Follow the Elephant

by Beryl Young

  “What does it mean?” he asked.

  “It’s a symbol of female energy. It protects girls and women. We buy these paper ones on sheets. Any colour you like to suit your mood!” Rani laughed. “Now, can I ask you a question?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Are you a baseball player?”

  “Sometimes.” Ben was puzzled. “Oh, my baseball cap. I wear it to keep off the sun. And it’s kind of a cool cap.” Ben doffed it at Rani.

  “You mean cool like not hot or cool like cool?”

  “Both, I guess,” Ben said.

  “I like it,” Rani said. “It is cool.” That smile again.

  They climbed over sand dunes and down onto the shore where they could see across the water to a red lighthouse at the farthest point of the headland. “You live in an amazing place. A beach like this is not what I expected in India,” Ben said.

  “What did you expect?”

  “Absolutely nothing that I’ve found! Like, seeing a man levitate in the air. Like a stone statue that moved to show me the way out of a temple.” Ben waved his arm like an elephant’s trunk.

  “A stone statue that moved?” Rani looked surprised.

  “Yes, I swear it did. I saw it,” Ben said.

  “Quite a trip for someone your age!” Rani laughed. “You’re my age, aren’t you, Ben? I’m almost thirteen.”

  “I turned thirteen last year. You live with your parents?”

  “Just my mum and my sister Lauren. She’s nine. My dad died last March.”

  Rani was quiet for a moment. “Such a short time ago. My father died when I was two years old. My mother raised us.” She bent to take off her sandals and bury her feet in the warm sand. A silver bracelet with tiny bells dangled from her ankle. Her legs were the colour of coffee with cream. “Prem is almost twenty now, but he is staying at home to help run the resort. I’d like to go to university and then travel when I graduate.”

  After wandering along the beach for a time, they headed back. Ben said, “I wish my PlayStation was working. I’d let you hear some cool music.” He explained about needing an adapter.

  “This town’s not very big, but we might be able to get you one.”

  “I think my grandmother knew we could buy one in India, but she didn’t tell me. I guess we all have our secrets.” Ben shrugged his shoulders. “But it’s no problem. I don’t miss it much these days.”

  Back at the bungalow Gran was stretched out in the hammock, pushing her foot against the porch railing to keep it swinging. “You have fun with Rani? She seems like a lovely girl.”

  “She’s okay.”

  Gran wobbled on the swinging hammock as she tried to get out. “I bet you’re hungry. They don’t serve dinner at the resort so we should go into town and find a place to eat.”

  Ben was hungry, and he didn’t feel like talking on the walk into town. They passed shops with stone carvings in the windows and stopped at the market. Piles of melons, squash and oranges rose on counters above bins of rice and beans and wide baskets filled with cucumbers, tomatoes and purple eggplant. They wandered inside the covered market, where haunches of meat hung in rows in one corner. On the counter, a pile of orange meat was covered with whizzing flies. Ben’s stomach lurched.

  “We’re a long way from the rows of wrapped meat at Safeway,” Gran said.

  “Yep. No sign of refrigeration,” Ben said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Up the street, they found a small restaurant. It seemed clean, but after the gross displays at the market, Ben had decided never to eat meat again. He ordered dhal and rice with chapatis.

  Gran ordered goat curry. “Never eaten goat, but I hear it’s good.”

  “Yuck!”

  “We’ll see,” Gran said.

  The curry came in a heaped bowl of brown blobs floating in dark gravy. It was a silent meal. Ben didn’t have anything to say, and Gran seemed absorbed in her own thoughts. Ben wondered how soon she’d miss her hat. They finished the meal quickly, and as they got up Ben saw that Gran had a dribble of brown on her chin.

  “You’ve got goat gravy on your face, Gran,” Ben said. Gran wiped with her paper napkin but didn’t get it all. What did it matter.

  Silently they passed through the darkening town back to their bungalow. The sun had just sunk and left behind a streaky purple sky over a dark and sombre sea.

  They were a long way from home.

  Day Eight

  BEN OPENED HIS EYES. The sound of retching from the bathroom had woken him. Over the steady pulse of the large ceiling fan, he could hear his grandmother vomiting.

  Ben leapt out of bed and stood barefoot outside their adjoining bathroom door. “Are you okay, Gran?”

  “I hope so,” was the hoarse response. Then a pause. “Must be … that curry I had last night.” Another pause, then more retching. “You’re not sick are you, Ben?”

  “No, I’m just tired,” Ben answered. Not certain what to do, Ben waited, standing by the door.

  White and shaky, his grandmother opened the door. Clutching her nightgown across her stomach, she stumbled back to bed.

  “It’s cramps … like knives … one after another,” she groaned. Ben helped her onto the bed, where she lay doubled up on her side with her face buried in the pillow.

  Her voice was weak. “I feel so awful. I never should have brought you to India. It’s all hopeless.”

  “Oh, Gran, I know we ran into a dead end in Varanasi, but don’t worry about that now.” This was not the time to tell her that this could be the day there’d be a message on the school site.

  “I’m a stupid old woman. Thinking I could find someone I knew fifty years ago.” Gran interrupted herself and rushed back to the bathroom. There were more sounds of heaving.

  It sounded gross in there. She’d need water. Ben poured some from the pitcher on the dresser and sat waiting on the end of his grandmother’s bed. When Gran came unsteadily out of the bathroom, she sat down beside him. Her hands were shaking as she sipped the water. Then she dropped back on the bed. One second later she was gagging and struggling to get up. There was no time to shut the bathroom door before she was vomiting in even more violent spasms.

  This had to be malaria. Gran was always reminding him to take his pills, but he’d never asked if she was taking hers. He sat on the bed, listening for sounds from the bathroom and keeping his bare feet off the floor in case of lizards or cockroaches.

  When she shuffled out of the bathroom, Gran was stooped over like a one-hundred-year-old woman. Ben shivered. He could tell she was going to die.

  Gran collapsed on the bed, barely able to raise her head from the pillow. “Don’t worry, Ben … it’s called Delhi belly … food poisoning … work its way through.”

  “I thought you’d missed taking your pills and you got malaria.”

  “I’ve … been … taking the … pills.”

  “More water, Gran?” offered Ben.

  “No. Couldn’t keep … down. Go back to bed … I’ll sleep.”

  Ben gave his grandmother a last look and turned out the light. “I’ll leave the door between our rooms open, Gran.”

  Ben lay down on his own bed. He wasn’t sure if he’d done the right thing leaving Gran. It was all so weird. The last thing he remembered was listening hard, not sure if he was imagining the soft scurrying noises in the room. Who knew what crawling creatures were hiding in the darkness? Who knew what would happen to his grandmother? He’d never seen anyone as sick as she was. And she was so weak. If she died, he’d be by himself, all alone in India.

  Then he heard more vomiting. Ben sat up, acutely awake. Rushing to the bathroom door Ben saw his grandmother collapsed on the tile floor.

  “Can’t get up …” It was an effort for Gran to speak. “Can’t stop … get a doctor, Ben.”

  Still in his pajamas and bare feet, Ben ran out into the dark, across the wet grass to the Gurins’ bungalow. He pounded on the door with both hands. After a few long moments, a sleepy Prem opened the
door.

  Ben could barely catch his breath. “It’s my grandmother. She’s been vomiting all night. Can you find a doctor?”

  Prem put his hand on Ben’s shoulder and said, “No problem, Ben. I’ll phone the doctor in town right away. Go back and stay with your grandmother.”

  Ben raced back across the grass, only faintly aware of the sun just rising over the rim of the sea. His grandmother was still lying on the bathroom floor. She had crawled close to the wall and lay curled up like a little kid. In her rumpled nightgown she could have been one of the bodies on the street in Delhi.

  The body moaned and Ben knelt down beside her. “The doctor’s coming, Gran.”

  A few minutes later Prem came in and said, “The doctor will arrive in fifteen minutes. He lives close by and will come on his bicycle.”

  Prem’s eyes opened wide when he saw Gran slumped on the bathroom floor. He signalled to Ben. “We must get your grandmother up.”

  With Prem lifting Gran’s shoulders and Ben holding her bare legs, they managed to lift her onto the bed. Prem was wiping Gran’s face with a wet cloth when a bearded man in a high blue turban arrived. To Ben’s relief, the man spoke English. Prem introduced Ben.

  “Hello, Ben. I am Dr. Sandeep Dhaliwal. Prem told me your grandmother has been sick all night. Vomiting and diarrhea, correct?”

  Ben nodded. The doctor bent over Gran and asked, “When were you first sick, Mrs. Leeson?”

  “About eleven last night … it got worse.”

  The doctor was taking Gran’s pulse.

  “What is it?” Ben asked.

  “Probably food poisoning. This can happen in India,” said Dr. Dhaliwal.

  “My grandmother had goat curry last night. That was it!” said Ben.

  “We rarely find out what causes the food poisoning,” said Dr. Dhaliwal. He felt Gran’s forehead, shook down a thermometer and put it in her mouth.

  “She has a bit of a fever,” he said. He leaned over the bed. “Mrs. Leeson, you are dehydrated from the fluids you’ve lost. I’d like to put you in hospital and start a saline drip.”

  Ben’s worst fears were coming true. His grandmother had a fever. She was dehydrated. She was so sick she had to go to a hospital. An Indian hospital! Was that man in a turban a qualified doctor?

  “I’ll phone for an ambulance,” Prem said, and with a nod from Dr. Dhaliwal, he was out the door.

  The doctor put down his stethoscope. “Ben, pack a bag for your grandmother. Put in her toothbrush and clean night-clothes.”

  “I will,” Ben said. “And her malaria pills and her high-blood pressure pills too.”

  “Good man. We’ll make sure she gets those.” Dr. Dhaliwal sat at the end of the bed holding Gran’s wrist while Ben rushed to gather the things from the bathroom.

  “Tell me what brings you and your grandmother to India,” he asked Ben.

  Ben stood by the bed, gripping the backpack to his chest. Trying to hide his shaky voice, he told the doctor about their search for Shanti. Being scared always made his voice wobble.

  “That’s an interesting quest,” Dr. Dhaliwal said. “What was the pen pal’s name?”

  “We don’t know her married name. When she wrote to my grandmother her name was Shanti Mukherjee.”

  Dr. Dhaliwal packed up his medical equipment. “It may be a coincidence, but I knew a man in Calcutta called Mukherjee. You see, although I am from the Punjab, I won a scholarship to medical school in Calcutta, and it is there I met a fellow student who may be related to the woman you seek.”

  Just then Prem came to the door with two men in white shirts, carrying a stretcher between them. They lifted Ben’s grandmother onto the canvas stretcher and tightened a strap across the middle. It was awful to see Gran lying there with her face screwed up in pain.

  Ben thought he should reassure her about the money and he leaned over to whisper, “I’ll take care of the money, Gran. I’ll wear the fanny pack.”

  “Thank … you,” she sighed, not opening her eyes.

  Ben squeezed her hand and followed the group as it trekked back across the lawn. Overlapping footprints in the morning’s wet grass had kept a visible record of the procession of people who had crossed it, beginning with Ben’s barefoot race in the dark to get Prem.

  The sun was now up, and Ben’s watch said almost eight o’clock. “Can I come in the ambulance?” he asked the attendant who was loading the end of the stretcher.

  “Sorry, no one rides in here except us,” the attendant said as he closed the door.

  “I’ll meet you at the hospital,” said Dr. Dhaliwal to the attendants. “Ben, you come to the hospital with Prem after four this afternoon. It’s my guess that you’ll find your grandmother feeling a good deal better.” The ambulance pulled out along the gravel driveway, giving Ben no time to protest.

  He hadn’t even had a chance to say goodbye to his grandmother. A terrible feeling washed over him. He remembered Geoffrey Bonder telling the joke about the sick man taking one look at the entrance of an Indian hospital and announcing he was cured.

  What had he done, letting his grandmother be taken to a hospital in India? He’d been irresponsible. His father would never have done that. Dad was always so good at taking care of things. Ben thought he’d probably find his grandmother’s cold dead body when he got to the hospital.

  Prem put his arm around Ben’s shoulder. “Cheer up, old boy. Let’s get some breakfast into you. I can smell my mother’s dosas cooking.”

  “I’d better email my mother and tell her what’s happened,” Ben said. He had to swallow hard to get the wobble out of his voice.

  “Why not wait until after we’ve been to the hospital this afternoon? We’ll have a better idea later of how your grandmother is recovering. These bugs usually work their way out. No need to alarm anyone just yet.”

  Rani and her mother sat across the table from Prem and Ben. The fried crepes filled with vegetables were hot and spicy, but Ben was distracted, imagining his grandmother being injected with dirty needles. She’d be scared. She didn’t know one person in the hospital. He refused the second masala dosa Rani offered him.

  “I’m sure my grandmother’s sick because she ate goat curry last night,” Ben said.

  “What makes you think it was the goat meat?” Mrs. Gurin asked.

  “Gran and I were at the market yesterday. None of that meat is refrigerated.”

  “True,” Mrs. Gurin said, “but it’s fresh. Did you see the bright orange meat?”

  “Sure did. Gran couldn’t believe it.”

  “That’s goat meat!” said Rani, smiling. “It’s orange before it’s cooked. Here we mostly eat vegetarian meals, but snake meat and goat meat are sold in our markets.”

  Rani and Prem laughed at the look on Ben’s face.

  “Your grandmother is overtired,” Mrs. Gurin said. “This trip has been upsetting for her.”

  Ben shook his head. You don’t get so sick just from being overtired. It was scary that she could be so weak so fast. Maybe Gran was wrong about taking her malaria pills. Maybe she’d forgotten she’d missed one. Or maybe they weren’t working. People died from malaria. Ben felt as though a monster had tied a rope around his chest and was pulling on it. “Gran could have malaria.”

  “No. She doesn’t have any symptoms of malaria,” Prem said.

  “Don’t worry, Ben,” Rani said. “Your grandmother is in good hands. Let the hospital take care of her.”

  Rani asked her mother something in a language Ben couldn’t understand. Mrs. Gurin nodded. “I’ve just asked my mother if I could take you swimming this morning after I do my work,” Rani said.

  When she looked directly at you, Rani’s eyes danced with light. He’d never seen eyes like them. For a moment Ben forgot to answer. Then he said, “Great idea, but I have to be at the hospital by four o’clock.”

  “Tell you what,” Prem said. “I have work to do in the office and Rani’s helping the women who clean the resort. Why don’t you make up f
or the sleep you lost last night, and Rani can come for you at eleven.”

  “Excellent,” agreed Ben.

  “Bring a towel,” Rani called as she headed out the door to start work.

  Once again Ben crossed the grass, now beginning to vibrate with the heat of the morning sun. The bungalow showed signs of a hard night. Sheets trailed off his grandmother’s rumpled bed; towels were scattered around the bathroom. The memory of his grandmother slumped on the floor made Ben feel sick. He had the whole day to put in before he could see her at the hospital. His head buzzed; he was wide awake.

  Poor Gran. She’d been in agony, and he’d stood by uselessly. He was not a good grandson. He’d left her favourite hat in the taxi and not said a word. Before that he’d blamed her for his father’s smoking. That was unfair. People started smoking because they didn’t know any better, and then they were hooked. His dad had tried to quit, but it was too late.

  Ben picked up Gran’s guidebook and sat on his own bed. Once more he studied the elephant photograph on the cover, then he flipped through a few pages. He lay back on the bed and started reading about the maharaja rule in India.

  The next thing he heard was Rani calling his name at the bungalow door. “Ben! Wake up. It’s time to swim.”

  Ben tried to make his voice sound as though he hadn’t been asleep. “Be right there. Just changing into my bathing suit.”

  He decided he had to take the fanny pack with him to the beach so he rolled it in a towel and put it under his arm. When he came out he saw that Rani wore a loose cotton beach coat over her dark blue bathing suit and had a towel over her shoulder. And she was smiling at him. “Race you!” she called.

  Ben stowed the towel under a palm tree and was first into the warm water, but once there Rani matched him stroke for stroke. Every few minutes Ben looked up to check that his towel with the money was safe under the tree. Rani and Ben chased each other through the water, dived for shells and hurled themselves through the waves. Ben lay on his back, buoyed up by the salty green water, and for the first time since he’d come to India, felt completely relaxed.