He lay in his suite in the same posture as on the mattress in the upstairs room, watching the girl Sumitra kneeling beside him.
“Can you take this off?” he whispered, touching the thickness of her full skirts, and now he could see they’d been sewn with sequins, tiny round mirrors of mica.
She had stood and unfastened her skirts with a cord and stepped out of them. Then she’d folded them, placed them on a chair, and returned to him naked, kneeling, as he lay watching her, her long eyelashes, her lips, her arms, the powder clinging to her hair. But when he touched her, trying to encourage her, she resisted.
She reached beneath the mattress. “Condom,” she said, and tore the small package open with her teeth.
He lay back and closed his eyes, and from time to time she released him and leaned aside and spat.
He did not want to remember the rest, but there was more, his shame like sorrow, the bold conspiratorial woman who bantered with him afterward, asking him for baksheesh. And at last, as he left the place, pausing in the coolness of the lane to get his bearings, he’d seen the old man from the promenade, still in his white cotton suit, carrying his cane. The man who had been shouting at the children looked mild and elderly now. He didn’t smile, hardly acknowledged Dwight, probably resented him for being a debauched white man in India, though (Dwight was walking quickly away) hadn’t the old man schemed with the pimping woman?
On the way to his hotel, the word came to him again. He was debauched. He had been aroused. He had held the Indian girl in his arms in that dusty room. Without being able to put the emotion into words, he felt he belonged here and could not remember how long he’d been in Mumbai or when he was supposed to leave, and didn’t care.
He was debauched, that was the word for how he felt—a corrupt man trifling with a teenage whore. It was bad enough that she was so young, somehow much worse that she could actually dance expertly—she knew the steps; she could have performed in a dance troupe, becoming brilliant. Instead she danced to titillate and seduce the greedy American who’d given her money.
It had been a colossal setup: the older, overfamiliar woman, the children he’d happened upon, seemingly by chance, the old man playing his role as an indignant and self-righteous pedestrian. Dwight, who thought of himself and his lawyer’s skills as shrewd, had been snared, fooled by this cheap trick, this ragged band, and he had gone the rest of the way, allowed himself to be lured into the room.
He was ashamed, but his shame did not overcome his wish to see the girl again. He felt sick with a need for her. He told himself she was poor, desperate, helpless, and the only way he could help her was by seeing her, letting her dance, making love to her, giving her money. The money mattered most; it was a kind of philanthropy—gift-giving, anyway—and might save her. If she had some money, she’d be able to give up the sex trade and be a dancer. He would tell her this.
“You are looking fit,” Shah said at the meeting the next day, but he peered a little too long and inquiringly.
They took their places at the table, and that was the first time Dwight raised himself from his chair and glanced down from Jeejeebhoy Towers to the Gateway of India for a look at the people milling around it.
The meeting with Shah and the suppliers was like an interruption of the day. Dwight endured it, approved the terms as quickly as they were set out, glanced over the draft contracts, and sighed when Shah began to quibble over the subsection of a clause.
“I would like to invite you to dine at my home,” Shah said. “It will be a simple meal, but you will understand better the custom of my people, the Jain.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve got some paperwork to attend to.”
He wished Shah had not invited him, because when he went in search of the old woman and the children later that day, he kept thinking of the purity and innocence of Shah’s earnest invitation. A simple meal. And here he was, pursuing a pimping old hag and those corrupted children, not her own but obviously kept by her to make money, and he was as corrupt as they were.
He waited until almost sunset before he began to stroll past the Gateway of India and the drink sellers, the peanut vendors, the ice cream men, the people hawking children’s toys, the balloon sellers. He knew that he would not find the woman—it was she who’d find him. And so it happened.
“Hello, my friend.”
She winked at him. She knew why he was there. She didn’t even ask him to follow her. She kept walking, and he was a step behind her. He hated himself, hated the thought that she knew him so well, but he told himself that it was necessary. He did not want to speak to her, and it was not until they reached the lane and stepped onto the porch of the stone house that she said, “Sumitra.”
“But no dancing.”
“As you wish.”
The girl’s dancing, the singularity of it, the glow of her soul in her whitened face, had upset him. He had not expected such seriousness, such concentration, such formality. The whole performance and the piercing notes of the music broke his heart and made her seem hopeless, using this brilliant skill to attract him for sex and money.
He gave the old woman a thousand rupees in an envelope, reminded himself that it was twenty dollars, and let her show him upstairs. As she left him at the door, he tried to read her face. He suspected that she despised him, but she gave nothing away.
The room was the same: the mattress, the tape player plugged into the wall under the portrait of the fierce, toothy, blackish-faced deity. Dwight waited, shuffling, too nervous to sit, and then the far door opened and Sumitra appeared and stepped forward.
She did not smile. She looked summoned, a little reluctant, like someone sent on an errand, which Dwight thought was exactly the case. But this time she wore a headdress, a sort of lacy veil, and her makeup was more carefully applied. She was barefoot and her anklets jingled as she came over to him. He leaned to kiss her.
“No,” she said, and averted her eyes, moved her head sideways with a pinched face, as though reacting to a bad smell.
She started the music and stood, one leg crooked, her arms upraised, to begin her dance.
“What are you doing?”
“I am dance,” she said.
“No dance.” He took her by the hand and set her down at the edge of the mattress, wishing that her anklets did not sound so merry. He had another envelope of money ready. He placed it in her hand.
Sumitra stared at him and tucked it into a fold of her thick skirt where there must have been a pocket.
No “thank you,” hardly an acknowledgment, just a sullen blinking of her yellow eyes within a shadow of mascara and a little nod of her head. How many other men had sat here and done this?
He had planned to give her the money and leave, but with her sitting next to him, her knees drawn up, her head bowed, the powder of her makeup prickling on his arm, she was like a cat in his lap. He could not get up, could not bear to abandon her.
The warmth of her body warmed his hands, the slightness of her figure aroused him. He fumbled with her clothes, to hold her. She squirmed slightly, and he guessed that she was resisting him, and he almost apologized. Then he saw that she was letting down the shoulder straps of her bodice, baring her small breasts for him. After that, he felt her hands on him, in a routinely practiced way, like someone feeling an obscure parcel, squeezing it to reveal what’s inside. Even though he recognized how mechanical an act this was, and despised himself for sitting through it, he was aroused. He let her do what she did well; she was intent, and silent, and then she spat on the floor.