Paul Theroux - My Secret History

“What was that all about?” I said.

We were walking back to the main road through the deadening heat and noise of the Tambaram bazaar.

Jenny said, “Don’t mock her. I liked that woman.”

“You’ll never guess how old she and her husband are.”

“Let me try,” Jenny said, and guessed at their ages and got them both.

“She must have told you,” I said. “When you were talking all that time in the kitchen.”

“No. We were talking about something else.”

Jenny faced me to see my reaction to this, and encouraged by it — I could not hide my curiosity, I could not mask my mounting sense of dread — she said, “I was seriously wondering whether the world is just illusion. Does the secret lie in letting go of things?”

In that moment I thought again of Eden. The other auntie .

Jenny simply stared at me, and when I said, “Is that all?” she laughed and took my hand.

“That is everything,” she said quietly.

We found a taxi at Tambaram Station that would take us to the temples at Mahabalipuram. I showed Jenny the temple that stood amid the crashing waves. Jenny was just behind me. I turned towards her. Was that grim expression on her face an effect of the strong wind, or was she thinking about us — our marriage? I didn’t know how to ask. The surf broke and pushed its suds up the shore. Fishermen wearing wet pajamas knelt in clumsy black catamarans and cast their nets downwind.

Jenny put her arm around my shoulder, the way she often did with jack. But there was almost no weight to her arm, no pressure to her hand, and she did not lean on me. Yet I was weakened by the gesture.

The monotonous surf kept collapsing on the shore near the temple.

“Or letting go of people,” she said, in a different voice, as though finishing a thought.

She spoke to the crashing waves.

For a moment I had not the slightest idea what she was talking about in this broken-off sentence. And before I could say anything she let go of me and left me. When I looked around she was gone — lost in the crowd of Indians on the beach.

I stood awhile and thought of Eden, of a particular moment — naked, wearing the skull necklace and standing over me, looking like Kali, looming above me with her legs apart. The memory rattled me. Feeling guilty I went in search of Jenny. I found her up the hillside standing near the grand bas-relief that was dense with the carvings of elephants and dwarfs and monkeys and birds.

A barefoot Indian in a pin-striped jacket and wraparound lungi was saying, “—depicting all the gods and humans and animals observing Lord Shiva who allowing River Ganga to flow through his tangled hair, so that it spills gently—”

Seeing me, Jenny said, “I reckon that’s why my husband didn’t tip his raft over.”

“Is this gentleman your husband, madam?”

“What’s left of him,” Jenny said, and then turned back to the gray stone cliff-face and its carvings. “That’s a beautiful story,” she said, as though the thought had just struck her.

She was silent as we visited the other raths and pillared caves and did not speak again until we were in the taxi back to Madras. She said, “But India is full of beautiful stories, isn’t it? That’s probably why it’s such a desperate shambles.”

The taxi was traveling down a narrow road of soft and broken tar, past parched fields.

“Letting go of me?” I asked.

At first she wouldn’t answer. Then she said, “Would that worry you?”

She smiled pityingly at me in my discomfort.

“What did that woman tell you?” I asked.

At first she shrugged, and then she had an answer.

“What I’ve known for ages,” she said.

I had not expected this at all. I did not know what to say. And it angered me that I did not know whether she was teasing me. And which was worse, the teasing or the truth?

At the hotel, Jenny said, “I hated that story the Indian told me about the Ganges. I kept thinking about that dead body you told me about — the one you buried.”

We were walking through the cool lobby.

“Whenever you see something dreadful here someone has a beautiful story to explain it,” Jenny said.

Another couple was waiting to take the elevator. The man was one of those bearded individuals whose hairy face is like a hedge — he peered at us silently across this barrier. The woman was small and blonde and wore a brick-red dress.

Seeing us they took a step nearer each other and held hands.

“Isn’t this weather something?” I said, to be friendly.

“It’s a lot hotter than this where we’re going,” the man said, and it seemed like a boast. “Thanjavur,” he said, unnecessarily giving the place its ancient name and then he explained, “Tan-jore.”

“Where the bull is.”

“The Nandi, yes,” he said, and the woman looked anxiously at him, averting her eyes from me. The man was still talking solemnly through his beard. “In the Pagoda of Brihadi-Swara. They anoint it every day with oil — the whole thing.”

“What a splendid idea,” Jenny said without raising her voice.

The man went silent, perhaps wondering whether he was being mocked. And when the elevator came we got in and ascended in silence.

“Another beautiful story,” Jenny said in the room. Then she smiled. “What a funny couple. I’ll bet you anything they’re not married. Americans can be so pedantic.”

“Why don’t you think they’re married?”

Jenny shrugged. “Something in the air. There was an atmosphere around them. They were edgy and bored and formal and a little too polite.”

“And holding hands?”

“That too. Another auntie.”

I hated the word — it was worse than wife . We had taken the word away with us from Mahadeva’s, and since then it had developed into a presence — not a person, but a specter. There were three of us now.

That night over dinner Jenny was raising some food to her mouth when she stopped her fork in the air and said, “I suddenly want to be out of here. I want to be home, in a mess I understand.”

We stayed two nights in Delhi in order to rest for the long flight back to London. Jenny said she wanted to see the place where Gandhi had been cremated, and so we went to Rajghat on the Jumna and mingled with the pilgrims. Her voice came out of that mob.

“What bothers me most is that I’ve been involved in some drama without knowing it. That I’m a character in a plot. That I’m a fool.”

She walked on, buying some flowers and strewing them over the Mahatma’s funeral ghat.

“You’re being very enigmatic,” I said.

“It’s my way of being honest,” she said. “Only writers believe that life has a plot, that stories have an end.” She was still tossing marigolds onto the dusty ground. “Don’t think I’m not glad we came here. It’s just that if I stayed longer I think I’d turn into Forster’s Mrs. Moore and start talking obscurely about the riddle of the universe and the irony of death — that silence is truth.”

She was still walking slowly and then she let go of the last of her flowers.

“Well, silence is truth, isn’t it?” she said, and walked on without waiting for my reply. “And I’m not a fool.”

I began to understand why Jenny doubted beautiful stories. There had to be a ragged element in the best of them, because certainty was nearly always false — it was self-deception. In this mood I could easily work around to the view that silence was truth and the whole world was maya , all illusion. But the mood was broken by the memory of Jenny saying to Indoo, “Then what’s that in your hand?”

All this time I felt that Eden was listening to us, and it made me feel guilty, because Eden believed in beautiful stories. She believed in me, she depended on me, she was waiting.