The Elephanta Suite (24 page)

"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.