Baby Elephant (Part One)
by Benjamin Simpson
This story was read aloud at:
After a month of traveling in India, it was the city of Chennai that gave me the stomach bug. It was a combination of the 100-degree weather, stuck between train rides, and a need for something cold. Drinking warm whiskey and gin for the last month was ok, but today I was hot and tired and in a bad mood and wanted what I wanted. I found an expensive hotel next to the train station and the dark bar in the basement. I ordered a shot of gin and after a moment said, for the first and last time, that I wanted ice with that
I paid for it three days later and decided to stay in Vanarasi, on the holy river of the Ganges, for a week or so. It was not a horrible bug, but I found that within an hour of eating I needed to be at a bathroom.
My hotel had a hole in the floor toilet. I liked that, because then I did not have to touch anything while excusing myself.
I spent a couple days not really eating, just bottled water and curled up in bed. There was a bookstore filled with English books and I also bought a few local magazines and relaxed. I went on a short trip up the Ganges, went to where Gandhi stayed, and visited Deer park where Buddha gave his first speech.
One of the things I wanted to purchase while I was in India was a Nehru suit. A black cotton Nehru suit. The one with the stand up collar popular in the sixties. I had visited many small shops looking for the perfect suit to match the vision in my head, but none had been perfect. I did not really need the suit, but as the time went on, it became more and more of an obsession.
It was also an excuse to wander the market and garment districts.
One afternoon I wandered the garment district and again could not find the suit. I was dejected and tired from not eating and was going to return to my book in my room when a teenage boy accosted me outside one of the shops. He asked me what I was looking for. I said a black cotton Nehru suit. He said his grandfather could make one for me.
I agreed and followed him into the alleyways. Vanarasi is many centuries old. And the streets near the river are tiny and random. Like the crayon scribble of a child. After much weaving we arrived at the back door of a house in an alleyway. We went inside and took off our shoes and sat down on a futon. Surrounding me was cloth stacked along the walls and a spindly old man came out. The young man showed me some fabric for the suit. The old man just sat there quietly watching the conversation.
"Here is great silk." The young man said.
"I was looking for cotton." I answered.
"But feel the silk"
"Do you have any cotton?"
"Yes, yes here it is."
"But do you have any black?"
"But this is a great color."
"I was looking for black."
At this point I got up and put on my shoes and saying goodbye nicely went out of the house. The young man followed me out to the alleyway. He said he knew of a place to get what I wanted. I declined. He then tried to sell me some drugs. I declined. He started to yell as I walked away, throwing obscenities and yelling that I had wasted his time. His last flung comment was just before I rounded the corner, that I would never find my way home in the alleyways.
I pulled out my compass, knowing that the river was to the south. Headed through the maze in that direction. Finally arriving upon the beautiful colourful gats leading down to the river.
I was feeling much better after my week vacation in Vanarasi. The food was staying inside me for the correct amount of time and I was feeling stronger. I took the train to Jaipur. But I took the cautious approach and did not eat all day on the train, because I knew the state of the bathrooms on the trains. It was partly the dirt and partly it unnerved me to flush the toilet and look down inside and watch the hole in the bottom open and see all that I had just excreted fall onto the tracks rushing by. Sometimes there was a sign stating, "Please do not flush the toilets while in the station."
Jaipur is a beautiful orange and brown city on the edge of the desert and is home to a most wonderful observatory, but that is another story. After finding my hotel, I decided to celebrate and go out for a meal. I paid for it by sitting next to the toilet for the rest for the evening.
The next morning I decided to visit the hospital. The man running the hotel gave me the address and I was in a rickshaw on my way.
The hotel was a crumbling British Victorian Mansion. There was a large green lawn and shade tree leading to the ten grand steps to the wide double door entrance. It must have housed some important British person before 1947, but was now the hospital. The lawn was filled with people, camped out, waiting and cooking. I found out later that the families of the sick would come to the house and camp out and cook meals for their sick loved ones. But all I saw was a stinking campground in front of the hospital.
Inside the grand entrance there was a large white room filled with milling people. After some confusion I found a small window and was told that I needed to go to room five and wait for a doctor to see me.
In the hallway toward room five was an old woman standing by an open window. She had a multicoloured sari wrapped around her body, with thin, tiny, dirty hands and feet sliding out the ends of the fabric. Her face was lined and dark, showing a hard life in the sun. She did not seem to notice me walking by, but started to pull up all the phlegm from her lungs into her mouth. Making that horrible growling gagging noise at the same time. She them proceeded to spit the entire mass out the window into the front garden. I did not look to see where it landed in the mass of people outside.
Room five was a square white room filled with people. A lot of them were sitting in the chairs along the walls, but there were many sitting on the floor or standing around. The one nurse I saw, wearing a not so clean white uniform, looked lost and harassed.
I turned around, and walked out of the hospital, thinking that the cure would be worse than the disease.