The Elephanta Suite (28 page)

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 mahout 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.