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 walclass="underline" 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.