Paul Theroux - My Secret History

When I opened the door she stepped from behind it. She was naked for the whole of her lovely length. She kissed me and began to fumble with my shirt. She was wearing the necklace — one moment it was squeezed into her cleavage, and the next it was looped around a breast. It was as I had thought a string of small skulls, carved from bone, staring with empty eye-sockets and grinning without lips.

Eden took hold of me and pushed me down to the bed. She sucked me, more with eager greed than pleasure, and then squatted on my nodding cock, fitting it into her with one hand, as her necklace of little skulls shook in my face. As I came she grunted and thrust harder and threw her head back, the necklace still rattling.

“It was a present,” she said later, when we woke from our sudden doze. And then she explained. She had found a shop that sold antiques — good ones, she said, real ones, the scarce one-of-a-kind that seldom reached the United States. She told the Indian owner (“a crazy little guy in a skullcap”) about her magazine and said she wanted to feature his shop in the Destinations section.

“The shop is full of great stuff,” she said. “Some of it is funky and some of it is incredible.”

“I know exactly what you mean.”

She said, “Are you putting me on?”

She would do an article, she said, and commission an Indian photographer to illustrate the piece. The shopkeeper had accepted the idea.

“Did you think he might object?”

And he had sent her away with the necklace.

“He just took it out of a drawer and hung it around my neck,” Eden said. “He refused to let me pay him.”

“Do you find that strange?”

“You’re being really sarcastic, Andy. I can’t stand it when you run people down.”

She was right. I had vowed that on this trip I would simply wander with her and say nothing, and I had broken that vow.

I said, “They’re yak bones. Tibetan refugees carve them. I’ve seen them in Darjeeling.”

Eden dug into her bag and brought out two other objects.

“He also gave me this and this. One’s a flute and the other’s a drum, I think.”

“They’re Tibetan, too.”

“You say it with such certainty. How can you be so sure?”

“Because Indians would never make any object out of human bones. That flute is a legbone — looks like a femur,” and I stroked her thigh. “The drum is made from a human skull.”

Eden started to laugh, as though she had just been made the butt of a mild joke.

“I told you he was crazy!”

I looked at the bones and saw a whole human head in the little drum and a skinny brown leg in the flute. I began to grieve for the way they had been mocked: they were lying on the thick white marble table with a copy of last week’s Time magazine and an empty bottle of Campa Cola and some torn rupees that looked like dead leaves.

“Are you going to keep them?”

“I suppose you want me to bury them.”

“It wouldn’t be a bad idea,” I said, and thought of how we had laboriously dug a hole with canoe paddles at the edge of the upper Ganges for bones just like these.

Eden laughed again and stood up. She was still naked. She had a piece of lopped-off cranium in one hand and a length of legbone in the other, and clicking at her throat the yellow necklace of skulls on a string.

She climbed onto the bed, still standing, and I saw little pearls of dew glistening on the hair beneath her navel, the neat beard pointed and dark and damp from our lovemaking. She straddled me, and then put one foot on my chest in a clumsy conquering way.

“What are you looking at?” she said in a tone of fierce teasing, as she moved her legs apart.

We made love again, and she was even more active than before. Afterwards we lay exhausted on the bed with the Indian sun just before it set piercing the curtains and leaving a bright hot stripe across our bodies.

“At least meet the guy,” she said. “You might change your mind.”

He was a starved-looking Kashmiri named Ismail. He had a bony face and bloodshot eyes. I distrusted him for his quivering politeness and the way he praised Eden and deferred to me. He seemed on rather familiar terms with her, though he had only met her that one time. I disliked his attentiveness, his furtive scrutiny, his subtle pressure, and his habit of bending double to spit silently onto the floor. Most of all I detested his air of confidentiality, the way he whispered and pretended to be conspiring with us when he mentioned prices. Someone had taught him the word “maximum.” “It is maximum value,” he said. “In Europe it will fetch maximum price.”

I said very little. Ismail talked a great deal. When I spoke I could not keep the sternness and the impatience out of my voice. This made Ismail all the more deferential, and his whisper became a hiss.

“I can give you maximum advice,” he said.

He offered us lassi . He clawed through trays of moonstones, and trawled with his fingers in boxes of silver chains and anklets, and when he ducked under the counter for more I suggested to Eden that we leave the next day for Agra.

We took the Janata Express, one of the slowest trains in India. Eden sat suffering on the wooden seat, groaning each time the train stopped — which was often — and glancing up at me in a blaming way. The Janata was a steam train, and so soot and smoke blew through the windows.

“I hated to leave that hotel.”

“You can’t visit India without seeing the Taj Mahal.”

“We had such a beautiful room,” she said. “I loved being with you there.”

“There’s a good hotel in Agra.”

She looked doubtful. Her face was damp, there was a smudge on her cheek, her T-shirt was dusty and so were her feet in her sandals. I had never seen her dirty. It made her look youthful and reckless and even desirable. When I tried to tell her that she accused me of mocking her.

The Indians stared at her. None of them was traveling very far. They crowded into the coach, they stood and jammed the corridors and they sweated, and after a few stops they fought their way out and were replaced by others, looking exactly the same — just as lusterless and tired.

A man pushed towards us with a wooden box on his shoulder.

“Ess crim. Ess crim. Ess-ess.”

He flipped the lid open and showed us the melting contents.

“It looks like poison. It’s probably rancid,” Eden said. “You’d better be right about that hotel in Agra.”

We traveled in descending darkness past ditches of noisy frogs and bushes screeching with cicadas. Eden put her head down and seemed to be holding her breath to make the time pass.

We arrived at Agra Fort Station and were jostled by Indians with bundles as we made our way along the platform. People were shouting, women shrieking, men heaving crates, children howling, as the train gasped and slavered. We were pushed from behind by impatient bony fingers.

“Sah, sah.”

This man pushing me was trying to get my attention.

“I carry your bags, sah. I have taxi.”

He was a small and slightly popeyed Indian in a torn white shirt. His hair was spiky and oily. One of his front teeth was missing, but the violence suggested in the gap made him seem more like a victim than a bully. He badly needed a shave.

“Take hers,” I said.

“Please, missus,” he said, and lifted Eden’s big bag onto his head.

His taxi somehow matched him. It was a small black jalopy with brown fuzzy upholstery and a broken grille. Its headlights were close together like the Indian’s eyes. The window cranks were unusable. One window wouldn’t open, the other wouldn’t close.

“I am Unmesh,” the man said, taking his seat next to the driver. He rested his chin on the seat back and faced us.