Did you get sick?
India was germ-laden. Sheely had ended up dehydrated and confined to his hotel room with an IV drip in his arm, and he swore he would never go back to that food and that filth.
Dwight too had been anxious. That was why he needed Shah. But giving Shah all that responsibility had released Dwight from the tedium of negotiating the outsourcing deals. Shah had the respect of the businessmen, he could handle them, and Dwight’s silences had been taken to be enigmatic and knowing. Not talking too much, indeed hardly talking at all, had been a good thing. His silences made him seem powerful. How could he explain that to his talkative and bullying partners?
He had feared and hated India. He had gone nonetheless because as a young, recently divorced man with no children he had been the logical choice. He had said, “I’ll hold my nose.”
On the first trip, he had not eaten Indian food, not gone out at night; he had seen the deals to their conclusion and then ached to be home. He had been welcomed home as though he had been in the jungle, returned from the ends of the earth, escaped the savages, the terrorists, a war zone. India represented everything negative—chaos and night. And so on his return from this second visit he understood what the partners were saying; he had once said them himself.
“Human life means nothing to those people,” Sheely had said. And because he’d been to India—and gotten sick—his word was taken to be the truth.
“It’s teeming, right?” Kohut asked. “I saw a program about it on the Discovery Channel.”
Ralph Picard, whose area was copyright infringement, said, “I’ve got to hand it to you, Dwight. I could never do anything like that.”
The Elephanta Suite was one of the best in the hotel. He had a driver always, and he seldom opened a door—doors were snatched open for him to pass through. Yet, even knowing that these praising remarks were undeserved, he accepted them, and was strengthened by them. After the fiasco of his brief marriage, it was nice to be thought of as brave, and he liked being regarded as a kind of conqueror—it was how a success in India was seen by the Boston office. It was unexpectedly pleasant to be thought of as a hero.
And so, although he was seldom inconvenienced in India, and lived in luxury, he played up the discomfort—the heat, the dirt, the rats, the beggars, the sidewalks so filled with people you couldn’t walk down them, the sight of bearded Muslims and their shrouded women, the sludgy buttery food that looked inedible, the water that wasn’t drinkable, people sleeping by the side of the road and pissing against trees. He said nothing about his suite or the manservant who came with it—I will be your butler, sir.
“Pretty grim,” he said.
But those characterizations of India, though containing a measure of truth, did not say it all, nor did they matter much to him. They merely described the stereotype of India, and it was always a relief for people to hear a stereotype confirmed.
He couldn’t say: I’ve broken through it all. He couldn’t say: It was the girl.
In small ways he’d known it in the past, this feeling of a place altered by a single person. How often a landscape was charged and sweetened for him because he had been in love, because he’d somehow managed to succeed with a woman. He had her and everything was different—he had a reason to be there, and more, a reason to return. It was not just the sex; it was a human connection that made a place important to him.
This discovery in India of a desire in himself that had found release, and also to be thought of as a hero—suffering a week of meetings and clouds of germs, when the fact was that India could be bliss—gave him strength.
It had happened so simply, because Indru had pursued him.
“I’m coming back,” he said.
“I wait you.”
Who in the States, in his whole life, had ever said those words to him with such a tremor of emotion? He wanted Maureen to call, to ask him how he was, so he could say, “Fine, and by the way, I gave the diamond ring away to a girl I met in an alley in India.”
He felt happier without the diamond in his pocket. But maybe it was better that Maureen didn’t call. He didn’t want to tell her he was happy. She’d say, “See? I told you it would change your life,” and he didn’t want her to be so complacently right about him.
He was strengthened by believing that India was the land of yes. And for the five months he remained in Boston he felt he was like the exiled king of a glittering country that was full of possibilities and pleasures. What made this sense of exile even more satisfying was the knowledge that his colleagues regarded his having gone there as an enormous sacrifice, a trip fraught with danger and difficulty.
He lobbied to return, first with Kohut, who was the most senior partner, then with Sheely, who was terrified of being sent back. But his lobbying took the form of casual questions rather than an outright offer to go. If he looked too eager, they’d take him less seriously and would be less inclined to offer him a hardship allowance.
“We’ve got a couple of clients pending,” Kohut said. “It’s great of you to ask. We’d like to send you back with three or four deals, not so much to maximize the hours as to make it easier for you.”
“I’m just saying I could probably help. I know the terrain a bit better.”
“It might mean two weeks of back-to-back meetings.”
“Make it three. Less pressure.” And Dwight spoke of strategy.
“Hunt, you’re amazing.”
“That I’ve developed some contacts?”
“That you’d go there at all. To me, it’s a black hole.”
“There’s money in that hole.”
But even as he spoke about the potential deals and the money to be made, he was thinking of Indru and how she had followed him in her white dress and white shoes. How she had said, I wait you.
Not just Indru, but she seemed to speak for thousands of others who were waiting, like the willing girls in the “Matrimonials” ads. Something within him had been liberated and released, perhaps something as simple as his fear.
So this was what true travelers knew, and maybe some lawyers too! You said, “Poor guy, so far away in that awful place,” never guessing that he was someone you didn’t know at all, a happy person in a distant place that allowed him to be himself—girls saying Whatever you want, sir and What you like? or the most powerful word in the language of desire, Yes.
He realized that he had discovered what other travelers knew but weren’t telling, that India could also be pleasurable. He was one of those men, just as smitten, just as cagey. He didn’t say to Kohut, “Please send me back.” Instead he let the client list accumulate and waited for Kohut to summon him.
And then he left, going to India as to a waiting lover, a patient mistress.
“We have meetings tomorrow,” Shah said. He had met him at the airport, behind a man in a uniform carrying a sign lettered Hunt-singha. They were sitting in the back of his car.
“It’s already tomorrow,” Dwight said.
It was two in the morning. This odor of dust and diesel, woodsmoke, decay, industrial fumes and flowers, and the odor of humans, the complex smell of India—he had never been anywhere that smelled like this. This dense cloud contained the hum of India’s history, too—conquerors, burnings, blood, the incense of religion. It was less a whiff than a wall of smell.