Paul Theroux - The Elephanta Suite - Three Novellas

His shame silenced him, the emotion fatigued him—or was it the early start, backseat nausea, the rutted road? He slept and was awakened by Shah’s saying, “Poona city. We will take luncheon.”

Shah said he knew of a Jain restaurant. He gave directions to the driver. The place was just a shop with trestle tables and creaky chairs. No menu. The usual humble meal, which Shah kept calling “luncheon,” served by an old man and a boy.

“He is a good man,” Shah said of the restaurant owner as he was clearing the plates. “Very strict. And a teacher too.”

The man smiled. He seemed to know that he was being spoken about.

“We Jains call such people ‘passage makers.’ He shows the way.”

“You do that too,” Dwight said.

“It is kind of you to say that. But …” His voice trailed off and he shrugged, ambiguous again, neither yes nor no, but probably yes.

Walking to the car, Shah said, “That lovely gateway was once entrance to a great palace, Shanwar Wada. And over there …”

He gestured and walked ten steps to a narrow street overlooked by old stone and stucco houses.

“Very nice,” Dwight said.

“… was a place of execution,” Shah said.

Dwight stepped backward, looked harder, but saw only a bumpy, weedy street contained by the leaning buildings.

“Men who transgressed were brought here. They were bound hand and foot. They were summarily executed.”

Gazing at the tussocky street, the potholes, a grazing cow, a skinny boy in a white shirt marching with a school backpack, the sun slanting into dust motes, Dwight said, “How?”

“Elephants were released that side. The men were trampled to death.” Shah winced, as though he’d gotten a glimpse of it. “For their indiscretions. Under the elephants’ mighty feet.”

He said no more. He led Dwight to the car. In the car he tapped on the back of the driver’s headrest and said, “Mahabaleshwar, for Mahuli.”

The Poona meal had made Dwight drowsy. He hugged himself, crouched in a corner of the back seat, and sank into sleep. The country was dry and hilly and looked crumbled and cracked: Dwight carried the landscape into his dreams. The road, the honking of the car, the sunlight in the window—it all became part of his vision of punishment, and the rumble of the wheels was like the pounding in his heart. When he awoke, strangely refreshed, yawning with vigor, relieved to see the day, he looked out of the car window and saw a rural landscape of great simplicity that he had never visited before and hardly imagined: men squatting in the shade of low huts, children carrying water in squarish tin containers, women slapping muddy chunks into Frisbie-sized dung pats for fuel.

Those serene people thrived in a dusty setting that Dwight saw as the counterpart of the tortured landscape of his heart. Lucky people, he thought. They’ve learned how to live here, how to flourish in a quiet way.

“I can see you are suffering,” Shah said.

“Suffering?”

“You were crying out in your sleep.”

“What did I say?”

“You were pleading for relief,” Shah said. “Don’t be embarrassed. Was it my mention of the execution ground?”

Dwight didn’t know. He remembered the sight of the big sunbaked land, the dusty stunted bushes, the dead trees, the yoked buffalo turning over dry curls of soil. But seeing Shah’s serious face he recalled, trampled … indiscretions … mighty feet.

So he said yes, and, “That would be an awful way to go.”

With the take-charge energy that Dwight noticed in him after his return from the States, Shah said brightly, “What I heard in America was people saying, ‘I know I have a problem. But I don’t know what to do.’”

“I understand that,” Dwight said. He had been fearful of speaking the words, but they had run through his mind.

“Or, ‘There are no answers,’” Shah said in a stilted quoting voice.

“Tell me about it,” Dwight said.

“Yes,” Shah said. “It is a Western confusion, a kind of spiritual ignorance. ‘I don’t know which way to turn.’ We in India never say such things. Why, do you think?”

The little car had tipped forward and they were descending into a steep-sided valley on a road that was like the bewildering track Dwight saw when he thought of his own life. “Going nowhere,” people said, when it was obvious that they were traveling hard on an awful road like this to somewhere, but the unknown.

“I don’t know,” Dwight said, not replying to a question but summing up every doubt in his head.

“In India we have answers. Real answers. That is Indian strength. It is our spiritual heritage. Never ‘I don’t know.’ Always ‘I can know.’”

“I wish I did.”

“It was my late father’s lesson to me, dear man, when he set off on his journey to be holy. A lack of holiness impedes enlightenment.”

It was the voice Shah used in the boardroom when he was speaking to the wholesalers—the plastic fabricators, the rubber people, the textile men. He was the wordiest man Dwight had ever met, but he could also be blunt, with his lawyer’s love of precision. He was that way now. He was saying, “Excess of karmic particles.”

“I’m listening,” Dwight said.

“Process we call nirjara. I have mentioned this to you in connection with my late father. Cessation of passionate action.”

“I think I know what that means.”

“Also fasting.” Shah splayed his fingers and enumerated. “Eating properly. Solitude. Mortification. Meditation. Study. Atonement.” He tugged at his thumb. “Renunciation of ego.”

The list could have seemed intimidating and demanding, but because it was different from anything he’d known, and a new thought, Dwight found it restful to contemplate.

“You will see,” Shah said, pointing ahead.

The land was hillier, emptier, with mountains showing in the distance like low clouds. What farms they saw, hacked into the hillsides, were even smaller than the ones they’d passed earlier. The corrugations of newly plowed gardens lay against the slopes. Farther on, a scene of almost biblical simplicity: women drawing water at a well, one with a clay pot on her shoulder, in an orange sari, and another woman heading up a dusty path in thin sandals, a flock of goats bleating at her.

“You see? We are leaving the world behind,” Shah said. “Soon we will be in Mahabaleshwar.”

It was twilight when they got to the edge of the town. Dwight could make out more hills beyond these, and in the car’s headlights, people walking in the road, boys in white shirts, men in dhotis. He expected the car to stop now that they were in the town, but the driver kept going, past the lighted shops and into the darkness of the winding road, toward the solitude of the overhanging forest.

“Pratapgarh,” Shah said, tapping the car window. And after a few minutes, “Mahuli.”

He spoke in Hindi to the driver, who began to brake and then turned into a long driveway that rocked the car.

“We have arrived.”

No lights, no sign of a building, just a dark place on an even darker road. And when they got out of the car the air was cool and damp. All that Dwight saw was the sky thickening with night, pierced by scattered pinholes of stars.

“I can’t see anything.” Yet the shadows were perfumed with incense.

“Tomorrow you will see everything.”

Preceded by a flame, a woman appeared, holding a platter on which an oil lamp flickered. She rotated the flame under Dwight’s chin, as Indru and Padmini had done, and marked his forehead with paste.

“Welcome,” she said.

Without thinking, merely reacting to her, Dwight fell to his knees and touched her feet in a single fluid movement, and while he knelt with his head bowed, tears of gratitude and relief blurred his vision.