Back in the Bedroom: A Caparisoned Elephant

I got out from under and stood. I was all better. In the windows, the day was blue. How the grass glittered, rinsed and rinsed by heady sprinklers.

I hadn’t stood up in so long, it was like swaying on high. It was like mounting a caparisoned elephant. I was grown up. I was tall.

And I thought that once upon a time, a little boy was separated from his elephant by the chicanery of the Raj, and some twenty years later, still a boy ungrown because of the draining lack of elephant, he was brought in state to Delhi and remounted on the animal, festooned for this occasion in ribbons and paint and gilded finery; he climbed up and was initially awkward and bobbled from side to side, but then the elephant took; the elephant became as it were magnetized and attracted the boy’s whole frame with its alternative balance and they promenaded off toward the open jungle, shedding tinsel on the Ministry lawns.

Later that day, Ralph came up to see me. He opened the door without knocking, and when he saw me sitting up on the bed, all showered, in clean clothes, he stepped back.

“Sorry. I thought you were asleep.”

I said, “That’s okay.”

He stood in the doorway, absolutely still. Finally I looked up and said bravely that I wanted to eat, but I didn’t want to eat in my bedroom, but I wasn’t sure I could make it down the stairs.

He smiled. “You can’t win, then, can you?”

There was a fly in the room that kept buzzing as if it was really desperate. Ralph just shut the door and went away.

So I made it downstairs and found him in the kitchen and he cooked me spaghetti with green spaghetti. Eddie had taken the chairs so we ate standing up.

And when I grew mawkish, hanging my head over the smeary plate,

Ralph said, “Cut it out.”

And he told me the story of his ugly stepsister, who had two passports at fourteen and traveled the world lightly with a briefcase of towels and cash, and broke the bank once at the Yak and Yeti Hotel Casino, Kathmandu, playing cards stalwartly through the many power cuts.