The Elephanta Suite (31 page)

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.

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 arrangement 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."