Paul Theroux - My Secret History

“That’s when we plan our Christmas issue,” Eden said. “I’ll never be able to get any time off then.”

“I’ll go alone.”

“I’ll think about you,” she said. “Now that I’ve seen you in India I’ll be able to picture it.”

Sometimes, speaking that way, she sounded sad and settled, like a widow.

“I’ll imagine you walking around in the heat. You never perspire. You never get sick on the food. You never miss a night’s sleep.”

“You sound as though you resent it.”

She gave me a blank look and said, “In a way I do. You never suffer.”

“I did once or twice when I was younger, and it was so awful nothing has seemed very bad since.”

“Everything seems awful when you’re young.”

“No. I was happy most of the time. I am talking about real fear. It was always other people. It was like a fatal illness.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I couldn’t even begin to talk about it,” I said. “Maybe I’ll write about it someday.”

“I’ll see your picture in the paper. I’ll read a review. I’ll buy the book and read all about it.”

She had begun to talk herself into a rueful mood, like an excluded mistress. Some of those words I had heard on the radio that very morning, when an Indian economist, talking about the recent bear market in Europe had said, If you make the market your mistress you have to put up with its moods .

I had something specific I wanted to do with her, though I approached it in the most casual way. After lunch, I said, “Want to go for a drive?” and took her in a taxi south of the city to the township of Tambaram, where I had a friend.

I had warned Mahadeva of my visit, but I had not wanted to involve him in the expense of meeting me in Madras. Anyway, we had first met here in Tambaram in 1973, at his little hut, and I wanted to repeat the encounter. He was a tailor, and he worked at his sewing machine on the veranda of his hut on the narrow road east of the market.

“We’ll walk,” I said to the taxi driver on the main road, because I had walked the first time. “Wait here for us.”

“You’re being very mysterious, Andy.”

The sky had become heavy and gray, with hot clouds hanging like old sheets. I felt scalded by the humidity. Eden was so absorbed in her own hatred of the weather that she did not notice that it also affected me. We walked slowly down the road, past the vegetable and fruit sellers, and I told Eden the story of how I had first met Mahadeva and how he had made me a shirt.

“What’s so special about him?”

“He refused to charge me,” I said. “He made the shirt for me for nothing. He said it was a matter of friendship — a gift. Afterwards I sent him a twenty-dollar bill.”

“So he got his money after all.”

“He was terribly insulted, of course,” I said. “He gave the money to charity. And there’s one other thing that’s special. I’ll tell you later.”

Mahadeva jumped up from his sewing machine when he saw us approaching. He wiped his hands and called to his wife and rushed towards us exclaiming, “I could have met you in Madras!”

He was noticeably older, unshaven in a gray bristly way, and though he was rather thin with spindly arms and legs, he had a perfectly round potbelly. His wife appeared beside him, and she was haggard as well. They drew the slack flesh of their faces into smiles and led us inside.

“Please sit down. You will have a drink.”

He sent his oldest boy next door to the shop for cold drinks. His other children gathered at the door and stared in. There were four of them, very thin and with large eyes.

Mahadeva was chirpy — how was I? What had I been doing? He had seen an article about me in The Illustrated Weekly of India —he had sent it to his brother in Vijayawada.

While we chatted Eden fell silent, beholding the monotony and boredom of poverty. And I saw her staring at the colored pictures on the wall, of Ganesh the elephant god and Hanuman the monkey.

“I want to make you another shirt,” Mahadeva was saying. “I can make a nice frock for the lady, eh?”

But Eden looked hot and inattentive.

We were brought palm leaves. They were set before us, and Mrs. Mahadeva ladled a mound of rice and a dollop of vegetable curry, some bright yellow potatoes and grated coconut. We ate with our hands, and Eden ate what I ate — the same food, the same quantity.

Mrs. Mahadeva said something to her husband in Tamil, and he turned to me and asked, “How many children?”

Before I could speak, Eden said rather sharply, “We’re not married.”

Mahadeva conveyed this information to his wife.

“I’m not drinking this water,” Eden said.

Mrs. Mahadeva came and went. She did not eat. She did not speak. The children stared. They all seemed a bit afraid of Eden. I wondered whether it was because we were not married. It was not logical that we should be traveling together — and in letters I had spoken to Mahadeva of my wife and my child. I could not explain anything to him now. I did not try. It was better that we should be a mystery and that Eden should sense their bewildered scrutiny.

“Palm leaf is very sanitary — we just throw it away,” Mahadeva said, because even in India it was regarded as a bit strange to eat off a leaf.

We sat and talked inconsequentially, to enact the ritual. It was a poor house, the man and woman looked unhappy and somewhat haunted, the children stared and the smallest, whom I suspected of being ill, just sat and squalled. There was a kind of sullen incompleteness about the place. The house smelled like a tomb, and the man and woman seemed too old to have such young children. To be poor was to be very uncomfortable, and I had wanted Eden to see how uninteresting it was too, how horribly inconvenient and hopeless. It seemed almost a contradiction that Mahadeva could be so spirited, but that was the whole point and one of the saddest aspects of the trap.

When we left and were walking back to the Tambaram road, Eden said, “What’s the other special thing?”

“He’s exactly my age,” I said. “And Mrs. Mahadeva is exactly your age.”

“That old woman?”

“That old woman is thirty-four.”

Eden was quiet and reflective the rest of that hot day. Something in the compactness of her posture told me she was thinking about herself.

She said, “They didn’t like me. Did you see the way they stared at me? They think I’m a whore.”

That night she cried in the Hotel Vishnu. She slept badly and didn’t eat breakfast. She said it wasn’t the Hotel Vishnu — it was something else, she couldn’t explain. We moved to the Hotel Taj Coromandel the next day. It was a fine hotel with large bright rooms, a coffee shop, a good restaurant, potted palms in the lobby, a swimming pool. Eden cheered up, and talked about her magazine, an article she wished to write, a meal she wanted to cook for us. She was happiest talking about the future. Mentally she had already left India, though there was more I wanted her to see.

We looked at the old ice house and the banquet hall, and all the other architectural relics of the Raj. We drove into the countryside and marveled at the rice fields. We went in a hired car to Mahabalipuram, the temple on the sea. It was a great ruin of carved elephants in stone next to the dumping surf, where black Tamil boys screamed and splashed in their ragged underwear.

Eden was wearing her skull necklace. The gusting wind pushed her hair aside.

She said, “I could learn to really hate this place. Maybe after I get home it will all seem wonderful. I wish I had the power to destroy it and build it all over again. You have that smile on your face.”

I heard that but I was hardly listening to her.