by Paul Theroux
“Good morning, darling.” And she kissed me.
I could not help but think that those words and that kiss were for lovers alone. Did married people say Good morning, darling, and kiss each other at the crack of dawn? I didn’t, and when I tried to picture it the effect was absurd and precious. Most people woke up and muttered Aw shit.
“Why are you smiling?”
I could not tell her why.
“I just remembered where we are,” I said. “Did you sleep all right?”
That was another lover’s question, and so was Can I get you anything?
“Like a log,” she said.
I pushed the windowshade up and was blinded for a moment, dazzled by the brightness—not only the sunny sky but the brilliant green of rice fields and tall slender palms. I turned away and saw Eden’s face—sallow, with lank hair and pale lips and swollen eyes in the same truthful and scorching light of the Indian plains. She had hardly slept; perhaps her little lie was her way of appeasing me.
She said, “I’m sorry I was cross with you yesterday. But you provoked me.”
“Maybe I should apologize in that case.”
She made a face and said, “I hate your sarcasm. I’ve just apologized, for Christ’s sake. Why don’t you accept it?”
I said nothing. We passed a station and the signboard flashed on the mirror at the back of the door. We clattered over a set of points and shimmied sideways onto a different line, and the motion made Eden’s cheeks shake.
I started to get up. I swung my legs out of the tangled sheet and gathered myself to rise and dress.
Eden said disgustedly, “That’s it. Run away. You always do that when we have an argument.”
“I’m not running away. I’m getting out of bed.”
“You completely ignored what I said.”
“I didn’t ignore it.”
“It was a fucking apology! What more do you want?”
She began to cry, looking sick and sleepless, in her rumpled blouse—and then her face was creased and rumpled, too, from her weeping. “I think you enjoy tormenting me,” she said.
I embraced her and as I did so glanced at my watch. It was seven-fifteen. I wanted to lie down and go back to sleep. I felt rattled and tired, though I had woken feeling wonderful. Holding Eden I sensed energy being drawn from me. There were some people I had known in my life who weakened me with their presence; something in their dependency drained my strength away, and they became frisky as I went limp.
After a moment Eden batted my arms away.
“Leave me alone. I can do without your sympathy.”
She hunched over and became a figure of grief with bent shoulders, looking sadder because of the bright sunlight on her pale skin and black hair.
Without another word, I left the compartment and went to the toilet, a damp cubicle of metal and battered gray paint, with a hole in the floor—the blurred tracks rushing past—and a cracked porcelain sink. As the train raced on I braced myself and took an inaccurate piss, and then washed—my feet, my face, and stuck my head under the faucet. I brushed my teeth using toothpaste but no water, NOT FOR DRINKING a sign said in two languages over the sink. I looked into the mirror and was surprised by my grouchy hedgehog face: I hated being shouted at in the morning. I took two aspirin, swallowing them without water, and lingered there looking at my face—trying to see my other face in those features—until someone urgently rattled the door handle.
My compartment was locked. I tried it and pushed the door.
“Who is it?” Eden’s voice was suspicious.
“It’s me,” I said, and I was going to say more when I heard the bolt being shot.
“Hurry up,” she said, snatching the door open.
The shade was drawn, the compartment was in semidarkness, with only cracks of light at the margins of the window. Yet there was enough light to see her. She wore a T-shirt and high-heeled shoes, and nothing else.
“Lock the door,” she said, and as I turned to do it, she hugged me from behind and ran her hands over me, and said, “I’m in charge. I’m a wicked filthy woman and you’re my sex slave. You have to do whatever I want you to.” She chewed my ear and moved her hands again and said, “This is mine, and this is mine, and this—this belongs to me.” She sat on the edge of the lower berth, with her legs parted. “Get on your knees.”
The dark compartment and the deafening noise of the train made her reckless. She insisted we make love again in the afternoon, but that time it was my turn, and I took all my cues from the games she had taught me in the morning. That day on the train was broken into many parts—eating, sleeping, making love, looking out of the window, and she read Emily Eden’s Up the Country while I scribbled notes. My notes were like an explorer’s, details of the weather and the distance and the landscape, and nothing about Eden, or about taking turns being slaves for each other in the hot compartment. We entered And-hra Pradesh and at nightfall were at Warangal, among glowing huts and chirruping rice fields.
“The second night on a train you always sleep better.”
“God, I hope so,” Eden said in her bunk.
We were brought tin trays of food—vegetables and rice and dhal, and three sodden chapatis, which had the discouraged look of failed tortillas.
“I can’t eat it,” Eden said. “I think I’ll just read.”
Within minutes she was asleep. I switched off the light and locked the door, but left the window open and the shade up, so that I could see the stars and the stations flashing past. And then I was asleep, and dreaming of my other life.
I woke hot and guilty in the bright sunshine of an early morning in Madras.
The Hotel Vishnu was old and hot and badly lit. It had the rotting carpets of all poor hotels in India: the carpets simply decayed in the damp shadows. It was airless and stank of mildew. The bathroom floor was wet, knobs were missing from the bureau drawer, in the closet were two misshapen wire hangers. The picture on the wall, cut from a calendar and framed, was of Mount Matterhorn, with a Swiss village in the foreground, a man in leather shorts, a woman in a bonnet and apron, some muscular cows.
Eden said, “It could be worse. At least I can have a shower.”
But when she had stripped and turned on the faucet there was no water.
She swore and then she began to cry. She said, “I haven’t had a bath for two days. I’ve had a bath every day of my life!”
I complained to the manager, a kindly man named Thumboosamy, with a black ratlike face. I had asked him whether that was his first name or his last, and he had replied, “Both!” He clucked and assured me that if we waited the shower would work. We had to be patient, he said.
“Water will come,” he said in the odd prophesying way that Tamils adopted when they were being badgered.
I heard the shower bubbling and spitting as soon as I entered the room, and Eden was under it slapping soap on her thighs.
“It’s cold but at least it’s wet,” she said. “It started just after you left the room.”
She apologized for having made a fuss; and I said nothing.
She said, “It’s all right, as long as we’re together.”
Later on, we bought oranges and bananas at a stall and ate them on a bench just off Beach Road.
“Why did we come here?” Eden said.
“For my Indian story. It’s been over ten years since I was here last. I’m going to all the places I visited before, to see what they’re like now.”
“What’s your conclusion?”
“I’ll let you know,” I said. “I’m also trying to see what I am like now.”
Eden said, “Maybe I’m the one who should be writing this story.”
“You’re helping,” I said.
“No, I’m not,” she said. “All I’ve done is obstruct you. I haven’t helped you at all. I’m ashamed of myself—but I’m desperate to be with you. I know you’d be traveling much faster without me, and probably seeing more. You’ll never cover all those places you
visited before.”
“I know. I’ll have to come back in July.”
“That’s when we plan our Christmas issue,” Eden said. “I’ll never be able to get any time off then.”
“I’ll go alone.”
“I’ll think about you,” she said. “Now that I’ve seen you in India I’ll be able to picture it.”
Sometimes, speaking that way, she sounded sad and settled, like a widow.
“I’ll imagine you walking around in the heat. You never perspire. You never get sick on the food. You never miss a night’s sleep.”
“You sound as though you resent it.”
She gave me a blank look and said, “In a way I do. You never suffer.”
“I did once or twice when I was younger, and it was so awful nothing has seemed very bad since.”
“Everything seems awful when you’re young.”
“No. I was happy most of the time. I am talking about real fear. It was always other people. It was like a fatal illness.”
“Tell me about it.”
“I couldn’t even begin to talk about it,” I said. “Maybe I’ll write about it someday.”
“I’ll see your picture in the paper. I’ll read a review. I’ll buy the book and read all about it.”
She had begun to talk herself into a rueful mood, like an excluded mistress. Some of those words I had heard on the radio that very morning, when an Indian economist, talking about the recent bear market in Europe had said, If you make the market your mistress you have to put up with its moods.
I had something specific I wanted to do with her, though I approached it in the most casual way. After lunch, I said, “Want to go for a drive?” and took her in a taxi south of the city to the township of Tambaram, where I had a friend.
I had warned Mahadeva of my visit, but I had not wanted to involve him in the expense of meeting me in Madras. Anyway, we had first met here in Tambaram in 1973, at his little hut, and I wanted to repeat the encounter. He was a tailor, and he worked at his sewing machine on the veranda of his hut on the narrow road east of the market.
“We’ll walk,” I said to the taxi driver on the main road, because I had walked the first time. “Wait here for us.”
“You’re being very mysterious, Andy.”
The sky had become heavy and gray, with hot clouds hanging like old sheets. I felt scalded by the humidity. Eden was so absorbed in her own hatred of the weather that she did not notice that it also affected me. We walked slowly down the road, past the vegetable and fruit sellers, and I told Eden the story of how I had first met Mahadeva and how he had made me a shirt.
“What’s so special about him?”
“He refused to charge me,” I said. “He made the shirt for me for nothing. He said it was a matter of friendship—a gift. Afterwards I sent him a twenty-dollar bill.”
“So he got his money after all.”
“He was terribly insulted, of course,” I said. “He gave the money to charity. And there’s one other thing that’s special. I’ll tell you later.”
Mahadeva jumped up from his sewing machine when he saw us approaching. He wiped his hands and called to his wife and rushed towards us exclaiming, “I could have met you in Madras!”
He was noticeably older, unshaven in a gray bristly way, and though he was rather thin with spindly arms and legs, he had a perfectly round potbelly. His wife appeared beside him, and she was haggard as well. They drew the slack flesh of their faces into smiles and led us inside.
“Please sit down. You will have a drink.”
He sent his oldest boy next door to the shop for cold drinks. His other children gathered at the door and stared in. There were four of them, very thin and with large eyes.
Mahadeva was chirpy—how was I? What had I been doing? He had seen an article about me in The Illustrated Weekly of India—he had sent it to his brother in Vijayawada.
While we chatted Eden fell silent, beholding the monotony and boredom of poverty. And I saw her staring at the colored pictures on the wall, of Ganesh the elephant god and Hanuman the monkey.
“I want to make you another shirt,” Mahadeva was saying. “I can make a nice frock for the lady, eh?”
But Eden looked hot and inattentive.
We were brought palm leaves. They were set before us, and Mrs. Mahadeva ladled a mound of rice and a dollop of vegetable curry, some bright yellow potatoes and grated coconut. We ate with our hands, and Eden ate what I ate—the same food, the same quantity.
Mrs. Mahadeva said something to her husband in Tamil, and he turned to me and asked, “How many children?”
Before I could speak, Eden said rather sharply, “We’re not married.”
Mahadeva conveyed this information to his wife.
“I’m not drinking this water,” Eden said.
Mrs. Mahadeva came and went. She did not eat. She did not speak. The children stared. They all seemed a bit afraid of Eden. I wondered whether it was because we were not married. It was not logical that we should be traveling together—and in letters I had spoken to Mahadeva of my wife and my child. I could not explain anything to him now. I did not try. It was better that we should be a mystery and that Eden should sense their bewildered scrutiny.
“Palm leaf is very sanitary—we just throw it away,” Mahadeva said, because even in India it was regarded as a bit strange to eat off a leaf.
We sat and talked inconsequentially, to enact the ritual. It was a poor house, the man and woman looked unhappy and somewhat haunted, the children stared and the smallest, whom I suspected of being ill, just sat and squalled. There was a kind of sullen incompleteness about the place. The house smelled like a tomb, and the man and woman seemed too old to have such young children. To be poor was to be very uncomfortable, and I had wanted Eden to see how uninteresting it was too, how horribly inconvenient and hopeless. It seemed almost a contradiction that Mahadeva could be so spirited, but that was the whole point and one of the saddest aspects of the trap.
When we left and were walking back to the Tambaram road, Eden said, “What’s the other special thing?”
“He’s exactly my age,” I said. “And Mrs. Mahadeva is exactly your age.”
“That old woman?”
“That old woman is thirty-four.”
Eden was quiet and reflective the rest of that hot day. Something in the compactness of her posture told me she was thinking about herself.
She said, “They didn’t like me. Did you see the way they stared at me? They think I’m a whore.”
That night she cried in the Hotel Vishnu. She slept badly and didn’t eat breakfast. She said it wasn’t the Hotel Vishnu—it was something else, she couldn’t explain. We moved to the Hotel Taj Coromandel the next day. It was a fine hotel with large bright rooms, a coffee shop, a good restaurant, potted palms in the lobby, a swimming pool. Eden cheered up, and talked about her magazine, an article she wished to write, a meal she wanted to cook for us. She was happiest talking about the future. Mentally she had already left India, though there was more I wanted her to see.
We looked at the old ice house and the banquet hall, and all the other architectural relics of the Raj. We drove into the countryside and marveled at the rice fields. We went in a hired car to Mahabalipuram, the temple on the sea. It was a great ruin of carved elephants in stone next to the dumping surf, where black Tamil boys screamed and splashed in their ragged underwear.
Eden was wearing her skull necklace. The gusting wind pushed her hair aside.
She said, “I could learn to really hate this place. Maybe after I get home it will all seem wonderful. I wish I had the power to destroy it and build it all over again. You have that smile on your face.”
I heard that but I was hardly listening to her.
She said, “Tell me you love me.”
The waves came very fast, one crashing on the back of another, blown by the wind.
“I love you.”
“I wish I hadn’t asked you,” she said. “Now it’s to
o late.”
That night in the hotel room I was lying on the bed reading the Madras daily newspaper, The Hindu, as Eden took a shower. With the sound of rushing water was another murmur. Was she speaking to someone? Was she singing? I put down the newspaper and went to listen at the door.
She was crying—and not just crying but sobbing, a slow struggling sound that rose and fell.
“Are you all right?” I called out.
She did not hear me. She went on sobbing. But soon the shower stopped and there was no sound from her. When she came out of the bathroom she looked relaxed—very calm, almost serene.
“I heard you talking in the shower,” I said.
“I was crying,” she said, but in a voice that indicated that whatever sadness she had felt had long passed.
She saw me still staring.
“I always cry in the shower,” she said, stating a fact and smiling at me for not knowing it.
She always cried in the shower?
In the plane on the way back to Delhi she said ruefully, “I wanted you to make love to me one more time.” She took my hand. “I wanted you to take me by force.” And then she became self-conscious. “I guess all women have rape fantasies. I’m pretty conventional that way.”
“Conventional meaning you have rape fantasies?”
“Of course,” she said, in that same fact-stating and smiling way.
“I’m forty-three years old, and I never—”
All women have rape fantasies?
But in Delhi, we did not stop, there was not time, I did not take her by force or test this fantasy. We changed planes and flew for nine and a half hours into the sun.
In London, at Heathrow, she looked suddenly alarmed, as though remembering, and said, “Oh, God, you’re leaving me.”
“You’ll be all right,” I said.
“I’m all right now. But when you turn that last corner in the terminal and I can’t see you anymore, I’m going to cry.”
5.
Then I was on the train, between two lives, hurtling from Eden to Jenny, and I was alone.
It was a thundery spring morning of blackish blowing trees and clouds the color of cast-iron marbled by yellow cracks. The window beside me was made so opaque by the storm that I could see my face in it—another person. But this one after a ten-hour flight and no sleep looked like a zombie who had risen from a hole in the ground to push his haunting face through the world. Around me were people on their way to work, reading newspapers and books. My impression was not that they were hardworking and virtuous people but simply that they were better than me. Yet when I considered that they too had deep secrets I realized how alike we were.