness of those buildings didn’t change the loveliness of tea, funny TV commercials, doner kebab carts with egg and meat packeted in foil, food smelling divine and tasting perfect after a night out. I didn’t drink liquor even before this pregnancy; I abstained for months in case you suddenly came into being. When I studied at Oxford, I found moments of quiet, when I jogged in the Deer Park around Magdalen and saw the lovely ones behind the fence, or when, by myself, I had tea and buttered scones on lonely afternoons, or when I sat near the window of some ancient common room and recited words from memory that you might hear from multitudes, if you come back to me—“Namo tassa bhagavato” and “Namo tassa bhagavato arahato samma sambuddhassa.” Imagining white elephants and dreaming of your birth. Sometimes boys would edge close, curious, asking me to repeat the prayers, giggling nervously at the strange words. But I took no of-fense—I liked it when the English boys couldn’t tell what the words meant. It gave me an excuse to stay away from them.

  This morning I travel to Oxford from the London Zoo. The spot where the cabbie lets me off will turn out to be a familiar corner near a bridge. The bridge leaves Magdalen and Green and graduate houses and a street that, if you follow it, leads to the Bodleian Library across from the King’s Arms. But when I walk over it, instead of turning back toward the colleges, the bridge leads to a different place, to Cowley Road and strong-smelling Indian fish-curry takeaways and a plebeian, exotic Oxford that I had secretly found comfort in, full of dreadlocked white hippies with mangy dogs, coupons at Sainsbury’s, and plastic-covered public library books. Sometimes, I would disappear into the normalcy of cardigans and quiet disparate streets with shops displaying porn magazines and fifty-pence boxes of Oxfam and cheap licorice, and there I would eat, slicing the bittersweet pink and yellow layers of the candy with my teeth, flipping with curiosity through Hot Indian Babes until some white woman, blowsy, unwashed with bad skin, would interrupt my reading, asking, “Cheap, aren’t they?” daring me to defend the beauties taunting her from the pages. (My sister posed once for her husband and he painted her, as he would paint you in her arms if she had you—if you ever came back to this world, my love, and found me gone.)

  Over the years, I have lost time being afraid. Hours lost as I hid in my bed, or stood on a chair staring at my face in the mirror over my small sink, anguished over what some boy or some very English tutor said, the state of my hair, the exact size of my body. The fact that I was not yet married and didn’t want to marry anyone I knew. I couldn’t walk or read or write or even hide in the basement of the foreign language institute, to feel less foreign.

  I thought I felt rage when someone shouted a slur at me from three feet away, while sitting on the tube from Paddington Station, or when someone called me a “cheap tart” when we were waiting in a line for a dance club and I was wearing silver shoes and a black dress that had a pulse, or when a law passed in the US that I didn’t agree with, or when, years after Oxford, I married your father and loved him, and despite that love, he could not save your life.

  Before my last morning with you, my love, I didn’t know rage. I didn’t know how empty rage is, like a bag of bones.

  Now I am walking across the Isis River, looking down, hearing the sound of my heels on the bridge. Once when I was here at Oxford, fifteen years ago, I stood wearing a towel, looking through the curtain at the garden below my room, making note of its beauty as if I were far away, because I would leave it soon; because it would never be mine. Not even noticing that I was beautiful. The radio was on, and I heard the reporter talking about a girl. She had been found in the river just before the May Day festivities. The girl could have been me.

  This morning at 0400 hours the body of a young, unidentified South Asian woman was found floating in the Isis River in Oxford. No other details are available from the police. The woman appeared to have been dead for a few days.

  In all the years I’ve lived, I haven’t realized that my body is dying. But you perceived this right away. You heard the thud of elephants, the dancing procession, the march not of a wedding but a funeral. You were so quiet, but you knew when the end came; you were silent as our blood leaked from my body.

  Every May Day, here on the riverbank where I’m stumbling now, there is a festival with Ferris wheels and carnival contraptions, displays and tricks that can cause accidents. And there are animals—swans, horses, maybe even dancing elephants. I lie down on the grassy bank and dream of you. I dream of elephants, thumping a distant melody, disrupting the forest. (If you were here now, my darling, how we’d dance, my love. And if you were old enough and strong enough to move your feet deliberately, you’d sing. You’d speak to me.)

  I lie down now and feel the weight of it on me, a white dancing elephant that I can see with my eyes closed, airy and Disney in one dream, bellowing despair and showing tusks in another. In the last dream, a gash of red stains the white hide, and I am forced to watch an elephant dying. It makes me want to sink into the earth, ashamed and finally mindful of my own blood. The sound of people walking on the bridge becomes a din. I close my eyes, drained, dreaming of six white tusks entering my flesh. I slide off my shoes. Now I could roll underwater. Now I could write the words describing how and why I ended my life.

  The woman found in the Isis River in June of this year was forty but was found to be pregnant. She was on her way, authorities learned, to give birth at her father’s home outside of London, as is the custom for Asians, but by the time she reached the river she had lost the pregnancy. Or it is possible, though less likely, that the child was born along the way and disappeared below the ripples of water, along the bank, under the trees, before being rescued and taken home by someone else watching.

  I get up, put on my shoes again. If I were to disappear, you would be taken home by someone, I believe it. My body, this body, could be discarded. But you could live. It isn’t that your soul came to me in a body that wasn’t durable. It’s that my body was failing, too late, too careless, too empty; but after my death, you could live. In my absence, my sister would love you like a prince.

  I walk away from the river, toward the road and the traffic, knowing one day, my own sweet love, you’ll come here and walk along this riverbank, and cross over this bridge, and sit calmly under a tree here—and not know me. But you will be awake when I’m asleep. Yes, you will be.

  THE STORY OF THE WOMAN WHO FELL IN LOVE WITH DEATH

  IN AN ARMCHAIR AT THE CENTER of a Starbucks, nearly hidden by its arms, a young boy reads, perplexed but concentrating hard:

  Once upon a time, there lived a man of little importance. But his fine young daughter did belong to him: her lovely face, the soft and the angular parts of her body, her hips, her strong legs, her glorious laugh—everything that made her worth the highest price.

  Naturally, the father had to search for some suitable person to bid for her. Every day the daughter offered a million prayers, begging for the blessing of a lover who wouldn’t pay money, and every night she lit a million candles, facing the lights away from where her father was always watching her. She’d occupy herself for the whole night with this one task, so that her father would be asleep by the time the sun came up, too tired to come into her room.

  The god of death was fed up with the piteous pleas of that tenacious girl, who asked for a salvation he would not be able to grant. Finally, either to avoid hearing the subterranean, growled prayers of her father (which the girl also heard), or out of some divine merc
y, the god of death performed a miracle. But neither the girl nor her father were aware of it at first.

  The god of death sent her a lover. The lover who would become the husband of the girl had to walk fifty miles.

  With time, the lover found their house, but he limped like an old man. The finest clothes awaited him, but the blisters on his feet prevented him from standing up. But once he healed, the girl could see how strong and independent he would be, how the god of death had sent her the right one after all, if she could be patient with him.

  After anxious days of waiting, the girl broke down and begged the man to marry her.

  He barely walked. He lacked the strength to lie on top of her. But the clever girl found a palanquin meant for brides and promised that, after the wedding, he could rest on its cushions. And since she had no horse, she promised that she would carry the palanquin’s long handles on her shoulders.

  The first night, instead of making love, the man slept a dreamless sleep. The girl stayed awake. When the sun rose on the marriage bed, there he was with his feet in bandages, the girl with her gown tightly fastened.

  The girl then stole a bigger palanquin that would allow more room for making love and sought out men who could take up her burden, so she could lie with the man. There was another sunrise, another dreamless sleep, and the restless girl searching out another palanquin, to be carried by a litter of strong fearless men whose legs could easily outrun her father’s, and another when her father seemed about to track her down, and another, and so on.

  Soon enough, the girl was left penniless with just the man, who could walk, albeit slowly, and without a sense of where to go. But soon, the stranger promised her, when he was healed, soon they would make mad, fierce love. As the hours crept on, the girl’s father pressing on their trail with his good horse, the girl and her husband, who had still to become her lover, lay down on the fifth night of their marriage, on the road next to their last broken palanquin, whose carriers had gone. The road was still. The girl and her lover rested, drifting to sleep then waking and kissing passionately, and every time she kissed him, she gave him strength.

  Just when he had almost recovered, a horse with a masked, heavy rider slashed the ground with steel-shod feet, striking the man in the head before streaking down the road.

  Instantly the god of death appeared.

  As the horse and his rider stopped, seemingly preparing to turn back, the god of death cushioned the dying man’s head in his hands, silently urging him to close his eyes. To stop her from lamenting the man, the god showed the frightened girl his own solemn face.

  But he is so beautiful, she thought with joy.

  The girl knew, from the stories she had read, and from the story that might be told about her, that she was to bargain with the god of death. Plead for her husband’s life. Show that her devotion extended beyond tears. Inspire the god of death, by her courage, to spare them both.

  But she could not look away from the god’s bleak, handsome face. The sound of the horse with its rider—deafening against the night’s silence, pressed closer and closer, growling desire, impatience.

  The girl unfastened her dress, offering her bare skin.

  “Hurry,” she whispered, winning him.

  In the Starbucks in Greenwich Village near West Fourth, the boy shut his book and sighed in contentment. He wasn’t old enough yet to drink coffee, let alone see the illustration in the book of the girl’s bare chest, though he lingered over it, not realizing that a barista with floppy soft hair was looking over his shoulder, admiring her breasts too.

  “My man,” the coffee meister purred. “My little man. What you got there, huh?”

  The boy, small for his age but nearly twelve, nodded with solemnity. Yes, there was something fruit-like and dark and perfect about the girl’s breasts in the book—without wanting to touch them, exactly, the boy felt content looking at them. He wasn’t a boy who had ever seen Playboy. His father wouldn’t allow it. And his sister—once long ago he did have a sister, though no one in the house, not father, not aunt, not the mother who had died when the boy was three, none of them ever mentioned her, the sister-girl, with breasts like these. He’d seen them in the other photograph, the one in his father’s sock drawer, the place where a picture of the boy’s lost sister was hidden, buried under softest cloth, dust motes like petals on her cheeks, her skin a lustrous color and unlined, his father’s fingerprints confined to the very edges of the photograph, as if that might keep his sister from being consumed.

  No one at school asked the boy anymore, “Where’s your sister? Did the cops ever find her?” No one seemed to worry about her. Only the boy, who’d once missed her whenever she ran away from home, the boy who had promised when he was four or five (though he didn’t remember saying the words) that he would somehow rescue her.

  Now in the Starbucks, the boy licked the foam off the plastic lid of his paper cup and put it down, reflecting, wondering.

  “What if she hadn’t gone?” he thought. He couldn’t get that question out of his head. Of who he would have become, if she had stayed. Of what would have happened to them.

  In college it became worse, the wondering, once it was coupled with an edgy curiosity. Not only just: Where did she go? But also: How do I bear it, that she left for good?

  By then, some of the questions were answered, of what the boy’s father had done. The family knew, but no one else imagined. By then the boy could make sense of some things—loud arguments, crying and shouting, slapping, pushing, pulling, then silence, the girl emerging afterward, quiet, appearing overcome.

  In the years since the boy discovered his favorite storybook, there had not been any news. Silence again, but this time not following any loud noise; only silence following on silence, building in intensity, proving the truth of what happened—she was gone, no one could dispute it. “Must have had her reasons,” the neighbors said.

  At first when the boy had become a young man—post-sex, post-fumbling around, post-fantasies, counting himself lucky for the one summer he had hitchhiked before college, not telling anyone, breaking away from the quiet house with his glowering father and talkative, overbearing aunt—the boy felt he was lucky to have been younger than the girl, younger and small for his age, no threat. No one could ever think him the reason for the girl leaving.

  “You should have taken me with you,” he’d say softly, touching the book that he still had in his dorm room, turning to the place where he had tucked the stolen picture, the one his father had stolen before him.

  In the city, the boy had felt anonymous. Walking through the Village or sitting in a public square where construction workers watched pigeons just as closely as women; sneaking coffees at Rafaella Café or eating a slice of pizza slowly, to savor it, at Two Boots; or waiting, just waiting, not really doing anything.

  But out in the country, where the college was, the boy felt exposed, even when others were not drinking or looking for a tall boy to go home with. Their gazes settled on him, not knowing how much his face resembled his beautiful sister’s. He felt put upon. Girls expected him to prove to them what boys were like: shallow, callous, laughing animals that could smell irresistible. Other boys wanted to see if he realized he was handsome, if he knew how to use it against them. And teachers mistook his quietness and matter-of-fact diligence for respect, when in fact the boy just didn’t know what to say to anyone, in the small, underground classrooms he could have mistaken for tombs.

  No subject moved him to express himself. Art history, geology, architecture, engineering, poetry: he liked classes about things, objects he could draw inside of books, whose intricacies absorbed and distracted. Protected him from being left with a blank page.

  Without fanfare, he finished his studies. The father called. The aunt came to visit, only once or twice, enough to make his neighbors look at him with sympathy. A querulous woman whispering too loudly about all the foreigners, the slutty girls, the subpar cafeteria. The aunt’s presence hadn’t always been n
oxious. After his sister disappeared, the boy remembered his aunt making hot chocolate and frosted cakes, day after day, as if by feeding herself and the boy, and sometimes the father, she could fill the absence, as if she were preparing extra food, stocking a wake.

  The aunt had been married once. The boy could remember an uncle. This uncle, his father’s brother, had taken his sister aside and said in a voice probably meant for others to overhear: “You deserve better. You can get out.”

  Then the uncle had driven a long way, for miles, returning in a bleak snowstorm. He had passed through country and city, driving on high roads, on the most remote mountains. The father had gone to help the uncle with a jump but had come back alone, refusing to say when the uncle would follow. When the aunt heard that the uncle’s car was lost, she hadn’t wept. “Foolish beast,” she’d said. “He would never listen to me. He’d never behave.” Hoping to bring back their uncle, the boy’s sister had gone out in the same snowstorm without wearing proper shoes and walked and walked alone.

  The sister came back to the house with blistered feet and her face chapped from crying, not telling the boy that the police believed the uncle had been killed. His aunt was the one who shared that truth.

  After the uncle disappeared, the father relaxed some but watched more carefully, controlling both the sister and brother, warning them that if he ever caught them doing wrong, he’d cut off their hands, no questions asked. Even once the threat was no longer a promise the boy believed in, he fled the house as often as he could. The Village Starbucks became less an ordinary shop, instead a kind of dirty, wellloved living room, where the boy knew each upholstery intimately, knew where the crumbs had spilled and by which newspaper-reading man, knew the barista’s name was Stan, short for Stanley, that he liked reading dirty books behind the counter before sweeping his floppy hair aside with a broad hand and granting the customers, especially the pretty girls, an even broader smile.