They were staring at him. He said, “What’s my name?”
Padmini began to giggle. Indru said, “I am know.”
“Tell me.”
“Mister,” she said, but she could not go any further. She was murmuring, “Ferringi.”
“I’m Dwight Huntsinger.”
Hearing this, they both laughed, for the name was impossible to say. They champed at a few syllables and laughed some more.
Padmini stood naked before him and said, “What you want?”
Just then he was thinking the same thing, a clumsy matching moment that helped him see clearly.
He said, “I want to go.”
They were still calling to him as he descended the stairs. A door opened on a landing below, and a chubby-faced woman looked out and seemed to pair the girls’ appeals to his fleeing—more humiliation.
On his way back to the hotel he almost succeeded in losing himself in the crowd, yet he felt that his face was vivid with shame, a pink and sweaty, guilty-looking ferringi face, debauched, different from everyone else’s.
His shame was strongest on that walk when a woman approached to beg from him, as if testing his willpower. India was weird that way, a culture of confrontation. Here he was, a few minutes’ away from one humiliation and a woman was stopping to challenge him with another. “Give me money.” He was so fearful he could not bring himself to give her a rupee. She hissed at him, and his agony was complete.
That night he went to the hotel’s business center, as he did most nights, to check his e-mail. Usually he forwarded the messages to Miss Chakravarti. Rarely was there a message on a business matter from Shah, though everyone in the firm praised him: “He’s developed some contacts at Harvard Business School” and “He found some great people in Boston who want to create a high-tech facility in Mysore” and “The partners like him. He might be the key to setting up a branch office in Mumbai.”
But tonight the message from Kohut was “Shah is talking about bringing his wife to the States.”
Dwight began typing, “Urgent. Please …”
Before he finished the message, he looked at the clock. It was morning in Boston. He deleted the message and found Kohut’s number on the speed dial of his BlackBerry.
“Huntsinger!”
“Ernie, listen to me. I need Shah back here.”
“Why are you pleading? You’re our guy in India. Anyway, Shah was planning a trip there. He’s got some great business lined up.” Perhaps aware of the huge distance, Kohut was shouting in the phone. “So, hey, Dwight, how’s it hanging?”
7
In the days before Shah returned, Dwight stayed at his hotel, either using the business center or sitting on the veranda of the Elephanta Suite, which was enclosed, a high wall protecting him from the road. He was slowed by a kind of fear. He could not bring himself to go out. The risks were too great—strangers would approach him, obstruct him, as they always did in India, and they would challenge him, ask for money or food, or ask that he give them a job. A young boy had tapped Dwight’s Rolex watch and demanded to know why it should not be given to him.
Once, he regarded dealing with people like this at close quarters as his strength, staring them down, like a chief or a king, or acceding to their request, with the power to change a person’s life. Not just Indru and the others. Those experiences had made him bold—he was known on the street as a soft touch. Now he had come to see himself as a victim, but a corrupt one.
He called Maureen, dialed the number impulsively, not quite sure why, until she answered in a small beaten voice. “Yes?”
“I’m so sorry,” he said, feeling tearful.
“Who is this?”
“Dwight,” he said. “It was all my fault, the breakup. I could have tried harder. We could have worked out our issues. But my damned pride prevented me. Can you ever forgive me?”
She came awake. She said, “It’s two o’clock in the morning, for God’s sake!”
“I’m sorry.”
“Dwight, don’t talk to me about issues. We have no issues. Your coupons have run out.”
“Honey?”
“Don’t ever do this again.”
He was left holding a buzzing phone. He deserved it, for having been so reckless in India. From where he sat on the veranda, he could see other Americans doing the same—lawyers, lobbyists, facilitators, dealers, wholesalers, all of them being wooed by Indians. They were traveling down the same road, under the promising billboard You Can Make Anything in India. It was the crux of the whole effort, the test of a person’s character. You had to be strong to survive it. But most of the people he saw had failed.
The middle-aged American with the pretty and pliant Indian girlfriend, the American woman with her saluting driver, the American lawyer with his submissive hacks, the young American traveler being helped by the groveling concierge, the Pinskers—the father starting a gourmet Indian restaurant in New York, the son trying to set up a movie, hustling in Mumbai and vacationing in Jaipur—everyone had a scheme to hook up the Indians and make money and behave badly.
With rising anger, Dwight saw an American brat—nine or ten years old, long hair, hat on backward—in the hotel dining room. The boy sulked as he was being asked by a waiter in a turban, frock coat, and crimson sash, “What do you desire for your meal, sir?”
The white-gloved waiter was bending low and abasing himself to the child while the parents studied their menus.
“May I suggest the soup?”
“I hate soup.” The child made himself ugly and turned away.
“Perhaps tasty grilled-cheese sandwich?”
“I don’t like that either.”
“Maybe young sir would prefer breaded cutlet?”
“What’s that supposed to be?”
“Meat, sir.”
“I want spaghetti, but no red stuff on it, and no cheese.”
“I will request kitchen to make, sir,” the waiter said, bowing, clicking his pen, while the brat’s father and mother still frowned at their menus.
Dwight wanted to slap the snarly child, then slap the parents; then tell the waiter to stop groveling, and then he wanted to slap himself. But it was too late. They were all lost. No hope for them, not much for him.
How had he been corrupted so quickly? It wasn’t as though the Indians were sensualists. They were forthright. They asked for what they wanted. He’d had the best of intentions, but he had been weak. The girls had not been beautiful, either, only young and hungry. Hunger was a terrible thing that turned you into both predator and prey. Winky Vellore was no beauty; she was greedy. Padmini had connived with Indru. It was all like the sort of deal he had been negotiating for months with Shah and the wholesalers. Sir, we will be good to you.
It wasn’t food they wanted. They craved dresses and shoes and electronics, an iPod, a better TV set. They were not starving; they were greedy for gold. He couldn’t blame them. He blamed himself. He needed for Shah to return, to protect him, somehow rescue him. The man was saintly: he didn’t swat flies, he didn’t eat eggs, he wouldn’t drink water at night for fear of guzzling an insect that might be floating on the surface.
At last Dwight got the e-mail from Shah with his arrival time. Dwight did not go to the airport to meet him—Mrs. Shah would do that—but he checked that the plane was on time, and he waited the next morning for Shah to call. Without quite knowing how, Dwight trusted Shah to release him from his misery.
He was convinced of it the morning after Shah’s arrival, when he met him for breakfast. It wasn’t his manner. In fact, he seemed somewhat changed: he was more urbane in a self-conscious way, wearing what looked like a Brooks Brothers suit and a Harvard tie and a matching hankie stuffed into his breast pocket. But he was a reassuring presence, and his choice of food was proof of his unchanged goodness, the simplest items on the menu: dhal, rice cakes, a plate of warm flaky pooris, some Indian cheese.