The Elephanta Suite

by Paul Theroux

  He'd had hopes, the usual ones, of partnership and plans, and had tried. But early on he'd lain beside his wife of less than a year and thought, It's over. He suspected that she was thinking the same.

  To calm himself while lying beside Maureen, he mentally moved out: his restless mind roamed through the apartment room by room, selecting the things he wanted to take with him, rejecting the things that were hers. In was an inventory of the place but also a way of processing the marriage, making a pile of the belongings he planned to leave behind.

  He had loved her for more than a year, the passionate part of the whole business; and then he proposed and set a date. But the nearer they got to the date, the less love he felt—panic set in—and his heart was almost empty as he went through the motions on his wedding day. The wedding itself, the expense, the decisions, their first arguments, seemed a ritual designed to break your spirit. After that it was just a struggle, as though marriage represented the end of a love affair, the beginning of mutual strife. She kept working, she wouldn't take the name Huntsinger, she rejected the idea of having kids, she didn't cook—but, then, neither did he. He asked Sheely, who could be trusted with confidences, if these were signs, but Sheely in his lawyer's way shrugged and gave a lawyer's equivocal answer: Maybe yes, maybe no.

  Maureen was also a lawyer—tax law and trust funds, but a different firm—and she seemed too preoccupied to notice his mood, the question on his face: Why did we do it?

  He was the first to mention splitting up. He told her in a cowardly way: "Maybe just spend a little time apart." But she could see he meant divorce, because the same thought was lurking in her own mind. She'd said, "My mother will be so angry. She said I wouldn't be able to do it—that I was too selfish."

  Maureen began to cry, and for the first time, with acute pain, Dwight saw how vulnerable she was. He held her tenderly, he felt protective, he said, "We'll figure something out," and he despaired, because it was turning out to be so much harder than he had imagined. Showing her weakness for the first time, the fear that she had expected the marriage to fail, made the breakup a nightmare. Losing her as a wife was painful, but he guessed he'd get over it; losing her as a friend—someone he had pushed overboard when the storm broke over them—that seemed unbearable and something she would never forgive.

  Not much remained to divide. They sold the apartment and split the proceeds.

  "Short marriages," Sheely said, "pretty common. Like a chess move. I know three people, not counting you. Couple of months and they're gonzo. Better now than later. Probably a book on the subject."

  In the melancholy months afterward they still saw each other. They didn't know anyone else, and their feelings were so raw they didn't want to make new friends.

  Maureen had been depressed by the men she'd met. She had no one else to tell, so she told Dwight. "The first drink is fine. On the second drink I hear about their marriage. How it ended. What a bitch she was. How she took him to the cleaners."

  So, as friends, they dated each other for some months, even recognizing that it was a failure and that they were too timid to enter the wider world and contemplate romance again. Dwight was amazed that after that anyone would take the same risk twice, going through that shredder.

  Eventually they disengaged. He was surprised, because at that point he had become comfortable, seeing her on weekends and going to movies. She asked how he was doing. With his new frankness—the divorce had made him blunt—he told her, "This is good. I'm happy." Maureen said, "It's not good. I can't stand this anymore. I don't want to see you. I'm starting to really dislike you."

  Was it because he was happy again? If so, she succeeded in making him miserable by saying this. That was his reason for saying, "I'm going to India," in the look-what-you're-making-me-do tone of voice.

  At last he saw his divorce as a triumph. No one else did, which was another reason he was happy to be in India. Perhaps failure was the severest kind of truth. His work was a punishment and a wrecking ball: he took manufacturing away from American companies and brought it to India. The American manufacturers hated him—and they failed; the Indian companies were cynical, knowing that if they could not produce goods cheaply enough, they would be rejected. Every success meant someone's failure. He could not take any pride in that process: he was part of it.

  The old woman pimping the children to passersby: he recognized himself in her. And in Indru too. Her stories were painful, but the experiences had damaged her so badly, her endearments were meaningless. Yet he belonged with her, not in the Elephanta Suite but in the oddly bare room, a stinky alley outside the window. In that human smell like the odor of sorrow he saw his connection to India.

  He stopped blaming Maureen, and he could hardly blame Indru for anything. Human frailty implied human strength. Most of the world is poor and weak, beset by the strong.

  A young man with an unpronounceable name began visiting Indru's apartment; one evening he seemed reluctant to leave. He was from the countryside, he said. Willage. Then he visited more often. But he looked more confident and better dressed than a villager, and he frowned at Indru in a proprietary way. He was sometimes impatient to leave the place with Indru ("Let we go marketing"). He nagged her in their own language, which wasn't Hindi—Dwight had asked. Indru sometimes replied in English, sulking and saying, "Not chivvy me" or "I fed up!"

  "My brother," she said. She left Dwight in the apartment and went out. He looked out the window and saw them—not holding hands but walking close together, touching shoulders, a kind of intimacy. He was rueful, but it was better to know, and he'd been so hurt by his shattered marriage he had kept from committing himself to her. Giving her money when she said "Ring money gone" was his way of possessing her, since it had more value to her than to him. The Indian deals were making him wealthy.

  Dwight was startled one evening when he went to the flat and, before he could turn the key in the lock, the door was opened by a small pretty girl, also in the sort of white dress Indru wore. Why?

  "I am work at hair and nail salon."

  Another one, younger than Indru—sixteen? seventeen? who could tell?—who said she was from Indru's village. Her name was Padmini. She did menial jobs in the two-room apartment in return for a place to sleep. Dwight believed the salon story because her nails were lovely—polished and pointed—and she wore fresh makeup and a hairstyle that always interested him, because unlike most Indian girls, her hair was cut short, boyishly. Dwight remarked on it.

  "I bob it," Padmini said, plumping her lips prettily.

  Dwight said, "Is that her brother?"

  Padmini joined him at the window, standing close, as Indru and the young man with the unpronounceable name turned the corner toward Chowpatty.

  "I am not know, sir."

  She was frightened. "Not know" meant she knew, and that the answer was yes, or else she would have said no, because as a villager, she too was a relative.

  Dwight smiled. She was slow to smile back, yet she did so. He gave her to understand that they were conspirators, both being manipulated by Indru. He thought of kissing her, as a test, but didn't—they seemed to resist that. Was it his breath? But she let him hold her loosely, allowing him to grope. His touching Pad-mini quieted her; with his hands on her, she stayed still and seemed to purr, like a cat being belly-scratched.

  He knew that, had he wished, he could have gone further—and Indru must have guessed at the situation she had created by inviting Padmini to stay, by leaving Dwight and the girl alone in the place. Indru was worldlier than she let on—they all were; they had to be to survive.

  And he had become reckless. More than that, he was debauched—the word that had seemed like hyperbole before was appropriate now. He had never known such sexual freedom, had not realized that it was in him to behave like this. It was India, he told himself; he would not have lived like this back in the States. All he had to do was leave India and he would be returned to the person he'd been before—forty-something, oblique in business d
eals, cautious with women, cynical of their motives, not looking for a wife, still smarting from his divorce, even a bit shy, and, like many shy men, prone to laughing too loudly and making sudden gauche remarks, of which "You bet your sweet ass" was one.

  His sexual experiences in India had opened his eyes and given him insights. The world looked different to him. That business about "my brother" had not fooled him, nor had it discouraged him. It gave him another opportunity, for the next time the brother appeared and took Indru away on some obscure errand, Dwight beckoned to Padmini and drew her down to the charpoy.

  "No," she said, and when he began to tug at her clothes—the white dress she wore for work at the nail salon—she resisted, turned away, and covered her face.

  "Okay," he said. He sat up and swung around, putting his feet on the floor.

  No meant no. He would not use force on a woman—had never done so in his life. Any suggestion of intimidation killed his desire. But when he got up from the charpoy Padmini rolled over onto her back and smiled at him in confusion.

  "You no like me," she said.

  "I like you too much," he said.

  But she just laughed and yanked at the tops of her knee socks and tossed her head, and when he gave her money that day she took it reluctantly, as though acknowledging that she didn't deserve it.

  He continued to give Indru money. He suspected that she was giving it to the young boy she called her brother. Deceits and failures and betrayals, but it was part of the India he had come to understand. He belonged here. He had found his level.

  Although India advertised itself as a land of sensuality, he had regarded that as hype. They were trying to sell tickets. And where were the sensualists? The businessmen were two-faced and so shifty they turned the women into scolds. Most of the people he'd met had been too angry—pestering and puritanical—with red-rimmed and tormented eyes. If they'd been liberated, they wouldn't have been such agitated nags. They scowled, they carped, they pushed, they honked their horns. Serenity seemed unattainable. The way the bosses screamed at their underlings, the shrill orders a manager gave a secretary, the bullshit, the buck-passing, the cruel teasing, the racism, hating each other much more than they hated foreigners—it all revealed to Dwight a culture of both punishment and sexual frustration, for the two always went together.

  Long ago, as a youth, as a law student, he had once behaved that way himself—on edge because he'd been unsuccessful with women. His first trip to India had reminded him of that—everything wrong, the yelling crowds, the food, the bad air, and the women were either virginal, with their eyes downcast, or married and plump and indifferent, in both cases impossible. The predatory divorcée or widow was just desperate, with no option except to be devious, and scheming turned him off. The society was packed too tight, jammed and impenetrable, and all a stranger could do was drift hopelessly around its dusty edges.

  Or so he had thought. He was wrong about this—wrong about everything, wrong in all his assumptions. India was sensual. If India seemed puritanical, it was because at the bottom of its puritanism was a repressed sensuality that was hungrier and nakeder and more voracious than anything he'd known. The strict rules kept most people in their place, yet there were exceptions everywhere, and where there were exceptions, there was anarchy and desire. If India had a human face, it was that of a hungry skinny girl, starved for love, famished for money.

  From his first encounter at the Gateway of India, when the canny woman had tricked him with the elaborate scam involving the old man and the children, Dwight had seen India differently, accommodated himself to it, and begun to live a double life. He had sunk to the bottom and entered a new level of the Indian experience—the low life of the truly desperate. Although Shah said, "I ring you at your hotel last night—you not there," Dwight explained that he had shut off his phone, and he was certain that Shah did not know he was elsewhere, living his other life in the grubby flat in Chowpatty. And he was glad, because he was not able to explain what he was doing and who he had become. His relationship with Indru in the two tiny rooms was equally unexplainable.

  When you could not explain your absences, when you were living your secrets and were happier living them than you'd ever been, you were leading a double life. He knew that. He also knew that in living this way you had to accustom yourself to telling lies and remembering them and building on them, so that a whole world of obvious and gabbling falsehood was a front for the hidden and wordless reality. Something else he discovered about the double life: you began to lose track of your identity—at least he did. Someone said, "Huntsinger!" and his instinctive reaction was to think, Who?

  How had it happened? Was it the sex, the young women, all the layers of living in India—the rooms, the religion, the castes, the crowds, the city of twenty million? His first visit to India had been a suspension of his life. Most Americans he knew went to India holding their nose, did what had to be done—found a contractor who would produce goods for one-fifth the U.S. price—and returned home, resumed living, fearing to be called back. That had been him once.

  But he had found a life in India, or rather two lives: Indru's little flat and the Elephanta Suite, the life of hidden, vitalizing sexuality that he was still learning and the boardroom existence he knew well, the world of contracts, competitive pricing, manufacturing, and outsourcing, the easy task of finding people who could produce good-quality samples—that is, copy the American sample at their own expense—and then signing them up, saying, "We'll grow together."

  The most recent deal was with a maker of blue jeans in Poona—he looked so hopeful, so eager to please, with suitcases of swatches and samples. Look at pocket formation, look at seams, quality, double stitching. We can supply unlimited units. It is a good pant.

  "What about a buck twenty-nine a pair, delivered," Dwight said.

  Shah conferred with the man and then turned to Dwight. "He can manage. Do you not agree, Mr. Hund?"

  "Deal." And later he said, "It's like shooting tuna fish in a can."

  Shah smiled in bewilderment—how did you explain?—and Dwight was reminded of the days when he had feared Indian food, how he'd come with a case of tuna fish in cans with pop-off lids, which he'd eaten standing over the sink in his hotel bathroom.

  Now he ate the food, most of it, not just the enamel plates of it that Indru and Padmini prepared, which they ate sitting on the floor of her little apartment, but also the dishes that Shah habitually ate. Adhering to the Jain rule of not eating any living thing, keeping to leaves and grains and lentils, Dwight had not been sick once. The idea was to keep it simple—no fish, no meat, no roots. He liked the okra dishes that Shah called bindi, the channa and gram, the rice cakes, the chapatis, the pooris. He ate no cold food, nothing from the street, nothing that had sat uncovered, no salads, nothing that had to be washed. Lettuce was fatal, so was water—water was a source of illness in India. Fruit that he had not peeled himself he didn't eat.

  He and Shah usually presided over a ceremonial meal in a restaurant as a way of sealing a contract. The deal with the blue jeans manufacturer was one of these, in a restaurant called the Imperial, a pleasant place near Church Gate. Dwight was asked to order first, and he glanced at the menu. Dine Like a Maharajah, it said. Chunks of mutton steeped in a savory broth and Slow-roasted chicken in a clay tandoor oven and Thick fillet of pomfret, Kerala style, with coconut milk in a spicy sauce. He clapped the menu shut and handed it to the waiter.

  "Just a dish of dhal makni, some yogurt, and rice."

  "Will that be all, sir?"

  "Unless you have bindi."

  The waiter wagged his head yes.

  And someone at the table said, "Mr. Shah, you are a bad influence on our friend from America."

  "Oh, yes, exceedingly bad."

  Everyone except Dwight and Shah ordered from the menu.

  "The sali boti is justifiably famous. Mutton and fried potatoes. Much talked about."

  Shah made a pained face.

  "The praw
ns here are also very good, I'm told."

  "I don't take prawns," Shah said.

  "I understand they raise their own chickens."

  "I don't take."

  "The fish is flown in fresh from Kochi."

  Shah smiled as the men were served enormous portions of meat and fish, while he and Dwight dabbed at their simple portions like a pair of monks.

  Dwight was complimented on his choice of diet, which was seen as a way of life, not as an affectation; it was a humble and healthy way of experiencing India. Almost without realizing it he'd become dependent on the food.

  "No coffee for me," he said at the end of the meal.

  "Nor me," Shah said. He frowned, as though preparing to deliver unwelcome news. "Doxins."

  Dwight nodded in agreement, feeling at ease and slightly superior to the meat-eating Indians. He looked around the overdecorated restaurant. It was elegant, but a gamy aroma of roasted meat hung in the air, along with the incense and the mildewed air conditioning. He looked closely at the other tables and noted with satisfaction that he was the only non-Indian in the place.

  He tried to imagine what Maureen would say had she seen him looking so at home in the Imperial. "I'm going to India" didn't sound suicidal anymore; it meant "I don't need you." Had Sheely or Kohut been in the restaurant with him they'd be wigging out—frightened, rigid with culture shock, dying to go back to the hotel, or on their cell phones reconfirming their flights home so as not to have to stay a moment longer. Beyond the dumb arrogance of mere bigotry, they would be terrified and angry, hating the place and the people. Dwight knew: he had once felt that way himself, like India's victim.

  That memory shamed him. How could a prosperous American lawyer with a first-class plane ticket feel that way, surrounded by the poorest people in the world?

  Yet his partners would never have done what he was doing—sitting among Indian businessmen, scooping dhal with the tornoff ear of a flaky poori, spooning yogurt, nibbling the slippery bindi. He did not know anyone in the office who would have sat so comfortably here. He was pleased with himself; he'd proven to be strong. India no longer scared him—rather the opposite: it aroused him, made him feel engaged with the world, most of all made him feel powerful.