The Elephanta Suite

by Paul Theroux

  Now, "I guess I just missed you," Beth would say, as a way of explaining her all-afternoon absence.

  "That's okay," Audie would reply. "I was tied up longer than I'd expected."

  Each was grateful for the other's casualness, since in the past they'd seemed to agree that solitude was selfish. But their absences were an unexpected relief, and the fact that they did not need to explain them to each other left the absences ambiguous, almost without meaning, as in other years when, late home from the office, Audie had said, "I was held up." On many of those occasions he'd been with a woman, his secretary, someone from the company, the wife of an employee.

  Beth somehow knew but hadn't asked, since asking would have made it real, more serious than she imagined it to be. And Audie, in the wrong, was thankful to her for giving him the benefit of the doubt. Because he did not examine these affairs, kept them in the dark where they were enacted, they vanished, and apart from certain moments, the bitterness mainly, even the memory of them was gone. Only in the reveries of the treatment room, being massaged, flirting obliquely with the therapist, did he remember. And in the week when Beth had begun to say that she'd been held up—"Just missed you"—he was calm. He owed her that much.

  As for Anna, he had never felt so attracted and yet so resistant to a woman. All his memories had welled up in him, and though he was aroused, the feeling was like a farewell. He was delighted that he still felt it as a throbbing in his ears, a swilling of blood, but he knew that it led nowhere. Knowing that he could have the woman so easily made him generous, and the knowledge calmed him. He saw Anna one evening with a young man, walking through the grove of bamboo, and he smiled, even as she was flustered—he knew that she did not want him to draw any conclusions, for everything in her demeanor said, I am waiting for you.

  Still, he saw her every day. He wondered where she lived, what her room was like, what she wore on her day off, the details of her real life when she was not in a uniform and working. Seeing her in an Agni sari or in the white pajamas of a spa therapist gave her an anonymity that prevented him from seeing her any other way. It was not physical desire he felt, hardly any compulsion at all, but only simple curiosity. He thought, Who are you when you're at home?

  Beth, in her absences, which were most of them treatments, wanted to be touched. And in the hours in between she needed to be alone, to reflect on being touched, being held, caressed, dripped with hot oil, and at last whispered to, even if the words were only "Please relax your arm" or "Please turn over for me" or "Is it too hard, madam?"

  She found that she could not pass easily from the intimacy of a treatment room, the fatigue following a massage, to a meal or a drink with Audie. She wanted enough privacy and solitude to reflect on what had just happened.

  I feel like a schoolgirl, she thought afterward, lying in a chair by the pool, out of sight, near where the monkeys had snatched her food. Had she been with Audie, she would have felt vulnerable and slightly ridiculous. But being alone added something delicious to her reverie—no one to judge it, nothing to measure it by, like the fantasy of a virgin almost, easy for her to recapture, since in her life she had been intimate with one man, whose absence now seemed like a kindness.

  And each of them, husband and wife, remembered what they had seen of Hanuman Nagar, the other world down the slope, on a dusty ledge of Monkey Hill, its disorder and its ragged shadows.

  5

  Someone breathing hard was waiting for her, someone's wet face watching her, eager for her to join him—all this was new and it made her happy. And as long as she was apart from Audie, she did not have to examine any of it. Unexamined, the thing held no blame: you could call it anything. It was a pulse, nothing more, like a sudden chord in a passage of music, notes played from that other world, the music that she'd been hearing ever since she'd come here. None of it had a name.

  Only when she picked something apart with self-conscious fingers, or was made conspicuous by someone familiar, a pair of scrutinizing eyes on her, did a tremble of guilt cause her to hesitate. Otherwise, what did it matter? She had done nothing wrong.

  If Audie's contentment was a plus, it was also a puzzle. He was too kind, too beneficent; he left her to herself and did not inquire as to her whereabouts. His benign absence made her uneasy, for her thoughts were complicated, and whenever she saw him—at meals, in the suite, glimpsed in the half spinal twist at yoga—she felt, without any reason, that she was deceiving him, that her heart was halfway down the mountain, in the dusty and littered bazaar of Hanuman Nagar.

  Still, she did nothing to encourage Satish—in fact she resisted him. With the sort of impatient clumsiness that he'd used against the wild monkeys, he'd offered her all sorts of invitations. She had first pretended not to understand, then had flatly refused. She stopped short of telling him that he was breaking the Agni rules—that seemed overbearing. Yet why had her refusals made her flush with guilt? Perhaps because she knew they were her secret, and when had she ever had a secret from Audie? None of her refusals had been so strong as to discourage the boy. As the days passed he had become more familiar, which was his way of being persistent.

  One day before a massage, while she stood in her robe, the blinds half drawn, the music playing—ragas, chants of Ganesha—he'd raised his hands and said, "Moment, madam."

  Satish assumed the lotus position and then, twining his legs and falling backward, hauled himself up in a series of specific but fluid moves, tipped forward onto his forearms, supporting his head and whole body, and raised his legs until they were vertical. Finally he lowered his legs over his back and lifted his neck so that his feet touched his face.

  "Vrischikasana," he grunted through his wiggling toes.

  "I've seen that in circuses," Beth said.

  "Scorpion pose."

  He was, she realized, trying to impress her, and his effort made her smile. She was happy merely being with him in the incense-filled room, the music playing, anticipating his hands on her, the hot oil, the sounds of his breath as he touched her. But he was young; he felt the need to perform.

  "You see this watch?" he said another day.

  She looked, but she could not tell the make. It was plump and seemed absurdly technical.

  "Chronometer," he said, pressing the protrusions at its edges. "Timer, digital readout. Twistable bezel. Totally waterproof. Immersible for two hundred meters. Self-winding."

  "I thought it was a bracelet."

  "Is also jewelry. Valuable!"

  Wide-eyed, blowing bubbles with his boasting. Walubloo!

  "You're not supposed to wear that when you do massages, are you?"

  Beth took him by the hand and turned his wrist over and squeezed the watchband, plucking open its fastener, slipping it off.

  "Isn't that better?" She had touched him for the first time.

  He looked chastened as he ducked outside to allow her the privacy to slide beneath the sheet on the massage table. But in the half-dark of the room, on his return, he was confident again, working on her shoulders, breathing softly against her neck.

  "Have a nice night," he said to her the following afternoon when the massage had ended.

  It seemed like an inquiry. She said, "What do you do at night?"

  "I repair to my house. Reading to improve education. Yoga to improve body and mind. Also painting."

  "You paint pictures?"

  "Classic painting," he said. "Indian gods and goddesses."

  What made her feel awkward was that she knew, before he said another word, where this entire conversation was going, the next elements of it, her questions, his responses, and how in a matter of minutes it would end. And she had started it.

  "Lovely," she found herself saying. "It sounds lovely."

  "Painting with brush. Making pictures for puja." He wobbled his head, a misleading movement she now understood as affirmative. "Classic."

  "You're a man of many talents."

  She was hardly speaking her own mind; she was glad no one could hea
r these predictable phrases and clichés. It was as though she were reciting dialogue that someone else had prepared for her, that other people had practiced. Or perhaps all love affairs began like this, as repetition, as mimicry, as passionate clichés. Yet she wanted to believe that the feeling was real and originated within her.

  It was better not to say anything, better just to smile, to let his hands work on her, to give nothing a name.

  In spite of this, another whole unthought-out line came to her. "I'd like to see them."

  "Yes, please."

  "Maybe sometime."

  "Madam, tonight."

  Against her will she found herself agreeing, and just afterward, avoiding Audie at the pool, she felt excited, thrilled and yet jittery, like a girl.

  Satish had said he'd meet her below the laundry building, which lay on the path that wound down Monkey Hill to the main road into Hanuman Nagar. She told Audie she was going up to the spa—"a treatment." He smiled and said, "Have a good one." But instead of climbing up the road, she ducked through the bamboo grove and walked quickly through the thick flowering trees, into the smoky air that rose from the town.

  She felt on her face the sourness of descending the path into a thickening smell, plunging toward shadows, ducking beneath the silken daylight of dusk in this upper world into the fugitive and divided lamplight of the town below.

  A person thrusting a broomstick at her rose up on the road and caused her to gasp.

  "Moddom."

  "Who are you?"

  "Chowkidar, moddom."

  "What do you want?"

  Fright made her severe, and her severity made the man deferential.

  He said, "Protection only, moddom."

  His mildness calmed her. She found some rupees in her pocket—in the darkness she could not tell how much—and handed the notes to the watchman. He touched them to his forehead, then bowed to let her pass.

  The downward path was so narrow her shoulders brushed the bushes on either side of it, and she imagined that at that time of day there might be monkeys, crouching to observe the setting sun, like the ones she'd seen with Audie a week or so before, when they'd heard the name Hanuman Nagar from the spectral old man.

  The sense that she was leaving one world for another was palpable: in the rising dust and the sound of impatient voices, the men shouting at the monkey temple, the smell of smoke, the sharp Indian yell, meant to be heard at a distance and to make the hearer submit to it. The grating of traffic, too—heavy trucks, the laboring bus, all shuddering metal and hisses. And, farther from the clear air and the tidy gardens of Agni, the stink of the town—dirt, dung, smoke, mingled with cooking odors and scorched oil. Disorder was also a stew of smells.

  Where she thought she saw a monkey squatting on its heels, a man stood up. Too startled to scream, her hands flew up to protect her throat and her face. She saw it was Satish.

  "Not to worry," he said.

  She hoped he wouldn't touch her. Rattled from her uneasy descent from Agni on the filthy path, she said, "I can't stay long."

  "It is near," he said, placing a finger on her elbow to steer her, and when she reacted, he said, "Sorry!"

  His touch made her stumble, the path here littered with loose trodden stones. He was still apologizing as they passed behind a shop, a wall that reeked of urine and was scribbled on, and came out onto the road. In the distance, at a curve in the road, she saw the shop fronts of Hanuman Nagar, merchandise hanging in doorways, and the fires at the monkey temple—men waving torches, some people chanting, the line of policemen holding sticks.

  "Cart road," Satish said, blocking her way as a truck went slowly past in gusts of diesel fumes.

  "That temple," Beth said.

  "Hanuman shrine. Long ago, Mughal time, Muslim ruler put mosque in its place. Now it is restored to Hindu. Now everyone so happy."

  "Why are those people shouting?"

  "Muslim people," Satish said, hurrying ahead, away from the center of town.

  She followed him, her head down, walking just above the gutter and the storm drain, by the roadside, thinking, This is insane.

  "I have to go back." She felt even more like a girl, but a foolish one.

  "It is just here," he said, fluttering his fingers into the middle distance.

  All she saw were small yellow windows, like lanterns hanging in darkness, faces at some of the windows, the blue flicker of TV sets, and the woof-woofing of dogs somewhere. At one doorway she smelled meat grilling, the sputter and hiss, the pucker and bust of hot snapping fat.

  Satish must have smelled it too. He said, "Muslim people. Many here. This we are calling"—he was pointing at Monkey Hill, but the sweep of his arm seemed to take in the whole province—"Muslim belt."

  She said, "I can't go any further."

  "We have arrived," he said, and led her up a path of broken paving stones that rolled under her feet, past a small astonished girl in a bright pink dress dawdling by a lighted doorway, past a padlocked shed, to a door latch which Satish manipulated, pushing the door open. Beth stepped inside quickly, fearing to be seen, and was at once suffocated by the smell of cooked food, steaming on a low table.

  "Bhaji," Satish said, lifting the lid of a tin pot. Then more lids up and down. "Mung dhal. Uttapam. Bindi. Naan bread. Rice."

  "Very nice," Beth said, overcome by the heat, the stifling aromas, and a distinct odor of turpentine.

  "Gurd," Satish said, offering her a dish of crudded yogurt.

  "I really must go back," she said.

  "Madam," he said, "take some food."

  "I'm not hungry," she said, and remembered from a book on India that it was considered offensive to refuse food in an Indian household, but that a small symbolic mouthful was all that was necessary. She said, "But some of that curd would be delicious. Just a touch."

  He spooned some into a bowl and handed it to her, saying, "Sit, please, madam. A drink. Hot tea. Juices. Cool water."

  She was rechecking the position of the door, preparing her exit, when she saw an assortment of foot-high paintings propped on a shelf under a bare light bulb.

  "No, thank you. Are those your pictures?"

  She was still standing, eyeing the door. He went to the paintings and selected a highly colored one of a fat naked baby attended by a smiling chubby-cheeked woman in a yellow sari.

  "Bal Krishna," he said. "Krishna baby. Mother Yashoda."

  Moving closer to the shelf, she saw other pictures she had taken to be animals, yet some of them had human features in spite of their snouts and multiple arms.

  "Ganesh. Hanuman. Durga. I do with brush. Classical."

  "Superb. Thank you. Now I must go."

  "Madam."

  But as soon as she turned and found the latch and got the door ajar he was next to her, embracing her, pressing himself against her, whinnying, "Madam. Madam."

  "I don't feel at all well," she said.

  "I have aspirin, madam." His hands and fingers flexed on her waist as though testing its pliability.

  But now she had gotten the door fully open, and the night air had a chilly smell of dirt and woodsmoke in it that clung like grime to the bare skin of her face and arms.

  Just a few feet down the path the small girl in the pink dress gaped at her, the light from the open door falling across her face, brightening her wide staring eyes. Satish had pursued Beth, but when he saw the little girl he hesitated, seemingly overcome, and he dropped his arms to his sides, gathering his hands into his pajama top as though in a reflex of shame.

  Without a word, moving efficiently in fear, Beth stepped along the walkway, those same uneven paving stones, and fled into the road, keeping her head down when car headlights passed her. She looked back several times to make sure she was not being followed.

  She slipped into the suite with all the stealth of a burglar, called out "Audie?" But there was no reply. The suite was empty.

  In the darkness outside the Agni enclosure, the smell was more apparent. Audie had stood j
ust at nightfall watching the sun drop, dissolving into the depths of dust and haze that lay in thick bars above the horizon, obliterating the mountains—and the mountains were the Himalayas. Rising around him in the gathering dusk was the sharpness of dry trees, the stray grit in the air, the dander of grubby monkey fur—and the smell of boiled beans, burned meat, woodsmoke, and foul water—until the darkness itself seemed to stifle him.

  Had Beth not announced that she was getting an evening treatment, he would not have come. But impulsively he had called Anna's cell phone and, as though expecting his call, she'd given him explicit directions, saying that she would meet him at six-thirty. She'd chosen sundown, but even at sundown there was leftover light, and this was the reason he gave for her being late.

  "Excuse me, sir."

  Her voice came out of the darkness. She was walking toward him, and she emerged as though materializing before him like a phantom.

  "I didn't see you coming. Don't you have a flashlight?"

  "A torch, sir, yes. But not necessary now."

  She did not want to be seen. That was a sign of her seriousness. And so Audie summed her up quickly: She is meeting me secretly. She thinks she knows what I want. She is willing to cooperate—all this was obvious in her unwillingness to use a light. Artful, he thought, but even I don't know what I want.

  "Your cell phone works pretty well on the hill."

  "My mobile, sir. Guest Services provides. Sometimes we are on call for night treatments."

  "Is that what this is?"

  Anna laughed, snuffling nervously. "I don't know, sir."

  "Where's your flashlight, honey?"

  "Here, sir."

  He groped for it, found her warm hand, took the flashlight and switched it on, hoping that the light would drive away the smells. It seemed to work; as soon as he could see the stony path, the whiffy shadow dispersed, and he could breathe more easily.

  "Where are we going?"

  "My friend's flat, sir."

  "In the woods?"

  "Not woods, sir. Residential Civil Lines."