The Elephanta Suite Read online

  "Elephants," he was saying, "bearing down on my friend Sanjeev."

  Surely he had told this story before?

  "But Sanjeev could not swim. He sank to his knees as big bull elephant approached. And elephant, too, fell to knees and enclosed poor Sanjeev between his great tusks."

  His teeth gleamed on the word "tusks."

  "And protected him from the other elephants," Beth said.

  "In beginning, yes, protection was there. Tusks were there," Dr. Nagaraj said. "But elephant rose to his feet and withdrew. Sanjeev remained on his knees, head down. When coast was clear I went to that side and found that my friend was dead."

  Surely this was the same story, with a different ending?

  "He had not been crushed," Dr. Nagaraj said. "He somehow died of heart failure. I could not help him, yet I had brought the poor man to this place. Of course, I was devastated."

  "Did he have a family?"

  "No wife, no children. But parents are there."

  "Life's so short," Beth said.

  Dr Nagaraj smiled. "No, no. Life continues. It flows. There is no end."

  3

  Mr. and Mrs. Blunden, Audie and Beth, lay in bed side by side, but apart, sinking into sleep by tumbling and bumping in the narrowing cave of consciousness, along the flowing stream of their vagrant thoughts. Sometimes they stirred in the shallows of embarrassed memory, often slowed and heavy in the eddies of the darker past, but always going down deeper, wishing for the gulping light to cease as they vanished into slumber and different images, twisting in the underground river of darkness, sleeping. Yet they were both awake.

  They had said good night and "Love ya," enacting their bedtime ritual, and kissed with dry lips like siblings. Some minutes later, still wakeful but numbed by the night, they breathed slowly, buoyed by their reveries, foundering, going under, but not deep enough.

  The specter of death hung at the periphery of Audie's wakefulness, pressing a bony finger to his lipless grin in admonition. The dead could seem like scolds. Never mind whether they were right or wrong, you couldn't answer back; they had the last word, which was Told you so. Audie was thinking of the things he owned, his mind roving over the many rooms in his four residences, the accumulation of so many objects, having turned his fortune into the valuable clutter that filled his houses. He imagined collapsing, falling face-forward into the middle of it, like someone stifled in a closet of expensive furs, or toppled off a stylish but wobbly chair to expire on the floor, blood leaking from his head. Thinking of what he owned, he was appalled, for all he had was that sagging face that looked back at him in the mirror, the jug ears, the thinning hair. He was no more than his breath.

  Not even the poor are more cynical than the rich, he thought.

  Something more, something only a man of sixty would know but a girl of twenty smiling at a school of fish in a fish tank would not know, sustained him and kept him calm: the life force was the push and pull of repetition—a novelty at first, you were easily deceived into thinking that the next phase would be something new. And so it seemed to the young, but growing wasn't progress, and all aging was decline. Audie had gone from a belief in experience to a realization that it was downhill all the way. His whole life he had been dying. Time passed and the something new, looked at closely, was something he'd seen before. Then it repeated, and occurring again it seemed trivial, even seedier, a mockery of his hopes. Feelings repeated and shamed him. Glittering objects appeared, and when he reached for them he was embarrassed by his gesture, for it was all a repetition—perhaps a new chair, possibly bigger, better upholstered, gilt or chrome, lumbar support, an original design, but no more than another chair, and he had more than he needed. And it, too, was one he could fall from and break his neck, and after his death the mute thing would still be there, to be auctioned for ready money by someone he hardly knew.

  He wondered, Have I lived too long?

  For if you live long enough, you see everything, and if you go on living, everything happens over again, just the same, even the women—especially the women. Earlier in his life he'd understood: a young woman wanted to be married, or a married woman wanted a nicer or richer husband, many women wanted to try again for something better. Who could blame them for looking to the future? But he, like most men, wallowed in the present and did not see farther than the foot of the bed. The women he'd known were, each of them, different, but what made them sisters was their same question, always spoken in the darkness, at a moment when he felt fulfilled and complete: Where is this going?

  He kept the answer to himself, because it was devastating. He'd got what he wanted, and now he wanted to go home. They wanted more. He hoped for a night—not even a night, hardly a few hours; they wanted a life.

  He did not know if he was like other men. That didn't matter, a comparison was futile. But he knew his past and how his life of accumulation had deluded him. He had years more to live but knew in advance that there was nothing new for him. An older man looking for novelty was fooling himself, and was even more ridiculous than he knew. He was just a clown, a bumbler in a circus.

  The remorseless symmetry of his life had become apparent to him since his arrival in India, his life of repetition, and anything that appeared new was what Dr. Nagaraj had told him was maya, illusion. Without putting the disturbing thought into words, keeping it an emotion that penetrated to the core of his body like the shiver of a taboo, he realized there was no point in being wealthy if you could still be deceived. To him, money represented privacy and comfort, but more than that, if it did not also allow access to the truth, then it was nothing but a deception. A rich man who was conned by a lie had no one to blame but himself. And there was no greater fool than a rich man who was self-deceived.

  And here was the irony: the man who ran a great company; who hired the best people and ruthlessly fired employees who were perceived as weak in their jobs; who took a faltering firm and whipped it into shape, cutting costs here, eliminating a whole department there, walking into offices of old timers and saying, "I'm sorry, but I'm letting you go, clear out your desk"—getting rid of them in a day so they didn't linger and stink up the place with their aggrieved indignation—that same scary CEO who nuked entire floors of workers would meet a young ambitious woman, greedy to be married, swift as a raptor, and the man would offer himself to be snatched. The man who could spot an unreliable employee a mile away could be possessed by the most transparent upstart. Not that she wasn't presentable. She might indeed be beautiful, but that was all, and it was only afterward that the man saw how he had been fooled, how he had fooled himself. The big swaggering toughie from the boardroom found himself snared by someone he would not have hired to work the photocopier. Then the woman had a child and said either "I want stock options for Junior" or else "I don't love you anymore," and she got the penthouse, the plane, child support, and a meal ticket for life. Didn't such a man ever say to himself, "Uh-oh, look out"?

  In the hour or so before he finally subsided into sleep, Audie Blunden saw this with his Indian clarity. Because India was a land of repetition, a land of nothing new. You couldn't say anything in India that hadn't been said before, and if you succumbed to India's vivid temptation to generalize, all you could do was utter a platitude so obvious it looked like a lie: The poverty's a problem or All these cows in the street or It's real dirty.

  Like a living, billion-strong festival of futility, India was the proof that you could not do anything here that hadn't been done before. India was a reminder of the extravagance of human self-deception, and the fundamental lesson of Indian life was that people and even animals had previous existences, other lives, past incarnations. They'd lived on earth before, they'd been through all this—they had to have done so, for otherwise how could they stand it? Nothing was new, and even the illusions were hackneyed, the deceptions old hat.

  I've lived enough, he thought, entering the mind of someone about to be reincarnated; I've had everything I wanted.

  On this thi
nning note, at the vanishing point of consciousness, seeing so little ahead of him, out of hope but weary of the process of perceiving it, Audie fell uncertainly into sleep, at the end of that subterranean river that flowed into oblivion, as though he were no more than a pebble, smoothed by the current and dropped into the dark.

  Beth was still awake. She sensed the ripple of resigned certitude pass through her husband's body, relaxing it until he sank and breathed differently, something innocent in the air that entered his nose and mouth as he lay defenseless in sleep.

  At moments like this, Beth felt like a sentinel. And the sense of her being his protector made her feel vulnerable and misunderstood, keeping guard over him and wishing to be concealed. She had spent most of her adult life standing by her husband or waiting for him to appear, and sometimes he was not there as she stood, or did not return when he said he would. Sometimes she had the feeling she had passed this time in suspense, being a woman, being a wife, being a housecleaner, a cook, a waiter. This trip to India had been her idea, yet they would not leave until he had given the word. The demeaning sense of needing permission wearied her by confining her to a world he occasionally visited and was often absent from. Maybe he had misgivings about what India would do to them? She didn't know; as Audie Blunden's wife she felt she didn't know much. The decisions, the money, the activity, the gusto, the opinions were all his; she was his companion.

  Krishna had gopis—milkmaids. She wondered if Krishna represented most men, because most men, like the blue god of power, had women tending to them.

  Have I lived at all? was a question that had occurred to her only now, in India. The whole of India was visible in its chaotic streets, as big as its movie posters, the agonies of life and the flaming deaths. In the streets the big questions were asked and no answers were available, which was why she was so excited and frightened. She had been woken, she had been challenged, and the challenge was physical—the sight out the car window on their ride to Agni, the greasy water in sacred tanks, the emaciated animals, the tortured looking trees, the women washing dirty clothes in a dirty stream. She was not disgusted. She accepted these as facts of life.

  And that afternoon in the massage room, with the gong music and the chanting and the young woman working on her, the pressure of the fingers did not soothe her. She was roused again, excited as she had been riding through the towns and villages along the Indian road, seeing the market stalls and the shouting men, the jostling pushcarts and the faces of beggars and postcard sellers and curious children and owlish men at the window. Women in scarves, men in turbans and waistcoats, the thick jerkins of cotton and silk. Naked men too, the ones in diapers, with holy splotches on their foreheads, and the women forever showing the bareness of their soft bellies. She saw the faces now, especially the pretty faces and white teeth of the children, their big glossy eyes and long lashes, their downy arms and pale fingernails. Faces at the window.

  Here at Agni the sensation had been keener: I have not lived, I have known only my husband, I have spent my whole life waiting; this is my life.

  And she yearned to be touched again by the fingers of the masseuse—"massage therapist," the girl had said, correcting her.

  What was it like to be loved the way men were loved, casually, recklessly, never having to explain it? Men never needed to know all the implications of love. Men took a woman as though taking a drink, and moved on.

  Audie had smiled at the mobs. He was not daunted. He believed he was invisible to these people, and perhaps he was, behind the tinted windows of the car. But she had feared suffocation—you could drown, you could sink and die in the middle of all these indifferent people. The crush of them was not exotic to her but rather like an intensification of her life. In India, even in this car, she was outdoors, in the world, confronted, as though being asked whether to live or not. In the car, Audie had seen the people struggling on bicycles or driving yoked buffalo or standing like anonymous victims or casualties, and he'd said, "Will you look at that?"

  India was as near to life and death as it was possible to be on earth. But it was not one or the other: here was life in death, and death in life.

  Still wondering whether she had ever lived at all, and smiling sadly, she tilted herself into sleep.

  In the morning, exhausted by their dreams, they woke like campers in a wilderness and prepared themselves for the routines of the day, yoga, breakfast, treatments, the pool, lunch, all the rest of it, not even talking. They had come to like the program of undemanding events, finding serenity in the ordinariness of the routine.

  But walking to yoga that day, each of them saw the smoke rising from beyond the perimeter of Monkey Hill, funneling up the slope where they'd been told that Hanuman Nagar was located. They smelled it too, as sulfurous, the sharpness of scorched dirt, that tang of burned excrement. But neither of them mentioned it, each thinking, It's smoke, it will be blown away. And they continued in their routine.

  But when, around noon, there was a break in their routine, they were disturbed.

  Dr. Nagaraj had tucked a message under their door requesting a meeting at one o'clock in his office. He had never written before; his handwriting was black and severe and intimidating; and one o'clock was their lunch hour.

  "What's this all about?" Audie asked.

  They met him together, feeling importuned, but Beth was sheepish when it turned out that Dr. Nagaraj was only being helpful. Somehow he had discovered—obviously from someone at the front desk—that she had been looking to buy a shatoosh, perhaps more than one. Dr. Nagaraj said that he knew a certain man, but that it was not possible for this shatoosh seller to enter Agni. It was not permitted.

  "He is just a common hawker, you see. From the town."

  "The town we keep hearing about," Beth said.

  "Hanuman Nagar," Dr. Nagaraj said. "His shop is that side."

  That name again, of the invisible place.

  "How will we get there?"

  "I will request a vehicle, a motorcar."

  They did not meet the car at the residence, in the circular drive, but in a more circumspect way, at the Agni entrance, near the signs Right of Entry Prohibited Except by Registered Guests and No Trespassing and Authorized Vehicles Only. The white old-fashioned sedan was waiting, curtains on its windows, tassels dangling on the curtains. The Blundens got into the rear seat, Dr. Nagaraj got in the front with the driver ("This is Deepak"), and they left Agni for only the second time in more than three weeks, descending the hill.

  Passing the lookout at the bend in the road where they had seen the monkeys, Beth said, "This man, the shatoosh seller, is he a friend?"

  "I know him," Dr. Nagaraj said in a tone that suggested: I am a doctor, how could a mere shatoosh seller be a friend?

  Walking to the main gateway, Audie had said, "The doc gets a kickback. That's how these things work. The driver will get something too. Everyone's on commission here."

  The road had leveled off at an intersection, the wider road continuing to descend, the narrower one traversing the slope. The car turned into this narrower road, into the glaring afternoon sun, which dazzled them. They averted their eyes, and when they were in shadow again it was the shadow of a row of roadside huts and shops, where there were plodding cows and two boys kicking a dusty blue ball.

  This was the talked-about town, the town they had smelled and heard, the town of the smoke. And now that they were in it they could identify the sounds—not just the laboring buses and trucks, but the wail of music, shrieking songs.

  Dr. Nagaraj said nothing. The Blundens sat horrified, as they had been on the way from the airport, at the squalor, the crowds of people. They drew level with a bus stop where people had gathered near a rusty Tata bus that was shuddering and letting off passengers. Beyond it the road became a main street of one-story shops set shoulder to shoulder above storm drains.

  "What's that?" Beth asked.

  Up ahead there was a pile of soot-blackened rubble inside the sort of walled courtyard sh
e associated with holy places and private villas.

  "Eshrine," Dr. Nagaraj said.

  "Are they tearing it down?"

  "No. Building it up."

  Audie smiled at the confusion. It was impossible to tell whether the place was in the process of being destroyed or put up.

  "Formerly it was mosque. Before mosque it was Hindu temple. Back to Hindu temple now."

  Smoke swirled behind the fortified gates.

  "Who are those people?"

  "Yatris. Pilgrims. Holy people. They are venerating the site. Also some people protecting the site."

  "Protecting it against who?"

  "Goondas. Rascals, and Muslims. Badmashes, you know?"

  Now they could see occupiers and protesters, both sides carrying signs, all of them shouting. Few noises in India were more frightening to the Blundens than these human voices, barking in anger.

  "How can you tell they're Muslims?"

  "Beards are there."

  "Is this a problem?"

  "It is situation," Dr. Nagaraj said.

  "What if it gets out of hand?"

  "Not possible. Though this is a Muslim area, so to say, Muslim people are outnumbered in this town. This is historic town. This town is mentioned favorably in Atharva Veda. This is Hanuman town, where he seized mountain of medicinal herbals to heal the sickly Lakshman."

  As he lectured them, Beth saw that a detachment of uniformed policemen had lined up and were holding four-foot sticks against a crowd of men—the men shouting and shaking their fists at the men inside the enclosure, where a bonfire blazed, sending smoke into the air high above the town.

  "I think I mentioned how I led my friend among the elephants," Dr. Nagaraj said, hardly seeming to notice the people peering into the car, the motorcycles and handcarts vying for space in the road, their own furiously honking driver, whom Beth hated for drawing the attention of bystanders to their car.