The Elephanta Suite

by Paul Theroux

  Beth was reading by the pool when her husband returned. He peered at her book, a hefty volume, and raised his head queryingly, to which Beth made a face. She was wearing earphones and listening to her iPod and so she spoke very loudly.

  "One of these novels by an Indian! About India! Not a lot of jokes! I don't think I ever want to go there!"

  But she went on turning pages and vowing to leave the book in the library of the residence, where there was also a billiards table and a smoking room. Audie had a book on yoga, mostly pictures, which he smiled at.

  "Check this out. 'The scorpion.' Is that one of the Flying Wallendas?"

  As they were reading under the sunshade, they became aware of a stirring just behind them—Audie hearing a rustle of feet in dry leaves and a thicker flutter of leaves in the shake of branches, while for Beth it was less a sound than a prickling of her skin, a brushing of the hair on her head, and a distinct physicality like a change in temperature, a sudden hotness, and a sense that she was being watched and that the air around her was being somehow stroked.

  They both turned, Beth first, Audie a second afterward. They saw nothing but a swaying tree limb.

  "Thought I heard something," he said.

  She had heard nothing at all, but said, "Yes."

  "Look at the time," he said, twisting his wrist. "I've got a treatment."

  "Which one?"

  "Abhiyanga."

  He did not say that on his way back from the lobby of the residence he had stopped by the spa and requested this treatment, specifying that his therapist for this Ayurvedic massage be Anna, whom he had met the previous evening working in the restaurant.

  He scuffed on Agni sandals to the spa lobby, where he was given a key to a locker in the men's section. He changed into a robe, and on returning to the lobby he saw Anna, her hands clasped before her, her head bowed in greeting.

  "This way, sir," she said, leading him up the marble stairs and past the gushing fountain to the massage room. A small dark girl awaited them there. She too bowed her head and greeted them.

  "This is Sarita," Anna said.

  Sarita washed his feet in a bowl of cool water and smooth stones. They murmured prayers, chanted, and rang a brass bell while Audie stood sniffing. And delicately they tied a loincloth on him, for modesty's sake.

  The two women helped him onto the dark wooden table, where he lay on his stomach, his face on a folded towel. His first sensation was of hot oil drizzled on the small of his back, fingers stirring it, spreading it, squeezing it into his spine. Anna was on one side, Sarita on the other; he was massaged, his muscles chafed and pressed. From time to time, more hot oil was poured on his shoulders and limbs, the warmth of it penetrating his body as it was worked into him by the four active hands and insistent fingers.

  Without effort, Audie sank into a reverie of women he had known. He did not orchestrate the reverie; he let it wash over him. He could not say why he always had the same reverie, why it began whenever he was massaged. He guessed it was his reaction to being touched by a strange woman's hands.

  "I must check," the Indian clerk had said when Audie first requested a woman to massage him, and he had been told that in India it was uncommon, though at Agni it was acceptable.

  He learned to relax and receive the treatment, the two young women pressing on his oiled back and working their way from his shoulders, down his arms, to his legs, to his feet. As this happened, his mind locked onto the thought he'd suspended when the massage had ended the day before.

  The women in his reverie, mainly faces, soulful ones, were lovers he'd had in his life, the ones he'd remembered for the desire he'd felt for them, not casual sex or one-night stands, but affairs that had exhausted him with the pleasure and pain of love. Yet what he recalled in the course of the massage was the last day he'd seen them, when he'd told them it was over, he could not see them anymore, after his desire had died and his guilt at deceiving Beth overcame him.

  Only with great difficulty could he recall the moment of their first meeting and the succeeding days, but it was no effort at all for him to remember the day they parted, usually after making love—saying what he had rehearsed, "I won't be able to see you anymore"—the expression on their faces of shock, indignation, sorrow, anger. And he averted his eyes from the woman's body, fearing to be attracted by his pity, and watched her get dressed, the awkwardness of it, sometimes sad and slow, sometimes spitefully hurried, the expression in the eyes, the moment that Audie called "the last look."

  Even as he stood there in the room, usually a bedroom, they seemed to recede, grow smaller, losing significance. They were affronted, abandoned, as though they were standing on a railway platform and he was at the window of a train, pulling away, waving goodbye.

  Each parting that had caused him pain had caused them greater pain, anguish. But he was always able to say, "What did you expect? I'm a married man. I have obligations. What about my wife?"

  The mention of his wife, just the word, had maddened some of them. But anger had usually given way to tears. The opposite of sexual desire was not indifference; it was tears. Tears made him impotent, clumsy, a big pointless jug-eared man with enormous and futile hands, incoherent in his consolation.

  The endings of love affairs were tableaux in his mind, nearly always enacted in hotel bedrooms, the room going colder and dimmer, and then just cheerless with white wrathful voices.

  "I hate you" and "How could you?" and "You led me on" and "I wish you ill, I really do. I hope something bad happens to you."

  Each parting was a moment of crisis that he relived as he was being massaged. He could not say why this was so, why the occasion of his nakedness in the presence of strangers who were pressing upon his body revived these memories, yet it was so. And there was something new today, the memory of a woman he'd ended an affair with, who had turned to him in fury to insist that he make love to her one last time. He went through the motions, hating himself, feeling that she was made of clay. She seemed to be testing him, perhaps trying to humiliate him. He believed he had brought it off, but at the end she'd said, "That was horrible."

  "Sorry."

  "You're right-handed?"

  "Yes."

  She adjusted herself in the bed and parted her legs and said, "Use that, then."

  On the days of these breakups he'd buy something for Beth—an expensive charm for her bracelet, some flowers, a scarf, a pair of earrings—and offer her the present, saying, "I love you, Tugar. I could never love anyone else."

  She had told him that, as a child, she was unable to pronounce "sugar." She had said "tugar," and the name had stuck. He used it only in these moments of grateful tenderness, as in similar moments of gratitude she called him "Butch."

  His love for Beth was sincere. He had said he'd loved these women, but the word never got out of the bedroom. He had desired them and could spend an entire afternoon in a hotel room with them, but it was an evaporating passion—he shrank at the thought of sitting across a table from them for an hour to have a meal. In his life, though he had searched, he had never met a woman who felt the same, who could separate desire from love. The women he'd known combined these feelings. For them, desire was love, and it was also the promise of a future. Desire was hope, a house, children, a car, a vacation, new shoes, even grandchildren. But for him desire had a beginning and an end—no middle, no future, only its ungraspable evaporation. The end that seemed so natural to him was seen by the women as a betrayal. But worse than "I hate you" was that rejected face, that abandoned posture, the disappointment, the tears.

  Then it was over and he heard, "Be careful, sir."

  Anna was wiping the oil from one of his feet, Sarita wiping the other.

  They helped him off the massage table and guided him to the shower, where he scrubbed himself clean, and he left the room swaying slightly, fatigued and stunned by the experience.

  At lunch, Beth said, "How was it?"

  "The treatment? Very nice."

  He had no w
ay of describing the turmoil of it, the women's hands, the drenching of hot oil, the reverie of sifted memories, the exhaustion, his sense of peace, and he regretted that this seemed like a deception.

  They were sitting outside, the sun-speckled shade falling across their table.

  "Carrot juice?" the waiter asked. "Please."

  "Did you swim?" Audie asked.

  Beth shook her head. "I wasn't in the mood."

  That was not the reason, and she pitied this man whom, in thirty years, she had never deceived. After her husband had left to get his treatment, she'd felt that someone had crept up behind her from the trees, a child or a small sinister man; she could sense that creature's presence on her skin—the prickling of its hovering just out of sight, waiting for her to relax her vigilance, so that he (it was male, and damp) could snatch her Birkin bag. Everything she needed was in the bag—her money, her picture ID, her passport and credit cards, her best charm bracelet, her perfume and makeup, her keys, and (not that either of them worked in India) her cell phone and BlackBerry. She knew that if she were foolish enough to jump into the swimming pool, she would return to her chair to find she'd been robbed, her bag gone.

  "I might take a dip," he said.

  He was a man, the indispensable person in her life who always said to her, "Let me handle it" or "I'll take care of it," and for that alone she loved him. He looked after her. He knew how to look after himself. He kept all his valuables in the room safe. She didn't trust the safe, but hardly trusted herself with her bag either. She wondered why she was here in India with thoughts of being stalked and violated, and for him the subject never seemed to occur, which was another reason she didn't bring it up.

  "I've got a treatment," she said, setting her soup spoon down, patting her lips with her napkin.

  They kissed, brushing cheeks, puckering, a sound like tasting air.

  As Beth walked through the bamboo grove to the spa lobby, she passed the gift shop. A woman in an Agni sari standing at the door to the shop stepped aside and said, "Please. You are welcome."

  "I'm running late, but I wanted to know if you have any shatooshes."

  "We can obtain," the woman said, a sweep of her head indicating her complete cooperation. "But it is not easy."

  "In what way not easy?"

  "It is contraband item."

  "I had thought of looking in the town. I didn't even know there was a town!"

  "Hanuman Nagar. Not available. Not hygienic."

  "But there's the monkey temple?"

  "Shrine, yes, but not temple. Disputed temple, so to say."

  "I'm sure it's interesting," Beth said, because the woman was agitated, as some Indians at Agni seemed to be when they were flatly contradicted, or even questioned.

  "There is such confusion, madam, such hullabaloo," the woman said, widening her eyes, swishing the drape of her sari over her shoulder. "Please, you desire shatoosh shawl, we will obtain full range for you with discretion."

  Beth was given a locker key at the spa. She changed into a robe, and when she went upstairs she was met by a young girl in a white uniform, in a posture of greeting, hands clasped, head bowed. "Namaskar. I am Prithi."

  On the way to the massage suite, Prithi complimented Beth on her lovely bag ("It is smart, madam") and on her clear skin. Beth thanked her but thought, Why not? I take care of myself. I eat right. I exercise. I'm only fifty. She was really fifty-three, but what was the difference? Her big birthday was far off and unthinkable.

  Prithi sat her down and washed her feet and said, "We believe that guests come from God," and with the solemnity of this ritual, with the antiphonal music playing on a plant stand, the warm water on her feet, and Prithi's gentle hands, Beth was on the verge of tears.

  She found she could not speak—her throat ached with emotion. Prithi helped her onto the table and lifted the large towel, and Beth slipped off her robe and lay down as the towel was tucked around her.

  "Thai massage, mam."

  "Yes," Beth murmured into the cushion under her face.

  She was tugged, first her shoulders and back, her legs pushed and pulled, Prithi's elbows and palms working her muscles, stretching her arms, tucking them behind her and applying pressure to them.

  And at each touch Beth was reminded of her strength, the legs that were toned from tennis, the limber calves and ankles, as her heels were pressed into her buttocks, the buttocks themselves trim from her exercise. Even her hands responded when they were manipulated—she was proud of the strength in her fingers and wrists.

  Each part of her body proved its elasticity in the massage; the physicality of the treatment was like an acknowledgment that she was fully alive. And something else—that no man apart from Audie had ever seen her like this. How odd that an Indian girl, hardly twenty, was caressing her this way. But the rhythm of the massage, the moving hands, the sense of blood being expressed through her muscle bundles, induced in her a dream state of being embraced and warmed by another body. She did not mind that the other person was a woman—was in fact reassured to know that only another woman would understand.

  Yet in this dream state at the edge of reverie she made Prithi a man, made those massage movements into caresses, the breathing of the young girl into a man's endearments. It worked. She was aroused, as though enclosed in the intimacy of a private bower in which she was exhausting herself in the throes of a passionate embrace.

  The music helped too; she felt it resonating within her, the vibrating fibers of the Indian strings clutching at her vitals. Even the massage oil had an aroma of sensuality, not a perfume but a musky heaviness that soaked her body and soothed it. Every bit of her body was awakened, sweetened by the pain of the massage, the attentive fingers, and before she knew it—before she was ready—it was over.

  "Here is some water, mam. I will await you outside. Take your time, mam."

  Audie was peering into the fish pond outside the dining room lobby, seeming to stare at the white and orange koi thrashing back and forth, darting, gulping at bubbles; but he was only killing time, looking sideways at Anna, who had changed into her restaurant uniform, the cream and gold sari. And where was Beth?

  "Good treatment, sir?" Anna said, creeping behind him.

  "The best," he said.

  "Thank you, sir."

  He turned to size her up, wondering if she knew that she sounded like a coquette, looking for a nuance on her lips, a lingering light in her eyes, the posture as well, the signs of Take me.

  "They are lucky fish," Anna said. He was sometimes unable to understand what she said, yet she made this assertion briskly. Indians could sound so confident even in their mispronunciations.

  "Lucky in what way?"

  "One Japanese guest tell me so, sir. Lucky fish." The fish were fat, their fins like wings, their big purse-like mouths gasping.

  "Jesus Christ is a fish, sir."

  Audie dipped his head sideways, as he did when he heard something unexpected.

  "The sign of fish is in all church, sir. Is a symbol, you can say, sir."

  Do I know this? Audie wondered, yet he was muddled pondering the odd fact, distracted by Anna's doll-like face, her clear skin, her slightly slanted eyes in puffy sockets, her pulled-back hair, her small sticking-out ears, her fleshy lips. She was lovely, and although she was still talking about Jesus the fish, Audie was fascinated. He could take her so easily into his arms, could scoop her up and possess her.

  His mind raced ahead, imagining Anna saying, But what about my mother?

  I will buy her a house.

  What about my brother's schooling?

  He can live with us. I'll send him to school. And: You are the prettiest thing I've seen in India.

  "In the Greek language, 'fish' means Jesus," Anna said. "And it was a secret word, sir. Even in my church, sir, fish picture on the wall."

  He was baffled and fascinated by the certainty of the Indian doll lecturing him on Jesus the fish symbol, but only half listening to this talk, hardly following i
t, while devouring her with his eyes.

  "Is that on the menu?" Beth said, stepping through the door, seeing her husband and the employee at the rail of the fish pond.

  Audie was not embarrassed by his reverie of possessing Anna. He was pleased with himself. He was someone who seldom craved anything. He'd had everything he ever wanted, he was content, he could not imagine wanting more. And here he was, experiencing desire—a rare emotion for him these days.

  Anna stepped back and became formal, deferring to a superior in the Indian way, as Dr. Nagaraj approached and greeted them.

  "We were discussing the fish," Audie said.

  "Ah, yes. Fish." He said peesh, making it sound inedible.

  "The Christian symbolism. Jesus is represented as a fish."

  Dr. Nagaraj waggled his head. He was saying yes, but didn't have a clue.

  Anna, self-conscious, perhaps suspecting that she would be referred to as the bringer of this news, sidled back to the table of menus and the brass dish of seeds.

  "Will you join us for dinner?" Beth asked.

  As the doctor waggled his head again, Audie said, "Just pineapple juice for me. I'm not eating after six."

  "Avoid sour juices," Dr. Nagaraj said. "You are kappa body type."

  Beth said, "I'm hungry, I'm eating."

  The massage had given her an appetite, made her thirsty, tired her, and reminded her that she had a body—her hunger she took to be a sign of health. She loved her body after it had been stroked by the young girl, whom she had trouble simplifying in the word "therapist."

  "Hinduism predates Christianity by many centuries," Dr. Nagaraj said at the table, without prompting. "You can find god Agni in Rig Veda, more than three thousand of years back. It is our path, our way of seeing the world, our consolation and salvation. Multiple functions and essential to Ayurveda."

  Audie asked himself again: Is he a real doctor? Is he a quack? And, Does it matter?

  Dr. Nagaraj was still speaking, perhaps answering one of Beth's questions. He had the Indian habit of monologuing, which was a gift for rambling on past all obstacles, deaf to any interruptions, indifferent to anyone's boredom, as though no one present had anything worthwhile to say—which, Audie reflected, was probably so, since neither he nor Beth had much to add. Beth was intent on what had become one of Dr. Nagaraj's stories. Or was it the same story?