Paul Theroux - The Elephanta Suite - Three Novellas

The Elephanta Suite was one of the best in the hotel. He had a driver always, and he seldom opened a door—doors were snatched open for him to pass through. Yet, even knowing that these praising remarks were undeserved, he accepted them, and was strengthened by them. After the fiasco of his brief marriage, it was nice to be thought of as brave, and he liked being regarded as a kind of conqueror—it was how a success in India was seen by the Boston office. It was unexpectedly pleasant to be thought of as a hero.

And so, although he was seldom inconvenienced in India, and lived in luxury, he played up the discomfort—the heat, the dirt, the rats, the beggars, the sidewalks so filled with people you couldn’t walk down them, the sight of bearded Muslims and their shrouded women, the sludgy buttery food that looked inedible, the water that wasn’t drinkable, people sleeping by the side of the road and pissing against trees. He said nothing about his suite or the manservant who came with it— I will be your butler, sir.

“Pretty grim,” he said.

But those characterizations of India, though containing a measure of truth, did not say it all, nor did they matter much to him. They merely described the stereotype of India, and it was always a relief for people to hear a stereotype confirmed.

He couldn’t say: I’ve broken through it all. He couldn’t say: It was the girl.

In small ways he’d known it in the past, this feeling of a place altered by a single person. How often a landscape was charged and sweetened for him because he had been in love, because he’d somehow managed to succeed with a woman. He had her and everything was different—he had a reason to be there, and more, a reason to return. It was not just the sex; it was a human connection that made a place important to him.

This discovery in India of a desire in himself that had found release, and also to be thought of as a hero—suffering a week of meetings and clouds of germs, when the fact was that India could be bliss—gave him strength.

It had happened so simply, because Indru had pursued him.

“I’m coming back,” he said.

“I wait you.”

Who in the States, in his whole life, had ever said those words to him with such a tremor of emotion? He wanted Maureen to call, to ask him how he was, so he could say, “Fine, and by the way, I gave the diamond ring away to a girl I met in an alley in India.”

He felt happier without the diamond in his pocket. But maybe it was better that Maureen didn’t call. He didn’t want to tell her he was happy. She’d say, “See? I told you it would change your life,” and he didn’t want her to be so complacently right about him.

He was strengthened by believing that India was the land of yes. And for the five months he remained in Boston he felt he was like the exiled king of a glittering country that was full of possibilities and pleasures. What made this sense of exile even more satisfying was the knowledge that his colleagues regarded his having gone there as an enormous sacrifice, a trip fraught with danger and difficulty.

He lobbied to return, first with Kohut, who was the most senior partner, then with Sheely, who was terrified of being sent back. But his lobbying took the form of casual questions rather than an outright offer to go. If he looked too eager, they’d take him less seriously and would be less inclined to offer him a hardship allowance.

“We’ve got a couple of clients pending,” Kohut said. “It’s great of you to ask. We’d like to send you back with three or four deals, not so much to maximize the hours as to make it easier for you.”

“I’m just saying I could probably help. I know the terrain a bit better.”

“It might mean two weeks of back-to-back meetings.”

“Make it three. Less pressure.” And Dwight spoke of strategy.

“Hunt, you’re amazing.”

“That I’ve developed some contacts?”

“That you’d go there at all. To me, it’s a black hole.”

“There’s money in that hole.”

But even as he spoke about the potential deals and the money to be made, he was thinking of Indru and how she had followed him in her white dress and white shoes. How she had said, I wait you.

Not just Indru, but she seemed to speak for thousands of others who were waiting, like the willing girls in the “Matrimonials” ads. Something within him had been liberated and released, perhaps something as simple as his fear.

So this was what true travelers knew, and maybe some lawyers too! You said, “Poor guy, so far away in that awful place,” never guessing that he was someone you didn’t know at all, a happy person in a distant place that allowed him to be himself—girls saying Whatever you want, sir and What you like? or the most powerful word in the language of desire, Yes.

He realized that he had discovered what other travelers knew but weren’t telling, that India could also be pleasurable. He was one of those men, just as smitten, just as cagey. He didn’t say to Kohut, “Please send me back.” Instead he let the client list accumulate and waited for Kohut to summon him.

And then he left, going to India as to a waiting lover, a patient mistress.

“We have meetings tomorrow,” Shah said. He had met him at the airport, behind a man in a uniform carrying a sign lettered Hunt-singha. They were sitting in the back of his car.

“It’s already tomorrow,” Dwight said.

It was two in the morning. This odor of dust and diesel, woodsmoke, decay, industrial fumes and flowers, and the odor of humans, the complex smell of India—he had never been anywhere that smelled like this. This dense cloud contained the hum of India’s history, too—conquerors, burnings, blood, the incense of religion. It was less a whiff than a wall of smell.

“Back-to-back meetings,” Shah said. Kohut’s expression—they must have been talking. Shah was an element of the firm now.

“When’s the first one?”

“Eight-thirty, and so on into the day,” Shah said.

“Okay.” Dwight thought: At least I’m here.

“Hit ground running, so to say.”

“But I’m free tomorrow night?”

“Tomorrow night we have fundraiser at the Oberoi, main ballroom. Two of potential clients will be attendees.”

This “we” was new, along with Shah’s brisker manner.

Shah dropped him at his hotel, saying, “See you shortly.”

It was a bad joke, which kept Dwight awake, wide-eyed in the darkness of the Elephanta Suite, his alertness reminding him that it was late afternoon in Boston. He lay sleepless in his bed, dozing, and did not begin to slumber deeply until it was time to wake up.

Being weary and irritable at the meeting had the effect of cowing the manufacturers—the textile man with his order of leisure wear, the plastics man and his patio furniture, the team from nearby Mylapore who made rolls of nylon webbing, and, at the end of the day, the hardest negotiation of all, the techies from Hyderabad whose company made components for cell phones.

Kohut had provided the client list and Shah had lined up the product people. As always there were costs to be assessed, samples to be examined and evaluated, quality-control clauses, shipping costs. The contracts were like architectural plans, each stage of the discussion a new set of elevations, a sheet of specs, going deeper into the descriptions. But Shah had taken care of that, too. Dwight sat while Shah went through the contracts, turning pages slowly, always drawn to a detail, as though to wear the manufacturer down.

“Item four, subsection B, paragraph two, under ‘Definitions,’” Shah said. “We suggest inserting ‘piece goods,’ do we not, Mr. Hund?”

“Gotta have it.”