The Elephanta Suite (8 page)

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 hear 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 just 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."

"Where do you live, Anna?"

"Staff block, sir. Hostel, sir."

"You keep saying 'sir.'"

"Yes, sir," and she giggled, her hand over her mouth.

Only the path just ahead was lit, but farther down the hill there was the glow that he now knew was the town of Hanuman Nagar and from that distant glow came chattering and shouting.

"What's that noise?"

"Temple, sir."

"Monkey temple?"

"Hanuman temple, sir."

Audie was careful not to touch her, though she was walking just in front of him on the steep downward path toward the sound of a coughing vehicle and the glare of sulfurous lights. He saw a three-story squarish building, a smell of rotting clothes lingering near it.

"Is that it?"

"It is, sir."

But he had stopped. He'd lost the momentum he'd had in the darkness on the path above. "In here, sir."

He took a step toward her. He reached and put his arm around her, and he could tell in his embrace that she was breathing hard. She was tense, she seemed to quail, holding her face away from him yet presenting her hips to him. Her bare belly was soft like a cushion of bread dough in his hand.

"Are you all right?"

"Yes, sir. I am all right, sir." He could tell she was willing; he could also tell she was terrified. "Let we go inside, sir?"

Audie took a deep breath and, expelling it, slackened his grip on her. Aware that he was holding her lightly, he became self-conscious and let go. He felt in his pocket for his wallet that was fat with rupees, and without looking at the denominations—he carried only five-hundred-rupee notes—he took out a thickness of them and pressed them into her hand.

"This is for you."

"Thank you, sir."

Not only did she accept them, she seemed relieved. Her whole body relaxed as she breathed more easily.

"You're a good girl. I want you to stay that way."

"Thank you, sir. Bless you, sir."

She giggled a bit in relief and drew another deep breath as she watched him back away, up the path.

 

Beth was in the room when Audie returned. He was so sheepish from his errand he did not notice how Beth held the book to shield her face, did not see her apprehension. He was himself so apprehensive.

"I wasn't very hungry," he said.

"I just had a snack."

"Love ya," he said.

Waiting in the woods, standing in the lowering darkness, had tired him; walking all that way down the path to the isolated apartment block had wearied him too. He thought, I don't have the energy anymore to walk in darkness. And he was ashamed of himself—of the power he had over the girl to make her obey. She had been afraid. He hated himself for putting her in that position, her obvious horror at the prospect of sex, yet willing to sacrifice herself to him for the money. In the exhaustion brought on by his shame he fell asleep, his mouth open, his harsh breath rising and falling.