“Where are you going, sir?”
“Got work to do.”
He walked quickly past the Gateway crowd, through the taxi rank and the traffic, then onto the sidewalk, where there was a guardrail. People plucked at his sleeve, not just beggars but shopkeepers—“In here, sir. All kinds of electronics”—but he kept walking. He passed a movie theater displaying a big colored poster of a fat woman with stupendous breasts and purple talons for fingernails. He was thinking: It wasn’t me. She was the one who’d asked.
“What is it you want, sir? Come inside,” a man in shirtsleeves demanded at the doorway of a curio shop.
Crossing a busy rotary of honking traffic, he began to notice the heat. He was perspiring now, but he would not let it slow him: he needed to go on walking. The sights, the shops, the churches made it easier for him—and wasn’t this a Christian church in the English style? He thought of going inside, but he saw a padlocked hasp on the front door.
Farther on he saw an emptier street, less traffic, just a few pedestrians, and heading there he found himself among lanes leading to another part of the harbor. He saw warehouses, a market with empty stone tables, the stalls vacated at this time of day.
Its emptiness looked attractive in this overcrowded city. He turned into the lane. He could see to the end, another warehouse, and water. Sensing movement, he looked down and saw a rat. He kicked at it, but the rat was unperturbed, big as a cat, nibbling at the husk of a coconut.
While he had been walking the sun had gone down. He walked under the afterglow in the sky, streaked with pink and gold. At the far end of the covered market was the warehouse, shuttered and dark, and stacked against it were great coils of rope and a partly rubbed-away sign, on which he could read the words Jute Mills.
He was near enough to the water to see the glimmer of the sea. He found a place to sit and drew a breath, thinking how odd it was in such a populous city to be where there were no people.
Then he heard another rat. He stamped his foot and turned to frighten it.
“Sir.”
Indru—her dress and shoes so white in these shadows.
“How did you find me?”
“I follow, sir.”
She bowed to him. She looked older with the shadows on her face, her white cotton dress glowing. Her stillness alarmed him, and her accent seemed stronger in the twilight.
“May I be seated, sir?”
He was sitting on a coil of rope on a giant spool the size and shape of a tractor tire. Still, he was impressed by her formality.
“Go ahead.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Was it her formality, the mode of her politeness, that made him feel, if not powerful, then dominant—in charge in this lonely place?
“Indru,” he said.
“You did not forget my name.”
“What do you want?”
“I am so hungry, sir.”
It was a terrifying statement. He put his hand into hers. Her hand lay open on her lap, small, though her palm was hard, almost coarse, and her skin like that of a scaly little animal. She said she worked in a salon, but perhaps she also did some sort of hard work? Her stiff stubby fingers closed on his hand—she was trying to show him some affection.
“You’re a nice girl, Indru.”
“Thank you, sir.”
With his free hand he touched her thigh through her loose dress, hiking it up slightly. He felt the skin just above her knee and slipped his fingers around her thigh, where she was warm, as though holding a fresh piece of meat, even sensing that this smoothness would taste good.
She did not resist, yet she made a sound in her throat, swallowing, as if bracing herself, the sort of sucking breath a person draws before taking a risk.
Hearing a rustling sound, he saw in the dim light a rat nibbling a broken blossom that was easily visible because of its white petals. But everywhere else it was dark in the alley. The only available light was the patch of sky above the lane and the twilit harbor framed by the end of the warehouse.
“May I kiss you?”
“Why not, sir?”
Her willingness to kiss seemed like the proof she wasn’t a whore.
He kissed her lips, loving their softness, and he marveled at the risk he was taking. But she had followed him here, the way a homeless animal seeks comfort. He remembered, I am so hungry, sir, and he dug in his pocket for the small soft pouch and the ring that he often fingered, hating the memory of it.
He had to do it now, before anything happened. It was a gift, not a fee. He put it into her hand. She took it without looking, slipped it into her pocket.
“Do you like me?”
She seemed to hesitate. Was it his searching hand that disturbed her? After a reflex of resistance, she allowed it.
“Yes, sir.”
3
Now, looking down at the Gateway of India from the boardroom at the top of Jeejeebhoy Towers, he saw the warehouses, the docks, the rope works, Apollo Bunder, the Taj Hotel, even the corner window of his suite, the steamy streets he had hurried through afterward, hot with exhausted desire. He could see beyond the promenade where the old woman had led him, and a rooftop that might have been part of her house. Laid out before him was the map of his past three days—transforming days. He did not know what to make of it except that he was not afraid of India anymore. He was anxious about what he had discovered in himself, but he did not want to look any deeper. He didn’t want to feel ashamed for something that he regarded as a kind of victory.
Someone—Miss Bhatia?—was passing him a dish of curried potato. He scooped some onto his plate. Three days ago he would have refused it. He passed the dish to Shah.
“I am not taking potato,” Shah said.
“Allergic?”
“They are having germs,” Shah said. “Also fungus. And little growths.”
“Afraid of getting sick?”
“Oh, no. As I mentioned to you, I am Jain. We do not kill.”
“You mean”—and Dwight began to smile—“you’re trying to avoid killing the germs?”
“That is correct.”
“And the fungus in the potatoes?”
“I will take some of nuts and pulses,” Shah said. And turning to Mr. Desai, “Shall we now discuss payment schedule?”
That was the second, the transformative trip. He left that night, or rather at two the next morning, a changed man. Or was he changed? Perhaps these impulses had always slumbered in him and now India had wakened them, allowing him to act.
“I can’t wait to come back,” he told Shah, who was pleased.
How shocked Shah would have been if he had explained why, and described his encounters—the dancer Sumitra, the waif Indru. He could not stop thinking about them, solitary Indru most of all. The whole of India looked different to him now, brighter, livelier. But more, he was himself changed. I am a different man here, he thought, as the plane roared down the runway and lifted above the billion lights of Mumbai. I want to go back and be that man again.
His fears were gone, he was a new man, he was happier than he could remember. The image of the Gateway of India came to him, and he thought, I have passed through it.
Back in Boston, at his desk, the partners stopped in, to convey their routine greetings, and the repeated note was that they admired him for having gone to India, regarded him as a real traveler and risk taker, gave him credit for enduring the discomfort, talked only of illness and misery, and said he was a kind of hero. All the senior partners congratulated him on the deals he’d done—such simple things, if only they knew. He could have said that Indians were hungry and they helped him because they were helping themselves.
On the first trip, and for part of the second, he had seen India as a hostile, thronged, and poisoned land where a riot might break out at any moment, triggered by the slightest event, the simplest word, the sight of an American. And he would be overwhelmed by an advancing tide of boisterous humans, rising and drowning him amid their angry bodies.