Paul Theroux - The Elephanta Suite - Three Novellas

She was squatting cross-legged in the back room, on the mattress that was spread on the floor, where she slept—not even a string bed, but what did that matter? The only light was the light from the street, filtered through a high dirty window.

Padmini was indistinct. He tried to read her expression, to see her posture. He thought, Reality is many-sided.

“Is bolt in door?”

“Yes.”

A quality of air, no more than a ripple, told him she had relaxed, hearing that. But when he held her she stiffened, like someone about to take a leap. She wouldn’t let him kiss her, though she allowed him to touch her. She seemed to grow limp as he did so, murmuring in her throat, and still the cow moaned in the alley.

In Shah’s absence, Dwight kept himself scarce. He spent less time in the boardroom, and when he was there he avoided looking down the long table for a view of the Gateway of India. Huge though it was, even when he did accidentally glance in that direction, he hardly saw it. The three-portaled archway did not loom for him anymore. Too much had happened to him for the thing to seem important in his life. It was just another monument in a country that was cluttered with monuments.

Unwelcome visitors were another reason for his keeping away. Incredibly, he was regarded as the expert on India now.

“I’d like to pick your brain,” people said in phone calls. That meant his dispensing free advice over a hotel lunch to another nervous American on his first visit to India.

And the odd thing was that when Dwight spoke to these newcomers, he said unexpected things, surprising himself in his opinions.

A man named Todd Pinsker visited. He was a Hollywood lawyer—he’d done a contract with Ralph Picard from the Boston office; he was passing through Mumbai on his way to Rajasthan for a luxury vacation. As a favor to Ralph, Dwight saw him for a drink at the Taj.

“And this is my son, Zack,” Pinsker said. “He’s making a movie.”

The boy’s smug expression matched his clumsiness. He wore a baseball cap backward, sat with his legs sticking out, and demanded that the waiter remove the ice from his drink.

“Ice can make you sick,” he said. “I mean, you can get a bad ice cube.”

“He’s got this dynamite idea,” the boy’s father said. “Sort of meld the Bollywood idea with an American movie. I mean, get some major talent from the States and shoot it here.”

“I have no contacts at all in the movie industry,” Dwight said. “I’m contracting for U.S. companies who want to outsource here.”

“That’s Zack’s project,” the man said. “I want to set up a concept restaurant in Manhattan. I’ve got some backing in L.A. I’m looking for ideas here, for a theme. Maybe headhunt a chef.”

“Wish I could help you. I don’t even eat in restaurants anymore,” Dwight said. He wondered, Is this true? And he surprised himself again by saying, “I mean, I’m a committed vegetarian.”

“That’s cool,” the man said, but his squint gave away his caution.

“Following kind of a Jain thing,” Dwight said.

That got Zack’s attention. “A Jain thing? Those people that don’t kill bugs?”

“Ahimsa,” Dwight said in almost a whisper, because the boy’s voice was so loud. “It’s part of the philosophy—non-killing.”

“Vegetarian options would play a big part in this restaurant,” the man said. “I’ve just got to meet some people. Have you been to Rajvilas?”

“No. I’ve hardly been out of Mumbai.”

“Clinton stayed there,” the boy said, and sucked on his glass of Coke.

Dwight became impatient. This father and son were annoying him with their presumption. They were both trying to get rich, do some business, use the Indians as everyone else did.

“You won’t have a problem finding what you want here,” he said. “Whatever it is. Everyone gets what they want. But at the same time you’re going to find something you didn’t bargain for.”

“Is that some kind of warning?”

“I suppose it is,” Dwight said. He thought: Where is this coming from? Why am I saying this? But without any effort, and hardly knowing what was coming next, he said, “But it’s a fact. India’s cheap, so it attracts amateurs and second-raters and opportunists. Backpackers. Little Leaguers. Because India’s desperate, Indians do most of the work for you.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?”

“Depends,” Dwight said. “Indians never lose. No matter how well you think you’re doing, they’re doing better. You’re glad because you can get a pair of blue jeans for a buck twenty-nine. But eighty cents of that is profit for them.”

“I’m trying to put a restaurant together. Zack’s doing a movie.”

“You’ll get it done. And you’ll get something else you never expected. The Indian extra. The Indian surprise.”

He knew he was being enigmatic; he was not even sure what he was saying. Certainly he was warning them, but he didn’t like them enough to explain the warning in detail. What alarmed him was, having given no thought to these opinions before, they seemed to be bubbling up from his unconscious. Maybe I am warning myself?

After an hour, he said he had an appointment. They swapped business cards—even the punk kid Zack had one. And then Dwight took a taxi to Indru’s. Probably that was what he meant when he mentioned the Indian surprise.

It was true that Indians did most of the work. And there were plenty of manufacturers eager to service clients—too many of them, perhaps, and they were ruthless with each other. They were persistent with him and tended to call his cell phone at all hours, offering to cut deals. It was no good for him to say, “You can’t do an end run on the tendering process,” because they didn’t understand the metaphor, and anyway, backstabbing was a standard business practice, even part of the culture, with real backs and real knives.

But Dwight had always found someone suitable to make the product—not movies or concept restaurants, time-wasting negotiations that brought together those natural allies, the dreamer and the bullshitter. He preferred deals for making plastic buckets, rubber gaskets, leisure wear, nylon plumbing fixtures, sports shoes, electronic components. The insulated wire that was a crucial part of a spark plug—no one wanted to make them in the States anymore, but Shah had found a man in Hyderabad, a former rope maker, who had retooled his shop to make the wire for a few dollars a spool. That kind of thing. The hard part was the contract, the final wording, the up-front payments, the penalty clauses, and for that he needed Shah’s scrupulous shit-detecting Jain eye.

“Still following up some contacts here,” Shah e-mailed, and it sounded like procrastination.

Fine. Dwight handed off the competing Indians to his secretary, Miss Chakravarti. Indians understood delegating. “I can do it, sir,” they’d say, and give the job to someone else, a menial, and that menial would delegate it to someone lower. And Dwight had more time, because he found that an e-mail or a letter, if left unanswered, became stale and less important as time passed, and soon diminished to something so thin and tentative it was easy for him to delete it. Filing it or keeping it fresh made it into an artificial demand.

Time was the test of any demand. He had never in his life felt the passage of time so palpably as he had in India. And he had concluded that, really, nothing was urgent—nothing at all. Maybe nothing mattered.

Now and then he forwarded a message to Shah, still in Boston. “You have given me a wonderful opportunity,” Shah e-mailed. And he stayed on.

On most days, but especially on weekends, Indians walked along Chowpatty Beach, a great expanse of tainted shoreline—dirty sand, sodden litter, scummy water, beached plastic—where it was always low tide. These days, with more time on his hands, Dwight walked along the beach with Indru, and sometimes with Padmini. He saw no other foreigners doing this, and thought, Maybe I’m not a foreigner anymore.