The Elephanta Suite (16 page)

"Perhaps," he said.

In the street, he was rueful but not unhappy. He mocked himself, replaying some of what she had said. Tingling, yawning with exhaustion, he felt giddy as he walked down the hill to the main road to hail a taxi. And in the taxi he reflected on how, for the hour or more he'd been in Winky Vellore's apartment, he had not once objected to India. He had forgotten the stink, the noise, the crowds. Now on the main road he was back in India, and he was surprised by his reaction: he was glad.

He was forty-three, and he believed he had made many mistakes in his life, but his pride had saved him from more. He'd married late, the marriage had lasted less than a year, an expensive mistake, but necessary. He knew men who, rebuffed by a woman, pursued her until she submitted; men who were energized by
Isn't that a little sudden?
and
Perhaps we can meet for lunch sometime.
By
You can take me shopping
when they had asked for a simple yes or no to sex. He was not one of them. Meeting resistance, Dwight shrugged and accepted it as final, was in fact slightly ashamed at having met resistance—ashamed of having requested a favor to which the answer was no. The word "no" did not rouse him. He did not pursue the woman, he had never pursued a woman, never tried to woo one without at least a smile of encouragement. He was literal-minded in sexual matters, and so
Perhaps we can meet for lunch sometime
he translated as
No dice.
The process of wooing he found discouraging and at times humiliating.

Because of this, his experiences of women were few, and since his divorce the only women he'd had were Sumitra and Indru—essentially streetwalkers who had pursued him, offered themselves to him in the dark.

Now he thought only of Indru, and after the evening with Winky Vellore—those shattering hours, like a whole relationship, beginning, middle, and end—he had never felt more tender toward Indru. That evening with Winky helped him understand Indru. He knew that Winky would have despised her, but that was a measure of Indru's worth.

At the Taj, he paid the taxi and was saluted by the doorman as he stood in the stew of odors, strong even here on the marble stairs of the expensive hotel. He remembered his first trip, his solemnly worded thought "the smell of failure." But there was vitality in it, not only death but life, too.

 

Meetings the next day kept him in the boardroom late, Shah doing most of the negotiating, yet he needed to observe the process and approve the wording of the contracts. Indian lawyers, their passion for redrafting, their love of arcane phraseology: they could sound in the middle of it all like astrologers. Manoj Verma had not married (and this was just idle water-cooler chat at the top of Jeejeebhoy Towers) until his family astrologer had drawn a chart of his prospective bride's planets and found them auspicious. Dwight went back to his hotel, his head spinning.

The following day he walked across the road to the Gateway of India at exactly the same time—in the fading glow of early evening—he had met Indru months before. He retraced his steps and passed the ice cream seller; he bought a Thums Up and lingered at the rail of the harbor, then took a seat, hoping that the ritual of these precise repetitions might conjure her up.

Without a word, she appeared and approached and sat beside him on the bench. That was another Indian surprise: Indians might spend hours or days waiting until you showed up—his driver, the courier, even J. J. Shah. When you wanted them, they were there standing at attention, or as in the Indru's case, uncoiling in the half-dark and smiling.

"I waiting you so long."

"I want to kiss you."

She giggled. "Not here. Follow me."

To anyone who glanced his way, he was a foreigner, a
ferringi,
perhaps an American—the baseball cap with the suit was a giveaway. He was alone, detached, strolling in the crowd of people on Apollo Bunder, heading north, and now toward Chowpatty Beach. But in fact he was watching a girl in a white dress, and guided by her, he crossed busy streets and negotiated sidewalks that were dense with pedestrians.

At the point in a busy road where in the clouds beyond a gleam of summer lightning broke through, like the shivered splinters of a precious stone smashed by a hammer, the smithereens puddling in a watery afterglow on the slop of the sea at Chowpatty, Indru glanced back at Dwight and her smile touched his soul. Then she walked down a narrow lane and through a gateway, where in the strange light a woman was washing a baby in a tin basin, like a child in a slop of mercury. At a distance the houses were lovely; here at the base of this apartment house the smell of packed-down and heated dirt was so strong it built in his head like a loud noise.

Indru was on the stairs, climbing three flights. He caught up with her on the last landing, as she was turning her key in the metal door.

"Please you come in."

He summed it up quickly in the twilight before she switched on the lamp: two rooms, a string bed he reminded himself was a charpoy, cushions on the floor, a chair.

"Please sit."

He chose the chair. The long walk in the humid heat had worn him out.

"How did you find this?"

"Money you gave me was ample."

"The ring?"

"I am sold," she said, looking fearful.

Instead of saying anything, he kissed her to reassure her.

"But first, sir."

She took his shoes off, plucked off his socks, slipped a mat under his bare feet. Then she got a bowl and filled it with water and knelt before him. And when she bent over and washed his feet, massaging his toes, he felt strengthened, and the distant rumble of thunder from Chowpatty echoed in his head as he thought, I am happy, I am home.

He asked the firm for another month. Thanking him for his willingness, they granted it immediately, e-mailing him a list of new clients, with specifications of product lines for outsourcing—sports clothes, leather goods, brass fittings, molded plastic tubes for patio furniture, gardening implements, lamp bases, glassware—and Kohut added, "Glad it's such a success," because no one had ever asked for an extension. Most had wanted to come home early.

After the meetings, or the flights to Bangalore and Hyderabad—usually a day in each place and the late flight back to Mumbai—he went to Indru's room rather than the Elephanta Suite. He lay in the half-dark listening to her stories, which she told in a monotone: how her father touched her—the shame of it; how her mother beat her, blaming her, and her father sent her away to her auntie's village; how her auntie locked her in an unlit room with the grain sacks and the rats; how, when Indru went to the police, they didn't believe her; how the village boys threw bricks of cow-shit at her, and when her uncle happened by to rescue her, he drove her on his motorbike to the riverbank, where he dragged her through the bamboo.

"He touch me here, he touch me down here on my privates, he bite me with his teeth and call me dirty dog."

They were harrowing stories, the more terrifying for the factual way she told them, lying on her back on the string bed, her fingertips grazing her body to indicate where she had been violated. She seemed to understand how they seized Dwight's attention and silenced him. And some evenings when he looked distracted, his gaze drifting to the window, sleepy and satisfied, she would prop herself on one elbow and drop her voice and show him a scar on her wrist, whitish on her dark skin.

"One uncle tie me with ropes. He say, 'Is a game.' I be so scare. He take my sari. He say, 'I no hurt you.'"

And what she told him next in that soft voice was more powerful to him than the racket at the window. He took a deep breath and gagged and thought, Not a success at all—it's a failure.

The smell of failure in India wasn't only Indian failure. It was a universal smell of human weakness, the stink of humanity, his own failure too. His firm of lawyers was bringing so many people down.

He remembered telling Maureen that he was being sent to India—like a threat, a risk, a martyrdom: I'm going to India—take that!

His marriage hadn't worked, but he thought: How can any marriage work? Everyone had their own problems—who was normal? If the two people remained themselves, with separate ambitions, there was strife. Submission was possible in the short term. But if one or the other surrendered to become absorbed in the other's life, then it was the annihilation of a human soul, something like slavery or an early death, and resentment was inevitable. Love was not enough, sexual desire didn't last, you had to make your own life.

He'd had hopes, the usual ones, of partnership and plans, and had tried. But early on he'd lain beside his wife of less than a year and thought, It's over. He suspected that she was thinking the same.

To calm himself while lying beside Maureen, he mentally moved out: his restless mind roamed through the apartment room by room, selecting the things he wanted to take with him, rejecting the things that were hers. In was an inventory of the place but also a way of processing the marriage, making a pile of the belongings he planned to leave behind.

He had loved her for more than a year, the passionate part of the whole business; and then he proposed and set a date. But the nearer they got to the date, the less love he felt—panic set in—and his heart was almost empty as he went through the motions on his wedding day. The wedding itself, the expense, the decisions, their first arguments, seemed a ritual designed to break your spirit. After that it was just a struggle, as though marriage represented the end of a love affair, the beginning of mutual strife. She kept working, she wouldn't take the name Huntsinger, she rejected the idea of having kids, she didn't cook—but, then, neither did he. He asked Sheely, who could be trusted with confidences, if these were signs, but Sheely in his lawyer's way shrugged and gave a lawyer's equivocal answer: Maybe yes, maybe no.

Maureen was also a lawyer—tax law and trust funds, but a different firm—and she seemed too preoccupied to notice his mood, the question on his face: Why did we do it?

He was the first to mention splitting up. He told her in a cowardly way: "Maybe just spend a little time apart." But she could see he meant divorce, because the same thought was lurking in her own mind. She'd said, "My mother will be so angry. She said I wouldn't be able to do it—that I was too selfish."

Maureen began to cry, and for the first time, with acute pain, Dwight saw how vulnerable she was. He held her tenderly, he felt protective, he said, "We'll figure something out," and he despaired, because it was turning out to be so much harder than he had imagined. Showing her weakness for the first time, the fear that she had expected the marriage to fail, made the breakup a nightmare. Losing her as a wife was painful, but he guessed he'd get over it; losing her as a friend—someone he had pushed overboard when the storm broke over them—that seemed unbearable and something she would never forgive.

Not much remained to divide. They sold the apartment and split the proceeds.

"Short marriages," Sheely said, "pretty common. Like a chess move. I know three people, not counting you. Couple of months and they're gonzo. Better now than later. Probably a book on the subject."

In the melancholy months afterward they still saw each other. They didn't know anyone else, and their feelings were so raw they didn't want to make new friends.

Maureen had been depressed by the men she'd met. She had no one else to tell, so she told Dwight. "The first drink is fine. On the second drink I hear about their marriage. How it ended. What a bitch she was. How she took him to the cleaners."

So, as friends, they dated each other for some months, even recognizing that it was a failure and that they were too timid to enter the wider world and contemplate romance again. Dwight was amazed that after that anyone would take the same risk twice, going through that shredder.

Eventually they disengaged. He was surprised, because at that point he had become comfortable, seeing her on weekends and going to movies. She asked how he was doing. With his new frankness—the divorce had made him blunt—he told her, "This is good. I'm happy." Maureen said, "It's not good. I can't stand this anymore. I don't want to see you. I'm starting to really dislike you."

Was it because he was happy again? If so, she succeeded in making him miserable by saying this. That was his reason for saying, "I'm going to India," in the look-what-you're-making-me-do tone of voice.

At last he saw his divorce as a triumph. No one else did, which was another reason he was happy to be in India. Perhaps failure was the severest kind of truth. His work was a punishment and a wrecking ball: he took manufacturing away from American companies and brought it to India. The American manufacturers hated him—and they failed; the Indian companies were cynical, knowing that if they could not produce goods cheaply enough, they would be rejected. Every success meant someone's failure. He could not take any pride in that process: he was part of it.

The old woman pimping the children to passersby: he recognized himself in her. And in Indru too. Her stories were painful, but the experiences had damaged her so badly, her endearments were meaningless. Yet he belonged with her, not in the Elephanta Suite but in the oddly bare room, a stinky alley outside the window. In that human smell like the odor of sorrow he saw his connection to India.

He stopped blaming Maureen, and he could hardly blame Indru for anything. Human frailty implied human strength. Most of the world is poor and weak, beset by the strong.

A young man with an unpronounceable name began visiting Indru's apartment; one evening he seemed reluctant to leave. He was from the countryside, he said.
Willage.
Then he visited more often. But he looked more confident and better dressed than a villager, and he frowned at Indru in a proprietary way. He was sometimes impatient to leave the place with Indru ("Let we go marketing"). He nagged her in their own language, which wasn't Hindi—Dwight had asked. Indru sometimes replied in English, sulking and saying, "Not chivvy me" or "I fed up!"