After an hour, he said he had an appointment. They swapped business cards—even the punk kid Zack had one. And then Dwight took a taxi to Indru’s. Probably that was what he meant when he mentioned the Indian surprise.
It was true that Indians did most of the work. And there were plenty of manufacturers eager to service clients—too many of them, perhaps, and they were ruthless with each other. They were persistent with him and tended to call his cell phone at all hours, offering to cut deals. It was no good for him to say, “You can’t do an end run on the tendering process,” because they didn’t understand the metaphor, and anyway, backstabbing was a standard business practice, even part of the culture, with real backs and real knives.
But Dwight had always found someone suitable to make the product—not movies or concept restaurants, time-wasting negotiations that brought together those natural allies, the dreamer and the bullshitter. He preferred deals for making plastic buckets, rubber gaskets, leisure wear, nylon plumbing fixtures, sports shoes, electronic components. The insulated wire that was a crucial part of a spark plug—no one wanted to make them in the States anymore, but Shah had found a man in Hyderabad, a former rope maker, who had retooled his shop to make the wire for a few dollars a spool. That kind of thing. The hard part was the contract, the final wording, the up-front payments, the penalty clauses, and for that he needed Shah’s scrupulous shit-detecting Jain eye.
“Still following up some contacts here,” Shah e-mailed, and it sounded like procrastination.
Fine. Dwight handed off the competing Indians to his secretary, Miss Chakravarti. Indians understood delegating. “I can do it, sir,” they’d say, and give the job to someone else, a menial, and that menial would delegate it to someone lower. And Dwight had more time, because he found that an e-mail or a letter, if left unanswered, became stale and less important as time passed, and soon diminished to something so thin and tentative it was easy for him to delete it. Filing it or keeping it fresh made it into an artificial demand.
Time was the test of any demand. He had never in his life felt the passage of time so palpably as he had in India. And he had concluded that, really, nothing was urgent—nothing at all. Maybe nothing mattered.
Now and then he forwarded a message to Shah, still in Boston. “You have given me a wonderful opportunity,” Shah e-mailed. And he stayed on.
On most days, but especially on weekends, Indians walked along Chowpatty Beach, a great expanse of tainted shoreline—dirty sand, sodden litter, scummy water, beached plastic—where it was always low tide. These days, with more time on his hands, Dwight walked along the beach with Indru, and sometimes with Padmini. He saw no other foreigners doing this, and thought, Maybe I’m not a foreigner anymore.
They walked, he bought them ice cream, they sat on the benches, they used the promenade, they gazed at the Malabar Hill beyond the bay, the mansions, the villas. They looked at the sea, which seemed idyllic, but Dwight knew—and so did the unbuoyant, non-swimming Indians—that it was polluted, and that if you looked closely you’d see that the sea water had the yellow-gray color and deadly fizz of battery acid.
Strolling made Indru talkative. “My mother treat me so harsh,” she said. “My father touch me. Shame for him.”
She was provoked to tell her stories whenever there was a lull in the conversation. Usually she spoke without emotion, lapping an ice cream cone, as she was doing now.
“My granny lock me in the dark room.”
“So you said.”
“After he make me naked, Father say, ‘Go away, you bad girl.’”
“I remember. You went to the police. They didn’t believe you.”
“Police not believe me at all. ‘You are talking blue lies.’ They take me to the village sarpanch. He touch my privates. Oh, my God.”
She spoke without anger, rotating the ice cream on its cone, licking her fingers when it dripped.
“And the boys in the village were cruel,” Dwight said.
“They throw things at me. They throw kanda. The cow dung women make for the fires, they throw at me.”
The same stories, in their way tragic, perhaps, but hearing them so often irritated him. He had been moved the first time. By now he knew them by heart. He could recite them verbatim, and what was more annoying that that? They became parodies. Apart from the stories of cruelty and abuse, which he only half believed (she told them a new way each time, and sometimes improved on them, with variations and discrepancies and gaps), Indru had no other conversation.
Obviously, she had remembered how, the first time, he had listened; how she had captured his attention, silenced him with her stories, a Scheherezade of sadism.
They were an important justification for him—for seeing her, being kind to her, sleeping with her—the poor kid, how she’d suffered. He needed the stories. They gave him the right to sleep with her and to be her benefactor.
She needed them too, for without the stories she was just a wayward girl in Mumbai, filling in at a hair and nail salon and lazily looking for someone to pay her way.
“My uncle, so cruel. He touch me and threaten me.”
“He had a motorcycle. He gave you a ride. He took you to a riverbank and raped you.”
“His friend also did things to me.”
That was a new twist. Dwight said, “Give it a rest, Indru.”
The trouble was that, bored by the stories—he had been outraged before—his own behavior seemed crass. She was not a victim he was helping but rather an opportunist overdramatizing her past.
He doubted the stories, not just because she told them without feeling; she seemed to repeat them because of his reaction to them. She believed they were the key to his sympathy, and they had been, but not on the twentieth retelling.
“What about you, Padmini? Any family problems?”
“No problem. I happy.”
“They beat Padmini at nail salon,” Indru said with indignation, as though looking to create drama.
“I spill nail varnish on customer sari,” Padmini said. And she began to laugh. “She so angry!”
“Did they really beat you?” Dwight asked.
“Oh, yes, but customer refuse to pay. She get out of chair and say goodbye and hurry out to street and rickshaw wallah hit her—whoof!—and she plop down. Ha!”
The memory of the angry customer being struck by a rickshaw was stronger than the memory of being beaten.
Padmini didn’t look for sympathy, which was probably why he liked her, and why, when Indru’s brother showed up and took Indru out, Dwight didn’t mind: he had Padmini, who was younger and prettier and, in her way, shrewder. Because she didn’t ask for anything, he gave her money and presents, and he was less inclined to give Indru presents, since she asked for them constantly these days.
Indru believed that her horror stories helped, but all they did was diminish her, turn her into a figure of melodrama, make her impossible to love and hard to like. Yes, he could pity her, but there were a billion others worthy of pity.
Both were living off him. Indru had stopped working. And Padmini worked less often. And when Indru asked Dwight for money or a present, he suspected that she was asking on behalf of her brother. Even Padmini admitted that she sent some of Dwight’s money home to her parents in the village.
That made him think. Behind Indru and Padmini, radiating outward from the two-room apartment, were more people living off them, each girl with a family, each family a village, each village a hierarchy, like the sarpanch whom Indru had mentioned—a great assortment of hungry people with their hands out. He was supporting them all, yet he could not call himself a benefactor.