“Do you want to be free?” the old man asked softly.
“Yes, yes.”
“It is possible. To be free, you must see things as they are.”
“That’s all?”
“That is a lot,” the old man said, and got to his feet. “Now sleep.”
He led Dwight through the courtyard. “Stars,” Dwight said. “You don’t see these in Mumbai.”
As if obeying a subtle cue, the old man walked a few steps away, toward a gateway carved with images of animals and gods.
In an urgent whisper, Shah said, “You are so lucky. No one knows you here. It is as though you don’t exist. You can be peaceful. You can think about your life. Meditate, my friend. Open your heart. What is the world? A flame in the wind. A flash of lightning in a summer cloud. So beautiful.”
Dwight said, “How can I thank you?”
“Trust me with your valuables,” Shah said, clutching the briefcase.
“They’re nothing. A bubble in a stream.”
The old man was watching, the light from the candles giving him the bright eyes of a nocturnal animal.
“I’ll leave first thing,” Shah said. “And then I’ll be away.”
“Whatever.”
Shah said, “I’ll stay in the States for a while.”
Dwight said, “I think I’ll stay here for a while.”
In the darkness of his cubicle, Dwight slept as though drugged. He lay on his back, lightly covered by a clean sheet, breathing the residue of the night’s incense.
At first light he was aware of Shah leaving, gathering his bags, scuffing his sandals on the path outside. Dwight simply held his breath and waited for silence to descend. The car doors slammed, the engine raced, and then, like a fly’s buzz fading, the sound of the car was overlaid by silence again. And with that silence and Shah’s departure a sweet fragrance filled his room.
Dwight imagined Shah in the car, heading back to Mumbai, rubbing his hands, probably making a gleeful call on his cell phone, hooting into it, something like, “It is done!” Shah thought he’d pulled a fast one, secured the Harvard account, ingratiated himself with Sheely and Kohut and Elfman—all the while keeping Dwight in the dark. He had maneuvered him to this ashram, divested him of his laptop, and was going off to get rich. He believed that he had fooled Dwight.
No, it had been a favor, a gift.
Once, at Shah’s house, at that dinner, hearing Shah describe his mendicant father, Dwight had had a vision of himself as a holy man on a dusty road, swinging a stick, eating an apple. He had laughed then, because it had seemed so improbable, and it had been a way of jeering at himself. Now, lying on a narrow cot in the tidy room freshened by the fizz of leaves and the morning air at his open window, he saw himself again, a skinny sunburned geek in a turban and loincloth, carrying a wooden staff, and strolling down a country road, craving nothing except more life—happy, seeing things as they were.
THE ELEPHANT GOD
1
Walking toward the railway station, its dome like a huge head, its scrollwork and buttresses suggesting big ears, Alice smiled at the way the old building glittered like a great gray creature of granite, but closer it was just fakery, India mimicking England, a hodgepodge of disappointed Gothic. Alice hesitated at the archway, then stepped through the entrance. Inside it was a nut house, and it stank. The smells of India still terrified her. From a distance, India was splendor; up close, misery.
A man with stumps for hands, just rounded wrists, approached her with pleading eyes and lips. She gave him a ten-rupee note but could not bear to see him manipulate it. She had to brave the waiting room because her friend Stella was late, as usual. Pretty girls were never punctual—was it another way of being noticed? Pretty girls were always forgiven. Pretty girls could be peculiarly reckless and were seldom harmed or blamed because they were pretty. And the weird thing was that pretty girls never believed they were pretty enough.
Alice was never late, and she knew what that implied about her, but she told herself she didn’t care. They had been friends at Brown, but not close. She had been the pretty girl’s plain friend, a protector, to be patronized. Now, as this was not Providence, Rhode Island, but the world, over the weeks of their traveling together Alice had begun to see Stella in a new way. She pitied her for her egotism, her passivity, her abrupt changes of mind. Pretty girls had a free pass, they could do anything, especially get away with a childlike sort of helplessness. Alice wanted to say, “Someday it will be your undoing.”
Having to search for Stella in the crowded station made Alice conspicuous and meant her having to stare at the people pushing, or the ones quarreling or sleeping in heaps on rectangles of cloth by the wall. Beaky old women sat abjectly in front of dishes of coins, exhibiting their misery. A mother with a limp baby made “give me food” gestures—her fingers fluttering to her mouth, presenting the baby as the object of suffering. Was the baby dead?
The Indian novels she’d read in the States had not prepared her for what she saw here. Where were the big fruitful families from these novels? Where were the jokes, the love affairs, the lavish marriage ceremonies, the solemn pieties, the virtuous peasants, the environmentalists, the musicians, the magic, the plausible young men? They seemed concocted to her now, and besieged in up-close India, all she thought of was Hieronymus Bosch, turtle-faced crones, stumpy men, deformed children.
“Yes?” It was someone else from Bosch, a dark brown man with dyed orange hair and red eyes. He pressed close to her and stroked her hair with a lizard-like hand. He held a tattered canvas bag in his other hand.
“Please leave me alone,” Alice said.
The man looked gleeful. He said, “There are more than one billion people in India. You will never be alone.”
A furious-faced mustached man in a khaki woolen uniform, with a truncheon under his arm, demanded to see Alice’s ticket. Roosterish and aggressive, he was not in any of the novels. The first man backed away, still smiling.
“What do you want?” She had been told that some of these people wanted bribes.
“Security. Where going?”
“Going Bangalore.”
“Flatporm pyve.”
“Me waiting friend,” Alice said, and smiled, hearing herself.
“Prend coming?”
“Friend coming just now.”
The man left her, and there she waited, as though abandoned, feeling scrutinized, assaulted by people’s stares. But what could she do? They had agreed to meet at the front of the station platform for the trip. Alice had not gotten used to Stella’s lateness, and she thought, Why should I? But the late person always seemed to think that after many instances of being late, she was understood and pardoned and the waiter was habituated to it. But the opposite was the case—the blame grew.
When, finally, Alice saw Stella approaching through the throng, she knew her friend had something on her mind. Mental conflict showed in the way she walked. They’d been traveling for three weeks, and in that time Alice saw how obvious Stella was, how easily she could be read. She touched her right eye when she was being untruthful; she jogged her left leg when she was impatient; she quickly agreed to anything Alice might say when she wanted to talk. And then she talked and talked, as a way to prevent Alice from asking any questions, talked in order to dominate and conceal. She had talked a lot lately, and ever since arriving in Mumbai Stella’s pretty-girl presumptions had been obnoxious. She was used to being treated as someone special; she was passive; she needed only to smile to attract notice.