Paul Theroux - My Secret History

Our Air India flight was not leaving until noon, and so I bought the London newspapers and read them over breakfast. I enjoyed eating and reading, and not saying much. But Eden was restless and more talkative than usual.

“It’s all grease,” she was saying of the eggs and bacon. “And what’s this supposed to be?”

“Fried bread,” I said, glancing up. “It’s a big English thing.”

“Yuck.”

She ate dry toast and an orange which she peeled with her own knife, and she drank Earl Grey tea — which she asked for by name.

“Tea bags,” she said contemptuously, because she always made tea in a pot with loose leaves. “What is this country coming to?”

That was another thing about antique fanciers — besides being gourmets they were usually anglophiles, and like the worst anglophiles they weren’t just lovers of England but they were very critical and class-conscious, too. It seemed a characteristic of such people that no matter where they had come from in America they always included themselves with the English upper-middle class.

“What’s wrong?”

I was frowning — disgusted with myself for noticing these characteristics in her.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m sorry you’re disappointed in England. But remember this is just the airport. All airports are identical. We might as well be in Tokyo. Even cities are getting similar — the big capitals resemble each other more and more.”

“All countries have a different smell,” she said.

Had she read that somewhere? She had not traveled much, only to vacation places like the Caribbean and Mexico and Florida. I guessed that she was rather intimidated by foreign parts. She wanted to know more than she knew, she wanted to be expert. In her way she was a perfectionist, or tried to be, which was why she was such an energetic self-improver. She was good at tricky things, but she was self-conscious, and so she seemed amateurish no matter how skillful she was. I felt that at Heathrow she was noticing everything and would mention it all later — the peculiar telephones, ashtrays, carpets, signs, spellings; the shoes people wore, their hats, the way they smoked and ate.

We dozed in the chairs of the Transit Lounge and when we woke I showed Eden the Duty Free Shop.

“Please buy something for yourself,” I said.

“You look so serious!”

“Because I want you to buy something.”

“I don’t want anything in the Duty Free Shop,” she said. “I just want you.”

She did not leave my side, nor would she let me buy her a bottle of perfume.

“Shall we get some vodka? In India it’s—”

She clutched me and kissed me and said how happy she was to be with me, and I was all she would need in India.

“And all Jumbo jets have a different smell,” she said, as the Air India flight filled with passengers — skinny parents with fat children and more hand luggage than I had ever seen on a plane.

It was nine hours to Delhi — two meals, another movie, and what they called “high tea.” Eden found the meals acceptable — she chose the vegetarian menu, when she saw the other high-caste orthodox Hindus doing the same. She snuggled up to me and slept for part of the flight with her head on my shoulder. She said she felt very cozy. I did not tell her that she was preventing me from sleeping, because I was glad to see her so serene. Besides, it fascinated me to see this tall person folded up and fast asleep.

We arrived in the middle of the night at Delhi Airport, were jostled by the other passengers and pestered by porters, and eventually found our way through the grubby terminal. Then we were driven through the darkness and the empty streets to our hotel. The night was cool, but the battered taxi smelled of dust. And there was at the window the mingled smells of dirt and vegetation, cowshit, rotting fruit, woodsmoke, and diesel fumes.

Eden took a deep breath and gagged.

I said, “You’d know you were in the Third World even if you were blindfolded.”

She seemed either angry or unhappy — she said nothing, only frowned.

“Poverty always has a bad smell,” I said. “But India looks better in daylight.”

The long drive into the city made her uneasy, and I could tell she was spooked by what she glimpsed from the window, and the odors, and the chattering and whine of the cicadas. Her nervousness made her sharp with the taxi driver.

“Why didn’t you put the meter on?”

She had to repeat this.

The driver said, “Meter broken, mahdhoom.”

“I’ll bet it is!”

I didn’t intervene. I had been told at the airport that the standard fare was 120 rupees, and I knew that Eden would be calmer at the hotel, reassured by the style of the place, its look of a mughal stage-set — marble floors, and flowers, vases of peacock’s feathers, and chairs like thrones; the fountain in the lobby, the men in gold turbans and uniforms waiting anxiously to be flunkies.

And that was how it was, and it had its effect. When she was calmer Eden was more compassionate, but in the queenly way of a prosperous person in a poor country.

“Don’t you wish you could take a couple of these little kids home with you?” she said as we were walking through the Red Fort the next day.

“They seem pretty happy here,” I said.

The children were scampering among the stalls and shops.

“Think of all the things you could do for them,” she said. “I’d like to gather up that little girl and spirit her away.”

She made it sound like an abduction.

“Would you be doing that for your sake or for hers?”

Eden became formal and ungainly when she was angry. In a deliberate and wooden way she turned away from me, stumbling slightly.

“I keep forgetting you’ve got a child,” she said. She was still walking with a ceremonial step, as though in a procession. She was still angry, her voice became poisonous when she added, “And a wife.”

“Eden, relax. It’s just that these children are happy as they are.”

“Are they happy? I wouldn’t know. I don’t have any children.”

“And this is Hathi Pol ,” the guide was saying. “This is place where elephant can enter Red Fort, carrying howdah on back. Sometime being clad in silk and jewels.”

Big ragged crows perched on the battlements of russet stucco, cawing at us as we tottered on the uneven cobblestones. We visited the Moti Mahal and the Throne Room and the Marble Pavilion.

“That is ghat where Mahatma Gandhi was cremated,” the guide said, pointing over the parapet and beyond the wall to the memorial on the banks of the Jumna River.

“I feel dizzy,” Eden said, sagging slightly. “I must get back to the hotel.”

“Memsahib is poorly?”

“Yes. Memsahib is poorly,” I said, thinking how anywhere else in the world the word was absurd, but here memsahib suited her perfectly.

Later, by the pool, she said, “What bothers me is that everyone seems to be reaching out and nagging — beggars, guides, taxi drivers, hustlers, people selling postcards and souvenirs. Even the birds — the sparrows and starlings and those horrible crows. They’re all pestering.” She sipped her tepid fruit juice and said, “God, I wish I had a real drink. We should have bought some duty-free booze.”

My friend Indoo met us at the hotel the next day. He was a journalist who had become a travel agent and publicist. He liked the glamour of travel, and dealing with foreigners — finding them always jet-lagged and compliant — suited his bossy nature. But he was, like many other Indian men I had known doing non-Indian jobs, more a big nervous boy, whose tetchiness made him a taskmaster. He told me frankly that he was in the business because he got cut-price tickets and was able to fly all over the world.