To match Shah’s tone, Dwight was subdued when he quietly thanked him, but inside he was rejoicing. He wouldn’t have to make the long trip back to Boston. Shah would be perfect for the business seminar.
Leaving Shah’s apartment, plunging back into the city, he was reminded that it had been the second time he’d been inside the house of a wealthy Indian. Like the big soft apartment of Winky Vellore, it was a refuge. All of India had been shut out, more than from the fastness of the Elephanta Suite. At Shah’s, India almost did not exist, except in the paintings and photographs of Shah’s father, the wandering holy man, and the talk of atonement. The apartment had shone with polished silver and white porcelain and crisp linen on the gleaming table.
Now Dwight recalled that music had been playing softly, the sounds of string instruments, the soft chanting, the odd and irregular harmonies. And the big glass doors had been shut so that Mumbai was its lights and shadows, and it had sparkled, silent and odorless, far below. What floor had they been on? It seemed that they’d hovered at a great height in the splendor of a glass tower. And he knew he would always remember the experience for its comfort, the softness of Mrs. Shah, the beauty of the serving girl, the glint of the silver in the candlelight. Mumbai had looked like a city of crystal.
Now he was at Indru’s, in the stew of stinks and harsh voices from the lane, in the cement stairwell—his secret, his hiding place. Approaching the building, he’d heard a groan and looked aside and saw a cow, visible because of its pale hide, sounding human and helpless in its distress.
He kicked the stairs as he climbed, to scatter the rats, and when he got to Indru’s landing he tapped a coin on the iron bars of the outer door.
Padmini scuffed forward, unlocked the door, held the round brass tray with the oil lamp flickering in its dish. On tiptoes the small thin girl stretched to apply the mark with her thumb.
“Never mind that.”
She stared, her eyes shining in the firelight. On the days she worked at the salon her hair was lovely, her makeup like a mask, her nails thickly varnished.
“Where’s Indru?”
Padmini hesitated, then said, “Brother come.”
Dwight shut the door. He lifted the tray from Padmini’s hands. In the sounds of the traffic, the yakking voices of television sets, car doors slamming, the loud blatting of motorbikes, he heard the moaning of the cow suffering in the alley.
He waved his hand at the dark insects and white moths strafing the naked bulb above his head. He shot the bolt in the door, and when he turned Padmini was gone.
“Where are you?”
From deep in the far room, “Here, sir.”
She was squatting cross-legged in the back room, on the mattress that was spread on the floor, where she slept—not even a string bed, but what did that matter? The only light was the light from the street, filtered through a high dirty window.
Padmini was indistinct. He tried to read her expression, to see her posture. He thought, Reality is many-sided.
“Is bolt in door?”
“Yes.”
A quality of air, no more than a ripple, told him she had relaxed, hearing that. But when he held her she stiffened, like someone about to take a leap. She wouldn’t let him kiss her, though she allowed him to touch her. She seemed to grow limp as he did so, murmuring in her throat, and still the cow moaned in the alley.
6
In Shah’s absence, Dwight kept himself scarce. He spent less time in the boardroom, and when he was there he avoided looking down the long table for a view of the Gateway of India. Huge though it was, even when he did accidentally glance in that direction, he hardly saw it. The three-portaled archway did not loom for him anymore. Too much had happened to him for the thing to seem important in his life. It was just another monument in a country that was cluttered with monuments.
Unwelcome visitors were another reason for his keeping away. Incredibly, he was regarded as the expert on India now.
“I’d like to pick your brain,” people said in phone calls. That meant his dispensing free advice over a hotel lunch to another nervous American on his first visit to India.
And the odd thing was that when Dwight spoke to these newcomers, he said unexpected things, surprising himself in his opinions.
A man named Todd Pinsker visited. He was a Hollywood lawyer—he’d done a contract with Ralph Picard from the Boston office; he was passing through Mumbai on his way to Rajasthan for a luxury vacation. As a favor to Ralph, Dwight saw him for a drink at the Taj.
“And this is my son, Zack,” Pinsker said. “He’s making a movie.”
The boy’s smug expression matched his clumsiness. He wore a baseball cap backward, sat with his legs sticking out, and demanded that the waiter remove the ice from his drink.
“Ice can make you sick,” he said. “I mean, you can get a bad ice cube.”
“He’s got this dynamite idea,” the boy’s father said. “Sort of meld the Bollywood idea with an American movie. I mean, get some major talent from the States and shoot it here.”
“I have no contacts at all in the movie industry,” Dwight said. “I’m contracting for U.S. companies who want to outsource here.”
“That’s Zack’s project,” the man said. “I want to set up a concept restaurant in Manhattan. I’ve got some backing in L.A. I’m looking for ideas here, for a theme. Maybe headhunt a chef.”
“Wish I could help you. I don’t even eat in restaurants anymore,” Dwight said. He wondered, Is this true? And he surprised himself again by saying, “I mean, I’m a committed vegetarian.”
“That’s cool,” the man said, but his squint gave away his caution.
“Following kind of a Jain thing,” Dwight said.
That got Zack’s attention. “A Jain thing? Those people that don’t kill bugs?”
“Ahimsa,” Dwight said in almost a whisper, because the boy’s voice was so loud. “It’s part of the philosophy—non-killing.”
“Vegetarian options would play a big part in this restaurant,” the man said. “I’ve just got to meet some people. Have you been to Rajvilas?”
“No. I’ve hardly been out of Mumbai.”
“Clinton stayed there,” the boy said, and sucked on his glass of Coke.
Dwight became impatient. This father and son were annoying him with their presumption. They were both trying to get rich, do some business, use the Indians as everyone else did.
“You won’t have a problem finding what you want here,” he said. “Whatever it is. Everyone gets what they want. But at the same time you’re going to find something you didn’t bargain for.”
“Is that some kind of warning?”
“I suppose it is,” Dwight said. He thought: Where is this coming from? Why am I saying this? But without any effort, and hardly knowing what was coming next, he said, “But it’s a fact. India’s cheap, so it attracts amateurs and second-raters and opportunists. Backpackers. Little Leaguers. Because India’s desperate, Indians do most of the work for you.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?”
“Depends,” Dwight said. “Indians never lose. No matter how well you think you’re doing, they’re doing better. You’re glad because you can get a pair of blue jeans for a buck twenty-nine. But eighty cents of that is profit for them.”
“I’m trying to put a restaurant together. Zack’s doing a movie.”
“You’ll get it done. And you’ll get something else you never expected. The Indian extra. The Indian surprise.”
He knew he was being enigmatic; he was not even sure what he was saying. Certainly he was warning them, but he didn’t like them enough to explain the warning in detail. What alarmed him was, having given no thought to these opinions before, they seemed to be bubbling up from his unconscious. Maybe I am warning myself?