“You no like me,” she said.
“I like you too much,” he said.
But she just laughed and yanked at the tops of her knee socks and tossed her head, and when he gave her money that day she took it reluctantly, as though acknowledging that she didn’t deserve it.
He continued to give Indru money. He suspected that she was giving it to the young boy she called her brother. Deceits and failures and betrayals, but it was part of the India he had come to understand. He belonged here. He had found his level.
Although India advertised itself as a land of sensuality, he had regarded that as hype. They were trying to sell tickets. And where were the sensualists? The businessmen were two-faced and so shifty they turned the women into scolds. Most of the people he’d met had been too angry—pestering and puritanical—with red-rimmed and tormented eyes. If they’d been liberated, they wouldn’t have been such agitated nags. They scowled, they carped, they pushed, they honked their horns. Serenity seemed unattainable. The way the bosses screamed at their underlings, the shrill orders a manager gave a secretary, the bullshit, the buck-passing, the cruel teasing, the racism, hating each other much more than they hated foreigners—it all revealed to Dwight a culture of both punishment and sexual frustration, for the two always went together.
Long ago, as a youth, as a law student, he had once behaved that way himself—on edge because he’d been unsuccessful with women. His first trip to India had reminded him of that—everything wrong, the yelling crowds, the food, the bad air, and the women were either virginal, with their eyes downcast, or married and plump and indifferent, in both cases impossible. The predatory divorcée or widow was just desperate, with no option except to be devious, and scheming turned him off. The society was packed too tight, jammed and impenetrable, and all a stranger could do was drift hopelessly around its dusty edges.
Or so he had thought. He was wrong about this—wrong about everything, wrong in all his assumptions. India was sensual. If India seemed puritanical, it was because at the bottom of its puritanism was a repressed sensuality that was hungrier and nakeder and more voracious than anything he’d known. The strict rules kept most people in their place, yet there were exceptions everywhere, and where there were exceptions, there was anarchy and desire. If India had a human face, it was that of a hungry skinny girl, starved for love, famished for money.
From his first encounter at the Gateway of India, when the canny woman had tricked him with the elaborate scam involving the old man and the children, Dwight had seen India differently, accommodated himself to it, and begun to live a double life. He had sunk to the bottom and entered a new level of the Indian experience—the low life of the truly desperate. Although Shah said, “I ring you at your hotel last night—you not there,” Dwight explained that he had shut off his phone, and he was certain that Shah did not know he was elsewhere, living his other life in the grubby flat in Chowpatty. And he was glad, because he was not able to explain what he was doing and who he had become. His relationship with Indru in the two tiny rooms was equally unexplainable.
When you could not explain your absences, when you were living your secrets and were happier living them than you’d ever been, you were leading a double life. He knew that. He also knew that in living this way you had to accustom yourself to telling lies and remembering them and building on them, so that a whole world of obvious and gabbling falsehood was a front for the hidden and wordless reality. Something else he discovered about the double life: you began to lose track of your identity—at least he did. Someone said, “Huntsinger!” and his instinctive reaction was to think, Who?
How had it happened? Was it the sex, the young women, all the layers of living in India—the rooms, the religion, the castes, the crowds, the city of twenty million? His first visit to India had been a suspension of his life. Most Americans he knew went to India holding their nose, did what had to be done—found a contractor who would produce goods for one-fifth the U.S. price—and returned home, resumed living, fearing to be called back. That had been him once.
But he had found a life in India, or rather two lives: Indru’s little flat and the Elephanta Suite, the life of hidden, vitalizing sexuality that he was still learning and the boardroom existence he knew well, the world of contracts, competitive pricing, manufacturing, and outsourcing, the easy task of finding people who could produce good-quality samples—that is, copy the American sample at their own expense—and then signing them up, saying, “We’ll grow together.”
The most recent deal was with a maker of blue jeans in Poona—he looked so hopeful, so eager to please, with suitcases of swatches and samples. Look at pocket formation, look at seams, quality, double stitching. We can supply unlimited units. It is a good pant.
“What about a buck twenty-nine a pair, delivered,” Dwight said.
Shah conferred with the man and then turned to Dwight. “He can manage. Do you not agree, Mr. Hund?”
“Deal.” And later he said, “It’s like shooting tuna fish in a can.”
Shah smiled in bewilderment—how did you explain?—and Dwight was reminded of the days when he had feared Indian food, how he’d come with a case of tuna fish in cans with pop-off lids, which he’d eaten standing over the sink in his hotel bathroom.
Now he ate the food, most of it, not just the enamel plates of it that Indru and Padmini prepared, which they ate sitting on the floor of her little apartment, but also the dishes that Shah habitually ate. Adhering to the Jain rule of not eating any living thing, keeping to leaves and grains and lentils, Dwight had not been sick once. The idea was to keep it simple—no fish, no meat, no roots. He liked the okra dishes that Shah called bindi, the channa and gram, the rice cakes, the chapatis, the pooris. He ate no cold food, nothing from the street, nothing that had sat uncovered, no salads, nothing that had to be washed. Lettuce was fatal, so was water—water was a source of illness in India. Fruit that he had not peeled himself he didn’t eat.
He and Shah usually presided over a ceremonial meal in a restaurant as a way of sealing a contract. The deal with the blue jeans manufacturer was one of these, in a restaurant called the Imperial, a pleasant place near Church Gate. Dwight was asked to order first, and he glanced at the menu. Dine Like a Maharajah, it said. Chunks of mutton steeped in a savory broth and Slow-roasted chicken in a clay tandoor oven and Thick fillet of pomfret, Kerala style, with coconut milk in a spicy sauce. He clapped the menu shut and handed it to the waiter.
“Just a dish of dhal makni, some yogurt, and rice.”
“Will that be all, sir?”
“Unless you have bindi.”
The waiter wagged his head yes.
And someone at the table said, “Mr. Shah, you are a bad influence on our friend from America.”
“Oh, yes, exceedingly bad.”
Everyone except Dwight and Shah ordered from the menu.
“The sali boti is justifiably famous. Mutton and fried potatoes. Much talked about.”
Shah made a pained face.
“The prawns here are also very good, I’m told.”
“I don’t take prawns,” Shah said.
“I understand they raise their own chickens.”
“I don’t take.”
“The fish is flown in fresh from Kochi.”
Shah smiled as the men were served enormous portions of meat and fish, while he and Dwight dabbed at their simple portions like a pair of monks.