“The elephants became enraged. I saw the bull elephant
trumpeting and I ran and hid in the trees. Sanjeev was behind me, rooted to
the spot, too frightened to move.”
As he spoke the waitress came back, paused at their table, then
asked whether there was anything more she could get them.
“We’re fine,” Audie said.
When she had gone, Dr. Nagaraj said, “I watched with horror as
the huge elephant bore down on Sanjeev, followed by the herd of smaller
elephants, raising so much dust. Seeing them, Sanjeev bowed his head and
knelt, knowing he was about to die. He couldn’t run, he couldn’t swim. But he
did yoga—bidalasana, cat position, instinctive somehow.”
Flexing his fingers, making a business of it, Dr. Nagaraj
straightened the mat in front of him, tidied the coaster under his glass, then
dipped his head and sucked at the lassi.
“And what happened?” Audie asked.
Dr. Nagaraj went vague, his face slackening, then, “Oh, yes,” as
he pretended to remember. “The great bull elephant lowered his head as
though to charge. But instead of impaling Sanjeev on his tusks as I had
expected, the elephant knelt, trapping Sanjeev between the two great tusks.
Not to kill him, oh no. I could see it was to protect him from the other
elephants trampling him.”
He seemed on the point of saying more when Beth said that she
was exhausted, that she would be a basket case if she didn’t get some sleep.
“I call that another miracle,” Beth Blunden said as they strolled
under the starry sky to their suite.
Stranger than fiction, blending tragedy and farce, How to Create the Perfect Wife is an engrossing tale of the radicalism, and deep contradictions, at the heart of the Enlightenment.
Z, the novel about the life of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is at points charming and; like another reviewer, I kept thinking of the movie, "Midnight...
read more
Although heavy on the scientific details, which slowed down the story for me (OK, I admit, I was one of those liberal arts majors who skipped out on...
read more
Loved this book. Magical, quirky, enchanting I could go on. All books do not have to be literary fiction, sometimes it is just so comforting to read...
read more
U.S. ebook sales up in 2012, but rate of growth is slowing(May 16 2013) In 2012, trade book sales (i.e. non academic book sales) rose 6.9%, to $15.049 billion, and e-book sales continued to grow, although the rate of growth...
Full Story
