And Miss Ghosh was complimentary, adding more hours to Alice’s schedule and reporting that the employees at the call center were more effective on their jobs.
“We can perhaps revise your contract to reflect a month-to-month contingency,” Miss Ghosh said. “We’re chalking that in.”
Alice agreed. The money helped. Now she was paying her way at the ashram, though they asked for very little. How odd to pass from InfoTech to Sai Baba, from Electronics City to Whitefield, yet had it not been for the elephant in between, she would have been lost.
“Musth?” she inquired of the mahout a week after the visit when she had seen the agitated elephant beating his chained leg against the post, his eye leaking.
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 ma hout 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.