Philosophy Made Simple (30 page)

By this time everything was beginning to happen of its own accord. The wedding was out of Rudy’s hands. No one individual was in charge—not Detroit Auntie, who agreed with the pandit that the wedding should be postponed till the following Monday,
a more auspicious day; not Molly or TJ, who would have been greatly inconvenienced by any postponement; not
Uncle Siva, not Nandini, not the pandit, who appeared from time to time in his saffron robe to perform various ceremonies or pujas. And yet, at the same time, Rudy couldn’t help but feel that everything that was happening was happening because he was willing it to happen, that the world was flowing through him, like water through the gate of the lateral canal.

On Thursday evening delicious curries and breads and platters of aromatic rice arrived, as if by magic, from the Taj Mahal in McAllen, and after dinner all the guests gathered in the barn to dance and talk. Late in the evening, when everyone was tired of dancing, Rudy got out his guitar and played quietly while the others talked.

The Indian contingent from Detroit—children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of Detroit Auntie, Nandini’s mothers sister—was settled in comfortable motel rooms along Highway 83. Philip and Daniel, as they had been promised, slept out in the barn with their grandfather and Norma Jean. TJ and Mollys friends from Ann Arbor were looked after at the seminary by Father Russell,
along with a few scattered Harrington relatives.

On Friday morning, the day before the wedding, the temperature dropped into the lower sixties. Rudy built a fire in the woodstove,
and the Indian women gathered in the kitchen, instead of on the veranda or out in the barn, to drink their milky tea. Their husbands stood outside the barn with Uncle Siva, smoking cigars, while inside the children watched Nandini touch up Norma Jean with another coat of paint. Norma Jean fidgeted so much that Rudy had to hold her tail as Nandini walked round her, daubing here and there, painting earrings on her ears and yellow diamonds and red rubies on her forehead, a fretwork of colored flowers on her trunk, till Norma Jean was
herself transformed into a bride. “I am not expert,” Nandini said, hitching up her jeans, but when she stepped back to survey her work Rudy could see that she was pleased.

Nandini and the girls spent the rest of the day closeted in the girls’ bedrooms upstairs. By late afternoon huge gray clouds had massed in the sky, like a herd of elephants about to charge, and the weather reports were not encouraging. They were forced to rethink some things. Dinner would have to be held in the house, and if it rained on Saturday, it would be impossible to proceed from the house to the
mandap,
which had been erected at a point equidistant from barn, house, and garage. The wedding would have to be held in the barn.
The pandit would have to build the sacred fire in Rudy’s Weber grill. In the evening, the caterer’s men from the Taj Mahal—a Bengali Indian and three Mexicans—set up their own grills on the veranda.

About six o’clock it began to rain. Rudy put on a slicker and went back and forth between the house and the barn, where Nandini,
who’d darkened her eyes with kohl and put on a light blue sari for the party, was trying to calm Norma Jean, whose trumpeting heralded the storm, and who was rumbling too, deep in her chest. She had not had a bath today, and she was restless because she had not been allowed to paint. Nandini talked to her in Assamese, in a kind of gentle singsong. A horsefly that had been bothering Norma Jean earlier had disappeared.

“We can use the rain,” Rudy said, putting a good face on things. “A nice shower. It’ll blow over. Nice to have it cooler.”

Nandini’s blue sari, which had little mirrors embroidered in it, didn’t look warm enough. Rudy went up to the house to get her a sweater. When he got back he closed the shutters in the barn on the ground floor and then those in the loft, so it was dark in the barn. The electric lightbulbs at the front and back were not powerful enough to illuminate this darkness. From the loft he
could look down on Norma Jean, who was drinking from her big water tank, which was almost empty. Nandini had moved to the door to watch the storm. He could see her in silhouette, like a figure cut out of black paper, as she adjusted the sweater over her sari and smoothed her hair. She turned to look up at him, and though he couldn’t see her face, he thought that the fact of her looking meant that she wanted to confirm their earlier unspoken understanding that there was something to be settled.
The electricity went off and then came back on. Rudy wanted to tell her about Helens death. He wanted to tell her about a storm that had hit Chicago right after he’d gone to work for Becker, a storm that had knocked down one of the big awnings at the market. He wanted to tell her everything.

A bird flew in the open door. A sparrow Out of the impending storm. It ducked under the eave, circled around, fluttered its wings, and perched on Norma Jean’s head. Norma Jean reached up with her trunk as if to greet it.

Rudy climbed down from the loft and turned on the hose to fill the water tank. “I have to change my clothes,” he said, leaving the water running and opening a bale of alfalfa. He cut the twine with a knife so that the bale unfolded, spreading itself open, like a poker hand. Rudy knew it was dangerous to wish too hard for something. All the philosophers were agreed on that.
Moderate your desires. Be satisfied with what you have. Stop wanting, craving, yearning.

A bolt of lightning lit up the entrance to the barn. Rudy heard the thunder at the count of two. Close. How
Helen had loved storms,
he thought. She’d sit with the girls in the bay window behind the piano, sit on the piano bench and watch the rain bounce off the brick street. Or she’d sit out on the little balcony over the bay window The roof covered only half the balcony, so she’d get soaked anyway. Sometimes Rudy would join her.

He asked Nandini about the monsoons in Assam, and she told him about the tremendous noise the monsoon rains made on the metal roof of the old tea-garden house, which had belonged to a British planter and which was not a proper Indian house at all.
Her father had always meant to build a proper house, but had never gotten around to it.

What would a proper Indian house be like, he wanted to know. She started to explain, but the wind picked up and tore one of the shutters loose. The banging upset Norma Jean, and Rudy drove a nail into the shutter to hold it closed.

Norma Jean was becoming increasingly agitated, and Nandini decided to chain her to one of the heavy eyebolts on the wall at the back of her stall. Norma Jean trumpeted loudly and bumped Nandini’s chest with her trunk, but she lifted her leg and allowed Nandini to fasten Rudy’s tow chain to her metal anklet. The sparrow, which was still perched on Norma Jeans head, seemed unconcerned.
It walked around and disappeared behind one ear.

Rudy went up to the house to put on clean clothes. The house, which Maria had filled with green and yellow asters, was full of people. Uncle Siva was acting as host, ordering around the caterers men who were preparing spicy fish and kebabs on the long grills on the veranda, sampling the soups and the chutneys and the different breads. The pandit had arrived, wearing his flowing robe. Father Russell was there too, in his priests collar.

The rain stopped as suddenly as it had started, but the wind had increased. One side of the
mandap
had come loose and Rudy thought they ought to take it down while they had a chance, before the wind blew it away Four of them went out—Rudy and Medardo and of two of the men from the Taj Mahal. The poles that supported the ends of the tent had collapsed and were thrashing about, but the three ridgepoles were still in place. All
they could do was knock down the ridgepoles so that the tent lay flat on the ground.

When Rudy got back to the barn, another shutter had come loose. He nailed it shut. The rain started again, and it began to thunder. A tremendous blast of lightning lit up the doorway Norma Jean let out a high-pitched scream and pulled against her chain. Nandini stood in front of her, stroking her trunk, trying to soothe her, but the elephant pushed Nandini to one side with her trunk and strained forward. The heavy eyebolt in the wall of the barn might have restrained an unruly stallion, but Norma Jean, who weighed three tons, tore it out of the old wood with a great wrench of a noise and smashed through the stall door, dragging her chain and part of the wall itself behind her. Rudy and Nandini both yelled and waved their arms:
dhuth, dhuth, dhuth.
The sparrow was still perched on Norma Jeans head as she disappeared through the door into the storm. There was another crack of lightning, another scream. When they reached the door they could see that Norma Jean was down on her left side on the gravel,
about thirty feet from the barn, her two right legs bobbing up and down as if they were made of rubber. They ran to her. Her eyes were closed, her moving legs slowed, then stopped. Nandini felt for her pulse, her heart. She yelled something. Rudy could see her lips move but he couldn’t hear her. Rudy threw himself on Norma Jeans neck and kissed her face, and then they went back to the barn.

“Lightning struck her leg chain,” Nandini said; “we have to get the anklet off.”

They went back out into the pouring rain. Rudy managed to get the chain itself loose, but the leg was burned and swollen around the metal anklet. There was no way to release it.

They were joined by Medardo, and the three of them managed
to untangle the tent and drag it so that it covered Norma Jean. Medardo went up to the loft, pried open the shutter that Rudy had nailed down, and let down a rope from the window, and Rudy attached the end of the rope to the trailer hitch on the pickup. He eased the pickup forward till the rope was taut. They managed to slide the tent up the rope and then stake the outer edges to provide a sort of shelter for the elephant.

Experience had outdistanced Rudy’s systems of explanation. He had no words to name what had happened. An accident?
Accident
was inadequate. Tragedy? Disaster? Omen? Rudy went from the jury-rigged tent up to the kitchen, where Meg and Margot and TJ were comforting Molly, who sat at the kitchen table and wept, and then he followed Nandini, still in her blue sari with the little mirrors in it, back out to the barn. Nandini picked up a pail and the shovel that Rudy used for Norma Jean’s
leed
and motioned Rudy to follow her. He followed her up the tractor path into the upper grove and then down to the river. She was after river mud and sawgrass to make a poultice for Norma Jeans leg.

The river was flowing faster, but Rudy didn’t think there was any danger of flooding. The excess water would drain into the floodway, and the house was on the only hill in the county. Rudy sank his shovel into the mud and grass by the cove, near the opening he’d cut in the chaparral.

They made two trips, and under the makeshift shelter their hands touched repeatedly as they packed the mud-and-grass poultice around Norma Jeans injured leg. TJ and Molly brought down dry sweaters and blankets and a half bottle of white wine, which they drank out of paper cups. Mollys eyes were red.

‘The pandits saying its not an accident,” she said; “he says it’s a
baadha,
a bad omen, an obstacle.”