The Elephanta Suite

by Paul Theroux

  Meanwhile Shah—so he said in an e-mail—had gone to Disney World in Orlando. He had visited New York City, where he had a cousin. He'd found clients all over New England. He'd been invited to Harvard Business School, to speak informally at a seminar. Kohut had given a dinner party for him in Sudbury. "Autumn leaves," Shah reported, "magnificent colors." And "I trust all is well, Mumbai-side."

  Was it? These walks along Chowpatty Beach, because they were interludes, because they required conversation, were revealing and proved to Dwight that he was kidding himself. He was a man who had discovered sex in India and thought it was magic. But it was an illusion, the consequence of his having power and money in a land of desperation. Sex was a good thing, because sex had an end, and when his desire died he saw he'd been a fool. But now, with more power and less conviction, his passion diminished to casual playing, and he took more risks.

  Seeing a boy with a CD player and headphones, Indru said, "Buy me one of those."

  "What will you do with it?"

  "Listen music."

  "Maybe," he said, to tease her, and saw she was agitated with greed. He said to Padmini, "Do you want one too?"

  Her whisper was so soft he could scarcely hear it, yet he knew her vibrant lips were saying yes.

  "But what will you give me?"

  He was ashamed. He had no right to feel powerful when he said this, making the request like a greedy king addressing his subjects, asking, How do you intend to please me?

  They were at the beach, another of their Sunday strolls, watched by groups of chattering boys who were attracted by the pretty girls, curious about the tall white man in the Indian shirt and kadi vest of homespun, which Dwight had begun to wear since Shah's departure for the States.

  Padmini glanced at Indru, who was smirking and looking coy, as though challenging Padmini to give the right answer.

  "Sir, we will be good to you," Padmini said.

  Indru laughed and skipped ahead. Her laugh got the attention of an old woman who was walking in the opposite direction. Dwight looked up at Indru and saw the woman. He wouldn't have noticed her at all except that she hesitated and stared at him.

  She had not changed. She was fat and slow, wearing a billowing sari banded with gold embroidery, gold bangles on her wrists, brown-gray hair, with a shawl thrown over it.

  For a moment Dwight wondered how she'd singled him out—but of course, he was the only white man on the beach. He was glad that Indru and Padmini had gone ahead. The old woman's unfriendly smile was like mockery.

  "Hello," he said.

  Instead of replying, the woman called out sharply. Amid the crowd of beach strollers, three figures hurried over—the little girl, the young boy, and the tall skinny dancer in her Gypsy dress. He recognized them only because the old woman was there. The boy was taller but thinner, with a resentful face; the little girl wore a new dress but seemed sickly, hollow-eyed, with lipstick and eye shadow, a parody of a whore. Sumitra, the dancer, looked at him with hatred. She was bony and her hair was full and frizzed, with dry patches on her strangely hairy arms and lines in her face, as though she'd become old. In the way they stared, they seemed brutalized and rude.

  The old woman gabbled in Hindi. Dwight knew she must have been saying, It is the man. You remember him from the Gateway of India?

  Were they speculating on whether they could con him again, somehow entice him?

  "Nice to see you," Dwight said.

  But as he made a move to go, they crowded him and blocked his way.

  With a yelp, a passing boy called out to his friends, and Dwight thought how suddenly stupid the boy became in his eagerness. The other boys hurried over, attracted by the odd public scene: the yakking old woman, the scruffy Gypsy-looking children, the white man—the towering, isolated white man. In just seconds there were more spectators, all boys, laughing, perhaps suspecting trouble—that slack-jawed look of anticipation was also moronic. Dwight had seen this before in India, how subtle and crafty Indians could be individually, how ignorant and obvious in a large crowd.

  At that moment, in what seemed to him a standoff, Dwight heard a screech.

  "Yaaagh!" Another animal noise—Indru's shriek, and followed by Padmini, Indru broke through the cluster of people.

  She snatched at Dwight's hand, and a jeering cry went up from the boys. But Indru screamed at them, something that had to be worse than "go away," because they howled back at her.

  Glancing around to make his escape, Dwight saw the old woman smile. It was a sour smile of contempt. Even she recognized what he was now, and she began to mutter defiantly. What was she saying? Something wicked about him to these foolish boys.

  Dwight stepped back while Indru continued to yell at the boys. She wasn't like a girl anymore, she was a howling woman with big reddish teeth in her wide-open mouth.

  Now the old woman, who seemed fearless and slightly superior, was saying something sly to Indru—vile words, they had to be, because Indru spat at her, a gob of reddish saliva that darkened in a streak on the old woman's sari. The boys laughed and punched the air in delight.

  "Come on," Dwight said, and pulled Indru away as the old woman craned her neck and screamed.

  Indru said, "That auntie say she know you. You give her money. You bad man."

  When they had crossed the expanse of Chowpatty sand and were back on the sidewalk, Dwight said, "I am a bad man!"

  He was disgusted with himself. He deserved this humiliating scene at the public beach on a busy Sunday, with the horrible boys watching, the cowshit, the yellow froth at the sea's edge, the poisonous water, the spectacle of a predatory American confronted by the victims he had paid off.

  I am a bad man had shocked Indru into silence. She merely followed him to the apartment block, and when they got there, Dwight shook his head. He saw that Padmini was just catching up with them, still looking flustered from the business at the beach.

  "No," he said.

  "Yes," Padmini said. She took his big hand in her small one. That gave him some strength. He climbed the stairs slowly, feeling weak.

  In the room, while Indru watched, Padmini said, "We be good to you."

  The words made him sad, but she had turned away and dropped her sari, and now her little brown made-up face made him sad, her skinny neck, the fuzz of hair on her lower back, the tight globes of her buttocks.

  Indru had taken most of her clothes off. She lay on the charpoy wearing a sarong, her heavy breasts hanging, one to the left, one to the right. There was something lewd in the asymmetry, and the way she lolled, half propped up, watching Padmini bend to pick up her sari and fold it.

  Dwight tried to laugh, but he was numb all over. The thought that saved him was: I created this. I brought these people here. I gave them my wedding ring to rent the place—it's all mine. And so I can do whatever I want.

  They were staring at him. He said, "What's my name?"

  Padmini began to giggle. Indru said, "I am know."

  "Tell me."

  "Mister," she said, but she could not go any further. She was murmuring, "Ferringi."

  "I'm Dwight Huntsinger."

  Hearing this, they both laughed, for the name was impossible to say. They champed at a few syllables and laughed some more.

  Padmini stood naked before him and said, "What you want?"

  Just then he was thinking the same thing, a clumsy matching moment that helped him see clearly.

  He said, "I want to go."

  They were still calling to him as he descended the stairs. A door opened on a landing below, and a chubby-faced woman looked out and seemed to pair the girls' appeals to his fleeing—more humiliation.

  On his way back to the hotel he almost succeeded in losing himself in the crowd, yet he felt that his face was vivid with shame, a pink and sweaty, guilty-looking ferringi face, debauched, different from everyone else's.

  His shame was strongest on that walk when a woman approached to beg from him, as if testing his willpower. India was weird that wa
y, a culture of confrontation. Here he was, a few minutes' away from one humiliation and a woman was stopping to challenge him with another. "Give me money." He was so fearful he could not bring himself to give her a rupee. She hissed at him, and his agony was complete.

  That night he went to the hotel's business center, as he did most nights, to check his e-mail. Usually he forwarded the messages to Miss Chakravarti. Rarely was there a message on a business matter from Shah, though everyone in the firm praised him: "He's developed some contacts at Harvard Business School" and "He found some great people in Boston who want to create a high-tech facility in Mysore" and "The partners like him. He might be the key to setting up a branch office in Mumbai."

  But tonight the message from Kohut was "Shah is talking about bringing his wife to the States."

  Dwight began typing, "Urgent. Please..."

  Before he finished the message, he looked at the clock. It was morning in Boston. He deleted the message and found Kohut's number on the speed dial of his BlackBerry.

  "Huntsinger!"

  "Ernie, listen to me. I need Shah back here."

  "Why are you pleading? You're our guy in India. Anyway, Shah was planning a trip there. He's got some great business lined up." Perhaps aware of the huge distance, Kohut was shouting in the phone. "So, hey, Dwight, how's it hanging?"

  7

  In the days before Shah returned, Dwight stayed at his hotel, either using the business center or sitting on the veranda of the Elephanta Suite, which was enclosed, a high wall protecting him from the road. He was slowed by a kind of fear. He could not bring himself to go out. The risks were too great—strangers would approach him, obstruct him, as they always did in India, and they would challenge him, ask for money or food, or ask that he give them a job. A young boy had tapped Dwight's Rolex watch and demanded to know why it should not be given to him.

  Once, he regarded dealing with people like this at close quarters as his strength, staring them down, like a chief or a king, or acceding to their request, with the power to change a person's life. Not just Indru and the others. Those experiences had made him bold—he was known on the street as a soft touch. Now he had come to see himself as a victim, but a corrupt one.

  He called Maureen, dialed the number impulsively, not quite sure why, until she answered in a small beaten voice. "Yes?"

  "I'm so sorry," he said, feeling tearful.

  "Who is this?"

  "Dwight," he said. "It was all my fault, the breakup. I could have tried harder. We could have worked out our issues. But my damned pride prevented me. Can you ever forgive me?"

  She came awake. She said, "It's two o'clock in the morning, for God's sake!"

  "I'm sorry."

  "Dwight, don't talk to me about issues. We have no issues. Your coupons have run out."

  "Honey?"

  "Don't ever do this again."

  He was left holding a buzzing phone. He deserved it, for having been so reckless in India. From where he sat on the veranda, he could see other Americans doing the same—lawyers, lobbyists, facilitators, dealers, wholesalers, all of them being wooed by Indians. They were traveling down the same road, under the promising billboard You Can Make Anything in India. It was the crux of the whole effort, the test of a person's character. You had to be strong to survive it. But most of the people he saw had failed.

  The middle-aged American with the pretty and pliant Indian girlfriend, the American woman with her saluting driver, the American lawyer with his submissive hacks, the young American traveler being helped by the groveling concierge, the Pinskers—the father starting a gourmet Indian restaurant in New York, the son trying to set up a movie, hustling in Mumbai and vacationing in Jaipur—everyone had a scheme to hook up the Indians and make money and behave badly.

  With rising anger, Dwight saw an American brat—nine or ten years old, long hair, hat on backward—in the hotel dining room. The boy sulked as he was being asked by a waiter in a turban, frock coat, and crimson sash, "What do you desire for your meal, sir?"

  The white-gloved waiter was bending low and abasing himself to the child while the parents studied their menus. "May I suggest the soup?"

  "I hate soup." The child made himself ugly and turned away. "Perhaps tasty grilled-cheese sandwich?"

  "I don't like that either."

  "Maybe young sir would prefer breaded cutlet?"

  "What's that supposed to be?"

  "Meat, sir."

  "I want spaghetti, but no red stuff on it, and no cheese."

  "I will request kitchen to make, sir," the waiter said, bowing, clicking his pen, while the brat's father and mother still frowned at their menus.

  Dwight wanted to slap the snarly child, then slap the parents; then tell the waiter to stop groveling, and then he wanted to slap himself. But it was too late. They were all lost. No hope for them, not much for him.

  How had he been corrupted so quickly? It wasn't as though the Indians were sensualists. They were forthright. They asked for what they wanted. He'd had the best of intentions, but he had been weak. The girls had not been beautiful, either, only young and hungry. Hunger was a terrible thing that turned you into both predator and prey. Winky Vellore was no beauty; she was greedy. Padmini had connived with Indru. It was all like the sort of deal he had been negotiating for months with Shah and the wholesalers. Sir, we will be good to you.

  It wasn't food they wanted. They craved dresses and shoes and electronics, an iPod, a better TV set. They were not starving; they were greedy for gold. He couldn't blame them. He blamed himself. He needed for Shah to return, to protect him, somehow rescue him. The man was saintly: he didn't swat flies, he didn't eat eggs, he wouldn't drink water at night for fear of guzzling an insect that might be floating on the surface.

  At last Dwight got the e-mail from Shah with his arrival time. Dwight did not go to the airport to meet him—Mrs. Shah would do that—but he checked that the plane was on time, and he waited the next morning for Shah to call. Without quite knowing how, Dwight trusted Shah to release him from his misery.

  He was convinced of it the morning after Shah's arrival, when he met him for breakfast. It wasn't his manner. In fact, he seemed somewhat changed: he was more urbane in a self-conscious way, wearing what looked like a Brooks Brothers suit and a Harvard tie and a matching hankie stuffed into his breast pocket. But he was a reassuring presence, and his choice of food was proof of his unchanged goodness, the simplest items on the menu: dhal, rice cakes, a plate of warm flaky pooris, some Indian cheese.

  "This is paneer. Please don't make a face, but cow dung is used in preparation."

  "Gives it a distinctive taste," Dwight said.

  "Exactly."

  "I'm so glad to see you back here."

  "Thank you, my friend."

  "Fruit, sir?" the waiter asked. He was holding a basket of oranges and bananas and apples.

  Shah said, "An apple only, but you must assure me that it was not picked. That it fell from tree and was garnered."

  "Apple fell to earth, sir."

  "I will take then," Shah said. "Please, Mr. Hund. Take yourself."

  Dwight selected an apple. He said, "It wasn't picked. It fell. I like that."

  Though he was scrupulous in what he ate, Shah's method of eating was noisy. He chawed the apple, biting hard and loudly. He chewed with his mouth open, flecks of the fruit on his lips, a smear of juice on his cheek. He talked with his mouth full, heedlessly spraying masticated apple flesh, and doing this while boasting made it all seem ruder.

  "In America they could not believe what I was saying. They offered me apples and whatnot. I said, 'Only if they have fallen. Not if they have been picked by human hand.' They were so surprised! And then I had to tell them, 'I do not take water at night. Insects may be adhering to surface.' The blighters were shocked, I tell you."

  This detail, which Dwight had admired in Shah, seemed pointless now that he was booming about it. He was changed—not the certain yet modest Shah but an overconfiden
t man who took pleasure in these triumphant stories, like Indru's tales of rape. In America he'd had a fatal revelation: he had been persuaded that he was interesting.

  "I told them, 'No potatoes. One might inadvertently eat the living things, such as fungi and microbial substances.' They thought I was joking. I said to them, 'Not at all, my friends!'"

  He was a bit too happy about this, and the other giveaway was his repeating himself. He must have told the stories fifty times, not remembering that he'd already told them to Dwight.

  Dwight remarked on the new pinstriped suit.

  "Brooks Brothers," Shah said. "Flagship store. It's a good cut, I think. I like the drape."

  "Probably made in India," Dwight said.

  "Oh, no," Shah said, protesting as he tugged on his lapel, reacting a bit too sharply to what Dwight had intended as a joke. "Italian made. Very good weave."

  When he took out his new cell phone, he said that he'd bought it on a trip to New York, that it took photographs and could store five hundred of them in its memory. He located one and displayed it for Dwight: Shah smiling beside a tweedy man with beetling brows and horn-rimmed glasses.

  "John Chapman Thaw. Harvard man. He presented me with this tie, as a matter of fact." He held the phone in his hand to admire it. "A very humble man."

  "New watch?"

  "Oh, yes. From duty-free in London. So many functions." He pinched the face of it. "I have two time zones here. It's seven at the office. Mr. Kohut will be calling Mrs. Kohut and saying, 'I'll be late, my dear.' What a delightful chap. Very faithful to his missus."

  Dwight smiled at him. The old Shah had been—not Americanized, but enlarged, made self-aware. He had been appreciated, someone had listened to him, he'd been praised. He seemed a new man. He wasn't sinuous and oblique anymore, and unexpectedly Dwight found this new assurance irritating. Dwight reminded himself that Shah had been in the States for almost two months.