White Dancing Elephants

by Chaya Bhuvaneswar

  The rumors were that disgruntled Mafiosi bombed the street adjacent to the museum. A famous tower was destroyed, never replaced; brutalized too was the room that worshipped Niobe, the mother who’d lost all her children for bragging she was more fertile than the gods. For one moment of exuberant maternal pride, Niobe paid with centuries of weeping, turned by the gods into a rock gushing water.

  A two-month old Italian baby, child of the Uffizi caretakers, was also killed in the bombing.

  Seema wondered, if she had been working for the museum, whether she could have prevented the whole thing. She imagined herself late at night leading a special guided tour for some fat-fingered gangster in exquisite Armani. Standing close enough to the David to see her reflection in his beautiful torso, the lean abdomen into pubic triangle, that gleaming stretch that left gay men and straight women weak. Being a protective mother to the reddish-blond Venus with breasts of pink champagne on the half-shell, every day noticing the timelessness of that beautiful face, the wide-spaced eyes, the long, almost boyish torso, a counterpoint to the doe-eyed expression, the duplication of the same beauty in numerous other paintings by that master.

  Botticelli. Wasn’t it the name of a guessing game as well? A word game based on biography and one letter. Know me by my life, my deeds, each famous person said, speaking through each raptly listening player. It was too painful to think, to acknowledge, that Seema would never be known. Seema’s life didn’t intrigue anyone enough to lead them to guessing. Her name would never rise to the level of symbol.

  She was an only child, without children. Pointless to think of playing Botticelli anyway, back then, in 1993, Seema thought, because it was a game played at parties, a social game. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been around other people by choice.

  At the end of her twelfth straight year at the insurance company, in May 2000, a week before she turned forty-three, Seema comfortably made her bonus by persuading many doctors not to spend money caring for patients. There was an announcement at a staff meeting that Seema was number one for hitting the target. The day she confirmed that the money was present in her account, Seema bought her first major artwork, just so she would have something to say when people asked her how she planned to celebrate. The work, a few hundred dollars, was a print of a famous Caravaggio made by a promising student. Boy with a Basket of Fruit. The student succeeded, probably beyond his own expectations, in making a sketch that fully captured the leaves’ irregularities, the boy’s fanciful curls. Seema stood looking at the painting in her living room, fighting her pride in this young man, reminding herself that this single decision, because it was one in a set of decisions, would doubtless prove to be as shitty as all of her other ones—she just couldn’t recognize how yet.

  The Medicis had left entire museums to descendants. She’d seen other shrewd, skilled, yet somehow discontent executives devote their lives to building similarly vast collections. Rare wine, books, and dolls in elaborate costumes. Permanent objects of devotion that never made demands like children would. There was, however, only so much satisfaction to be gained from each acquisition. Seema knew that, going in. To make the pleasure last, she considered cooking the numbers that she entered on the spreadsheet she’d been keeping, rating each purchase alongside the objective data like its sticker price and estimated resale value. When quantifying how much she enjoyed each on a spreadsheet, she might buff the numbers slightly, so that when she looked at the whole thing and saw numbers like “ninety-nine percent”, she would experience a flush of happiness, a pinkness of the cheeks like one of Tintoretto’s demure girls.

  In other areas of life, she’d often try to fool herself this way. Look at a photo of an interracial couple, in some trendy ad, and say out loud, if she were alone, “He’s probably going to break her heart.” Pass by a flyer for a university lecture starring some historian or art critic and think, “But how much, hourly, could some professor be earning anyway?” She avoided completely any images of children. It sometimes worked, unless the couple looked too much like they were really in love or unless the art historian looked like he had a great sense of humor. Then the pain stayed, and all she could rely on was her art. The Janson textbook she kept in her office, the pair of leopards staring at each other in the section on Titian, top folds of the pink robe thrown back against the wind behind Bacchus’s head. Her eyes moved there; she pictured the leopards whispering their growls. She supped the blue of a woman’s dress; a visual feast, the eye going from blue to pink, rich texture to texture, wave of the ocean to a rose. Contentment she couldn’t measure.

  But each image in the textbook was so distant and condensed. She was never close enough to see the texture of the paint. She’d never had a feeling of being inside the picture, of letting it contain and soothe her, even when she bought high-quality prints and hung them on her walls.

  Still, the act of collecting, at least for a time, satisfied Seema. She’d scout out gallery shows in small Northeastern seaside towns, drive out, eat clam chowder—which for some reason, out of all dishes, she never minded eating alone. The thick salty whiteness comforted in its sameness and solidity and made her feel more like one of the locals than eating a salad would have. Despite the rich food, Seema remained thin, and always came to galleries wearing her corporate uniform: black blazer and heels, cultured pearls dangling from her ears. Out of sheer habit she still wore makeup every day, and since she was miserly when it came to personal expenses, she drew from her stores of deep red lipstick and purple eye-shadow, the same paint that her college boyfriend had enjoyed seeing on her dark mocha skin. People either mistook her for being a well-organized wife from one of the banking enclaves, like Marblehead, Back Bay, maybe the Vineyard, or wondered if she were some rich man’s Oriental mistress. Only the gallery owners who became friendly with her, who sold her meticulous reproductions, learned the truth by asking about her husband, her employer—Any men? Any at all?—expected to weigh in on the sale. In a series of awkward moments, the owners learned that Seema had no one.

  Soon enough, she tired of answering their friendly, or maybe prurient, questions. She used a whole week of vacation time to go to San Francisco, boarding the ferry to a Sausalito gallery, where no one would know her history.

  The gallery was rococo, not austere. Its doorway framed in golden curving arches, the Palace took up much of the Main Street, where previously there had been small sandwich shops and smaller galleries. Its oval windows overlooked the dock where the Sausalito ferry would sit waiting, its captain reliably patient with how slowly rich shoppers walked when laden with their purchases. The captain was always a white and sunburnt man. There were few naturally dark faces to be seen anywhere on the island, Seema noticed. The captain was less patient with the kids than single adults. The open sun and dream-white spaces of the boat made a physical prelude to the gallery.

  Seema knocked. The mustachioed proprieter looked startled to see her but let her in after a pause. She must look different to him, she imagined, from how she sounded on the phone. Perfectly white. Inside, the walls were also bright eggshell, the gallery somehow containing preserved rubble from reclaimed antique palaces, its floors gleaming, its hallway inlaid with tapestries like those that once lined the hallways of the Uffizi.

  Seema found it comforting that Uffizi meant “offices.” Her office at the company was where Seema forced herself to go, hating the weight of her heels on carpet, the strained smiles of people forced to live as closely as families, yet never able to trust as family should. Seema’s parents had become kind enough now that they were impaired by dementia, living mostly in comfort on savings and Seema’s contributions. Or maybe it just seemed like they were kind, now that they could only smile absently. Soon her parents would be out of money except for what they counted on from her.

  Walking in a dark corridor behind the fat mustachioed man, who turned and smiled periodically, encouragingly, saying, “We keep originals from Europe in a vault here, just for security,” Seema justifi
ed her plan to spend fifteen thousand, more than she had spent so far on any single visit, by assuring herself that she’d be making a sure investment. Better than buying the work of some modern hotshot. Life sculptures, meaning the artist sat on a stage pretending to be inanimate. Mobiles made from toilet paper. Decapitated heads made from real, presumably donated, frozen blood. None of these qualified as art. Whereas the work in front of her now, in the room the man opened with grace, hung by itself on a clean, well-lit wall, security walking just outside—this was art without pretense. She’d come to the island to buy this reproduction, again by a talented student from Tintoretto’s studio, of an early sketch of what became the master’s self-portrait, somehow capturing, as if in advance, the bottomless black stare of the artist, simple and pitiless.

  Seema appreciated, too, that the gallery owner had the sense to let her stand before the painting, to possess it mentally, even before he took possession of her check. This man, the bearded artist on the wall, particularly satisfied her, she couldn’t say why. As if he wouldn’t bother trying to fool her. As if he could commiserate with how she’d chosen the wrong life.

  When the blast came, Seema felt peaceful and was already on her way out. There was a boom and shattering, the combination loud enough to dull her ears. She and a guard dropped to the ground, holding their knees, eyes shut tightly. After sustained quiet, they made their way to the front room of the gallery, the guard cautioning Seema to stay behind him, though it wasn’t as if he carried a gun.

  Once in the open air, her full hearing returned. It helped too that the front room was colder than it had been only a few minutes before. One of the big windows had been smashed, that was all. The light coming in danced with fury, varied colors a sudden spectacle on all the shards of broken glass, on walls, even on the lone face of the young and slender woman in black who worked for the gallery owner, and whose face, Seema was glad to see, was free of blood and unwounded. But the fat man in the grey suit and the mustache, had blood on his hands and was standing near the doorway, shouting down. The boy at the entrance was cowering and brown, his faded white T-shirt streaked with blood. Without thinking, Seema ran forward, realizing quickly, with a surprising surge of joy, that he was still alive. She pushed aside the gallery owner and instructed him to call 911.

  Seema held the boy, who could have been no more than ten, precisely in the way that she’d been taught. He breathed, he moved. Then one by one she asked him all the questions she still carried in her heart, though she had not been in a hospital for years. Palpated, checked, confirmed, counted. Saw he was fine, though his face, arms, and hands were bloodied by the glass, with most of the cuts at least appearing to be superficial lac’s, only one or two needing sutures. The firecracker he and his friend were playing with had gone off suddenly when he’d thrown it, but only broken the window and taken no life, damaged no sculptures or paintings. Severed no fingers. “But it sounded exactly like a bomb,” the owner shouted. “Why would you bring fireworks here? Why on earth would anyone,” repeating the phrase, over and over, over the phone with the police, until Seema asked him to please lower his voice and bring some gauze and bandages.

  “What is your name?” the boy asked. His lashes were fluttering black brushstrokes. His friend had disappeared long before the police and the ambulance came. He refused to answer when they’d asked about parents. By then Seema had a bed sheet around him, the kind used to cover paintings in a state of repair.

  There was confusion everywhere, police sirens blaring, people talking loudly into walkie-talkies, the street cordoned off, so all the glass could be cleaned from the road. Seema helped the boy into the ambulance. Settled into the space next to him, nodding to the paramedics that she was riding along. Finally, she whispered her name in the boy’s ear. She didn’t mind, not even a little, that once he was handed off to others, at the hospital, he would likely forget her.

  THE ORPHAN HANDLER

  AT DAWN, ANOTHER VAN WITH GIRLS comes in and Sister Agnes takes them onto the back veranda, branding them with a tattoo and warning that they’d better not scream. Then she checks for scabies and lice, wearing non-latex hypoallergenic gloves. Then she leads them, even the ones who are weeping quietly, into a vast gay room with bright-colored streamers and balloons and glittering signs spelling out birthday greetings, even though not one of them has given us their real birthdays or names. Then she initiates the change that is our little spiritual secret: the transformation of orphaned girls with special powers, the powers to change into wild creatures of various kinds, into future housekeepers, grounds cleaners, toilet scrubbers, perhaps a secretary or two, or God-fearing wives. After the birthing rite come songs, a ritual that never fails to irritate Mother Superior Devi. Before erecting this orphanage-cum-vocational school, Devi had been arrested for drug trafficking in Kamathipura, where prostitutes lived and where indeed she was involved in heroin. In jail, she learned to read the Bible and took orders as a nun. Now she gives us orders and sporadically allows us to watch a blue movie or two, just to remind us that God accepted her because of, and not in spite of, where she had been, and how blind we would be to think that anything we ever did would be beyond his Love.

  Post-birthing ritual, during the songs, in between clapping after each number, I write fake letters home and to the government. These are to advise any last living relatives and state welfare agencies that the girl in question has died. Sometimes I throw in their new names, the names I assign to the girls at my pleasure. No one can select names better than mine, not even the girls themselves, who usually claim not to remember who they were. “They’re orphans, all orphans,” the sisters say, but whispers abound outside our colony that in reality the girls all have parents somewhere, or aunts or other relatives, wondering what’s become of them, concluding that they ran off once and for all like the unruly girls they always were. In order to allow themselves the privacy they deeply craved to become eagles or panthers or wild mares, the girls had often disappeared, throughout their whole lives. When the government aid workers call with their concerned voices, wanting more details of how the girls died, I’m reassuring and solemn. I cry only at the conclusion of the tragic ends I narrate, holding my voice steady and calm and factual when I talk of accidental drownings, suicides, auto rickshaw crashes, kitchen fires. Then, as per Mother Superior Devi, I ask if they’d mind sending us the girls’ remaining possessions, so these can be buried like relics, just as was done for the Catholic saints the Hindu government workers aren’t all that certain existed. The possessions may look cheap but sell well. And here and there is a treasure: a bracelet of the finest gold, a piece of ivory carved into sandalwood. Once, in my memory, even a thick packet of coins.

  These days the girls’ possessions are my main joy. I’m too old to attract male company. I am nearly seventy. Even among permissive nuns, allowed to watch blue movies, masturbate with each other, and bathe the girls alone without being questioned, I’m considered past my prime. I don’t like it, considering how long it took me, a nun ordained at age sixteen, to find permission for my wants, but like the girls’ fates, the situation is beyond my control.

  I am unique, alive, organism, the girls cry out to each other in their regional languages, or, more often, telepathically, and these are only the words I and the other nuns imagine are broadcast on young faces. After the branding they know better than to implore us. They see the fates of girls who fight the Mother, hear whispers of how some are sent to the cages in Kamathipura, remote stations, and truck stops, to service drivers bringing heroin from Thailand. Then the shouting stops and with it the girls’ old beliefs about justice. It’s not that we teach them right from wrong. It’s more like we show them a rainbow spectrum of cobalt blues and subtlest orange hues, whereas in their previous lives they only saw red, indigo, and green.

  The colors of their clothes alerts us to how many will need to have told more than one story. Those in bright, fresh, clean-looking clothes shouldn’t be here. At ten, eleven, twelve years old
, it means they have mothers who will not rely on fathers to find them. They have the kind of mothers who may show up at the gate, and in the years that I and my sisters of mercy have been here, there has been one mother or two dragged into the compound for branding. Mother Superior Devi can smell women who change—and the girls, the special girls, with powers to transform into animals, well, many of them inherit this capacity from their mothers.

  Girls in grey are easy fish: calls are cursory, inquiries disinterested. It isn’t even grey that they’re wearing. It’s filth, their clothing washed, if you can call it that, in refuse-tainted water, in puddles that slum dwellers make do with for small ponds. There is a smell on these girls that is distinct, not just a smell but a texture—the unwashed clinging even to the newly-washed, the smell of their hair still rank though it is combed and gilded with flowers.

  Only the transformations astound me. At night, manacles aren’t enough. Mother Superior Devi has gone into deep pockets, money retrieved from her former lucrative life, to build tunnels and dungeon rooms equipped with chains and cages and even one exhibit with rocks and grass where girls who become panthers can be contained, where the wildness of these girls can be transformed in changes more powerful and still more devastating than their earliest age, around age five or six, when they first must have discovered that, as girls, they had a secret; when they first sounded a different voice, thrilling to them in its forbidden and unexpected grace. What was it like when you discovered you could roar? I asked a beautiful fourteen-year-old girl-cub-lioness one time, a girl whose eyes were golden brown and her hair matted from life in the slum. But by then she had already been branded and subdued. Doubtful that she knew anymore what to answer; nor how grateful she’d be, shortly after, for how the Mother made her forget, helped her attain a quieter, more durable power.