But truthfully, this is a collection about pain—and the challenge of not
flinching in the face of it. In this first story, even as the narrator
suffers a tragic loss, she tries her best to function in the world.
Nothing around her has changed, no one knows about her inner struggles.
Life simply goes on. Bhuvaneswar’s biggest asset is her pacing; mostly,
her stories race along, masterfully slowing down where necessary to fill
out the details of her worlds. The woman who suffers a miscarriage sees
a prostitute on the street with a baby in the pram talking to a man in a
van. “My taxi stops near enough for me to see her painted but young
face when she steps back; I see her shaking her head at the driver of
the black van; she will have other babies, I am sure of it, and they
will live even though she smokes, exhaling blankly while she pokes milk
bottle into her baby’s face.” It’s another little moment, but one may,
when reading, need to stop and come up for air, the pain too much to
bear.
Bhuvaneswar gives voice to an astonishing array of women—immigrant,
queer, lost misfits, hopeless romantics, aggrieved women,
sexually-abused victims—and the sheer ground the stories cover is
powerful, but not gimmicky. The struggles feel real, the characters
lifelike. A husband’s infidelity causes the wife to flee to a writer’s
retreat which helps her to deal with her own fears and secrets; a boy
finds comfort in the legend of a woman who weds Death to grapple with
the disappearance of his sister; the betrayal of a friend who sleeps
with her best friend’s husband leaves her feeling conflicted; growing up
estranged from a father, a sister and her disabled brother reunite
after years.
It’s a many-headed pain the reader must navigate, but oh, it’s worth it!
In the stories that deal with rape, sexual assault, or violence,
Bhuvaneswar renders things more than just relevant and timely. When she
exposes her characters, it feels like an awakening. In “A Shaker Chair” a
psychotherapist is caught off guard when one of her young patients ends
up sleeping with the therapist’s father as revenge, thus reminding her
of her own sexual assault. In “Orange Popsicles,” Jayanti, an
international student, afraid of losing her scholarship, cheats on a
test by taking help from a boy. But things take a turn for the worse
when that boy rapes her to shut her up, certain that he will get away
with it. “Good girl,” he tells her. “I’ll feed you a lot more of my
horse c*** unless you shut your mouth.”
But they’re timely too. It may be a cliché for a book like this to speak
so precisely about this moment in the wake of #MeToo, but it’s also
accurate. Bhuvaneswar doesn’t look away from the pain, and she dares you
to do the same. Her sentences are largely elaborate descriptions paired
with tight dialogue, with brisk asides to check in on the emotions of
her characters. It’s a curious precision—down to a formula almost—but it
allows the stories to work in unison. “I mean, like if they come to you
and say there’s a way to save your scholarship, by putting it all on
me, you won’t do it, will you?” Dave thinks in Orange Popsicles.
“Because you know my lawyer would take you down, you’re completely in
this mess, and if you don’t keep your mouth shut I’ll start talking
about how you begged me to help you, that you offered me a free fuck.
You can’t imagine you’re the first to make the trade. And I’ve gotten
A’s in every other science class this year. I’m a star in the biology
major. My Dean says that I’m headed for a top ten med school. You can’t
exactly say the same.” There is a great sense of importance here: it is
important to read these stories because they ring so true.
There’s a lot that could have gone wrong here—but it doesn’t. White
Dancing Elephants is important, but not self-important. Portraying so
many lives and so many women may be impressive, but what really keeps
one reading is the rawness and the ugliness, the painful depth. What
could have gone immensely heavy-handed, doesn’t.
In “Talinda,” the narrator, Narika, has an affair with her best friend’s
(Talinda’s) husband, George, and discovers that Talinda is dying.
Deepening Narika’s betrayal is the knowledge that the two friends were
also once lovers. Narika fights an inner battle, and struggles to do the
right thing while simultaneously finding the courage to follow her
heart: “I have done my good deed for the day, I tell myself. Sitting
with her for hours, at the doctor’s. It doesn’t make me good for a
second, but it was something she needed.”
The pain, for Narika, is ambivalent. She sinks in and out of guilt, and
simultaneously contemplates Talinda’s early death. We, too, are torn.
This is, after all, a person who is remorseful but daydreams of her
future with George after Talinda is gone. As she waits for Talinda in
the hospital, she regrets it all; she could have been a better friend
had the circumstances been different. She wants forgiveness from
Talinda, but perhaps also approval for her actions. As a reader, one can
sympathize: we are just as conflicted as her.
This is a story about a friendship, and what greed, love, and humanity
portend for it. It cannot be easy for George and Narika to deal with
Talinda’s sickness, which perhaps caused them to get together in the
first place. The relationship between the women makes it harder not to
feel sorry for them. “She put a hand on Talinda’s cold, white one,
noticing as she always did the difference in their skin color. But this
time it seemed like a ghastly difference between a living and dying
thing—Narika’s rosy-golden-brown hand, unlined, against Talinda’s pale
one.” Growing up without fathers, these two girls had found one another
in high school and grown to love one another. Narika had always been
attracted to Talinda. But, in the end, when Talinda wants to be with
her, it is too late, even if there is love between them. “‘Why don’t you
fucking let me sleep,’ Talinda says, rolling onto her side, but she
doesn’t slap my hand away when I come close enough to smooth my
bedclothes over her. ‘In a little while I’ll call my husband, and he’ll
come here because I ask, because it’s right. And he’ll ignore you. And
you can break up with him then, fine. Sure, you will. But meantime,
Narika, let me sleep. I mean, really, can’t you? Leave me alone to
goddamn sleep.’”
Above all, Bhuvaneswar’s collection is daring—each story capable of
transporting you to their specific settings, while simultaneously
throwing you off-guard with brilliant endings yet making you reel from
the hurt and sorrow. Nothing about the stories or characters seems
obvious in her worlds, but White Dancing Elephants is genuinely honest
about its characters. Even when the plot feels muddled, there’s a fealty
to the characters that it doesn’t squander. The tiniest of details
allow the reader to pause, and to prepare themselves for what is coming
next, a brief respite from the horrors that are yet to follow. One
minute Bhuvaneswar indulges the reader with beautiful prose and
descriptions, and the next she throws them off balance.
White Dancing Elephants is an astonishing debut. The plethora of
unexpected twists and surprising endings may be what keep the pages
turning furiously—but the real sense here is that Bhuvaneswar has
captured all our most profound losses and our most painful agonies. It’s
as if she’s telling us: No matter how hard it is, we must look.
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