White Dancing Elephants

by Chaya Bhuvaneswar

  Instead there was a special article on Dad’s wedding in the nation’s most important newspaper, and in this article his new, quite young bride described how much they hoped to have children.

  In the year 2001, when people in a certain city where the Bang Bang club was located were on the streets searching, lamenting loved ones, posting ads and Xeroxes about missing beloveds, Millind stood in front of a memorial, not knowing that his son watched him.

  By then, his son hadn’t been a young man for some years. In fact, he was nearly the same age that Millind had been when he discovered poetry. His son was on a field trip from the group home where he lived, where the police and courts had finally placed him when he refused, no matter how they badgered, to tell them where he’d come from.

  If Millind turned to look, he could have seen a face that seized his own, that bowdlerized his calm features, combining his serene looks with the anger of a thwarted child. He could have seen determination, intention, the resolution of a man still young enough to realize: he could be more loved by his sister than his father ever was. Unknown to Millind, this man, his son, would tell the people who took care of him the name of his sister. Then he would let them find her, and he would learn how it felt to be an uncle to her child.

  That face, my brother’s face. My brother’s life worth more than poetry. My brother whose life could have been crushed. My father a stranger until his death, until I found a way to profit from his legacy and smile when his poems were recited, studied by schoolchildren, beloved.

  ORANGE POPSICLES

  THAT SUMMER, ONCE SHE’D SETTLED INTO a new life and moved into a sublet her college roommate Becca had made available from among the numerous properties owned by her large and prosperous American lawyer family, Jayanti felt she understood the rape.

  Jayanti was raped because she dared to cheat on an exam. Her understanding was simple by now, unequivocal. She wasn’t interested in penance, though. She was more interested in analyzing, as if with three-dimensional revolving diagrams, the pattern of choices that put her in the position of cheating in the first place. Like so many choices in life, like coming to the U.S. for her studies, the instant of cheating felt both unexpected and inevitable. The same day she received a surreal $20,000 check from a women’s foundation, a full scholarship her freshman year she enrolled on an impulse in the big Modernist Poetry lecture her American hallmates were talking about, with that dreamy Irish teacher who knew Yeats by heart. He was as cute as they’d promised. But that class made her late for nearly every single Biology 501 lecture, considering how long it took to walk to Science Hill, and how quickly all the seats were filled up by more savvy and realistic classmates, and that precise set of circumstances, at once preventable and inescapable, was what made Jayanti desperate enough to cheat.

  Her mother would have said that her lateness for a critical class had been a kind of opening, a vital crack through which the evil eye could peer at her. But Jayanti wouldn’t ever tell her mother she’d been raped. The danger began with that one day of giddy freedom, when, check in hand, she’d felt wholly American. Or had it really started way back, much further back?—when she was still in India, sending back course choices by mail, or when she’d made the wrong decision to take the rigorous-sounding biology class in the first place when everyone knew that the painters, sculptors, and English majors on campus took “Rocks for Jocks” or “Stars for the Bars” to pass the science requirement.

  But to Jayanti, sitting on her Athai’s veranda in Madras and feeling the scholarship pressing down on her, learning real science seemed integral to becoming worthy of such a distinction. Scientific thinking was key to making art. There was the same rigorous lack of compromise, the same remove from what anyone else thought, among real scientists as there was among artists. So Jayanti, a painter who had, before college, already shown some of her work in galleries all over the world, conferred with no one before enrolling in Bio 501, or “The Crucible,” as it was called—not even telling the nice pen pal the college’s International House had assigned to her—though it was the most intense biology course offered to undergrads, though she had taken none of the prerequisites. Though the class was graded on a curve.

  On the first day, slightly late and sitting among strangers who were friendly enough, Jayanti felt good. The first few diagrams filled her with reverence for the human body. Nudes by Michelangelo, anatomy drawings, the fact that all the blood in the body somehow circulated, thirty liters per minute, pumped precisely to and from every cell of every living tissue by a heart no bigger than a fist.

  Back in her room, listening to an evening sitar raag, she loved reading about cytokines and neurotransmitters, invisible signals between the brain and heart that had the reach of seismic waves. She approached science impressionistically, concentrating on whatever moved her. She even brought a sketchbook to class the first day, not realizing until too late, when there were already over two hundred slides to memorize by the end of the first week, that she was in over her head, and that it mattered not at all that the distinctive cilia of a paramecium looked like a Paul Klee painting, or that the luster of a white, skeletal bone brought to mind one of Dali’s surreal paintings. Walking back from the last review session, watching her classmates huddle over fiercely-guarded notes, Jayanti finally saw a truth as firm as Koch’s postulates. She’d fail.

  The night before the final exam—the only test in the course, apart from ungraded quizzes and problem sets, which Jayanti had somehow not registered the literal importance of actually working through—she sat in the expensively appointed Law Library trying not to cry. Her papers were scattered before her, covered with panicky, barely decipherable notes. She tried not to think about how, if she failed this exam, she would most likely lose her scholarship and have to go back to India. It didn’t do any good now, she knew that, but here she sat thinking and thinking of it, how she’d suddenly failed. She hadn’t imagined, until the review session the week before, that everything she’d studied so far would be completely irrelevant. All she had to know was what keywords to write in the exam paper, nothing more and nothing less, but her notes from the semester were irrelevant. All she needed were the foundations, precisely understood, like the humble and often-overlooked foundations of the convent school building Jayanti had attended in Madras, but what she had on the desk in front of her, was nothing but clouds.

  A boy she knew a little from biology, Dave Sheffield, walked by Jayanti’s carrel, stopped at a shelf across from hers. Walked near where she was sitting, loitered. At first, she scarcely noticed. He wasn’t the type she imagined would have given her a second glance. He looked from a distance like he’d grown up playing polo. She looked up at last, when it appeared that he wasn’t going away. He came closer.

  The few minutes they spent talking about the exam made her feel even worse. How could she sit here, flirting with this Abercrombie & Fitch guy, just hours before she would most likely lose her scholarship? Lose her whole life? She couldn’t fathom it. And yet she let Dave run a finger down the silk of her embroidered sleeve, down to her wrist, encircle it and observe, with a satisfied smile, how small her hand was in his grasp. Let him massage her back and even kiss her on the cheek.

  The next morning in the exam hall, Dave came over and sat right next to her. Jayanti hadn’t confided in him, but his sympathetic smile and whispered “Don’t worry” suggested he knew all too well how desperate she felt. She had been up all night studying, going through the textbook word by word and testing herself on key concepts, writing out practice answers, reviewing old exams. But the process had begun far too late. She’d phoned her mother that morning, when it was still evening in Madras, and confessed to her terrible mistake. Her mother said she would make a special trip by train to the Meenakshi temple in Madurai that weekend and offer prayers. The exam results would be back on Tuesday, time enough for Jayanti to be rescued by prayer no matter what she had written on the test paper. That was what her mother promised, speaking on God’s
behalf.

  Dave had reddish-blond hair and a lanky, confident body. He veered between arrogance and authentic goofy charm. Rumor was he’d been a real nerd in high school, run some sort of essay-writing service, worn glasses. But here he was in contacts, sharp-eyed, yet as always, indolent, even in this tense examination hall. He rested his hands at the back of his neck as he looked over the exam, stretched his legs close to Jayanti’s, jiggled his foot until his Birkenstock nearly fell off. Jayanti was too afraid of failing to allow herself to look directly at any of his body parts. She went through the exam once quickly, then again, filling in everything she remembered in a few bursts of rote recall, then fading as she reread the answers and began doubting herself.

  Jayanti tapped her pencil on the desk, making a noise before she realized she was doing it. Dave nudged her leg with his, once, then for a second and third time. She looked up finally. They were in the middle but near the back, away from the proctors’ gaze, and Dave had a typed sheet with what looked like notes from the review session. Quickly, she glanced at it: there was something about nematode locomotion she could use for the last problem on the test, asking for an invertebrate evolution example. She looked toward the front of the room before she wrote: the proctor was staring at her, but Dave was busily writing, no sign of the typed sheet on his desk, and Jayanti herself was looking down at their feet, so close together, barely allowable. “No touching your neighbor,” the proctor called out, and Dave looked up at the sound before smiling at her and exaggeratedly edging his foot away.

  When the proctor circled back to the front, Dave’s typed sheet was out again. This time she saw phrases—“antigenic shift and drift,” “founder effect”—before looking away. It was enough to jog her memory; if nothing else, seeing the words restored some of her confidence. Along one edge of the paper was a long column of letters that Jayanti stared at blankly, confused until she realized it held the answers to the multiple-choice section that made up one-quarter of the test. The column raised all kinds of questions about how Dave had gotten the typed paper, which up until that moment she had assumed was just a crib sheet. There were rumors that one of the TA’s habitually sold parts of the exam to the highest bidders, although this had never been proven and no one had ever been caught.

  Library. After the exam. At first, Jayanti had thought to avoid Dave at all costs, but he’d come up to her, bashful and almost sweet, saying, “You seemed like you needed help.” Compassionate. She’d blinked at him, surprised, stunned that he would speak of their cheating out loud. How sure Dave was. How much he’d been given. Finally, she nodded at him and even smiled but kept on walking.

  He must have thought she was only playing hard to get. He followed her into a cubbyhole, a claustrophobic cabinet with a desk and a sliding door that only the most studious inhabited. She imagined he’d probably never been in one before, but before she could turn on the light his hands moved over her back, pushing aside her chunni to find her nipple under the cotton tunic and then seizing her throat to kiss her. She pushed his hands aside, freeing her breast and her head, but his taste was intoxicating, and they tangled. He was the one who pulled away, looking down at her.

  “Test wasn’t so bad after all, was it, Jayanti,” he said, pronouncing her name so that it sounded like the name of a cheap perfume, “Jean Nate.” She could have sworn Dave was sneering as he left her there, but she was too ashamed to look at him.

  The letter came to her regular mailbox, in the post office next to the building where the Modernist Poetry class, now a painful reminder of her looming failure, was held. It was on the Dean’s letterhead, and at first she assumed it was junk mail, the Dean’s Newsletter or something equally useless, until she read it again and saw that it was addressed to her and cc’d to Dave Sheffield. She had to sit down because she could hardly think for the blood rushing to her head. They’d been found out. The proctor at her exam had named her and Dave as two “candidates for investigation” in a large cheating scandal that had contaminated the exam process for over five hundred freshmen class students in pre-med biology and chemistry. The letter encouraged the two of them to come forward together, rather than try to lay the blame on each other. While they weren’t promised amnesty for coming forward of their own accord, they were “assured a reasonable process” that “would not necessarily result in their expulsion, though a brief suspension and automatic failure of Biology 501 was likely at this point.”

  Jayanti couldn’t imagine what to do. She wondered if it was too late to stop them from sending a copy of the letter to her mother. On the walk back to her dorm, a boy with broad shoulders and short hair like Dave’s swooped by on his bike and she turned to look, nauseous with fear.

  In her room, she sat down on the bed. Her hands were numb and the weight of the suitcases in her closet was too much to lift, though she would have to start packing. To lose her scholarship! Her maternal uncle had taken her to a posh restaurant in Nungambakkam High Road the night before she left for the U.S., told her she would be able to earn the money to treat them all someday.

  When Dave called later that night, she’d been doing nothing more than lying in bed silently. Her roommate wanted to know what was wrong; when Jayanti didn’t answer, she assumed it was “some stupid boy.”

  “And don’t tell me it’s Alok,” Becca said, “because if I hear his name again after what he did to you, I swear I’m disconnecting the phone so you can’t call him.” As Becca got ready for one of her many evening meetings, this one for an on-campus lesbian feminist group though Becca was not a lesbian, Jayanti wondered if her no-nonsense, even self-righteous roommate would still want to be her friend when the whole cheating scandal came out.

  Becca knowing about her ex-boyfriend Alok was different. Every girl, even if gay now, had been with some man, at some point, who was a snake. Jayanti’s very-much-ex-boyfriend Alok had cheated on her with a Pakistani girl he met at one of the SASA conferences, tall and thin with green dishonest eyes in the photos Jayanti had seen of the two of them, but then he regretted it, tried to conceal what he had done and even proposed to Jayanti when she’d confronted him. Alok’s brand of cheating was allowed, maybe even expected. He was handsome and single, turning twenty-one in a few months. His false promises to Jayanti and the other girl would never get him expelled.

  Dave Sheffield too gave the impression that he would be exempt from any consequence. When he called later that evening, after Becca had gone out, he was edgy and belligerent, describing how he’d already spoken to one of his father’s lawyers, how the letter was nothing more than an intimidation tactic, how all they had to do was stand their ground. The main thing, he told her, was not to say anything directly to the Dean or anyone else. Refuse to cooperate. Above all, don’t act like you’re about to leave the campus anytime soon.

  When Jayanti brought up the issue of her scholarship, Dave was silent. “Well, maybe you could find an immigration lawyer and fight that too,” he said off-handedly. She didn’t reply. “So, friend, you can be counted on?” he pressed.

  “What?” she asked, hardly absorbing what he’d said.

  “I mean, like if they come to you and say there’s a way to save your scholarship by putting it all on me, you won’t do it, will you? Because you know my lawyer would take you down, you’re completely in this mess, and if you don’t keep your mouth shut I’ll start talking about how you begged me to help you, that you offered me a free fuck. You can’t imagine you’re the first to make the trade. And I’ve gotten A’s in every other science class this year. I’m a star in the biology major. My Dean says that I’m headed for a top-ten US medical school. You can’t exactly say the same.”

  Alert at last, wholly repulsed the way she wished she’d been from the beginning, before the test, before she failed the moment she didn’t raise her hand and ask to change seats, Jayanti hung up the phone. She wanted someone to confide in, not Dave, that she had wanted to be an artist, not a doctor, that it had all been a mistake. But there was no one
to talk to.

  The phone rang and rang, until she took it off the hook. Calls came to her cell phone too—easy enough to block. For a few days, Jayanti succeeded in avoiding him, but then one day they both received a second letter, instructing them to come to the Dean’s office in a fortnight and advising them of their right to contact the student council (and a lawyer, although the college “didn’t recommend that at this time”). The night they got the second letter, Dave was waiting for her inside the stairwell when she came back from dinner. It was too early for anyone else on her floor to be back. Becca was out again.

  Seeing Dave in the hallway, Jayanti resolved to get inside her dorm room and shut the door quickly. It wasn’t as if he’d force his way in. Tonight, he was wearing glasses, nerdy and timid again the way he must been in high school chemistry. His clothes were shabby, plain. He was thinner than she remembered. Only his watch looked expensive. He leaned against the wall and seemed to be trying to look sincere. “I was scared, and I took it out on you. It wasn’t cool. Will you accept my apology?” Without warning, he reached out with long arms and pulled her close. She held her body rigid, not wanting to make a scene. “You smell good,” he said, rubbing her back, and at that moment, she did step away, saying, “It’s okay. You can go now. Go, please.”

  She spoke softly, not wanting strangers to look at them, and he didn’t go. Instead he slid past her and pushed open her door, which Becca, had left unlocked. Dave pulled Jayanti inside and kicked the door shut behind him. “Becca,” she called out as loudly as she could, trying to put a note of warning in her voice. The lights were off in the living room.