Four tonnes of elephant block the middle of the only road to Rishikesh, butt smirking like a lazy Mona Lisa. Vishnu kills the engine.
Lee and I obey our family’s devotion to health anxiety and apply our mosquito repellent before exiting the car. Mom gave us four 4 bottles of it at the airport.
I follow Lee and Jo as they retreat, then we hoist ourselves onto a concrete barricade separating trifling highway from mighty Ganges.
“Why is it here?” Lee asks Vishnu.
“He looks for a mate.”
The water glides serenely, but I remind myself that it’s subject to flash flooding.
“Look!” Vishnu points to specks of fuchsia pigment scattered in the dirt. “Two days ago we celebrate Holi. We throw powder to show beauty of all colours.”
I try to imagine the purposeful feeling of belonging to something bigger than a collective fear of death by infectious disease.
Jo sighs. “It’s an hour ‘til our welcome ceremony.”
Vishnu snorts. “Elephant doesn’t care about ceremony.”
Jo’s bottle-green eyes converge hard upon Vishnu. “We’re paying you to get us there by 5.”
Lee and I raise our eyebrows, but Vishnu keeps watching the elephant’s tail.
“We wait until he moves,” he asserts.
Lee takes me by the arm and leads me past a chai wallah singing Billie Jean, a cow scratching against a fence, and a group of boys sitting around a pile of rubbish.
“Jo’s a real ray of sunshine,” I grin.
“She’s just the tip of the iceberg. We had three near misses on the road, and now an actual elephant is standing between us and our ashram. We don’t belong here.”
Before I can find the words to argue, we hear a splash, and turn to see the elephant swaggering through the river, leaving the fuchsia-flecked road open.
