The Elephanta Suite (10 page)

The waiters came and went, refilling the water glasses, using tongs to put warm naan into the basket, and finally slipping the bill to be signed into a plastic wallet and placing it near Audie's plate.

"So polite," Audie said.

He found himself whispering, because everyone else was whispering. The angry woman Beth had seen in the pool was hunched over her food, avoiding eye contact, and there were some people eating on the veranda whom Beth and Audie had never seen before at lunchtime.

That large table near the far rail, for example, was occupied by two men in suits and ties, looking out of place, one of them talking to the man Audie knew to be the manager, a man with an unpronounceable name whom he spoke to every Friday to renew their booking for another week. Today was Friday—he'd be seeing the man later.

When the waiter approached Audie to pick up the wallet with the signed lunch bill, Audie put his hand over it to detain him.

"Who's that?"

"Mr. Shah, sir. Owner of Agni, sir. And his managing partner. Also, as you know, Mr. Rajagalopalachari, manager."

Audie smiled in the direction of the owner, this Mr. Shah, as businessman to businessman, wishing for eye contact. But the man was still speaking, using the back of his hand, tapping on the table with his gold ring for emphasis.

"I want to tell him he's got a great little place here," Audie said. He kept looking. "He's got things on his mind. He's working. I recognize that. Taking a meeting."

"Coffee, sir? Madam?"

"I'm going to do without the toxins," Beth said.

"Good idea."

They left the veranda restaurant holding hands, feeling grateful—to have each other, to be in India, to be staying in this wonderful place.

"Another week, Tugar?"

They walked through the gardens and up the slope to the lobby of the main building to signal their intention to stay another week.

The clerk they spoke to stood up at his desk and faced them. "You must see the manager, sir."

"He's at the restaurant," Audie said.

"Yes, sir."

"So what do we do?"

"Come back later, sir."

They had a nap by the pool, in the shade of the overhanging trees, and at four, yawning, they made their way back up the slope for the formality of requesting another week.

A man they had never seen before met them on the stairs of the main building, greeting them but also obstructing their way. He was smiling broadly, though his eyes had a glaze of unblinking vigilance.

"You're not the manager," Audie said.

"Acting manager."

"Where's the manager?"

"He has been put on indefinite leave," the man said. "How may I help you?"

"It's just, here we are again. We're staying another week."

There was a head-wagging that meant "yes," a wobble that meant "certainly," but this man's head did not move, and he went on staring. Then his mouth tightened. He said, "Sorry, sir."

Audie said, "What do you mean?"

"Fully booked, sir. From tomorrow, sir."

"We've been doing this week to week. We've never had a problem. You can fix us up."

Beth added, "We'll take anything you've got."

"Nothing available, sir." He had begun to smile, which made his intransigence the more baffling.

"The place is practically empty," Audie said. "What are we going to do?"

"Departure time tomorrow morning time is eleven, sir. Bags will be picked up. Car will be waiting."

"What about Doctor Nagaraj? He might be able to help," Beth said. "We hate to leave—"

"Yes, madam."

"Maybe we can get another treatment," Audie said. Though he had spoken to Beth, the man said, "Spa is closed until further notice, sir."

"What are we going to do?"

"Settle bill, sir. Paperwork, sir. All charges to date."

"You mean now?"

"If you please."

Their excessive politeness now seemed to the Blundens like a form of excessive rudeness of an old-fashioned kind. Audie handed him his credit card and then sat with Beth in the garden among the hibiscus bushes, listening to the Indian musicians who played in a corner of the garden, seated in an open pavilion.

From here, above the music, they heard loud voices, scolding, possibly the owner—it was a tone they had never heard before at peaceful Agni. There were sounds of scurrying, the whir of golf carts coming and going, the important slamming of car doors. It was a suggestion of turbulence, turmoil anyway, the sort of thing they'd seen in the lower world of Hanuman Nagar.

"Someone's getting his nose bitten off," Audie said. "Glad it's not me."

He took Beth's hand, and from the pressure of his fingers she knew he was rueful. He didn't want to leave, nor did she. Yet Audie, who hated not getting his way, seemed content. They sat, feeling relaxed, with a glow of health, the harmony that they had hoped for penetrated by the light of peace that made them feel almost buoyant, loving each other.

"I don't really want to see anything more of India," Beth said, still holding his hand, as though answering a question he was asking with his fingers.

 

They skipped dinner and went to bed early—too early perhaps, because neither of them could sleep. Beth kept seeing Satish's toothy face saying,
I will see you tomorrow,
and now it sounded like a threat. Audie wondered what Anna was going to do with the money and regretted giving her so much. He had made that mistake before. They lay wakeful, face-saving in their separate beds, too chagrined to confide their feelings, yet they knew, without conferring bed to bed, that they had been rebuffed.
Nothing available
was just a lie, one of those obvious lies intended to humiliate you. But they were not sorry to leave. It was India, after all—at least the lower slopes of Monkey Hill counted as India—and they were headed home. They were dimly aware that they were being cast out, banished from Agni, sent below.

The morning was smokier than usual, a haze hanging over Agni, seeming to rise from the town. Sniffing it, they decided that they were glad to leave. When they put their bags out to be picked up, they saw the golf cart parked at the entrance, the porter standing beside it. So they rode with their bags to the main building.

They had expected one of the white Mercedes from the Agni fleet to be waiting, but instead saw a tubby black Ambassador parked in the porte-cochere. The car's hood was secured with a piece of rope that dangled over the radiator. No driver in sight, nor was there anyone from Agni to see them off. After more than a month of Indian effusiveness and thanks they were leaving in silence. They were used to the sendoffs at luxury hotels:
Please do come back and see us again.
But there was nothing, and even the golf cart driver had gone after putting the Blundens' luggage in the trunk of the Ambassador.

As Audie began to complain, he heard Beth say, "Hello, stranger," in a grateful way.

Dr. Nagaraj had approached the car and was opening doors for them. Now Audie noticed that the car had side curtains, a flourish that made it look older and somehow grubbier.

"My wee-ickle," Dr. Nagaraj said.

"You're taking us?

"Why not?"

"Where's the driver?"

"Not available."

Yesterday's lame excuse. And though Beth had already gotten into the back seat, Audie was puzzled. "I don't get it. Why no drivers?"

"They were lodging complaints about road conditions."

All these uncooperative people, and the sense of being banished, made Audie cross; he showed it by seating himself next to Beth and slamming the door hard.

"I will drive you to the airport for the first Delhi flight."

They could see from the way he clutched the steering wheel and labored with his forearms that Dr. Nagaraj was a terrible driver, stamping on the brake, thumping the clutch, and mashing the gears. Audie mumbled, "Grind me a pound."

Down the drive, through the gate, past the sign
Right of Entry Prohibited Except by Registered Guests,
Audie winked at Beth and knew what was in her mind: Who cares?

Now Dr. Nagaraj was taking the curves amateurishly, veering too far over at each bend, cutting into the oncoming lane. Audie was going to tell him to be careful but realized he didn't have to, because when he spoke to him, Dr. Nagaraj slowed down to reply.

"Anyway, what's wrong with the road conditions?"

"Main road is closed," Dr. Nagaraj said, riding the brake. "Blockage and stoppage.
Rasta roko,
we say."

"Is that unusual?"

"It is usual. People are angry because of Hanuman temple. Muslim people. That is the snag. The blockage is on the main road."

"Which way will you go?"

They were approaching the junction where the main road continued downhill and the road to Hanuman Nagar turned to the right, leveling off.

"Just here. Cart Road."

Beth recognized the name. "That's the road that goes past the temple. If there's a mob there, won't it be dangerous?"

"I will guide you," Dr. Nagaraj said.

Audie smiled at Beth and said, "Tugar, you actually know the name of this road?"

As he spoke, the road constricted and India seemed to shrivel around them, the stony slopes rushing up to the windows of the car, not just a pair of stray cows and the poorer shops at the edge of the town but a family of monkeys looking up from where they were picking through a garbage pile. This sense of walls closing in was made weirder by the absence of any people—not a single soul on a road that had been crowded with bikes and buses the last time they'd been on it, heading to the shatoosh seller.

"Where is everybody?"

This empty road in India had the familiar desolation of a road in an absurd dream that you woke from sweating.

Dr. Nagaraj, snatching at the steering wheel, rounded another curve and spoke in Hindi, slowing down. A multicolored barrier lay in the distance, a head-high barricade.

No, it was a solid mass of men jammed together like a wall across the narrow road. They were waving sticks, perhaps the men were shouting too, but there was no sound. The windows of the car were shut, and what the Blundens saw resembled the India they had seen from the car on their first day. But these men were bearded and angry, and the sunlight made it all much worse.

"Turn around!" Audie shouted.

Shocked into his own language, Dr. Nagaraj was yapping with fear. He slowed the car and struggled with the steering wheel, attempting a U-turn. But the road was too narrow, and seeing he could go no farther, he began to jiggle the loose gearshift. When he looked back to reverse the car, his face was close to the Blundens', gleaming in terror.

"Get us the hell out of here!"

"Oh, God." Dr. Nagaraj winced at the
pock-pock
of stones hitting the car, the sound on its metal as of teeth and claws.

On these stifling days in Mumbai, when a meeting dragged on, Dwight hitched himself slightly in his chair and looked at the spot where his life had changed. From the height of the boardroom on the top floor of Jeejeebhoy Towers, where Mahatma Gandhi crossed Church Gate, he could see down the long table and out the window, to marvel at it and to reflect on how far he'd come. He loved the Gateway of India for its three portals, open to the sea on one side, land on the other. He regarded it as something personal, a monumental souvenir, an imperial archway, attracting a crowd—the ice cream sellers, the nut vendors, the balloon hawkers, the beggars, and the girls looking for men.

Eight Indians sat at the gleaming conference table, four on either side, and he, Dwight Huntsinger, visiting American, lawyer and moneyman, was at the head of it.

"You are a necessary evil," M. V. Desai, the industrialist, had joked.

Objecting to the preening boldness of the man, Dwight smiled, saying, "You bet your sweet ass I am."

The man was worth millions. Everyone at the table winced, but Dwight's remark was calculated: they would never forget it.

An assortment of roof tiles were scattered on the table—samples, to be manufactured somewhere in Maharashtra. Also a bottle of water and a glass with a paper cap at each place, a yellow pad, pencils, dishes of—what?—some sort of food, hard salty peas, yellow potato lumps, spicy garbanzos, something that looked like wood shavings, something else like twigs, bundles of cheese straws.

"It's all nuts and cheese balls at this table," Dwight had said the first day, another way of responding to M. V. Desai, another calculation. They had stared at him as though they'd just heard bad news. None of the food looked edible. Although it was his second trip to India, he had not so far touched any Indian food. He did not think of it as food; all of it looked lethal.

Get me out of here
had been his constant thought. India had been an ordeal for him, but he had chosen it in a willful way, knowing it was reckless. It was deliberate. Recently divorced, he had said to his ex-wife in their last phone call, "Maureen, listen carefully. I'm going to India," as if he were jumping off a bridge. It was the day he received her engagement ring back—no note, just the diamond ring, sent by FedEx to his office—and he was hoping she'd feel bad. But as though to spite him, she said, "It'll probably change your life," and he thought, Bitch!

That was the first trip, a week of Indian hell—a secular hallucinatory underworld of actual grinning demons and foul unbreathable air. He had dreaded it, and it had exceeded even his fearful expectations—dirtier, smellier, more chaotic and unforgiving than anywhere he'd ever been. "Hideous" did not describe it; there were no words for it. It was like an experience of grief, leaving you mute and small.

The worst of it was that Indians never ceased to praise it, gloating over it, saying how much they loved it. But it was a horror, and here was his discovery: the horror didn't stop; it went on repeating; he turned a corner and went down a new street and his senses were assaulted again, the sidewalks like freak shows.

"You seem a good deal disappointed," Mr. Shah said. Shah, the point man, was his guide in everything.