by Paul Theroux
She seemed to be praising the man who had dumped her for a younger woman. Dwight said, "People like that are never happy."
"He was supremely happy," Winky said, contradicting him. "Arun had exquisite taste. It rubbed off on me, I'm afraid. When we used to travel to London together on holiday we always stayed at the Connaught. One shopped at Harrods, and we had many posh friends nearby in Ovington Gardens. They were delightful and highly educated, but London can be so ... how does one put it?"
She spoke slowly but deliberately, so Dwight could not interrupt, as he wanted to at this point, to tell her about his trips to London.
"So damnably trying. Masses of these colored people, hubshis from Africa who go there just to get welfare, all these lazy people on the dole. One can't bear looking at them. Knightsbridge and Kensington are fine, but parts of London are absolutely filthy. Arun used to say, All these welfare people should be given a broom!'"
Dwight said, "But Mumbai is..."
"Vibrant," Winky said. "One has lived here one's whole life. Oh, yes, visitors complain about the crowds. But look closely at these so-called crowds. Everyone has something to do, something to make. It is a hive of activity. We Indians manufacture everything under the sun. Arun said that it was only a matter of time before we'd be making jet aircraft. We make cars, buses, lorries, even ships. We have a great navy—my father was in the military. Arun told me that China has no navy, did you know that? It's true! And it's not just the broad range of manufacturing but of course we make quality too. Go to Jodhpur and you will see they are producing fine linens and silks and for the high fashion houses and the designer labels of New York. Go up and down New York and virtually everything you see in the best shops is made in India—women's handbags, fine coats, silk scarves, lingerie, garments of all sorts, even shoes, though all one's own shoes are made in Italy. But Americans hardly know the difference."
Shut up! The throbbing in his temples was battling his desire, and yet the easy way she sat on the sofa, leaning slightly forward, caused her heavy breasts to sway as she spoke, and kept him attentive.
"Um." Sipping from her wine glass, she couldn't utter a word, yet she was making a droning sound in her nose, as if to signal that she was about to start speaking again.
"Where do you stay in New York?" Dwight asked.
"Gracious me, one would never go to America. It's far too violent. Everyone has a gun, and it's far too dirty. The fast life! Arun's brother had business there, somewhere in California. Electronics. He had so many stories about drugs and gangs—one was quite terrified just listening. An employee of his was killed, some sort of mugging. No, thank you. One has no plans to go to America. One's London holiday suits one nicely. One used to buy jewelry in Bond Street, but it's all got so predictable—all the shops in London cater to American tourists, so the pieces are nothing special and the prices are absurd. I think the piece you picked up at the charity auction was quite acceptable, was it not."
Was this a question? Dwight could not remember ever being subjected to such a barrage at short notice. In the woman's confidence was a weird honesty. Awful as it was to endure, he was almost grateful to her for this monologue, because in it she gave everything away: she was a snob, she was materialistic, a boaster, a bigot. Now he was too tired to respond, her talk had tired him the more, and so he sat on his plush chair in the overdecorated apartment watching her breasts move in counterpoint to her complaints. He also sensed that her talk might not be the idle chatter it seemed, but rather a way of wearing him down, a way of dominating him. She was still talking, but when at last she stopped, his willpower would be gone and he would be hers.
If her talk was like a test—of his patience and his own opinions—it also allowed him plenty of time to sit and stare. She was lovely, even if her chatter and her opinions were obnoxious. He smiled to think that the woman was desirable. Her golden skin, her lovely eyes flashing in indignation; her lips were full, her face fox-like, beaky, imposing. Her heavy breasts swayed in her sari, but such was the odd wrap of the garment that he could gaze at a great expanse of her pale belly, and in his fatigued state he imagined nuzzling its warmth and pillowing his face upon that softness.
Repelled by her talk, attracted by her body, aroused by being in the seclusion of her apartment late on this Mumbai night, he watched for the wine to take effect—and she was still talking! Now it was about her ex-husband, and what was strange about that was her frankness, her fondness for the man, how she talked about his bad-boy side in the way that Indian women—Miss Bhatia and Miss Chakravarti anyway—talked about men, always in motherly tones.
"What about children?" he managed to ask, reminding himself that in situations like this, which usually involved a nervous client, he felt like an interviewer.
"Thank goodness we didn't have any, so there were no entanglements. Aren't there enough unhappy children in the world without adding to their number? Though one sometimes thinks, Wouldn't it be nice to have a little girl to take shopping and to spoil rotten with all sorts of delicious treats? One can see her on a pony—riding lessons at the Gymkhana Club. Arun wanted a son. Well, maybe his new woman will provide him with one, and jolly good luck to them. He was a good provider. He found me this flat and he still keeps in touch. He knows that it's not easy for one. A divorced woman in India is damaged goods."
At the back of his throat he was gargling, blah-blah-blah, and was so intent that he did not notice, until a few moments had passed, that she had stopped speaking. What had she just said? He asked her to repeat it.
"You don't look it," he said.
"I assure you one is."
She laughed because she knew she was attractive and liked the conceit of calling herself damaged. Smiling, she looked even prettier. She tossed her hair, she laughed, she patted her hair into place. Her pale belly was dimpled, and only when she leaned over to refill her glass did a fold of flesh press against the silk. Now, sipping, she looked over the rim of her glass at him.
"What about you?"
She did not know his name, and after—what?—maybe half an hour of yapping, her first question.
"Me? Damaged goods."
"Not at all," she said. "You wouldn't have been at that charity ball, and at Gopi's table, if you didn't have some standing. All Mumbai was there, the best sort of people, and—hey, presto—you came up trumps with your bid."
Her tone annoyed him, but he was still so dazzled by her glamour, he tried to change the subject. "What kind of wine are you drinking?"
"Indian made. A vineyard in Karnataka. Quite drinkable, actually," she said. "Do you have them with you?"
"The earrings? I think so." He took the silk pouch out of his pocket. It reminded him of the pouch in which he'd carried his rejected wedding ring. That thought created an afterimage of Indru, who now possessed the diamond ring.
As he handled the silk pouch, Winky extended her arm, dark and slender and articulated—delicately jointed like the limb of a spider—and Dwight shook the earrings into the palm of her hand.
Deftly, she slipped off the earrings she was wearing, and in a set of movements like a dancer's gestures, more like touching her ears than attaching earrings, she hooked them, one and then the other, and turning to face him made them swing and glitter.
"They suit me, don't you think?"
Dwight said yes, realizing what was happening, but could not say any more.
"They catch the highlights of my sari," she said, and twitched her sash where it was trimmed with gold piping.
"Let me see," Dwight said. He placed his glass of water onto the marble-topped table and went over to the sofa and sat heavily next to her. He lifted her hair and smoothed it, then touched the earrings, poked one with his finger, and peered closely. "I guess they're a good fit."
"I'm delighted you approve."
He saw that this, like her rambling talk, was another test. He did not like her, but he was fascinated by how obvious she was, and he longed to weigh her breasts in his hands.
"Look at me," he said—because she was looking away, at a cabinet where there was a mirror.
She turned her head and lifted it slightly with a kind of hauteur that the earrings framed and accentuated.
He kissed her then, just leaned over and put his mouth on hers as though lapping an ice cream. She did not part her lips. She remained as she was, like a big doll, and as she did not even purse her lips to receive his kiss, they seemed to bump his, almost to resist. The first awkward kiss he had ever bestowed on a girl—at the age of twelve: Linda Keith, behind the First Baptist Church—had been something like this.
"What's wrong?"
"Isn't that a little sudden? A little previous?" She turned back to look at the mirror, as if to assess whether she had been injured by the kiss, and her earrings danced.
"I guess I had the wrong idea."
"You're a very nice man. A generous man"—still she was looking at her reflection, the earrings trembling on her ears.
"What's the plan, then?"
"The plan," she said, repeating it his way as though to mock him. "Perhaps we can meet for lunch sometime. Perhaps you can take me shopping."
Another test, another hoop.
"Perhaps," he said, using her tone as she had used his. She did not know that when Dwight said "perhaps," it meant never. At this moment he had finally concluded that he disliked her and almost said: I hope I never see you again. He got up and looked at his watch and put on an expression of surprise and said again, with finality, "Perhaps."
She seemed startled that he was leaving. She touched the earrings with her beautiful fingers. She said, "Well, then, cheerio."
"By the way, my name is Dwight Huntsinger."
"I'm terrible at names. Will you e-mail me? My address is on that card."
"Perhaps," he said.
In the street, he was rueful but not unhappy. He mocked himself, replaying some of what she had said. Tingling, yawning with exhaustion, he felt giddy as he walked down the hill to the main road to hail a taxi. And in the taxi he reflected on how, for the hour or more he'd been in Winky Vellore's apartment, he had not once objected to India. He had forgotten the stink, the noise, the crowds. Now on the main road he was back in India, and he was surprised by his reaction: he was glad.
He was forty-three, and he believed he had made many mistakes in his life, but his pride had saved him from more. He'd married late, the marriage had lasted less than a year, an expensive mistake, but necessary. He knew men who, rebuffed by a woman, pursued her until she submitted; men who were energized by Isn't that a little sudden? and Perhaps we can meet for lunch sometime. By You can take me shopping when they had asked for a simple yes or no to sex. He was not one of them. Meeting resistance, Dwight shrugged and accepted it as final, was in fact slightly ashamed at having met resistance—ashamed of having requested a favor to which the answer was no. The word "no" did not rouse him. He did not pursue the woman, he had never pursued a woman, never tried to woo one without at least a smile of encouragement. He was literal-minded in sexual matters, and so Perhaps we can meet for lunch sometime he translated as No dice. The process of wooing he found discouraging and at times humiliating.
Because of this, his experiences of women were few, and since his divorce the only women he'd had were Sumitra and Indru—essentially streetwalkers who had pursued him, offered themselves to him in the dark.
Now he thought only of Indru, and after the evening with Winky Vellore—those shattering hours, like a whole relationship, beginning, middle, and end—he had never felt more tender toward Indru. That evening with Winky helped him understand Indru. He knew that Winky would have despised her, but that was a measure of Indru's worth.
At the Taj, he paid the taxi and was saluted by the doorman as he stood in the stew of odors, strong even here on the marble stairs of the expensive hotel. He remembered his first trip, his solemnly worded thought "the smell of failure." But there was vitality in it, not only death but life, too.
Meetings the next day kept him in the boardroom late, Shah doing most of the negotiating, yet he needed to observe the process and approve the wording of the contracts. Indian lawyers, their passion for redrafting, their love of arcane phraseology: they could sound in the middle of it all like astrologers. Manoj Verma had not married (and this was just idle water-cooler chat at the top of Jeejeebhoy Towers) until his family astrologer had drawn a chart of his prospective bride's planets and found them auspicious. Dwight went back to his hotel, his head spinning.
The following day he walked across the road to the Gateway of India at exactly the same time—in the fading glow of early evening—he had met Indru months before. He retraced his steps and passed the ice cream seller; he bought a Thums Up and lingered at the rail of the harbor, then took a seat, hoping that the ritual of these precise repetitions might conjure her up.
Without a word, she appeared and approached and sat beside him on the bench. That was another Indian surprise: Indians might spend hours or days waiting until you showed up—his driver, the courier, even J. J. Shah. When you wanted them, they were there standing at attention, or as in the Indru's case, uncoiling in the half-dark and smiling.
"I waiting you so long."
"I want to kiss you."
She giggled. "Not here. Follow me."
To anyone who glanced his way, he was a foreigner, a ferringi, perhaps an American—the baseball cap with the suit was a giveaway. He was alone, detached, strolling in the crowd of people on Apollo Bunder, heading north, and now toward Chowpatty Beach. But in fact he was watching a girl in a white dress, and guided by her, he crossed busy streets and negotiated sidewalks that were dense with pedestrians.
At the point in a busy road where in the clouds beyond a gleam of summer lightning broke through, like the shivered splinters of a precious stone smashed by a hammer, the smithereens puddling in a watery afterglow on the slop of the sea at Chowpatty, Indru glanced back at Dwight and her smile touched his soul. Then she walked down a narrow lane and through a gateway, where in the strange light a woman was washing a baby in a tin basin, like a child in a slop of mercury. At a distance the houses were lovely; here at the base of this apartment house the smell of packed-down and heated dirt was so strong it built in his head like a loud noise.
Indru was on the stairs, climbing three flights. He caught up with her on the last landing, as she was turning her key in the metal door.
"Please you come in."
He summed it up quickly in the twilight before she switched on the lamp: two rooms, a string bed he reminded himself was a charpoy, cushions on the floor, a chair.
"Please sit."
He chose the chair. The long walk in the humid heat had worn him out.
"How did you find this?"
"Money you gave me was ample."
"The ring?"
"I am sold," she said, looking fearful.
Instead of saying anything, he kissed her to reassure her.
"But first, sir."
She took his shoes off, plucked off his socks, slipped a mat under his bare feet. Then she got a bowl and filled it with water and knelt before him. And when she bent over and washed his feet, massaging his toes, he felt strengthened, and the distant rumble of thunder from Chowpatty echoed in his head as he thought, I am happy, I am home.
4
He asked the firm for another month. Thanking him for his willingness, they granted it immediately, e-mailing him a list of new clients, with specifications of product lines for outsourcing—sports clothes, leather goods, brass fittings, molded plastic tubes for patio furniture, gardening implements, lamp bases, glassware—and Kohut added, "Glad it's such a success," because no one had ever asked for an extension. Most had wanted to come home early.
After the meetings, or the flights to Bangalore and Hyderabad—usually a day in each place and the late flight back to Mumbai—he went to Indru's room rather than the Elephanta Suite. He lay in the half-dark listening to her stories, which she told in a monotone: how he
r father touched her—the shame of it; how her mother beat her, blaming her, and her father sent her away to her auntie's village; how her auntie locked her in an unlit room with the grain sacks and the rats; how, when Indru went to the police, they didn't believe her; how the village boys threw bricks of cow-shit at her, and when her uncle happened by to rescue her, he drove her on his motorbike to the riverbank, where he dragged her through the bamboo.
"He touch me here, he touch me down here on my privates, he bite me with his teeth and call me dirty dog."
They were harrowing stories, the more terrifying for the factual way she told them, lying on her back on the string bed, her fingertips grazing her body to indicate where she had been violated. She seemed to understand how they seized Dwight's attention and silenced him. And some evenings when he looked distracted, his gaze drifting to the window, sleepy and satisfied, she would prop herself on one elbow and drop her voice and show him a scar on her wrist, whitish on her dark skin.
"One uncle tie me with ropes. He say, 'Is a game.' I be so scare. He take my sari. He say, 'I no hurt you.'"
And what she told him next in that soft voice was more powerful to him than the racket at the window. He took a deep breath and gagged and thought, Not a success at all—it's a failure.
The smell of failure in India wasn't only Indian failure. It was a universal smell of human weakness, the stink of humanity, his own failure too. His firm of lawyers was bringing so many people down.
He remembered telling Maureen that he was being sent to India—like a threat, a risk, a martyrdom: I'm going to India—take that!
His marriage hadn't worked, but he thought: How can any marriage work? Everyone had their own problems—who was normal? If the two people remained themselves, with separate ambitions, there was strife. Submission was possible in the short term. But if one or the other surrendered to become absorbed in the other's life, then it was the annihilation of a human soul, something like slavery or an early death, and resentment was inevitable. Love was not enough, sexual desire didn't last, you had to make your own life.
