Paul Theroux - The Elephanta Suite - Three Novellas

Dwight followed them into traffic to the other side of the street and past the Taj Mahal Hotel, into narrower streets and sudden, reeking lanes. All the while he was thinking of how he had reacted—his anger, defending the children, defying the man—and had never doubted that he could have snatched the stick and used it to beat the man. He imagined the gratitude of a woman who had just witnessed her children being rescued.

A ten-minute walk took them through crowded streets and more smelly lanes and a recumbent cow near a row of parked motorbikes. Ahead, he saw the woman enter a seedy porch at what looked like a shop front. Yet it was not a shop, nor did it seem to be a café. The porch led to the vestibule of an old building near the dead end of a lane.

“Cup of hot tea, sir,” the old woman said.

Dwight took a seat at the table just inside the door. He said, “Got any coffee?”

“Indeed.”

The children sat at the table with their cups of tea. Dwight’s coffee was instant, but it was scalding hot—it had to be safe. He sipped it and marveled. Just a little while ago he had been alone at the Gateway of India, and now he was sitting with this strange little family on this dead end, the children watching him, the old woman fussing. The taller girl had sat herself next to him. She had thin downy arms, chipped pink polish on her fingernails, and yellowish eyes.

“Thank you, sir,” she said when she saw he was staring.

“What’s your name?”

“Sumitra.”

The old woman said, “Tell uncle what is your speciality.”

The girl pressed her lips together, took a nervous breath, and said, “I am dance.”

Now he saw in her not starvation but a dancer’s skinny build, a dancer’s delicate hands, and a dancer’s upright neck.

“That’s nice,” Dwight said. “Who taught you?”

“Auntie.”

“She want to make dance for you,” the old woman said.

Dwight folded his arms and sat back on his chair and thought: I can leave now, and that will be the end. I will be the same man. Or I can stay, and follow the old woman’s suggestions, and see it through, and something will happen that can’t be undone.

He drank his coffee, which had cooled a bit and tasted weak and muddy. He knew he was being watched. For a reason he could not explain, he thought of the Elephanta Suite, the bathroom shelf of pop-open cans of tuna fish, and he disliked the idea of going to that empty place and hiding himself.

The old woman was talking. Had she been talking all this time?

“—because you saved these children from harm,” she was saying.

He thought, Dance? He looked at the children again, and then around the small vestibule, and was relieved that no one seemed to be watching him, that he was hidden from the people who were walking past the porch on this narrow lane.

“Where?” he said, hardly knowing what he was asking.

“Upstairs. Second floor, back. Last door on right.”

The woman was precise, but he must have made a face.

“It is clean, sir.”

“How much?”

“No charge, sir. You have helped us, sir.”

Now the girl reached beneath the table and put her hand on his knee. She had to slump in her chair and lean awkwardly to do this, and that made her seem small. But still she kept her gaze on him, and he was fascinated by the glint of her yellowish eyes.

“Name a price,” he said, because he feared the ambiguity of her gratitude and a shakedown afterward.

“One thousand rupees,” the old woman said, and as she spoke the number, for the first time since he’d met her he felt he understood her. In naming the price he heard her true voice, and he knew her: shrewd, firm, a bit impatient, a practical pimp attaching a fluttering price tag to the girl.

“Let’s go.”

He followed the girl up the stairs, losing count of the flights, until she led him to a landing and down a hall. He was fearful of meeting someone, but the building was empty and hot and stifling. The girl found a key on a dirty string somewhere within her skirts and turned it in a locked door. He saw a window that was almost opaque from its film of dust, a couple of chairs, a mattress on the floor, a large framed picture of a Hindu god, and on the floor with a trailing cord what looked like a radio. It was an old tape deck. The girl snapped a cassette into it and switched it on. Music filled the room and made it more bearable.

Gesturing for Dwight to sit, the girl went through a door. He heard water running. He went to the window and drew the curtains. When the girl reentered the room, Dwight was sitting in one of the chairs. He could see that she was wearing fresh lipstick, she had powdered her face, she looked doll-like and delicate, and then she raised her arms, sending her bangles sliding to her elbows, and she cocked one leg. She began to dance in the shadowy room to the aching music.

That night in the Elephanta Suite he had lain on his bed, staring at nothing, feeling fragile; the slightest sound jarred his ears. He was exhausted and empty—sorrowful, but why? Perhaps for the young submissive girl, who had shocked him by being so deft, for understanding so much, for her gift of anticipation. How could she know all that?

Her dancing had held him with its formality and precision, the way she lifted her knees and crooked her arms and made fans of her fingers, the way she twirled her skirts. Without hesitating, she had looped her thumb under one shoulder strap and slipped it sideways, and then the other, and soon she was dancing bare-breasted, barefoot, lifting her gauzy red skirts with her knees. At certain points in the music she seemed to move in a trance-like state, oblivious of him, her yellow eyes upturned to the portrait of a fierce and blackish Hindu god, whose legs were similarly crooked and who wore a necklace of human skulls.

Unhurried, pacing, turning, reaching upward with her skinny arms, she had danced to the music that twanged in the hot dusty room. Her face was a powdery mask, her cheeks rouged, her lips red. She had brought him to the room like a servant girl, but reentered with her makeup—the white powder that made her face purplish, her lips larger and sticky red—with bangles clattering at her wrists, silver earrings, and some sort of bells tinkling on anklets. Soon she was half naked, with small breasts, with sallow skin, and she was not a servant girl anymore but an object of desire, with flashing eyes, stamping feet, twirling and skipping until the music stopped.

He lay in his suite in the same posture as on the mattress in the upstairs room, watching the girl Sumitra kneeling beside him.

“Can you take this off?” he whispered, touching the thickness of her full skirts, and now he could see they’d been sewn with sequins, tiny round mirrors of mica.

She had stood and unfastened her skirts with a cord and stepped out of them. Then she’d folded them, placed them on a chair, and returned to him naked, kneeling, as he lay watching her, her long eyelashes, her lips, her arms, the powder clinging to her hair. But when he touched her, trying to encourage her, she resisted.

She reached beneath the mattress. “Condom,” she said, and tore the small package open with her teeth.

He lay back and closed his eyes, and from time to time she released him and leaned aside and spat.

He did not want to remember the rest, but there was more, his shame like sorrow, the bold conspiratorial woman who bantered with him afterward, asking him for baksheesh. And at last, as he left the place, pausing in the coolness of the lane to get his bearings, he’d seen the old man from the promenade, still in his white cotton suit, carrying his cane. The man who had been shouting at the children looked mild and elderly now. He didn’t smile, hardly acknowledged Dwight, probably resented him for being a debauched white man in India, though (Dwight was walking quickly away) hadn’t the old man schemed with the pimping woman?