White Dancing Elephants

by Chaya Bhuvaneswar

  “Impossible. But what did she do? I mean, did she break something?” A memory. “Did she set a fire?”

  “Oh, my, good heavens, my dear. Just look at it so you can determine what to do. Lawyers will likely be involved. Courage, okay?” Sylvia, too frightened to do more than end the call, pulled over in a no-longer-bucolic clearing. Whatever it was, she would face it. The Buddhist word from that long-ago meditation class. Upekkha. Equanimity.

  She Googled Maya’s first and last name on her smartphone, something she’d never done before, out of respect but also because she’d never wanted to see pictures of Maya with lovers. Sylvia clicked YouTube and waited.

  Then Sylvia heard Daddy’s voice, angry and aroused.

  Slapping bare skin, shouting loud curses.

  And there was Maya’s full face on the screen—beautiful up close, watching everything, looking out of the phone surface as if she now saw Sylvia. You like it like this? she asked the camera, looking out with immense eyes. You like it, Mr. Uwagaba, father of Sylvia Uwagaba, renowned professor?

  Yes.

  More slurs, familiar words about “fucking Hindoo bitches,” the sounds of which literally made Sylvia sick.

  And then the white rolling text, which Sylvia assumed Maya had written:

  THIS ADULT VIDEO CONTENT, APPROVED AND ORGANIZED BY DOCTOR AND ESTEEMED PROFESSOR SYLVIA UWAGABA, WHO GAVE ME THE KEYS TO HER PARENTS’ HOUSE AND INSTRUCTIONS ON PLEASING HER FATHER FROM HER OWN EXPERIENCE. LOCATION: I LEXINGTONMA. EXACT LOCATION: SYLVIA’S PARENTS’ HOUSE. EXACT LOCATION: THEIR EXPENSIVE SHAKER CHAIR, NICE ANTIQUE.

  WHO SYLVIA’S FATHER THOUGHT I WAS: A CLEANING LADY, JUST ONE OF THE ASIAN GIRLS TURNING TRICKS TO MAKE AN EXTRA BUCK.

  WHO I REALLY AM: THE GODDESS KALI, YOU MOFOS, AND DON’T YOU FORGET IT. NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE.

  The call from Maya to Sylvia came minutes later, before Sylvia had had a chance to react, or even restart her car.

  “Performance art. Your father enjoyed it.”

  “You’re severely ill,” Sylvia said. “You need treatment.”

  “You were supposed to be giving me treatment. Not covering your ass.”

  “Where are you?” Sylvia asked. Parked along the side of the road, a few miles from Hanscom Base, she could hear the military planes taking off from a vast airfield.

  “Where am I going’s the question,” she said. “I’m thinking New Mexico. Don’t you think Ken would enjoy me?” Maya laughed.

  “You stay the hell out of my life,” Sylvia, throwing aside technique.

  “Just so you know, I booked two plane tickets to Phoenix in your name. For you and for me. Your cute little gold credit card was laying on your desk one time, next to one of your catalogues. During a session that turned boring—yes that’s right, boring for me, boring for you—I realized I could read the numbers on the card. I memorized them in a flash, something I’m good at. Like all Indians, right? We’re monkeys, so good at math and computers, aren’t we?

  “I booked the tickets for us with a nice hotel, spa treatments included, just one room. I bought them a month ago and you didn’t call your company or block the charge. People will believe you planned this. But just to make sure, I hacked into your email account. Poor password selection on your part! And naughty too! Doctor Uwagaba, a.k.a. ‘doctorSappho’?

  “Anyway, once I had sent myself a bunch of friendly and erotic messages from your address—messages I’m planning to print out and show the board of psychology—I sent a bunch of emails to Ken and made it look like you were going to pimp me out. In the emails, I wrote about all your fantasies and the times you kept me late, alone in your office, mentally and physically undressing me. I told Ken things, all kinds of things, and he was so ‘honored’ by you confessing to him. You let a good one get away there, I think. He said all the right things. Seek supervision on the case. You really need treatment. I can’t wait to meet him. But your romance with Ken is done, and you are too, Professor Uwagaba. You wanted me, didn’t you? That’s why you ended the treatment. Except you only thought that I would endanger myself. You will be lucky if they let you keep your license. But don’t worry, your father’s a real sweetie. He’ll support you, I’m sure. Even though he really does seem to hate not only Indians, but queers.

  “And your mother—it won’t surprise you. She wasn’t home when it happened. She was off writing. I would bet cold cash that he’s done it before. With other young girls. Maybe boys too. When I explained I was with your cleaning service, he let me in, grasped my hand a little too tightly, then shadowed me all through the house until I began unbuttoning, and instead of acting all outraged, he smiled and started undressing too. But you must know exactly what he does. What he has done. Maybe that’s why you couldn’t bear to continue treating me. Because we had that in common. What we know. What he did.”

  Uselessly, Sylvia tried pressing the record button on her phone. But it was too late. Maya was gone, and there was only a tone, loud in the space—the sound, Sylvia sat there imagining, of bugs in the desert. The desert like the one that Maya might soon be flying over, sitting on a plane with an empty seat next to her. Sylvia’s car was empty too, no longer full of possibility.

  But Sylvia didn’t want to fill the space. She didn’t want anything now, not even lawyers. It was an indulgence, like her dreams about Maya had once been, but Sylvia just wanted to think. Of vast and quiet areas where one could sit, in the desert, out in a simple metal folding chair, and contemplate phenomena never seen before by anyone. Of Maya, her desperate, outlandish behavior. Of her need for revenge, which Sylvia recognized and understood, and of Sylvia and her father, long ago, when Sylvia had just turned eleven, and had been pulled into the Shaker chair. Pulled onto her daddy’s lap, naked, afraid.

  JAGATISHWARAN

  IN THE BACK OF THE HOUSE there is a corner room that does not open onto the lush and well-tended garden. Its shutters are indolent eyelids opening and closing with the wind. Light comes in small beams from the courtyard where pots are being washed. A woman is sweeping dirty water away from the steps outside the window. At a certain spot behind the empty teak wardrobe that barricades the door, all noises from the courtyard and the kitchen it adjoins are muffled by thick wood. Crouching there, it is not possible to hear the women shouting at each other, mistress to servant and back again, scolding and fretting, cramming the small house full of nervous life.

  Flat on my stomach, facing the wall, I can look at my paintings. They are vivid miniatures, set low, near the molding. Their tiny faces sport green Kathakali dancing masks, leering with painted lips and yellow hair like aging American starlets, their glossy eyes faded. My paints have dried in large, expensive tubes littered on the floor, strewn in the dust along with tiny sable brushes that were once a woman’s accessories. The mirror on the wall is British, cracked and decadent looking with too many faded gilt curlicues around it. Amid old newspapers and combs black with hair dye, I keep my shaving kit and my traveling case. The mirror, like the room, is dark. When I look into it I see the sweat on my forehead and chin and wonder how it remains in the air-conditioned coolness.

  I shelter myself from the house with second-hand screens, four of them, made of wood that looks better for the dust on it, less costly and more secure. I write after the others have gone to bed, hiding my diaries and papers during daylight. Sometimes their faces flash by me in the darkness, as if they were peering in rudely through a space between the screens. Only the visitors are overcome by curiosity. The niece from the States who looks at me with her little cat face, jeans curving around soft plump hips. My sister the doctor, talking about leper colonies at tea, bringing medicine and a fancy new toaster when she comes, making the house smell of Ben-Gay and bread. Even the trees in the garden move away from the house, as if in disgust. The living room is brightly lit behind embroidered cotton drapes. On each evening of her stay, I hear the news on television from where I crouch behind the screens, and listen to loud, excited voices talking above the announcers, nearly dr
owning them out. The niece is always quiet when her mother and my father shout about corruption and bribery or point to picket signs and angry crowds when they appear on the old-fashioned screen.

  No one in this house knows that I listen to a radio hidden in my room, and that I read imported copies of The Herald Tribune. Or that I spend the money given to me by Father on tobacco, and go to the same place almost every afternoon with my pockets bulging. Nixon, Watergate—my sister doesn’t know how much I know, how much I hold fast in my memory from those times. Imprisonment, Emergency. Who wouldn’t have been paranoid then? But it’s my sister who’s the smart one, the doctor lady. She thinks of us as dull-witted rice eaters waiting for her borrowed Anglo china plates and blue jeans, silk ties and pantyhose, perfume in fish-shaped bottles, white linen napkins and forks so we won’t eat with our hands, expensive bolts of brilliant cloth—smelling slightly of glue, precious… “The exchange rate is wonderful,” my sister remarks, at least with the grace to laugh uneasily. Once she brought paints on a visit—“Padma picked them out specially,” she explained, handing over a shiny gift-wrapped box. Padma’s gift. They are beautiful and useless now. Exotic.

  I don’t voice my opinions anymore because I know they only pretend to listen, looking at me as if I still ranted and raged as I did in the early days of my illness. Breakdown. Maybe schizophrenia, ranting…I can hear them whispering it, concerned. The cleaning woman who goes everywhere, poking into wardrobes for silk pieces and loose change, cleans carefully around my teak screens, never daring to touch anything behind them. On trips to the kitchen to fill my coffee mug, I watch her slowly moving and she peers at me, afraid. That’s what the barricade is there for.

  From behind the screens I can smell food from the kitchen, the smell cleaving to the carpets, damp, stronger than the scent of leaves and sweat from the courtyard. The old man calls me “demon” when he sees me eating, muttering as if I were still a young child and he were bending over my pillow promising candies in my ear. I am his youngest son; years and years ago he called me “eyes” in Tamil, which meant I was the dearest. Then in school I didn’t turn out like his nine good children, neither physicist nor lawyer, neither doctor nor engineer. I got sick, I remind him often, just before my college exams. I got very ill, it was terrible. First tuberculosis, then something else, something in my head. I was in pain, for pity’s sake. It became too late, impossible to work. To do anything but sit or stand very quietly, in peace, left to myself. I’ve tried to explain. “But you’re a grown man now,” Father says in disbelief, “and that was years ago.” He talks about my hair and the sweat on my face, jabbing at my clothes, fuming, gesticulating, until my mother stands between us, the veins bulging in her frail hand on his arm.

  Mother used to come at night, years ago, before I put up the screens, to ask how I was, but now she’s afraid. Once I pushed him hard, not her, never her, and I felt disgust at his shriveled skin, his nasal voice, always skeptical, his tiny well-read eyes like an elephant’s, nearly blind but remembering everything.

  On some evenings when the house is empty my father and I sit in the library pretending to read, not looking at each other, crickets caught between the pages of old books, gray moths appearing from the bare bulb on the ceiling as if by spontaneous generation. He taps his cane as he turns the pages, licking his soft, wrinkled thumb as he lifts the corners like a toady hidden in reams of office paper, calculating newborn deaths and taking bribes. I stare at him first if he’s been bothering me that day. “Have you taken your medicine?” he asks in English. Patrician, concerned, I am silent. In the dim light he can see the outline of my face, my bones almost his bones, my hands threatening. “Don’t hit me,” he says, as a warning, though I never do, and he knows it. It has become an evening ritual, more honest than prayer.

  When my sister comes in the summers there are annual rituals—special prayers, more sweets, more garlands lying on the puja room floor or strung up around glossy pictures of the gods. She calls for the barber to come in the evening. He does his work squatting on the steps leading out toward the blue main gate of the house, never coming in the house. He squints up at the dimming sunlight and tells my sister’s son to hold still—he uses scissors and a gleaming old-fashioned razor. The little boy shakes his head no, rubs his soft, protruding belly and laughs. Once I watched from the doorway, making him laugh even harder by imitating the girlish, feline sounds of his voice, until my sister stood in front of me and edged the door nearly closed. “Leave him alone, he’ll get himself cut,” she muttered quietly, not looking up at my face. I stared at her as she turned away, aware of the fresh smell of her hair and clothes. “Why don’t you take a bath,” she advised, watching the boy, her shoulders tensed until I moved out of sight.

  The large bookcases in the corridor between my room and the puja room are opened in the summers for my sister’s daughter. Her back pressed against the wall, eyes fish-flat behind thick glasses, she reads old books, like Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, in the opium-den light. “Conserve your eyes,” my father says when he passes on his way to prayer, rapping on her glasses with a finger. He adds, sounding like my sister, “Near-sightedness is a reading disease.” She puts the book down, covers her face with her palms for a moment and laughs, as if pretending to put her eyes away.

  When she was younger, she asked me all kinds of questions about Indian politics, Shakespeare, the price of sandalwood soap in villages, why I had painted on the walls. She would nod calmly at the answers and say little. She would lean against the door of my room near the bookcases, staring like a pretty cat with blue-black eyes and secret thoughts. “Don’t bother uncle,” my mother began to say, when the girl grew older, and she nodded as if she understood. “Leave Padma alone,” my father said once, stopping me on my way out from taking salt from the kitchen. Now with her large feet in new American tennis shoes, with her hidden breasts and her delicate neck, she only glances at me now and then with that same mute questioning look, grown-up ivory jangling at her wrists.

  When my sister comes every summer, Father comes out of his room to talk to her. My niece and mother smile and whisper to each other as my sister talks about San Francisco, New York, Santa Fe, the old man repeating the names, drawing them out with his proud camel lips. My sister doesn’t know that I’ve seen the names in books, in the paper. I’ve heard them pronounced properly on my secret radio. They talk about the days she has left in India, counting up the brief nights and muddy afternoons watched from the window of the genteel Ambassador car, traffic stopped for thin men driving even thinner cows across the road and being photographed by the niece’s new expensive camera. I listen to them without hearing words, staring from behind my book at the faces. I am quiet in my dusty chair, sitting away from the soft light that hangs over the center of the room. Crickets chirp near my ear on the window, the light bounces off the limbs of a black dancing Shiva that has been placed on top of the television set. I watch their faces as they think about the tiny airport, old man and woman pressed against a large window with other damp cotton cloth-wrapped bodies, looking out at the plane with tiny windows about to take off. Men in white, Western uniforms will dot the runway, red English and Hindi letters juxtaposed on glossy white wings. Before leaving the house they will pray, jeans and mustard seeds packed, my niece and sister looking awkward in new saris. They will mix languages in a sad babble of exclaiming. When my parents cry they look like blind newborns, skulls soft and nearly bald, features melting so that the sharp creases of age grow mild and nearly invisible.

  In the early afternoons, after lunch has been cleared away, I sit in the dark room near the door, listening to the servant wash pots outside; my travel kit propped on my knees. The women sleep lightly in a cool room, the door closed, the light soft on their thick eyelashes. I close my eyes, waiting, wondering if the old man is too tired to watch me. He asks me questions like a child. “Where are you going? Where do you go in the afternoons?” When he has not eaten well he demands, “Why don’t you go get
a job, demon, if you feel strong enough to go out every day?” He combs back his few strands of white hair, crackling them with static and impatience.

  He follows me to the main road only on dry afternoons. I sense the gate swinging open again behind me. I hear my father softly complaining to stray dogs. “That man shoveling dirt over dead bodies is better than you,” he said once, when he saw me stop to look at a young man with dirt on his teeth. “He’s working at an honest job.” I made no answer, walking on as if he were a beggar I heard whimpering in the street. My father continued. “He isn’t draining the life out of his parents.” I took longer strides that day, aware that my breathing was strained, aware of the wind pressing against my back.

  In the afternoons, I lose him easily in the crowd, when we get to the rikshaw stand where drivers are always waiting. He follows me only to demonstrate that he can, I suppose. The effort of the gesture is enough. He turns back without running after me, wiping his high forehead with a white handkerchief my mother ironed herself, and slowly starts the walk home. Chewing paan and leaning on his auto-rickshaw, the driver watches the old man as I climb into the back. The driver is a young boy who comes to the big house in his rikshaw on some evenings, waiting by the blue gate to take my sister and niece to the bazaar. He notices the flowers in my niece’s hair, glancing down at her soft brown fingers gripping the bar against his warm back before asking where to go.

  The driver doesn’t need to ask where I am going. Like all auto drivers he is careless, even dangerously fast. I can barely see the road from the tear in the plastic sheet that serves as a door. I grip the metal bars tightly, knuckles showing white, tasting the potatoes and rice I ate before I left. I am thrown forward when the driver stops for a person or an animal. I swallow the different tastes in my mouth, remembering the salt hoarded in my room from the kitchen in newspaper packets. I imagine the peppermint taste of the crushed medicine my sister bought for me this time, which my mother will soon start mixing in with the salt. When I fell ill again last year, Father cried on the phone to my sister long distance. No doubt the connection took hours to get, with long silences and wrong houses woken up somewhere in the middle of the night by a sudden ceaseless ringing. After the phone rang in the right house, darkness here and light there, Mother excited and barely whispering, “It has come, it has come,” in girlish Tamil—I could hear my sister loud and soothing, yelling calm assurances through the static.