Paul Theroux - The Elephanta Suite - Three Novellas

They walked, he bought them ice cream, they sat on the benches, they used the promenade, they gazed at the Malabar Hill beyond the bay, the mansions, the villas. They looked at the sea, which seemed idyllic, but Dwight knew—and so did the unbuoyant, non-swimming Indians—that it was polluted, and that if you looked closely you’d see that the sea water had the yellow-gray color and deadly fizz of battery acid.

Strolling made Indru talkative. “My mother treat me so harsh,” she said. “My father touch me. Shame for him.”

She was provoked to tell her stories whenever there was a lull in the conversation. Usually she spoke without emotion, lapping an ice cream cone, as she was doing now.

“My granny lock me in the dark room.”

“So you said.”

“After he make me naked, Father say, ‘Go away, you bad girl.’”

“I remember. You went to the police. They didn’t believe you.”

“Police not believe me at all. ‘You are talking blue lies.’ They take me to the village sarpanch. He touch my privates. Oh, my God.”

She spoke without anger, rotating the ice cream on its cone, licking her fingers when it dripped.

“And the boys in the village were cruel,” Dwight said.

“They throw things at me. They throw kanda. The cow dung women make for the fires, they throw at me.”

The same stories, in their way tragic, perhaps, but hearing them so often irritated him. He had been moved the first time. By now he knew them by heart. He could recite them verbatim, and what was more annoying that that? They became parodies. Apart from the stories of cruelty and abuse, which he only half believed (she told them a new way each time, and sometimes improved on them, with variations and discrepancies and gaps), Indru had no other conversation.

Obviously, she had remembered how, the first time, he had listened; how she had captured his attention, silenced him with her stories, a Scheherezade of sadism.

They were an important justification for him—for seeing her, being kind to her, sleeping with her—the poor kid, how she’d suffered. He needed the stories. They gave him the right to sleep with her and to be her benefactor.

She needed them too, for without the stories she was just a wayward girl in Mumbai, filling in at a hair and nail salon and lazily looking for someone to pay her way.

“My uncle, so cruel. He touch me and threaten me.”

“He had a motorcycle. He gave you a ride. He took you to a riverbank and raped you.”

“His friend also did things to me.”

That was a new twist. Dwight said, “Give it a rest, Indru.”

The trouble was that, bored by the stories—he had been outraged before—his own behavior seemed crass. She was not a victim he was helping but rather an opportunist overdramatizing her past.

He doubted the stories, not just because she told them without feeling; she seemed to repeat them because of his reaction to them. She believed they were the key to his sympathy, and they had been, but not on the twentieth retelling.

“What about you, Padmini? Any family problems?”

“No problem. I happy.”

“They beat Padmini at nail salon,” Indru said with indignation, as though looking to create drama.

“I spill nail varnish on customer sari,” Padmini said. And she began to laugh. “She so angry!”

“Did they really beat you?” Dwight asked.

“Oh, yes, but customer refuse to pay. She get out of chair and say goodbye and hurry out to street and rickshaw wallah hit her— whoof!— and she plop down. Ha!”

The memory of the angry customer being struck by a rickshaw was stronger than the memory of being beaten.

Padmini didn’t look for sympathy, which was probably why he liked her, and why, when Indru’s brother showed up and took Indru out, Dwight didn’t mind: he had Padmini, who was younger and prettier and, in her way, shrewder. Because she didn’t ask for anything, he gave her money and presents, and he was less inclined to give Indru presents, since she asked for them constantly these days.

Indru believed that her horror stories helped, but all they did was diminish her, turn her into a figure of melodrama, make her impossible to love and hard to like. Yes, he could pity her, but there were a billion others worthy of pity.

Both were living off him. Indru had stopped working. And Padmini worked less often. And when Indru asked Dwight for money or a present, he suspected that she was asking on behalf of her brother. Even Padmini admitted that she sent some of Dwight’s money home to her parents in the village.

That made him think. Behind Indru and Padmini, radiating outward from the two-room apartment, were more people living off them, each girl with a family, each family a village, each village a hierarchy, like the sarpanch whom Indru had mentioned—a great assortment of hungry people with their hands out. He was supporting them all, yet he could not call himself a benefactor.

Indian money was peculiarly filthy, the frayed little ten rupee notes, the tattered hundreds; a stack of bills looked like a pile of dirty rags. The money smelled of all the people who had fingered it and used it. The thought of this killed his desire, and he began to see Indru and Padmini as two lazy girls, older and cleverer than they looked. He saw himself as even lazier, or worse—credulous and weak. As he saw their cynicism, he liked himself less. He feared that one day he would come to despise them.

Meanwhile Shah—so he said in an e-mail—had gone to Disney World in Orlando. He had visited New York City, where he had a cousin. He’d found clients all over New England. He’d been invited to Harvard Business School, to speak informally at a seminar. Kohut had given a dinner party for him in Sudbury. “Autumn leaves,” Shah reported, “magnificent colors.” And “I trust all is well, Mumbai-side.”

Was it? These walks along Chowpatty Beach, because they were interludes, because they required conversation, were revealing and proved to Dwight that he was kidding himself. He was a man who had discovered sex in India and thought it was magic. But it was an illusion, the consequence of his having power and money in a land of desperation. Sex was a good thing, because sex had an end, and when his desire died he saw he’d been a fool. But now, with more power and less conviction, his passion diminished to casual playing, and he took more risks.

Seeing a boy with a CD player and headphones, Indru said, “Buy me one of those.”

“What will you do with it?”

“Listen music.”

“Maybe,” he said, to tease her, and saw she was agitated with greed. He said to Padmini, “Do you want one too?”

Her whisper was so soft he could scarcely hear it, yet he knew her vibrant lips were saying yes.

“But what will you give me?”

He was ashamed. He had no right to feel powerful when he said this, making the request like a greedy king addressing his subjects, asking, How do you intend to please me?

They were at the beach, another of their Sunday strolls, watched by groups of chattering boys who were attracted by the pretty girls, curious about the tall white man in the Indian shirt and kadi vest of homespun, which Dwight had begun to wear since Shah’s departure for the States.

Padmini glanced at Indru, who was smirking and looking coy, as though challenging Padmini to give the right answer.

“Sir, we will be good to you,” Padmini said.

Indru laughed and skipped ahead. Her laugh got the attention of an old woman who was walking in the opposite direction. Dwight looked up at Indru and saw the woman. He wouldn’t have noticed her at all except that she hesitated and stared at him.

She had not changed. She was fat and slow, wearing a billowing sari banded with gold embroidery, gold bangles on her wrists, brown-gray hair, with a shawl thrown over it.