THE GATEWAY OF INDIA
1
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 unbreath-able 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.
“Not disappointed,” Dwight said. “I’m disgusted. I’m frightened. I am appalled. Don’t you see I want to go home?”
In this world of anguish he felt physically hurt by what he saw. But it continued for the days he was there and did not stop until he had gotten back on the plane and left the smell of failure, of futility, of death and disease, returning to Boston with another discovery: in all that misery, there was money.
“I can’t believe we closed the deal,” he said to Shah. “My clients are very happy.”
Shah smiled and said, “I am at your service, sir.”
“They’re either at my throat or at my feet,” he’d e-mailed to Kohut back at the office after the deal had been made. “And then they’re biting each other’s ankles.”
But there was another deal to be done. After two days of fighting the misery, he’d stopped going out. He stayed in his hotel until it was time to meet the car, then he went to Jeejeebhoy Towers and the meeting, ate nothing, and returned to his hotel in the car. He ate bananas in his room—bananas were safe. But a diet of bananas and bottled water blocked him solid. There’s a headline, he told himself. But it was something to report.
“You get sick?” It was the usual response to his saying he’d just been to India.
“I was constipated.”
Second trip, the life-changing one. At first he had refused. He had taken his risk; Maureen didn’t care. He had pleaded with Sheely to take the assignment. Sheely had been to India once and was allowed to say “Never again” because he was a senior partner, but he didn’t stop there.
“Go to India?” Sheely raged. The very name could set him off. “Why should I go to India? Indians don’t even want to go to India! Everyone’s leaving India, or else wants to leave, and I don’t blame them. I understand why—I’d want to leave too if I lived there. Which I don’t, nor do I ever want to go to that shitty place ever again. Don’t talk to me about India!”
Kohut too had seniority. Instead of pleading, Dwight thought: Extreme measures. He brought a supply of tuna fish, the small cans with pop-off lids, and crackers, and Gatorade. It was like a prison diet, but it would be bearable and appropriate for his seven days of captivity in Mumbai. These he would spend in the best room of the best hoteclass="underline" the Elephanta Suite at the Taj Mahal Hotel, just across from the Gateway.
Yet he was ashamed of himself, standing in his hotel bathroom of polished marble and gilt fittings, leaning over the sink, eating tuna fish out of a can with a plastic fork. Three days of that, three days of Shah’s saying, “You must see Crawford Market and Chor Bazaar. Perhaps Elephanta Caves, perhaps side trip to Agra to see Taj? What you want to see?”
“The Gateway of India.”
“Very nice. Three portal arches. Tripulia of Gujarati design. Not old, put up by British in 1927. But …” Shah widened his mouth, grinning in confusion.
“What?”
“You can see it from here.”
“That’s what I like about it.”
India was a foreign country where he’d been assigned to find outsourcing deals, not a place to enjoy but one to endure, like going down a dark hole to find jewels. He worked in the boardroom, wrangling with manufacturers; he sat in his suite and watched CNN. His grimmest pleasure was looking through the classifieds of the Hindustan Times, the pages headed “Matrimonials,” and he smiled in disbelief at the willingness in the details, the eagerness of the girls desperate to be brides, the boys to be grooms. His disillusionment with marriage was compounded by his misery in India. He suffered, and the firm was grateful, for India proved to be outsourcing heaven.
“I had a query from a potential client at a hotel near Rishi kesh, my brother’s place,” Shah said. “One Mr. Audie Blunden. He owns a mail-order housewares catalogue. He wants prices on power tools.”
“The question is whether they’d meet the codes.”
“Meet and surpass codes,” Shah said insistently. “You can make anything in India.”
They were in the boardroom, waiting for Mr. Desai and his entourage.
“Kinda wood is this table?” Dwight asked.
“Deek,” said Manoj Verma. “You want some? I can arrange consignment.”
“That some kinda Indian wood?”
“Deek? You don’t have in Estates?”
“Never heard of it.”
But you can make anything in India, he remembered. He was thinking of it now as he looked past portly, confident Mr. M. V. Desai, his assistant Miss Bhatia, their lawyer Mr. R.R.K. Prakash-narayan in a thick cotton knot-textured jacket, Manoj Verma the product analyst, Ravi Ramachandran on the right-hand side munching wood shavings, Taljinder Singh in his tightly wound helmet-like turban, Miss Sheela Chakravarti taking notes, and last Mr. J. J. Shah—indispensable Shah—also a lawyer, who was a master of postures and faces, scowling in disbelief, distrust, his defiant smile saying, No. Never. Prove it. Shah always had the right answer. He said enigmatically, I am Jain, sir. Dwight, trying another joke, said, And I’m Tarzan. And he looked past the end of the table, the empty chair, out the window, below the level of the stained rooftops, the rusted propped-up water tanks, to the Gateway of India, where he could see the people milling around, promenading, as Indians seemed inclined to do at the end of the day, near the harbor, the gray soupy water, the people just splotches of colored clothing, but he knew that each of them was there for a purpose.