She was still looking hard at the elephant when the driver stopped the car and switched off the engine.
“Where are we?” she said, and suddenly overcome by apprehension, she got out of the car and slammed the door. She gave him the money she had been clutching. “I don’t trust you!”
The driver was not perturbed. He tucked the money in his shirt pocket with the phone. He was not even looking at her. He was looking past her, at the road they’d just traveled down. She saw the elephant had gone, and felt a pang, as if it had not walked away but had simply vanished, evaporated from her sight. She walked a little, heard a sound, and saw the car.
From his window, the man spoke the word again, and she realized he was saying “Husband.”
He started the car, jerked it into the center of the road, and drove away in the direction the elephant had gone.
The other car was reversing, but someone had gotten out of it, Amitabh, now slowly advancing on her, his white sleeves gleaming in the shadowy dusk. He seemed to fill the road, as the elephant had done.
“Hey, would I hurt you?” he said.
6
She had woken, and in the bad light of the dirty littered room in which she sat wrapped in a gown, the mustached man was seated across the desk from her. He was holding a dark, brittle-looking piece of paper, thick with smudged blue handwriting, like an ancient document from a vault. But she recognized it as a carbon copy of her statement, which she had dictated to the policeman earlier in the evening, after the nurse had examined her. She was cold, she was sad, she was someone else now.
“Just one or two questions,” the man said.
Alice sat feeling indistinct, part of her body was missing, as if she’d suffered an amputation—a portion of her mind, her torso where she’d been touched, the arm she’d used to defend herself. She was a shattered remnant of herself. The rest of her had been shivered away in the darkness, and she sensed those missing parts of herself as phantoms, numbed and useless, mere suggestions of physicality, as amputees spoke of a cut-off limb. She remembered his fingers and his face and she felt like wreckage.
Yet this man was smiling at her as though she were still whole.
“You say here that the alleged assailant is known to you?”
“He was in my class in Bangalore. A call-center English class.”
“And you know him by name?”
“He was my student.”
“He was traveling with you?”
“Following me,” Alice said. “Stalking me.”
“When did you realize this happenstance?”
“As I said.” She yawned, she was weary, she had written it all. “On the train from Bangalore.”
“Yet you persisted traveling in his company?”
Alice said, “You said one or two questions.”
“We need to clear up these discrepancies.”
“What discrepancies? He stalked me. He chased me. He was on the bus. When I tried to get away he somehow got the phone number of the taxi I was in and he followed me.”
“You provided no details of the taxi.”
“He must have told the taxi driver to leave. I didn’t see the license plate.”
“Yet you’re sure you saw his taxi?”
“Of course. How else could he have gotten there?”
“You might have arrived together. It is rather a remote spot.”
“His taxi followed mine,” Alice said.
The man’s obstinate finger was poking the paper. “All taxis in this state are required to be in possession of a numbered disk, displayed on dashboard, also on rear of car. Can be on the wing. You have omitted this detail.”
“I was frightened. It was dark. I didn’t see anything. I don’t understand why you’re asking me these questions.”
But she did understand. The man was insinuating that she was lying, that she had traveled with Amitabh and, this being India, she being foreign, was behaving in a way no Indian woman would dare to.
“My statement is the truth.”
“But there are certain significant omissions. Full and complete statement is required.”
“What omissions?”
He held the flimsy page, trembling in his slender fingers. He said, “Relationship to accused, first of all, is omitted. Traveling ar rangement is omitted. What taxi or taxis? You say you were going to Mahabalipuram, yet you were found in Chingleput district.”
The man looked up at her. He seemed too young to be so intrusive and so severe.
“An Indian woman would not travel alone with someone she distrusted. She would not travel alone, full stop.”
“Haven’t you noticed,” Alice said, intending to be insulting, “I’m not an Indian.”
The man adjusted his posture, shuffled papers on the desk, found one he wanted, studied it, tapped one line, and said, “We have the results of your medical examination. It is noted that there is no sign of injury.”
“He raped me,” Alice said, choking slightly on the word, on the verge of tears.
“Yes, I see you assert that here,” the man said.
“He used his finger,” she said softly.
The man made a note and frowned. He said blandly, “Unless and until that is proven, this is an open case.”
“When are you going to arrest him?”
“When we have some inkling of his whereabouts we will do so with dispatch.”
“‘Inkling of his whereabouts’? What’s the matter with you? I told you he has a return ticket to Bangalore,” she said, sitting forward, trying to shout. “I’ve already written my statement and I’ve answered those questions.”
“We have incomplete knowledge,” the man said, stonewalling.
“I spoke to your people!”
The man said mildly, as if to a child, “When was the first time you met this man?”
Alice did not want to answer, but the man was attentive, his eager patience unnerved her, and the truth would come out in any case. There was no point in withholding what in time would become well known.
“I met him on the train to Bangalore in March.”
“How did you meet him? Were you introduced?”
“He introduced himself.”
“Just like that. ‘Hello, how are you?’” The man had begun to write on a pad.
“He was in my compartment.”
“What class of travel.”
“Sleeping compartment.”
“First-class AC?” he asked, still writing, but faster than before, scribbling as he asked questions distractedly, breathing hard, his head tilted toward the privacy curtain at the side of the room, as though he were listening not to Alice but to something else. Or perhaps calculating, as they all seemed to do.
“So you have enjoyed the acquaintance of the named person for some three-over months?”
Alice decided to say nothing. Everything she said seemed to incriminate her, as if she were guilty of allowing it all to happen.
But fury overcame her, and she said, “Look. I was traveling on my own. He followed me. He had somehow found out my plans. You people seem to have ways of getting all sorts of private information.”
The man cocked his head and then shoved at the desk and stood up.
Alice said, “When do I get a chance to tell my side of the story?”
“Excuse me,” the man said, seeming to go meek. He crumpled the statement into his canvas briefcase and looked at once very stern and very frightened, as though emboldening himself—yet indifferent to Alice’s watching him. He screwed up his face and squinted, like a stiffened animal in the dark.
“Listen to me!” she said, her voice breaking.