Paul Theroux - The Elephanta Suite - Three Novellas

Indru was on the stairs, climbing three flights. He caught up with her on the last landing, as she was turning her key in the metal door.

“Please you come in.”

He summed it up quickly in the twilight before she switched on the lamp: two rooms, a string bed he reminded himself was a charpoy, cushions on the floor, a chair.

“Please sit.”

He chose the chair. The long walk in the humid heat had worn him out.

“How did you find this?”

“Money you gave me was ample.”

“The ring?”

“I am sold,” she said, looking fearful.

Instead of saying anything, he kissed her to reassure her.

“But first, sir.”

She took his shoes off, plucked off his socks, slipped a mat under his bare feet. Then she got a bowl and filled it with water and knelt before him. And when she bent over and washed his feet, massaging his toes, he felt strengthened, and the distant rumble of thunder from Chowpatty echoed in his head as he thought, I am happy, I am home.

He asked the firm for another month. Thanking him for his willingness, they granted it immediately, e-mailing him a list of new clients, with specifications of product lines for outsourcing-sports clothes, leather goods, brass fittings, molded plastic tubes for patio furniture, gardening implements, lamp bases, glassware—and Kohut added, “Glad it’s such a success,” because no one hadever asked for an extension. Most had wanted to come home early.

After the meetings, or the flights to Bangalore and Hyderabad —usually a day in each place and the late flight back to Mumbai—he went to Indru’s room rather than the Elephanta Suite. He layin the half-dark listening to her stories, which she told in a monotone: how her father touched her—the shame of it; how her mother beat her, blaming her, and her father sent her away to her auntie’s village; how her auntie locked her in an unlit room with the grain sacks and the rats; how, when Indru went to the police, they didn’t believe her; how the village boys threw bricks of cow-shit at her, and when her uncle happened by to rescue her, he drove her on his motorbike to the riverbank, where he dragged her through the bamboo.

“He touch me here, he touch me down here on my privates, he bite me with his teeth and call me dirty dog.”

They were harrowing stories, the more terrifying for the factual way she told them, lying on her back on the string bed, her fingertips grazing her body to indicate where she had been violated. She seemed to understand how they seized Dwight’s attention and silenced him. And some evenings when he looked distracted, his gaze drifting to the window, sleepy and satisfied, she would prop herself on one elbow and drop her voice and show him a scar on her wrist, whitish on her dark skin.

“One uncle tie me with ropes. He say, ‘Is a game.’ I be so scare. He take my sari. He say, ‘I no hurt you.’”

And what she told him next in that soft voice was more powerful to him than the racket at the window. He took a deep breath and gagged and thought, Not a success at all—it’s a failure.

The smell of failure in India wasn’t only Indian failure. It was a universal smell of human weakness, the stink of humanity, his own failure too. His firm of lawyers was bringing so many people down.

He remembered telling Maureen that he was being sent to India—like a threat, a risk, a martyrdom: I’m going to India—take that!

His marriage hadn’t worked, but he thought: How can any marriage work? Everyone had their own problems—who was normal? If the two people remained themselves, with separate ambitions, there was strife. Submission was possible in the short term. But if one or the other surrendered to become absorbed in the other’s life, then it was the annihilation of a human soul, something like slavery or an early death, and resentment was inevitable. Love was not enough, sexual desire didn’t last, you had to make your own life.

He’d had hopes, the usual ones, of partnership and plans, and had tried. But early on he’d lain beside his wife of less than a year and thought, It’s over. He suspected that she was thinking the same.

To calm himself while lying beside Maureen, he mentally moved out: his restless mind roamed through the apartment room by room, selecting the things he wanted to take with him, rejecting the things that were hers. In was an inventory of the place but also a way of processing the marriage, making a pile of the belongings he planned to leave behind.

He had loved her for more than a year, the passionate part of the whole business; and then he proposed and set a date. But the nearer they got to the date, the less love he felt—panic set in—and his heart was almost empty as he went through the motions on his wedding day. The wedding itself, the expense, the decisions, their first arguments, seemed a ritual designed to break your spirit. After that it was just a struggle, as though marriage represented the end of a love affair, the beginning of mutual strife. She kept working, she wouldn’t take the name Huntsinger, she rejected the idea of having kids, she didn’t cook—but, then, neither did he. He asked Sheely, who could be trusted with confidences, if these were signs, but Sheely in his lawyer’s way shrugged and gave a lawyer’s equivocal answer: Maybe yes, maybe no.

Maureen was also a lawyer—tax law and trust funds, but a different firm—and she seemed too preoccupied to notice his mood, the question on his face: Why did we do it?

He was the first to mention splitting up. He told her in a cowardly way: “Maybe just spend a little time apart.” But she could see he meant divorce, because the same thought was lurking in her own mind. She’d said, “My mother will be so angry. She said I wouldn’t be able to do it—that I was too selfish.”

Maureen began to cry, and for the first time, with acute pain, Dwight saw how vulnerable she was. He held her tenderly, he felt protective, he said, “We’ll figure something out,” and he despaired, because it was turning out to be so much harder than he had imagined. Showing her weakness for the first time, the fear that she had expected the marriage to fail, made the breakup a nightmare. Losing her as a wife was painful, but he guessed he’d get over it; losing her as a friend—someone he had pushed overboard when the storm broke over them—that seemed unbearable and something she would never forgive.

Not much remained to divide. They sold the apartment and split the proceeds.

“Short marriages,” Sheely said, “pretty common. Like a chess move. I know three people, not counting you. Couple of months and they’re gonzo. Better now than later. Probably a book on the subject.”

In the melancholy months afterward they still saw each other. They didn’t know anyone else, and their feelings were so raw they didn’t want to make new friends.

Maureen had been depressed by the men she’d met. She had no one else to tell, so she told Dwight. “The first drink is fine. On the second drink I hear about their marriage. How it ended. What a bitch she was. How she took him to the cleaners.”

So, as friends, they dated each other for some months, even recognizing that it was a failure and that they were too timid to enter the wider world and contemplate romance again. Dwight was amazed that after that anyone would take the same risk twice, going through that shredder.

Eventually they disengaged. He was surprised, because at that point he had become comfortable, seeing her on weekends and going to movies. She asked how he was doing. With his new frankness—the divorce had made him blunt—he told her, “This is good. I’m happy.” Maureen said, “It’s not good. I can’t stand this anymore. I don’t want to see you. I’m starting to really dislike you.”