Paul Theroux - The Elephanta Suite - Three Novellas

“New watch?”

“Oh, yes. From duty-free in London. So many functions.” He pinched the face of it. “I have two time zones here. It’s seven at the office. Mr. Kohut will be calling Mrs. Kohut and saying, ‘I’ll be late, my dear.’ What a delightful chap. Very faithful to his missus.”

Dwight smiled at him. The old Shah had been—not Americanized, but enlarged, made self-aware. He had been appreciated, someone had listened to him, he’d been praised. He seemed a new man. He wasn’t sinuous and oblique anymore, and unexpectedly Dwight found this new assurance irritating. Dwight reminded himself that Shah had been in the States for almost two months.

“I hear you took a course at Harvard Business School,” Dwight said.

“Your fellow Elfman fixed it for me. Very decent chap,” Shah said. “I met so many Indians in Cambridge. It was like a little India. I invited the prof. He will be visiting.”

“Indian?”

Shah opened his camera phone again. He said, “No, Chappie. John Chapman Thaw. Harvard man. You must know him?”

“I went to BU.”

“Very famous. Very accomplished. Very moral chap. Truthful in all things.” Gazing again at the man’s picture, Shah hadn’t registered Dwight’s remark. “Family money. Excellent set of contacts.”

That was another thing—the new friends. In Mumbai, Shah had seemed to be part of a small circle of businessmen, most of whom Dwight knew. But while enlarging his personality, his experience in America, where modesty was usually a fault and never a virtue, he had widened his network of friends. He was impressed by the people he had met. He wasn’t cynical, yet he always made a point of saying how impressed they’d been to meet him, an insect-preserving Jain, an abstemious man who lived by strict rules. But Elfman? God, he’d finally found someone to share his fatuous passion for Harvard.

“They said to me, ‘Shah, you don’t deviate.’ And I said”—he sat back on the banquette of the hotel restaurant—“‘I am ruthlessly consistent.’”

Dwight smiled at the way Shah had praised the Americans he’d met: very moral, very decent, very faithful, very humble, truthful in all things. Did Shah know something? But Dwight was glad he was back. And when, later that day, they got down to business, working through the list of new appointments that Miss Chakravarti had prepared, Dwight placed his hand on Shah’s forearm and gripped it in gratitude, feeling the energy. He was the man to emulate—his work ethic, his sense of appreciation, his moral code.

Over the next few days, they kept the appointments. Dwight resumed his normal office hours in Jeejeebhoy Towers, and when he was in the boardroom he didn’t look down at the Gateway of India. He watched the efficient way that Shah dealt with the clients, he commented on the deals, and he reflected on the Diamond Sutra, what Shah had told him that evening, that the world gave false messages with sounds, odors, flavors. And the Three Jewels of Jainism—right belief, right knowledge, right conduct.

Never mind Shah’s self-interested stories, Dwight was consoled by his being near and giving him strength. He often thought of his last visit to Indru’s, when he had asked the two women what his name was, and they hadn’t known it, or remembered it; when Padmini had asked him what he wanted; when he had said, “I want to go.” Had it not been for his holding to right conduct, he would have gone back.

“Bangalore next week,” Dwight said at the end of one meeting about information technology.

“I’ll have to stay in Mumbai. Chappie is coming.”

“I can look after him,” Dwight said.

Shah did not reply, yet he reacted, something involuntary, a twitch visiting his head and shoulders, almost recoiling, as though to the drift of a questionable smell.

“I need you to do something important,” Shah said.

That was fine—what Dwight needed was to be kept busy. Shah had returned so much more confident than before—a good sign—and with a list of contacts and accounts to pursue. Dwight had imagined they’d be working together, yet Shah’s confidence and his full schedule kept him distant and somewhat aloof.

This is his city, Dwight told himself. But the master-servant relationship of before, in which Shah had been a punctilious helper, a junior partner, seemed to be over, and at times Dwight suspected that their roles had been reversed: Shah was the active partner now, Dwight the assistant who required direction.

“I need your help in releasing a consignment of rice from a certain warehouse,” Shah said. “A ton or so.”

Shah was giving him something to do? Dwight said, “Maybe we could do it together.”

“I will be extremely busy,” Shah said. “I need a few days. I’ll give you details of the shipment, bill of lading, whatever. It will be coming by lorry from Chennai to the bonded warehouse. You’ll have to see to the paperwork.”

“Paperwork” was an ominous term in India. So were “bill of lading” and “bonded warehouse.” Dwight saw in advance the clipboards, the carbon paper, the inventory numbers, the perforated certificates, the seals to be broken, the forms to be filled out in triplicate, the coarse smelly paper, “you must apply for permit,” and at the end of it all, baksheesh.

“Payment will be made by wire transfer from a bank in Baltimore, Maryland.”

What? But he did do it. The chore took five days, back and forth to the warehouse in Bhiwandi, an hour by taxi from the Taj Hotel.

“Why Bhiwandi?” he had asked.

“Because it is adjacent to Grand Trunk Road.”

All this time—negotiating for the release of the shipment of rice, moving it from Bhiwandi to a secure facility nearer the railway junction at Kalyan, following Shah’s specific instructions—Dwight had the feeling he was working for Shah. And what he was doing any office manager could have done—Manoj Verma, Dinesh Patel, Sarojini Dasgupta, Miss Chakravarti, any of them. The other, better question was: What did a consignment of rice have to do with client business? Agricultural products had never been a priority. Five days of this bafflement went by without his setting eyes on Shah. Maybe he was at home, in his lovely apartment, dining off his porcelain?

The phone rang at midnight.

“Hund?”

What happened to “Mr. Hund”?

“It’s kinda late.”

“I am just now proceeding from the airport, speaking on mobile. Sorry to wake you. I wasn’t sure you’d be in your room.”

“Where else would I be at this hour?”

Shah didn’t answer. He said, “Just to thank you for your assistance with consignment of food grains. It is not entirely billable, but I will compensate you.”

“You’ll pay me for moving that ton of rice?”

He intended to sound sarcastic. Literal-minded Mr. J. J. Shah said, “Indeed, for facilitating in business just concluded.”

“The rice?”

“The visit of Chappie.”

“I don’t get it.”

“John Chapman Thaw. Harvard prof. He’s putting some of his people into Bangalore to study IT and related areas. It will benefit us with tech transfer. He is amply funded, but a humble and humane individual.”

“I’d like to meet him,” Dwight said.

“Chappie and tech team have just departed. I saw them off. Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt.”

Dwight tried to draw a breath, but his concentration was too intense, the air too thin, his punctured lungs would not inflate, for he had begun to understand.

“Gone?”

“I would have introduced you, but his schedule was jam-packed.”

He still said wisit and shed-jewel , yet he was a different man, and this was the proof of it. While I’ve been dealing with a ton of rice in forty-pound sacks, Dwight thought, Shah has been wining and dining this Harvard professor and his team. An American contact, an important lead, has come and gone, and I haven’t seen him. How had this happened? Dwight was not angry, he was sad. He felt the bewilderment of a younger brother, a rejected suitor, an excluded bystander, a bypassed partner. And the silly name “Chappie” rankled.