The Elephanta Suite (3 page)

"They've got zip," Audie said, his face to the car window. And in conversation with various Indian guests at Agni, peering at them closely, "Sure, I saw the Indian miracle."

The miracle to them was that India was not a country but a creature, like a monstrous body crawling with smaller creatures, pestilential with people—a big horrific being, sometimes angry and loud, sometimes passive and stinking, always hostile, even dangerous. And another miracle was that they'd found a remote part of it that was safe.

Agni seemed to be in the heart of India, yet India seemed far away. Perhaps that was the secret to experiencing India, to bury yourself deeply in it to avoid suffering it. The few times at Agni they'd seen something exotic or strange—like the monkeys staring at the sunset, or had they been looking at the town?—it was not anything they'd anticipated, not the India of stereotype, and that was so disconcerting, they withdrew into the Agni gate and shut India out.

They had been surprised to hear the old man say he lived "just here" in the town, Hanuman Nagar. Where was this? They had believed they were on a rugged foothill of the Himalayas, an empty hill. Where was the town? They had no idea there was a settlement anywhere near Agni. And the "venerable temple" was news to them too. They suspected that the old man, a fantasist and yarn spinner, was indulging in hyperbole, another Indian trait, for how could there be a village nearby? Agni—the spa and maharajah's residence—occupied the serene top of Monkey Hill, at the end of a road that wound around the steep slope. Had there been a village, they would have spotted it on the drive up that first day. Instead, they had seen a yellow forest of trees with dusty leaves, staggering cows, glossy big-beaked crows, a few people on foot, and that was all.

The Blundens had woken refreshed in the silence of their suite, a powdery dawn at the window, of pink dust and diffused light. They stretched, they bathed, they put on their white suits, like pairs of elegant pajamas, and they went downstairs and across the lawn to yoga.

But here was something new. On this morning following their encounter with the old man, they looked down the hill and saw ropes of smoke untangling in the sky from the direction where he had pointed with his skinny hand. There was an earthen odor of damp flowers but also a smell of that distant smoke.

They crossed the lawn to the yoga pavilion. Half a dozen others had preceded them and sat on rush mats, in lotus postures. Some had their eyes shut in meditation, a few greeted them softly; all were wearing the same white suits. The Blundens took their places. Vikram, the yoga teacher, sat on a raised platform, his hands clasped under his chin.

"
Om,
" Vikram intoned,
auuummm,
three times. Then, "Rub your hands, massage your eyes, feel the energy, feel the vibration. Open your eyes slowly, listen to the birds singing."

The Blundens, without communicating this thought, each smelled the smoke they'd seen earlier, and another smell penetrating it, something sharp, like burned toast.

They stood, they stretched, they did "the tree," balancing on one foot, then the other. They raised their arms, locked their hands, and stood on tiptoe. They felt like children, faltering in an exercise they barely understood, and, like children, not caring.

"For
tadasana,
mountain pose. Think, 'This is Hanuman Mountain.' Find something to concentrate on," Vikram said. "A brick. A leaf."

Audie saw a crack on a pillar of the pavilion. He stared hard at it. It held him up; he balanced on the crack, and it turned from a flaw to a distinct profile, a coastline, something with symmetry and meaning.

"Now, slowly, lie on mat with feet apart. Inhaling breath, raise legs twenty degrees and slowly let out breath."

They did this, lifting their legs higher, feeling their stomachs twist. They then knelt, extended one leg, did more poses and counterposes. Their arms and legs were tingling.

"Feel the energy," Vikram said. "Breathe in, raise your arms as you inhale, bend to the left as you exhale, and hold the posture. Very good for kidneys, for spine, for pancreas, for blood circulation. Five regular breaths."

No one except Vikram spoke. They assumed the posture of the archer pulling a bow, then the cat, the dog, and, resting with their hands on their chins, the crocodile.

Without remarking on it to each other, feeling quietly strengthened, the Blundens knew they were improving. Beth, who had gripped her calves on the first day, could now touch the mat with her fingertips. Audie, who had trembled with his legs aloft, could now hold the position until Vikram said, "Exhale slowly and lower your legs. Prepare for
pranayama."

The breathing exercises cleared their heads: first the sequence of explosive breaths, expelling air through the nose, and then, using the thumb and ring finger, closing one nostril and drawing a breath through the other, exhaling through the first nostril.

"This finger is earth. This is fire. This is sky. Use earth and sky."

All this time Audie felt buoyant, vitalized, refreshed, serene; and Beth was enlivened, discovering new muscles, her arms and legs awakened. The end of the session came sooner and sooner, Vikram saying, "Now
om
and
shantih
three times," and taking a breath,
"Auuummm."

Afterward they lay for a minute or so, stretched flat on the mat, the cool air on their dampened faces, all the drowsiness of deep sleep wrung from their bodies.

But lying there with their eyes shut, they were aware of the subtle smoke smell, not burned toast anymore but something fouler, a whiff of excrement.

"I am limp," Audie said. "I feel wonderful."

Not limp, Beth thought. She felt a heightened awareness, a keener sense of smell and touch. She was not soothed so much as set on edge.

"Just floating," Audie said.

No, she was alert, something quickening within her. Nevertheless, she hummed as though agreeing with him.

"It's like an out-of-body experience."

She felt it was the opposite, an intensification of the flesh, not the buoyancy he was describing to her as they walked past the clicking bamboo grove to breakfast. She had felt—still felt—a density in her body and a control over that density. Certain of her muscles were attached to her active mind: she was aware that she inhabited a whole live body in which she had been buried.

"With each breath," Audie was saying, "I was sort of inhaling peacefulness through my nose, calming myself and getting lighter."

Beth smiled at him and said, "It's lovely—I want to go on doing this when we get home," yet nothing that Audie described was familiar to her. When she had lain on her mat she had felt energy pulsing out of the solid earth into her back and up her spine. Raising her eyes, tipping her head backward, she had sensed more energy pouring from the sky into her. Her fingers were limber, her grip was tested; she received power through her bare feet.

"Like I'd slipped out of my body," Audie said.

Not at all—Beth had felt naked, and she was soothed, as though a lover's hands had touched her, not erotically but like a caress.

Audie had always spoken for her, expressing what she felt. That had been the case since before they were married, and it accounted for the happiness in their marriage. They were happier than ever, but these days at Agni, he would say something and she would smile, not because she agreed, but in disbelief.

Even at breakfast this was subtly so. They chose the Indian options, but she saw that they each selected something different from the stainless steel containers at the buffet: he took a plate of idlis and sambar and curry soup; she chose the rotis and spiced beans, the sprouted lentils, the yogurt. She did not comment on this; he did not seem to notice. They ate without feeling full, they drank green tea, and they compared their reactions to the yoga session—that is, Audie enlarged on what he called his lightness of soul, and Beth nodded in agreement, yet distinctly felt that she had been affected not just in her arms and legs but in the pit of her stomach and in every inch of her spine.

"Like I've had a lube job, an oil change, all the fluids checked," Audie said. "This is the nearest I've ever come to religion."

"Yes," Beth said. That part was true. She had felt touched in a particular sense—light fingers on her body.

"And I want more of it."

"Yes," she said with conviction.

"Meet you at the pool," he said. "I'm going up to the lobby to sign on for another week."

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."