The Elephanta Suite: Three Novellas

1

Walking toward the railway station, its dome like a huge head, its scrollwork and buttresses suggesting big ears, Alice smiled at the way the old building glittered like a great gray creature of granite, but closer it was just fakery, India mimicking England, a hodgepodge of disappointed Gothic. Alice hesitated at the archway, then stepped through the entrance. Inside it was a nut house, and it stank. The smells of India still terrified her. From a distance, India was splendor; up close, misery.

A man with stumps for hands, just rounded wrists, approached her with pleading eyes and lips. She gave him a ten-rupee note but could not bear to see him manipulate it. She had to brave the waiting room because her friend Stella was late, as usual. Pretty girls were never punctual—was it another way of being noticed? Pretty girls were always forgiven. Pretty girls could be peculiarly reckless and were seldom harmed or blamed because they were pretty. And the weird thing was that pretty girls never believed they were pretty enough.

Alice was never late, and she knew what that implied about her, but she told herself she didn’t care. They had been friends at Brown, but not close. She had been the pretty girl’s plain friend, a protector, to be patronized. Now, as this was not Providence, Rhode Island, but the world, over the weeks of their traveling together Alice had begun to see Stella in a new way. She pitied her for her egotism, her passivity, her abrupt changes of mind. Pretty girls had a free pass, they could do anything, especially get away with a childlike sort of helplessness. Alice wanted to say, “Someday it will be your undoing.”

Having to search for Stella in the crowded station made Alice conspicuous and meant her having to stare at the people pushing, or the ones quarreling or sleeping in heaps on rectangles of cloth by the wall. Beaky old women sat abjectly in front of dishes of coins, exhibiting their misery. A mother with a limp baby made “give me food” gestures—her fingers fluttering to her mouth, presenting the baby as the object of suffering. Was the baby dead?

The Indian novels she’d read in the States had not prepared her for what she saw here. Where were the big fruitful families from these novels? Where were the jokes, the love affairs, the lavish marriage ceremonies, the solemn pieties, the virtuous peasants, the environmentalists, the musicians, the magic, the plausible young men? They seemed concocted to her now, and besieged in up-close India, all she thought of was Hieronymus Bosch, turtle-faced crones, stumpy men, deformed children.

“Yes?” It was someone else from Bosch, a dark brown man with dyed orange hair and red eyes. He pressed close to her and stroked her hair with a lizard-like hand. He held a tattered canvas bag in his other hand.

“Please leave me alone,” Alice said.

The man looked gleeful. He said, “There are more than one billion people in India. You will never be alone.”

A furious-faced mustached man in a khaki woolen uniform, with a truncheon under his arm, demanded to see Alice’s ticket. Roosterish and aggressive, he was not in any of the novels. The first man backed away, still smiling.

“What do you want?” She had been told that some of these people wanted bribes.

“Security. Where going?”

“Going Bangalore.”

“Flatporm pyve.”

“Me waiting friend,” Alice said, and smiled, hearing herself.

“Prend coming?”

“Friend coming just now.”

The man left her, and there she waited, as though abandoned, feeling scrutinized, assaulted by people’s stares. But what could she do? They had agreed to meet at the front of the station platform for the trip. Alice had not gotten used to Stella’s lateness, and she thought, Why should I? But the late person always seemed to think that after many instances of being late, she was understood and pardoned and the waiter was habituated to it. But the opposite was the case—the blame grew.

When, finally, Alice saw Stella approaching through the throng, she knew her friend had something on her mind. Mental conflict showed in the way she walked. They’d been traveling for three weeks, and in that time Alice saw how obvious Stella was, how easily she could be read. She touched her right eye when she was being untruthful; she jogged her left leg when she was impatient; she quickly agreed to anything Alice might say when she wanted to talk. And then she talked and talked, as a way to prevent Alice from asking any questions, talked in order to dominate and conceal. She had talked a lot lately, and ever since arriving in Mumbai Stella’s pretty-girl presumptions had been obnoxious. She was used to being treated as someone special; she was passive; she needed only to smile to attract notice.

The most obvious thing about Stella today Alice did not see until they were next to each other. She had no bag. She wasn’t coming.

They had set off from Delhi with much too big rucksacks. Stella’s had a teddy bear dangling from it, another of her affectations. (“Teddy doesn’t want to see the temple.”) Without the rucksack she looked smaller and straighter and a little devious.

“Where’s your pack?”

“Long story. I left it at the hotel.” Stella’s hand flew up and she touched her right eye.

Before she said anything more, Alice knew that Stella was trying to find the right words to say that she wasn’t coming to Bangalore —would not be traveling with Alice, after they had spent every day together since leaving the States on the graduation trip that they’d planned since last January. Alice knew that from Stella’s wan smile and her now contorted posture, digging her toe into the platform where someone had spat. She was staying behind—but why?

“I’ve been thinking really hard about us traveling together,” Stella said. “How really fun it’s been.”

Alice said, “So you’re bailing.”

“Don’t say it like that.” Stella was shocked. She disliked Alice’s bluntness. “You make it sound like I don’t care.”

“The plan was to take the train to Bangalore. To visit Sai Baba. He’s there at the moment. There’s a darshan this week. We have beds reserved at the ashram. And the trip to Chennai to see the temple. That was the plan, right?”

“I know, but—oh, gosh, I’m so confused. I don’t know what to do.”

“That was the plan,” Alice insisted. “And this is the train. It’s leaving in twenty minutes.”

“I’m really sorry, Allie.”

“So you really are bailing?”

“You make it sound like I’m betraying you.”

It was not at all what Alice meant, but now she realized that it was what Stella was doing. She had guiltily uttered the exact word that she was denying, another of her traits, as “It’s the truth, Allie” was always a lie.

“Bombay’s a zoo. That’s what you said. So why are you staying here?”

“I don’t know. It’s a long story.”

But her expression, and especially her unreliable eyes, indicated that she knew. Well, of course she did. She was an only child. She always did what she wanted, and if there was a better deal, she took it, even if it meant breaking her word.

Alice had given up any hope of Stella’s coming along, but she hated being lied to, and she was genuinely curious as to why a weak, spoiled girl like Stella had changed her mind and was staying in a city she said she disliked for its noise and its crowds and its smelly sidewalks.

“This is like a scene in one of those great movies when the characters have this painful farewell on a railway platform.”

“No, it’s not,” Alice said. “In the movies it’s always lovers. We weren’t even roommates.”

“It’s like a farewell, though.”

“It’s not painful.”

“It’s painful for me,” Stella said.

She’s going to cry, Alice thought, seeing Stella’s pretty mouth crumple, so she said, “You’re the one who’s bailing. So why is it painful for you?”

Stella started to cry, but managed to say, “You’re being really harsh.”

“If you cared so much, you’d be coming along. And what I don’t get at all is why you’re deciding to stay in Bombay alone.”

As soon as she said the word “alone,” Alice knew why. Stella would never travel alone, never stay alone; she had met someone else—she was with that person. The fact that Alice had only just realized this made her feel foolish—obtuse, anyway. But who was it? Where had they met?

“You’re staying with that hippie chick from Bennington we met at the bazaar.”

“God, no. She was so gross, like she flossed her teeth in that restaurant,” Stella said, in such an outburst Alice was sure she was telling the truth.

But she knew that Stella had teamed up with someone else. She said, “Don’t be enigmatic, Stell. We’re supposed to be friends. Who’s the guy?”

It was a shot in the dark, but from the way Stella reacted, grimacing—the tears were gone—Alice knew she’d guessed right.

“Nobody special.” She touched her right eye again. “But that kid Zack, um …”

When she uttered the name, Alice knew everything. Zack with his baseball cap on backward. Zack from the ticket line at the Regal Cinema and the Bollywood movie, who had gone to NYU film school and wanted to make a Bollywood movie himself with big-name American actors. Zack in the T-shirt that said Choose Death, whose father was (so he said) a connected Hollywood lawyer, who was staying at the Taj Mahal Hotel. Zack with his cell phone that worked in India for U.S. calls—Stella had called her mother on it. Zack whose father knew Bill Clinton.

“You said he was a brat.”

“That was a first impression. He’s got a spiritual side, plus he’s really funny.”

“He just wants to nail you.”

Stella looked appalled and on the verge of crying again.

“He already has!” Alice said. “You’re screwing him. That’s what you were doing the other night when we were at that club and you said you had a headache and went back to that fancy suite his father got for us.”

Hearing the raised voices, and especially You’re screwing him, some Indian men paused and drew closer to listen to the two women, whose faces were flushed.

When one pressed close to her, Alice turned on him and said, “Do you mind?” and the man stepped away but remained within earshot.

“I told you it’s a long story.”

“It’s not! It’s a short story. You met a guy. He said his father was in India to go to that luxury spa near Jaipur.”

She saw it all. Zack had gotten his father to pay for them to spend one night at the Elephanta Suite, and afterward Zack had invited Stella to travel with him and his father to the spa where Bill Clinton had stayed. Stella was as interested in the father as she was in Zack—perhaps more so, since spoiled children were always looking for protectors, who would let them have their own way. Now Alice was glad that Stella—shallow, selfish Stella—was not coming. She began to laugh.

Hearing her laughter, the Indian men stepped closer, as though to inquire, What is so funny?

Alice said, “I think you’re right. This is like one of those partings on a railway platform in a movie.”

And Stella looked happier.

Right at the beginning of the trip they had agreed: no boys, or if there had to be boys, no relationships. Also, no expensive hotels, no patronage, no accepting drinks from strangers. We’ll pay our own way, even if it hurts.

And of all people, Zack. Now Alice remembered with scorn how Zack had passed an image of Ganesh, the elephant deity, fat and cheerful and beneficent, bringing luck to any new enterprise, seated on his big bottom, with jewels on his domed head and his floppy trunk and his thick legs.

“He looks like a penis,” Zack had said.

“I guess you haven’t seen too many penises,” Alice said.

Stella had looked alarmed and glanced with concern at Zack, who said, “More dicks than you have, girl.”

That meant, You’re plain. When she was heavy at Brown, she heard fat jokes, and now that she had lost weight, she heard ugly jokes. And the amazing thing was that people actually said them to your face, as though there was some subtlety in them, rather than: You’re fat, you’re plain, you can’t get a date. And they also said them because, if you were plain or heavy, you were supposed to be strong and have a sense of humor.

Now she remembered Zack saying, “Want to text-message your folks?” And she smiled angrily at Stella and said, “Aren’t you the clever one.”

Meaning, You’re not clever at all. But Stella, with the pretty girl’s deafness to irony, took it as a compliment.

“Maybe we can hook up somewhere,” Stella said.

“You’re on your own now, girlfriend,” Alice said.

She had to summon all her strength to say it, because she knew that Stella was taken care of. As soon as she spoke, she was breathless.

Seeing that the foreign women had become more conversational, with lowered voices, the Indian men lost interest and wandered away, down the platform where people were pushing to enter the train. Suitcases were being hoisted through the windows of the coaches, families were hurrying to board, red-shirted porters carried boxes in wheelbarrows.

Now a man approached with a clipboard and sized them up. He said, “Boarding time.”

Alice showed her ticket and said, “She’s not coming. She found another friend.”

Stella began again to cry. She hugged Alice and said, “I love you, Allie. I have to do this. I can’t explain.”

“This is a bad movie,” Alice said, and broke away.

After she boarded and found her seat, she saw Stella outside, gaping, looking cow-like. Stella leaned and waved and remained watching until the train pulled away. She was still tearful, but she was meeting Zack and staying at Zack’s fancy hotel, and it was Alice who was on her own.

But no sooner had the train pulled out of the station and was rumbling past the tenements and traffic of the Mumbai outskirts than an unexpected feeling came over Alice, glowing on her whole body: she was alone and liked it. Free of Stella, she felt stronger and more decisive. She could do whatever she wanted without consulting her fickle friend. Just fifteen minutes into the twenty-four-hour trip, she realized that Stella had been a much bigger burden than she’d imagined. Now Stella was at risk and it was she who was happy in the swaying train, like being in the body of a bulgy creature that protected her while plodding forward in the heat.

With the whole day ahead of her, she sat by the window and watched India slip by in a stream of simple images—women threshing grain on mats, men plowing with placid oxen, children jumping into muddy streams, clusters of houses baking in the sun, here and there a level crossing where a blue bus or a man on a bike was stopped by a passing train. These human sights became rarer, for after Poona there were only fields or stunted trees or great dusty plains to the horizon, an India Alice had not seen or read about before, and because she was not sharing it with Stella it was all hers, a secret disclosed to her, a discovery too that India was also a land of empty corners.

And so all that hot day in the hinterland of Maharashtra Alice marveled at this revelation of big, yawning India. It was the antithesis of crowded, damp, and noisy Mumbai, the words “critical mass” as a visible image. She liked what she saw now for being unfinished and unpeopled. Stella knew nothing about it—might never know, for Zack harped on about being a city person, talked importantly about setting up a movie, and you could do that only in a big, stinking city.

“You can have him,” Alice said clearly, still at the hot window.

She was startled when a voice said, “Pardon?”

The seat where an elderly Indian woman had been sleeping wrapped in a thin sheet just a moment ago—or so it seemed—was now occupied by a young Indian man. He was fat-faced and bulky, with big brown eyes, a lovely smile, and wore a clean, neatly pressed shirt. He was sitting cross-legged, barefoot, where the old woman had been, and both his posture and his face conveyed the assurance that he was harmless, even if a bit innocent and fearful. He sat with his chubby fingers locked together in a patient posture of restraint.

“I was just thinking out loud,” Alice said.

“Talking out loud,” the young man said.

“Not exactly,” Alice said. “The thought was in my head but it somehow got turned into some words.”

“Something worse?”

“No. Some words. The thought became a statement.”

“Thought in head becoming utterance.”

Now “utterance” was one of those words, like “miscreants,” “audacious,” “thrice,” “ample,” and “jocundity,” that some Indians used in casual conversation and Indian writers used in sentences, in the same way that out the window the Indian farmers were using antique sharp-nosed hand plows pulled by yoked oxen and women carried water jars on their heads. India was a country of usable antiques.

Alice kept a list of these Indian English words in her notebook. Comparative linguistics was a subject she had thought of pursuing in grad school—what else could an English major do?—but first she wanted to take this year off after graduation, the trip with Stella—who had slipped into thin air, just bailed, selfish bitch. But Alice smiled to think that here she was, enjoying herself in this adventure to Bangalore, while Stella and Zack were sneering at Mumbai and discovering how shallow each other was. It gives me no pleasure to think that you’re unhappy, Alice thought, and smiled, because it did.

“You are ruminative,” the young man said.

“Ruminative,” Alice said, thinking, Write that down. “That’s me.”

“Cudgeling your mind.”

“The expression is ‘cudgeling your brains,’ only I’m not.”

“You are indeed thinking out loud.”

“You learn fast,” Alice said. “Where are you going?”

“Bangalore,” he said.

He was going the whole way in this sleeping compartment?

“Job interview,” he said. “Eye Tee. Bee Pee Oh.”

“A call center?”

“Can be call center or tech-support center. Voice based or computer driven. Wish me luck.”

Alice was touched by the fat young man’s saying that. She said, “I really do wish you luck. I hope you get the job. Maybe I’ll call the tech support line someday and you can help me fix my computer.”

“It would be my pleasure. You are smiling.”

“Because we’re in this train. India out there, rolling along. It’s so Merchant-Ivory.”

When Alice glanced out the window, she saw that dusk had fallen and they were pulling into a station. It was Gurgaon. Many people got on, and just as the train started again, a woman entered the compartment with two suitcases. She did not offer a greeting but instead concentrated on chaining her luggage to a stanchion by the door. Then, muttering, she claimed the lower berth and sent the young man to the upper berth and out of sight. It was as though a chaperone had intervened, for he was at once both obedient and less familiar. While he appeared to read—Alice heard the rattling of magazine pages—the woman made her bed and lay down to sleep. Alice was reassured by the woman, whom she saw as not an intrusion at all but a typically bossy Indian woman who would keep order.

A man came by with a tray of food—dhal, rice, two puris, a pot of yogurt, the sort of meal that Stella had begun to call “the slimy special,” but Alice found delicious. And after she ate it and the tray was collected, she lay down and read a Sai Baba pamphlet, “The Meaning of Love,” in preparation for the ashram, but had hardly turned a page when she fell asleep, rocked by the train.

In the morning a coffee seller came by. She bought a paper cup of coffee, and some bananas from a woman with bunches of them in a basket, and she sat in the sunshine, feeling on this lovely morning that a new phase of her life was beginning.

“Can you please inform me, what is your good name, madam?”

She looked up and saw the tubby young man smiling at her, sitting in a lotus posture. She had forgotten him.

“Sure thing. Alice—Alice Durand.”

He was now leaning over, his arm extended. “My card. May I obtain yours?”

“I don’t actually have a business card,” Alice said. “But I’m sure I’ll see you around. We’re both getting off at Bangalore.”

“No. You must be getting off at Cantonment, for Whitefield.”

“How do you know that?”

“Sai Baba Center. You have been perusing pamphlet.”

Anyone’s watchfulness slightly unnerved her, but she also admired this man’s. He was a fast learner. He would get the job.

“We are sitting on eight o’clock. Cantonment is coming up.”

“And what is your good name?”

“Amitabh. On the card. Also mobile number and Hotmail account. Also pager. You will find me accessible.”

He was still sitting, wide in his solid posture, when Alice hoisted her topheavy rucksack and struggled off the train to face the squawking, reaching auto-rickshaw drivers, who seemed to know exactly where she was going.

2

The passage of time was not easily calculable in the ashram. You didn’t count hours or days, but rather months, maybe years. A month had gone by, though time meant nothing here, even with the routine: up at four or so to queue for a place at the hall for the darshan and a chance to hear Swami at six-thirty; then bhajans until eight or so, and breakfast; then chores and food prep and more queuing until more of Swami at two and more bhajans, of which Alice’s favorite began,

Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey Gajaanana

Gajaanana Hey Gajavadana …

(Victory to Gajaanana,

The elephant-faced God …)

“Work is worship,” Swami said, and “Hands that help are better than lips that pray,” and “Start the day with love, spend the day with love, fill the day with love, end the day with love. That is the way to God.”

Alice’s days spilled one into the other, full and fluid, guided by Swami. And the passage of time was a consoling liquefaction of weeks in which she was gently turned, as though tumbled downstream, without any effort, feeling the buoyancy of happiness chanted into her ears.

Swami was smaller, slighter, older than his photographs suggested, the hair a less symmetrical frizz-ball, his smile more fatigued than impish. But he was eighty. His direct confrontation, his practical advice, his refusal to preach—the essential Swami appealed to her. He seemed to single her out at the daily darshan and to hold her gaze, and while seeming to preach, said, “I am not here to preach. Only to listen. Only to make suggestions. I tell you”—and here Alice felt the warmth of his attention—“if you are Christian, be the best Christian you can be.”

“He will leave his body at ninety-six,” Alice’s roommate Priyanka said. “And after some eight years, the third and last incarnation will be born. Prema Sai. I wish to observe this.”

Priyanka and her friend Prithi had gotten robes for Alice and allowed her to share their room, claiming they were spiritual sisters, since single women were discouraged from applying for rooms. The room was spartan and clean—well, Alice cleaned it, after bhajans. She was glad that Stella was not here to distract her. Stella would have hated the food, made a fuss about the flies or the heat, or else said, as she had at the temple at Muttra, “I don’t see why I should take off my shoes here, since the floor is a heck of a lot dirtier than my feet.”

Alice loved the simplicity of the place, the strict routine, the plain food, the safety of the perimeter wall, the knowledge that Swami was right next door, beyond the gate in his funky yellow house. It was like a nunnery, and yet there were no vows. She could leave any time she wanted. But the routine suited her, and the city—what she had seen of it—seemed pleasant enough. Too much traffic, though; too many people; honks, shouts, the crackle of music, new stinks.

Against Priyanka’s advice—“Swami doesn’t like us dibble-dabbling in the town”—Alice took a bus to Lalbagh Gardens and lost herself among the giant trees, the first real trees she’d seen in India, big old ones that spoke of space and order, that provided damp shade and coolness. Indian families roamed in the gardens, lapping at ice creams, and Alice regarded these people wandering among the great trees as worshipers of the most devout sort, without dogma, lovers of the natural world, as Swami was.

Some of the Bangalore streets were lined with flowering trees, like any good street in Providence, and the same sort of solid, smug-fronted houses and bungalows. Stella would have shopped—there were silks and pashminas and bangles—but Alice only looked. The Christian churches, an inexplicably large number of them, helped calm her, because all those Christians were a link with a world she knew and the faith itself had Swami’s approval.

But the dust-laden and echoey churches were not enough. She was drawn to another place of worship, the Ganesh temple in the heart of the city, the elephant image smiling at her from the inner sanctum. That was how it seemed: another big soft gaze in her life. The other deities sat glowering, with horror teeth like Kali’s, or else solemnly dancing like Shiva; with half-closed eyes like Saraswati playing the sitar, or goofy-faced with pouchy cheeks like Hanuman. But only the elephant god smiled, always the kindly eyes directed straight at her, and the full satisfied mouth chomping on the tusks like a tycoon with two cigars. The way the fat thing sat on the rounded cushion of his bottom, his center of gravity in his broad bum, was also a pleasure to see, but most of all his eyes reassured her with a What can I do for you? look and a guarantee: I can help you.

The afterlife was not intimated in any of the elephant god’s intercessions. He was worldly and efficient, not granting grace or forgiving sins, but promising to bring his heavy foot down to flatten a problem.

Alice’s problems were small, but they were problems nonetheless. One was the memory of Stella’s dropping out. Alice wanted to forgive her, but she could not rid her mind of the betrayal, and she remembered Zack trying to impress Stella, saying that his favorite line in How to Marry a Millionaire was the Marilyn Monroe one about maharajahs: “Think of all the diamonds and rubies. And all those crazy elephants.” Stella had laughed, and now she had what she wanted.

One afternoon, having ducked out of the ashram to be soothed by a visit to the Ganesh shrine, she decided to walk back to Whitefield. A taxi always meant bantering with the driver and having to answer too many questions. In an area of narrow lanes she passed the courtyard of an old house and saw what looked like a stable. The air was rich with sweet decay here. What she sniffed as a relief from the sourness of traffic fumes she realized was manure that had the density of compost, the powerful suggestion of a healthy animal and also of the fertile earth. She took a few steps into the passageway and saw a large dusty elephant.

The smiling creature with the swaying trunk seemed linked to the deity she’d just prayed to, as if it were his living embodiment. She could not separate the two, but, having prayed, she saw this animal as the privileged answer to those prayers. His big staring eyes held her and seemed to fix her as an image, as though photographing her—certainly remembering her. As he stared, he danced from side to side, swinging his rubbery trunk. He reached toward her with the big hose-like thing and then lowered it, wrapped a broken stalk of sugar cane and clenched the pink edges of its nose holes, delicately plucking the fragment, and with one upward bend of the trunk popped it into his mouth and crunched it. He had teeth too.

The elephant still swayed, holding Alice’s attention like a promise fulfilled. And for the first time in India she did not feel lonely.

She saw with sadness the collar of metal around the lower part of his left rear leg; the heavy chain was fastened with an iron spike. The elephant was male, yet he appeared to Alice like an enormous plain woman, chained to a post, overwhelmingly frustrated, murmuring to herself to get attention.

“Ha!” A man stepped forward, wearing a dhoti like a diaper, and a badly tied turban, and sprayed the elephant with a hose.

She decided to try the word that was in her mind. She pointed at the man and said, “Mahout?”

He smiled, said, “Mahout, mahout,” and went on spraying, and the elephant too seemed to smile.

Alice lingered a little, watching the elephant being drenched, his gray dusty skin blackened by the water, thick and wrinkled, looking like cold lava. Then she clasped her hands, said “Namaste,” and was delighted when the mahout returned her greeting and somehow encouraged the elephant to nod his great solid head at her.

“You were missed,” Priyanka said when Alice got back to the ashram.

Priyanka had a haughty, well-brought-up way of speaking that annoyed Alice, not for its Indian attitude but its English pretension.

The other young woman, Prithi, said nothing, but Alice knew what she was thinking.

They were her friends, but not so close that she could tell them that she’d just made a new friend. They were a little older than she was, Prithi a runaway fiancée, Priyanka a runaway bride. Told that a husband had been selected for her in an arranged marriage, Prithi had been rescued by Priyanka and had found peace here under the benign presence of Sathya Sai Baba.

Priyanka had her own story, another arranged marriage, but to an abusive husband, in a house with a nagging, possibly insane mother-in-law. She had suffered it for two years and then done the unthinkable—slipped away, disgraced her parents, infuriated her in-laws, and hid here. The ashram was her refuge. Although she was damaged, scandalous, unmarriageable, she was safe. And she had money.

Prithi also had money. She said to Alice, “Until I was seventeen, I had no idea there were poor people in India. I thought everyone lived like us, in a big house, with servants and a driver and a cook and all the rest of it, surrounded by flowers. I thought our servants had lots of money. Their uniforms were beautiful.”

“Your father probably bought them their uniforms,” Alice said.

“May I finish?” Prithi smiled in annoyance. “I wanted to walk home from school one day. The other girls weren’t met by a chauffeur, as I had been all my life. The driver begged me to get in. He called me on my mobile, but I refused to answer, and I walked home while the car followed me.” She folded her hands primly. “So there.”

“I don’t get it.”

“I saw how people lived. Not like us. It was quite a shocker.”

But Prithi said that she still had never been on an Indian bus or train. She had flown to Bangalore from Mumbai and had not left the ashram for eight months.

So it seemed more and more to Alice like a nunnery, yet with none of the fear, no talk of salvation, nothing of sin, no rejection of the outside world; simply the pleasure of being in a safe and loving place, among happy people, where everyone was accepted. Not like an organized religion at all, but perhaps like the first followers of Christ, the people who had been so moved by the Sermon on the Mount they had left houses and families to follow the Master and to witness miracles.

Swami performed miracles, always reluctantly, which made them more startling, and always with a smile. He had a magic ring: cookies materialized in his hand for children, and sometimes money. The devotees applauded, as though at a party trick, and Alice realized they were like the earliest Christians, whose heads were turned by Christ’s words and his marvels, not seeing him as a figure foretold by Scripture or a human sacrifice, the Lamb of God, but a handsome man with a new voice, a beautiful spirit, a reformer, a liberator, someone who was able, in the most memorable words, to make sense of the world.

“I love Swami,” Alice told them.

“We were worried—isn’t that so, Prithi,” Priyanka said. “You have such a good education. You are so independent and strong. Such people seldom tarry here, you know.”

“I feel that we are here at the beginning,” Alice said, still thinking of the listeners to the Sermon on the Mount. “Seeing Swami in the flesh. Hearing him at the darshan. I love watching him nod and smile as we chant the bhajans.”

“Yes, we’re lucky,” Priyanka said. “I see that life has a meaning. Even my divorce has a meaning. It allowed me to come here.”

More time passed, some weeks perhaps, and one day both women approached Alice while she was sweeping the room.

“We have something for you,” Prithi said.

She took her hands from behind her back and presented Alice with a large cloth pouch, decorated with small round mirrors sewn to it, a piece from Rajasthan, red and orange, glittering on Alice’s lap.

“It’s great,” Alice said.

“Open it.”

Alice untwisted a woven cord that held it shut and saw that it contained a soft brick of rupees, held together with rubber bands. Because they were worn and dirty they seemed somehow tested and proven to be especially valuable.

“I can’t take them.”

“Yes,” Priyanka said. “You must.”

“But you don’t have to keep them,” Prithi said. “You can give them to Swami.”

“Swami doesn’t want money—he says so all the time. ‘Where money is asked for and offered, I have no place.’ I love him for that.”

“It is one of his most spiritual qualities,” Prithi said. “But still, ghee butter costs money. Pulses cost money. That broom.”

Alice was holding the broom in one hand and the chunk of money in the other. She said, “Yes, he can buy some more brooms!”

A day or two later Alice realized what the women had done. They were helping her pay her way, giving her the money as an oblique present so as not to embarrass her. One of the devotees was always passing the hat—actually, it was a brass bowl—and the residents putting money in. Alice usually slipped in a one-hundred-rupee note—about two dollars. This had been noticed.

She had believed that sweeping and washing and tending to the pots of flowers and weaving garlands for Swami were enough. But no—it seemed you had to pay.

This face-saving gesture, done so sweetly, saddened her. She had come to India in a spirit of renunciation, looking to Swami—with the help of Ganesh—as an example. Stella had hindered her in her quest; Alice saw that after Stella had gone off with Zack. But this need for money was a surprise, because she wanted to go on living at the ashram, and clearly she could do that only by getting a job somewhere in Bangalore. Well, wasn’t that why most people came to Bangalore?

“I’m looking for a phone,” Alice said to Priyanka, slightly distracted by the way Priyanka ate—using her fingertips on the cha-patis, but one-handed, eating with the fastidious concentration of a watch repairer.

Priyanka let her fingers hover and dangle while she looked at Alice with amazement, as though she’d asked for a forbidden thing.

“Whatever do you require a phone for?”

“The usual thing,” Alice said.

“Idle phoning is discouraged by Swami.”

“Who said it was idle?”

“Phones are frivolous, Swami says. Ashram is complete and self-sufficient. He is the only link we need.”

“Maybe I want to phone Swami,” Alice said, and she could tell that she was becoming angry in her sarcasm.

“He won’t pick up.”

“I thought you had a cell phone. You mentioned it once.”

Priyanka smiled while she chewed her mouthful, then she dabbed her lips. “I left my mobile with Daddyji. He was flabbergasted.”

“My daddyji doesn’t even know where I am,” Alice said.

“Phoning parents is discouraged by Swami.”

Alice said, “Why am I a little sorry we had this conversation?”

And it occurred to her that had Priyanka known whom and why she was planning to call, she would have been even more scolding and unhelpful.

She put on her walking shoes and sunglasses and went to the main gate—the gatekeeper saluted—and she walked along the busy road on the broken sidewalk, stepping past the fruit vendors, who were crouched on low stools, selling oranges and mangoes. She had not gone thirty yards when she saw three or four storefronts advertising telephone services, International Calls—Best Rates—Fax and Internet Connectivity, with lists of countries and prices per minute.

After the solitude and order of the ashram, the street—and this was right outside, just over the wall—was startling in its dirt and disorder, the hawkers crowded against the wall of the ashram, people seated at small tables selling picture frames and pens and cheap watches and hair ornaments. It was a relief to see someone selling fresh flowers, a pile of marigold blossoms, but the rest of it was a bazaar of cheap merchandise. The shops that lined the road sold rubber tires and shoes and clocks and sacks of beans and rice and spices. At one storefront a man was mending shoes, at another a boy was on his knees, his forearms streaked with grease, laboring to fix a bike. The large number of pedestrians made it hard for Alice to walk, and when she dodged them to buy a bag of roasted chickpeas, cars honked at her. She thought of turning back, yet she had to make the call.

“What country, madam?” the clerk said, showing her an assortment of phone cards.

“India.” Alice handed over the business card. “Right here. Bangalore.”

“Is mobile number, madam. Better you purchase card.”

She bought a three-hundred-rupee card, feeling that she was being cheated—the man claimed he had nothing smaller. Could that be true?

Feeling helpless—Indians fussing around her created that illusion—she waited while the clerk dialed the number.

“Ringing, madam.” He handed Alice the phone. Once, long ago, a phone like this had sat on a small table in Alice’s house: black, solid, heavy, but always a small voice issuing from it.

“This is Shan.”

That’s what it sounded like, an Asiatic name but with the twanging palate of a forced American accent.

Alice was so surprised by the voice she could not respond.

“How can I help you? Is there anyone there? Hullo?”

The voice was extraordinary—nasal, the mouth wide open, the suggestion of a smile in the tone, and though it had an American sound, something unnatural subverted it, so that it was hardly human, a cartoon voice. Alice was reminded of a parrot—a mimicky voice, as if the speaker had no idea what he was saying, just uttering words in a tortured way, swallowing and gargling.

“I think I have the wrong number.”

“Who are you wishing to speak to at this time?”

The singsong was odd too, the whole effect so weirdly comic that Alice did not put the phone down.

“I’m calling Amitabh.”

“This is Amitabh”—still, in an American accent, the name was approximate.

“I thought you were Shan.”

“I’m at work. I’m Shan at work. Who am I speaking to, please?”

“This is Alice—from the train. I wanted to talk to you about something.”

“I’m on late shift till three A.M. Can we maybe meet tomorrow?”

The voice was still bizarre. Was it really him? “I guess so. Can you come to Whitefield?”

“Sure thing. Whitefield! Now I remember. You’re the Sai Baba woman from the first AC compartment.”

“That’s me,” but she thought, Sure thing? Then she saw a sign, Vishnu Hotel and Lunch House, and read Amitabh the address. He took it down expertly, then read it back to her.

After she hung up she kept walking, away from the ashram. It was too late to line up for the darshan—she’d be at the end of the line, at the back of the hall, Swami barely visible. She had a better idea. She felt a need to make a superstitious gesture, and so she waved down an auto-rickshaw and gave the driver the address of the elephant’s stable.

She liked the side street, the quiet gloom from overhanging trees, the archway to the courtyard stable, the sight of the elephant’s hindquarters. He was snatching at hay with his trunk and stuffing it into his mouth, but when Alice approached the elephant lurched, his chain clanking, and he swung around and nodded at her.

Now she saw the mahout with a hayfork, piling the fodder near the elephant.

“Namaste,” Alice said, clasping her hands.

The mahout held the hayfork with his knees and returned the greeting. He then beckoned her closer.

Alice said, “I know you have no idea what I’m saying, but thank you. I need a job, I need some money. I am here because I love this elephant.”

The mahout smiled, the elephant smiled, the odor of manure was sweetish, the stable was shadowy, cool with the aromas of drying hay.

Alice held out some roasted chickpeas for the mahout, and he took some, but instead of eating them he poked his hand toward the elephant’s trunk and allowed them to be seized from his hand. The elephant swung his trunk backward and blew the chickpeas into his mouth and then reached for more—not toward the mahout but, in a show of cleverness, lifting his trunk toward Alice and seeming to gesture with his twitching nose holes, wrinkling the pink flesh around them. A faint stink reached her from the holes at the tip of his trunk, a gust of sour breath.

“Here you go, darling.” She held the chickpeas in the flat of her hand and let the elephant scoop them up.

The mahout nodded and went back to forking hay, the elephant to eating it. But she could see that the elephant was looking directly at her with his great round eye.

“Thank you, thank you. Namaste.”

The mahout waved the hayfork and Alice thought, He looks like Gandhi. She returned to the ashram refreshed, at peace, as though she’d visited a holy place.

And the next day she slipped out to meet Amitabh. He was waiting at Vishnu Hotel and Lunch House, seated at a table, holding a cup of tea and studying his cell phone, perhaps reading a number and wondering if he should answer. There was no doubt that it was Amitabh—smiling, fat-bellied, fleshy arms and big brown cheeks and beautiful eyes.

“Hi,” he said. “Take a chair. This is real positive, seeing you.”

The tone of voice belonged to someone else—the words, too. Yet he was smiling as he spoke—this was a novelty. His mouth was set in a grin, and he was open-mouthed as he twanged at her.

“How long has it been? Like six weeks or more?” He was sipping tea, sucking it through his open mouth.

“I don’t even know how long,” Alice said. “I wanted to ask you a few things. Looks like you got the job.”

“The job, yeah”—he said jahb. “I was working when you called. That’s why I gave you my work name.”

“Which is?”

“Shan.”

She said, “Would that be anything like Shawn?”—seeing it as Sean.

“You got it. Shan Harris.”

“You have two names?”

“Don’t you? You sure do! It’s kind of strange. My mother calls me Bapu. It means Dad!”

She said, “Amitabh, why are you talking like this?”

“American accent? That’s my job just now, at the call center. I’m a consultant—working toward being an associate.”

“For a company?”

“We service Home Depot.”

Alice had heard of such jobs, but this was the first time she was seeing an employee at close quarters. She said, “Good news. That’s great.”

Because she was thinking: His accent is grotesque. I can do much better than that—and smiled at the thought of operating a phone at a call center in Bangalore, fielding calls from Rye and Bedford, maybe people she knew, though she didn’t know anyone who shopped at Home Depot.

Amitabh said, “How can I offer you excellent service?”

She almost laughed but thought better of it. She said, “I need a job.”

“Have a cup of tea,” Amitabh said. “Then tell me what you want to do.”

Over tea, Alice explained that she was short of money. She said that she had been an English major but was computer-savvy.

“I’m open to doing anything,” she said.

Amitabh’s face gleamed at this. He savored it, working his mouth, then said, “You got a good attitude. Plus, it’s my day off. Let’s get a taxi.”

Waiting for the taxi, Amitabh made a call on his cell phone. When he used his thumb to end the call, he said, “Plus, you’re real lucky. Miss Ghosh is interviewing today. They have a major manpower need.”

She was glad that there was no delay, that she would not have to report to the ashram and hear “Swami doesn’t approve.” As this thought turned in her mind, Amitabh asked about Swami.

“Sai Baba—is he as great as everyone says?”

“Greater,” Alice said. “He’d be glad I was doing this. Work is worship. Are we going into Bangalore?”

“No. Electronics City. Phase Two.”

He would not shake the accent. He said, Electrahnics Seety.

It was not far, but it took more than half an hour in traffic on a dusty road of two wheelers and auto rickshaws, limping cows and mobs of tramping people. They turned off the main road onto a new empty road of an industrial area where there were tall glass buildings and many more roughed out in concrete, and although these looked like bombed ruins, she saw that they were rising.

“This is InfoTech,” Amitabh said. He showed his pass at the front desk and walked down a side corridor. “I can introduce you to the head of personnel.”

He knocked on an open door and became obsequious, bowing, losing something of the accent, laughing softly as he greeted the woman at the desk.

“Please sit down,” the woman said to Alice. “Amitabh tells me you’re looking for a position.”

“That’s right.”

“Perhaps you could fill up this form and we’ll see if we have anything.” She handed Alice a set of printed sheets. “Please take them outside.”

Alice sat in the corridor and answered the questions, filled in the blanks, and elaborated on her education and previous jobs. When she had finished and handed in the forms, she sat and watched the woman examine them. The woman had a solemn, unimpressed way of reading, pinching the pages with her thumb and forefinger, holding them away from her face.

“I can’t offer you anything permanent, but we could extend something informal. No benefits, no contract. Just a week-to-week arrangement.”

“That would suit me. Is this at the call center?”

The woman smiled. “Not exactly. With your skill sets you could be useful in the classroom. We have lessons most days.”

“To teach …?” She left the question hanging, for a space to be filled in.

“American accent and intonation.”

“I can do that.”

So she had a job, and a secret, and smiling an elephant smile, she discovered that Bangalore was not one place but two.

3

Alice knew herself to be single-minded, and successful because of it—how else to explain her magna cum laude at Brown, all the loans she had floated to pay tuition, and most recently her ability to overcome Stella’s defection? The face she showed the world was dominant and determined. She was reconciled to living with the personality her body suggested, the one people expected—she was heavy again, with her father’s features—always the pretty girl’s plain friend. She had to be decisive, because she also knew that people like her got no help from anyone. She had had to learn to be the helper, the humorist, to be self-sufficient and ironic, too. She coped with that role, yet she was someone else—sensitive to slights, appreciative of attention, spiritual, even submissive, more sensual than anyone imagined, yet no man had ever touched her.

With the job, her life changed. The inner Alice was released, and she was able to be two different people in the two different parts of Bangalore. That was how it seemed. But really she was the same person using the two sides of her personality, just as perhaps Bangalore was one place with two aspects—indeed, as the elephant god, whom she esteemed rather than worshiped, had two aspects, the spiritual enabler and the fat, jolly, workaday elephant, spiritual and practical, as she believed herself to be.

She had made the traveler’s most important discovery. You went away from home and moved among strangers. No one knew your history or who you were: you started afresh, a kind of rebirth. Being whoever you wished to be, whoever you claimed to be, was a liberation. She wrote the thought in her diary and ended, So now I know why people go away.

And in between the ashram and Electronics City was the stable where the elephant was chained and the mahout lived. The elephant was more eloquent than the mahout: the elephant smiled more, was more responsive, hungrier—and hunger said so much. She visited at least once a week, mostly on her way home from Electronics City. She paid the taxi driver and then lingered to feed the elephant, or just watched, and afterward she walked back to the ashram in a better mood.

This elephant also had two personalities. Usually the mahout welcomed Alice—in his way, with a downward flap of his hand, meaning “Come closer,” or by cupping his hand to indicate “Feed him.” But one day he made an unmistakable “Keep away” gesture, pressing his palms at her, pushing them toward her face.

And he said an Indian word that Alice recognized, because it existed in English too. Pointing at his eye, he said, “Musth.”

She peered at the elephant’s eye and saw that it was leaking brownish fluid, staining its coarse skin, like rusty water dripping from an old pipe. The elephant’s eye was glowing, his chain clanked, he looked trapped and agitated.

“Musth, musth,” Alice said. Of course, the elephant was half demented with frustrated desire, chained against venting it, lust and anger mingled in his big body and leaking out of his eye. For the first time she heard that fury in the elephant’s trumpeting, and the sound of it made her step back.

The mahout was relieved. He too gave the elephant room, and he forked the grass and branches very carefully into a pile that was at the limit of the elephant’s reach. That the mahout with all his knowledge, and what she guessed to be his history with this animal, was so cautious, and even perhaps fearful, impressed her greatly.

That very evening she knelt and prayed to Ganesh and chanted, Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey Gajaanana, reminding herself of what she had seen at the stable, the explosive elephant chained to a post.

In the morning, as always, she attended Swami’s daily darshan, and later she was a cleaner, a menial, a mopper, an acolyte, an arranger of flowers, and a collector of rupees, her hands clasped before her.

She sat with Priyanka and helped weave garlands of marigolds to drape before the big statue of Saraswati at the edge of the pavilion.

“My personal favorite,” Priyanka said, smiling at Saraswati holding the sitar. “Making beautiful music.”

Was it because Alice smiled that Priyanka asked her whom she prayed to?

She did not say the elephant god, Ganesh. She needed her secret. She said, “They’re all related, the Indian gods—fathers and daughters, sons and mothers, avatars and incarnations. It’s a family, isn’t it? I pray to the family.”

Priyanka had a way of twisting her head, contorting herself in a way that said, I don’t believe you. And she assumed this posture of disbelief now, looking sideways, perhaps because the answer had come so neatly. But Alice’s was an Indian reply—indisputable and yet untruthful, too well rehearsed, a little too elaborate, a little too general, not to be hiding the truth. She had been hearing such replies since arriving in India.

She was well aware that Priyanka was suspicious of her. But that was all right. Alice was used to the Indian habit of inventing the person others supposed you to be, assigning you particular traits. Alice was American, middle class, good school, funny about food, careful with money, always with her nose in a book, a bit too quick to point out that some Indians were poor, not quick enough to venerate Swami, with a deplorable tendency to treat him as a fallible human, because Americans made a point, didn’t they, of being hard to please.

And for Alice, a lot of these devotees at the ashram were little more than cultists, even though Swami rejected any idea of its being a cult. But they had come from rigid, structured backgrounds—good families like Priyanka’s and Prithi’s; they were well brought up, had lived sheltered lives, and could say with wide-open eyes to an American, “I had no idea there were poor people in India!”

Alice had read the books. In their adulthood, such people needed an authority figure, needed to be with like-minded companions, needed moral certainties, needed a path—no, they needed the path. Sai Baba was a power figure, and the ashram was the center of their world. They would have sat all day knitting shawls for him and been blissfully happy.

Or, if not a cult, pretty close to one.

“As for me, I’m just curious,” Alice told herself, and she was glad she was not much like them, nor much like Stella—worldly, selfish Stella.

And she had another life on the far side of Bangalore, in Electronics City. From this vantage point she was able to keep her life at the ashram in perspective.

She had taken the job because she needed money, but she saw it was about more than money: the job kept her clear-sighted. As for her notion that the devotees at the ashram resembled cultists, that insight came to her one night at InfoTech as she saw the employees—her students—making their way from the company cafeteria. They were laughing and talking, comparing notes, whispering among themselves, one or two making calls on their cell phones, all dressed differently, all of them young, all free. They were doing what they wanted. They were independent, being paid, and hoping to get to the next level. They had supervisors, but none of these bosses was an authority figure in any solemn sense. They followed company rules and protocol, but they had no path except their own. They had not forsaken anything—far from it; they were embracing the world and pressing their smiling faces against it, hoping it would smile back.

Alice’s sari worked in both places. It was the perfect disguise. She liked slipping out of the ashram and becoming anonymous on the busy sidewalk, then hailing a taxi. She liked moving from the comfortable decrepitude of Whitefield to the unfinished modernity of Electronics City, which sometimes seemed to her a city already glittering in decay: so many buildings were under construction, the place looked like an elaborate ruin. Often in India you could not tell whether a building was going up or falling down, and the construction sites were a mess, but with tall buildings here and there, the fragments of a crystal city.

And then to InfoTech, which was a compound behind a high wall: the glass tower with tall palm trees in the lobby, and the annex behind it where her classroom was located, and the ugly power plant.

“Good evening, madam. How was your day?”

Yesterday’s lesson had included that catch phrase, as well as the words “catch phrase.”

Some of the others repeated it. They were confident. The quality of poise that Alice had seen in Amitabh when they’d met on the train was a trait that all of them shared. Speaking Hindi, they bowed their heads, they were deferential, they sounded elaborate and oblique and evasive. In Basic English they were direct, even blunt, certainly unsubtle. Basic English was a good telephone language: its edges had been knocked off; it was informal yet helpfully intrusive, demanding a reply.

Amitabh had proven to be the best student, the quickest learner. Any word or phrase he heard became part of his permanent vocabulary.

“It takes very little brains to learn a language,” Alice had told the students. They seemed to resent her saying this, but she insisted on it. “Anyone can do it. Children do it. You just have to make the right noises. But what you say—that’s a different story. So you can be fluent and have nothing to say. I can’t teach you to be good salespeople, but I can give you the tools.”

All of them were altered by speaking American English, given new personalities, but Amitabh was changed the most. On the train he had been a strange figure, with his obsolescent words. India clung to the past, and so for all the new buildings and new money, nothing changed very much. These were the words the East India Company had brought from England hundreds of years before, and still they were spoken and written, however musty they seemed. Perhaps Indians used these archaic words to give themselves dignity, power, or presence, but the effect was comic.

Yet saying “We can ramp up a solution,” Amitabh underwent a personality change. “Or we could go another rowt,” he might add, “depending on whether you have the in-surance. Pick up a pin and make a note of this, or with one click of your mouse we could have a done deal.”

Alice smiled to think that it was all her doing. She herself said “root,” not “rowt,” for “route.” “Ramp up” made her laugh. “Insurance,” and “pin” for “pen,” were southern but spreading. Why not hand them all over, to give these callers credibility? They often dealt with mechanical objects—nuts and bolts, metal sleeves, tubes, and rods—toobs and rahds.

“I’d so appreciate it if you’d share the serial number of your appliance with me. You’ll find it on the underside—that is the bottom of the appliance, stamped on a metal plate. Thank you much.”

And after they’d rehearsed this in a classroom chorus, Alice would say, “The bahdum of the appliance.”

“The bahdum of the appliance!”

“Thank you so very much,” she said.

“Thank you so very much!”

The expression made her laugh, but it was American.

These students, who were known as sales and technical associates, worked for a company that retailed home appliances and power tools. Manning the phones, they needed information from the person on the other end, an American, so that they could find solutions in the user’s manual. Once they found the specific model and the serial number, they would try to solve the problem. They needed polite but exact ways to ask for information.

“And, plus, I’d be very grateful for your attention at this point in time. Kindly turn the appliance so that the power cord is facing away from you. You will be looking at the head of the appliance, which is green in color.”

“And, plus, I’d be very grateful for your attention at this point in time!” they repeated, twanging the words.

Alice surprised herself in finding pleasure teaching informal American English—not essay phrases but telephonic American. “What I’m hearing is that your product might be defective” and “Let’s focus in on the digital messages you see on the screen” and “Have you remembered to activate the On switch?”

Speaking in this way, with Alice’s urging, the students were, after just a few weeks, slightly different people—more confident, like Amitabh, but also friendlier and funnier, more casual, more direct. Alice smiled to think that in teaching American English she was giving them magic formulas to utter: they were getting results on the phone, helping customers, becoming efficient trouble-shooters.

And Miss Ghosh was complimentary, adding more hours to Alice’s schedule and reporting that the employees at the call center were more effective on their jobs.

“We can perhaps revise your contract to reflect a month-to-month contingency,” Miss Ghosh said. “We’re chalking that in.”

Alice agreed. The money helped. Now she was paying her way at the ashram, though they asked for very little. How odd to pass from InfoTech to Sai Baba, from Electronics City to Whitefield, yet had it not been for the elephant in between, she would have been lost.

“Musth?” she inquired of the mahout a week after the visit when she had seen the agitated elephant beating his chained leg against the post, his eye leaking.

The mahout smiled and shook his head, and he gave her to understand—waving his open hand in the air—that he had been wrong, that it had not been musth. Another gesture, pointing ahead—the musth would come later. He welcomed her into the courtyard. The elephant nodded, seeing her, and when she gave him a handful of peanuts, which he crushed and shelled with his trunk, blowing the nuts into his mouth and expelling the husks, she knew he associated her with food, and she brought more and more. She found he especially liked cashews. They had no shells. She brought bags of them, and fed the grateful animal, and felt she had a friend.

The elephant calmed her, kept her centered—another expression she delighted in teaching the employees, who called themselves InfoTechies.

“Aapka naam ke hai?” she asked the mahout one day, having found the sentence in a Hindi phrase book.

“Gopi,” the mahout said.

Alice pointed to the elephant and said, “Aapka naam?”

With a smile, perhaps at the absurdity of the question, the ma hout said, “Hathi.” Alice knew that this was the word “elephant,” for Hathi Pol was the Elephant Gate at the Red Fort in Delhi.

But she was glad that the animal had no name, that he was Elephant, a designation that made him seem a superior example, as though he represented all elephants.

At the ashram, wobbling her head in a knowing way, Priyanka said, “You’re proving to be a dark one.”

Alice stared at her until Priyanka smiled. All she meant, apparently, was that Alice had a secret.

“I’m working,” Alice said. “I don’t want to be a parasite here. And as Swami says, work is worship.”

“There is work, and there is work,” Prithi said, at Priyanka’s side.

She was trying to be mysterious, but Alice knew she disapproved of her leaving the ashram to go to an unnamed job.

“Have you ever had a job?” Alice asked, and when they smiled at the thought of such an absurdity—their families were wealthy: why would they ever need to work?—Alice said, “I’ve had plenty.”

Alice did not say where she worked, but when she hinted that it was in education, this suggestion of uplift and intellect reassured the two women, and they left her alone.

She did not reveal that she passed from the world of speculation and the spirit, and Swami’s talk of dignity and destiny, to the other world of Bangalore, of tech support and skill sets and her students, who dealt with cold calling, hot leads, and diagnostic parameters.

“How can I resolve your issues today?” was a sentence she drilled at InfoTech but not one that Swami would ever have spoken.

“Hey, guess what?” Amitabh said to her as she was going into the class. He did not wait for her to reply. “I’ve been made team leader. They bumped up my pay! Thank you so very much.”

He was so different she hardly recognized him. She was well aware that in having taught Amitabh a new language she had altered his personality. At first she thought he’d changed “in many ways,” and then she came to see that the alteration was profound. When speaking American he was someone else. He bore no resemblance to the awkward, slightly comic, rather oblique, and old-fashioned job seeker she’d met on the train. He was radically changed from the mimic she’d met at Vishnu Hotel and Lunch House, who’d said, This is real positive, seeing you. He was a new man.

Saying, “Hey, can you spare a minute?” he was no longer the fogy. He was a big importuning brute, hovering over her and demanding an answer.

The rest of the class, thirty-seven of them, women and men, had undergone a similar transformation, and she marveled at the changes.

“’Scuse me” was not the same as “I’m sorry,” and “Huh?” or “What?” was not the same as “Pardon?”

It seemed to Alice that Indians were much ruder speaking American. They sounded more impatient. Naturally confrontational, these Indians now had a language to bolster that tendency and no longer had to rely on the subtleties of Hindi. The obliqueness of Indian English, with its goofy charm that created distance, was a thing of the past. The students were without doubt more familiar, even obnoxious in American. Can you please inform me, what is your good name, madam? had become So who am I talking to?

And she was the teacher, the cause of it all!

She had succeeded, because they needed to be direct, with a certain bossy control of language, as techies in the call center. They were effective on the phone only if they were listened to.

If you’d just let me finish was another rasping way of dominating a conversation that Alice had given them.

But Alice was regretful, for in acquiring the new language they had made a weird adaptation: they had become the sort of American that Alice thought she’d left behind back in the States. And Amitabh, the quickest learner, was the best of them, which was to say the worst—her personal creation, a big blorting babu with a salesman’s patter. He was full of gestures—the chopping hand, the wagging finger, even backslapping. In a country where people never touched each other in public, he was all hands—that also was part of speaking American.

“I gotta talk to you,” Amitabh said to Alice one day after the classroom drills. She winced at the way he said it, and she cringed when he tapped her on the shoulder.

The lesson that day was concerned with useful Americanisms for “I don’t understand.” She had drilled them with Sorry, I don’t follow you and You’ve lost me and Mind repeating that? and I’m still in the dark.

Amitabh she knew to be a fundamentally patient and polite young man, but in his American accent, using colloquialisms, he sounded blunt and impatient. Speaking Indian English, he allowed an evasion, but his American always sounded like a non-negotiable demand. It worked on the phone—well, that was the point—but in person it was just boorish.

Now Amitabh was saying, “How about it?”

Alice smiled at his effrontery, the liberty he was taking with her, his teacher; but inwardly she groaned, knowing that she was the one who had given him this language, this new personality.

She said, “It just occurred to me that I don’t think I’ve spent enough time on ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’”

“Hey, whatever,” Amitabh said, flinging his cupped hands in the air.

“No, really, Amitabh. I’m pretty busy.”

She had hoped to stop and feed the elephant—she was sure the elephant was expecting her—but she was overdue at the ashram. She didn’t want anyone to notice her lateness. The devotees, with all the time in the world, were punctual—often pointlessly early, making the twiddling of their thumbs into a virtue, almost a yoga position, as though to abase themselves to Swami, to please him with the obedient surrender of their will.

“There’s one or two things I want to go over,” Amitabh said.

“And you want to do it now?”

“That’s about the size of it,” Amitabh said.

“Maybe someone else can help you.”

“Nope. I’m focusing on yourself.”

“Not ‘yourself.’ ‘I’m focusing on you.’”

“I’m focusing on you.”

“Better. But I wish you wouldn’t.”

It seemed that whenever she was in a hurry or had a deadline in India, she encountered an obstruction: a traffic jam, or the sidewalk was mobbed and slowed her, or someone wanted money, or the office was closed. Or, like today, she wanted to feed the elephant and rush back to the ashram, and here was Amitabh, in her face with a question. But she had given him the convincing accent, and with it, an attitude.

“The thing is,” Amitabh said with the heavy-lidded gaze and torpid smile he affected at his most American, “you said you were kind of interested in seeing the gods at Mahabalipuram.”

He said kinda and gahds.

“Did I say that?”

“You mentioned the elephants on The Penance of Arjuna and the Ganesh temple.”

“I think I said Ganesh seemed the most dependable, maybe the most lovable. And the carvings of elephants there—”

Interrupting her, Amitabh said, “I’ll take that as a yes.”

Alice began to laugh. Had she taught him that? No, but as with other phrases he knew, she might have used it in conversation. He remembered everything.

Using her laughter as a chance to interrupt again, Amitabh said, “I know somebody who knows somebody who got me a couple of tickets on the so-called Super Express to Chennai. You haven’t been there, am I right?”

“Not yet.”

“I figured as much,” he said. “So this is your chance to see the whole thing.”

How did he know that? Perhaps she had mentioned the elephant carvings at Mahabalipuram during one of her classes. She and Stella had spoken about visiting the shrine. One of the attractions of the ashram in Bangalore was that it was half a day by train to Chennai and the coastal temple, the famous bas relief called The Penance of Arjuna, the temples called the Raths, one dedicated to Ganesh, all of it at the edge of the great hot Indian Ocean. That’s on the list, they had said. This was before Zack entered the picture.

“How about a trip there some weekend?”

Alice smiled at his presumption and squirmed away from his reaching hand.

“Sorry.”

“What’s the problem?”

“The problem is that I’m a teacher and you’re a student, and it’s against the rules.”

Wagging his finger and opening his mouth wide to speak, he said, “We’re both employees of InfoTech. I’m team leader, full time, and you’re an associate instructor, part time. Hey, you owe me—I got them to kick some work your way.”

“Listen, I got this job on my own merits, and don’t you forget it.”

“It’s not about that,” he said, and shrugged. “It’s about the tickets.”

“If I wanted to go to Chennai I’d pay my own way.”

She did want to go—he was reminding her of what she had planned to do. But she objected to big smiling Amitabh’s insisting that she go with him.

She said, “Find someone else, please. I’m pretty busy.”

When she got to the stable and indicated to the mahout that she had brought some cashews for the elephant, she could tell that he was preoccupied: he had already fed the elephant, was just humoring her by allowing her to give the animal some nuts. But the elephant at least was grateful—forgiving, glad to see her, still smiling.

She was so late arriving at the ashram that she replayed the whole delaying conversation with Amitabh and began to hate him for his insolence. How about a trip there some weekend? and Got them to kick some work your way infuriated her. He now seemed to her a monster of presumption, without any grace. That night she sat in her room, ignored by Priyanka and Prithi, hating herself.

Two days later at InfoTech, she went to Miss Ghosh to tell her how she felt. Not just her misgivings about the emphasis on the American accent, but her suspicion that with these fast learners, taking on so much language and accent, they were losing something important—some subtlety, an Indian obliqueness and charm, a fundamental courtesy.

Feeling that she was rambling, she then said, “I’m starting to wonder whether I’m any good at this.”

Miss Ghosh said, “I can sincerely offer assurance that you have been a resounding success.”

“I can see I’ve made a difference.”

“It is chalk and cheese, for which I am duly grateful.”

Miss Ghosh’s Indian English and her dated Anglicisms reminded Alice of how the students had once sounded. The archaic and plodding language made Miss Ghosh seem trustworthy and sensible.

“Block Four, I am thinking of,” Alice said. And she was seeing in her mind this rather shy but intelligent roomful of bright young people had become a crowd of noisy Americans.

“You have worked wonders with them. They have developed a high success rate. We have taken them off Home Depot and put them on call lists to obtain service agreements for contractors to sign up with mortgage companies in southern California. The percentage of sign-ups has been phenomenal.”

“I’ve been finding them familiar.”

“That worries you?”

“The rudeness does. Overfamiliar, I mean.”

Miss Ghosh’s head wagged back and forth. “Rudeness will not be tolerated in any manner.”

“Some of them, the men especially, seem presumptuous.”

“How so?”

“The way they talk to me.”

“Not Mr. Amitabh. He has come on very well as your protégé.”

“He’s one of them.”

“He is scheduled for promotion. You would enjoin me to initiate action?”

Alice was turning shed-jeweled over in her mind. “Not really. I can take care of myself.”

Miss Ghosh said, “I think you are being modest about your achievements. I want to show you the results of your efforts.”

No one was allowed to enter the inner part of InfoTech without a pass—a plastic card that was swiped on a magnetic strip beside the doors. Miss Ghosh got a pass for Alice and took her, swiping her way through a succession of doors, to the call center where her class worked, all thirty-seven of them, in cubicles, sitting before computer screens, most of them on the phone.

Alice had never seen the callers at work. The sight was not surprising. Most business offices looked like this: people talking on the phone, tapping on keyboards, watching monitors. The workers all wore headphones and hands-free mikes that made them insectile in appearance—bulgy heads, antennae, a proboscis. But that was a passing thought.

What astonished her, overwhelmed her, and even physically assaulted her were the voices, the jangle of American accents, inquiring, pleading, importuning, apologizing.

“This is Jahn. Jahn Marris. May I speak to the homeowner?”

“Let me repeat that information …”

“I’m gonna need the serial number …”

“The mahdel number. I said, the mahdel number.”

“Are you sure this is our prahduct?”

They sounded like a flock of contending birds. Even the room had a cage-like quality, the employees roosting in their narrow cubicles like squawkers in a hen house. Their sounds were strangely similar in harshness, as though they were all the same species of bird, not hens at all but a roomful of macaws, the teeth and smiles of American voices but hardly human.

Miss Ghosh said, “Why are you smiling?”

“I’m thinking of that line about a dog walking on its hind legs. You don’t care that it’s done well—you’re amazed that it’s done at all.”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” Miss Ghosh said, pursing her lips—she was offended. “But this is your accomplishment.”

Miss Ghosh seemed to mean it as praise, but Alice construed it as sarcasm.

4

The ashram was a retreat from the ambition and worldliness of Electronics City. Electronics City was a refuge from the selfish spiritualism and escapism of the ashram. In his stable on the side street, the elephant was balanced between them, sometimes swaying like a prisoner, now and then the whole of its head and trunk painted in colored chalk, designs of whorls and flowers. One day the elephant wore a brass bell on a heavy cord. When the mahout encouraged Alice to ring it, the elephant nodded and lifted his great head and stamped his feet, his leg as thick as a tree. He knows me, Alice told herself.

And her trips from Swami to elephant to InfoTech, in a taxi or an auto-rickshaw, were a weird reminder of another India, of traffic and skinny cows vying with cars, and people, thousands of them, walking in the road carrying bundles. The whole of it lay in a dust cloud during the day and was eerily lighted at night, the dust-glow like the soft edges of an incomplete dream, lovely to look at, but at times it gagged her.

Hers was a divided life, but shuttling among these places, she thought of the original idea of keeping the ashram as a base and traveling from there to the nearer cities of Mysore and Chennai, just to see the sights. That had been the plan she’d made with Stella. Without Stella, Alice felt that a trip to the coast to see Mahabalipuram would be a pleasure, especially now that she’d found a friend in the elephant. Her only hesitation was that Amitabh had reminded her of it. It annoyed her that he knew of her desire to see the temple by the sea—she was cross with herself for having mentioned it. Probably she had casually said something to someone in the class: “You’re from Chennai? I’ve always wanted to go to Mahabalipuram.” But that was unlike her, because she made a point of never telling anyone the things she yearned for, since those were the very things that must never be revealed; speaking about them was the surest way of destroying them.

This irritated memory convinced her that she must go. She asked Priyanka and Prithi if they wanted to take the trip.

“I’ve never been on an Indian train and I don’t intend to start now,” Priyanka said.

In the same reprimanding tone, Prithi said, “We feel our place is here with Swami.”

That was another disturbing aspect of the ashram, the notion that the female devotees were like old-fashioned wives of Swami.

“I see this trip as a kind of pilgrimage,” Alice said, appealing to their venerating side.

“Isn’t this enough for you?” Prithi said.

“This is your home,” Priyanka said.

Alice said, “I’ll find my own way of going.”

That remark was one she went on regretting, because its brash-ness, she feared, would attract bad luck or misinterpretation, as overconfidence often seemed to. And why? Because such confident certainty helped people remember your words and want to hold them against you.

For reassurance, she paid the elephant a visit, and in the course of fifteen or twenty minutes she emptied a big bag of cashews into the pink nostrils of his trunk, contracting and inquiring and vacuuming the nuts from her hand. He was a marvel, and he gave her strength. No wonder the first Central Asians worshiped great gilded bulls, and the earliest Hindus the smiling elephant Ganesh. A powerful animal was a glory of the natural world and suggested such strength and innocence, such a godlike presence, it seemed to link heaven and earth.

Instead of going to Bangalore Cantonment Station, which was near the ashram, Alice took a taxi to Bangalore City, so as to keep her plans secret. When she showed her passport as an ID at the booking hall, the clerk asked her if she was paying in American dollars.

“I could.”

“Upstairs. International booking for foreigners.”

“What’s the advantage?”

“Quota is there.”

A better seat, in other words. Alice went upstairs, where she found a young bearded man bent over a low table, filling out a form. His backpack was propped against a pillar.

“Do I have to fill out one of those?”

“A docket, yeah.”

Australian, or perhaps a kiwi—she could not tell them apart, though they could identify each other in an instant. She found a form, filled it in with as much information as she could muster, then brought it to the ticket window.

“Me go Chennai in a week or so. One person only.”

“We have four trains daily. Super Express is fastest day train. Which day had you in mind?”

The man’s fluent reply was a reproach to her clumsy and patronizing attempt at broken English.

“Say the twenty-ninth.”

The man tapped his computer and peered at the screen.

“Down-train, departure is seven-thirty in the morning, arrival Chennai Central at two P.M., give or take. What currency are you proferring?”

Alice paid in dollars, a little more than five, which she counted into the man’s hand. She received her change in rupees, with a freshly printed ticket.

“Have a nice day,” the man said.

She smiled at him, grateful for his efficiency, his effort to please, the accent even, which seemed like a favor to her, the man being himself.

But it wasn’t a pleasure trip to the coast, as it had probably seemed to the clerk. She had told Priyanka and Prithi that the journey to Mahabalipuram was more in the nature of a pilgrimage, and so it was. The elephant carvings on the wall and the great rocks at The Penance of Arjuna awaited her. It was not a comfortable summer-camp-like place, protecting her, as the ashram was—Swami in charge, the devotees like cultists and counselors—but rather a quest. She was not looking for shelter and ease; she sought revelation and inner peace. Stella had found an easy option with Zack. The devotees at the ashram were complacent in their piety, as the workers at InfoTech were boringly ambitious. And as for their mimicry—putting their education and achievement to use by making phone calls to the United States, something American housewives and college students had done as part-time workers in the past—these InfoTechies were making a career.

It is not my career, Alice vowed. She was sad that the employees were satisfied with so little, but of course if they asked for more, if they demanded to be fairly paid, they would not have jobs.

She told Miss Ghosh that she would be taking a week off.

Miss Ghosh made an astonished face, her lovely dark eyebrows shooting up. “You have applied for leave?”

“I guess you could say that’s what I’m doing now.”

“This is rather sudden. We must have ample notification.”

Alice smiled at her, gladdened that Miss Ghosh was confounded.

“I am a casual worker, as you said. I can be dropped from the roster at any time, without prior notice. I have no medical benefits. I’m not even paid very well.” She smiled again, to allow what she said to sink in. “And you tell me that I am obliged to give you ample notification?”

“We take a dim view of irregular shed-jeweling practices.”

“It’s called a vacation. I haven’t had one.”

The woman had spoken to her in the tone of a headmistress, and it was odd how quickly the tone had changed from the other day. Just when you thought you had a friend in India, you looked up and saw a rival.

“The normal procedure is that one builds up leave over time.”

“But I’m casual labor, and on the lowest pay scale.”

The woman, Miss Ghosh, merely stared at her.

“So I guess I owe you everything and you owe me nothing.”

“May I remind you that this is a company and not a charitable institution. What if everyone did what you are proposing to do?”

“I don’t believe this. Does this mean you’re refusing me permission to take a week off?”

“What it means,” Miss Ghosh said, picking up a pencil and tapping its point on her green blotter, “is that because of the precipitate nature of your request for departure, I cannot guarantee that your job slot will still be vacant on your return.”

This was the same grateful woman who had said, You have worked wonders. I think you are being modest about your achievements.

“What is your purpose in this holiday?”

“Excuse me?”

“Where are you going, may I ask, and who with?”

Alice said with a hoot of triumph, “With all respect, I don’t understand how that is any of your business.”

And she knew in saying that, in seeing Miss Ghosh’s face darken—the prune-like skin around her sunken eyes, the way Indians revealed their age, and the eyes themselves going cold—that she had burned a bridge.

Things went no better at the ashram. She did not need to seek permission to leave—after all, she was a paying guest. Yet when she broke the news to Priyanka, who, because she spoke Hindi, held a senior position as a go-between and interpreter with the ashram staff, Priyanka became haughty and said in the affected way she used for scolding, “I am afraid that Swami will not be best pleased.”

“It’s only a week.”

“Swami is not happy to see people using his ashram as a hostel, merely coming and going willy-nilly.”

“One week,” Alice said, and thought, I have never heard an American utter the phrase “willy-nilly.”

“But you are requesting checkout.”

“I’m not requesting checkout, as you put it. I just don’t see any point in my paying for my room and my food if I’m not here.”

Priyanka turned sideways in her chair and faced the window. She said, “If you like, I will submit your request. You will have to apply in writing, in triplicate. I will see that your request is followed up. But I’m not hopeful of a positive result.”

“Well, what’s the worst that can happen? I’ll leave my backpack in the storeroom and get it when I come back. And I’ll hope there’s a room available.”

“Ashram cannot assume responsibility for your personal property, as though we are Left Luggage at a station. This is a spiritual community.”

Alice said, “Swami has personal property. People give him money. He has a house. He has a big car. He has another house in Put ta parthi. Are you kidding me?”

Priyanka pursed her lips and said in a stern and reprimanding way, “Swami is our father and teacher. It is not for us to question him. He is the embodiment of love. He is a vessel of mercy.”

“Then obviously such a paragon of virtue won’t have the slightest problem with anything I say or do. He’ll forgive me and give me his blessing.”

As soon as she said it, she realized it sounded too much like a satire of Swami. Priyanka fell silent. Alice knew she’d gone too far.

Another bridge in flames. She went to see her last friend in Bangalore. He looked miserable. His leg dragged at the chain, and then she saw the stain running beneath his eye, gleaming on his rough hide. The mahout, Gopi, clasped his hands and with pitying eyes urged Alice to back away.

She boarded the Super Express to Chennai in a mood of triumphant farewell. Although Priyanka had said it was impossible for her to leave her bag behind, Alice found a devotee who was willing to lock it in a storeroom. She knew Priyanka was being destructive. Perhaps Priyanka saw that she was being left behind. Whose fault was that? She was the one who refused to travel on Indian Railways. Alice was leaving Bangalore, the ashram, and the job at Electronics City, but she was well aware of her slender resources. Eventually she might have to return and negotiate and be humble, but she hoped not.

The uncooperative people of the past few days only strengthened her, as Stella had done. I’ll show them, she thought. I don’t need them.

Though these Indians were difficult, India was not hostile. It was indifferent, a great, hot, uncaring mob of trampling feet in an enormous and blind landscape, damaged people scrambling on ruins. But why should anyone care about me? The country was so huge and crowded that if anyone seemed to care—to try to sell her something, as the hawkers were doing now in the train—it was because she was a foreigner and probably had money.

“Nahi chai hai,” she had learned to say. Leave me alone.

She had come to understand what the solitary long-distance traveler learns after months on the road—that in the course of time a trip stops being an interlude of distractions and detours, pursuing sights, looking for pleasures, and becomes a series of disconnections, giving up comfort, abandoning or being abandoned by friends, passing the time in obscure places, inured to the concept of delay, since the trip itself is a succession of delays.

Solving problems, finding meals, buying new clothes and giving away old ones, getting laundry done, buying tickets, scavenging for cheap hotels, studying maps, being alone but not lonely. It was not about happiness but safety, finding serenity, making discoveries in all this locomotion and an equal serenity when she had a place to roost, like a bird of passage migrating slowly in a sequence of flights. The famous swallows that summered in Siberia, then wintered in the Zambesi Valley: they weren’t taking trips, travel was an aspect of their extraordinary survival; they never lingered anywhere for long, yet the itinerant nature of their lives, their quest for food, had made them strong. The distances they flew were legendary, but their lives were made up of short economical flights to breed and then move on. She wanted to become such a bird.

She smiled, seeing that what had happened by accident to her was a gift, a further ripening of her personality. The jaunts in Europe hadn’t done it, the experience of India had. By degrees she had been moved farther and farther from the life she’d known into a new mode of existence, as though soaring upward and finally, after some buffeting, moving with certainty onward, alone, no longer disturbed, in an orbit of her own, freed from her past, her unreliable friend, even her family, and pleased by the idea that the future would be like this—stimulated by the random lyricism of chance events, of good days and bad days.

Not a journey anymore, not an outing or an interlude, but seeing the world; not taking a trip, not travel with a start and a finish, but living her life. Life was movement.

How had it happened? She guessed that it had come about by being alone, the circumstance Stella had forced upon her. By earning the money she’d needed and, oddly, by being exploited, like most working people on earth. By being disappointed, abandoned, taken for granted. She did not depend on anyone, surely not a man; she had become strong. The elephant was an example—chained because he was powerful, becoming more powerful because he was chained. Released from that chain, he would flap his ears and fly.

Her illnesses had given her heart. Needing a tooth pulled on her way through Turkey, she’d found a woman dentist, and after a period of recovery the problem was solved. She did not tell her family until afterward. The flu she’d picked up in Tblisi, the twisted ankle in Baku, and the bumpy flight to Tashkent, the plane’s germ-laden air, the clammy days in Bukhara, and at last the flight to India—even Stella’s illnesses, which she’d ministered to—all these had given her confidence, because she’d overcome them. You fell sick, you got well, then healthier. You didn’t go home or call Mom because you’d caught a cold. You paused and cured yourself and continued on your way, stronger than before.

This is my life, Alice thought on the train to Chennai, a good life of my own making, and all the decisions are mine. And here is my journey—a five-dollar seat, a ten-dollar hotel, a one-dollar meal. At this rate I can live for a month without working again.

The man with the narrow pushcart sold her lunch: rice, a chapati, some dhal and green beans in a plastic dish, a pot of yogurt, some curried potato—perfect. Thirty rupees, which was seventy-five cents. And eating it, studying her thrift, she smiled and thought, I can go on and on.

She had enough money, the country was poor, the cost of living low. I’ll be fine. She made a mental note to write a postcard home—not a letter but just a few sentences, to say hello and to give no information, to show she did not need them.

This was what travel meant, another way of living your life and being free.

She began to read another Indian novel, much praised, by an Indian woman who lived in the States. Was this merely sentimentality? The book did not speak to her. The problem with it and the others she’d read was that they did not describe the India she had encountered or the people she’d met. Where were these families? The novels described a tidier India, full of ambitions, not the India of pleading beggars or weirdly comic salesmen or people so pompous they were like parodies.

As she was reading, the man in the adjoining seat started a conversation, interrupting her. But he was friendly, a Jain, he said, who would not eat potatoes because they were crawling with living creatures.

“Full of germs and organisms,” he said.

“Not good to eat,” she said, trying to be helpful.

“No—good. But I must not take lives.”

Didn’t want to kill the germs! Where was the book in which he appeared?

“So what do you eat?”

“Pulses. Beans. Curd. Also greens.”

“I get it,” she said.

“And later, when I am a bit older, I shall renounce the world and go hither and thither, barefoot, as my father did in his dotage. Just wandering with no possessions, eschewing the material world.”

“I think I’m doing that now,” Alice said.

The man was corpse-like, almost skeletal, a faster and an abstainer, even now mortifying his flesh. He smiled with too many teeth, a skull’s smile. He didn’t believe her, but that didn’t matter. Another aspect of her freedom was that she didn’t feel a need to explain her life or justify what she’d done.

“My father became a saint,” the man said.

He showed her a snapshot of a gaunt bearded man with a shawl over his narrow shoulders, carrying a walking stick.

“I will do likewise,” he said. “My children will look after my wife.”

Poor woman, Alice thought—why can’t she be a saint? But she smiled and returned to her book, and found that she was unable to hold her head up. The book was a soporific. She was soon asleep in the overheated compartment, the sun pressing through the window, burning one side of her face. She dreamed of sleeping by a fire, the noisy train creating in her dream a rumbling night.

When she woke up the Jain man was gone, and in his place was Amitabh, as strange as if he had been shifted from her dream and was just as shocking and insubstantial.

She made a sound, an involuntary gasp—she couldn’t help it. Amitabh woggled his head with a smile of satisfaction, as though pleased by her discomfort. He sat facing her, looking smug and ludicrous in a white long sleeved shirt and dangling gray necktie.

“How did you get here?”

“Take a guess.” She hated his drawling accent, all the syllables in his nose, and what a nose. “I have friends in lowly places.”

5

He stared at her with the dumb frankness of a big hungry animal contemplating something tiny and edible. His gaze tugged at her face—she felt it on her cheek—his leer lurking first on her upper body, then her legs, lingering at her feet, flashing upward again at her hair, as though she didn’t know. She kept her attention at the window to count the passing stations. She felt with disgust that he was regarding her with his mouth, his moist parted lips, his prominent teeth, the wet tip of his tongue just showing in a witless way.

At their first meeting on the other train, months before, she’d found his bulky body a big hopeless thing, like a sack he stuffed food into. But now she found it absurdly overlarge, even monstrous, refusing to obey her, obstinate and persistent like those eyes, that mouth.

At last, very softly but with unmistakable firmness, she said, “I want you to go away and leave me alone.”

“I am holding a ticket. This is my assigned seat.”

She caught a glimpse of his mouth again, his tongue bulging against his teeth. He was fatter than when she’d last seen him. His size made him seem smug and immovable.

Alice sighed and prayed for a station and was reproached by what she’d thought earlier about being free—mocked, but glad she hadn’t written it in her journal.

“The Sai Baba people don’t like you at all,” he said.

“That’s not true.”

“It is a fact. They believe you’re selfish.”

It stung her, for though she denied it again, she knew there was some truth in what he said.

“You look at India and see people everywhere and it seems like a mob,” he said. “But it’s not—it’s like a family. We know each other. There are no secrets in India. Hey, this isn’t China! Everything is known here. And where a ferringi is concerned it’s all public knowledge.” He was smiling at her, then he opened his mouth to laugh and she got a whiff of the hot stink of his breath. “It’s funny how people come here from overseas—Americans, like you—and don’t realize how we are in constant touch with each other. We’re always talking. You have no idea what we’re saying. Because we speak English so proficiently, you have no need to learn Hindi. We know what’s going on!”

Alice had vowed not to listen to him or to follow his argument, and yet she was intimidated by what he said, understood it in spite of herself.

“Please leave me alone,” she said.

“Gimme a chance.”

She was so disgusted by his saying gimme, she did not reply.

“I can help you.”

She prayed for a station so that she could see how far it was to Chennai.

He read her mind, and that frightened her. He said, “This is Tiruvallur. Twenty more minutes to Chennai. Not far.”

She slid out her train ticket, which she’d used as a bookmark, and palmed it. The arrival time was printed on it, 1445.

“See? I’m right.” He was smiling again. “And I’m going back with you. You can ignore me, but we’ll be sitting right here, day after tomorrow.”

She was suddenly angry. She said, “It’s against the law for private information to be given out. Your friend at the ticket counter is going to be in big trouble.”

“Alice, want to know something? Huh?”

She went hot again with anger. She hated him. She feared she might cry, not from sadness but with frustration at his spoiling something she’d looked forward to, one she paid for. He had no right to force himself on her.

He was still smiling and said, “A lot of people in India think it should be against the law for women to be walking around alone. Wearing shorts! They think it’s immoral.”

“Then they have a problem,” she said, and became self-conscious because she was wearing shorts.

“Alice”—she hated his using her name—“listen, most things that people do in India are against the law. That’s how we survive. We’re too poor to obey the law. You can bribe anyone, you can do anything if you have money. That’s why we hate foreigners. We know they always bend the rules too, just like us, except they always get away with it.”

Against her will he had gotten her attention. She had found herself listening to him and was disgusted by his logic and wanted to stop listening.

“Hey, but not me. I don’t think like that. I know that foreigners have given us a lotta investment. My job, for one. I’m real grateful. I got so much to be thankful for.”

That last sentence, in his American accent, mimicry from one of her own lessons, turned her stomach. She got up and went to the door of the compartment, but when she slid it open, she could not move. A man in a gray uniform was standing inches away from her, the conductor.

“Chennai coming up, madam.”

“This man,” she said, gesturing at Amitabh, but without turning her head, “this man is pestering me.”

“Passenger making nuisance, madam?”

“He is talking to me.”

The conductor spoke in Hindi—perhaps Hindi, how was she to know?—and his tone was familiar and almost friendly. Amitabh replied as though bantering, exactly as he had described earlier, like a family member.

“Making unwelcome advances, madam?”

The conductor seemed unconvinced. It was like a conspiracy.

“No. But I wish he were sitting somewhere else.”

The conductor beckoned with his hole puncher for Amitabh’s ticket, which he examined.

“Passenger is holding valid ticket for this place, madam.”

“Never mind,” she said. She grabbed her bag and squeezed past him. She made her way to the end of the coach, where the vestibule door was open to the trackside.

The clicking of the tracks slowed, the wall of a culvert was visible, and soon the backs of houses, laundry hanging on poles protruding from windows. She heard the echo of clattering wheels and a sudden muffled rumble as the train drew into the station.

She leaned out the door and hopped off before the train came to a stop, and so she stumbled slightly and almost fell, drawing the attention of the bystanders, mostly porters in red shirts and ragged turbans. She hurried down the platform, following the exit signs, to the front of the station, where she was set upon by frantic men.

“Taxi, madam!”

“Taxi, taxi!”

They struggled with each other to be seen by her. They had hot frenzied eyes and red-stained teeth.

“I’m looking for the bus,” she said, pushing through them.

“Where going?

“Hotel, hotel!” another man was chanting.

“Bus. Mahabalipuram.”

“Take taxi, madam. Special price.”

She kept walking through the mob, resolute, yet fearing that someone would touch her.

“Bus is not there,” a voice said into her ear, mocking her. “Bus station is Mylapore side. I take you. Taxi just here.”

“Oh, God.”

She turned to escape this man and saw a crush of men in ragged shirts watching her and blocking the way. The heat here was heavy with humidity. Her clothes clung to her. Her face was already wet with perspiration. She wiped her face with her forearm and was bumped by the man saying “Taxi.”

“Fifty rupees, madam.”

“Forty,” she said.

“Okay, forty-five.”

A dollar. He hurried in a new direction while she followed, the other men falling back. He led her into the glare of the sun, a parking lot, and not to a taxi but an auto-rickshaw. It was too late for her to change her mind—she needed to get away from this station immediately.

She was glad for the breeze in her face, but the driver was talking incomprehensibly and sounding his buzzing horn. She was stifled by the fumes of the other vehicles and jostled by the sudden braking. At last he bumped through a gateway where, among food sellers and people with suitcases, she saw rusted and brightly painted buses parked in bays, facing a low building.

“Bus to Mahabalipuram,” she said to a man sitting on a crate.

The man was eating peanuts out of a twist of newspaper. His mouth was full, his lips flecked. He pointed to a bus.

“Where buy ticket?”

He swallowed and chewed again and said, “Ticket on bus.”

She walked quickly to the bus he had indicated and was relieved when she found a seat. Within minutes—anxious minutes for her—the bus filled with passengers carrying bags, some men with children in their arms, weary-looking women in saris, boys in baseball caps. Sooner than she expected, the bus shuddered and reversed out of its bay, slowly turned, and swayed and banged through the gateway.

The bus was overheated and made of loud metal, and when its sides flapped and clanked it seemed like a big old-fashioned oven with people cooking inside it, too many of them pressed together, sputtering and dripping. Alice’s discomfort verged on physical pain, but the sight of pedestrians out the window jostling on the sidewalk, the density of traffic, made her glad she was inside this contraption rather than at risk in the street. All she had to do was relax and practice the yoga breathing she’d learned at the ashram, and before long—a couple of hours, a woman told her—she’d be at the temple by the sea, safe among elephants.

“You are going to …?” the same woman asked, in the open-ended way of the Indian question.

“Mahabalipuram,” she said. “Elephants.”

The woman smiled, and Alice was reassured. She was happier among women and here one was beside her, one in front, one squatting in the aisle; she felt their soft maternal bodies as protective. She closed her eyes, inhaled deeply, held her breath for a count of five, exhaled, and breathed in again. The bus stopped and started, toppling each time, the scrape of the brakes, the sucking of the doors opening and closing, smacking the rubber on the frame—all that was like breathing too, the labored breathing of a big overworked machine. More people got on, few got off. The bus grew even hotter and now it was lumbering through a residential district, the dirty windows dazzled by the sun that shot from between the old buildings, honking every few seconds, and still Alice breathed and kept her eyes shut and was aware of the sun from the way it reddened her eyelids, and the warmth on her face gave her a sunbather’s fixed smile.

When the bus began to roll on a straight road, the engine coughing, its tin plates flapping at its sides, somehow this unimpeded stretch induced her to open her eyes. She took another breath, looked up forward, and saw Amitabh. He was holding a clear plastic bottle and swigging from it.

“Wadda?” he said.

Beyond the shock of seeing him, she was insulted and even felt violated by his accent. Now she hated hearing him speak English in that exaggerated American way. The very nuances she hated most were the ones she had taught him. In Bangalore she had learned that the most irritating traits of a person are the imitative ones, especially those you had yourself, when you looked at someone and saw a distorted image of yourself—the misery of teachers.

The bus was full. Amitabh, so topheavy, gasping in his white wilted long-sleeved shirt, could hardly stand, and although he was speaking in his grating accent, his voice was mostly drowned out by the babble of the passengers, two screaming babies, the laboring of the bus’s chugging engine, its oddly bronchial brakes, the banging of its loose metal doors, and somewhere at the back the repeated clatter of a metal flap that made the bus sound like a tin box shaking down the road.

Most of the time Amitabh moved his mouth and smiled, but Alice heard little except the din of the bus, and there was something smothering, deadening to her senses, in the smell of the sweating humans on board.

Now, outside the bus, every bit of the roadside looked safe to her—the shop fronts, the bungalows with their verandas, the rickshaws, the taxis, the fields of wheat. But if she got off at any of these stops—which were less and less frequent—he would get off too, and as long as she stayed on board, so would he.

Protected by the women around her, she briefly drowsed, only to awaken—jerking upright, as though someone had slapped her—as the bus came to a halt, huffing, its abrupt silence as provocative as its noise had been. So soon? Her fears of arrival made her shrink in her seat.

“Are we there?” she asked the woman next to her.

The woman clawed at her long trailing braid and made no reply.

“Pit stop,” Amitabh said.

He was staring at her from between a crush of passengers, his fat face tightened in a smile, his tie rucked up and twisted against a child’s damp head.

Because he was standing in the aisle, he was among the first to get off. Alice waited until everyone else had left and then she did some yoga breathing and stepped out.

A crowd of people were pushing against one another at the counter of a roadside shop, reaching to be served, and some drifted away holding bottles and plastic cups. Alice saw a hunkered-down woman breastfeeding a baby. She envied her concentration, her secure posture close to the ground, and had a great longing to change places with her. The woman had flung the shawl of her sari over her head, so that it covered her and sheltered the baby, and she squatted in this silken tent of serenity, unseen by anyone else.

Alice was afraid to look for Amitabh—she didn’t want to see his face. But nearer the shop, against her will, she got a glimpse of the fat man holding two bottles of brown soda, and she knew that one was for her.

He put them on the counter to rummage in his pocket for money. As soon as he turned aside and took his eyes off her, Alice trotted to the far side of the bus, concealing herself from him.

A man leaning against the bus—this was the shady side—put his face up to hers, startling her. He had wild hair and a torn, fluttering, untucked shirt.

“Taxi?”

“Mahabalipuram,” she said. “How much?”

His face went waxen in calculation, mute yet tremulous, his mouth pressed shut, the numbers vibrant on his tongue. Alice knew that look: an Indian guessing not at the value of something but at what a foreigner would pay.

“Three hundred rupees only,” he said.

“One hundred,” she said.

“Cost of petrol,” the man said, his voice becoming a whine as he bent over, assuming an insincere groveling posture to plead.

“Okay, let’s go,” she said, and thought: I’m stupid, trying to escape and bargain at the same time. The man looked crushed. She said, “Let’s go,” and gestured, and he pointed to his parked car.

The man was wiggling the key and tramping on the accelerator as she got into the back seat. There was more room in front but she wanted some distance from this wild-haired driver. The car stank and the seats were torn; it was a jalopy. She prayed for it to start. After a gargling and clacking hesitation there was a powerful swelling of engine blat, and the man pulled at the steering wheel with his skinny hands.

She did not dare to look back until they were on the road and traveling fast. Then she risked it and saw the shop, the parked bus, the gathering of passengers in a clearing of yellow dust. The road was empty and straight, lined by tufts of discolored grass.

“How far is it?” she asked.

“Far is it,” the man said.

“How many miles—kilometers?”

“Kilometers,” the man said.

He had numbers, he knew “cost of petrol,” but apart from that he had no English. He was simply barking back her own words.

“Mahabalipuram?” she asked.

“Mahabalipuram.”

But the speed made her hopeful, and the clear road, and the fact that she had slipped away from Amitabh. And she did not really need to know the distance. She had tried to speak to the driver mainly to assess his friendliness, sending out a signal, hoping it would resonate.

“You live here?” she asked, trying again.

He did not reply. He was nodding his head, pretending he had understood. She saw a small portrait of Sai Baba fixed to the dashboard, encircled by plastic flowers.

“Sai Baba,” she said. “Me go darshan—Sai Baba—Bangalore.”

Even this broken English didn’t work, and now she saw why. He was talking on a cell phone, holding it against his right ear, seeming to conceal it. He was mumbling in a language she took to be Tamil, rolling, bubbling words, like someone talking under a fizzing spigot in a narrow shower stall.

“Who are you talking to?”

He slipped the phone into his shirt pocket and said confidently, “You talking to.”

He seemed dim but he was driving fast, with conviction. The car was not a taxi, just a rattletrap with ripped seats, but it was moving. The man’s indifference to her, the way he was holding the wheel, caused Alice to consider her options. It would be foolish to continue on the road to Mahabalipuram. Amitabh would find her there. Give up The Penance of Arjuna, she thought. Never mind the elephants, the animals, the grottoes, the temples, the carvings. Only one thing mattered.

“Stop,” she said. “Stop! Do you understand?”

He kept driving. He seemed to be smiling in concentration.

“I want you to turn back.”

Nothing.

“Go Chennai. I pay you. Three hundred. Please stop.”

Then he turned and looked Alice in the face—or was he looking behind her, out the back window?

“Turn back now,” she said sharply, and thumped the broken seat.

The man did not react at once, but after a few moments, the time it took Alice to draw three long yoga breaths, he slowed down and veered to the side, struggling to control the car, his skinny arms fighting the shakes of the steering wheel, the tires bumping on the large loose stones on the shoulder of the main road.

He slowed some more, toppling in thick tussocks of grass past a sign advertising a brand of toothpaste. Then he hung a hard left into a road that Alice saw only when he entered it. At last, she thought. The road was pinched by high grass on either side, a strip of grass in the middle, a country lane.

“Where are we going?”

He said something, gobbling, seeming to reprimand her: in this out-of-the-way place he had taken charge. They all seemed to do it when she least expected it, not just Indian men, but Priyanka too. They would chatter and then at once they would go dark; they’d turn, they’d become strangers, and she’d think, Who are you? and become angry and frightened. It had just happened again.

And then, up ahead, she saw the big gray creature, like a piece of bizarre architecture, but moving, becoming a bizarre vehicle—the hindquarters of an elephant, filling the road. Amazing—she smiled and relaxed. It seemed a benign presence. The taxi driver slowed behind it and kept his distance. He could not pass it, did not even honk his horn, just drove at the slow speed of the elephant’s deliberate plodding pace as it dropped its round feet on the road, big feet, yet it picked its way forward with grace.

Alice was happy. She smiled at the great slow creature and sat back, watching the flicking of its tail, the brush, the wide dusty rump.

The elephant helped her see that the daylight was waning, the sky was blue-green but the road was in darkness, the sun setting behind this tall grass.

The driver spoke a word, it sounded like “bund,” and he reacted, twisting in his seat as though he’d heard something that was not audible to her. This had happened to her elsewhere in India, an Indian hearing something, saying “Listen,” making her feel deaf because she heard nothing and only felt foreign.

She was still looking hard at the elephant when the driver stopped the car and switched off the engine.

“Where are we?” she said, and suddenly overcome by apprehension, she got out of the car and slammed the door. She gave him the money she had been clutching. “I don’t trust you!”

The driver was not perturbed. He tucked the money in his shirt pocket with the phone. He was not even looking at her. He was looking past her, at the road they’d just traveled down. She saw the elephant had gone, and felt a pang, as if it had not walked away but had simply vanished, evaporated from her sight. She walked a little, heard a sound, and saw the car.

From his window, the man spoke the word again, and she realized he was saying “Husband.”

He started the car, jerked it into the center of the road, and drove away in the direction the elephant had gone.

The other car was reversing, but someone had gotten out of it, Amitabh, now slowly advancing on her, his white sleeves gleaming in the shadowy dusk. He seemed to fill the road, as the elephant had done.

“Hey, would I hurt you?” he said.

6

She had woken, and in the bad light of the dirty littered room in which she sat wrapped in a gown, the mustached man was seated across the desk from her. He was holding a dark, brittle-looking piece of paper, thick with smudged blue handwriting, like an ancient document from a vault. But she recognized it as a carbon copy of her statement, which she had dictated to the policeman earlier in the evening, after the nurse had examined her. She was cold, she was sad, she was someone else now.

“Just one or two questions,” the man said.

Alice sat feeling indistinct, part of her body was missing, as if she’d suffered an amputation—a portion of her mind, her torso where she’d been touched, the arm she’d used to defend herself. She was a shattered remnant of herself. The rest of her had been shivered away in the darkness, and she sensed those missing parts of herself as phantoms, numbed and useless, mere suggestions of physicality, as amputees spoke of a cut-off limb. She remembered his fingers and his face and she felt like wreckage.

Yet this man was smiling at her as though she were still whole.

“You say here that the alleged assailant is known to you?”

“He was in my class in Bangalore. A call-center English class.”

“And you know him by name?”

“He was my student.”

“He was traveling with you?”

“Following me,” Alice said. “Stalking me.”

“When did you realize this happenstance?”

“As I said.” She yawned, she was weary, she had written it all. “On the train from Bangalore.”

“Yet you persisted traveling in his company?”

Alice said, “You said one or two questions.”

“We need to clear up these discrepancies.”

“What discrepancies? He stalked me. He chased me. He was on the bus. When I tried to get away he somehow got the phone number of the taxi I was in and he followed me.”

“You provided no details of the taxi.”

“He must have told the taxi driver to leave. I didn’t see the license plate.”

“Yet you’re sure you saw his taxi?”

“Of course. How else could he have gotten there?”

“You might have arrived together. It is rather a remote spot.”

“His taxi followed mine,” Alice said.

The man’s obstinate finger was poking the paper. “All taxis in this state are required to be in possession of a numbered disk, displayed on dashboard, also on rear of car. Can be on the wing. You have omitted this detail.”

“I was frightened. It was dark. I didn’t see anything. I don’t understand why you’re asking me these questions.”

But she did understand. The man was insinuating that she was lying, that she had traveled with Amitabh and, this being India, she being foreign, was behaving in a way no Indian woman would dare to.

“My statement is the truth.”

“But there are certain significant omissions. Full and complete statement is required.”

“What omissions?”

He held the flimsy page, trembling in his slender fingers. He said, “Relationship to accused, first of all, is omitted. Traveling ar rangement is omitted. What taxi or taxis? You say you were going to Mahabalipuram, yet you were found in Chingleput district.”

The man looked up at her. He seemed too young to be so intrusive and so severe.

“An Indian woman would not travel alone with someone she distrusted. She would not travel alone, full stop.”

“Haven’t you noticed,” Alice said, intending to be insulting, “I’m not an Indian.”

The man adjusted his posture, shuffled papers on the desk, found one he wanted, studied it, tapped one line, and said, “We have the results of your medical examination. It is noted that there is no sign of injury.”

“He raped me,” Alice said, choking slightly on the word, on the verge of tears.

“Yes, I see you assert that here,” the man said.

“He used his finger,” she said softly.

The man made a note and frowned. He said blandly, “Unless and until that is proven, this is an open case.”

“When are you going to arrest him?”

“When we have some inkling of his whereabouts we will do so with dispatch.”

“‘Inkling of his whereabouts’? What’s the matter with you? I told you he has a return ticket to Bangalore,” she said, sitting forward, trying to shout. “I’ve already written my statement and I’ve answered those questions.”

“We have incomplete knowledge,” the man said, stonewalling.

“I spoke to your people!”

The man said mildly, as if to a child, “When was the first time you met this man?”

Alice did not want to answer, but the man was attentive, his eager patience unnerved her, and the truth would come out in any case. There was no point in withholding what in time would become well known.

“I met him on the train to Bangalore in March.”

“How did you meet him? Were you introduced?”

“He introduced himself.”

“Just like that. ‘Hello, how are you?’” The man had begun to write on a pad.

“He was in my compartment.”

“What class of travel.”

“Sleeping compartment.”

“First-class AC?” he asked, still writing, but faster than before, scribbling as he asked questions distractedly, breathing hard, his head tilted toward the privacy curtain at the side of the room, as though he were listening not to Alice but to something else. Or perhaps calculating, as they all seemed to do.

“So you have enjoyed the acquaintance of the named person for some three-over months?”

Alice decided to say nothing. Everything she said seemed to incriminate her, as if she were guilty of allowing it all to happen.

But fury overcame her, and she said, “Look. I was traveling on my own. He followed me. He had somehow found out my plans. You people seem to have ways of getting all sorts of private information.”

The man cocked his head and then shoved at the desk and stood up.

Alice said, “When do I get a chance to tell my side of the story?”

“Excuse me,” the man said, seeming to go meek. He crumpled the statement into his canvas briefcase and looked at once very stern and very frightened, as though emboldening himself—yet indifferent to Alice’s watching him. He screwed up his face and squinted, like a stiffened animal in the dark.

“Listen to me!” she said, her voice breaking.

But he had become an utter stranger in just seconds. He turned his back on her and pushed the curtain aside and was gone. She did not even hear the sound of his footsteps, a noiseless departure, another vanishing. From being a big persuasive presence he had become small and finally left without a sound, swallowed up.

That was what was most foreign to her now, the way people came and went, as they did in dreams. Indian vanishings, of which the elephant blocking the road had been an example. If the elephant hadn’t been there, she’d have gotten away. Always it seemed insulting and disorienting, with dream-like irrationality—people showing up when she least expected them, people dropping from view.

Alice felt cheated again. It was worse than an interruption. It was first an intrusion, and to make it worse, the man had turned his back on her and seemed to flee—another abandonment.

She slumped and put her head in her hands, heavy, bereft, sorrowful in the empty room. She had never felt farther from home, and the India she had known slipped away and became not just unfamiliar—ruins and shadows—but hostile.

When she heard a sound, the rings on the curtain rod scraping again, she lifted her head and was startled to see a woman, a nurse, the one she’d spoken to earlier, and behind this woman a man in a khaki uniform. They stood just outside the privacy curtain, holding it open, peering in, the man holding a briefcase.

“Are you all right?” the woman asked.

“No,” Alice said.

“The inspector wishes to speak with you.”

“It won’t take long,” the man said.

Alice saw on the man’s face a look of pain. He seemed awkward, even sheepish, unwilling to step beyond the curtain.

“All you’ve got are questions,” Alice said. “How about some answers?”

“I will be as quick as I can,” the man said. He entered the room and took a seat at the table while the nurse stood to one side. He opened his briefcase and slipped out a pad and pen. He said, “We have requested a fast-track hearing. It can be held in Bangalore, in the first instance, if you approve.” He clicked the pen and stuck out his elbow, as left-handers often did. “How well did you know the accused?”

“I’ve just told you,” Alice said.

“I’m sorry, I don’t follow.”

“I told your man.”

“What man do you mean?”

“The other policeman. The young one. That just left here.” The inspector turned accusingly to the nurse and said something fierce—it might even have been English, it certainly was a reprimand, but it remained incoherent to Alice. Yet she could tell that something had gone wrong, that there was tension between the policeman and the nurse in which her own misfortune, her pain, did not figure.

“I don’t get it,” Alice said.

“We have no other man. I am assigned to your case.”

“So who was I talking to just a little while ago?”

The policeman had been facing away from her all this time, staring at the serious face of the nurse. He was still looking at the nurse, and now she looked appalled.

He said, “Let’s pray it wasn’t one of these journalists.”

The story appeared the next day in the Hindustan Times. The policeman who accompanied her to the station handed the paper to her, folded, but why would he give it to her if there was nothing in it? Alice saw the story on the third page and began to read it. When she came across “I met him in February on the train in my compartment,” she averted her eyes and turned the paper over on the seat so that she would not have to look at the headline: “Alleged American Rape Victim Knew Her Assailant.”

She sat in the Ladies Only coach with three other women and two children. One of the children was a chubby boisterous boy who tugged at his mother’s sari and then climbed onto a seat and jumped noisily to the floor, clamoring for attention. Alice disliked the fat boy and disliked the woman for her placidity. The big pale mothers indulged the spoiled child, taking no notice of the small girl, who sat wincing at the boy’s disruption.

Only a few days before, Alice would have struck up a conversation with the women; she had believed such women to be strong, holding India together. She now saw them as complacent and hypocritical, bullies and nags to everyone except their sons, allowing them to rule. My mother calls me Bapu. It means Dad.

These women had betrayed her. That selfish pushy boy would grow up to be a tormentor.

“Katapadi,” one woman said, seeing a station platform appear at the window.

Skinny sharp-voiced food sellers hovered at the open windows, calling to the women, holding teapots and trays of nuts and cups of ice cream.

The fat boy wailed for an ice cream and got one. He had a devilish face, and though he could not have been older than six or seven he seemed to Alice like a wolf child, with a shadow of hair on his cheeks, a low-growing hairline on his forehead, and a slight mustache. His fingernails were painted pink—Alice could see that they were chipped. His legs were hairy too. He sat down with a thump next to her and poked her with his elbow.

Alice felt violent toward him and wanted to poke him back, slap his hairy cheek. She said, “You’re dripping ice cream on my bag!”

She knew she’d made an ugly face and shouted for effect, to insult the mother. The boy scowled at her and lapped at his ice cream.

“Rupesh,” his mother said, calling him wearily.

He went to his mother, who nuzzled him and hugged him. The other women cooed, as if to soothe the boy.

The women were opposite Alice in the six-seat compartment, occupying the three seats on one side, the children dawdling at their legs. And they stayed there, facing Alice in the corner seat on her side, two empty seats beside her. An invisible frontier ran down the compartment, not a racial barrier, Alice told herself, but a cultural divide.

She crouched, feeling wounded, hating the journey, sorrowing, feeling like an amputee. A cleaner entered the compartment with a whiskbroom and a sack for rubbish. The Indian women tossed in the ice cream wrappers and used tissues and orange peels. Alice twisted the Hindustan Times and tucked it into the sack of garbage.

Later, Alice was grateful for the women ignoring her. She slept soundly for short periods and was awakened only when the train screeched and halted at stations. Then she dozed again as the train continued into the afternoon.

She said nothing when the women and children pulled out their bags, turned their backs on her, and got off at a station where more boys were shouting. Aching with fatigue, she found she could not wake up properly, so she locked the door by working the bolt. She pulled down the tin shutter and slept deeply for a period of time, an hour perhaps, and was jolted awake—alarmed, gasping—when the door slid open.

“Bangalore City,” the conductor said.

She went tentatively to the ashram, where she was welcomed in a subdued way, gently, almost obliquely, as though she were fragile and had been injured. Alice thought, It shows on my face, it shows in the way I walk, in my whispers.

All topics unrelated to the assault seemed frivolous, and only Priyanka and Prithi dared ask about her experience. They seemed excited by her story. While seeming to commiserate, they wanted details.

“I have to see Swami,” Alice said, as a way of deflecting their curiosity.

In the past he had rebuffed her, but now it seemed that he too knew what had happened to her. Perhaps everyone knew. The devotee at Swami’s gate did not ask her name. He nodded, made a namaste with his hands, and said, “You may pass.”

Touching Swami’s feet, Alice knelt before him. He placed his fingers on her head covering and murmured prayers. He was smiling when she sat back and clasped her hands.

“Something terrible happened to me,” she said.

Swami was still smiling, his head slightly inclined, one of his familiar expressions, as though to indicate that he knew something she didn’t.

“My dear child. You have seen devotees walking on hot coals?”

She nodded. Early on, they’d arranged it. She had been invited. The fire walkers had made an elaborate business of it, praying before they set forth on the glowing coals, chanting as they hurried across, giving thanks when they were done.

“Their hearts were not burned. Feet only.”

But it was some sort of trick. Fire walking was a con. There was a scientific explanation for not scorching your foot soles, nothing to do with heat. Anyone who was sufficiently confident could do it without getting burned. And Swami was using this as a parallel for that fat bastard trapping her and dragging her into the field?

“Swami, I’m sorry, I don’t see the point.”

“You must separate body from mind. Mind must meditate and find peace. Body must be occupied with work. That way you will overcome tribulation.”

“I was injured,” Alice said.

“Injury is in mind. Rid mind of injury. Prayer will do it. Work also.”

“Have you ever seen a big suffering elephant chained to a post? That’s how I feel.”

“That is a good thought. But take it further. What if elephant keeps very still?” He held his hand before her to represent the standing elephant. “If elephant is still, elephant is free, not chained to post. Elephant is Lambodar.”

“Lambodar?” she asked.

“One with Protruding Belly. Ganesh.”

Swami twinkled at his own neat piece of wisdom, as though Alice had handed him a limp ribbon and he’d tied it into a bow. He was so pleased with himself he began praying over her, using his hands, murmuring sticky-sounding words.

“That is Ganesh mahamantra,” he said. “It comes from Ganapati Upanishad. It is used for beginning anything new in your life. If hindrances are there, hindrances are removed, and you can be crowned with success.”

Alice bowed and thanked him, she touched the hem of his orange tunic, and, still bowing, she backed away.

Crap, she thought.

“Swami is the answer,” Priyanka said. “Always, Swami sees to the heart of things.”

Alice agreed because she did not want to be cast out, but what Swami had said seemed like a libel on her only friend, the creature at the stable, who was not Ganesh at all, not a god, but hathi, just a nameless elephant trapped by a chain.

She visited the elephant. At a vegetable stall on the way, she bought a bag of carrots. The elephant wrapped the tender end of his trunk around each carrot and fed himself, crunching them, working his lower jaw, extending his trunk for more.

The mahout allowed her to spray him with the hose and, cooled by the water, the elephant danced back and forth, tugging his chain. If elephant is still, elephant is free, not chained, Swami had said. But the truth was that such an elephant, big and restless, was never still. It was always conscious of the grip on its leg, the clank of the chain, so what Swami had said was meaningless. The elephant could only be free without the shackle.

Alice stood, beholding the elephant’s eye, which was like the eye of a separate being, the eye of someone inhabiting the elephant’s body, someone like Alice herself. The words trailed in her head: I will never be the woman I was before—horrible, that fat man has changed me forever. She sorrowed for the innocent woman, trapped and frightened on that narrow Indian road.

“No, no,” the mahout cried out, rushing toward her, appealing to her, looking tormented and helpless, because for the first time since the awful thing had happened, Alice had begun to cry.

7

She had not gone back to Electronics City, had not even called Miss Ghosh. She knew she’d be unwelcome. She was stained, scandalous, an embarrassment, the subject of an investigation. But what did “fast track” mean? There was no sign of a hearing, only more paperwork—visa questions, a reprimand, and a warning because she’d put down that she was a teacher at InfoTech and she had no work permit. More official forms were sent, with detailed questions about places she’d visited, people she knew, Indian citizens she’d met—names, addresses, specific locations. Attach additional sheets if necessary. She was under suspicion. She had come to India to be free, and now she was under scrutiny and hated it. Everyone knew, of course they did. Only the elephant and his mahout still smiled at her as before.

She wondered, Should I leave? But she did nothing. The weather had grown hot, no rains yet, dust hanging in the air, particles of it on her lips. She languished in the soupy lukewarm air of the ashram, where time was so clouded it was measured in months.

Miss Ghosh’s secretary called her on the ashram’s emergency number, the only one she had, and passed on Miss Ghosh’s complaint that intrusive strangers were trying to get in touch with Alice. People who claimed they wanted to help were wasting InfoTech’s time. You couldn’t be more despised in India than being told by someone’s secretary you were a problem. Letters and printed e-mail messages were forwarded in bundles to the ashram. Using a phone card and the phone across the road at the ramshackle shop, Alice responded to the offers of help.

“We must meet you face to face,” a woman said.

Alice agreed, but regretted it as soon as they showed up, three of them. One was the speaker, the others were silent, supporting her on either side. Alice met them just inside the ashram gate, the public entrance near the shoe rack, where there were chairs.

The two silent women stood; the woman who spoke sat on a white molded-plastic chair. Like the others she carried a basket. She had a mean face and sunken, mask-like eyes, and even trying to talk in a benign way she sounded like a scold, saying, “You are new to India. We are taught to be kind to strangers. We need you to bear with us.”

People offering favors in India always were in need of greater favors. No charity ever, only salesmanship.

The woman said, “The smallest misstep can destroy a whole future. An elephant sees a mouse and it rears up and kills its keeper and tramples passersby.”

Alice said, “What happened wasn’t a misstep. It was the worst thing that has ever happened to me.”

“I am not thinking of your future. The boy will be ruined.”

“I’m ruined,” Alice said. She thought, Oh, God, don’t cry again, and could not speak.

“You think that because you are young. Worse things will hap pen to you. Death will visit you and your family. This episode will seem like nothing.”

“It was like death. What do you know?”

“You are strong and quite young. You can go on living your life. You can go home.”

“I’m staying. I’m fighting this.”

Her face crumpling, the speaking woman began quietly to weep. The other women consoled her. The one on the right, nearest to Alice, said, “This is Auntie. Her mother is sick. She has taken to her bed.”

“A young man is being destroyed,” the woman on the left said, while still the aunt wept.

Alice looked nervously behind her, and seeing that no one from the ashram was watching, she said, “Don’t you see? He tried to destroy me.”

“But he failed.”

Alice lowered her head and whispered harshly, “He raped me.”

“You are able to walk away,” the woman on the right said. Now her stern tone was apparent. “He will be disgraced.”

“I’m disgraced. You’re women—why don’t you see it?”

The aunt recovered and dabbed her eyes. “We are begging you.”

Then Alice found herself weeping with the woman, unable to speak.

The next day a man visited. He was kindly, with a black mustache that hid his mouth. He twisted its ends as he spoke, giving the big thing tips like tails. He wore a shirt and tie and a pale silk suit, and in that terrible heat did not look hot.

“I represent the family of the accused,” he said. He handed Alice his card. He looked absurd on the white plastic chair, but it was the only place on the grounds where Alice could meet someone without being overheard. It was bad enough being seen like this. No one dressed that way ever visited the ashram.

Alice glanced at the card, the man’s long name, the word “Solicitors.” The man took some papers out of his briefcase.

“This is a release form. Your signature is required.”

“I don’t get it.”

“It is the wisest course. This way, no one gets dragged through the mud.” He tugged and twisted his mustache tips.

“I don’t care. I want him on trial, facing the charges.”

“Miss. Listen to me. You will also be on trial. Everything will be known about you. A thorough investigation will be undertaken and all the facts of the case made public.”

Another wordy Indian trying to sell her his opinion. She said, “So what?”

“In some instances, unpleasant facts.”

“I’m not signing.”

With one hand twisting a mustache tip, and seeming confident, the man said, “For example, in Mumbai, it has been established that you entertained a young American chap in your hotel room.”

“That’s a lie.”

“We are in receipt of the desk clerk’s signature on a sworn affidavit.”

It had to be Stella, entertaining Zack, but Alice said nothing.

“We are well aware that you have limited funds at your disposal. The family is prepared to compensate you. This can be negotiated.”

Alice said, “Please leave.”

“A young man’s life is in your hands.”

She wanted to say, “Fuck him,” but instead she said, “Not in my hands, unfortunately. In the hands of the law. I demand justice.”

A trait she deplored in herself was lapsing into pomposity when trying to control her anger. But that was preferable to the obscenity, which she was inclined to scream into the man’s face.

“This charge is like death in India. I assure you the family will fight it passionately. You may regret that you pushed so hard for justice, young lady.”

“You’re threatening me,” Alice said, rising from her chair, a shriek entering her voice. “In this holy place!”

The man stood up then and, with a frown of regret, thanked her. He walked to the gate, where his car was waiting.

Priyanka found her, dried tears staining her face, and spoke to her as though to soothe her, yet Alice heard what she said as scolding.

More people visited, offering conciliation, mediation, money; also making solemn promises, pleading with her to drop the case. One of them, a man in a homespun cotton jacket and a Nehru cap, left an envelope behind, a plane ticket to Delhi inside it. There was no return address on the envelope, so she couldn’t send it back. She tucked it into her journal. She had done no writing since the day of the incident. She did not have the words to describe what had happened to her.

After the first wave of people, begging and pleading, after a visit from another lawyer—this one also had a document he wanted her to sign—there ensued several more waves of visitors, each less friendly than the last. Apart from the lawyers, the imploring people had come in shuffling groups, women mostly, weepers and grovelers. The darker, unpleasant ones came singly. They were younger and tougher. They claimed to know all about her.

“We’ve been in touch with your friends,” one man said.

Alice said nothing. Was he talking about Stella, or was he fishing?

“We’ve taken statements from them.”

This was a young man in a blue shirt and brown slacks and sandals, with dangerous-looking hands.

“I think you’re trying to frighten me.”

“If you’re smart you will be frightened. Take my advice. Drop this and go home.”

Alice was thinking how well these people spoke English, with diabolical accuracy, always with a rejoinder, and all of them were on Amitabh’s side.

The young man left glowering because Alice had fallen silent. Another man came the next day, trying to wear her down. He was older, better dressed, a gold chain around his neck, a gold bracelet on his wrist, an expensive watch.

“You’re way out of your depth. You’re lucky nothing has happened to you so far. Some of these blighters want to make a move. I don’t know how long I can keep them away.”

His manner was so persuasive it roused her. She said, “What do you mean?”

“I mean, maybe prevent you from testifying at a trial. Maybe prevent you from going anywhere.”

This was a direct threat to her life. Yet, like the others, he left her abruptly, first handing over his business card.

Some days passed, days of peace; she had almost forgotten the earlier visits. And then two men came. They said they had a message. They looked fierce. The hot weather, the humidity, their sweating faces made them look villainous.

“You should be afraid,” one of them said.

He was nudged aside by his friend, who said, “I am going to put this very plainly. Amitabh is betrothed. A match has been found. It’s a good arrangement. But if this trial goes forward he is ruined. The other family will withdraw—no marriage.”

“Your fault,” the first man said.

Alice said, “You want me to drop the charges so that Amitabh can go ahead with his arranged marriage?”

“That’s the idea.”

“Does this woman know he’s a rapist?”

“The charge will never be proven, so why waste your time?”

“That poor woman,” Alice said. And without her being conscious of their leaving, the men simply disappeared.

Priyanka was waiting for her at the far side of the pavilion, near the statue of Saraswati balancing her sitar. She took Alice’s damp and anxious hands in hers and said, “We’re concerned that you have so many visitors.”

“I can’t help it. I don’t invite them.”

Priyanka released Alice’s hands and took a step back, a self-conscious move, like a formal dance step, as though she’d rehearsed this.

“The committee has met and decided”—she tilted her head, another affectation—“with regret, that you’ll have to leave.”

“When?”

“Forthwith. Oh, we can suggest some other places where you’d be comfortable.”

Alice had begun to walk away. Without turning, she said, “I don’t want you to know where I’m going.”

Her rucksack that had been such an awkward burden months ago was now much smaller. She’d given away all her cold-weather clothes. She had her saris, some T-shirts, the shawls. Since the assault, she had become obsessed with covering herself.

There was one place for her to go—in a sense, the only place, but logical: the last place.

8

From her tiny room above the stable she could hear the snorting of the elephant. And she saw the gateway leading to the lane where she had stood the previous day, her pack on her back, a plastic bag in her hand—carrots for the elephant. The elephant had seen her first, had trumpeted, then nodded and tugged at his leg chain. He rocked to and fro on his great cylindrical legs. Hearing him, the mahout had appeared, and smiled when he saw Alice, and approached her. He grasped her predicament in an instant. He didn’t need language or explanation. He worked with animals. He did not need to be told when one was lost.

He gestured decisively with his hand, clawing the air, saying “Come” with it, using his head, too, to be emphatic.

Alice smiled to show him she understood, and when she shrugged, seeming helpless, the mahout became active, began talking in his own language, and called to an open window. A woman stuck her head out, probably his wife, and she listened to what the mahout was saying.

Wiping her hands on a blue towel, the woman swept out of the ground floor door, her legs working quickly but invisibly under her sari, and went straight to Alice. She did not offer a namaste. She took Alice in her arms, enfolded her, and Alice began to sob.

She also thought, Is it so obvious that I look pathetic? How friendless I must seem.

She valued her own strength, she believed she was tough—too tough, she often thought—and here she was, weeping in the arms of a stranger.

That was what the assault had done to her—turned her into a wreck. People say, You’ll be stronger for it, but I will never be strong again.

He has broken me, she thought. She had not dared to think it in the ashram, where they’d seen her as a tough American—tough enough to be turned into the street. But here, among these kind people, in the presence of the nodding elephant, she could admit to being what she had become, a weakling, in tears.

The woman took her to a sink and put a piece of soap into her hand and urged her to wash her face. Then she sat Alice at a wobbly table and brought her a dish of rice, a bowl of dhal, some okra, some yogurt, a sweetish paste, a lump of glistening pickle.

“I hadn’t realized how hungry I was,” Alice said.

The woman was smiling, as though at her daughter. She understood Alice’s gratitude. She brought out a framed photograph, a young woman in a cap and gown, a graduation picture.

“Mysore,” the mahout said.

Their daughter, obviously, looking proud, holding a rolled-up diploma. Working in Mysore, probably Alice’s age. Their own daughter’s absence made them sympathetic.

The mahout stood at a little distance, bandy-legged, in torn trousers and sandals, a turban knotted on his head, watching Alice eat.

Afterward, the woman brought a bowl of warm water for Alice to wash her hands, a small towel, a broken piece of soap.

All this ritual, shuffling and serving, and then, snatching air with her hand, the woman gestured for Alice to follow her. When Alice bent to pick up her rucksack, the woman waved her away. The mahout called out the window, and a young girl hurried into the room, hoisted the rucksack, and unsteadily mounted the stairs behind them.

Up the flight of stone stairs there was a small room overlooking the courtyard, where the elephant was chained. The bed was on a low frame, near the wall sat a table and chair, and above them hung a colored picture of a seated god—perhaps Shiva, with a cobra hovering over him. On the floor a pale pink rug, at the far wall a bookshelf: most of the books in English, biology, organic chemistry, physics textbooks. Of course, the daughter’s room, the daughter’s books. She was studying—what?—medicine? nursing? dentistry?

The old couple had no language to explain any of this, but no explanation was necessary. They had between them summed up Alice’s predicament, and they knew when to leave her alone in the room. Alice showed them some money, a purse of rupees, but they made motions of refusal and backed away.

So she lay for a while on the hard bed, the clean sheet, her head empty, feeling stunned. Time did not advance, it rotated, twisting around her, defying her to name the day or month, as though she were in suspension. She may have dozed, for when she next looked at the window, night had fallen. The elephant stood still, his broad back and the dome of his head gleaming in the moonlight.

Alice went downstairs to thank the woman. She was offered another meal, some of which she ate. Then she went to bed again and slept until dawn, when she became conscious of the warm animal odors, which were like freshly baked bread—the elephant under her window.

In the crowded, traffic-ridden city of frenzied millions, this courtyard and stable was hidden and peaceful, smelling sweetly of new straw and elephant dung.

I’m so lucky, Alice thought. In this enormous hostile city, where her life had been threatened, she had found rescuers—well, she’d seen the elephant first, and after that, the people. At breakfast, she gave the woman an envelope of rupees, about four hundred, not even ten dollars. The woman made a show of refusing it, a ritual of indignation, but Alice insisted she take it, and when she did, Alice felt better, for now there was a kind of contract. She would have time to think. It was easier among strangers.

The days that followed were dream-like and wonderful. She spent the mornings spraying the elephant with the hose—directing the nozzle into his mouth, into the pink nose holes in his trunk, and watched him spray himself, blowing water onto his back. She fed him, using the hayfork to make a stack of fodder, and she marveled at his eating. He could eat all day, shifting his weight from foot to foot, occasionally kicking the chain.

I have found friends, Alice thought. Once again she lost the sense of time passing, and she realized this was so because she was content. India was not the huge country and the crowded streets and the stinks and the racket; it was this stable yard, and this food, and these kind people, and this elephant.

She could tell that the mahout liked her from the way he cheerfully involved her in the work of caring for the elephant, finding ways to please her.

She said, “You have no idea who I am, and yet you’re being good to me. Bless you, bless you.”

The mahout laughed, hearing this stream of English.

One day she took an auto-rickshaw to the ashram. The gatekeeper looked apprehensive.

“Just visiting,” she said.

“Swami at Puttaparthi,” the man said.

She asked to see Priyanka, whose face fell when she saw her.

“I’m just here for my mail,” Alice said.

“We’re trying to get over the hoo-hah,” Priyanka said.

“By hoo-hah, do you mean the fact that I was assaulted and raped?”

“We are bitterly sorry,” Priyanka said.

“Never mind. You have more important things to deal with. But would you mind holding my mail for me?”

“Of course. Not to worry. Have you found lodgings?”

“I’ll let you know,” Alice said.

That day there was no mail of any consequence, but a few days later there was a large buff-colored envelope from the court in Chennai, with a stamp and many signatures, explaining formally that the date of the hearing had been deferred, “pending further enquiries.” So much for fast track.

Someone had sent her a prayer printed on one sheet of paper, another envelope included a religious card, the scary-faced goddess Kali, the size of a playing card. The second lawyer who had visited sent a form to sign—the same form, a letter with her name typed at the bottom, stating that she wished to drop all charges. Even Amitabh wrote, suggesting that they meet to discuss “this matter.” The nerve!

She began to hate picking up her mail. And what had become of Stella? She thought of her now—probably she had left India; perhaps she was traveling with Zack or living with him. Stella was safe. I am safe too, Alice told herself; safe but in suspense.

Sleeping in the small fragrant room, rising early, tending to the elephant, beginning to make notes in her journal—about the elephant, not herself—and eating with the mahout and his wife became her routine. These days her accumulated letters were left at the front desk of the ashram. With Swami at his other ashram, there were few devotees around. Alice did not see Priyanka and Prithi. They were obviously miffed that she had not revealed to them anything of her whereabouts.

At night in the dark, she told herself that she had a mission: she could not leave India until her case was heard and Amitabh was punished.

As if she’d sensed Alice’s disdain, Stella wrote to her, care of the ashram. She’d read the story, she said. Zack was in preproduction for his Bollywood film. They were living in Mumbai. Zack says that his father might be able to help.

Alice wrote various replies in her head, all of them on the theme of I-refuse-to-be-patronized. But she did not send anything; she did not want Stella to know she’d received the letter. She did not want anyone to know where she was. It was a great plus to her that the mahout and his wife had no idea who she was.

More weeks passed, more delays, more ambiguous legal letters. It was a pettifogging culture. Instead of justice there was combat and an elaborate confrontation that was a form of evasion. The ancient quality of India, its ruinous look, was the result of delay. You would die before any promise was kept, but denial was another way of doing business. The legal system was based on creating obstacles.

In this mood, Alice became indecisive herself and was saddened to think that she had surrendered to this Indian lack of urgency. So she was surprised one morning when she went to the storeroom for the hayfork and saw the mahout blocking her way. He would not allow her to go near the elephant. Shooing her away, he indicated a door in the corner of the stable yard, which led to the street. She understood what he was saying—it was an escape route. Should she find herself cornered, she could slip out and avoid the elephant’s wrath.

She saw why. The tear stain dripped from the lower part of his eye, brownish on the rough gray skin. And the eye itself looked troubled, the great animal agitated, yanking its chain.

“Musth?”

“Musth. Musth.” The mahout made a gesture of helplessness. The frenzy had come at last; it had possessed the elephant.

From her room, unable to feed the elephant, she looked down at the restless creature, trumpeting, snorting, twisting his head, flapping his ears. Alice put her chin on her hands, resting her arms on the windowsill, and saw how the poor thing was much like herself, hobbled, trapped by the chain. She watched for most of the day, and saw the mahout leave by the concealed door. He had no role to play with the elephant so restless—more than restless, the poor thing was suffering.

She remembered how, months before, when she’d misunderstood the mahout and imagined the elephant as half demented with frustrated desire, chained against venting it, lust and anger mingled in his big body and leaking out of his eye. She’d written it in her journal. Now she was not imagining it.

In her meditative posture, listening to the moaning of the elephant, Alice made a decision.

The phone card that she’d bought months before, and used once, was still valid. She went out the way the mahout had gone, into the lane and a street of shops. She found one with a pay phone, and, reading from a business card, she dialed a number.

“This is Shan.”

“It’s Alice.” She took a breath and told him exactly where she was and how to get there; where the gate was latched, that he must secure it as soon as he entered the stable yard; that she would meet him.

He was relieved—she heard it in his expression of thanks—but she shuddered in disgust and hung up. She could not bear to listen to his gratitude in his strangled American voice, that hideous accent.

She was squatting in the stable yard, behind the elephant’s post, in the darkness there, where the animal’s odor brimmed and stung her eyes. She was so still the elephant was not aware of her presence. She listened hard—was that a car in the side lane? Yes, the latch on the gate was lifted. The elephant heard, and he snorted and swayed. He began to roar. She was glad for that sound—it drowned out every other noise.

She did not act until she saw, by the light of the streetlamp in the lane, the gate being shut, the brace slipped into the slots, the door secured.

The elephant was straining forward. Alice saw Amitabh, greenish in the bad light, much fatter now, trying to judge the limit of the elephant’s reaching trunk, and he was skirting the animal, believing himself to be safe, when he saw Alice and called out softly, “Hey, you.”

Then she pulled the long pin from the ring on the post, releasing the chain, releasing the elephant, releasing herself. And just before she slipped through the small door to the lane, which led to the world, she lingered. She saw Amitabh tumble to the cobbles of the stable yard under the pounding feet of the ramping elephant, twisted in the posture of a helpless victim, bellowing in terror in his own voice.

It was day again, just after dawn, in the Ladies Only coach on the Mumbai Express. The noise of the clattering train made for a kind of drama, like a soundtrack to the image in the compartment window: her face, with the Indian landscape passing behind her pale features. The bang of the wheels on the rails, like rough music, filled her head with the insistent reassurance of the train speeding her to safety. She began to chant:

Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey Gajaanana

Gajaanana Hey Gajavadana …