Most of the time Amitabh moved his mouth and smiled, but Alice heard little except the din of the bus, and there was something smothering, deadening to her senses, in the smell of the sweating humans on board.
Now, outside the bus, every bit of the roadside looked safe to her—the shop fronts, the bungalows with their verandas, the rickshaws, the taxis, the fields of wheat. But if she got off at any of these stops—which were less and less frequent—he would get off too, and as long as she stayed on board, so would he.
Protected by the women around her, she briefly drowsed, only to awaken—jerking upright, as though someone had slapped her—as the bus came to a halt, huffing, its abrupt silence as provocative as its noise had been. So soon? Her fears of arrival made her shrink in her seat.
“Are we there?” she asked the woman next to her.
The woman clawed at her long trailing braid and made no reply.
“Pit stop,” Amitabh said.
He was staring at her from between a crush of passengers, his fat face tightened in a smile, his tie rucked up and twisted against a child’s damp head.
Because he was standing in the aisle, he was among the first to get off. Alice waited until everyone else had left and then she did some yoga breathing and stepped out.
A crowd of people were pushing against one another at the counter of a roadside shop, reaching to be served, and some drifted away holding bottles and plastic cups. Alice saw a hunkered-down woman breastfeeding a baby. She envied her concentration, her secure posture close to the ground, and had a great longing to change places with her. The woman had flung the shawl of her sari over her head, so that it covered her and sheltered the baby, and she squatted in this silken tent of serenity, unseen by anyone else.
Alice was afraid to look for Amitabh—she didn’t want to see his face. But nearer the shop, against her will, she got a glimpse of the fat man holding two bottles of brown soda, and she knew that one was for her.
He put them on the counter to rummage in his pocket for money. As soon as he turned aside and took his eyes off her, Alice trotted to the far side of the bus, concealing herself from him.
A man leaning against the bus—this was the shady side—put his face up to hers, startling her. He had wild hair and a torn, fluttering, untucked shirt.
“Taxi?”
“Mahabalipuram,” she said. “How much?”
His face went waxen in calculation, mute yet tremulous, his mouth pressed shut, the numbers vibrant on his tongue. Alice knew that look: an Indian guessing not at the value of something but at what a foreigner would pay.
“Three hundred rupees only,” he said.
“One hundred,” she said.
“Cost of petrol,” the man said, his voice becoming a whine as he bent over, assuming an insincere groveling posture to plead.
“Okay, let’s go,” she said, and thought: I’m stupid, trying to escape and bargain at the same time. The man looked crushed. She said, “Let’s go,” and gestured, and he pointed to his parked car.
The man was wiggling the key and tramping on the accelerator as she got into the back seat. There was more room in front but she wanted some distance from this wild-haired driver. The car stank and the seats were torn; it was a jalopy. She prayed for it to start. After a gargling and clacking hesitation there was a powerful swelling of engine blat, and the man pulled at the steering wheel with his skinny hands.
She did not dare to look back until they were on the road and traveling fast. Then she risked it and saw the shop, the parked bus, the gathering of passengers in a clearing of yellow dust. The road was empty and straight, lined by tufts of discolored grass.
“How far is it?” she asked.
“Far is it,” the man said.
“How many miles—kilometers?”
“Kilometers,” the man said.
He had numbers, he knew “cost of petrol,” but apart from that he had no English. He was simply barking back her own words.
“Mahabalipuram?” she asked.
“Mahabalipuram.”
But the speed made her hopeful, and the clear road, and the fact that she had slipped away from Amitabh. And she did not really need to know the distance. She had tried to speak to the driver mainly to assess his friendliness, sending out a signal, hoping it would resonate.
“You live here?” she asked, trying again.
He did not reply. He was nodding his head, pretending he had understood. She saw a small portrait of Sai Baba fixed to the dashboard, encircled by plastic flowers.
“Sai Baba,” she said. “Me go darshan—Sai Baba—Bangalore.”
Even this broken English didn’t work, and now she saw why. He was talking on a cell phone, holding it against his right ear, seeming to conceal it. He was mumbling in a language she took to be Tamil, rolling, bubbling words, like someone talking under a fizzing spigot in a narrow shower stall.
“Who are you talking to?”
He slipped the phone into his shirt pocket and said confidently, “You talking to.”
He seemed dim but he was driving fast, with conviction. The car was not a taxi, just a rattletrap with ripped seats, but it was moving. The man’s indifference to her, the way he was holding the wheel, caused Alice to consider her options. It would be foolish to continue on the road to Mahabalipuram. Amitabh would find her there. Give up The Penance of Arjuna, she thought. Never mind the elephants, the animals, the grottoes, the temples, the carvings. Only one thing mattered.
“Stop,” she said. “Stop! Do you understand?”
He kept driving. He seemed to be smiling in concentration.
“I want you to turn back.”
Nothing.
“Go Chennai. I pay you. Three hundred. Please stop.”
Then he turned and looked Alice in the face—or was he looking behind her, out the back window?
“Turn back now,” she said sharply, and thumped the broken seat.
The man did not react at once, but after a few moments, the time it took Alice to draw three long yoga breaths, he slowed down and veered to the side, struggling to control the car, his skinny arms fighting the shakes of the steering wheel, the tires bumping on the large loose stones on the shoulder of the main road.
He slowed some more, toppling in thick tussocks of grass past a sign advertising a brand of toothpaste. Then he hung a hard left into a road that Alice saw only when he entered it. At last, she thought. The road was pinched by high grass on either side, a strip of grass in the middle, a country lane.
“Where are we going?”
He said something, gobbling, seeming to reprimand her: in this out-of-the-way place he had taken charge. They all seemed to do it when she least expected it, not just Indian men, but Priyanka too. They would chatter and then at once they would go dark; they’d turn, they’d become strangers, and she’d think, Who are you? and become angry and frightened. It had just happened again.
And then, up ahead, she saw the big gray creature, like a piece of bizarre architecture, but moving, becoming a bizarre vehicle—the hindquarters of an elephant, filling the road. Amazing—she smiled and relaxed. It seemed a benign presence. The taxi driver slowed behind it and kept his distance. He could not pass it, did not even honk his horn, just drove at the slow speed of the elephant’s deliberate plodding pace as it dropped its round feet on the road, big feet, yet it picked its way forward with grace.
Alice was happy. She smiled at the great slow creature and sat back, watching the flicking of its tail, the brush, the wide dusty rump.
The elephant helped her see that the daylight was waning, the sky was blue-green but the road was in darkness, the sun setting behind this tall grass.
The driver spoke a word, it sounded like “bund,” and he reacted, twisting in his seat as though he’d heard something that was not audible to her. This had happened to her elsewhere in India, an Indian hearing something, saying “Listen,” making her feel deaf because she heard nothing and only felt foreign.