The Elephanta Suite

by Paul Theroux

  "I hear you took a course at Harvard Business School," Dwight said.

  "Your fellow Elfman fixed it for me. Very decent chap," Shah said. "I met so many Indians in Cambridge. It was like a little India. I invited the prof. He will be visiting."

  "Indian?"

  Shah opened his camera phone again. He said, "No, Chappie. John Chapman Thaw. Harvard man. You must know him?"

  "I went to BU."

  "Very famous. Very accomplished. Very moral chap. Truthful in all things." Gazing again at the man's picture, Shah hadn't registered Dwight's remark. "Family money. Excellent set of contacts."

  That was another thing—the new friends. In Mumbai, Shah had seemed to be part of a small circle of businessmen, most of whom Dwight knew. But while enlarging his personality, his experience in America, where modesty was usually a fault and never a virtue, he had widened his network of friends. He was impressed by the people he had met. He wasn't cynical, yet he always made a point of saying how impressed they'd been to meet him, an insect-preserving Jain, an abstemious man who lived by strict rules. But Elfman? God, he'd finally found someone to share his fatuous passion for Harvard.

  "They said to me, 'Shah, you don't deviate.' And I said"—he sat back on the banquette of the hotel restaurant—"'I am ruthlessly consistent.'"

  Dwight smiled at the way Shah had praised the Americans he'd met: very moral, very decent, very faithful, very humble, truthful in all things. Did Shah know something? But Dwight was glad he was back. And when, later that day, they got down to business, working through the list of new appointments that Miss Chakravarti had prepared, Dwight placed his hand on Shah's forearm and gripped it in gratitude, feeling the energy. He was the man to emulate—his work ethic, his sense of appreciation, his moral code.

  Over the next few days, they kept the appointments. Dwight resumed his normal office hours in Jeejeebhoy Towers, and when he was in the boardroom he didn't look down at the Gateway of India. He watched the efficient way that Shah dealt with the clients, he commented on the deals, and he reflected on the Diamond Sutra, what Shah had told him that evening, that the world gave false messages with sounds, odors, flavors. And the Three Jewels of Jainism—right belief, right knowledge, right conduct.

  Never mind Shah's self-interested stories, Dwight was consoled by his being near and giving him strength. He often thought of his last visit to Indru's, when he had asked the two women what his name was, and they hadn't known it, or remembered it; when Pad-mini had asked him what he wanted; when he had said, "I want to go." Had it not been for his holding to right conduct, he would have gone back.

  "Bangalore next week," Dwight said at the end of one meeting about information technology.

  "I'll have to stay in Mumbai. Chappie is coming."

  "I can look after him," Dwight said.

  Shah did not reply, yet he reacted, something involuntary, a twitch visiting his head and shoulders, almost recoiling, as though to the drift of a questionable smell.

  "I need you to do something important," Shah said.

  That was fine—what Dwight needed was to be kept busy. Shah had returned so much more confident than before—a good sign—and with a list of contacts and accounts to pursue. Dwight had imagined they'd be working together, yet Shah's confidence and his full schedule kept him distant and somewhat aloof.

  This is his city, Dwight told himself. But the master-servant relationship of before, in which Shah had been a punctilious helper, a junior partner, seemed to be over, and at times Dwight suspected that their roles had been reversed: Shah was the active partner now, Dwight the assistant who required direction.

  "I need your help in releasing a consignment of rice from a certain warehouse," Shah said. "A ton or so."

  Shah was giving him something to do? Dwight said, "Maybe we could do it together."

  "I will be extremely busy," Shah said. "I need a few days. I'll give you details of the shipment, bill of lading, whatever. It will be coming by lorry from Chennai to the bonded warehouse. You'll have to see to the paperwork."

  "Paperwork" was an ominous term in India. So were "bill of lading" and "bonded warehouse." Dwight saw in advance the clipboards, the carbon paper, the inventory numbers, the perforated certificates, the seals to be broken, the forms to be filled out in triplicate, the coarse smelly paper, "you must apply for permit," and at the end of it all, baksheesh.

  "Payment will be made by wire transfer from a bank in Baltimore, Maryland."

  What? But he did do it. The chore took five days, back and forth to the warehouse in Bhiwandi, an hour by taxi from the Taj Hotel.

  "Why Bhiwandi?" he had asked.

  "Because it is adjacent to Grand Trunk Road."

  All this time—negotiating for the release of the shipment of rice, moving it from Bhiwandi to a secure facility nearer the railway junction at Kalyan, following Shah's specific instructions—Dwight had the feeling he was working for Shah. And what he was doing any office manager could have done—Manoj Verma, Dinesh Patel, Sarojini Dasgupta, Miss Chakravarti, any of them. The other, better question was: What did a consignment of rice have to do with client business? Agricultural products had never been a priority. Five days of this bafflement went by without his setting eyes on Shah. Maybe he was at home, in his lovely apartment, dining off his porcelain?

  The phone rang at midnight.

  "Hund?"

  What happened to "Mr. Hund"?

  "It's kinda late."

  "I am just now proceeding from the airport, speaking on mobile. Sorry to wake you. I wasn't sure you'd be in your room."

  "Where else would I be at this hour?"

  Shah didn't answer. He said, "Just to thank you for your assistance with consignment of food grains. It is not entirely billable, but I will compensate you."

  "You'll pay me for moving that ton of rice?"

  He intended to sound sarcastic. Literal-minded Mr. J. J. Shah said, "Indeed, for facilitating in business just concluded."

  "The rice?"

  "The visit of Chappie."

  "I don't get it."

  "John Chapman Thaw. Harvard prof. He's putting some of his people into Bangalore to study IT and related areas. It will benefit us with tech transfer. He is amply funded, but a humble and humane individual."

  "I'd like to meet him," Dwight said.

  "Chappie and tech team have just departed. I saw them off. Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt."

  Dwight tried to draw a breath, but his concentration was too intense, the air too thin, his punctured lungs would not inflate, for he had begun to understand.

  "Gone?"

  "I would have introduced you, but his schedule was jam-packed."

  He still said wisit and shed-jewel, yet he was a different man, and this was the proof of it. While I've been dealing with a ton of rice in forty-pound sacks, Dwight thought, Shah has been wining and dining this Harvard professor and his team. An American contact, an important lead, has come and gone, and I haven't seen him. How had this happened? Dwight was not angry, he was sad. He felt the bewilderment of a younger brother, a rejected suitor, an excluded bystander, a bypassed partner. And the silly name "Chappie" rankled.

  "I must hasten home," Shah said. "We meet tomorrow."

  It was not like Shah to exclude him from a negotiation. And it was absurd that Shah had taken the initiative to give Dwight five days' unpaid work while he shepherded the Harvard team around Mumbai. And Dwight was his boss! Yet Dwight was grateful. For those five days he had worked at this menial task. He had not gone to a club. He had not called Indru or Padmini. He had hardly thought of them. He had felt not virtuous—he was certainly not virtuous—but serious, and he understood the fatigue that creates a passivity that empties the mind and gives access to spirituality, the trance state induced by routine that helps in the practice of meditation.

  "Many thanks," Shah said the next day at Jeejeebhoy Towers before the usual meeting—a parade of eager manufacturers with ring binders of products, a lining up of contracts.


  Shah was his old submissive self, deferring to Dwight and calling him "Mr. Hund."

  The last deal of the day involved a process for applying a rubberized coating to metal roof racks—not just the pieces that were fixed to the car, but kayak cradles, bike holders, attachments for skis and ski poles. This created an enormous inventory, since many of the racks and clamps were unique to a specific model of car.

  Shah itemized the list of attachments and fittings, wetting his thumb and moving through the clipboard of papers. Two companies would be involved, a steel fabricator and the rubber coater. Shah knew about carbon quotients, potential bruising, the matrix of the rubber solution, even the windage—resistance of the carrier on the car roof.

  Dwight looked on in admiration, forgiving Shah for putting him to all that trouble with the rice shipment, which was obviously a dodge—Shah didn't want him to meet the Harvard team, for whatever reason. Never mind. Dwight was grateful to him for the days of pious mindless toil. He had almost forgotten his debauchery.

  At the end of the day, Shah saw the businessmen to the door. Then he turned to Dwight and said, "Now we will go on our spiritual journey."

  8

  "What's that?" Dwight asked when the driver opened the trunk of the car. It was early morning, just after dawn, a sourness of damp streets, women scraping twig brooms in gutters. Out of the corner of his eye, Dwight saw two girls with enormous backpacks walking up the driveway. They had stringy hair and sandals. One was very pretty, the other one heavy, with a beautiful smile, saying, "This is unreal." American girls: he envied them their innocence and wondered what their Indian surprise might be.

  "Sack of rice," Shah said. "Symbol of gift. Remainder will go by train."

  "Will go where?"

  "Mahuli," Shah said. "Adjacent to Mahabaleshwar."

  "Is that where we're going?"

  "Indeed so. We take luncheon at Poona and proceed to Mahabaleshwar, for Mahuli. You have checked out of hotel?"

  "I'm going to miss that suite."

  Then they were on the road, sitting side by side in the back seat of the small car. The driver fought the other cars, jockeyed for position in the traffic, and once they were clear of Mumbai—it took over an hour—he struggled to pass the big filthy trucks that hogged the road, staring at Horn Please. Living in Mumbai could be horrible, but nothing was worse than a journey like this.

  On the first open stretch of road, Dwight's head cleared. He was able to recall the obvious thought that had occurred to him in the confusion of the previous day.

  "You didn't introduce me to those Harvard people."

  "Chappie?"

  The silly name sounded even sillier the solemn way that Shah uttered it. Dwight said, "And his team."

  "They will prove to be excellent partners. Don't think of Harvard as a mere college. It is a billion-dollar business, a tremendous source of contracts and expertise. Pay dirt. And skill sets, my God!"

  Something he has just found out, and is preaching, is something I've known since I got into this business, Dwight thought. Yet he was glad for Shah's enthusiasm, because that always implied willingness, and "pay dirt" made him smile.

  "But you didn't introduce me."

  "They were so busy, tied up most of the time. And they went sightseeing. Chor Bazaar. Crawford Market. Towers of Silence. Elephanta Caves. Side trip to Agra. They much enjoyed themselves."

  All the things he had never seen, while his own interest had been elsewhere. He said, "You thought I'd corrupt them."

  "Not at all," Shah said without conviction. He said nothing more, and because Dwight was looking closely at him, he saw Shah's nostrils widen—a breath instead of another denial, but it was the more telling for being a deliberate breath.

  Now Dwight was surer of himself. He said, "You were afraid I'd lead them astray."

  Without blinking, Shah took another breath, flaring his nostrils again. He was a spiritual soul, his pieties were obvious in the office, yet he had the manner of an accountant—discreet, overcautious, revealing nothing, but giving off a distinct hum of repressed fuss. Something of the Indian businessman informed the spiritual man, with his credit and debit columns in the ledger of karma.

  "You heard something," Dwight said.

  Anyone new to India would not have detected the slight head-wobble, or would have assumed it to be an involuntary twitch, a sideways nod on a bad stretch of road. But Dwight knew it was not a pothole. It was Shah's acknowledgment; that tilt of the head was an emphatic yes.

  "What did you hear?"

  Shah did something with his lips, his mouth, and compressed his lips, another subtlety, as though he'd tasted something unpleasant, while at the same time, out of politeness, refraining from showing his disgust.

  He said, "Are you knowing Cape Cod in Massachusetts?"

  "Very well. I grew up not far from there. We spent our summers in Chatham."

  "Exactly. When I visited Harvard to pursue that research angle of business, they took me by road to Cape Cod. We visited lovely towns. Saw Kennedy compound from road. Went for a fine walk on expanse of beach. An impressive place with many vivid sights."

  Get to the point, please, Dwight thought, staring hard to speed him up. Shah had the Indian businessman's way of speaking (and it had also been Winky's way), which seemed designed to force you to submit, to cry uncle. But this manner was his strength in the firm.

  He raised a skinny finger. He said, "One sight was more vivid than any other that day. Can you guess?"

  "Maybe one of those big sailboats in Hyannis harbor?"

  "Not at all," Shah said.

  "Kennedy compound?"

  "Not."

  "I can't guess."

  "It was me," Shah said.

  "You were the sight?"

  "I was the sight. That day, in that place, I was indeed the most unusual feature. There were no other Indians anywhere we went—none in the restaurant, none in the museum. At the botanical gardens in the town of Sandwich. With this face and these hands"—now he looked at Dwight; until then he had been looking away—"I was the most visible."

  Wisible was also how Dwight had felt in his shame.

  "I get it," he said.

  But Shah went on, saying, "Had I drunk beer in a bar, or gone about with a woman, or given money..."

  "I said I get it."

  "In India, we see everything. We hear everything. And if you are visible..."

  "Please stop," Dwight said. He put his head in his hands. He saw himself, a big white goon, at the Gateway of India, at the charity ball with Winky Vellore, talking to Indru, whispering to Padmini, sneaking off to their flat, kicking the sand at Chowpatty Beach. Wisible.

  His shame silenced him, the emotion fatigued him—or was it the early start, backseat nausea, the rutted road? He slept and was awakened by Shah's saying, "Poona city. We will take luncheon."

  Shah said he knew of a Jain restaurant. He gave directions to the driver. The place was just a shop with trestle tables and creaky chairs. No menu. The usual humble meal, which Shah kept calling "luncheon," served by an old man and a boy.

  "He is a good man," Shah said of the restaurant owner as he was clearing the plates. "Very strict. And a teacher too."

  The man smiled. He seemed to know that he was being spoken about.

  "We Jains call such people 'passage makers.' He shows the way."

  "You do that too," Dwight said.

  "It is kind of you to say that. But..." His voice trailed off and he shrugged, ambiguous again, neither yes nor no, but probably yes.

  Walking to the car, Shah said, "That lovely gateway was once entrance to a great palace, Shanwar Wada. And over there..."

  He gestured and walked ten steps to a narrow street overlooked by old stone and stucco houses.

  "Very nice," Dwight said.

  "...was a place of execution," Shah said.

  Dwight stepped backward, looked harder, but saw only a bumpy, weedy street contained by the leaning buildings.

 
; "Men who transgressed were brought here. They were bound hand and foot. They were summarily executed."

  Gazing at the tussocky street, the potholes, a grazing cow, a skinny boy in a white shirt marching with a school backpack, the sun slanting into dust motes, Dwight said, "How?"

  "Elephants were released that side. The men were trampled to death." Shah winced, as though he'd gotten a glimpse of it. "For their indiscretions. Under the elephants' mighty feet."

  He said no more. He led Dwight to the car. In the car he tapped on the back of the driver's headrest and said, "Mahabaleshwar, for Mahuli."

  The Poona meal had made Dwight drowsy. He hugged himself, crouched in a corner of the back seat, and sank into sleep. The country was dry and hilly and looked crumbled and cracked: Dwight carried the landscape into his dreams. The road, the honking of the car, the sunlight in the window—it all became part of his vision of punishment, and the rumble of the wheels was like the pounding in his heart. When he awoke, strangely refreshed, yawning with vigor, relieved to see the day, he looked out of the car window and saw a rural landscape of great simplicity that he had never visited before and hardly imagined: men squatting in the shade of low huts, children carrying water in squarish tin containers, women slapping muddy chunks into Frisbie-sized dung pats for fuel.

  Those serene people thrived in a dusty setting that Dwight saw as the counterpart of the tortured landscape of his heart. Lucky people, he thought. They've learned how to live here, how to flourish in a quiet way.

  "I can see you are suffering," Shah said.

  "Suffering?"

  "You were crying out in your sleep."

  "What did I say?"

  "You were pleading for relief," Shah said. "Don't be embarrassed. Was it my mention of the execution ground?"

  Dwight didn't know. He remembered the sight of the big sunbaked land, the dusty stunted bushes, the dead trees, the yoked buffalo turning over dry curls of soil. But seeing Shah's serious face he recalled, trampled...indiscretions...mighty feet.