The Elephanta Suite (2 page)

"Very spiritual here," he said after an awkward pause, having gotten no response from Audie.

Audie smiled. How was it possible for people to talk so much that they were oblivious of their listener? Yet Audie was relieved—he didn't want to give out information about himself. He did not want to lie to anyone, and knew that if anyone asked a direct question he would give an evasive or misleading reply. Talkative people made it so easy for him to be anonymous.

"What do you do for a living?" he was sometimes asked.

"Whole bunch of things," he would reply. "I've got a bunch of companies. I'm involved in some start-ups and rebrandings. We're in housewares. Hard furnishings. White goods. We used to do a lot of mail order, catalogue inventory, and now it's mostly online."

The Indian woman said to him, "Where do you live?"

"Tough question," Audie said. "This time of year we're usually in our house in Florida. We've got an apartment in New York. We mostly spend our summers in Maine. We've got a condo in Vermont, ski country. Take your pick."

But the woman wasn't listening to him. She was talking about her daughter, who lived in New York City and was now twenty-seven and a little overdue to be married. They—mother and father—were in India to meet the parents of a boy they hoped would be a suitable husband. The boy happened to be living in Rochester, New York, where he taught engineering.

"Arranged marriage," she said. "Best way."

She seemed to be twinkling with defiance, challenging Audie to question her adherence to the custom of arranged marriage. He enjoyed hearing her overselling it.

"Rupesh and I were arranged by our parents. Americans find it so funny." She shrieked a little and wobbled her head. "I didn't know his name. Only his horoscope. He was almost stranger to me. Almost thirty years together now!"

While insisting on her approval of the custom of arranged marriage, she was also presenting herself as an antique, if not an oddity, and wished to be celebrated that way. She lived in the USA; she had shocked her American friends with this sort of talk and was defying Audie to be shocked. But Audie decided to defy her in return by smiling at her.

"Beth was a stranger to me when we met, too," he said. "Picked her up in a bar."

He overheard the Indian man—Bill? Rupesh?—say, "vas vesting away" and "his own urine"—and he turned away from the man's disappointed wife.

"My father," the man said, glad for another listener. "He was in intensive care at Georgetown Medical Center. They said they couldn't do any more for his condition, which was inoperable cancer of pancreas. 'He will be more comfortable at home.' They were abandoning him, no question. He was wasting. As last resort we saw a yogi. He prescribed the urine cure. My father was instructed to drink a beaker of his own urine first thing in morning. He did so. After a week he grew stronger. Appetite came back. Hunger was there. Thirst was there. Second week, my God, he began to put on weight. Skin better, head clear. Third week he was walking a bit. Balance was there. Two months of this, drinking urine, and body was clear. Doctor said, 'Miracle.'"

That was another thing: one minute it was budget projections and stock analysis, the next minute it was horoscopes and arranged marriages and the wonder of drinking your own whiz.

"I tell you, India is booming," the man said when Audie did not react. "There is no stopping it. Bangalore is next Silicon Valley. Innovation!"

"So I heard," Audie said, "but all I see in India"—and he smiled at the couple—"all I see in India is people reinventing the flat tire."

Soon after that the couple smiled, and said they'd enjoyed meeting them, and excused themselves; and only then did Audie take notice of them, because he was unable to tell from their manner whether they were offended and abruptly ducking out or else actually meant what they said. It was a kind of inscrutability he had not associated with Indians. He was impressed.

"He seemed nice," Beth said.

"Nice doesn't seem like the right word for Indians," Audie said. "It's a little too bland. Lavish, outlandish, pious, talkative, overbearing, in your face, slippery, insincere, holy—I'm thinking they are Indian words. That talk about drinking number one—did you ever hear anything like it?"

"I wasn't listening. I thought he was handsome. That's the trouble with you—you expect them to make sense."

"What do you do?"

"I look at them talking. I don't listen. Didn't you notice he had lovely eyes?"

They had gotten up and were leaving the table when they heard a sharp "Hello." An Indian man was bowing, another one who'd materialized next to them. He was carrying a clipboard.

"Doctor," Beth said—she had forgotten his name, but he too wore an Agni nameplate, lettered
Nagaraj.
"Doctor Nagaraj."

He had said that he would see them at dinner, and they had forgotten they'd promised they'd see him. But he was unfussed, saying "Not to worry" as they apologized, and again Audie smiled at his inability to read the man's mood—whether or not he minded their having forgotten him.

"We've already eaten," Audie said, seeing the waitress approach, and he noticed it was the girl who had seated them, Anna. She held three menus and stood next to the table, looking serene, patient, attentive. She had a pale, round, Asiatic face, like a doll, her hair in a bun, drawn back tight, giving her prominent ears. She was small, quick to smile when she was smiled at.

"Is that short for something—maybe Annapurna?"

"No, sir. Mother of Mary. I am Christian, sir."

"Imagine that."

"Anna Hunphunwoshi, sir. From Nagaland, sir. Kohima, sir. Very far, sir."

"I've seen you in the spa."

"I also do treatments in daytime, sir."

"Are you eating, doctor?" Audie said.

"Thank you, no. I don't take food after six p.m." He spoke to Anna. "I will take some salted lassi."

"We should follow your example," Beth said.

"As you wish."

"Three of those, Anna, please."

"Thank you, sir." She stepped silently away, clutching the menus.

"Where did you say you went to medical school?" Audie asked the doctor.

"Ayurvedic Institute in Mangalore."

"That makes you a doctor?"

"Ayurvedic doctor, yes."

"Can you practice outside India?"

"Where Ayurvedic medicine is licensed, indeed, I can practice Ayurvedic without hindrance," Dr. Nagaraj said. "May I see your right hand, sir?" And when Audie placed his big hand in the doctor's warm slender hand, the doctor said, "Just relax," and scrutinized it, and made some notes on his clipboard.

"That Indian script looks like laundry hanging on a clothesline," Audie said.

The doctor, intent on Audie's palm, said nothing. And even when the waitress returned with the three tumblers of lassi, he went on studying the big splayed hand. He made more notes and, what was disconcerting to Audie, he wrote down a set of numbers, added more numbers to them, subtracted, multiplied, got a total, then divided it and underlined the result. Still holding Audie's palm, the doctor raised his eyes and did not smile.

"You had a hard life until age thirty-five," Dr. Nagaraj said. "You prepared the ground, so to say. Then you reaped rewards. You can be helpful to a politician presently, but avoid it. Next ten years very good for name and fame. Madam?"

He offered his hand to Beth, and she placed hers, palm upward, on top of his.

"Those numbers," Beth said.

"Good dates, bad dates, risky times."

"How long will I live?" Audie said.

"Until eighty-five, if all is observed," the doctor said without hesitating. He went back to examining Beth's palm and scribbling notes.

"I don't want to know how long I'm going to live," Beth said. "Just give me some good news."

"Happy childhood, but you have no children yourself," the doctor said. "Next ten years, excellent health. Never trust any person blindly, especially those who praise you. Follow intuition. Invest in real estate. Avoid crowds, smoke, dust." The doctor strained, as if translating from a difficult language he was reading on Beth's palm. "Avoid perfume. No litigation."

As the doctor tensed, showing his teeth, Beth said, "That's enough," and lifted her hand and clasped it. Audie glanced at her and guessed that she was also wondering if Dr. Nagaraj was a quack. But that thought was not in her mind.

Dr. Nagaraj perhaps sensed this querying, though he seemed calm again. He sipped his lassi, he nodded, he tapped his clipboard.

"I took my friend Sanjeev to Rajaji National Park to see the wild elephants. They are my passion. Did you not see my collection of Ganeshes in my office?"

"I remember," Beth said. "The elephant figurines on the shelves."

"Quite so." The doctor drank again. "We encountered a great herd of elephants in Rajaji. They are not the same as the working domesticated elephants but a separate species. They saw us. We were near the banks of the river. Do you know the expression 'Never get between an elephant and water'?"

"No," said Beth.

"I guess I do now," said Audie.

"The elephants became enraged. I saw the bull elephant trumpeting and I ran and hid in the trees. Sanjeev was behind me, rooted to the spot, too frightened to move."

As he spoke the waitress came back, paused at their table, then asked whether there was anything more she could get them.

"We're fine," Audie said.

When she had gone, Dr. Nagaraj said, "I watched with horror as the huge elephant bore down on Sanjeev, followed by the herd of smaller elephants, raising so much dust. Seeing them, Sanjeev bowed his head and knelt, knowing he was about to die. He couldn't run, he couldn't swim. But he did yoga—
bidalasana,
cat position, instinctive somehow."

Flexing his fingers, making a business of it, Dr. Nagaraj straightened the mat in front of him, tidied the coaster under his glass, then dipped his head and sucked at the lassi.

"And what happened?" Audie asked.

Dr. Nagaraj went vague, his face slackening, then, "Oh, yes," as he pretended to remember. "The great bull elephant lowered his head as though to charge. But instead of impaling Sanjeev on his tusks as I had expected, the elephant knelt, trapping Sanjeev between the two great tusks. Not to kill him, oh no. I could see it was to protect him from the other elephants trampling him."

He seemed on the point of saying more when Beth said that she was exhausted, that she would be a basket case if she didn't get some sleep.

"I call that another miracle," Beth Blunden said as they strolled under the starry sky to their suite.

They woke to a brilliant sunrise and felt there were no days like this anywhere but on this hilltop in India. The rest of India and the stormy world were elsewhere.

Was it two weeks they'd been there? With a clarity of mind and a lightness in their bodies that was new to them, they had lost their sense of passing time. Being at Agni had strengthened them, and they were surprised, for it was like a cure for an obscure but tenacious ailment of which they'd been unaware. Rested, well looked-after, like children on an extended holiday pampered by adults, they were invigorated, enjoying the power and poise of contentment. Audie had even stopped teasing the waiters about the food, calling the uttapam "shit on a shingle."

Everyone was pleasant to them, the staff always pausing to say hello or
namaskar.
Always smiling, deferential without groveling, they waited on the Blundens, devoted servants, prescient too, anticipating their desires. "Carrot juice again, sir?" "Green tea sorbet again, madam?" And when the Blundens skipped meals the waiters would say, "We missed you last night, sir," as though their absence mattered and was a diminishment.

The Blundens were, to their surprise, grateful and patient. What Audie said about owning "a bunch of businesses" wasn't a hollow boast—it was true. They were wealthy, they owned four homes in four different states, and they knew all about employees and servants. They had gardeners, housekeepers, caretakers, odd-job men, but all of them were so well paid and so used to the Blundens as to be unafraid and presumptuous.
You need us
seemed to show in their resentful eyes. Indian workers were different, neither presumptuous nor servile; well spoken, educated, and skilled, they were like people from another planet whose belief was
We need you.

"I should start a company here," Audie said. "Or do what everyone else is doing, outsource here."

They had arrived in the dark smoky midnight at Mumbai Airport and had been driven swiftly past lamp-lit shacks—a vision of fires, of torches—on the way to the brilliantly lit hotel, where they stayed in the Elephanta Suite—Audie intoned the name printed over the carved doorway. They had slept well, waking at dawn to be driven to the airport for the one-hour flight, after which they had been met by a driver in a white uniform holding a signboard lettered
Belondon
in one hand and a platter of chilled face towels in the other.

What the Blundens had seen of India, the populous and chaotic India they'd been warned about, the India that made you sick and fearful and impatient, was that one-hour drive from the airport to the top of Monkey Hill, the Ayurvedic spa known as Agni. Audie thought of the drive as a long panning shot, the sort you'd get in a documentary with a jumping camera, the very first image a woman with no hands, begging at a stoplight just outside the airport, raising her stumps to Audie's window ("Don't look, honey"), then the overloaded lopsided trucks with
Horn Please
written on the bumper, the ox carts piled high with bulging sacks sharing the road with crammed buses painted blue and red, the sight of women slapping clothes on boulders in a dirty stream ("Laundering," the driver said), others threshing grain on mats. Wooden scaffolding on brick buildings that already looked like ruins, whitewashed temples, mosques with minarets like pencils, gated houses, hovels, the lean-tos and tents of squatters. ("Gypsies—many here, sir.") Small girls in clean white dresses, boys in shorts, men in business suits on bicycles, youths on motorbikes, skinny cows chewing at trash heaps, a man pissing against a tree ("Without a pot to piss in," Audie said), another squatting at the edge of a field, the whole country on the road. Every few miles huge billboards showing movie posters of bug-eyed fatties in tight clothes. This India had no smell and hardly had a sound: the windows of the car were closed; the air conditioner was on. Whenever the subject of India came up, the Blundens referred to their drive from the airport, through the small city and along the road and up Monkey Hill to Agni, that one hour of India.