Delhi New Year

Delhi New Year

It was about noon on New Year’s Day when the elephant walked up to me. I was sitting on a tiny side street in Karol Bargh, a collection of tenements and tangerine stalls that sprawled just west of Delhi proper, a place where any tourist worth his salt wouldn’t know about—but should. I was flying out later that night, leaving India after a three-month stay. But for just these few minutes I was sunning myself on the steps of my hotel, recuperating from my New Year’s Eve overindulgence. I had spent the previous evening packed into a tiny nightclub called The Qasbah watching the frantic revelry of secular Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and probably a few atheists all squashed together in a room the size of a typical American laundry-room. The scene had all the color, smell, and drama of The Death of Sardanapalus, without the blood and horses. As a child I remembering hearing my older cousins dramatically intone the phrase Take me to your kasbah. We all knew that it referred to that point in their play when the man swept them off their feet and took them to the mysterious region that existed behind closed doors. As a teenager the word “kasbah” conjured up scenes of smoky rooms draped with saffron-colored silk redolent of cinnamon and myrrh where gypsy violinists played the opening strains of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini. But since I was raised in a subculture peopled mostly by Conservative Fundamental Independent Pre-Millennial Baptists, what went on behind the doors of the kasbah remained very much a mystery until my honeymoon. Twenty years later as a middle-aged divorcee with grown children, I was still intrigued by the word.
But the literal Qasbah turned out to be somewhat less than expected. Everyone was attempting to have fun, attempting to drink, attempting to dance while attempting to avoid the pools of vomit--offerings from people unfamiliar with large amounts of alcohol. There was a frantic quality to their celebration, as if the idea was new and not altogether wholesome, and therefore had to be done quickly. It was unclear whether fun was being had. At one point I found myself waiting outside the women’s restroom. Instead of signs (what language would it be?) there were roughly carved wooden sculptures hanging on the doors denoting male and female. As the minutes ticked by and the women’s loo remained occupied, I took the female off the door and began to study it. Small and stylized, a bust not more than eight inches tall with large Buddha ears, coiled hair, and bare breasts partially covered with a bead necklace. A crude copy of some rustic East-Indian tribal art. A friend once told me that the best souvenir is the one you don’t buy and I had yet to find a suitable symbol for my three-month stay in India. I don’t know what puckish spirit possessed me at that moment. It may have had something to do with the reckless abandon that everyone around me was trying so hard to achieve. I had never stolen anything in my life. Okay, there was the one time in first grade when I lusted after Bobby Wilson’s ballpoint pen. So I waited until recess and pretended to tie my shoe, etc. But that was it. I had never shoplifted as a sulky teen thumbing my nose at the establishment. But for some reason, as the door to the restroom opened, I slipped the object into my purse. Back in the U.S.A. when I showed it to my grown children they were shocked to think of their middle-aged middle-class mother stealing something from a shady nightclub on New Year’s Eve halfway around the world. But even stranger than my stealing it, is the fact that I have never experienced the tiniest tremor of guilt over the incident.
The next day I sat on the steps watching the little minutes of daily life whirl around the street in hot dusty puffs. When I first arrived in Delhi this street with its glare and noise and swarming pockets of humanity had looked to me like the wrong side of Bagdad on a bad day. I crept into my hotel room and pushed a table against the door to ensure that India stayed well outside. But after three months I had fallen in love with India and the neighborhood felt like home. Across the street I could see the telephone stall where I had made frantic long distance calls back to the USA. Inside the three-sided cubicle sat a wrinkled old woman in a dingy silk sari who spoke no English but still managed to convey an incredible amount of sympathy as I cried into the mouthpiece at those times when India threatened to overwhelm me. Next door was the grocery stall hung with bags of chips and candy bars well past their sell-by date. There was the fruit stand where I bought my daily measure of tangerines. And then there was the elephant. A creature larger than my hotel room had appeared and was just standing there looking at me. He had more intelligence in his eyes than most people I knew. He seemed huge and spiritual, more event than animal. I lifted my hand hesitantly. He lifted his trunk. Our separate appendages hung there in the air. Not touching. I felt like Adam hanging from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel watching God’s finger as it reaches out into space, hanging forever in suspended animation. I’ve always wondered what would have happened if the paint and plaster had not dried so quickly; if time had not stopped at that particular moment with those two fingers so close, but forever never touching. I guess that’s why we have lightening.
I’m unsure who made the first move, but suddenly my hand was touching the hairy gray roughness and his trunk was next to my cheek. He felt like old leather, safe and familiar. The sun was hot and there was this mammalian smell about him—clean and dusty like rain out on the desert of the Deccaan Plateau. The noise of the street disappeared and in its place was a silence that sort of sat down beside us. We made a comfortable trio. Somehow this act, this sitting beside the quiet and the elephant, seemed a summation of all that I had experienced in my short stay. It was the reason, formed in matter rather than words, for this longing I had to stay in this country for another three months, ten years. A lifetime would not be enough, I knew, to fill up the empty space I felt inside. Not empty as in existential angst, but empty as in the lack of the unnecessary.
We stayed like that until the owner appeared asking money for his services. Want a ride? How much you give me for a ride? The elephant’s big liquid god-eye held me and I wondered if climbing up onto that huge expanse of rug-covered wrinkles would be to commit some sort of sacrilege. I shook my head at the owner just as a father and his small son came to buy a ride. The owner said some words and tapped with his stick. The gray bulk knelt. The going down was slow and awkward, unhurried and the child after much encouragement climbed up. But the standing up again was like a displacement of space, an earthmover shuddering into action. The elephant stood in the hot street swaying back and forth. The little boy squealed in mid-air terror that turned to delight as the whole miracle moved off down the street. Hours later as my plane lumbered down the runway and lifted heavily off the tarmac the miracle of flight seemed somehow a lesser thing.