Paul Theroux - The Elephanta Suite - Three Novellas

Once, he regarded dealing with people like this at close quarters as his strength, staring them down, like a chief or a king, or acceding to their request, with the power to change a person’s life. Not just Indru and the others. Those experiences had made him bold—he was known on the street as a soft touch. Now he had come to see himself as a victim, but a corrupt one.

He called Maureen, dialed the number impulsively, not quite sure why, until she answered in a small beaten voice. “Yes?”

“I’m so sorry,” he said, feeling tearful.

“Who is this?”

“Dwight,” he said. “It was all my fault, the breakup. I could have tried harder. We could have worked out our issues. But my damned pride prevented me. Can you ever forgive me?”

She came awake. She said, “It’s two o’clock in the morning, for God’s sake!”

“I’m sorry.”

“Dwight, don’t talk to me about issues. We have no issues. Your coupons have run out.”

“Honey?”

“Don’t ever do this again.”

He was left holding a buzzing phone. He deserved it, for having been so reckless in India. From where he sat on the veranda, he could see other Americans doing the same—lawyers, lobbyists, facilitators, dealers, wholesalers, all of them being wooed by Indians. They were traveling down the same road, under the promising billboard You Can Make Anything in India. It was the crux of the whole effort, the test of a person’s character. You had to be strong to survive it. But most of the people he saw had failed.

The middle-aged American with the pretty and pliant Indian girlfriend, the American woman with her saluting driver, the American lawyer with his submissive hacks, the young American traveler being helped by the groveling concierge, the Pinskers—the father starting a gourmet Indian restaurant in New York, the son trying to set up a movie, hustling in Mumbai and vacationing in Jaipur—everyone had a scheme to hook up the Indians and make money and behave badly.

With rising anger, Dwight saw an American brat—nine or ten years old, long hair, hat on backward—in the hotel dining room. The boy sulked as he was being asked by a waiter in a turban, frock coat, and crimson sash, “What do you desire for your meal, sir?”

The white-gloved waiter was bending low and abasing himself to the child while the parents studied their menus.

“May I suggest the soup?”

“I hate soup.” The child made himself ugly and turned away.

“Perhaps tasty grilled-cheese sandwich?”

“I don’t like that either.”

“Maybe young sir would prefer breaded cutlet?”

“What’s that supposed to be?”

“Meat, sir.”

“I want spaghetti, but no red stuff on it, and no cheese.”

“I will request kitchen to make, sir,” the waiter said, bowing, clicking his pen, while the brat’s father and mother still frowned at their menus.

Dwight wanted to slap the snarly child, then slap the parents; then tell the waiter to stop groveling, and then he wanted to slap himself. But it was too late. They were all lost. No hope for them, not much for him.

How had he been corrupted so quickly? It wasn’t as though the Indians were sensualists. They were forthright. They asked for what they wanted. He’d had the best of intentions, but he had been weak. The girls had not been beautiful, either, only young and hungry. Hunger was a terrible thing that turned you into both predator and prey. Winky Vellore was no beauty; she was greedy. Padmini had connived with Indru. It was all like the sort of deal he had been negotiating for months with Shah and the wholesalers. Sir, we will be good to you.

It wasn’t food they wanted. They craved dresses and shoes and electronics, an iPod, a better TV set. They were not starving; they were greedy for gold. He couldn’t blame them. He blamed himself. He needed for Shah to return, to protect him, somehow rescue him. The man was saintly: he didn’t swat flies, he didn’t eat eggs, he wouldn’t drink water at night for fear of guzzling an insect that might be floating on the surface.

At last Dwight got the e-mail from Shah with his arrival time. Dwight did not go to the airport to meet him—Mrs. Shah would do that—but he checked that the plane was on time, and he waited the next morning for Shah to call. Without quite knowing how, Dwight trusted Shah to release him from his misery.

He was convinced of it the morning after Shah’s arrival, when he met him for breakfast. It wasn’t his manner. In fact, he seemed somewhat changed: he was more urbane in a self-conscious way, wearing what looked like a Brooks Brothers suit and a Harvard tie and a matching hankie stuffed into his breast pocket. But he was a reassuring presence, and his choice of food was proof of his unchanged goodness, the simplest items on the menu: dhal, rice cakes, a plate of warm flaky pooris, some Indian cheese.

“This is paneer. Please don’t make a face, but cow dung is used in preparation.”

“Gives it a distinctive taste,” Dwight said.

“Exactly.”

“I’m so glad to see you back here.”

“Thank you, my friend.”

“Fruit, sir?” the waiter asked. He was holding a basket of oranges and bananas and apples.

Shah said, “An apple only, but you must assure me that it was not picked. That it fell from tree and was garnered.”

“Apple fell to earth, sir.”

“I will take then,” Shah said. “Please, Mr. Hund. Take yourself.”

Dwight selected an apple. He said, “It wasn’t picked. It fell. I like that.”

Though he was scrupulous in what he ate, Shah’s method of eating was noisy. He chawed the apple, biting hard and loudly. He chewed with his mouth open, flecks of the fruit on his lips, a smear of juice on his cheek. He talked with his mouth full, heedlessly spraying masticated apple flesh, and doing this while boasting made it all seem ruder.

“In America they could not believe what I was saying. They offered me apples and whatnot. I said, ‘Only if they have fallen. Not if they have been picked by human hand.’ They were so surprised! And then I had to tell them, ‘I do not take water at night. Insects may be adhering to surface.’ The blighters were shocked, I tell you.”

This detail, which Dwight had admired in Shah, seemed pointless now that he was booming about it. He was changed—not the certain yet modest Shah but an overconfident man who took pleasure in these triumphant stories, like Indru’s tales of rape. In America he’d had a fatal revelation: he had been persuaded that he was interesting.

“I told them, ‘No potatoes. One might inadvertently eat the living things, such as fungi and microbial substances.’ They thought I was joking. I said to them, ‘Not at all, my friends!’”

He was a bit too happy about this, and the other giveaway was his repeating himself. He must have told the stories fifty times, not remembering that he’d already told them to Dwight.

Dwight remarked on the new pinstriped suit.

“Brooks Brothers,” Shah said. “Flagship store. It’s a good cut, I think. I like the drape.”

“Probably made in India,” Dwight said.

“Oh, no,” Shah said, protesting as he tugged on his lapel, reacting a bit too sharply to what Dwight had intended as a joke. “Italian made. Very good weave.”

When he took out his new cell phone, he said that he’d bought it on a trip to New York, that it took photographs and could store five hundred of them in its memory. He located one and displayed it for Dwight: Shah smiling beside a tweedy man with beetling brows and horn-rimmed glasses.

“John Chapman Thaw. Harvard man. He presented me with this tie, as a matter of fact.” He held the phone in his hand to admire it. “A very humble man.”