Paul Theroux - The Elephanta Suite - Three Novellas

Was it because he was happy again? If so, she succeeded in making him miserable by saying this. That was his reason for saying, “I’m going to India,” in the look-what-you’re-making-me-do tone of voice.

At last he saw his divorce as a triumph. No one else did, which was another reason he was happy to be in India. Perhaps failure was the severest kind of truth. His work was a punishment and a wrecking ball: he took manufacturing away from American companies and brought it to India. The American manufacturers hated him—and they failed; the Indian companies were cynical, knowing that if they could not produce goods cheaply enough, they would be rejected. Every success meant someone’s failure. He could not take any pride in that process: he was part of it.

The old woman pimping the children to passersby: he recognized himself in her. And in Indru too. Her stories were painful, but the experiences had damaged her so badly, her endearments were meaningless. Yet he belonged with her, not in the Elephanta Suite but in the oddly bare room, a stinky alley outside the window. In that human smell like the odor of sorrow he saw his connection to India.

He stopped blaming Maureen, and he could hardly blame Indru for anything. Human frailty implied human strength. Most of the world is poor and weak, beset by the strong.

A young man with an unpronounceable name began visiting Indru’s apartment; one evening he seemed reluctant to leave. He was from the countryside, he said. Willage. Then he visited more often. But he looked more confident and better dressed than a villager, and he frowned at Indru in a proprietary way. He was sometimes impatient to leave the place with Indru (“Let we go marketing”). He nagged her in their own language, which wasn’t Hindi—Dwight had asked. Indru sometimes replied in English, sulking and saying, “Not chivvy me” or “I fed up!”

“My brother,” she said. She left Dwight in the apartment and went out. He looked out the window and saw them—not holding hands but walking close together, touching shoulders, a kind of intimacy. He was rueful, but it was better to know, and he’d been so hurt by his shattered marriage he had kept from committing himself to her. Giving her money when she said “Ring money gone” was his way of possessing her, since it had more value to her than to him. The Indian deals were making him wealthy.

Dwight was startled one evening when he went to the flat and, before he could turn the key in the lock, the door was opened by a small pretty girl, also in the sort of white dress Indru wore. Why?

“I am work at hair and nail salon.”

Another one, younger than Indru—sixteen? seventeen? who could tell?—who said she was from Indru’s village. Her name was Padmini. She did menial jobs in the two-room apartment in return for a place to sleep. Dwight believed the salon story because her nails were lovely—polished and pointed—and she wore fresh makeup and a hairstyle that always interested him, because unlike most Indian girls, her hair was cut short, boyishly. Dwight remarked on it.

“I bob it,” Padmini said, plumping her lips prettily.

Dwight said, “Is that her brother?”

Padmini joined him at the window, standing close, as Indru and the young man with the unpronounceable name turned the corner toward Chowpatty.

“I am not know, sir.”

She was frightened. “Not know” meant she knew, and that the answer was yes, or else she would have said no, because as a villager, she too was a relative.

Dwight smiled. She was slow to smile back, yet she did so. He gave her to understand that they were conspirators, both being manipulated by Indru. He thought of kissing her, as a test, but didn’t—they seemed to resist that. Was it his breath? But she let him hold her loosely, allowing him to grope. His touching Padmini quieted her; with his hands on her, she stayed still and seemed to purr, like a cat being belly-scratched.

He knew that, had he wished, he could have gone further—and Indru must have guessed at the situation she had created by inviting Padmini to stay, by leaving Dwight and the girl alone in the place. Indru was worldlier than she let on—they all were; they had to be to survive.

And he had become reckless. More than that, he was debauched—the word that had seemed like hyperbole before was appropriate now. He had never known such sexual freedom, had not realized that it was in him to behave like this. It was India, he told himself; he would not have lived like this back in the States. All he had to do was leave India and he would be returned to the person he’d been before—forty-something, oblique in business deals, cautious with women, cynical of their motives, not looking for a wife, still smarting from his divorce, even a bit shy, and, like many shy men, prone to laughing too loudly and making sudden gauche remarks, of which “You bet your sweet ass” was one.

His sexual experiences in India had opened his eyes and given him insights. The world looked different to him. That business about “my brother” had not fooled him, nor had it discouraged him. It gave him another opportunity, for the next time the brother appeared and took Indru away on some obscure errand, Dwight beckoned to Padmini and drew her down to the charpoy.

“No,” she said, and when he began to tug at her clothes—the white dress she wore for work at the nail salon—she resisted, turned away, and covered her face.

“Okay,” he said. He sat up and swung around, putting his feet on the floor.

No meant no. He would not use force on a woman—had never done so in his life. Any suggestion of intimidation killed his desire. But when he got up from the charpoy Padmini rolled over onto her back and smiled at him in confusion.

“You no like me,” she said.

“I like you too much,” he said.

But she just laughed and yanked at the tops of her knee socks and tossed her head, and when he gave her money that day she took it reluctantly, as though acknowledging that she didn’t deserve it.

He continued to give Indru money. He suspected that she was giving it to the young boy she called her brother. Deceits and failures and betrayals, but it was part of the India he had come to understand. He belonged here. He had found his level.

Although India advertised itself as a land of sensuality, he had regarded that as hype. They were trying to sell tickets. And where were the sensualists? The businessmen were two-faced and so shifty they turned the women into scolds. Most of the people he’d met had been too angry—pestering and puritanical—with red-rimmed and tormented eyes. If they’d been liberated, they wouldn’t have been such agitated nags. They scowled, they carped, they pushed, they honked their horns. Serenity seemed unattainable. The way the bosses screamed at their underlings, the shrill orders a manager gave a secretary, the bullshit, the buck-passing, the cruel teasing, the racism, hating each other much more than they hated foreigners—it all revealed to Dwight a culture of both punishment and sexual frustration, for the two always went together.

Long ago, as a youth, as a law student, he had once behaved that way himself—on edge because he’d been unsuccessful with women. His first trip to India had reminded him of that—everything wrong, the yelling crowds, the food, the bad air, and the women were either virginal, with their eyes downcast, or married and plump and indifferent, in both cases impossible. The predatory divorcée or widow was just desperate, with no option except to be devious, and scheming turned him off. The society was packed too tight, jammed and impenetrable, and all a stranger could do was drift hopelessly around its dusty edges.

Or so he had thought. He was wrong about this—wrong about everything, wrong in all his assumptions. India was sensual. If India seemed puritanical, it was because at the bottom of its puritanism was a repressed sensuality that was hungrier and nakeder and more voracious than anything he’d known. The strict rules kept most people in their place, yet there were exceptions everywhere, and where there were exceptions, there was anarchy and desire. If India had a human face, it was that of a hungry skinny girl, starved for love, famished for money.