The woman had spoken to her in the tone of a headmistress, and it was odd how quickly the tone had changed from the other day. Just when you thought you had a friend in India, you looked up and saw a rival.
“The normal procedure is that one builds up leave over time.”
“But I’m casual labor, and on the lowest pay scale.”
The woman, Miss Ghosh, merely stared at her.
“So I guess I owe you everything and you owe me nothing.”
“May I remind you that this is a company and not a charitable institution. What if everyone did what you are proposing to do?”
“I don’t believe this. Does this mean you’re refusing me permission to take a week off?”
“What it means,” Miss Ghosh said, picking up a pencil and tapping its point on her green blotter, “is that because of the precipitate nature of your request for departure, I cannot guarantee that your job slot will still be vacant on your return.”
This was the same grateful woman who had said, You have worked wonders. I think you are being modest about your achievements.
“What is your purpose in this holiday?”
“Excuse me?”
“Where are you going, may I ask, and who with?”
Alice said with a hoot of triumph, “With all respect, I don’t understand how that is any of your business.”
And she knew in saying that, in seeing Miss Ghosh’s face darken—the prune-like skin around her sunken eyes, the way Indians revealed their age, and the eyes themselves going cold—that she had burned a bridge.
Things went no better at the ashram. She did not need to seek permission to leave—after all, she was a paying guest. Yet when she broke the news to Priyanka, who, because she spoke Hindi, held a senior position as a go-between and interpreter with the ashram staff, Priyanka became haughty and said in the affected way she used for scolding, “I am afraid that Swami will not be best pleased.”
“It’s only a week.”
“Swami is not happy to see people using his ashram as a hostel, merely coming and going willy-nilly.”
“One week,” Alice said, and thought, I have never heard an American utter the phrase “willy-nilly.”
“But you are requesting checkout.”
“I’m not requesting checkout, as you put it. I just don’t see any point in my paying for my room and my food if I’m not here.”
Priyanka turned sideways in her chair and faced the window. She said, “If you like, I will submit your request. You will have to apply in writing, in triplicate. I will see that your request is followed up. But I’m not hopeful of a positive result.”
“Well, what’s the worst that can happen? I’ll leave my backpack in the storeroom and get it when I come back. And I’ll hope there’s a room available.”
“Ashram cannot assume responsibility for your personal property, as though we are Left Luggage at a station. This is a spiritual community.”
Alice said, “Swami has personal property. People give him money. He has a house. He has a big car. He has another house in Put ta parthi. Are you kidding me?”
Priyanka pursed her lips and said in a stern and reprimanding way, “Swami is our father and teacher. It is not for us to question him. He is the embodiment of love. He is a vessel of mercy.”
“Then obviously such a paragon of virtue won’t have the slightest problem with anything I say or do. He’ll forgive me and give me his blessing.”
As soon as she said it, she realized it sounded too much like a satire of Swami. Priyanka fell silent. Alice knew she’d gone too far.
Another bridge in flames. She went to see her last friend in Bangalore. He looked miserable. His leg dragged at the chain, and then she saw the stain running beneath his eye, gleaming on his rough hide. The mahout, Gopi, clasped his hands and with pitying eyes urged Alice to back away.
She boarded the Super Express to Chennai in a mood of triumphant farewell. Although Priyanka had said it was impossible for her to leave her bag behind, Alice found a devotee who was willing to lock it in a storeroom. She knew Priyanka was being destructive. Perhaps Priyanka saw that she was being left behind. Whose fault was that? She was the one who refused to travel on Indian Railways. Alice was leaving Bangalore, the ashram, and the job at Electronics City, but she was well aware of her slender resources. Eventually she might have to return and negotiate and be humble, but she hoped not.
The uncooperative people of the past few days only strengthened her, as Stella had done. I’ll show them, she thought. I don’t need them.
Though these Indians were difficult, India was not hostile. It was indifferent, a great, hot, uncaring mob of trampling feet in an enormous and blind landscape, damaged people scrambling on ruins. But why should anyone care about me? The country was so huge and crowded that if anyone seemed to care—to try to sell her something, as the hawkers were doing now in the train—it was because she was a foreigner and probably had money.
“Nahi chai hai,” she had learned to say. Leave me alone.
She had come to understand what the solitary long-distance traveler learns after months on the road—that in the course of time a trip stops being an interlude of distractions and detours, pursuing sights, looking for pleasures, and becomes a series of disconnections, giving up comfort, abandoning or being abandoned by friends, passing the time in obscure places, inured to the concept of delay, since the trip itself is a succession of delays.
Solving problems, finding meals, buying new clothes and giving away old ones, getting laundry done, buying tickets, scavenging for cheap hotels, studying maps, being alone but not lonely. It was not about happiness but safety, finding serenity, making discoveries in all this locomotion and an equal serenity when she had a place to roost, like a bird of passage migrating slowly in a sequence of flights. The famous swallows that summered in Siberia, then wintered in the Zambesi Valley: they weren’t taking trips, travel was an aspect of their extraordinary survival; they never lingered anywhere for long, yet the itinerant nature of their lives, their quest for food, had made them strong. The distances they flew were legendary, but their lives were made up of short economical flights to breed and then move on. She wanted to become such a bird.
She smiled, seeing that what had happened by accident to her was a gift, a further ripening of her personality. The jaunts in Europe hadn’t done it, the experience of India had. By degrees she had been moved farther and farther from the life she’d known into a new mode of existence, as though soaring upward and finally, after some buffeting, moving with certainty onward, alone, no longer disturbed, in an orbit of her own, freed from her past, her unreliable friend, even her family, and pleased by the idea that the future would be like this—stimulated by the random lyricism of chance events, of good days and bad days.
Not a journey anymore, not an outing or an interlude, but seeing the world; not taking a trip, not travel with a start and a finish, but living her life. Life was movement.
How had it happened? She guessed that it had come about by being alone, the circumstance Stella had forced upon her. By earning the money she’d needed and, oddly, by being exploited, like most working people on earth. By being disappointed, abandoned, taken for granted. She did not depend on anyone, surely not a man; she had become strong. The elephant was an example—chained because he was powerful, becoming more powerful because he was chained. Released from that chain, he would flap his ears and fly.
Her illnesses had given her heart. Needing a tooth pulled on her way through Turkey, she’d found a woman dentist, and after a period of recovery the problem was solved. She did not tell her family until afterward. The flu she’d picked up in Tblisi, the twisted ankle in Baku, and the bumpy flight to Tashkent, the plane’s germ-laden air, the clammy days in Bukhara, and at last the flight to India—even Stella’s illnesses, which she’d ministered to—all these had given her confidence, because she’d overcome them. You fell sick, you got well, then healthier. You didn’t go home or call Mom because you’d caught a cold. You paused and cured yourself and continued on your way, stronger than before.