The Elephanta Suite (20 page)

"Still following up some contacts here," Shah e-mailed, and it sounded like procrastination.

Fine. Dwight handed off the competing Indians to his secretary, Miss Chakravarti. Indians understood delegating. "I can do it, sir," they'd say, and give the job to someone else, a menial, and that menial would delegate it to someone lower. And Dwight had more time, because he found that an e-mail or a letter, if left unanswered, became stale and less important as time passed, and soon diminished to something so thin and tentative it was easy for him to delete it. Filing it or keeping it fresh made it into an artificial demand.

Time was the test of any demand. He had never in his life felt the passage of time so palpably as he had in India. And he had concluded that, really, nothing was urgent—nothing at all. Maybe nothing mattered.

Now and then he forwarded a message to Shah, still in Boston. "You have given me a wonderful opportunity," Shah e-mailed. And he stayed on.

 

On most days, but especially on weekends, Indians walked along Chowpatty Beach, a great expanse of tainted shoreline—dirty sand, sodden litter, scummy water, beached plastic—where it was always low tide. These days, with more time on his hands, Dwight walked along the beach with Indru, and sometimes with Padmini. He saw no other foreigners doing this, and thought, Maybe I'm not a foreigner anymore.

They walked, he bought them ice cream, they sat on the benches, they used the promenade, they gazed at the Malabar Hill beyond the bay, the mansions, the villas. They looked at the sea, which seemed idyllic, but Dwight knew—and so did the unbuoyant, non-swimming Indians—that it was polluted, and that if you looked closely you'd see that the sea water had the yellow-gray color and deadly fizz of battery acid.

Strolling made Indru talkative. "My mother treat me so harsh," she said. "My father touch me. Shame for him."

She was provoked to tell her stories whenever there was a lull in the conversation. Usually she spoke without emotion, lapping an ice cream cone, as she was doing now.

"My granny lock me in the dark room."

"So you said."

"After he make me naked, Father say, 'Go away, you bad girl.'"

"I remember. You went to the police. They didn't believe you."

"Police not believe me at all. 'You are talking blue lies.' They take me to the village
sarpanch.
He touch my privates. Oh, my God."

She spoke without anger, rotating the ice cream on its cone, licking her fingers when it dripped.

"And the boys in the village were cruel," Dwight said.

"They throw things at me. They throw
kanda.
The cow dung women make for the fires, they throw at me."

The same stories, in their way tragic, perhaps, but hearing them so often irritated him. He had been moved the first time. By now he knew them by heart. He could recite them verbatim, and what was more annoying that that? They became parodies. Apart from the stories of cruelty and abuse, which he only half believed (she told them a new way each time, and sometimes improved on them, with variations and discrepancies and gaps), Indru had no other conversation.

Obviously, she had remembered how, the first time, he had listened; how she had captured his attention, silenced him with her stories, a Scheherezade of sadism.

They were an important justification for him—for seeing her, being kind to her, sleeping with her—the poor kid, how she'd suffered. He needed the stories. They gave him the right to sleep with her and to be her benefactor.

She needed them too, for without the stories she was just a wayward girl in Mumbai, filling in at a hair and nail salon and lazily looking for someone to pay her way.

"My uncle, so cruel. He touch me and threaten me."

"He had a motorcycle. He gave you a ride. He took you to a riverbank and raped you."

"His friend also did things to me."

That was a new twist. Dwight said, "Give it a rest, Indru."

The trouble was that, bored by the stories—he had been outraged before—his own behavior seemed crass. She was not a victim he was helping but rather an opportunist overdramatizing her past.

He doubted the stories, not just because she told them without feeling; she seemed to repeat them because of his reaction to them. She believed they were the key to his sympathy, and they had been, but not on the twentieth retelling.

"What about you, Padmini? Any family problems?"

"No problem. I happy."

"They beat Padmini at nail salon," Indru said with indignation, as though looking to create drama.

"I spill nail varnish on customer sari," Padmini said. And she began to laugh. "She so angry!"

"Did they really beat you?" Dwight asked.

"Oh, yes, but customer refuse to pay. She get out of chair and say goodbye and hurry out to street and rickshaw wallah hit her—
whoof!
—and she plop down. Ha!"

The memory of the angry customer being struck by a rickshaw was stronger than the memory of being beaten.

Padmini didn't look for sympathy, which was probably why he liked her, and why, when Indru's brother showed up and took Indru out, Dwight didn't mind: he had Padmini, who was younger and prettier and, in her way, shrewder. Because she didn't ask for anything, he gave her money and presents, and he was less inclined to give Indru presents, since she asked for them constantly these days.

Indru believed that her horror stories helped, but all they did was diminish her, turn her into a figure of melodrama, make her impossible to love and hard to like. Yes, he could pity her, but there were a billion others worthy of pity.

Both were living off him. Indru had stopped working. And Pad-mini worked less often. And when Indru asked Dwight for money or a present, he suspected that she was asking on behalf of her brother. Even Padmini admitted that she sent some of Dwight's money home to her parents in the village.

That made him think. Behind Indru and Padmini, radiating outward from the two-room apartment, were more people living off them, each girl with a family, each family a village, each village a hierarchy, like the
sarpanch
whom Indru had mentioned—a great assortment of hungry people with their hands out. He was supporting them all, yet he could not call himself a benefactor.

Indian money was peculiarly filthy, the frayed little ten rupee notes, the tattered hundreds; a stack of bills looked like a pile of dirty rags. The money smelled of all the people who had fingered it and used it. The thought of this killed his desire, and he began to see Indru and Padmini as two lazy girls, older and cleverer than they looked. He saw himself as even lazier, or worse—credulous and weak. As he saw their cynicism, he liked himself less. He feared that one day he would come to despise them.

Meanwhile Shah—so he said in an e-mail—had gone to Disney World in Orlando. He had visited New York City, where he had a cousin. He'd found clients all over New England. He'd been invited to Harvard Business School, to speak informally at a seminar. Kohut had given a dinner party for him in Sudbury. "Autumn leaves," Shah reported, "magnificent colors." And "I trust all is well, Mumbai-side."

Was it? These walks along Chowpatty Beach, because they were interludes, because they required conversation, were revealing and proved to Dwight that he was kidding himself. He was a man who had discovered sex in India and thought it was magic. But it was an illusion, the consequence of his having power and money in a land of desperation. Sex was a good thing, because sex had an end, and when his desire died he saw he'd been a fool. But now, with more power and less conviction, his passion diminished to casual playing, and he took more risks.

Seeing a boy with a CD player and headphones, Indru said, "Buy me one of those."

"What will you do with it?"

"Listen music."

"Maybe," he said, to tease her, and saw she was agitated with greed. He said to Padmini, "Do you want one too?"

Her whisper was so soft he could scarcely hear it, yet he knew her vibrant lips were saying yes.

"But what will you give me?"

He was ashamed. He had no right to feel powerful when he said this, making the request like a greedy king addressing his subjects, asking,
How do you intend to please me?

They were at the beach, another of their Sunday strolls, watched by groups of chattering boys who were attracted by the pretty girls, curious about the tall white man in the Indian shirt and
kadi
vest of homespun, which Dwight had begun to wear since Shah's departure for the States.

Padmini glanced at Indru, who was smirking and looking coy, as though challenging Padmini to give the right answer.

"Sir, we will be good to you," Padmini said.

Indru laughed and skipped ahead. Her laugh got the attention of an old woman who was walking in the opposite direction. Dwight looked up at Indru and saw the woman. He wouldn't have noticed her at all except that she hesitated and stared at him.

She had not changed. She was fat and slow, wearing a billowing sari banded with gold embroidery, gold bangles on her wrists, brown-gray hair, with a shawl thrown over it.

For a moment Dwight wondered how she'd singled him out—but of course, he was the only white man on the beach. He was glad that Indru and Padmini had gone ahead. The old woman's unfriendly smile was like mockery.

"Hello," he said.

Instead of replying, the woman called out sharply. Amid the crowd of beach strollers, three figures hurried over—the little girl, the young boy, and the tall skinny dancer in her Gypsy dress. He recognized them only because the old woman was there. The boy was taller but thinner, with a resentful face; the little girl wore a new dress but seemed sickly, hollow-eyed, with lipstick and eye shadow, a parody of a whore. Sumitra, the dancer, looked at him with hatred. She was bony and her hair was full and frizzed, with dry patches on her strangely hairy arms and lines in her face, as though she'd become old. In the way they stared, they seemed brutalized and rude.

The old woman gabbled in Hindi. Dwight knew she must have been saying,
It is the man. You remember him from the Gateway of India?

Were they speculating on whether they could con him again, somehow entice him?

"Nice to see you," Dwight said.

But as he made a move to go, they crowded him and blocked his way.

With a yelp, a passing boy called out to his friends, and Dwight thought how suddenly stupid the boy became in his eagerness. The other boys hurried over, attracted by the odd public scene: the yakking old woman, the scruffy Gypsy-looking children, the white man—the towering, isolated white man. In just seconds there were more spectators, all boys, laughing, perhaps suspecting trouble—that slack-jawed look of anticipation was also moronic. Dwight had seen this before in India, how subtle and crafty Indians could be individually, how ignorant and obvious in a large crowd.

At that moment, in what seemed to him a standoff, Dwight heard a screech.

"Yaaagh!" Another animal noise—Indru's shriek, and followed by Padmini, Indru broke through the cluster of people.

She snatched at Dwight's hand, and a jeering cry went up from the boys. But Indru screamed at them, something that had to be worse than "go away," because they howled back at her.

Glancing around to make his escape, Dwight saw the old woman smile. It was a sour smile of contempt. Even she recognized what he was now, and she began to mutter defiantly. What was she saying? Something wicked about him to these foolish boys.

Dwight stepped back while Indru continued to yell at the boys. She wasn't like a girl anymore, she was a howling woman with big reddish teeth in her wide-open mouth.

Now the old woman, who seemed fearless and slightly superior, was saying something sly to Indru—vile words, they had to be, because Indru spat at her, a gob of reddish saliva that darkened in a streak on the old woman's sari. The boys laughed and punched the air in delight.

"Come on," Dwight said, and pulled Indru away as the old woman craned her neck and screamed.

Indru said, "That auntie say she know you. You give her money. You bad man."

When they had crossed the expanse of Chowpatty sand and were back on the sidewalk, Dwight said, "I am a bad man!"

He was disgusted with himself. He deserved this humiliating scene at the public beach on a busy Sunday, with the horrible boys watching, the cowshit, the yellow froth at the sea's edge, the poisonous water, the spectacle of a predatory American confronted by the victims he had paid off.

I am a bad man
had shocked Indru into silence. She merely followed him to the apartment block, and when they got there, Dwight shook his head. He saw that Padmini was just catching up with them, still looking flustered from the business at the beach.

"No," he said.

"Yes," Padmini said. She took his big hand in her small one. That gave him some strength. He climbed the stairs slowly, feeling weak.

In the room, while Indru watched, Padmini said, "We be good to you."

The words made him sad, but she had turned away and dropped her sari, and now her little brown made-up face made him sad, her skinny neck, the fuzz of hair on her lower back, the tight globes of her buttocks.

Indru had taken most of her clothes off. She lay on the charpoy wearing a sarong, her heavy breasts hanging, one to the left, one to the right. There was something lewd in the asymmetry, and the way she lolled, half propped up, watching Padmini bend to pick up her sari and fold it.

Dwight tried to laugh, but he was numb all over. The thought that saved him was: I created this. I brought these people here. I gave them my wedding ring to rent the place—it's all mine. And so I can do whatever I want.

They were staring at him. He said, "What's my name?"

Padmini began to giggle. Indru said, "I am know."

"Tell me."

"Mister," she said, but she could not go any further. She was murmuring, "
Ferringi."

"I'm Dwight Huntsinger."

Hearing this, they both laughed, for the name was impossible to say. They champed at a few syllables and laughed some more.