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.”