Paul Theroux - My Secret History

Jenny merely stared at him, her head slightly tilted in disbelief.

Indoo was trying to look pious. He held his glass primly and in a soulful voice said, “I myself believe this is so.”

“Then what’s that in your hand?” Jenny asked. “Is that whiskey or an illusion?”

Indoo laughed slowly and insincerely. “Jolly good,” he said. “I like that. I forgive you for that.”

It seemed to me that this little get-together was not working at all.

Finally, Indoo said — as though for the first time—“I tell you what I would like to do very much indeed. White-water rafting on the Ganges. Bring your bathing costumes. I shall provide a hamper and all other requisites.”

“That’s an interesting idea,” I said.

“Yes,” Indoo said. “I will collect you in my car early in the morning — say, four or four-thirty. We will drive northward to Hardwar. There we take a back road to my agency’s camp on the Ganges. The river is very swift at that place. I have four chaps onsite who will take us downriver. You put on life jackets and paddle like hell through the rapids. I tell you, it is jolly exciting, especially when raft twists and turns in water. Adventure travel is the thing these days. This is a full day’s adventure. What do you say?”

This produced a silence, and then Jenny said calmly, “Excuse me, are you talking to me?”

“Indeed,” Indoo said, and I saw he was miserable — just the way he tried to wink at me made him seem pathetic. “What about it? White-water rafting on Mother Ganga.”

Jenny smiled at him. She said, “You must be joking.”

But she agreed to go with us the next day as far as Hardwar, where she got out, holding Murray’s Guide .

Indoo and I had breakfast at the camp. He seemed to relax as soon as Jenny was gone. Was it because she was my wife and he had had to keep a pretense of formality? Or was it that he felt part of a deception? I was surprised that he had any reaction at all, since I had always taken him for a fairly easygoing hypocrite.

“It is better this way,” he said, buckling on his life jacket. “Women are not at home on rubber rafts, you know.”

He paddled just behind me in the rear seat, shouting and screaming in the rapids and yelling to his men to go faster. When we came to the reach in the river where we had seen the corpse, he laughed and said, “Remember?”

The water brimmed where we had buried the bones. After seeing that I lost my taste for the rapids and couldn’t paddle very hard. I wasn’t grieving — I simply became heavy and thoughtful, and I kept looking back, as though in burying those bones I had buried something of myself.

I wanted to tell Jenny this when we met her later in the afternoon at the bridge in Hardwar. But I did not want to burden her with a lugubrious thought: she was smiling, she was happy, she said she had had a wonderful day. I’d tell her tomorrow.

“We must see Roorkee,” Indoo said, but he forgot to tell the driver, and he was sleeping when we came to the turnoff, so we kept on the direct road to Delhi. Indoo slept crookedly beside the driver, his head at an unnatural angle, and it flopped forward, waking him briefly, each time the driver touched the brake.

I told Jenny about the white-water rafting. I did not mention the corpse; only the rapids, the cold water, the hike afterwards.

“I would have hated it,” Jenny said. “You know who you sound like? One of those boring scoutmasters, always rabbiting on about fresh air. One of those tedious middle-aged men who walk around in shorts showing their knobbly knees. The next thing you’ll say to me is that I need more color in my cheeks!”

But this was mischief, not malice. She was hugging me as she spoke, and then she kissed me.

“I’m glad I came,” she said. “And I’m glad you had a good time. You don’t really need me to hold your hand, do you?”

“How did you spend the day?”

“I wandered around Hardwar. I had a cup of tea and then I had lunch at a filthy little place. The food was quite decent. I took some pictures and looked at the temples. You know Hard-war is a holy city? Then I got a taxi and went across the river to Rishikesh. Do you remember how the Beatles used to go there, to see the Maharishi? I wasn’t expecting much — I was prepared to mock it. I walked around and watched the people praying and washing in the river and”—there was a catch in her throat—“don’t laugh, but I felt a kind of holiness come over me.”

She stopped, suddenly self-conscious in the jogging car.

“Go on,” I said, holding her.

“I looked at all the skinny people traipsing round the town, and I began to cry — from the sheer joy of seeing them. They looked so innocent, and their happiness made me happy. It wasn’t pretty, but there was a logic to it all. They had found a way of being happy in this strange world. I was thinking about there being order in the spirit of things, that holiness was order, and it all seemed so far from my accounting in London. The sun was slanting into the river, and I thought how your friend”—she nodded at the crumpled, sleeping figure of Indoo—“called it Mother Ganga.”

She paused again, and swallowed, and I thought she was going to cry.

“I was moved,” she said. “I felt like Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India —something wonderful and weird was happening to me. Maybe this is what people call a religious experience, except that it sounds so bloody pompous. But I loved it without even understanding it. I didn’t want to leave. I just wanted to stay and see those people washing themselves and praying, and the children praying, and that glorious late-afternoon sun striking the river.” She made an odd honking noise and I realized that she was laughing. “I kept thinking, ‘I want to go on living.’ ”

“That’s good,” I said. “I love you.”

“You don’t have to say that. Just show me that you do.”

Soon after, Indoo woke and insisted on stopping for ice cream.

“I enjoy going on these trips,” he said. “It means I can eat whatever I want.” He ordered a Campa Cola and a chocolate bar and a vanilla ice-cream cone. “I never eat this stuff at home. My wife doesn’t like it.”

Did he remember that he had told me that before? I doubted it. When people repeated things to me it made me feel that they didn’t know me — didn’t remember — didn’t care who they were talking to. They existed and I didn’t.

Indoo was smiling in a way that irritated me and made me feel that he could be very stupid. I looked out of the window, but I could not make any sense of the mass of rough stars that cluttered the sky. They were so bright they deflected my eyes to the thick blackness that surrounded them. The road turned dusty and what looked like rising fog was this same dust, with lights glaring in it, and those shaky orange headlights that always seemed to belong to old dangerous buses.

“It’s been a perfect day,” Jenny said at the hotel after we made love.

I agreed, but I also thought of Eden and felt that I had somehow to explain my absence to her. What better time than late at night when everyone was fast asleep? What better place than by the marble fountain in the lobby of this hotel, on hotel notepaper? But after I mailed it and was on my way upstairs I could not help feeling that I had spoiled the day.

When I suggested taking the Janata Express to Agra the day after we arrived back in Delhi, Jenny said, “What’s the hurry? We haven’t seen Delhi properly. I want to see the Red Fort again. You didn’t tell me that Shah Jahan built it, and his daughters built mosques all over the old city. And we British built New Delhi. Don’t you think I have a right to be interested in that? And there’s a tomb here that was a sort of clumsy prototype for the Taj Mahal.”