The Elephanta Suite

by Paul Theroux

  "In this other picture he's wearing a mask," Dwight said.

  "So as not to breathe in microbes and fleas."

  "So as not to get sick?"

  "So as not to kill them. Ahimsa. Not killing a life, even flea's life."

  "I get you."

  "I will share with you some literature about our beliefs," Shah said. "We are not extreme—not like the Digambara, who are sky-clad."

  "Sky-clad, meaning...?"

  "Nakedness. They go about mortifying themselves in the nakedness state. No one on earth could live more simply. But we are Svetambara. We follow the tenets of our faith. It is ancient, I tell you—older than your Christianity, from long before."

  "Maybe you can tell me about it sometime."

  "We have sweetened curd for dessert," Mrs. Shah said, ringing the servant bell again.

  "I anticipate being a saddhu myself—giving up the world. Just wandering, as my father wandered. He was so contented."

  "I guess that's an Indian solution to life."

  "No. It was penance. He was not pure previously. I am not pure." He smiled at Dwight, who read in Shah's smile, And you?

  Dwight saw himself with a wooden staff and a loincloth and a turban, striding down a dusty road in the sunlight in sandals, eating an apple—did they eat apples? Birds sang, a fragrant breeze cooled his face, he carried a bowl full of flower petals. He smiled, mocking himself with this image, knowing that he would be visiting Indru later.

  Shah's apartment was luxurious, with gilt-framed mirrors and brocade cushions on a white sofa that could have held five people, a thick carpet—he'd left his shoes at the door—windows like walls with panes of glass that went from floor to ceiling, and a balcony that gave onto Mumbai, from this height a magical-looking city of twinkling lights and toy cars.

  The food could not have been simpler, yet it had been served on the thinnest porcelain; even the bell that Mrs. Shah rang to summon the serving girl looked precious. The colored portraits on the walls could have been deities, objects of veneration, as well as a valuable collection of paintings.

  All this time, Shah was talking about Jainism, atonement, penance, poverty.

  "Nirjara—process of atonement," he said. "Ahimsa—respect for all living things, great and small, all jiva, all life and soul."

  The mention of living things great and small made Dwight think of his partners in Boston. He said, "Have you given any thought to my proposal? I've cleared it with the firm. They're pretty excited."

  "I have reflected deeply on it," Shah said. He kept a studied tone of reluctance in his voice that Dwight recognized as an eagerness he didn't want to show. "I will accept. I will do my level best."

  To match Shah's tone, Dwight was subdued when he quietly thanked him, but inside he was rejoicing. He wouldn't have to make the long trip back to Boston. Shah would be perfect for the business seminar.

  Leaving Shah's apartment, plunging back into the city, he was reminded that it had been the second time he'd been inside the house of a wealthy Indian. Like the big soft apartment of Winky Vellore, it was a refuge. All of India had been shut out, more than from the fastness of the Elephanta Suite. At Shah's, India almost did not exist, except in the paintings and photographs of Shah's father, the wandering holy man, and the talk of atonement. The apartment had shone with polished silver and white porcelain and crisp linen on the gleaming table.

  Now Dwight recalled that music had been playing softly, the sounds of string instruments, the soft chanting, the odd and irregular harmonies. And the big glass doors had been shut so that Mumbai was its lights and shadows, and it had sparkled, silent and odorless, far below. What floor had they been on? It seemed that they'd hovered at a great height in the splendor of a glass tower. And he knew he would always remember the experience for its comfort, the softness of Mrs. Shah, the beauty of the serving girl, the glint of the silver in the candlelight. Mumbai had looked like a city of crystal.

  Now he was at Indru's, in the stew of stinks and harsh voices from the lane, in the cement stairwell—his secret, his hiding place. Approaching the building, he'd heard a groan and looked aside and saw a cow, visible because of its pale hide, sounding human and helpless in its distress.

  He kicked the stairs as he climbed, to scatter the rats, and when he got to Indru's landing he tapped a coin on the iron bars of the outer door.

  Padmini scuffed forward, unlocked the door, held the round brass tray with the oil lamp flickering in its dish. On tiptoes the small thin girl stretched to apply the mark with her thumb.

  "Never mind that."

  She stared, her eyes shining in the firelight. On the days she worked at the salon her hair was lovely, her makeup like a mask, her nails thickly varnished.

  "Where's Indru?"

  Padmini hesitated, then said, "Brother come."

  Dwight shut the door. He lifted the tray from Padmini's hands. In the sounds of the traffic, the yakking voices of television sets, car doors slamming, the loud blatting of motorbikes, he heard the moaning of the cow suffering in the alley.

  He waved his hand at the dark insects and white moths strafing the naked bulb above his head. He shot the bolt in the door, and when he turned Padmini was gone.

  "Where are you?"

  From deep in the far room, "Here, sir."

  She was squatting cross-legged in the back room, on the mattress that was spread on the floor, where she slept—not even a string bed, but what did that matter? The only light was the light from the street, filtered through a high dirty window.

  Padmini was indistinct. He tried to read her expression, to see her posture. He thought, Reality is many-sided.

  "Is bolt in door?"

  "Yes."

  A quality of air, no more than a ripple, told him she had relaxed, hearing that. But when he held her she stiffened, like someone about to take a leap. She wouldn't let him kiss her, though she allowed him to touch her. She seemed to grow limp as he did so, murmuring in her throat, and still the cow moaned in the alley.

  6

  In Shah's absence, Dwight kept himself scarce. He spent less time in the boardroom, and when he was there he avoided looking down the long table for a view of the Gateway of India. Huge though it was, even when he did accidentally glance in that direction, he hardly saw it. The three-portaled archway did not loom for him anymore. Too much had happened to him for the thing to seem important in his life. It was just another monument in a country that was cluttered with monuments.

  Unwelcome visitors were another reason for his keeping away. Incredibly, he was regarded as the expert on India now.

  "I'd like to pick your brain," people said in phone calls. That meant his dispensing free advice over a hotel lunch to another nervous American on his first visit to India.

  And the odd thing was that when Dwight spoke to these newcomers, he said unexpected things, surprising himself in his opinions.

  A man named Todd Pinsker visited. He was a Hollywood lawyer—he'd done a contract with Ralph Picard from the Boston office; he was passing through Mumbai on his way to Rajasthan for a luxury vacation. As a favor to Ralph, Dwight saw him for a drink at the Taj.

  "And this is my son, Zack," Pinsker said. "He's making a movie."

  The boy's smug expression matched his clumsiness. He wore a baseball cap backward, sat with his legs sticking out, and demanded that the waiter remove the ice from his drink.

  "Ice can make you sick," he said. "I mean, you can get a bad ice cube."

  "He's got this dynamite idea," the boy's father said. "Sort of meld the Bollywood idea with an American movie. I mean, get some major talent from the States and shoot it here."

  "I have no contacts at all in the movie industry," Dwight said. "I'm contracting for U.S. companies who want to outsource here."

  "That's Zack's project," the man said. "I want to set up a concept restaurant in Manhattan. I've got some backing in L.A. I'm looking for ideas here, for a theme. Maybe headhunt a chef."

  "Wish I could help you
. I don't even eat in restaurants anymore," Dwight said. He wondered, Is this true? And he surprised himself again by saying, "I mean, I'm a committed vegetarian."

  "That's cool," the man said, but his squint gave away his caution.

  "Following kind of a Jain thing," Dwight said.

  That got Zack's attention. "A Jain thing? Those people that don't kill bugs?"

  "Ahimsa," Dwight said in almost a whisper, because the boy's voice was so loud. "It's part of the philosophy—non-killing."

  "Vegetarian options would play a big part in this restaurant," the man said. "I've just got to meet some people. Have you been to Rajvilas?"

  "No. I've hardly been out of Mumbai."

  "Clinton stayed there," the boy said, and sucked on his glass of Coke.

  Dwight became impatient. This father and son were annoying him with their presumption. They were both trying to get rich, do some business, use the Indians as everyone else did.

  "You won't have a problem finding what you want here," he said. "Whatever it is. Everyone gets what they want. But at the same time you're going to find something you didn't bargain for."

  "Is that some kind of warning?"

  "I suppose it is," Dwight said. He thought: Where is this coming from? Why am I saying this? But without any effort, and hardly knowing what was coming next, he said, "But it's a fact. India's cheap, so it attracts amateurs and second-raters and opportunists. Backpackers. Little Leaguers. Because India's desperate, Indians do most of the work for you."

  "Isn't that a good thing?"

  "Depends," Dwight said. "Indians never lose. No matter how well you think you're doing, they're doing better. You're glad because you can get a pair of blue jeans for a buck twenty-nine. But eighty cents of that is profit for them."

  "I'm trying to put a restaurant together. Zack's doing a movie."

  "You'll get it done. And you'll get something else you never expected. The Indian extra. The Indian surprise."

  He knew he was being enigmatic; he was not even sure what he was saying. Certainly he was warning them, but he didn't like them enough to explain the warning in detail. What alarmed him was, having given no thought to these opinions before, they seemed to be bubbling up from his unconscious. Maybe I am warning myself?

  After an hour, he said he had an appointment. They swapped business cards—even the punk kid Zack had one. And then Dwight took a taxi to Indru's. Probably that was what he meant when he mentioned the Indian surprise.

  It was true that Indians did most of the work. And there were plenty of manufacturers eager to service clients—too many of them, perhaps, and they were ruthless with each other. They were persistent with him and tended to call his cell phone at all hours, offering to cut deals. It was no good for him to say, "You can't do an end run on the tendering process," because they didn't understand the metaphor, and anyway, backstabbing was a standard business practice, even part of the culture, with real backs and real knives.

  But Dwight had always found someone suitable to make the product—not movies or concept restaurants, time-wasting negotiations that brought together those natural allies, the dreamer and the bullshitter. He preferred deals for making plastic buckets, rubber gaskets, leisure wear, nylon plumbing fixtures, sports shoes, electronic components. The insulated wire that was a crucial part of a spark plug—no one wanted to make them in the States anymore, but Shah had found a man in Hyderabad, a former rope maker, who had retooled his shop to make the wire for a few dollars a spool. That kind of thing. The hard part was the contract, the final wording, the up-front payments, the penalty clauses, and for that he needed Shah's scrupulous shit-detecting Jain eye.

  "Still following up some contacts here," Shah e-mailed, and it sounded like procrastination.

  Fine. Dwight handed off the competing Indians to his secretary, Miss Chakravarti. Indians understood delegating. "I can do it, sir," they'd say, and give the job to someone else, a menial, and that menial would delegate it to someone lower. And Dwight had more time, because he found that an e-mail or a letter, if left unanswered, became stale and less important as time passed, and soon diminished to something so thin and tentative it was easy for him to delete it. Filing it or keeping it fresh made it into an artificial demand.

  Time was the test of any demand. He had never in his life felt the passage of time so palpably as he had in India. And he had concluded that, really, nothing was urgent—nothing at all. Maybe nothing mattered.

  Now and then he forwarded a message to Shah, still in Boston. "You have given me a wonderful opportunity," Shah e-mailed. And he stayed on.

  On most days, but especially on weekends, Indians walked along Chowpatty Beach, a great expanse of tainted shoreline—dirty sand, sodden litter, scummy water, beached plastic—where it was always low tide. These days, with more time on his hands, Dwight walked along the beach with Indru, and sometimes with Padmini. He saw no other foreigners doing this, and thought, Maybe I'm not a foreigner anymore.

  They walked, he bought them ice cream, they sat on the benches, they used the promenade, they gazed at the Malabar Hill beyond the bay, the mansions, the villas. They looked at the sea, which seemed idyllic, but Dwight knew—and so did the unbuoyant, non-swimming Indians—that it was polluted, and that if you looked closely you'd see that the sea water had the yellow-gray color and deadly fizz of battery acid.

  Strolling made Indru talkative. "My mother treat me so harsh," she said. "My father touch me. Shame for him."

  She was provoked to tell her stories whenever there was a lull in the conversation. Usually she spoke without emotion, lapping an ice cream cone, as she was doing now.

  "My granny lock me in the dark room."

  "So you said."

  "After he make me naked, Father say, 'Go away, you bad girl.'"

  "I remember. You went to the police. They didn't believe you."

  "Police not believe me at all. 'You are talking blue lies.' They take me to the village sarpanch. He touch my privates. Oh, my God."

  She spoke without anger, rotating the ice cream on its cone, licking her fingers when it dripped.

  "And the boys in the village were cruel," Dwight said.

  "They throw things at me. They throw kanda. The cow dung women make for the fires, they throw at me."

  The same stories, in their way tragic, perhaps, but hearing them so often irritated him. He had been moved the first time. By now he knew them by heart. He could recite them verbatim, and what was more annoying that that? They became parodies. Apart from the stories of cruelty and abuse, which he only half believed (she told them a new way each time, and sometimes improved on them, with variations and discrepancies and gaps), Indru had no other conversation.

  Obviously, she had remembered how, the first time, he had listened; how she had captured his attention, silenced him with her stories, a Scheherezade of sadism.

  They were an important justification for him—for seeing her, being kind to her, sleeping with her—the poor kid, how she'd suffered. He needed the stories. They gave him the right to sleep with her and to be her benefactor.

  She needed them too, for without the stories she was just a wayward girl in Mumbai, filling in at a hair and nail salon and lazily looking for someone to pay her way.

  "My uncle, so cruel. He touch me and threaten me."

  "He had a motorcycle. He gave you a ride. He took you to a riverbank and raped you."

  "His friend also did things to me."

  That was a new twist. Dwight said, "Give it a rest, Indru."

  The trouble was that, bored by the stories—he had been outraged before—his own behavior seemed crass. She was not a victim he was helping but rather an opportunist overdramatizing her past.

  He doubted the stories, not just because she told them without feeling; she seemed to repeat them because of his reaction to them. She believed they were the key to his sympathy, and they had been, but not on the twentieth retelling.

  "What about you, Padmini? Any family problems?"
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  "No problem. I happy."

  "They beat Padmini at nail salon," Indru said with indignation, as though looking to create drama.

  "I spill nail varnish on customer sari," Padmini said. And she began to laugh. "She so angry!"

  "Did they really beat you?" Dwight asked.

  "Oh, yes, but customer refuse to pay. She get out of chair and say goodbye and hurry out to street and rickshaw wallah hit her—whoof!—and she plop down. Ha!"

  The memory of the angry customer being struck by a rickshaw was stronger than the memory of being beaten.

  Padmini didn't look for sympathy, which was probably why he liked her, and why, when Indru's brother showed up and took Indru out, Dwight didn't mind: he had Padmini, who was younger and prettier and, in her way, shrewder. Because she didn't ask for anything, he gave her money and presents, and he was less inclined to give Indru presents, since she asked for them constantly these days.

  Indru believed that her horror stories helped, but all they did was diminish her, turn her into a figure of melodrama, make her impossible to love and hard to like. Yes, he could pity her, but there were a billion others worthy of pity.

  Both were living off him. Indru had stopped working. And Pad-mini worked less often. And when Indru asked Dwight for money or a present, he suspected that she was asking on behalf of her brother. Even Padmini admitted that she sent some of Dwight's money home to her parents in the village.

  That made him think. Behind Indru and Padmini, radiating outward from the two-room apartment, were more people living off them, each girl with a family, each family a village, each village a hierarchy, like the sarpanch whom Indru had mentioned—a great assortment of hungry people with their hands out. He was supporting them all, yet he could not call himself a benefactor.

  Indian money was peculiarly filthy, the frayed little ten rupee notes, the tattered hundreds; a stack of bills looked like a pile of dirty rags. The money smelled of all the people who had fingered it and used it. The thought of this killed his desire, and he began to see Indru and Padmini as two lazy girls, older and cleverer than they looked. He saw himself as even lazier, or worse—credulous and weak. As he saw their cynicism, he liked himself less. He feared that one day he would come to despise them.