White Dancing Elephants

by Chaya Bhuvaneswar

  Why had she given it to him? She couldn’t remember now. Probably there was a day he’d seen the cover peeking from the bag she carried, a tattered canvas tote, only something cheap. Liking that it was so out of place on Newbury, Vinita wore the old bag like a signature, for which Leo teased her. “That’s like your new berry,” Leo had said. “Your new thing looking so delicious.” She was new to the manicure shop then. Long before she’d ever seen Marco. “Sweet like your body,” Leo whispered, making Vinita giggle. The bag, so faded now, had once glowed with vivid red cherries and strawberries.

  The books in her bag, including the one by the leftist sociologist Nandy, were from her father, who was once a literature professor in Khottayam, but now scarcely ever left their Brockton house, and often lived as if alone. The house had once belonged to crack dealers. It stood opposite a methadone clinic, where addicts reported every morning at seven, oddly cheerful and carrying Starbucks, usually obediently lining up, but sometimes ugly and obstreperous. On a bad day, they’d stand in the street shouting oaths or roaring incoherently. Vinita’s father couldn’t sleep through their tirades. Most mornings, she woke to him at the window, peering from behind the white lace curtains her mother had begged Vinita to sew. Years before, Vinita’s mother had gone blind. But the lace, the touch of lace, like bursts of berries on her tongue, like sunlight still generous on her face and hands, this her mother said she still enjoyed.

  Vinita’s father had supported the family. Worked night shifts as a janitor at a hospital. Taught adjunct courses in South Asian history until he had his stroke. Her father could still see and notice everything. Vinita propped his chair near the window, and every morning, the most exuberant among the recovered addicts waved to him, calling, “Hey, Gandhi, what up?” and “See something you like?” They didn’t know how his expression, regardless of mood, would stare men down. Would stare Vinita down as well, when she arrived home from bar nights with Leo, late nights when Leo told her about the syndicate, “the life.” Saying, “I mean, you need to know. Where all the money is. Where it comes from. ’Cause one day, baby, I’ll train you to be like my right hand.”

  That was before Marco. Marco and the peaceful temptation.

  Now, back from his California vacation, on this morning when Vinita had already vowed to stop thinking of him, Leo tipped her chin upward, looked serious, asked, “Is your dad okay?” A few months ago, she told him about the stroke; one day she’d had to call in sick. Leo had even come out to Brockton. Actually, because of Leo, Vinita went back to the church. Only for a single service, but after long years.

  It was the music she loved. AME Church on Turner Street, Brockton. Vinita had worn a hat, hair tucked inside. Kind of a brown late-night-to-early-morning impeccable sophisticate, with her well-painted red lips and tailored dress but punk nose ring. A sort of Indian Gwen Stefani. With Leo like Tony Kanal, the brown boyfriend Gwen had long ago discarded. During the service, Leo took Vinita’s hand. Then during the singing, he was silent, “because I just wanted to listen to you sing. It was so beautiful,” he’d said.

  Why didn’t she and Leo get together at the start, before they’d become “friends”? Or at least move in together months ago, or even go on proper dates? They’d never even kissed full on the lips. Only the cheek tantalizers, as Vinita thought of them. Those moments of air kissing. Leo’s lips had come too close to hers, when with a bold lick of her tongue she could have tasted his soft mouth.

  “I would’ve loaned you money. Why didn’t you ask?” she could hear Leo saying, in a conversation they would never have.

  “Don’t waste your life,” her father always cautioned her. “None of us knows how long we’ll get to be ourselves.” Vinita, an only child, had been his hope. But then she’d only gotten into an average college, and in that place, there’d been a small scandal where she had been accused of stealing her roommate’s diamond ring and emerald choker, the two together worth thirty grand. Vinita hadn’t been able to prove it wasn’t her, and in the end, she’d left the college completely, muttering about “racism” and “mediocre assholes,” thinking to work awhile and save up, then reapply to somewhere really good. Now it was nearly two years later and Vinita was twenty. According to her father, she was headed “nowhere.” Spending her money on things like Japanese hair straightening and a cable TV subscription, wasting her time reading Us magazine and watching e-News. Picking up extra shifts at the salon, where she would play receptionist, only to spend the money going out with Leo or, more recently, helping out Marco with his rent.

  Vinita resolved her father would never find out how she had paid for the home nurse. The one who would sit patiently and read to her father. The one who’d be paid to remember that her mother loved the sun. The nurse was supposed to start tomorrow morning.

  “I’ll take a quick lunch,” Vinita promised Leo, on his first day back from vacation, as they stood now in the sun on Newbury just a few steps outside the salon.

  Before he could answer, the receptionist poked her head out the front door, calling to Leo, “You need to come quick.” The girl in all black didn’t look at Vinita, didn’t say hello or excuse herself for interrupting them, or even make polite eye contact. That bitch had slept with Leo once, Vinita remembered. So had the other two girls at the desk.

  With a quick nod to Leo before setting off, Vinita walked at her usual, preening pace down Newbury, carrying her old bag with berries painted on the front, sashaying just a little bit when gangs of European boys who liked the cafés on Newbury slowed to check her out. The way Vinita sashayed for Leo’s enjoyment, sometimes. Watching her walk out of a room. His gaze on her felt like an oil spill. Viscous, too heavy. As if she’d feel too content with him to ask why he sometimes carried a gun. As if, once he pressed himself down on her, she’d never slide away. As if she would stay beneath him forever, her painted talons caressing his back.

  When Vinita’s mother had first gone blind, she asked Vinita’s help to keep doing her nails. “I can’t see the color, but I can feel where they’re painted,” she’d said, smiling, still gentle. Her MS diagnosis was a fact of life by then, like where they lived. Vinita was a freshman in college, before the incident, carefree in the dorm room watching Rihanna videos.

  Leo taking off Vinita’s camisole, nuzzling her young breasts. Leo in the salon backroom sitting before a laptop, reviewing the whole month’s take. No shirt, only his baggy shorts. Proud of his stomach too. As he ought to be, at thirty-nine.

  She could hear Leo’s voice with hers now, talking in bed. As if they’d had a night like that, even one night, and she had not imagined it. As if they’d started living together. “That’s some cool shit,” Leo would mutter, settling back against the pillows, back into the Ashis Nandy book once he fucked her. “Check out how he starts up this thing. Camus. ‘Through a curious interposition of the times, it is innocence that is called upon to justify itself.’”

  By two forty-five, instead of heading back to the salon, Vinita and Marco were driving down the Pike. She didn’t want to take the chance of those extra few hours; at two, from a payphone, she’d called Leo, said she felt sick and had to go home for the day. Over the phone, he said nothing that wasn’t professional. Leo would deduct five hours from Vinita’s sick days. In the background, she heard one of the front desk girls laughing with him. She heard him quiet on the other end, patient but preparing to go.

  Vinita would never see Leo again. Never hold him. That was what she had decided four days ago, the morning Marco called her in a panic about being arrested. When it felt like it was too hard to have faith in any other choice. When suddenly it felt like rescuing Marco could be a way that she rescued herself.

  Both her and Marco’s cell phones had been dismantled so they couldn’t be tracked. This van unmarked, bags and fake papers in the backseat, as Marco’s cousin had organized. Vinita’s new name would be Kim, as in Kardashian. She and Marco would have to be the bolder migrants, heading farther north. Canada. No Trump. And if the syndicat
e people pressed Leo, which they might not, and if he figured out she’d taken the money, which he had no reason to do, Vinita was sure Leo would never lead them to her parents. He’d find someone else to pin it on. She could count on him.

  In the backseat, guidebooks on the state of Alberta. The money left after paying their fixer was already in a Cayman account, according to the new records Vinita set up and checked on the new laptop, right before she started driving. It was a nest egg, even after Vinita had also left a wad of cash in a drawer, with instructions to her father, whose facial droop and weakness all on his left side had left his major hand intact, right dominant. Two plane tickets for her parents to Cochin via Bombay, Cochin where Vinita’s grandparents on her father’s side still lived, vendors of the spice trade that had persisted over centuries. They hawked bottles of various cheap spices they labeled as “saffron” from a roadside stall. Just in case the syndicate’s men threatened her parents, or ever came to collect what they considered debt.

  There were glossy magazines in the backseat, pillows, chocolates. A day trip, two lovers, not a thing that could be objected to. There were hours ahead to drive, but she wouldn’t share them. She wouldn’t have trusted Marco to drive them anywhere, not now. But he didn’t mind. A passenger, he slept, indifferent, the lines of a new poem stretching themselves tight, plucking the music from his sleeping thoughts and closing his kind eyes.

  ASHA IN ALLSTON

  THE ONE THING YOU PROMISED, you swore, was that you’d never allow her inside our house. Remember, when we came here, you believed we’d have four sons. An optimistic belief but not impossible, since I come from a family of ten, you from just five, and the astrologers had said we’d have sons. Their predictions made us get engaged.

  You said this was the house where we’d grow old. I say “this was the house” because, though you don’t know it yet, there was a kitchen fire last week. Your patio, gutted. Water damage to the tiles, the basement. Cheap melted plastic and disjointed machines, the sound of a soft female voice droning all her broken syllables. Don’t bother asking what became of her. I won’t answer. You shouldn’t care. You have her download stored somewhere permanent. You have what you need to make as many new Malins as you need. I can’t say the same for making me.

  I know you’ve got enough to think about, nodding and bowing your way through the summer retreat with VC’s, trying to make sure you keep your job. Everyone at Ganesha Inc. is aware now, aren’t they, not only engineers, even corporate, that Malin became one with you, somehow? That like an animal researcher who gets too attached to his primates, you seek to protect her still?

  I shouldn’t say “her.” I never forget what Malin is. A mannequin with hardware, an old-style robot encased in new-style coverings, turning her tricks. A plastic dream. The sum consciousness of notebooks, graph paper, comic books you used to read and collect long years before I ever met you, where women’s breasts were large and conical, leg muscles strong and well-defined so they can leap between buildings. Malin’s a fucking joke, the sister of inflatables. She isn’t real. She never will be real. It doesn’t matter that her legs and arms can move so precisely. Her smile isn’t her own. She can’t own anything.

  But that must be why you love her. Malin has nothing to lose.

  That old stupid question: What does she have that I don’t? I know the answer without having to ask. Her sight. She can see better than most people, nearly as good as an eagle. But that reflects on you, not her. You designed and built her laser gaze. I recall just how intent you were on that detail.

  I was just back from the neurologist, a cold morning that left me shivering. The doctor in JP was still too—what? I couldn’t say. Empathic? Guarded? Practical? All of the above? to make my diagnosis definitive, even though I’d read enough by then not to be fooled. The best we could hope for was relapsing remitting. There would be good days, even Richard Pryor funny days, days I could walk and even dance a little bit. But the doctor wouldn’t confirm the name of my disease, let alone the number of bad days. “How many children do you have?” he’d asked, the absentminded and respectable doctor.

  “Zero,” I forced myself to say, only because at that moment, I craved his pity.

  By ten-thirty I’d taken a cab home because of how pressed-down I felt, held back by the silence in the examining room, the sense of life moving so fluidly all around me. I hadn’t exposed myself on public transportation—by “exposed” I mean even sitting on the T among strangers—because of how frightened I felt. What would go first? Speech or hearing? Memory or mind? Where would the plaques surface, white clearings where there should be brain forest? I did not want to know.

  You had equipment spread on the table, a naked blond woman open and smiling before you, flat on her back. You had a headlamp on and tiny screwdrivers and tools I did not recognize. But most of all you had the room, and there was no way I could have entered it. It wasn’t until three weeks afterward that, spent after your run around Jamaica Pond, you came to me smiling, wanting to make love before you showered, and I had to show you the neurology report, the patient education handout. Wait for you to read it. Blame and even hate myself for turning you so grave. We stayed in bed for hours. I can’t remember what we did, except that I had you completely, you had me, yet all the while, I felt empty-handed.

  That was six months ago. Nothing has changed since. Everything has changed. There is a taut anticipation in our lives. We wait for the worst. I lose my balance often. You catch me before I fall. You’re dutiful, perfect. The best neurologists. Second and third opinions. The articles you clip, saying it might be Lyme’s disease, Guillain-Barre, benign tumor, even a mild case of herpes. Anything reversible. Anything but what it is. And yet, the more attentive you are, the less I have of you, the less you’re here. You disappear into the closed garage, the place where I once thought of gassing myself while I still could. While I still have enough control to decide. But the garage is your space. The place where Malin was constructed, after a big check was written to your AI program from no less than Paul Allen; after your postdoc at Stanford and you being recruited to a Kendall Square biotech; after you’d earned a big enough bonus to bring me to you from India and bid high for this house.

  And now there won’t be any sons, or daughters. There won’t be birds singing in the trees. Sunrises, sunsets. First my balance, then all my senses, ephemera, sometimes working, other times blocked by muffled synapses, ghosts in the machine of me. My cellular catastrophes.

  But you’ll have Malin, won’t you? Yes. This being, first inert, named after a Swedish actress, your crush from a superhero movie at first. Now quite a bit more. This thing that’s come alive. She can think now. You look like you could spend eternity watching her think.

  No doubt, when you build her next version, salvaging whatever you must after the fire, she’ll tell you how frightened she was. When I approached her, leaning on my cane, dousing her with kerosene, lighting the match. At first not caring if I burned myself too, but in the end running while she stayed still. I’d glued her feet. I’d tried to think of every possibility.

  I couldn’t kill her. It shouldn’t surprise you, given that I couldn’t kill myself either. The fire was only for her physical body. Your files, your work in the garage, I left intact. So, you will be able to rebuild, of that I’m confident, and also—that you’d rebuild me if you could. That if you had to choose between Malin and me, there’d be no choice. But, my love, we don’t get to choose

  THE LIFE YOU SAVE ISN’T YOUR OWN

  BY HER FORTY-THIRD BIRTHDAY, Seema Venkatramanan had almost stopped minding how much she’d messed up her life. By then her wrong decisions had all bloomed like seeds. They’d flowered into vines that bound her tight, though without the titillation of some fifteenth-century naked satyr-nymph, S&M scenario.

  First, in college, making the mistake of thinking that she didn’t love him enough, and that they would never be alike enough, Seema had broken up with her tall and handsome white, blue-eyed bo
yfriend, who promptly found Indian Girlfriend 2.0—smarter and calmer, with prettier tits and less traditional parents. This decision led to seven years of Seema alone, followed by a quasi-arranged marriage with an alcoholic engineer who’d been in love with his ex, too. On top of that, Anand was sterile. Weeks after their third anniversary, Seema learned via a cable that he’d divorced her and moved to the U.K. to start over. By then she was thirty-two, with her own problems. Miscarriage number five from the sperm bank only confirmed what she’d already suspected: there wouldn’t be kids.

  And then there was her job in insurance. Four years of college, graduating as a nurse and coming to hate the hospital, but instead of quitting to be an art historian like she’d always wanted, Seema had sold out and gone into managed health care nursing mid-level leadership, boring meetings, endlessly pedestrian white binders full of pages no one would ever read, and miniscule numbers on screens.

  Her company job paid well, but more than that, it soothed her fear, assured her that she wasn’t a loser. She was successful at sustainable unhappiness, stable enough so that she came to work without fail but soaked so thoroughly in misery that each night she couldn’t remember what she’d done that day and melted like a rum cake in her whipped-cotton-sheeted, cool white bed.

  The sight of numbers, staccato black strokes, soothed and suffocated her. To the dollar, Seema knew what was in her bank account. So much went to an IRA, so much to her parents’ expenses, and just a little bit for that one trip, to the Uffizi. She’d been to Florence, to that museum, on a vacation by herself, only weeks before the big fire bombing in 1993.

  When Seema had seen the news about the fire, she’d wished for a second that she’d managed to curate a completely different life. As if it existed somewhere, the colors bright, like a painting she had yet to see. As if there’d been a moment where she could have been in it.