Paul Theroux - The Elephanta Suite - Three Novellas

For a moment Dwight wondered how she’d singled him out—but of course, he was the only white man on the beach. He was glad that Indru and Padmini had gone ahead. The old woman’s unfriendly smile was like mockery.

“Hello,” he said.

Instead of replying, the woman called out sharply. Amid the crowd of beach strollers, three figures hurried over—the little girl, the young boy, and the tall skinny dancer in her Gypsy dress. He recognized them only because the old woman was there. The boy was taller but thinner, with a resentful face; the little girl wore a new dress but seemed sickly, hollow-eyed, with lipstick and eye shadow, a parody of a whore. Sumitra, the dancer, looked at him with hatred. She was bony and her hair was full and frizzed, with dry patches on her strangely hairy arms and lines in her face, as though she’d become old. In the way they stared, they seemed brutalized and rude.

The old woman gabbled in Hindi. Dwight knew she must have been saying, It is the man. You remember him from the Gateway of India?

Were they speculating on whether they could con him again, somehow entice him?

“Nice to see you,” Dwight said.

But as he made a move to go, they crowded him and blocked his way.

With a yelp, a passing boy called out to his friends, and Dwight thought how suddenly stupid the boy became in his eagerness. The other boys hurried over, attracted by the odd public scene: the yakking old woman, the scruffy Gypsy-looking children, the white man—the towering, isolated white man. In just seconds there were more spectators, all boys, laughing, perhaps suspecting trouble—that slack-jawed look of anticipation was also moronic. Dwight had seen this before in India, how subtle and crafty Indians could be individually, how ignorant and obvious in a large crowd.

At that moment, in what seemed to him a standoff, Dwight heard a screech.

“Yaaagh!” Another animal noise—Indru’s shriek, and followed by Padmini, Indru broke through the cluster of people.

She snatched at Dwight’s hand, and a jeering cry went up from the boys. But Indru screamed at them, something that had to be worse than “go away,” because they howled back at her.

Glancing around to make his escape, Dwight saw the old woman smile. It was a sour smile of contempt. Even she recognized what he was now, and she began to mutter defiantly. What was she saying? Something wicked about him to these foolish boys.

Dwight stepped back while Indru continued to yell at the boys. She wasn’t like a girl anymore, she was a howling woman with big reddish teeth in her wide-open mouth.

Now the old woman, who seemed fearless and slightly superior, was saying something sly to Indru—vile words, they had to be, because Indru spat at her, a gob of reddish saliva that darkened in a streak on the old woman’s sari. The boys laughed and punched the air in delight.

“Come on,” Dwight said, and pulled Indru away as the old woman craned her neck and screamed.

Indru said, “That auntie say she know you. You give her money. You bad man.”

When they had crossed the expanse of Chowpatty sand and were back on the sidewalk, Dwight said, “I am a bad man!”

He was disgusted with himself. He deserved this humiliating scene at the public beach on a busy Sunday, with the horrible boys watching, the cowshit, the yellow froth at the sea’s edge, the poisonous water, the spectacle of a predatory American confronted by the victims he had paid off.

I am a bad man had shocked Indru into silence. She merely followed him to the apartment block, and when they got there, Dwight shook his head. He saw that Padmini was just catching up with them, still looking flustered from the business at the beach.

“No,” he said.

“Yes,” Padmini said. She took his big hand in her small one.

That gave him some strength. He climbed the stairs slowly, feeling weak.

In the room, while Indru watched, Padmini said, “We be good to you.”

The words made him sad, but she had turned away and dropped her sari, and now her little brown made-up face made him sad, her skinny neck, the fuzz of hair on her lower back, the tight globes of her buttocks.

Indru had taken most of her clothes off. She lay on the charpoy wearing a sarong, her heavy breasts hanging, one to the left, one to the right. There was something lewd in the asymmetry, and the way she lolled, half propped up, watching Padmini bend to pick up her sari and fold it.

Dwight tried to laugh, but he was numb all over. The thought that saved him was: I created this. I brought these people here. I gave them my wedding ring to rent the place—it’s all mine. And so I can do whatever I want.

They were staring at him. He said, “What’s my name?”

Padmini began to giggle. Indru said, “I am know.”

“Tell me.”

“Mister,” she said, but she could not go any further. She was murmuring, “Ferringi.”

“I’m Dwight Huntsinger.”

Hearing this, they both laughed, for the name was impossible to say. They champed at a few syllables and laughed some more.

Padmini stood naked before him and said, “What you want?”

Just then he was thinking the same thing, a clumsy matching moment that helped him see clearly.

He said, “I want to go.”

They were still calling to him as he descended the stairs. A door opened on a landing below, and a chubby-faced woman looked out and seemed to pair the girls’ appeals to his fleeing—more humiliation.

On his way back to the hotel he almost succeeded in losing himself in the crowd, yet he felt that his face was vivid with shame, a pink and sweaty, guilty-looking ferringi face, debauched, different from everyone else’s.

His shame was strongest on that walk when a woman approached to beg from him, as if testing his willpower. India was weird that way, a culture of confrontation. Here he was, a few minutes’ away from one humiliation and a woman was stopping to challenge him with another. “Give me money.” He was so fearful he could not bring himself to give her a rupee. She hissed at him, and his agony was complete.

That night he went to the hotel’s business center, as he did most nights, to check his e-mail. Usually he forwarded the messages to Miss Chakravarti. Rarely was there a message on a business matter from Shah, though everyone in the firm praised him: “He’s developed some contacts at Harvard Business School” and “He found some great people in Boston who want to create a high-tech facility in Mysore” and “The partners like him. He might be the key to setting up a branch office in Mumbai.”

But tonight the message from Kohut was “Shah is talking about bringing his wife to the States.”

Dwight began typing, “Urgent. Please …”

Before he finished the message, he looked at the clock. It was morning in Boston. He deleted the message and found Kohut’s number on the speed dial of his BlackBerry.

“Huntsinger!”

“Ernie, listen to me. I need Shah back here.”

“Why are you pleading? You’re our guy in India. Anyway, Shah was planning a trip there. He’s got some great business lined up.” Perhaps aware of the huge distance, Kohut was shouting in the phone. “So, hey, Dwight, how’s it hanging?”

In the days before Shah returned, Dwight stayed at his hotel, either using the business center or sitting on the veranda of the Elephanta Suite, which was enclosed, a high wall protecting him from the road. He was slowed by a kind of fear. He could not bring himself to go out. The risks were too great—strangers would approach him, obstruct him, as they always did in India, and they would challenge him, ask for money or food, or ask that he give them a job. A young boy had tapped Dwight’s Rolex watch and demanded to know why it should not be given to him.