“This is paneer. Please don’t make a face, but cow dung is used in preparation.”
“Gives it a distinctive taste,” Dwight said.
“Exactly.”
“I’m so glad to see you back here.”
“Thank you, my friend.”
“Fruit, sir?” the waiter asked. He was holding a basket of oranges and bananas and apples.
Shah said, “An apple only, but you must assure me that it was not picked. That it fell from tree and was garnered.”
“Apple fell to earth, sir.”
“I will take then,” Shah said. “Please, Mr. Hund. Take yourself.”
Dwight selected an apple. He said, “It wasn’t picked. It fell. I like that.”
Though he was scrupulous in what he ate, Shah’s method of eating was noisy. He chawed the apple, biting hard and loudly. He chewed with his mouth open, flecks of the fruit on his lips, a smear of juice on his cheek. He talked with his mouth full, heedlessly spraying masticated apple flesh, and doing this while boasting made it all seem ruder.
“In America they could not believe what I was saying. They offered me apples and whatnot. I said, ‘Only if they have fallen. Not if they have been picked by human hand.’ They were so surprised! And then I had to tell them, ‘I do not take water at night. Insects may be adhering to surface.’ The blighters were shocked, I tell you.”
This detail, which Dwight had admired in Shah, seemed pointless now that he was booming about it. He was changed—not the certain yet modest Shah but an overconfident man who took pleasure in these triumphant stories, like Indru’s tales of rape. In America he’d had a fatal revelation: he had been persuaded that he was interesting.
“I told them, ‘No potatoes. One might inadvertently eat the living things, such as fungi and microbial substances.’ They thought I was joking. I said to them, ‘Not at all, my friends!’”
He was a bit too happy about this, and the other giveaway was his repeating himself. He must have told the stories fifty times, not remembering that he’d already told them to Dwight.
Dwight remarked on the new pinstriped suit.
“Brooks Brothers,” Shah said. “Flagship store. It’s a good cut, I think. I like the drape.”
“Probably made in India,” Dwight said.
“Oh, no,” Shah said, protesting as he tugged on his lapel, reacting a bit too sharply to what Dwight had intended as a joke. “Italian made. Very good weave.”
When he took out his new cell phone, he said that he’d bought it on a trip to New York, that it took photographs and could store five hundred of them in its memory. He located one and displayed it for Dwight: Shah smiling beside a tweedy man with beetling brows and horn-rimmed glasses.
“John Chapman Thaw. Harvard man. He presented me with this tie, as a matter of fact.” He held the phone in his hand to admire it. “A very humble man.”
“New watch?”
“Oh, yes. From duty-free in London. So many functions.” He pinched the face of it. “I have two time zones here. It’s seven at the office. Mr. Kohut will be calling Mrs. Kohut and saying, ‘I’ll be late, my dear.’ What a delightful chap. Very faithful to his missus.”
Dwight smiled at him. The old Shah had been—not Americanized, but enlarged, made self-aware. He had been appreciated, someone had listened to him, he’d been praised. He seemed a new man. He wasn’t sinuous and oblique anymore, and unexpectedly Dwight found this new assurance irritating. Dwight reminded himself that Shah had been in the States for almost two months.
“I hear you took a course at Harvard Business School,” Dwight said.
“Your fellow Elfman fixed it for me. Very decent chap,” Shah said. “I met so many Indians in Cambridge. It was like a little India. I invited the prof. He will be visiting.”
“Indian?”
Shah opened his camera phone again. He said, “No, Chappie. John Chapman Thaw. Harvard man. You must know him?”
“I went to BU.”
“Very famous. Very accomplished. Very moral chap. Truthful in all things.” Gazing again at the man’s picture, Shah hadn’t registered Dwight’s remark. “Family money. Excellent set of contacts.”
That was another thing—the new friends. In Mumbai, Shah had seemed to be part of a small circle of businessmen, most of whom Dwight knew. But while enlarging his personality, his experience in America, where modesty was usually a fault and never a virtue, he had widened his network of friends. He was impressed by the people he had met. He wasn’t cynical, yet he always made a point of saying how impressed they’d been to meet him, an insect-preserving Jain, an abstemious man who lived by strict rules. But Elfman? God, he’d finally found someone to share his fatuous passion for Harvard.
“They said to me, ‘Shah, you don’t deviate.’ And I said”—he sat back on the banquette of the hotel restaurant—“‘I am ruthlessly consistent.’”
Dwight smiled at the way Shah had praised the Americans he’d met: very moral, very decent, very faithful, very humble, truthful in all things. Did Shah know something? But Dwight was glad he was back. And when, later that day, they got down to business, working through the list of new appointments that Miss Chakravarti had prepared, Dwight placed his hand on Shah’s forearm and gripped it in gratitude, feeling the energy. He was the man to emulate—his work ethic, his sense of appreciation, his moral code.
Over the next few days, they kept the appointments. Dwight resumed his normal office hours in Jeejeebhoy Towers, and when he was in the boardroom he didn’t look down at the Gateway of India. He watched the efficient way that Shah dealt with the clients, he commented on the deals, and he reflected on the Diamond Sutra, what Shah had told him that evening, that the world gave false messages with sounds, odors, flavors. And the Three Jewels of Jainism—right belief, right knowledge, right conduct.
Never mind Shah’s self-interested stories, Dwight was consoled by his being near and giving him strength. He often thought of his last visit to Indru’s, when he had asked the two women what his name was, and they hadn’t known it, or remembered it; when Padmini had asked him what he wanted; when he had said, “I want to go.” Had it not been for his holding to right conduct, he would have gone back.
“Bangalore next week,” Dwight said at the end of one meeting about information technology.
“I’ll have to stay in Mumbai. Chappie is coming.”
“I can look after him,” Dwight said.
Shah did not reply, yet he reacted, something involuntary, a twitch visiting his head and shoulders, almost recoiling, as though to the drift of a questionable smell.
“I need you to do something important,” Shah said.
That was fine—what Dwight needed was to be kept busy. Shah had returned so much more confident than before—a good sign—and with a list of contacts and accounts to pursue. Dwight had imagined they’d be working together, yet Shah’s confidence and his full schedule kept him distant and somewhat aloof.
This is his city, Dwight told himself. But the master-servant relationship of before, in which Shah had been a punctilious helper, a junior partner, seemed to be over, and at times Dwight suspected that their roles had been reversed: Shah was the active partner now, Dwight the assistant who required direction.
“I need your help in releasing a consignment of rice from a certain warehouse,” Shah said. “A ton or so.”
Shah was giving him something to do? Dwight said, “Maybe we could do it together.”