Philosophy Made Simple (24 page)

She wanted to know how many kilograms to expect from a single tree; how much it cost to irrigate; how many men he employed and how much he paid them. When he got home, he
looked up
hectare
in a dictionary, and then he did the conversions: hectares to acres and acres to hectares, kilograms to pounds and pounds to kilograms. A tea garden of 1,500 hectares would be 1,500 x 2.47 = 3,705 acres. An avocado grove of 29.5 acres would be only 11.943 hectares. It didn’t occur to him till later that she’d been asking questions like a prospective buyer, and he wondered if her brother had suggested to her that he, Rudy, might be a prospective seller.

I
n the morning, Rudy and Nandini walked to the river to see if Rudy’s little cove might be a suitable spot for giving Norma Jean a bath. The Russian hadn’t returned on Sunday night and Rudy was starting to worry, but Nandini seemed to have a perfect understanding of Norma Jean, and Norma Jean seemed to have a perfect understanding of Nandini. When they came out into the open at the end of the last row of avocados, they could see the river through the feathery leaves of the mesquite trees. Rudy wanted to surprise Nandini, just as he had been surprised when he first visited.

“Look, Mr. ‘arrington, wild
suar.”

“Pigs?”

“Yes, that’s the word. Pigs.”

A herd of javelinas was feeding on prickly pear.

“These are javelinas. They’re not really pigs.”

“They look like pigs to me.”

“They have four toes instead of three on their hind feet.”

She held up four fingers. “How does that make them not pigs?”

“Well, they’re different from domestic pigs, anyway.”

“I thought pigs have hoofs. Can you have toes and hoofs at the same time?”

“Hooves
are
toes,” Rudy said. “They smell pretty bad—the javelinas. Like polecat.”

“What is polecat?”

Rudy tried to explain that too. A kingfisher rose from the water with a fish in its beak. The kingfisher she recognized, and the green heron fishing in the little cove, and the hoarse chuckle of a yellow-billed cuckoo—
ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-kow-kow-kowp, kowp, kowp.

“Is maximum beautiful, Mr. ‘arrington. You must be very happy here.”

He didn’t answer that question, but he did explain some of the “obstacles” that remained to be removed: the disagreement or misunderstanding over the menu with the manager of the Taj Mahal, the pandit’s insistence that the wedding be postponed because September 9 was an inauspicious day. And he’d learned from Father Russell that the deadline for applying for a wedding license had passed. Something would have to be done on Monday.

Rudy picked up a stone and threw it at the javelinas, which scattered and disappeared. “They scatter in all directions,” Rudy said, “so usually one of them seems to be chasing you.”

“But this time, no,” she said. “So we are safe to walk to the river.”

They walked down to the river, to Rudy’s little cove. “I’ve cut back some of the chaparral,” he said, “the rough brush along here. There ought to be room for her to get through, and the drop-off here is only about a foot.”

“Elephants can’t jump, you know,” she said, “but a foot is less than one half meter, right? So she should be able to manage this step.”

“Right. About a third of a meter.”

They walked back up the slope. When they reached the top they paused and looked back.

“I don’t know about the wedding permission,” Nandini said, “but there is always something that can be done, and my brother can deal with the restaurant manager and the pandit. He is very good at these things.”

“He told me that
you
were the one who was good at these things.” She laughed, and seeing that she was not as worried as she ought to be about these obstacles, Rudy put his own worries aside for the moment. They turned and headed back to the barn. Nandini’s attitude toward Norma Jean was puzzling. On the one hand, she seemed to regard her as a god—a manifestation of Lord Ganesh—but on the other she talked about her as if she were an old draft horse, not something set apart from ordinary life, but at the heart of it. Rudy supposed this was like his feelings about avocados. On the one hand, they’re a good, nourishing fruit—the source of his livelihood for many years, and of his daughters’ science projects too. On the other, many people regard them as exotic,
weird, something for foreigners. He tried to explain this to Nandini. “When I was growing up,” he said, “no one ate avocados.
Avocados were for Mexicans. People thought they made you…well…hot-blooded. The name comes from an Indian word for testicle—
ahuacatl.”

“An Indian word?” she asked. “I have never heard of this word before.”

“South American Indian,” Rudy explained. “Nahuatl.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Well, anyway,” Rudy said, “Norma Jean certainly likes them. Did I tell you her Indian name is Narmada-Jai?”

“Yes, I believe she must be coming from Kerala. You see her long trunk and her big ears and the two domes on her head, and her nice round shape, like a barrel. Her back is making a perfect arc. Or maybe from Bihar. Do you know that the festival of Lord Ganesh will be coming soon? Ganesh Chaturthi, the birth anniversary of Ganesh, the son of Shiva and Parvathi. We don’t celebrate Ganesh Chaturthi in Assam, but I have seen pictures that my uncle brought from Bombay one time, of boats and clay images that they are sending into the river. I think it would be very nice, don’t you? We could do it right here.” She nodded at the river.

“Yes, why not? The pandit suggested something like that. Clay images. You know,” he went on, “I had a kind of vision when I decided to buy this place. I was standing right here.” And he told her about the radio show about the end of the world.
“They thought the Second Coming—that’s when Christ comes back at the end of the world—was going to be the next morning. I was talking to the Realtor and the widow of the owner. I seized up inside. I had to get away It was supposed to happen at ten seventeen, when the sun went down in Jerusalem. I didn’t believe it, of course, but I wanted to be by myself anyway. I climbed up on the rise and saw the river. I hadn’t even realized it was here. This is where I waited, right where we’re standing,
for the end of the world.”

“I know about this Second Coming,” she said, “because there are many missionaries in Assam, among the tribal peoples. But it didn’t happen, did it?”

“No.” Rudy laughed. “We’re here, aren’t we? They must have got their calculations wrong.” He didn’t mention that he’d taken a leak, hadn’t wanted to be blown into Kingdom Come with a full bladder. “I knew then that I was going to buy this place.
Maybe that wasn’t really a vision. I mean, I didn’t
see
anything.
But I had a sense of
understanding
something.
Seeing
in that sense.
Understanding.”

“And what did you understand?”

“That’s just it. I don’t know. I was hoping your brother could explain it to me, but probably it was nothing at all.”

“Perhaps a sign from Kshipra Ganapathi. It is very beautiful. I can understand how pleased you were when you saw the river.”

“You have a big river near you, don’t you.”

“Yes, the Brahmaputra. In places, you cannot see the far shore.”

“I told my daughters I was thinking of selling the house in Chicago. I was trying to scare them, but they thought it was a good idea. So I put it up for sale, and then they changed their minds. But I was too stubborn. I had this idea of starting a new life.”

“Molly is telling me this story.”

“There was something else too. That night in the motel, the people on the radio were encouraging listeners to call in and leave a message for someone they loved if they were separated or estranged. People were calling in. And I called in too. I had a message for my wife.”

“Your wife?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. ‘She’s been dead for seven years. I shouldn’t be telling you these things. It’s embarrassing. I hardly know you.”

“It’s quite all right, Mr. arrington.”

“I’ll try to pull myself together,” he said. “We’d better get back.”

In the afternoon, Molly and Nandini went into McAllen to do some shopping. When they got back Nandini wanted to take Norma Jean to the river. There was a certain amount of stomping around and trumpeting as they brought her out of the barn. Nandini
commanded her to kneel so that Molly, in a very revealing bikini, almost nothing at all, and TJ could ride on her back. While they were mounting the elephant, Rudy walked on ahead with the chain saw to widen the opening in the chaparral along the bank of the river. The saw roared and the blade dug down into the dirt to cut the tough brush close to the ground. He’d just sharpened the chain, and now he’d have to sharpen it again, but he didn’t care. A pair of snowy egrets, who sometimes wandered up from Bentsen, flapped their wings and moved to the ducks-bill end of the cove and resumed feeding. Looking up, he saw Uncle Siva walking next to his sister, who was leading Norma Jean. She was wearing her green sari and TJ’s dark blue and gold University of Michigan baseball cap to protect her face from the sun.

Rudy pulled the trigger on the saw and cut into the heart of a horse-crippler cactus with nasty red spikes. He didn’t want Norma Jean to step on it. The saw caught hold of the cactus roots and fired dirt and blue smoke into the air. When he released the trigger he heard Nandini shouting at him. “Please, you are going to upset Norma Jean. She does not like this noise.”

It was hot. Rudy was sweating, and Norma Jean, who had stopped at the last row of trees to eat a few avocados, was flapping her ears like fans. The bumps on her head had swelled up, but she didn’t look upset to Rudy. As she approached the river she started coiling and uncoiling her trunk and squealing, as if she were returning to a favorite swimming hole of her childhood.
Nandini held her back, shouting “
Dhuth, dhuth.”
Norma Jean’s whole body began to vibrate with excitement, and Rudy thought she might charge ahead, but instead she began to kick at the short grass along the riverbank, uprooting it with her toes before gathering it up with her trunk. It was only when Nandini released her that she stepped down into the water.

The egrets took off but then circled back to watch. Norma Jean
kept moving forward till the water almost reached her stomach and then stopped. TJ and Molly jumped feetfirst into the water.

Rudy took the chain saw back to the barn. He went up to the house to put on his swimming suit. When he returned, Norma Jean was squirting everyone with trunkful after trunkful of water. Nandini’s sari was completely soaked and he could see the outline of her new American bathing suit underneath it. He had brought the Russians bucket of scrub brushes and sponges from the barn and now passed them around. Nandini spoke to Norma Jean, and the elephant lay down on her side in the shallows, trunk up,
while they scrubbed one side. At a word from Nandini, she turned over so they could scrub the other side. The Russian had hosed her down every night, but even so, the cracks in her skin were caked with dirt. Rudy patted her head.

When they’d finished scrubbing Norma Jeans sides and her head, Nandini removed her pleated sari—one end of which was draped over her left shoulder, the other knotted just above her waist—and tossed it on the bank, along with her U of M baseball cap,
and began to wade out of the cove into the main channel of the river. Rudy thought for a moment that she’d been pulled under by the current, and a fantasy in which he swam to her rescue took him by surprise. This fantasy was as vivid as any he’d ever experienced, but then he realized that she was swimming, that she was in fact a strong swimmer. He swam after her but couldn’t catch her before she reached the opposite shore, where the bank was steeper. They steadied themselves by hanging on to a low branch of a live oak tree that provided a little shade.

“Now you can say you’ve been to Mexico,” Rudy said. “Like your brother.” Looking back, he could see Uncle Siva standing by himself, the sun gleaming on his Humpty Dumpty forehead. Was he looking at them? He was shading his eyes, but he had his sunglasses on, so Rudy couldn’t tell.

Nandini reached out and touched the steep bank. “Who lives here?”

“Mexicans.”

“No, I mean here.” She touched the bank again.

“No one. It’s just desert—creosote, mesquite, cholla, prickly pear. But wildflowers too.”

“I’m sorry for scolding at you, Mr. ‘arrington. My brother is explaining to me about the cactus, how it could hurt Norma Jeans foot.”

“Your brother knows everything, doesn’t he?”

“Oh yes,” she said, “he is quite a know-every thing.” She looked at Rudy and smiled. “But he has reminded me,” she said, “that elephants are quite extraordinary in this country I know that. I mean, I have seen many books, I am not a village person.
I have seen American films and television programs. I have visited in Paris and London, but I am tired from the trip. I am forgetting that not every American is so fortunate to have an elephant, especially such a good elephant as Norma Jean.”

“She’s not mine,” Rudy said. “She’ll only be staying for a few more weeks.”