by Paul Theroux
“You are such a jackass,” Jenny said to me softly, almost with affection.
I was still standing by the car, on the broken road.
“How would you like to live here?”
“You mean here in this scruffy little place, or in India in general?”
“Here—in that village over there.”
“I am know this willage,” Unmesh said.
But Jenny was laughing. “What a silly question!”
We left Unmesh at Agra Station one hot night. The darkness was like a thick blanket lying suffocatingly over us. Unmesh’s gesture of farewell was to show us snapshots of his daughter, Vanita. Jenny said, “She looks just like you,” but he protested, saying “Not at all!” as though this was an unwarranted slur on the little girl.
Two trains pulled into the station at once from opposite directions. This sent Unmesh into a passion of explanation.
“Over here Up-train. That one Down-train. This for Gwalior, that for Madras Express. Two bogies, four coaches freight, sleeping coach this one—”
At last I relented and gave him a tip to calm him. And he and the driver stood on the platform perspiring at us as we boarded.
Jenny said nothing about him until I asked her.
Then she replied, “He’s a funny little person, isn’t he? Do you suppose he’s a bit simple?”
The Madras Express was not air conditioned, but the scorching draft that blew under the raised window shutters was only part of our discomfort. There was no bedding, the compartment was dirty, the mattresses stank of bug shit, and we were told that there would be no food until tomorrow morning.
“This compartment has taken away my appetite,” Jenny said. “And I’m so tired I don’t think I’ll notice the lack of sheets. But God, sometimes you have the silliest ideas, Andy.”
She wrapped herself in a length of cloth she had bought in Delhi and she went directly to sleep. I lay awake cursing the train but also thinking that with Jenny this was a different trip. I had not decided whether it was better or worse; it was like a trip through an altogether different country. The hotels did not seem the same, the people were altered, Ismail was not Ismail, Indoo was not Indoo, and even the Taj had changed. The merchandise in shops—the antiques and crafts—seemed less exotic and rather crude. The weather was different, so hot I felt feverish, and the noise made it seem hotter still.
“It will be cooler in the rains,” the conductor said the following morning. “The monsoon is late.”
Dawn had come early and suddenly, the sun rising—an extraordinary size and shape from the simple flat fields. Then the whole sky filled with light and turned bluer, until at noon the day was drenched with heat under a white sky.
I watched black buffaloes submerged to their nostrils in the wallows beside the track, and I envied the naked children leaping from the top of culverts into ditches of frothy water.
That day Jenny hardly spoke. She said she was too hot to eat much. She read a novel she had brought from London, a plotty and pretentious spy story. “My holiday book,” she called it.
“Why do you read him?” I said, irritated by the serene way she sat on her berth turning pages.
“Don’t be jealous,” she said. “Write another novel and I’ll read it. In the meantime, please don’t bother me. This is a bit overwritten but it’s not bad. Just childish in the way that spying is childish. It’s a game that men play, isn’t it?”
“Who cares?” I said, and turned away as the train jogged along through the heat. “My next book’s going to be travel.”
“I hate travel books,” Jenny said. “Oh, don’t be offended. You know what I mean. What’s the point of them? It’s usually just second-rate writers waffling on about themselves and looking for trouble. They have absolutely nothing to say.”
“Are you talking about me?”
“This is a discussion, Andy. It’s not personal,” and she smiled sweetly. “My feeling is that travel writers are like bitchy reviewers. They go to a place and review the weather, then they review the people, then the sights, then the hotels. That’s what travel writing is—it’s all bitchy reviews.”
She said this with such fluency and certainty that I found it funny, and as soon as I laughed, she faltered. She said, “They all write well these travel writers—that’s what’s so pathetic about them—” and then she stopped. “I’m hot,” she said.
She did not return to her book. Some minutes passed and then she said, “By the way, I’ve been watching you ever since we left Delhi.”
The train clunked across the points in a junction and then swayed as we passed a freight train. Jenny began to speak again, but she knew she would not be heard and so she paused until the noise subsided and we were in the open again.
“I hope you don’t mind that I’ve been observing you,” she said. “I couldn’t help it. I mean, it’s so obvious.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You haven’t really looked at any of the sights. You hardly glanced at the Taj Mahal—and that was gorgeous. You just plopped down at Fatehpur-Sikri as though you had dropsy or something. And for the past two days you’ve just been mooning around with your mouth open.”
Perhaps that was how it seemed, yet how could I admit that I had been observing her?
“Forgive me for asking,” she went on, “but don’t you have any work to do?”
“I’ve been making notes,” I said lamely.
“I’m not asking you for an explanation,” Jenny said, “but your attitude does seem extraordinarily casual.”
Then she went back to her book. We traveled all that day in the dusty train, on a route that seemed longer than it had a month before. I murmured to myself a line from a poem I loved, as I looked at a stupa painted white in a village at the center of some drowned rice fields: What spires, what farms are those?
I wished that Jenny had been reading something I had written. I thought of the tube train that morning I arrived in London, when I had seen the young woman reading a book of mine. Just watching her turn the pages was such a pleasure for me that time had passed quickly and I had almost missed my station. I loved the look of absorption on the woman’s face, her occasional smiles; she was a friend and she knew me intimately.
Watching Jenny read someone else’s boring book made time pass slowly. But it was my fault for not being busier. I should have been writing—making notes, at least. I was doing nothing, and I was agitated. Jenny always looked serene when she was idle, and she was happiest in repose. Her own contentment helped me: she did not require my constant attention, she never said, What are you thinking? which always meant Are you thinking about me?
I now knew how being married to her had freed me. What we were today we would continue to be, and so I could see clearly this same scene, but on the Cape, one afternoon under a cloudy sky left by a severe winter storm. We were in our house, the same house as ever, but it was warmer, cozier, quieter. Jack was going to call tonight from London, where he lived. In our silence we were anticipating that—his news, his mood, his new life. There was a kettle of stew on the stove, bread in the oven, the makings of a salad on the butcher’s block. We were so used to one another we hardly talked, and our lives were somewhat separate—we each had a car, and Jenny did some consultancy work in Boston. As ever she protected me from people I did not want to see, and I used her as my excuse. This was the life I had been tending towards for years, and this was the house I had planned, filled with my artifacts from India and China. Jenny had made a place for herself in it, though she occasionally complained of being an alien—in America, in this house. At intervals, short or long, like a sudden fit of sobbing that gives relief, we made love.
She saw me watching her.
“This book isn’t half bad,” she said. “I mean, it’s rubbish but it’s fairly readable.”
Then she looked out of the window of the train, at the evening sun dissolving into a flooded field of rice.
“God. India. Still there after
all the miles we’ve gone.”
That night, still traveling, we shared a sticky meal.
“I’ve had better Indian food in Clapham,” Jenny said.
We turned in, climbing into our separate shelves, and we lay there in the heat, listening to the clatter of the wheels and every so often passing a station on the line and being raked with the glaring yellow lights of the railway lamps.
In the darkness, Jenny said, “Do you suppose anyone ever makes love on these trains?”
I said nothing; she was still murmuring.
“You’d probably dislocate your back.”
“Do you want to make love?” I asked, whispering from the lower berth.
“Not now. I’m too hot,” she said, and after a moment, “I’d rather have a nice cup of tea.”
Mr. Thumboosamy, the manager of the Hotel Vishnu in Madras, was anxiously watching Jenny’s face for a reaction as she took a deep dramatic breath. The door to Room 25—I had requested that one—had just been opened, but Jenny had hesitated on the threshold, Thumboosamy beside her with her bag in his hand.
“Yes,” Jenny said, and sniffed again.
Thumboosamy looked eager.
“That’s the smell of my mother’s house in Balham,” Jenny said, turning to Thumboosamy. And now she smiled. “Mice. I hate mice. I’m not superstitious. I’m not frightened of mice. I can’t stand them. They’re dirty. They spread disease. They crawl over you when you’re asleep. I’m not staying in this place.”
“This room, darling?”
“This hotel,” Jenny said.
“It’s the only hotel in town with rooms free,” I said.
Mr. Thumboosamy confirmed that this was so. Madras was packed with tourists, he said.
“There must be something,” Jenny said.
“Not available,” Mr. Thumboosamy said, making it a cluster of consonants, like a Tamil phrase.
“That’s absurd,” Jenny said. “Madras looks a hideous place. And this is the hot season. Who would want to come here? There must be lots of hotels with empty rooms.”
I said, “What if there aren’t any?”
“Then I’ll sleep under a tree,” she said. “Anywhere but here.”
We went to the Taj Coromandel, the luxury hotel just off Mount Road, and were told they had plenty of spare rooms. “This is more like it,” Jenny said of our clean pleasant room with its view over the city. She did not jeer at me, as I guessed she might, but simply said that perhaps I didn’t know as much as I thought I did about traveling in India.
“Maybe I should come along with you more often,” she said. “Aren’t you glad I found you a nice place to stay?”
We rested that day—had a nap, made love, and then swam in the hotel pool. The water was uncomfortably warm and after the swim I felt limp and exhausted as though I had been stewed.
Our room overlooked a mosque, and in the early evening there was a call to prayers. We watched the muezzin climbing into the minaret. Jenny had been reading her spy novel. She put it down and crept to the window, when she heard the muezzin clearing his throat in the loudspeaker.
Below us the faithful were gathering. I watched Jenny’s intense concentration and admired her reverence. She picked up her camera quickly and fingered it and focused. But she did not shoot a picture—out of respect, I felt. She said nothing, only watched, and I kept looking at her, the way she scrutinized the scene at the mosque. I thought how travel was composed of moments like this: discoveries and reverences separated by great inconvenience. These encounters, taken together, added up to one’s experiences of a place—the inconvenience had to be forgotten and displaced by the epiphany—like this call to prayer.
I had never seen Jenny so patient, and I felt the same love for her that had welled in me when I had seen Eden in front of the Taj Mahal sobbing for the beauty of it.
I joined Jenny. I took her hand. She held mine a moment and then dropped it.
In the courtyard of the mosque, as the muezzin howled, a solitary muslim was bent double, worshiping Allah.
“He’s praying,” I said.
“I know that.”
“They do it five times a day.”
“I know that, too.”
We stared at the praying man.
“I just remembered something,” Jenny said. “Isn’t it awful when someone says a striking thing that you know is unfair? The way it sticks in your mind, as though it’s true?” Her eyes were still on the muslim crouched in prayer. “I admire that man’s piety. My vulgar Uncle Monty fought in Mesopotamia. He was a war hero, so we could never contradict him. When they pray, he used to say, they look like a dog fucking a football.”
Mahadeva was watching us from his little wooden porch. We had taken a rattly train from Madras to Tambaram. Mahadeva had suggested the train when I came the day before by taxi to explain that I would be returning with my wife—and I gave emphasis to the word.
He called out and clapped his hands when we approached his house, and three of his children rushed up to us, the smallest and dirtiest plucking at Jenny’s bag.
Mrs. Mahadeva was apologetic and shouted for the older girl to take the child away.
“Please don’t worry,” Jenny said. “All children are the same. Mine used to be like that. It’s good—it means they’re not afraid of strangers.”
“You are having?” Mrs. Mahadeva said.
“Just one. A little boy,” Jenny said. “Not so little!”
Mahadeva listened to this exchange and smiled. He said, “Let us leave these ladies to entertain themselves.”
Jenny was marveling at the older daughter’s gleaming hair.
“We are applying coconut oil to it, sometimes on a daily basis.”
Mrs. Mahadeva spoke English!
When I saw Mahadeva relaxed I realized how fearful he had been when I had brought Eden here. His fear had made him seem poor and beaten. This time he was expansive. He had little experience of a single woman; but a wife and mother he understood.
As we ate—and this time we ate together, the four adults sitting around the table—the older girl served and spooned seconds onto our palm leaf plates. And she sometimes missed the leaf: she had been staring at Jenny, and she kept glancing back at her.
It was clear that she had made Jenny self-conscious, because Jenny began to speak with her. The girl was sweet and inattentive, and she went on serving in her clumsy way until her mother muttered at her.
“What is your name?” Jenny asked.
“My name is Annapurna.”
She was very thin, with bony hands and bony feet, and large sunken eyes, and she was wrapped in a faded sari. But the name was that of the mightiest mountain ridge in the world.
“This food is really delicious, Annapurna,” Jenny said, squelching the rice into a little ball and wiping it through the puddle of smashed lentils and conveying the sticky mass to her mouth.
Jenny’s dexterity with the food was remarked on by Mahadeva—and still his daughter Annapurna stared. Why did this make me so uneasy? The rest of them were talkative, complimenting Jenny on her pretty dress, her sensible hat, her sturdy shoes, her lovely hair; and they said how lucky I was to have her with me.
“I hope, before we leave Madras, that you’ll come to our hotel and join us for a meal,” Jenny said.
Mahadeva was pleased and flattered to be asked, and it was obviously a novelty for him to be negotiating this with Jenny and not me. Out of deference to Jenny he consulted his wife, and out of deference to us they discussed the matter in English.
“But there is impending arrival of Subramaniam,” Mahadeva said.
“We have ample of time before then to make preparations,” Mrs. Mahadeva said.
“I think he will be left cooling his heels,” Mahadeva replied.
This went on for a while, and at last, with profuse apologies they said they were forced to decline—and they used those words.
“What about next time?” Mrs. Mahadeva said, and she went on to say that she
looked forward to seeing our son.
Still Jenny ate and still Annapurna stared.
Mahadeva said, “We will go to Mahabalipuram. We will bring a picnic hamper.”
It did not matter that this was fantasy and probably would never happen. It brought consolation to them. Or perhaps it seemed to them that I was making regular visits to Madras—I had been to their little house twice in six weeks.
Sensing Annapurna’s eyes on her, Jenny said, “My husband hasn’t finished his rice. I hope he did better than that the last time he was here.”
“Oh, yes,” the girl said slowly, folding her skinny arms together. “But the other auntie did not eat the food as you do.”
A silence swelled in the room and solidified like lead, and stifled every noise. And then the Mahadevas, husband and wife, spoke at once.
“Annapurna, hurry and get the container of pickle!”
“Our children will play together in the sea,” Mahadeva said. “In Mahabalipuram.”
Jenny had only momentarily lost her smile.
“I look forward to that,” Jenny said. “To coming back and seeing you.”
“And I hope you will bring your hubby,” Mrs. Mahadeva said.
Jenny was rising from the table. She gathered her palm leaf and mine, and some of the tin bowls and cups and she made for the kitchen.
“That’s up to him,” she said, just as she disappeared behind the door.
I rose to follow her, but Mahadeva waved me back.
“Never mind. We will talk.”
But all we did was sit, and I tried to hear the whispers from the kitchen. Jenny stayed there a long time with Mrs. Mahadeva and Annapurna. Nothing said was audible, though once I heard Jenny laugh—and the others did the same in a nervous respectful way.
“You see? It is all right,” Mahadeva said.
When they emerged, Mrs. Mahadeva said, “Your lady wife was adamant about helping me.”
When it was time for us to go, I was moved by the tenderness of Mrs. Mahadeva’s farewell to Jenny. She seemed genuinely sorry to see Jenny leave, and I wondered perhaps whether they shared a secret. Again, we were made to promise to return soon.
“Both of you together,” Mrs. Mahadeva said, stepping in front of Annapurna. And she repeated it, “Both of you together!”