by Paul Theroux
So he said yes, and, "That would be an awful way to go."
With the take-charge energy that Dwight noticed in him after his return from the States, Shah said brightly, "What I heard in America was people saying, 'I know I have a problem. But I don't know what to do.'"
"I understand that," Dwight said. He had been fearful of speaking the words, but they had run through his mind.
"Or, 'There are no answers,'" Shah said in a stilted quoting voice.
"Tell me about it," Dwight said.
"Yes," Shah said. "It is a Western confusion, a kind of spiritual ignorance. 'I don't know which way to turn.' We in India never say such things. Why, do you think?"
The little car had tipped forward and they were descending into a steep-sided valley on a road that was like the bewildering track Dwight saw when he thought of his own life. "Going nowhere," people said, when it was obvious that they were traveling hard on an awful road like this to somewhere, but the unknown.
"I don't know," Dwight said, not replying to a question but summing up every doubt in his head.
"In India we have answers. Real answers. That is Indian strength. It is our spiritual heritage. Never 'I don't know.' Always 'I can know.'"
"I wish I did."
"It was my late father's lesson to me, dear man, when he set off on his journey to be holy. A lack of holiness impedes enlightenment."
It was the voice Shah used in the boardroom when he was speaking to the wholesalers—the plastic fabricators, the rubber people, the textile men. He was the wordiest man Dwight had ever met, but he could also be blunt, with his lawyer's love of precision. He was that way now. He was saying, "Excess of karmic particles."
"I'm listening," Dwight said.
"Process we call nirjara. I have mentioned this to you in connection with my late father. Cessation of passionate action."
"I think I know what that means."
"Also fasting." Shah splayed his fingers and enumerated. "Eating properly. Solitude. Mortification. Meditation. Study. Atonement." He tugged at his thumb. "Renunciation of ego."
The list could have seemed intimidating and demanding, but because it was different from anything he'd known, and a new thought, Dwight found it restful to contemplate.
"You will see," Shah said, pointing ahead.
The land was hillier, emptier, with mountains showing in the distance like low clouds. What farms they saw, hacked into the hillsides, were even smaller than the ones they'd passed earlier. The corrugations of newly plowed gardens lay against the slopes. Farther on, a scene of almost biblical simplicity: women drawing water at a well, one with a clay pot on her shoulder, in an orange sari, and another woman heading up a dusty path in thin sandals, a flock of goats bleating at her.
"You see? We are leaving the world behind," Shah said. "Soon we will be in Mahabaleshwar."
It was twilight when they got to the edge of the town. Dwight could make out more hills beyond these, and in the car's headlights, people walking in the road, boys in white shirts, men in dhotis. He expected the car to stop now that they were in the town, but the driver kept going, past the lighted shops and into the darkness of the winding road, toward the solitude of the overhanging forest.
"Pratapgarh," Shah said, tapping the car window. And after a few minutes, "Mahuli."
He spoke in Hindi to the driver, who began to brake and then turned into a long driveway that rocked the car.
"We have arrived."
No lights, no sign of a building, just a dark place on an even darker road. And when they got out of the car the air was cool and damp. All that Dwight saw was the sky thickening with night, pierced by scattered pinholes of stars.
"I can't see anything." Yet the shadows were perfumed with incense.
"Tomorrow you will see everything."
Preceded by a flame, a woman appeared, holding a platter on which an oil lamp flickered. She rotated the flame under Dwight's chin, as Indru and Padmini had done, and marked his forehead with paste.
"Welcome," she said.
Without thinking, merely reacting to her, Dwight fell to his knees and touched her feet in a single fluid movement, and while he knelt with his head bowed, tears of gratitude and relief blurred his vision.
Shah made no sound, and yet—how was this?—Dwight could tell that the man approved, that he was delighted and proud of him.
"What did you just say?" Dwight asked as he got to his feet, hearing Shah speak to a man in a white robe who seemed to materialize behind the woman with the flaming platter.
"I told him, 'Swamiji, this man has brought you a gift.'"
Dwight brushed his eyes with the back of his hand. "What are you talking about?"
Now the light from the trunk of the car was illuminating a tall gateway he had not seen before, yet had passed through. The driver was directing a young man to lift it—the Indian chain of command: a driver was not a carrier.
"The rice. A full ton of it."
"I didn't do that," Dwight said.
"Collecting the money in America was the easy part. Buying it was simple. The hard business was shifting it. The paperwork, the supervision, the permits and signatures. So it is your gift."
Dwight had resented his unpaid work in dealing with the rice shipment; he had even suspected Shah of fobbing off this chore onto him to keep him away from the visiting Harvard team. He now saw the design in the whole effort. He could take credit: it hadn't been easy.
"Swamiji is thanking you," Shah said.
"Who is he?"
"He too is a passage maker," Shah said. The old man was still speaking. "He is inviting us to eat. But before we go in to take some food, he must ask you to give him your mobile phone."
"Glad to get rid of it." He rummaged in his pockets.
"All electronic devices," Shah said.
Dwight handed over his cell phone, then his BlackBerry.
"He is asking if you have a computer."
"Laptop's in my briefcase."
"Shall I put it in my safekeeping?" Shah said.
"Go ahead."
"As you saw, I too am a passage maker."
Dwight felt lighter, out of touch, relaxed. Nothing would ring or buzz; nothing would interrupt him. He followed the two men to the dining area, feeling happy.
They ate from clay bowls, by candlelight, in a cool clean room, seated on mats.
"Swami says again he is grateful for the rice," Shah said. "He is asking if you are Christian."
"I spent a lot of time in church when I was a boy," Dwight said.
The old man and Shah spoke awhile in Hindi, and then Shah said, "He is complimenting you. He knows Jesus Christ. Jesus, who said, 'If you want to be perfect, go and sell everything you have and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in Heaven.'"
"That's nice," Dwight said, feeling that he was hearing it for the first time.
"My late father did so," Shah said.
Now the old man was speaking—a shock to hear him speaking English.
"There was something that Jesus did not say."
"What did Jesus leave out?"
"He did not describe world of ego—fleeting world."
"I thought he did."
"Not at all," the old man said.
Shah was beaming, the flames lighting his face. Dwight waited for more.
"What is the world?" The old man gestured toward the door—toward Mumbai, Dwight guessed, where his own memories were so painful. "It is almost nothing, do you not agree?"
Dwight said, "It was something to me."
"But do you sincerely want to leave it behind?"
"Very much."
"That will not be hard if your heart is right."
"What is it then?" Dwight asked, and realized, hearing the reverence in his tone, that he had become a student, an initiate. He had surrendered his will, and was happy.
"It is a falling star," the old man said. "It is a bubble in a stream. A flame in the wind. Frost in the sun. A flash of lightning in a sum
mer cloud."
Dwight was too moved to speak. He blinked—tears maybe, or maybe he was overcome by the perfume in the incense that thickened the air.
"A phantom in a dream," the old man said. "Why are you rising, sir?"
Dwight did not answer. He knelt and bowed his head and touched the old man's feet, feeling a surge of energy in his fingers that jolted his wrists and stiffened his arms.
"Do you want to be free?" the old man asked softly.
"Yes, yes."
"It is possible. To be free, you must see things as they are."
"That's all?"
"That is a lot," the old man said, and got to his feet. "Now sleep."
He led Dwight through the courtyard. "Stars," Dwight said. "You don't see these in Mumbai."
As if obeying a subtle cue, the old man walked a few steps away, toward a gateway carved with images of animals and gods.
In an urgent whisper, Shah said, "You are so lucky. No one knows you here. It is as though you don't exist. You can be peaceful. You can think about your life. Meditate, my friend. Open your heart. What is the world? A flame in the wind. A flash of lightning in a summer cloud. So beautiful."
Dwight said, "How can I thank you?"
"Trust me with your valuables," Shah said, clutching the briefcase.
"They're nothing. A bubble in a stream."
The old man was watching, the light from the candles giving him the bright eyes of a nocturnal animal.
"I'll leave first thing," Shah said. "And then I'll be away."
"Whatever."
Shah said, "I'll stay in the States for a while."
Dwight said, "I think I'll stay here for a while."
In the darkness of his cubicle, Dwight slept as though drugged. He lay on his back, lightly covered by a clean sheet, breathing the residue of the night's incense.
At first light he was aware of Shah leaving, gathering his bags, scuffing his sandals on the path outside. Dwight simply held his breath and waited for silence to descend. The car doors slammed, the engine raced, and then, like a fly's buzz fading, the sound of the car was overlaid by silence again. And with that silence and Shah's departure a sweet fragrance filled his room.
Dwight imagined Shah in the car, heading back to Mumbai, rubbing his hands, probably making a gleeful call on his cell phone, hooting into it, something like, "It is done!" Shah thought he'd pulled a fast one, secured the Harvard account, ingratiated himself with Sheely and Kohut and Elfman—all the while keeping Dwight in the dark. He had maneuvered him to this ashram, divested him of his laptop, and was going off to get rich. He believed that he had fooled Dwight.
No, it had been a favor, a gift.
Once, at Shah's house, at that dinner, hearing Shah describe his mendicant father, Dwight had had a vision of himself as a holy man on a dusty road, swinging a stick, eating an apple. He had laughed then, because it had seemed so improbable, and it had been a way of jeering at himself. Now, lying on a narrow cot in the tidy room freshened by the fizz of leaves and the morning air at his open window, he saw himself again, a skinny sunburned geek in a turban and loincloth, carrying a wooden staff, and strolling down a country road, craving nothing except more life—happy, seeing things as they were.
The Elephant God
1
Walking toward the railway station, its dome like a huge head, its scrollwork and buttresses suggesting big ears, Alice smiled at the way the old building glittered like a great gray creature of granite, but closer it was just fakery, India mimicking England, a hodgepodge of disappointed Gothic. Alice hesitated at the archway, then stepped through the entrance. Inside it was a nut house, and it stank. The smells of India still terrified her. From a distance, India was splendor; up close, misery.
A man with stumps for hands, just rounded wrists, approached her with pleading eyes and lips. She gave him a ten-rupee note but could not bear to see him manipulate it. She had to brave the waiting room because her friend Stella was late, as usual. Pretty girls were never punctual—was it another way of being noticed? Pretty girls were always forgiven. Pretty girls could be peculiarly reckless and were seldom harmed or blamed because they were pretty. And the weird thing was that pretty girls never believed they were pretty enough.
Alice was never late, and she knew what that implied about her, but she told herself she didn't care. They had been friends at Brown, but not close. She had been the pretty girl's plain friend, a protector, to be patronized. Now, as this was not Providence, Rhode Island, but the world, over the weeks of their traveling together Alice had begun to see Stella in a new way. She pitied her for her egotism, her passivity, her abrupt changes of mind. Pretty girls had a free pass, they could do anything, especially get away with a childlike sort of helplessness. Alice wanted to say, "Someday it will be your undoing."
Having to search for Stella in the crowded station made Alice conspicuous and meant her having to stare at the people pushing, or the ones quarreling or sleeping in heaps on rectangles of cloth by the wall. Beaky old women sat abjectly in front of dishes of coins, exhibiting their misery. A mother with a limp baby made "give me food" gestures—her fingers fluttering to her mouth, presenting the baby as the object of suffering. Was the baby dead?
The Indian novels she'd read in the States had not prepared her for what she saw here. Where were the big fruitful families from these novels? Where were the jokes, the love affairs, the lavish marriage ceremonies, the solemn pieties, the virtuous peasants, the environmentalists, the musicians, the magic, the plausible young men? They seemed concocted to her now, and besieged in up-close India, all she thought of was Hieronymus Bosch, turtle-faced crones, stumpy men, deformed children.
"Yes?" It was someone else from Bosch, a dark brown man with dyed orange hair and red eyes. He pressed close to her and stroked her hair with a lizard-like hand. He held a tattered canvas bag in his other hand.
"Please leave me alone," Alice said.
The man looked gleeful. He said, "There are more than one billion people in India. You will never be alone."
A furious-faced mustached man in a khaki woolen uniform, with a truncheon under his arm, demanded to see Alice's ticket. Roosterish and aggressive, he was not in any of the novels. The first man backed away, still smiling.
"What do you want?" She had been told that some of these people wanted bribes.
"Security. Where going?"
"Going Bangalore."
"Flatporm pyve."
"Me waiting friend," Alice said, and smiled, hearing herself.
"Prend coming?"
"Friend coming just now."
The man left her, and there she waited, as though abandoned, feeling scrutinized, assaulted by people's stares. But what could she do? They had agreed to meet at the front of the station platform for the trip. Alice had not gotten used to Stella's lateness, and she thought, Why should I? But the late person always seemed to think that after many instances of being late, she was understood and pardoned and the waiter was habituated to it. But the opposite was the case—the blame grew.
When, finally, Alice saw Stella approaching through the throng, she knew her friend had something on her mind. Mental conflict showed in the way she walked. They'd been traveling for three weeks, and in that time Alice saw how obvious Stella was, how easily she could be read. She touched her right eye when she was being untruthful; she jogged her left leg when she was impatient; she quickly agreed to anything Alice might say when she wanted to talk. And then she talked and talked, as a way to prevent Alice from asking any questions, talked in order to dominate and conceal. She had talked a lot lately, and ever since arriving in Mumbai Stella's pretty-girl presumptions had been obnoxious. She was used to being treated as someone special; she was passive; she needed only to smile to attract notice.
The most obvious thing about Stella today Alice did not see until they were next to each other. She had no bag. She wasn't coming.
They had set off from Delhi with much too big rucksacks. Stella's had a
teddy bear dangling from it, another of her affectations. ("Teddy doesn't want to see the temple.") Without the rucksack she looked smaller and straighter and a little devious.
"Where's your pack?"
"Long story. I left it at the hotel." Stella's hand flew up and she touched her right eye.
Before she said anything more, Alice knew that Stella was trying to find the right words to say that she wasn't coming to Bangalore —would not be traveling with Alice, after they had spent every day together since leaving the States on the graduation trip that they'd planned since last January. Alice knew that from Stella's wan smile and her now contorted posture, digging her toe into the platform where someone had spat. She was staying behind—but why?
"I've been thinking really hard about us traveling together," Stella said. "How really fun it's been."
Alice said, "So you're bailing."
"Don't say it like that." Stella was shocked. She disliked Alice's bluntness. "You make it sound like I don't care."
"The plan was to take the train to Bangalore. To visit Sai Baba. He's there at the moment. There's a darshan this week. We have beds reserved at the ashram. And the trip to Chennai to see the temple. That was the plan, right?"
"I know, but—oh, gosh, I'm so confused. I don't know what to do."
"That was the plan," Alice insisted. "And this is the train. It's leaving in twenty minutes."
"I'm really sorry, Allie."
"So you really are bailing?"
"You make it sound like I'm betraying you."
It was not at all what Alice meant, but now she realized that it was what Stella was doing. She had guiltily uttered the exact word that she was denying, another of her traits, as "It's the truth, Allie" was always a lie.
"Bombay's a zoo. That's what you said. So why are you staying here?"
"I don't know. It's a long story."
But her expression, and especially her unreliable eyes, indicated that she knew. Well, of course she did. She was an only child. She always did what she wanted, and if there was a better deal, she took it, even if it meant breaking her word.
Alice had given up any hope of Stella's coming along, but she hated being lied to, and she was genuinely curious as to why a weak, spoiled girl like Stella had changed her mind and was staying in a city she said she disliked for its noise and its crowds and its smelly sidewalks.