“They were so busy, tied up most of the time. And they went sightseeing. Chor Bazaar. Crawford Market. Towers of Silence. Elephanta Caves. Side trip to Agra. They much enjoyed themselves.”
All the things he had never seen, while his own interest had been elsewhere. He said, “You thought I’d corrupt them.”
“Not at all,” Shah said without conviction. He said nothing more, and because Dwight was looking closely at him, he saw Shah’s nostrils widen—a breath instead of another denial, but it was the more telling for being a deliberate breath.
Now Dwight was surer of himself. He said, “You were afraid I’d lead them astray.”
Without blinking, Shah took another breath, flaring his nostrils again. He was a spiritual soul, his pieties were obvious in the office, yet he had the manner of an accountant—discreet, overcautious, revealing nothing, but giving off a distinct hum of repressed fuss. Something of the Indian businessman informed the spiritual man, with his credit and debit columns in the ledger of karma.
“You heard something,” Dwight said.
Anyone new to India would not have detected the slight head-wobble, or would have assumed it to be an involuntary twitch, a sideways nod on a bad stretch of road. But Dwight knew it was not a pothole. It was Shah’s acknowledgment; that tilt of the head was an emphatic yes.
“What did you hear?”
Shah did something with his lips, his mouth, and compressed his lips, another subtlety, as though he’d tasted something unpleasant, while at the same time, out of politeness, refraining from showing his disgust.
He said, “Are you knowing Cape Cod in Massachusetts?”
“Very well. I grew up not far from there. We spent our summers in Chatham.”
“Exactly. When I visited Harvard to pursue that research angle of business, they took me by road to Cape Cod. We visited lovely towns. Saw Kennedy compound from road. Went for a fine walk on expanse of beach. An impressive place with many vivid sights.”
Get to the point, please, Dwight thought, staring hard to speed him up. Shah had the Indian businessman’s way of speaking (and it had also been Winky’s way), which seemed designed to force you to submit, to cry uncle. But this manner was his strength in the firm.
He raised a skinny finger. He said, “One sight was more vivid than any other that day. Can you guess?”
“Maybe one of those big sailboats in Hyannis harbor?”
“Not at all,” Shah said.
“Kennedy compound?”
“Not.”
“I can’t guess.”
“It was me,” Shah said.
“You were the sight?”
“I was the sight. That day, in that place, I was indeed the most unusual feature. There were no other Indians anywhere we went—none in the restaurant, none in the museum. At the botanical gardens in the town of Sandwich. With this face and these hands”—now he looked at Dwight; until then he had been looking away—“I was the most visible.”
Wisible was also how Dwight had felt in his shame.
“I get it,” he said.
But Shah went on, saying, “Had I drunk beer in a bar, or gone about with a woman, or given money …”
“I said I get it.”
“In India, we see everything. We hear everything. And if you are visible …”
“Please stop,” Dwight said. He put his head in his hands. He saw himself, a big white goon, at the Gateway of India, at the charity ball with Winky Vellore, talking to Indru, whispering to Padmini, sneaking off to their flat, kicking the sand at Chowpatty Beach. Wisible.
His shame silenced him, the emotion fatigued him—or was it the early start, backseat nausea, the rutted road? He slept and was awakened by Shah’s saying, “Poona city. We will take luncheon.”
Shah said he knew of a Jain restaurant. He gave directions to the driver. The place was just a shop with trestle tables and creaky chairs. No menu. The usual humble meal, which Shah kept calling “luncheon,” served by an old man and a boy.
“He is a good man,” Shah said of the restaurant owner as he was clearing the plates. “Very strict. And a teacher too.”
The man smiled. He seemed to know that he was being spoken about.
“We Jains call such people ‘passage makers.’ He shows the way.”
“You do that too,” Dwight said.
“It is kind of you to say that. But …” His voice trailed off and he shrugged, ambiguous again, neither yes nor no, but probably yes.
Walking to the car, Shah said, “That lovely gateway was once entrance to a great palace, Shanwar Wada. And over there …”
He gestured and walked ten steps to a narrow street overlooked by old stone and stucco houses.
“Very nice,” Dwight said.
“… was a place of execution,” Shah said.
Dwight stepped backward, looked harder, but saw only a bumpy, weedy street contained by the leaning buildings.
“Men who transgressed were brought here. They were bound hand and foot. They were summarily executed.”
Gazing at the tussocky street, the potholes, a grazing cow, a skinny boy in a white shirt marching with a school backpack, the sun slanting into dust motes, Dwight said, “How?”
“Elephants were released that side. The men were trampled to death.” Shah winced, as though he’d gotten a glimpse of it. “For their indiscretions. Under the elephants’ mighty feet.”
He said no more. He led Dwight to the car. In the car he tapped on the back of the driver’s headrest and said, “Mahabaleshwar, for Mahuli.”
The Poona meal had made Dwight drowsy. He hugged himself, crouched in a corner of the back seat, and sank into sleep. The country was dry and hilly and looked crumbled and cracked: Dwight carried the landscape into his dreams. The road, the honking of the car, the sunlight in the window—it all became part of his vision of punishment, and the rumble of the wheels was like the pounding in his heart. When he awoke, strangely refreshed, yawning with vigor, relieved to see the day, he looked out of the car window and saw a rural landscape of great simplicity that he had never visited before and hardly imagined: men squatting in the shade of low huts, children carrying water in squarish tin containers, women slapping muddy chunks into Frisbie-sized dung pats for fuel.
Those serene people thrived in a dusty setting that Dwight saw as the counterpart of the tortured landscape of his heart. Lucky people, he thought. They’ve learned how to live here, how to flourish in a quiet way.
“I can see you are suffering,” Shah said.
“Suffering?”
“You were crying out in your sleep.”
“What did I say?”
“You were pleading for relief,” Shah said. “Don’t be embarrassed. Was it my mention of the execution ground?”
Dwight didn’t know. He remembered the sight of the big sunbaked land, the dusty stunted bushes, the dead trees, the yoked buffalo turning over dry curls of soil. But seeing Shah’s serious face he recalled, trampled … indiscretions … mighty feet.
So he said yes, and, “That would be an awful way to go.”
With the take-charge energy that Dwight noticed in him after his return from the States, Shah said brightly, “What I heard in America was people saying, ‘I know I have a problem. But I don’t know what to do.’”
“I understand that,” Dwight said. He had been fearful of speaking the words, but they had run through his mind.
“Or, ‘There are no answers,’” Shah said in a stilted quoting voice.
“Tell me about it,” Dwight said.
“Yes,” Shah said. “It is a Western confusion, a kind of spiritual ignorance. ‘I don’t know which way to turn.’ We in India never say such things. Why, do you think?”
The little car had tipped forward and they were descending into a steep-sided valley on a road that was like the bewildering track Dwight saw when he thought of his own life. “Going nowhere,” people said, when it was obvious that they were traveling hard on an awful road like this to somewhere, but the unknown.