by Paul Theroux
He offered us lassi. He clawed through trays of moonstones, and trawled with his fingers in boxes of silver chains and anklets, and when he ducked under the counter for more I suggested to Eden that we leave the next day for Agra.
We took the Janata Express, one of the slowest trains in India. Eden sat suffering on the wooden seat, groaning each time the train stopped—which was often—and glancing up at me in a blaming way. The Janata was a steam train, and so soot and smoke blew through the windows.
“I hated to leave that hotel.”
“You can’t visit India without seeing the Taj Mahal.”
“We had such a beautiful room,” she said. “I loved being with you there.”
“There’s a good hotel in Agra.”
She looked doubtful. Her face was damp, there was a smudge on her cheek, her T-shirt was dusty and so were her feet in her sandals. I had never seen her dirty. It made her look youthful and reckless and even desirable. When I tried to tell her that she accused me of mocking her.
The Indians stared at her. None of them was traveling very far. They crowded into the coach, they stood and jammed the corridors and they sweated, and after a few stops they fought their way out and were replaced by others, looking exactly the same—just as lusterless and tired.
A man pushed towards us with a wooden box on his shoulder.
“Ess crim. Ess crim. Ess-ess.”
He flipped the lid open and showed us the melting contents.
“It looks like poison. It’s probably rancid,” Eden said. “You’d better be right about that hotel in Agra.”
We traveled in descending darkness past ditches of noisy frogs and bushes screeching with cicadas. Eden put her head down and seemed to be holding her breath to make the time pass.
We arrived at Agra Fort Station and were jostled by Indians with bundles as we made our way along the platform. People were shouting, women shrieking, men heaving crates, children howling, as the train gasped and slavered. We were pushed from behind by impatient bony fingers.
“Sah, sah.”
This man pushing me was trying to get my attention.
“I carry your bags, sah. I have taxi.”
He was a small and slightly popeyed Indian in a torn white shirt. His hair was spiky and oily. One of his front teeth was missing, but the violence suggested in the gap made him seem more like a victim than a bully. He badly needed a shave.
“Take hers,” I said.
“Please, missus,” he said, and lifted Eden’s big bag onto his head.
His taxi somehow matched him. It was a small black jalopy with brown fuzzy upholstery and a broken grille. Its headlights were close together like the Indian’s eyes. The window cranks were unusable. One window wouldn’t open, the other wouldn’t close.
“I am Unmesh,” the man said, taking his seat next to the driver. He rested his chin on the seat back and faced us.
We said nothing.
“I am know everything.”
“That’s good, Unmesh.”
“This man is my employee,” Unmesh said, of the man at the wheel. The man resembled Unmesh: whiskers, red teeth, torn shirt, damp eyes. “This is my driver.”
“Isn’t this a taxi?” Eden said.
“This is vehicle of tour company,” Unmesh said. “Vanita Tourist Agency.” He smiled and wagged his head with pleasure. “Vanita is my daughter.”
The picture of the little girl was suddenly in his skinny hand: an astonished tot in a frilly dress.
“I call this automobile Vanita, too.”
The seats were broken and lumpy—I was sitting on the bulge of a spring. The driver swerved without slowing down as we passed clopping tongas. The rising dust was like dense fog as it shrouded the lanterns of the roadside fruitstalls.
“I am managing director of Vanita Tourist Agency,” Unmesh said. “I tell you, I am know everything.”
We entered a long driveway lined by hedges. Eden looked out—hers was the open window. We came to a portico, a marble doorway, a bright foyer, and an Indian in a turban, looking like a maharajah, opened the door of the car. He wore white gloves. From behind the hedge came the wail of a peacock.
“This is more like it,” Eden said, and got out.
Unmesh lifted his chin from the seatback and said, “You want to see Taj Mahal? I take you. I show you. I am know everything.”
“Be here tomorrow at nine o’clock,” I said.
Unmesh looked very surprised, almost shocked; and then he recovered and said, “Thank you, sah. Thank you. Oh, thank you,” and pressed his hands together before his nose.
Eden had a bath and a drink and was happy. And after we ate she was relaxed and amorous.
“I love you,” she said. “I love being here with you. I’m sorry I was so cranky on the train.”
“Were you cranky?”
“I think I was,” she said. “But I’m not cranky anymore. I’m going to be a good little girl from now on.”
“Prove it.”
“Put me to bed and you’ll see,” she said, and she breathed, “I want you to make love to me. Wait here—give me five minutes.”
She was wearing a sari when I entered the bedroom. She turned slowly and let me unwrap her, but not completely. We made love in a tangle of silk.
She laughed the next day; she said “Where did you dig him up?” when she saw Unmesh. But she was friendly to him. We sat in the broken back seat and were driven to the Taj Mahal, as Unmesh told us about the Emperor Shah Jahan and his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal. They were so passionate they were joined as one flesh, Unmesh said.
Eden held my perspiring hand.
“Are you married?” she asked, interrupting Unmesh.
“I am married and I am having one daughter, Vanita,” Unmesh said, and out came the snapshot again.
Eden smiled sadly. She hugged me, she looked out of the window and I knew she was thinking of children.
“How many kids, sah?”
“We don’t have any children,” I said carefully. “Not yet.”
Eden squeezed my hand and looked sorrowful; yet I knew she was happy.
“I am show you Taj Mahal,” Unmesh said. “I am tell you all about it. I am know everything.”
But we dismissed him. We walked hand in hand through the gateway and looked past the narrow reflecting pool at the small exquisite building. In the early morning light it was pink and princely and so delicate it was like a seashell, with the slenderest minarets and the most precise windows and marble screens. It had a fresh and almost tremulous beauty, as though it had just been made, just finished that morning—like a newly blossomed flower with dewdrops on it.
I started to speak, but Eden squeezed my hand in a cautioning way that stopped me.
She was crying—tears running from beneath her sunglasses and her lips curled.
She turned to me to say something, but the effort to speak convulsed her and made her choke. And then her face seemed to swell and she began to sob. She kept her face turned to the Taj Mahal and she sobbed in a sad hiccupping way.
I took hold of her. I had never loved her more than at that moment. I hugged her and said, “I love you.”
“Oh, Andy, I love you so much.”
There was a sort of passionate relief, like a long sigh, as she said it, and she stopped crying.
She pressed her face against mine, and said “Please—” but went no further, for at that moment Unmesh appeared.
He grinned and showed us the gap in his stained teeth.
“I am not having ticket,” he said, gesturing at the ticket window inside the main gate. “That ticket seller is my friend. He is knowing me.”
I stared at Unmesh as Eden turned away and wiped her face.
Unmesh straightened and frowned and said in a reciting voice, “This is Taj Mahal built by twenty thousand men ordered by Shah Jahan, emperor, son of Jahangir, father of Au-rangzeb. This Shah Jahan was a great collector of precious gems and jewels as we can see in world-famous Peacock Throne
and even inlaid walls of Taj itself—go closer and you will see multitude of gems and jewels and semiprecious stones of every variety, and even so fascinated with jewels was Shah Jahan that on one occasion when nautch girls were dancing for him, almost naked and showing immodest and shameless posturing, Shah Jahan said nothing and coolly continued to examine some gems and jewels and semiprecious stones that had just been presented to him, taking no further notice of dancing girls. Shah Jahan—”
“Please, Unmesh,” I said. “We just want to look around.”
“I am show you,” Unmesh said. “I am know everything.”
But we left him behind and strolled on to explore the Taj itself.
“He’s so sweet,” Eden said. “Poor guy.”
She had become tolerant. Amorousness made her forgiving, and I loved her for her kindness. The magical place had transformed us and made us better people.
I was going to tell her what Aldous Huxley had said about the Taj Mahal when he had come this way in 1926—that the Taj exhibited “poverty of imagination” and that the minarets were “among the ugliest structures ever created by human hands.” Aldous Huxley, who of course knew about beauty because he lived in Los Angeles. He died the day Kennedy was shot, and so he was never mourned.
But Eden groaned softly and began to weep again, and I knew I couldn’t tell her any of this.
We spent an hour or more looking inside at the various chambers, and she photographed the semiprecious stones inlaid in the marble—small carved gem chips arranged in flower patterns. The Taj looked immaculate at a distance but up close it glittered with borders of flowers and leaves.
We walked in the gardens, up the side of one triangle and down another, under the trees and the twittering birds.
“Please don’t go away again,” Eden said, holding my hand tightly. “I’m so miserable without you. I try to be brave, I do my work, but I think of you every second. I don’t think about anything else.”
I kissed her to calm her, but she resisted and said, “Missing you that much isn’t healthy—it makes me crazy. Andy, we have to be together or else—”
She sniffed and breathed hard as though she was going to cry again. She was silent for a while, seeming to hesitate, as we walked past the fountains and more green boughs that hid screeching birds.
“It’s a kind of death without you,” she said. “I’m dead inside.” She turned back to look at the Taj Mahal and pushed a damp strand of hair off of her forehead. “It’s both love and loss. It’s that”—and nodded at the lovely mausoleum in the sunlight. “I understand that.”
As soon as we left the enclosure her mood changed, and on the way back to town she laughed and joked with Unmesh. He brought us to a marble carver, where I assumed he was paid a commission to include this on the tourists’ itinerary. The work was extremely good. We bought an inlaid marble slab that could be used as a tabletop.
“This is for our house,” Eden said, her face shining with pleasure.
We walked to the car in silence.
Our house, she had said, and I saw it vividly—a hot morning in California, in a dry landscape of cactuses and high white skies, in a place where neither of us had been before, our fresh start. I saw our life under the thick palm trees. Eden was sitting by a swimming pool, painting her toenails, taking her time, and she was framed by a carved door which left me in shadow. Our house was low and lovely—Eden had done most of the furnishing, found the antiques, the mission furniture, the paintings. She had done the curtains, made the candles, potted the plants, woven the rugs. There were no children or animals, but there was a sizable live tree in the lounge, standing near the marble slab from Agra. The kitchen was enormous, and although we seldom entertained, Eden often cooked gourmet food. I was fully alive in this heat and light, all my senses alert—a new place, a new life. I felt younger, I exercised, and we made love all the time. I had turned my back on the past. That was painful: the ache, the emptiness, the sense of failure. But I was writing about new things, about that ache, about the derangement of life. Eden and I always talked, we touched, we went to restaurants. Eden became terribly upset when my gaze wandered from her, when I seemed to be staring at another woman. We studied Spanish; she had been pestering me to take up tap-dancing—it seemed absurd but I was tempted.
“What are you thinking?” Eden asked, looking into my eyes.
It was always, to me, a devastating question, because my answer was always Everything.
“About you,” I said. “About us.”
And then she took my hand.
4.
“This place is magic,” Eden said, stretching naked by the window the next morning. Her obvious happiness had made her seem physically different—stronger, bright-eyed, more relaxed and sexier. I had not realized how fretful and nervy she had been in the States until I saw her happy in Agra. But it was not only the Taj Mahal that put her in a good mood; she also loved the hotel, its pool, its fruit juice and its food, its bedrooms and its hot showers. And she was with me every minute. I wondered whether I should tell her that I felt slightly oppressed by our constantly being together. Wouldn’t she understand? After all, she also knew a thing or two about solitary pleasures.
Unmesh drove us to Sikandra to see Akbar’s Mausoleum, a big red crumbly palacelike place with an echoing chamber under the dome. Unmesh howled inside and we timed the echo. He took us to Fatehpur Sikri, the magnificent ghost-town in the desert. We ate stale cheese sandwiches and drank milky tea. Eden said she didn’t mind at all. She had no complaints.
“I like roughing it,” she said.
“This isn’t roughing it.”
She looked at me suspiciously, perhaps wondering whether I was mocking her. Didn’t she know that having a picnic in the splendor of an abandoned Moghul city, among the mynah birds on a sunny day, was luxury?
Unmesh’s car was stuffy and dusty. On the way back it jolted us into every pothole. It was prone to misfire and gasp, and then to chug and hip-hop on the road. Unmesh had a temporary remedy for his car’s convulsions. He pulled over and blew into the fuel line. “Rubbish,” he said, gasoline shining on his lips. About ten miles outside Agra the car began to jog—a flat tire.
“Sorry,” Unmesh said, and swore at the driver in Hindi. The driver replied by kicking the tire.
“Don’t be sorry,” I said, and I meant it.
“The imperturbable Andre Parent,” Eden said.
“That’s me.”
We were standing by the side of a hot dusty road. The road was made of broken slabs of soft tar.
“We could camp here,” Eden said.
A cyclist went past and cleared his throat and spat a squirt of red betel juice at us, just missing Eden’s dress. Eden did not see it as hostility. The man was just a bumpkin on a bike.
“It’s so quiet,” she said.
It was the sorrowful dead-quiet of the plains in summer that always reminded me of stinking shade and stagnant water and cholera.
“There is a willage that side,” Unmesh said. “I am know this place.”
“You see?” Eden said. “We’d be all right. We could live here in a little hut.”
The driver knelt and struggled with the rusty nuts as Unmesh hectored him.
“I want him to hurry,” Eden whispered to me. “I want to go back to that wonderful hotel and make love to you. I want you to use me—just use my body. Do anything you want. Give me commands, make me your slave, tell me what to do.”
I turned to Unmesh and said, “Couldn’t he change that tire a bit faster?”
The following day, when I told Eden we were moving south to Madras, she said, “Do we have to?” in the small-girl’s voice that she affected to win me over.
But I had woken in a state of agitation, worrying that I had made so few notes. I said, “This isn’t a vacation, you know. I have to write an article. I haven’t done a thing so far.”
“Have I kept you from working?” Eden said, looking hurt.
I said nothing. I shru
gged. It was my own fault for not insisting on being allowed time to myself.
She said, “You have plenty of time for working when I’m not with you. How long have we been together this time? Two or three weeks on the Cape and ten days here in India. And you’re surprised that I want to be with you?”
“Take it easy,” I said, because I knew what was coming.
“Your wife has you all the rest of the time. Months, years! And I have nothing!”
This was another subject that stifled me and made me silent.
“And you have the nerve to accuse me of keeping you from your work,” Eden said, in a poisonous voice.
She was backing towards the door.
“Okay,” she said. “You want to work? Go ahead and work!”
She snatched her handbag and went out banging the door so hard the wall shook. And another door banged shut in my head.
I sat down at the table by the window and stared at my blank notebook with my head in my hands. I doodled awhile, sketching in the margin, and then I tore out a page and wrote a letter that began Darling Jenny …
The Madras Express arrived just after midnight at Agra Station. Unmesh stayed with us on the platform. He looked mournful, more ragged than ever. He brought out his snapshot of his daughter Vanita, and a tiny picture of his wife, just her face, like a mug shot. He produced two bottles of Campa Cola, and two straws.
The driver stood behind Unmesh, urging us to drink. It was too late to ask him his name.
Eden said, “These guys are starting to get on my nerves.”
When the train began to pull out we lingered in the doorway next to the conductor, crowding the vestibule. Unmesh stood to attention. The driver did the same. They wagged their heads sadly at us.
“You come back, sah. I am taking you. I am showing you. I am know everything. I have good business then.” Unmesh looked at me imploringly and repeated, “Please. You come.”
We found our two-berth compartment and were rocked to sleep by the motion of the train.
In the morning I rolled over and saw Eden sitting gingerly at the edge of my berth, near my feet. I suspected that she had been sitting there for quite a while, waiting for me to wake.