The Elephanta Suite: Three Novellas

1

On these stifling days in Mumbai, when a meeting dragged on, Dwight hitched himself slightly in his chair and looked at the spot where his life had changed. From the height of the boardroom on the top floor of Jeejeebhoy Towers, where Mahatma Gandhi crossed Church Gate, he could see down the long table and out the window, to marvel at it and to reflect on how far he’d come. He loved the Gateway of India for its three portals, open to the sea on one side, land on the other. He regarded it as something personal, a monumental souvenir, an imperial archway, attracting a crowd—the ice cream sellers, the nut vendors, the balloon hawkers, the beggars, and the girls looking for men.

Eight Indians sat at the gleaming conference table, four on either side, and he, Dwight Huntsinger, visiting American, lawyer and moneyman, was at the head of it.

“You are a necessary evil,” M. V. Desai, the industrialist, had joked.

Objecting to the preening boldness of the man, Dwight smiled, saying, “You bet your sweet ass I am.”

The man was worth millions. Everyone at the table winced, but Dwight’s remark was calculated: they would never forget it.

An assortment of roof tiles were scattered on the table—samples, to be manufactured somewhere in Maharashtra. Also a bottle of water and a glass with a paper cap at each place, a yellow pad, pencils, dishes of—what?—some sort of food, hard salty peas, yellow potato lumps, spicy garbanzos, something that looked like wood shavings, something else like twigs, bundles of cheese straws.

“It’s all nuts and cheese balls at this table,” Dwight had said the first day, another way of responding to M. V. Desai, another calculation. They had stared at him as though they’d just heard bad news. None of the food looked edible. Although it was his second trip to India, he had not so far touched any Indian food. He did not think of it as food; all of it looked lethal.

Get me out of here had been his constant thought. India had been an ordeal for him, but he had chosen it in a willful way, knowing it was reckless. It was deliberate. Recently divorced, he had said to his ex-wife in their last phone call, “Maureen, listen carefully. I’m going to India,” as if he were jumping off a bridge. It was the day he received her engagement ring back—no note, just the diamond ring, sent by FedEx to his office—and he was hoping she’d feel bad. But as though to spite him, she said, “It’ll probably change your life,” and he thought, Bitch!

That was the first trip, a week of Indian hell—a secular hallucinatory underworld of actual grinning demons and foul unbreath-able air. He had dreaded it, and it had exceeded even his fearful expectations—dirtier, smellier, more chaotic and unforgiving than anywhere he’d ever been. “Hideous” did not describe it; there were no words for it. It was like an experience of grief, leaving you mute and small.

The worst of it was that Indians never ceased to praise it, gloating over it, saying how much they loved it. But it was a horror, and here was his discovery: the horror didn’t stop; it went on repeating; he turned a corner and went down a new street and his senses were assaulted again, the sidewalks like freak shows.

“You seem a good deal disappointed,” Mr. Shah said. Shah, the point man, was his guide in everything.

“Not disappointed,” Dwight said. “I’m disgusted. I’m frightened. I am appalled. Don’t you see I want to go home?”

In this world of anguish he felt physically hurt by what he saw. But it continued for the days he was there and did not stop until he had gotten back on the plane and left the smell of failure, of futility, of death and disease, returning to Boston with another discovery: in all that misery, there was money.

“I can’t believe we closed the deal,” he said to Shah. “My clients are very happy.”

Shah smiled and said, “I am at your service, sir.”

“They’re either at my throat or at my feet,” he’d e-mailed to Kohut back at the office after the deal had been made. “And then they’re biting each other’s ankles.”

But there was another deal to be done. After two days of fighting the misery, he’d stopped going out. He stayed in his hotel until it was time to meet the car, then he went to Jeejeebhoy Towers and the meeting, ate nothing, and returned to his hotel in the car. He ate bananas in his room—bananas were safe. But a diet of bananas and bottled water blocked him solid. There’s a headline, he told himself. But it was something to report.

“You get sick?” It was the usual response to his saying he’d just been to India.

“I was constipated.”

Second trip, the life-changing one. At first he had refused. He had taken his risk; Maureen didn’t care. He had pleaded with Sheely to take the assignment. Sheely had been to India once and was allowed to say “Never again” because he was a senior partner, but he didn’t stop there.

“Go to India?” Sheely raged. The very name could set him off. “Why should I go to India? Indians don’t even want to go to India! Everyone’s leaving India, or else wants to leave, and I don’t blame them. I understand why—I’d want to leave too if I lived there. Which I don’t, nor do I ever want to go to that shitty place ever again. Don’t talk to me about India!”

Kohut too had seniority. Instead of pleading, Dwight thought: Extreme measures. He brought a supply of tuna fish, the small cans with pop-off lids, and crackers, and Gatorade. It was like a prison diet, but it would be bearable and appropriate for his seven days of captivity in Mumbai. These he would spend in the best room of the best hotel: the Elephanta Suite at the Taj Mahal Hotel, just across from the Gateway.

Yet he was ashamed of himself, standing in his hotel bathroom of polished marble and gilt fittings, leaning over the sink, eating tuna fish out of a can with a plastic fork. Three days of that, three days of Shah’s saying, “You must see Crawford Market and Chor Bazaar. Perhaps Elephanta Caves, perhaps side trip to Agra to see Taj? What you want to see?”

“The Gateway of India.”

“Very nice. Three portal arches. Tripulia of Gujarati design. Not old, put up by British in 1927. But …” Shah widened his mouth, grinning in confusion.

“What?”

“You can see it from here.”

“That’s what I like about it.”

India was a foreign country where he’d been assigned to find outsourcing deals, not a place to enjoy but one to endure, like going down a dark hole to find jewels. He worked in the boardroom, wrangling with manufacturers; he sat in his suite and watched CNN. His grimmest pleasure was looking through the classifieds of the Hindustan Times, the pages headed “Matrimonials,” and he smiled in disbelief at the willingness in the details, the eagerness of the girls desperate to be brides, the boys to be grooms. His disillusionment with marriage was compounded by his misery in India. He suffered, and the firm was grateful, for India proved to be outsourcing heaven.

“I had a query from a potential client at a hotel near Rishi kesh, my brother’s place,” Shah said. “One Mr. Audie Blunden. He owns a mail-order housewares catalogue. He wants prices on power tools.”

“The question is whether they’d meet the codes.”

“Meet and surpass codes,” Shah said insistently. “You can make anything in India.”

They were in the boardroom, waiting for Mr. Desai and his entourage.

“Kinda wood is this table?” Dwight asked.

“Deek,” said Manoj Verma. “You want some? I can arrange consignment.”

“That some kinda Indian wood?”

“Deek? You don’t have in Estates?”

“Never heard of it.”

But you can make anything in India, he remembered. He was thinking of it now as he looked past portly, confident Mr. M. V. Desai, his assistant Miss Bhatia, their lawyer Mr. R.R.K. Prakash-narayan in a thick cotton knot-textured jacket, Manoj Verma the product analyst, Ravi Ramachandran on the right-hand side munching wood shavings, Taljinder Singh in his tightly wound helmet-like turban, Miss Sheela Chakravarti taking notes, and last Mr. J. J. Shah—indispensable Shah—also a lawyer, who was a master of postures and faces, scowling in disbelief, distrust, his defiant smile saying, No. Never. Prove it. Shah always had the right answer. He said enigmatically, I am Jain, sir. Dwight, trying another joke, said, And I’m Tarzan. And he looked past the end of the table, the empty chair, out the window, below the level of the stained rooftops, the rusted propped-up water tanks, to the Gateway of India, where he could see the people milling around, promenading, as Indians seemed inclined to do at the end of the day, near the harbor, the gray soupy water, the people just splotches of colored clothing, but he knew that each of them was there for a purpose.

“Do you not agree, Mr. Hund?” Shah asked. In a country where anyone could say Vijayanagar and Subramaniam, “Huntsinger” was unpronounceable. So he said, “Call me Hunt. All my friends do.” But “Hund” made him smile.

The way the question was framed was a kind of code, meaning that Shah approved of the terms of the deal and the answer had to be yes.

“Absolutely,” Dwight said, but his gaze returned to the window, the stone arch far below, the shuffling people.

He had stopped following the negotiation. He had a stomach for details, but not Indian details—minutiae, escape clauses, fine print, subsections of clauses. His presence was important to the meeting, but not his participation. In fact, he had discovered that his saying little added to his mystique and gave him more power for his seeming enigmatic. He had learned early on in Indian business deals that the power brokers were men of few words, well known and even revered for their silences. Underlings could be talkers, chatterers, hand wringers, anguished in their bowing and nodding. He had seen a man in a diving attempt to touch Mr. M. V. Desai’s foot in a show of respect, which was another reason for his saying, You bet your sweet ass I am. Touching his foot!

Anyway, the deal was apparently done. They had found a supplier, they had agreed to a price structure, they had approved the samples—the ribbed, composite roof tiles of fibrous plastic that looked so odd on the lovely table, identical to the ones made in Rhode Island at eight times the price, same quality, no liabilities, no restrictions on the noxious fumes such plastic-making produced—a class-action lawsuit was pending in Providence. The idea was to encourage the Indian tile maker to build inventory, to keep this supplier desperate and backed up and hungry, one or two payments in arrears. Shah would handle that.

Dwight’s attention had drifted from the boardroom to the promenade at the Gateway of India, where he’d been walking off his three days of jet lag, enjoying the late-afternoon coolness, the breeze from the harbor, and a bit fearful away from his suite.

“Ess crim. Ess-ess.”

He almost bought an ice cream, then remembered that he might poison himself. Instead he bought a soda, something called Thums Up. As he’d paid for it, a woman had approached him.

“Sir,” the woman said. She clasped her hands and bowed.

He was moved by her politeness, her submissiveness. He half expected her to touch his foot. Yet he resisted her. She was smiling—seeing into his suspicious eyes.

She saw that he was looking past her at the lovely building, and she seemed to read a question in his mind.

“Taj Mahal Hotel, sir. Best hotel. It is dop of line.”

Walking to the rail at the harbor’s edge, he saw that she was following him. What struck him was that the woman was stout and gray-haired, not destitute-looking, decently dressed in a blue sari and shawl, carrying a tidy straw bag. She was not a beggar but someone’s granny. An echo in his head, something to do with the woman saying dop, made him think: Deek—Verma was saying “teak.”

He said, “I can’t give you anything.”

“Sir!” the woman exclaimed. “I am wanting nothing.”

But that put him on his guard. In business here, in business generally, someone who said he wanted nothing was suspect. Who wanted nothing? Always someone who was untruthful, who had a plan, who wanted to negotiate for something specific. Never say what you want—this was a tactic he had learned from Shah on his first morning in India.

He was still walking, while eyeing the woman sideways.

“What is matter, sir?”

“Nothing,” he said; but he knew he was lying. He was wary of this big confident woman.

“Your first time in India, sir?”

“Second,” he said.

“Second! We are honored. You have made return journey.”

“Thank you.”

Now he didn’t look at her. He was walking along the perimeter of the railing, honking traffic on one side, bobbing boats in the harbor on the other, and also uncomfortably aware that the woman was keeping pace with him. Why hadn’t he brushed her off? Why had he thanked her? Because she wasn’t a beggar. She was a plump housewife, a granny maybe; not indigent. She wore gold bangles.

Probably an evangelist, he thought. She’s going to hand me a religious pamphlet. If not Hindu then something Christian, with Bible quotations. One of those busybodies. Are you saved? And when he said no, she would set about to save him.

Without slackening his pace he said, “What do you want?”

She laughed a bit breathlessly because he was walking fast and she was trying to keep up and failing. “Only to bid you welcome, sir.”

“I appreciate it.”

“You are a kind man, I can see.”

That was another giveaway: only someone who was angling for something would say that.

“I’m a very busy man,” he said.

But if I were so busy, he thought, why would I be swigging a Thums Up and sauntering along this seafront, yapping to this woman at four in the afternoon? And he knew she had detected the same idleness in him.

“As you wish, sir. I will not detain you further.”

She dropped behind. He kept walking to the end of the promenade, where there was no shade and the only people were some boys fishing with bamboo poles at the revetment below the rail.

He glanced over his shoulder and saw that the woman had stopped walking and was sitting on a bench, though was still watching him, perhaps to give him his privacy, having abandoned any thought of talking to him. Had he been rude to her?

Continuing to the end of the promenade, he was startled by a commotion ahead, some children being loudly threatened by an Indian man in a white suit. The man was old, white-haired, and fierce, waving a cane at them, swiping the air just above their heads and shouting.

Dwight summed it up. The children, Gypsy-looking, had obviously asked him for money—a young boy in shorts, a small girl in a red dress, a taller girl in colorful skirts. But they were skinny and poor and probably persistent; the man had taken offense and was screeching at them to go away. The stick looked wicked in the man’s furious grip, and he struck with it again, just missing the taller girl, who seemed terrified.

“Hey!” Dwight called out. “You!”

The man swung around, and seeing Dwight he stepped back, looking chastened. Dwight saw just where he could snatch the cane and disarm the man, and maybe elbow him in the gut. But the man’s anger left him, and as he dropped his guard, Dwight went nearer.

“Leave those kids alone!”

The man made a conciliatory gesture with his hands and backed away.

“Acha. Acha.” And, still muttering, he moved quickly, now using the cane to propel himself into the street and amid the traffic.

“Thank you, sir,” the tall girl said, and she knelt and touched Dwight’s shoe, as the underling had attempted to do with M. V. Desai.

The girl had large famished eyes, and though she was child-sized he could see she was the eldest, probably sixteen, not wearing a sari but rather a white blouse with long sleeves and traced with embroidered flowers; a thickness of red, slightly tattered skirts; and gold satin shoes, like dancing pumps. She did not wear gold jewelry, but instead colored bangles and orange beads, and had a marigold pinned in her hair.

All this Dwight took in because the two smaller children seemed so drab and fearful, the girl in the dress, the boy in shorts, both of them twelve or so. But who could tell the ages of hungry children? They might have been older, but stunted.

“Be careful,” Dwight said. “That old man could have hurt you.”

But at that point the children had begun looking past him, and he turned to see the old woman in the blue sari hurrying forward, her basket bumping against her side.

“You are a good man,” she said. “You have protected my children from wrath of that wicked person.”

“These are your kids?”

“I am their auntie. I have come to meet them.” She had taken the small boy’s hand, the small girl pressed herself against her, and the Gypsy girl smiled and seemed to skip. The woman was walking and still talking, not looking back. “Now you will come and have cup of tea with us.”

Dwight followed them into traffic to the other side of the street and past the Taj Mahal Hotel, into narrower streets and sudden, reeking lanes. All the while he was thinking of how he had reacted—his anger, defending the children, defying the man—and had never doubted that he could have snatched the stick and used it to beat the man. He imagined the gratitude of a woman who had just witnessed her children being rescued.

A ten-minute walk took them through crowded streets and more smelly lanes and a recumbent cow near a row of parked motorbikes. Ahead, he saw the woman enter a seedy porch at what looked like a shop front. Yet it was not a shop, nor did it seem to be a café. The porch led to the vestibule of an old building near the dead end of a lane.

“Cup of hot tea, sir,” the old woman said.

Dwight took a seat at the table just inside the door. He said, “Got any coffee?”

“Indeed.”

The children sat at the table with their cups of tea. Dwight’s coffee was instant, but it was scalding hot—it had to be safe. He sipped it and marveled. Just a little while ago he had been alone at the Gateway of India, and now he was sitting with this strange little family on this dead end, the children watching him, the old woman fussing. The taller girl had sat herself next to him. She had thin downy arms, chipped pink polish on her fingernails, and yellowish eyes.

“Thank you, sir,” she said when she saw he was staring.

“What’s your name?”

“Sumitra.”

The old woman said, “Tell uncle what is your speciality.”

The girl pressed her lips together, took a nervous breath, and said, “I am dance.”

Now he saw in her not starvation but a dancer’s skinny build, a dancer’s delicate hands, and a dancer’s upright neck.

“That’s nice,” Dwight said. “Who taught you?”

“Auntie.”

“She want to make dance for you,” the old woman said.

Dwight folded his arms and sat back on his chair and thought: I can leave now, and that will be the end. I will be the same man. Or I can stay, and follow the old woman’s suggestions, and see it through, and something will happen that can’t be undone.

He drank his coffee, which had cooled a bit and tasted weak and muddy. He knew he was being watched. For a reason he could not explain, he thought of the Elephanta Suite, the bathroom shelf of pop-open cans of tuna fish, and he disliked the idea of going to that empty place and hiding himself.

The old woman was talking. Had she been talking all this time?

“—because you saved these children from harm,” she was saying.

He thought, Dance? He looked at the children again, and then around the small vestibule, and was relieved that no one seemed to be watching him, that he was hidden from the people who were walking past the porch on this narrow lane.

“Where?” he said, hardly knowing what he was asking.

“Upstairs. Second floor, back. Last door on right.”

The woman was precise, but he must have made a face.

“It is clean, sir.”

“How much?”

“No charge, sir. You have helped us, sir.”

Now the girl reached beneath the table and put her hand on his knee. She had to slump in her chair and lean awkwardly to do this, and that made her seem small. But still she kept her gaze on him, and he was fascinated by the glint of her yellowish eyes.

“Name a price,” he said, because he feared the ambiguity of her gratitude and a shakedown afterward.

“One thousand rupees,” the old woman said, and as she spoke the number, for the first time since he’d met her he felt he understood her. In naming the price he heard her true voice, and he knew her: shrewd, firm, a bit impatient, a practical pimp attaching a fluttering price tag to the girl.

“Let’s go.”

He followed the girl up the stairs, losing count of the flights, until she led him to a landing and down a hall. He was fearful of meeting someone, but the building was empty and hot and stifling. The girl found a key on a dirty string somewhere within her skirts and turned it in a locked door. He saw a window that was almost opaque from its film of dust, a couple of chairs, a mattress on the floor, a large framed picture of a Hindu god, and on the floor with a trailing cord what looked like a radio. It was an old tape deck. The girl snapped a cassette into it and switched it on. Music filled the room and made it more bearable.

Gesturing for Dwight to sit, the girl went through a door. He heard water running. He went to the window and drew the curtains. When the girl reentered the room, Dwight was sitting in one of the chairs. He could see that she was wearing fresh lipstick, she had powdered her face, she looked doll-like and delicate, and then she raised her arms, sending her bangles sliding to her elbows, and she cocked one leg. She began to dance in the shadowy room to the aching music.

2

That night in the Elephanta Suite he had lain on his bed, staring at nothing, feeling fragile; the slightest sound jarred his ears. He was exhausted and empty—sorrowful, but why? Perhaps for the young submissive girl, who had shocked him by being so deft, for understanding so much, for her gift of anticipation. How could she know all that?

Her dancing had held him with its formality and precision, the way she lifted her knees and crooked her arms and made fans of her fingers, the way she twirled her skirts. Without hesitating, she had looped her thumb under one shoulder strap and slipped it sideways, and then the other, and soon she was dancing bare-breasted, barefoot, lifting her gauzy red skirts with her knees. At certain points in the music she seemed to move in a trance-like state, oblivious of him, her yellow eyes upturned to the portrait of a fierce and blackish Hindu god, whose legs were similarly crooked and who wore a necklace of human skulls.

Unhurried, pacing, turning, reaching upward with her skinny arms, she had danced to the music that twanged in the hot dusty room. Her face was a powdery mask, her cheeks rouged, her lips red. She had brought him to the room like a servant girl, but reentered with her makeup—the white powder that made her face purplish, her lips larger and sticky red—with bangles clattering at her wrists, silver earrings, and some sort of bells tinkling on anklets. Soon she was half naked, with small breasts, with sallow skin, and she was not a servant girl anymore but an object of desire, with flashing eyes, stamping feet, twirling and skipping until the music stopped.

He lay in his suite in the same posture as on the mattress in the upstairs room, watching the girl Sumitra kneeling beside him.

“Can you take this off?” he whispered, touching the thickness of her full skirts, and now he could see they’d been sewn with sequins, tiny round mirrors of mica.

She had stood and unfastened her skirts with a cord and stepped out of them. Then she’d folded them, placed them on a chair, and returned to him naked, kneeling, as he lay watching her, her long eyelashes, her lips, her arms, the powder clinging to her hair. But when he touched her, trying to encourage her, she resisted.

She reached beneath the mattress. “Condom,” she said, and tore the small package open with her teeth.

He lay back and closed his eyes, and from time to time she released him and leaned aside and spat.

He did not want to remember the rest, but there was more, his shame like sorrow, the bold conspiratorial woman who bantered with him afterward, asking him for baksheesh. And at last, as he left the place, pausing in the coolness of the lane to get his bearings, he’d seen the old man from the promenade, still in his white cotton suit, carrying his cane. The man who had been shouting at the children looked mild and elderly now. He didn’t smile, hardly acknowledged Dwight, probably resented him for being a debauched white man in India, though (Dwight was walking quickly away) hadn’t the old man schemed with the pimping woman?

On the way to his hotel, the word came to him again. He was debauched. He had been aroused. He had held the Indian girl in his arms in that dusty room. Without being able to put the emotion into words, he felt he belonged here and could not remember how long he’d been in Mumbai or when he was supposed to leave, and didn’t care.

He was debauched, that was the word for how he felt—a corrupt man trifling with a teenage whore. It was bad enough that she was so young, somehow much worse that she could actually dance expertly—she knew the steps; she could have performed in a dance troupe, becoming brilliant. Instead she danced to titillate and seduce the greedy American who’d given her money.

It had been a colossal setup: the older, overfamiliar woman, the children he’d happened upon, seemingly by chance, the old man playing his role as an indignant and self-righteous pedestrian. Dwight, who thought of himself and his lawyer’s skills as shrewd, had been snared, fooled by this cheap trick, this ragged band, and he had gone the rest of the way, allowed himself to be lured into the room.

He was ashamed, but his shame did not overcome his wish to see the girl again. He felt sick with a need for her. He told himself she was poor, desperate, helpless, and the only way he could help her was by seeing her, letting her dance, making love to her, giving her money. The money mattered most; it was a kind of philanthropy—gift-giving, anyway—and might save her. If she had some money, she’d be able to give up the sex trade and be a dancer. He would tell her this.

“You are looking fit,” Shah said at the meeting the next day, but he peered a little too long and inquiringly.

They took their places at the table, and that was the first time Dwight raised himself from his chair and glanced down from Jeejeebhoy Towers to the Gateway of India for a look at the people milling around it.

The meeting with Shah and the suppliers was like an interruption of the day. Dwight endured it, approved the terms as quickly as they were set out, glanced over the draft contracts, and sighed when Shah began to quibble over the subsection of a clause.

“I would like to invite you to dine at my home,” Shah said. “It will be a simple meal, but you will understand better the custom of my people, the Jain.”

“I’m sorry. I’ve got some paperwork to attend to.”

He wished Shah had not invited him, because when he went in search of the old woman and the children later that day, he kept thinking of the purity and innocence of Shah’s earnest invitation. A simple meal. And here he was, pursuing a pimping old hag and those corrupted children, not her own but obviously kept by her to make money, and he was as corrupt as they were.

He waited until almost sunset before he began to stroll past the Gateway of India and the drink sellers, the peanut vendors, the ice cream men, the people hawking children’s toys, the balloon sellers. He knew that he would not find the woman—it was she who’d find him. And so it happened.

“Hello, my friend.”

She winked at him. She knew why he was there. She didn’t even ask him to follow her. She kept walking, and he was a step behind her. He hated himself, hated the thought that she knew him so well, but he told himself that it was necessary. He did not want to speak to her, and it was not until they reached the lane and stepped onto the porch of the stone house that she said, “Sumitra.”

“But no dancing.”

“As you wish.”

The girl’s dancing, the singularity of it, the glow of her soul in her whitened face, had upset him. He had not expected such seriousness, such concentration, such formality. The whole performance and the piercing notes of the music broke his heart and made her seem hopeless, using this brilliant skill to attract him for sex and money.

He gave the old woman a thousand rupees in an envelope, reminded himself that it was twenty dollars, and let her show him upstairs. As she left him at the door, he tried to read her face. He suspected that she despised him, but she gave nothing away.

The room was the same: the mattress, the tape player plugged into the wall under the portrait of the fierce, toothy, blackish-faced deity. Dwight waited, shuffling, too nervous to sit, and then the far door opened and Sumitra appeared and stepped forward.

She did not smile. She looked summoned, a little reluctant, like someone sent on an errand, which Dwight thought was exactly the case. But this time she wore a headdress, a sort of lacy veil, and her makeup was more carefully applied. She was barefoot and her anklets jingled as she came over to him. He leaned to kiss her.

“No,” she said, and averted her eyes, moved her head sideways with a pinched face, as though reacting to a bad smell.

She started the music and stood, one leg crooked, her arms upraised, to begin her dance.

“What are you doing?”

“I am dance,” she said.

“No dance.” He took her by the hand and set her down at the edge of the mattress, wishing that her anklets did not sound so merry. He had another envelope of money ready. He placed it in her hand.

Sumitra stared at him and tucked it into a fold of her thick skirt where there must have been a pocket.

No “thank you,” hardly an acknowledgment, just a sullen blinking of her yellow eyes within a shadow of mascara and a little nod of her head. How many other men had sat here and done this?

He had planned to give her the money and leave, but with her sitting next to him, her knees drawn up, her head bowed, the powder of her makeup prickling on his arm, she was like a cat in his lap. He could not get up, could not bear to abandon her.

The warmth of her body warmed his hands, the slightness of her figure aroused him. He fumbled with her clothes, to hold her. She squirmed slightly, and he guessed that she was resisting him, and he almost apologized. Then he saw that she was letting down the shoulder straps of her bodice, baring her small breasts for him. After that, he felt her hands on him, in a routinely practiced way, like someone feeling an obscure parcel, squeezing it to reveal what’s inside. Even though he recognized how mechanical an act this was, and despised himself for sitting through it, he was aroused. He let her do what she did well; she was intent, and silent, and then she spat on the floor.

“See you again,” the old woman said when he went downstairs.

The other children were staring at him in the vestibule. He said nothing, he was too ashamed, he thought, Never again, and was nauseated by the stinging reek of urine and cow dung in the narrow lane.

All through the following day he reminded himself that he was corrupt and weak. He felt sorrowful whenever he thought of Sumitra, her yellow eyes and small shoulders and thin fingers with the chipped polish on her fingernails. This sad and sentimental feeling penetrated him with the sense that he belonged in India and nowhere else, that he had begun to live there in a way that he could not explain to anyone.

“That man Blunden,” Shah said.

What man Blunden? Dwight thought. He had paid no attention to business these past few days. The name rang no bell.

Seeing his vagueness, Shah explained, “American man. He wanted information on outsourcing for his housewares catalogue. Pricings for commodities and products.”

“Yes?”

“He was Rishikesh side.”

“And?”

“A happenstance has occurred.”

“Can’t we do something?”

“He has met with accident.”

“Serious?”

“He has left his body.”

That was the Indian surprise. India attracted you, fooled you, subverted you, then, if it did not succeed in destroying you with the unexpected, it left you so changed as to be unrecognizable. Or it ignited a fury in you, as it had in Sheely, who hated the very name of the place, and spat when he said it. Or it roused your pity and left you with a sadness that clung like a fever. Even the simplest sight of it. He had watched an American woman enter the Taj lobby weeping after the drive from Mumbai Airport, her first experience of India, those five or so miles, the stretch of shanties, that had once shocked Dwight.

I’d like to leave my body, Dwight thought. He was a lost soul, but he was also reminded that for the past two days he had conquered his fear of India—in fact, felt possessed by it, weirdly vitalized, with something bordering on obsession. His body was a stranger he inhabited, but a risk-taking stranger.

I can’t help myself, he wanted to tell Shah. But Shah was pious; he would be shocked, as a family man, a Jain, someone who had never allowed himself to be led into a dingy room for sex with a skinny girl.

But what did Shah know of passion? Dwight could not explain how he was both attracted and repelled, like a drunkard with a bottle, sick from the pleasure of it, knowing the thrill, knowing the consequences. But no consequences could outweigh the ecstasy of the drink; no anticipated shame could prevent him from seeing the girl again. So there was shame in his desire, but his desire was stronger.

He couldn’t help himself. He drifted back to the Gateway of India at nightfall, and he loitered with the peculiarly unhurried walk of someone trawling for a woman, someone going nowhere. The old woman was not there. He felt sick at the idea that she’d found another man, yet that had to be the case. He was disgusted and gloomy, his vision clouded by his distress. He felt sorry for himself and for the girl Sumitra. He almost said aloud, “I should have given her more money.”

A young woman was staring at him. She wore a white dress, knee length, like a nurse’s, with a white belt and white shoes and knee socks. She did not look away when he stared back at her; she came nearer.

Instinctively he clapped his hands to the pocket where he kept his money, suspecting a thief. They worked in pairs, he knew that; and he knew how elaborate their scams were—some threw shit, some carried razors. Where was this one’s pimp? What was her ruse? The lump of his wallet on one side, the diamond wedding ring in its purse on the other—there was a safe for valuables in his suite, but he had not broken the habit of carrying the rejected ring.

He bought a bottle of Thums Up so that he could delay and have a look at the girl. The soda wallah seemed to recognize him, greeted him heartily, and then hissed at the girl. But she shrugged, and though she walked a few steps away, Dwight could see that she was lingering.

Using the bottle as a prop, he carried it to the edge of the walkway beyond the Gateway and pretended to be interested in the boats in the sea, their bows to the wind. He sipped and was calmed by the setting sun, the light breeze, the smell of roasted nuts on braziers, the sight of strolling families, the popcorn trolley, the energy of the boys jumping from the parapet into the frothy water. Lost in the rhythms of this activity, he felt his need for Sumitra leaving him.

“Please, sir.”

The girl in the white nurse’s uniform was next to him, putting on a pained pleading face. Why was she wearing this white dress and not a sari? Her hair was plaited into a long braid that lay against her back.

“Give me money, sir.”

She was neither a girl nor a woman, seventeen maybe, older than Sumitra anyway, attractive and primly dressed, an unlikely beggar, more like a hospital worker or a dental assistant in her knee socks and white shoes.

“What is your country, sir?”

Dwight turned away, feeling self-conscious. He wanted her to keep walking so that he could examine his diminishing ardor for Sumitra. He had come to search for her, and now he had concluded that the old woman had found someone else.

“I am hungry, sir.”

“What’s your name?”

“Indru, sir.”

“Do you work at a hospital?”

“Hair and nail salon, sir. But my money is gone.”

“Here,” Dwight said, and handed his bottle of Thums Up to her.

As though disgusted, she stepped back and shook her head.

“Why not?”

“You have taken some, sir. I cannot take from selfsame bottle.”

He was not offended but impressed that she would not share the same bottle: she was both a beggar and a chooser!

“I must have my own bottle,” she said.

“If I buy you a drink, what will you give me?”

He said it without thinking, without knowing what he meant. It was reckless, but he was in India. Who cared? On fine days, walking to the office, he had often encountered panhandlers on Boston Common, sometimes women, now and then young and attractive, if a bit grubby. He would never have dared to engage one in conversation or ask for something.

Indru smoothed her dress and said, “What is it you want, sir?”

“Think about it.”

He gave her some money for a bottle of soda, a hundred-rupee note—he had nothing smaller. Handing it over, seeing her become submissive and polite, bowing to him, he felt powerful and at the same time annoyed with himself for even caring.

Yet he sat on a bench and watched Indru buy a bottle of soda, and he was not surprised when she returned and sat next to him.

“Where do you live?”

“Far from here.”

“Where are your parents?”

“In village, sir.”

“Why is everyone always asking for money?”

“No work, sir.”

“But you work in a salon.”

“Casual work, sir. Not enough.”

“What kind of work can you do?”

“I can do anything, sir. What you like?”

He knew he had gone too far. As he raised his bottle and prepared to toss it into a trash barrel, the soda wallah hurried over—he must have been watching—and lifted it from Dwight’s hand. Just then, looking up, he saw across the road, four floors up, his Elephanta Suite, and in the distance, looming above the other buildings, the big bright windows on the top floor of Jeejeebhoy Towers. He got up and started to walk away.

“Where are you going, sir?”

“Got work to do.”

He walked quickly past the Gateway crowd, through the taxi rank and the traffic, then onto the sidewalk, where there was a guardrail. People plucked at his sleeve, not just beggars but shopkeepers—“In here, sir. All kinds of electronics”—but he kept walking. He passed a movie theater displaying a big colored poster of a fat woman with stupendous breasts and purple talons for fingernails. He was thinking: It wasn’t me. She was the one who’d asked.

“What is it you want, sir? Come inside,” a man in shirtsleeves demanded at the doorway of a curio shop.

Crossing a busy rotary of honking traffic, he began to notice the heat. He was perspiring now, but he would not let it slow him: he needed to go on walking. The sights, the shops, the churches made it easier for him—and wasn’t this a Christian church in the English style? He thought of going inside, but he saw a padlocked hasp on the front door.

Farther on he saw an emptier street, less traffic, just a few pedestrians, and heading there he found himself among lanes leading to another part of the harbor. He saw warehouses, a market with empty stone tables, the stalls vacated at this time of day.

Its emptiness looked attractive in this overcrowded city. He turned into the lane. He could see to the end, another warehouse, and water. Sensing movement, he looked down and saw a rat. He kicked at it, but the rat was unperturbed, big as a cat, nibbling at the husk of a coconut.

While he had been walking the sun had gone down. He walked under the afterglow in the sky, streaked with pink and gold. At the far end of the covered market was the warehouse, shuttered and dark, and stacked against it were great coils of rope and a partly rubbed-away sign, on which he could read the words Jute Mills.

He was near enough to the water to see the glimmer of the sea. He found a place to sit and drew a breath, thinking how odd it was in such a populous city to be where there were no people.

Then he heard another rat. He stamped his foot and turned to frighten it.

“Sir.”

Indru—her dress and shoes so white in these shadows.

“How did you find me?”

“I follow, sir.”

She bowed to him. She looked older with the shadows on her face, her white cotton dress glowing. Her stillness alarmed him, and her accent seemed stronger in the twilight.

“May I be seated, sir?”

He was sitting on a coil of rope on a giant spool the size and shape of a tractor tire. Still, he was impressed by her formality.

“Go ahead.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Was it her formality, the mode of her politeness, that made him feel, if not powerful, then dominant—in charge in this lonely place?

“Indru,” he said.

“You did not forget my name.”

“What do you want?”

“I am so hungry, sir.”

It was a terrifying statement. He put his hand into hers. Her hand lay open on her lap, small, though her palm was hard, almost coarse, and her skin like that of a scaly little animal. She said she worked in a salon, but perhaps she also did some sort of hard work? Her stiff stubby fingers closed on his hand—she was trying to show him some affection.

“You’re a nice girl, Indru.”

“Thank you, sir.”

With his free hand he touched her thigh through her loose dress, hiking it up slightly. He felt the skin just above her knee and slipped his fingers around her thigh, where she was warm, as though holding a fresh piece of meat, even sensing that this smoothness would taste good.

She did not resist, yet she made a sound in her throat, swallowing, as if bracing herself, the sort of sucking breath a person draws before taking a risk.

Hearing a rustling sound, he saw in the dim light a rat nibbling a broken blossom that was easily visible because of its white petals. But everywhere else it was dark in the alley. The only available light was the patch of sky above the lane and the twilit harbor framed by the end of the warehouse.

“May I kiss you?”

“Why not, sir?”

Her willingness to kiss seemed like the proof she wasn’t a whore.

He kissed her lips, loving their softness, and he marveled at the risk he was taking. But she had followed him here, the way a homeless animal seeks comfort. He remembered, I am so hungry, sir, and he dug in his pocket for the small soft pouch and the ring that he often fingered, hating the memory of it.

He had to do it now, before anything happened. It was a gift, not a fee. He put it into her hand. She took it without looking, slipped it into her pocket.

“Do you like me?”

She seemed to hesitate. Was it his searching hand that disturbed her? After a reflex of resistance, she allowed it.

“Yes, sir.”

3

Now, looking down at the Gateway of India from the boardroom at the top of Jeejeebhoy Towers, he saw the warehouses, the docks, the rope works, Apollo Bunder, the Taj Hotel, even the corner window of his suite, the steamy streets he had hurried through afterward, hot with exhausted desire. He could see beyond the promenade where the old woman had led him, and a rooftop that might have been part of her house. Laid out before him was the map of his past three days—transforming days. He did not know what to make of it except that he was not afraid of India anymore. He was anxious about what he had discovered in himself, but he did not want to look any deeper. He didn’t want to feel ashamed for something that he regarded as a kind of victory.

Someone—Miss Bhatia?—was passing him a dish of curried potato. He scooped some onto his plate. Three days ago he would have refused it. He passed the dish to Shah.

“I am not taking potato,” Shah said.

“Allergic?”

“They are having germs,” Shah said. “Also fungus. And little growths.”

“Afraid of getting sick?”

“Oh, no. As I mentioned to you, I am Jain. We do not kill.”

“You mean”—and Dwight began to smile—“you’re trying to avoid killing the germs?”

“That is correct.”

“And the fungus in the potatoes?”

“I will take some of nuts and pulses,” Shah said. And turning to Mr. Desai, “Shall we now discuss payment schedule?”

That was the second, the transformative trip. He left that night, or rather at two the next morning, a changed man. Or was he changed? Perhaps these impulses had always slumbered in him and now India had wakened them, allowing him to act.

“I can’t wait to come back,” he told Shah, who was pleased.

How shocked Shah would have been if he had explained why, and described his encounters—the dancer Sumitra, the waif Indru. He could not stop thinking about them, solitary Indru most of all. The whole of India looked different to him now, brighter, livelier. But more, he was himself changed. I am a different man here, he thought, as the plane roared down the runway and lifted above the billion lights of Mumbai. I want to go back and be that man again.

His fears were gone, he was a new man, he was happier than he could remember. The image of the Gateway of India came to him, and he thought, I have passed through it.

Back in Boston, at his desk, the partners stopped in, to convey their routine greetings, and the repeated note was that they admired him for having gone to India, regarded him as a real traveler and risk taker, gave him credit for enduring the discomfort, talked only of illness and misery, and said he was a kind of hero. All the senior partners congratulated him on the deals he’d done—such simple things, if only they knew. He could have said that Indians were hungry and they helped him because they were helping themselves.

On the first trip, and for part of the second, he had seen India as a hostile, thronged, and poisoned land where a riot might break out at any moment, triggered by the slightest event, the simplest word, the sight of an American. And he would be overwhelmed by an advancing tide of boisterous humans, rising and drowning him amid their angry bodies.

Did you get sick?

India was germ-laden. Sheely had ended up dehydrated and confined to his hotel room with an IV drip in his arm, and he swore he would never go back to that food and that filth.

Dwight too had been anxious. That was why he needed Shah. But giving Shah all that responsibility had released Dwight from the tedium of negotiating the outsourcing deals. Shah had the respect of the businessmen, he could handle them, and Dwight’s silences had been taken to be enigmatic and knowing. Not talking too much, indeed hardly talking at all, had been a good thing. His silences made him seem powerful. How could he explain that to his talkative and bullying partners?

He had feared and hated India. He had gone nonetheless because as a young, recently divorced man with no children he had been the logical choice. He had said, “I’ll hold my nose.”

On the first trip, he had not eaten Indian food, not gone out at night; he had seen the deals to their conclusion and then ached to be home. He had been welcomed home as though he had been in the jungle, returned from the ends of the earth, escaped the savages, the terrorists, a war zone. India represented everything negative—chaos and night. And so on his return from this second visit he understood what the partners were saying; he had once said them himself.

“Human life means nothing to those people,” Sheely had said. And because he’d been to India—and gotten sick—his word was taken to be the truth.

“It’s teeming, right?” Kohut asked. “I saw a program about it on the Discovery Channel.”

Ralph Picard, whose area was copyright infringement, said, “I’ve got to hand it to you, Dwight. I could never do anything like that.”

The Elephanta Suite was one of the best in the hotel. He had a driver always, and he seldom opened a door—doors were snatched open for him to pass through. Yet, even knowing that these praising remarks were undeserved, he accepted them, and was strengthened by them. After the fiasco of his brief marriage, it was nice to be thought of as brave, and he liked being regarded as a kind of conqueror—it was how a success in India was seen by the Boston office. It was unexpectedly pleasant to be thought of as a hero.

And so, although he was seldom inconvenienced in India, and lived in luxury, he played up the discomfort—the heat, the dirt, the rats, the beggars, the sidewalks so filled with people you couldn’t walk down them, the sight of bearded Muslims and their shrouded women, the sludgy buttery food that looked inedible, the water that wasn’t drinkable, people sleeping by the side of the road and pissing against trees. He said nothing about his suite or the manservant who came with it—I will be your butler, sir.

“Pretty grim,” he said.

But those characterizations of India, though containing a measure of truth, did not say it all, nor did they matter much to him. They merely described the stereotype of India, and it was always a relief for people to hear a stereotype confirmed.

He couldn’t say: I’ve broken through it all. He couldn’t say: It was the girl.

In small ways he’d known it in the past, this feeling of a place altered by a single person. How often a landscape was charged and sweetened for him because he had been in love, because he’d somehow managed to succeed with a woman. He had her and everything was different—he had a reason to be there, and more, a reason to return. It was not just the sex; it was a human connection that made a place important to him.

This discovery in India of a desire in himself that had found release, and also to be thought of as a hero—suffering a week of meetings and clouds of germs, when the fact was that India could be bliss—gave him strength.

It had happened so simply, because Indru had pursued him.

“I’m coming back,” he said.

“I wait you.”

Who in the States, in his whole life, had ever said those words to him with such a tremor of emotion? He wanted Maureen to call, to ask him how he was, so he could say, “Fine, and by the way, I gave the diamond ring away to a girl I met in an alley in India.”

He felt happier without the diamond in his pocket. But maybe it was better that Maureen didn’t call. He didn’t want to tell her he was happy. She’d say, “See? I told you it would change your life,” and he didn’t want her to be so complacently right about him.

He was strengthened by believing that India was the land of yes. And for the five months he remained in Boston he felt he was like the exiled king of a glittering country that was full of possibilities and pleasures. What made this sense of exile even more satisfying was the knowledge that his colleagues regarded his having gone there as an enormous sacrifice, a trip fraught with danger and difficulty.

He lobbied to return, first with Kohut, who was the most senior partner, then with Sheely, who was terrified of being sent back. But his lobbying took the form of casual questions rather than an outright offer to go. If he looked too eager, they’d take him less seriously and would be less inclined to offer him a hardship allowance.

“We’ve got a couple of clients pending,” Kohut said. “It’s great of you to ask. We’d like to send you back with three or four deals, not so much to maximize the hours as to make it easier for you.”

“I’m just saying I could probably help. I know the terrain a bit better.”

“It might mean two weeks of back-to-back meetings.”

“Make it three. Less pressure.” And Dwight spoke of strategy.

“Hunt, you’re amazing.”

“That I’ve developed some contacts?”

“That you’d go there at all. To me, it’s a black hole.”

“There’s money in that hole.”

But even as he spoke about the potential deals and the money to be made, he was thinking of Indru and how she had followed him in her white dress and white shoes. How she had said, I wait you.

Not just Indru, but she seemed to speak for thousands of others who were waiting, like the willing girls in the “Matrimonials” ads. Something within him had been liberated and released, perhaps something as simple as his fear.

So this was what true travelers knew, and maybe some lawyers too! You said, “Poor guy, so far away in that awful place,” never guessing that he was someone you didn’t know at all, a happy person in a distant place that allowed him to be himself—girls saying Whatever you want, sir and What you like? or the most powerful word in the language of desire, Yes.

He realized that he had discovered what other travelers knew but weren’t telling, that India could also be pleasurable. He was one of those men, just as smitten, just as cagey. He didn’t say to Kohut, “Please send me back.” Instead he let the client list accumulate and waited for Kohut to summon him.

And then he left, going to India as to a waiting lover, a patient mistress.

“We have meetings tomorrow,” Shah said. He had met him at the airport, behind a man in a uniform carrying a sign lettered Hunt-singha. They were sitting in the back of his car.

“It’s already tomorrow,” Dwight said.

It was two in the morning. This odor of dust and diesel, woodsmoke, decay, industrial fumes and flowers, and the odor of humans, the complex smell of India—he had never been anywhere that smelled like this. This dense cloud contained the hum of India’s history, too—conquerors, burnings, blood, the incense of religion. It was less a whiff than a wall of smell.

“Back-to-back meetings,” Shah said. Kohut’s expression—they must have been talking. Shah was an element of the firm now.

“When’s the first one?”

“Eight-thirty, and so on into the day,” Shah said.

“Okay.” Dwight thought: At least I’m here.

“Hit ground running, so to say.”

“But I’m free tomorrow night?”

“Tomorrow night we have fundraiser at the Oberoi, main ballroom. Two of potential clients will be attendees.”

This “we” was new, along with Shah’s brisker manner.

Shah dropped him at his hotel, saying, “See you shortly.”

It was a bad joke, which kept Dwight awake, wide-eyed in the darkness of the Elephanta Suite, his alertness reminding him that it was late afternoon in Boston. He lay sleepless in his bed, dozing, and did not begin to slumber deeply until it was time to wake up.

Being weary and irritable at the meeting had the effect of cowing the manufacturers—the textile man with his order of leisure wear, the plastics man and his patio furniture, the team from nearby Mylapore who made rolls of nylon webbing, and, at the end of the day, the hardest negotiation of all, the techies from Hyderabad whose company made components for cell phones.

Kohut had provided the client list and Shah had lined up the product people. As always there were costs to be assessed, samples to be examined and evaluated, quality-control clauses, shipping costs. The contracts were like architectural plans, each stage of the discussion a new set of elevations, a sheet of specs, going deeper into the descriptions. But Shah had taken care of that, too. Dwight sat while Shah went through the contracts, turning pages slowly, always drawn to a detail, as though to wear the manufacturer down.

“Item four, subsection B, paragraph two, under ‘Definitions,’” Shah said. “We suggest inserting ‘piece goods,’ do we not, Mr. Hund?”

“Gotta have it.”

But, frowning for effect, he was thinking of Indru. He was impatient to see her, and because he had not heard from her, he knew he would have to go looking for her. He couldn’t marry her. He fantasized adopting her. This is my daughter. Could he get away with it? Give her piano lessons, find her a tutor, get her some grooming, teach her French, move to Sudbury and buy her a pony.

After the meeting, alone with Shah in the boardroom, he said, “I’m wiped out. I can’t face this fundraiser.”

“Gala dinner and dance for charity,” Shah said.

“Whatever.”

“It is necessary.”

This finicky urgency, this tenacity, set Shah apart—perhaps set Indians apart. It was another aspect of the obsession with detail. Dwight had arrived at two A.M., he’d hardly slept, the meetings had gone on all day; now it was almost six in the evening and Shah was insisting on this further event.

“Give me a reason.”

Shah said, “Reason is that sociability is highly prized by Mumbai people. You will be noticed. You will get big points for attending. And Oberoi is important venue.”

Dwight was shaking his head.

Shah said, “And major client will be there, software developer Gopinathan. You must meet him in a social setting in the first instance. It is critical. We are seated at his table.”

“What’s the dress code?”

“Suits for gents.”

But half the men at the gala wore black tie. In the hotel lobby a large placard propped on an easel said, Shrinaji Gala Dinner Dance to Aid Women in Crisis. Glamorous couples chatted in the busy ballroom, where tables had been elaborately set, three wine glasses at each place. Dwight noticed that many of the beautiful women were being escorted by their much shorter, much older, much fatter husbands. It was a genial and noisy crowd, people loudly greeting each other, some with namastes, some with kisses.

Wine was being served by waiters in white suits and red turbans. A tray of filled champagne flutes was offered to Shah.

“I do not take,” Shah said.

Another waiter slid a platter of hors d’oeuvres toward Shah.

“I do not take.”

A gong was rung; no one paid any attention. But after it was rung three or four more times, the guests drifted to their assigned tables.

“Mr. Gopinathan, I have the pleasure to introduce you to my colleague …”

Before Shah could mispronounce his name, Dwight said, “Dwight Huntsinger. And I want you to know that although I arrived at two this morning and put in a whole day’s work, I would not have missed this for anything.”

“Good cause,” Mr. Gopinathan said. “Women in crisis. Battered, abused, that sort of thing.”

“And meeting you,” Dwight said. “I am looking forward to learning from you.”

“You are too kind,” Mr. Gopinathan said. “Please be seated.”

Dwight sat next to Mr. Gopinathan’s wife, whose stoutness made her seem friendlier, easier company than the woman on his other side, a golden-skinned beauty in a bottle-green sari. During the meal he concentrated on Mrs. Gopinathan.

“I am cochair of the charity,” she said. “It is a heavy burden.”

“You’re doing good work,” Dwight said. He wondered if his weariness was making him slur his words.

“And it is not just women. It is young girls—schoolgirls abducted and abused. You cannot believe. Treated like property. And the health issues!”

He was glad for the woman’s volubility. After he had listened to two courses of this, he turned to the woman on his right, the beauty, and said, “Tell me your story.”

“Perhaps when we have more time,” she said, and because she had said it coquettishly, Dwight looked past her, expecting to see her husband, but only saw Shah, spooning orange paste from a small bowl.

“It is choley,” Shah said, startled in his eating.

“Have you lodged any bids in the silent auction?” the woman asked.

“No, but I’d like to lodge some,” Dwight said. “Maybe you can advise me.”

Glad for any excuse to leave the table, and wishing to stretch his legs—his fatigue was beginning to tell—he excused himself and went with the woman to the foyer, where auction items were set out on long tables, each item with a numbered pad next to it showing the bidders’ names.

“These are exquisite,” the woman said, lifting up a velvet-covered box on which a pair of hoop earrings lay on a satin cushion.

When a woman said “exquisite” like that, it meant “I want them.”

“I don’t know much about this stuff,” Dwight said, to see her reaction.

“It’s South Indian style,” the woman said. “Perhaps something for your wife.”

She was sharp-faced, her green eyes set off by her honey-colored skin. She wore a necklace like a draping of golden chainmail, and her green sari was edged with gold highlights. She was the loveliest woman Dwight had seen in India.

“If I had a wife,” Dwight said. “Which I don’t.”

“Pity. Any woman would love to have that piece.”

On the pad next to it was its number and a list of names, the last one showing a bid of twenty-two thousand rupees.

“How much is that in real money?”

“In dollars, about”—the woman pursed her lips and swallowed hard, looking more beautiful in this moment of concentration and greed—“six hundred. Even twice that would be a bargain.”

“So I’ll improve on it.” Dwight added five thousand rupees to the bid, and as he was signing his name, a woman passed by, waited for him to finish, and lifted the pad.

“Bidding is closed,” she called to the room.

“You’re in luck,” the lovely woman said. “You’re the last bidder, so you’ll get the earrings.” She smiled at him. “What will you do with them?”

He leaned toward her and said softly, “Maybe you can help me decide.”

“It would be my great pleasure.” Saying this, she drew a small card from the silk purse at her wrist and slipped it into his hand. Then she dropped her voice to a whisper and said, “My mobile number is on it.”

“Thanks.”

The woman was still talking. “It would be better if we did not leave together. The dinner is over in any case. Call me in thirty minutes and I will give you directions.” She turned to go, then remembered something else. “You can pay for that at the table over there, where a queue is forming.”

Shah saw him in the payment line. He said, “Ah, you succeeded in a bid. What did you win?”

“Just a bauble.”

“You succeeded with Gopinathan, too. His wife said you are a great listener.”

It had been his weariness, his inertia, yet now he felt wired, hy-per alert, as though drugged. He wondered if it was the woman who had wakened him.

“Want a lift?”

“I’ll get a taxi.”

All day he had thought of Indru. At the dinner, especially seeing the expensive food and wine, he had tried to imagine what Indru might be eating at that moment. And having stayed up so late, he thought perhaps he’d stroll past the Gateway of India, just to see whether she might be out strolling herself.

But instead here he was in a corner of the Oberoi lobby, looking at the name on the woman’s card—it was Surekha Shankar Vellore—and dialing the number on his cell phone.

“Hello.”

“Is that Miss Vellore.”

“Yes. Where are you?”

“Still in the lobby.”

“Step outside. Have the doorman hail a taxi. Show the card to the driver and he will take you to my address. It’s not far.”

Blind to the progress of the taxi, Dwight had looked out the window hoping for a glimpse of the Gateway of India. He saw nothing. Yet he felt unfaithful—where was he going, and why? The last part of the brief taxi ride was a steep hill lined with tall whitish apartment blocks.

“Shall I wait, sir?”

“Not necessary.”

Dwight pressed the bell labeled Vellore, and the door latch buzzed open. He heard her voice in the speaker: “Eighth floor.” Dwight saw his haggard face in the elevator mirror and said, “What are you doing here?”

Her apartment, the door ajar, was diagonally across from the elevator, and she stood just inside. She had changed from the green sari into one that was crimson and gold. She had done something to her hair, unbraided it, combed it out. There was more of it than he had seen at dinner. She was barefoot.

“You’re Surekha.”

“Please call me Winky. Come in. What will you drink?”

He asked for water, and when she brought it, filling his glass from a pitcher, he said, “Um, Winky. You’re not married?”

“Divorced.” She sipped at a glass of white wine. “My husband left me for a more up-to-date model. The latest model. That’s how he was in life, in business, and cars. Always competitive, but blessed with taste. Always he had to have the best of everything.”

She seemed to be praising the man who had dumped her for a younger woman. Dwight said, “People like that are never happy.”

“He was supremely happy,” Winky said, contradicting him. “Arun had exquisite taste. It rubbed off on me, I’m afraid. When we used to travel to London together on holiday we always stayed at the Connaught. One shopped at Harrods, and we had many posh friends nearby in Ovington Gardens. They were delightful and highly educated, but London can be so … how does one put it?”

She spoke slowly but deliberately, so Dwight could not interrupt, as he wanted to at this point, to tell her about his trips to London.

“So damnably trying. Masses of these colored people, hubshis from Africa who go there just to get welfare, all these lazy people on the dole. One can’t bear looking at them. Knightsbridge and Kensington are fine, but parts of London are absolutely filthy. Arun used to say, ‘All these welfare people should be given a broom!’”

Dwight said, “But Mumbai is …”

“Vibrant,” Winky said. “One has lived here one’s whole life. Oh, yes, visitors complain about the crowds. But look closely at these so-called crowds. Everyone has something to do, something to make. It is a hive of activity. We Indians manufacture everything under the sun. Arun said that it was only a matter of time before we’d be making jet aircraft. We make cars, buses, lorries, even ships. We have a great navy—my father was in the military. Arun told me that China has no navy, did you know that? It’s true! And it’s not just the broad range of manufacturing but of course we make quality too. Go to Jodhpur and you will see they are producing fine linens and silks and for the high fashion houses and the designer labels of New York. Go up and down New York and virtually everything you see in the best shops is made in India—women’s handbags, fine coats, silk scarves, lingerie, garments of all sorts, even shoes, though all one’s own shoes are made in Italy. But Americans hardly know the difference.”

Shut up! The throbbing in his temples was battling his desire, and yet the easy way she sat on the sofa, leaning slightly forward, caused her heavy breasts to sway as she spoke, and kept him attentive.

“Um.” Sipping from her wine glass, she couldn’t utter a word, yet she was making a droning sound in her nose, as if to signal that she was about to start speaking again.

“Where do you stay in New York?” Dwight asked.

“Gracious me, one would never go to America. It’s far too violent. Everyone has a gun, and it’s far too dirty. The fast life! Arun’s brother had business there, somewhere in California. Electronics. He had so many stories about drugs and gangs—one was quite terrified just listening. An employee of his was killed, some sort of mugging. No, thank you. One has no plans to go to America. One’s London holiday suits one nicely. One used to buy jewelry in Bond Street, but it’s all got so predictable—all the shops in London cater to American tourists, so the pieces are nothing special and the prices are absurd. I think the piece you picked up at the charity auction was quite acceptable, was it not.”

Was this a question? Dwight could not remember ever being subjected to such a barrage at short notice. In the woman’s confidence was a weird honesty. Awful as it was to endure, he was almost grateful to her for this monologue, because in it she gave everything away: she was a snob, she was materialistic, a boaster, a bigot. Now he was too tired to respond, her talk had tired him the more, and so he sat on his plush chair in the overdecorated apartment watching her breasts move in counterpoint to her complaints. He also sensed that her talk might not be the idle chatter it seemed, but rather a way of wearing him down, a way of dominating him. She was still talking, but when at last she stopped, his willpower would be gone and he would be hers.

If her talk was like a test—of his patience and his own opinions — it also allowed him plenty of time to sit and stare. She was lovely, even if her chatter and her opinions were obnoxious. He smiled to think that the woman was desirable. Her golden skin, her lovely eyes flashing in indignation; her lips were full, her face fox-like, beaky, imposing. Her heavy breasts swayed in her sari, but such was the odd wrap of the garment that he could gaze at a great expanse of her pale belly, and in his fatigued state he imagined nuzzling its warmth and pillowing his face upon that softness.

Repelled by her talk, attracted by her body, aroused by being in the seclusion of her apartment late on this Mumbai night, he watched for the wine to take effect—and she was still talking! Now it was about her ex-husband, and what was strange about that was her frankness, her fondness for the man, how she talked about his bad-boy side in the way that Indian women—Miss Bhatia and Miss Chakravarti anyway—talked about men, always in motherly tones.

“What about children?” he managed to ask, reminding himself that in situations like this, which usually involved a nervous client, he felt like an interviewer.

“Thank goodness we didn’t have any, so there were no entanglements. Aren’t there enough unhappy children in the world without adding to their number? Though one sometimes thinks, Wouldn’t it be nice to have a little girl to take shopping and to spoil rotten with all sorts of delicious treats? One can see her on a pony — riding lessons at the Gymkhana Club. Arun wanted a son. Well, maybe his new woman will provide him with one, and jolly good luck to them. He was a good provider. He found me this flat and he still keeps in touch. He knows that it’s not easy for one. A divorced woman in India is damaged goods.”

At the back of his throat he was gargling, blah-blah-blah, and was so intent that he did not notice, until a few moments had passed, that she had stopped speaking. What had she just said? He asked her to repeat it.

“You don’t look it,” he said.

“I assure you one is.”

She laughed because she knew she was attractive and liked the conceit of calling herself damaged. Smiling, she looked even prettier. She tossed her hair, she laughed, she patted her hair into place. Her pale belly was dimpled, and only when she leaned over to refill her glass did a fold of flesh press against the silk. Now, sipping, she looked over the rim of her glass at him.

“What about you?”

She did not know his name, and after—what?—maybe half an hour of yapping, her first question.

“Me? Damaged goods.”

“Not at all,” she said. “You wouldn’t have been at that charity ball, and at Gopi’s table, if you didn’t have some standing. All Mumbai was there, the best sort of people, and—hey, presto—you came up trumps with your bid.”

Her tone annoyed him, but he was still so dazzled by her glamour, he tried to change the subject. “What kind of wine are you drinking?”

“Indian made. A vineyard in Karnataka. Quite drinkable, actually,” she said. “Do you have them with you?”

“The earrings? I think so.” He took the silk pouch out of his pocket. It reminded him of the pouch in which he’d carried his rejected wedding ring. That thought created an afterimage of Indru, who now possessed the diamond ring.

As he handled the silk pouch, Winky extended her arm, dark and slender and articulated—delicately jointed like the limb of a spider—and Dwight shook the earrings into the palm of her hand.

Deftly, she slipped off the earrings she was wearing, and in a set of movements like a dancer’s gestures, more like touching her ears than attaching earrings, she hooked them, one and then the other, and turning to face him made them swing and glitter.

“They suit me, don’t you think?”

Dwight said yes, realizing what was happening, but could not say any more.

“They catch the highlights of my sari,” she said, and twitched her sash where it was trimmed with gold piping.

“Let me see,” Dwight said. He placed his glass of water onto the marble-topped table and went over to the sofa and sat heavily next to her. He lifted her hair and smoothed it, then touched the earrings, poked one with his finger, and peered closely. “I guess they’re a good fit.”

“I’m delighted you approve.”

He saw that this, like her rambling talk, was another test. He did not like her, but he was fascinated by how obvious she was, and he longed to weigh her breasts in his hands.

“Look at me,” he said—because she was looking away, at a cabinet where there was a mirror.

She turned her head and lifted it slightly with a kind of hauteur that the earrings framed and accentuated.

He kissed her then, just leaned over and put his mouth on hers as though lapping an ice cream. She did not part her lips. She remained as she was, like a big doll, and as she did not even purse her lips to receive his kiss, they seemed to bump his, almost to resist. The first awkward kiss he had ever bestowed on a girl—at the age of twelve: Linda Keith, behind the First Baptist Church-had been something like this.

“What’s wrong?”

“Isn’t that a little sudden? A little previous?” She turned back to look at the mirror, as if to assess whether she had been injured by the kiss, and her earrings danced.

“I guess I had the wrong idea.”

“You’re a very nice man. A generous man”—still she was looking at her reflection, the earrings trembling on her ears.

“What’s the plan, then?”

“The plan,” she said, repeating it his way as though to mock him. “Perhaps we can meet for lunch sometime. Perhaps you can take me shopping.”

Another test, another hoop.

“Perhaps,” he said, using her tone as she had used his. She did not know that when Dwight said “perhaps,” it meant never. At this moment he had finally concluded that he disliked her and almost said: I hope I never see you again. He got up and looked at his watch and put on an expression of surprise and said again, with finality. “Perhaps.”

She seemed startled that he was leaving. She touched the earrings with her beautiful fingers. She said, “Well, then, cheerio.”

“By the way, my name is Dwight Huntsinger.”

“I’m terrible at names. Will you e-mail me? My address is on that card.”

“Perhaps,” he said.

In the street, he was rueful but not unhappy. He mocked himself, replaying some of what she had said. Tingling, yawning with exhaustion, he felt giddy as he walked down the hill to the main road to hail a taxi. And in the taxi he reflected on how, for the hour or more he’d been in Winky Vellore’s apartment, he had not once objected to India. He had forgotten the stink, the noise, the crowds. Now on the main road he was back in India, and he was surprised by his reaction: he was glad.

He was forty-three, and he believed he had made many mistakes in his life, but his pride had saved him from more. He’d married late, the marriage had lasted less than a year, an expensive mistake, but necessary. He knew men who, rebuffed by a woman, pursued her until she submitted; men who were energized by Isn’t that a little sudden? and Perhaps we can meet for lunch sometime. By You can take me shopping when they had asked for a simple yes or no to sex. He was not one of them. Meeting resistance, Dwight shrugged and accepted it as final, was in fact slightly ashamed at having met resistance—ashamed of having requested a favor to which the answer was no. The word “no” did not rouse him. He did not pursue the woman, he had never pursued a woman, never tried to woo one without at least a smile of encouragement. He was literal-minded in sexual matters, and so Perhaps we can meet for lunch sometime he translated as No dice. The process of wooing he found discouraging and at times humiliating.

Because of this, his experiences of women were few, and since his divorce the only women he’d had were Sumitra and Indru—essentially streetwalkers who had pursued him, offered themselves to him in the dark.

Now he thought only of Indru, and after the evening with Winky Vellore—those shattering hours, like a whole relationship, beginning, middle, and end—he had never felt more tender toward Indru. That evening with Winky helped him understand Indru. He knew that Winky would have despised her, but that was a measure of Indru’s worth.

At the Taj, he paid the taxi and was saluted by the doorman as he stood in the stew of odors, strong even here on the marble stairs of the expensive hotel. He remembered his first trip, his solemnly worded thought “the smell of failure.” But there was vitality in it, not only death but life, too.

Meetings the next day kept him in the boardroom late, Shah doing most of the negotiating, yet he needed to observe the process and approve the wording of the contracts. Indian lawyers, their passion for redrafting, their love of arcane phraseology: they could sound in the middle of it all like astrologers. Manoj Verma had not married (and this was just idle water-cooler chat at the top of Jeejeebhoy Towers) until his family astrologer had drawn a chart of his prospective bride’s planets and found them auspicious. Dwight went back to his hotel, his head spinning.

The following day he walked across the road to the Gateway of India at exactly the same time—in the fading glow of early evening—he had met Indru months before. He retraced his steps and passed the ice cream seller; he bought a Thums Up and lingered at the rail of the harbor, then took a seat, hoping that the ritual of these precise repetitions might conjure her up.

Without a word, she appeared and approached and sat beside him on the bench. That was another Indian surprise: Indians might spend hours or days waiting until you showed up—his driver, the courier, even J. J. Shah. When you wanted them, they were there standing at attention, or as in the Indru’s case, uncoiling in the half-dark and smiling.

“I waiting you so long.”

“I want to kiss you.”

She giggled. “Not here. Follow me.”

To anyone who glanced his way, he was a foreigner, a ferringi, perhaps an American—the baseball cap with the suit was a giveaway. He was alone, detached, strolling in the crowd of people on Apollo Bunder, heading north, and now toward Chowpatty Beach. But in fact he was watching a girl in a white dress, and guided by her, he crossed busy streets and negotiated sidewalks that were dense with pedestrians.

At the point in a busy road where in the clouds beyond a gleam of summer lightning broke through, like the shivered splinters of a precious stone smashed by a hammer, the smithereens puddling in a watery afterglow on the slop of the sea at Chowpatty, Indru glanced back at Dwight and her smile touched his soul. Then she walked down a narrow lane and through a gateway, where in the strange light a woman was washing a baby in a tin basin, like a child in a slop of mercury. At a distance the houses were lovely; here at the base of this apartment house the smell of packed-down and heated dirt was so strong it built in his head like a loud noise.

Indru was on the stairs, climbing three flights. He caught up with her on the last landing, as she was turning her key in the metal door.

“Please you come in.”

He summed it up quickly in the twilight before she switched on the lamp: two rooms, a string bed he reminded himself was a charpoy, cushions on the floor, a chair.

“Please sit.”

He chose the chair. The long walk in the humid heat had worn him out.

“How did you find this?”

“Money you gave me was ample.”

“The ring?”

“I am sold,” she said, looking fearful.

Instead of saying anything, he kissed her to reassure her.

“But first, sir.”

She took his shoes off, plucked off his socks, slipped a mat under his bare feet. Then she got a bowl and filled it with water and knelt before him. And when she bent over and washed his feet, massaging his toes, he felt strengthened, and the distant rumble of thunder from Chowpatty echoed in his head as he thought, I am happy, I am home.

4

He asked the firm for another month. Thanking him for his willingness, they granted it immediately, e-mailing him a list of new clients, with specifications of product lines for outsourcing-sports clothes, leather goods, brass fittings, molded plastic tubes for patio furniture, gardening implements, lamp bases, glassware—and Kohut added, “Glad it’s such a success,” because no one hadever asked for an extension. Most had wanted to come home early.

After the meetings, or the flights to Bangalore and Hyderabad —usually a day in each place and the late flight back to Mumbai—he went to Indru’s room rather than the Elephanta Suite. He layin the half-dark listening to her stories, which she told in a monotone: how her father touched her—the shame of it; how her mother beat her, blaming her, and her father sent her away to her auntie’s village; how her auntie locked her in an unlit room with the grain sacks and the rats; how, when Indru went to the police, they didn’t believe her; how the village boys threw bricks of cow-shit at her, and when her uncle happened by to rescue her, he drove her on his motorbike to the riverbank, where he dragged her through the bamboo.

“He touch me here, he touch me down here on my privates, he bite me with his teeth and call me dirty dog.”

They were harrowing stories, the more terrifying for the factual way she told them, lying on her back on the string bed, her fingertips grazing her body to indicate where she had been violated. She seemed to understand how they seized Dwight’s attention and silenced him. And some evenings when he looked distracted, his gaze drifting to the window, sleepy and satisfied, she would prop herself on one elbow and drop her voice and show him a scar on her wrist, whitish on her dark skin.

“One uncle tie me with ropes. He say, ‘Is a game.’ I be so scare. He take my sari. He say, ‘I no hurt you.’”

And what she told him next in that soft voice was more powerful to him than the racket at the window. He took a deep breath and gagged and thought, Not a success at all—it’s a failure.

The smell of failure in India wasn’t only Indian failure. It was a universal smell of human weakness, the stink of humanity, his own failure too. His firm of lawyers was bringing so many people down.

He remembered telling Maureen that he was being sent to India—like a threat, a risk, a martyrdom: I’m going to India—take that!

His marriage hadn’t worked, but he thought: How can any marriage work? Everyone had their own problems—who was normal? If the two people remained themselves, with separate ambitions, there was strife. Submission was possible in the short term. But if one or the other surrendered to become absorbed in the other’s life, then it was the annihilation of a human soul, something like slavery or an early death, and resentment was inevitable. Love was not enough, sexual desire didn’t last, you had to make your own life.

He’d had hopes, the usual ones, of partnership and plans, and had tried. But early on he’d lain beside his wife of less than a year and thought, It’s over. He suspected that she was thinking the same.

To calm himself while lying beside Maureen, he mentally moved out: his restless mind roamed through the apartment room by room, selecting the things he wanted to take with him, rejecting the things that were hers. In was an inventory of the place but also a way of processing the marriage, making a pile of the belongings he planned to leave behind.

He had loved her for more than a year, the passionate part of the whole business; and then he proposed and set a date. But the nearer they got to the date, the less love he felt—panic set in—and his heart was almost empty as he went through the motions on his wedding day. The wedding itself, the expense, the decisions, their first arguments, seemed a ritual designed to break your spirit. After that it was just a struggle, as though marriage represented the end of a love affair, the beginning of mutual strife. She kept working, she wouldn’t take the name Huntsinger, she rejected the idea of having kids, she didn’t cook—but, then, neither did he. He asked Sheely, who could be trusted with confidences, if these were signs, but Sheely in his lawyer’s way shrugged and gave a lawyer’s equivocal answer: Maybe yes, maybe no.

Maureen was also a lawyer—tax law and trust funds, but a different firm—and she seemed too preoccupied to notice his mood, the question on his face: Why did we do it?

He was the first to mention splitting up. He told her in a cowardly way: “Maybe just spend a little time apart.” But she could see he meant divorce, because the same thought was lurking in her own mind. She’d said, “My mother will be so angry. She said I wouldn’t be able to do it—that I was too selfish.”

Maureen began to cry, and for the first time, with acute pain, Dwight saw how vulnerable she was. He held her tenderly, he felt protective, he said, “We’ll figure something out,” and he despaired, because it was turning out to be so much harder than he had imagined. Showing her weakness for the first time, the fear that she had expected the marriage to fail, made the breakup a nightmare. Losing her as a wife was painful, but he guessed he’d get over it; losing her as a friend—someone he had pushed overboard when the storm broke over them—that seemed unbearable and something she would never forgive.

Not much remained to divide. They sold the apartment and split the proceeds.

“Short marriages,” Sheely said, “pretty common. Like a chess move. I know three people, not counting you. Couple of months and they’re gonzo. Better now than later. Probably a book on the subject.”

In the melancholy months afterward they still saw each other. They didn’t know anyone else, and their feelings were so raw they didn’t want to make new friends.

Maureen had been depressed by the men she’d met. She had no one else to tell, so she told Dwight. “The first drink is fine. On the second drink I hear about their marriage. How it ended. What a bitch she was. How she took him to the cleaners.”

So, as friends, they dated each other for some months, even recognizing that it was a failure and that they were too timid to enter the wider world and contemplate romance again. Dwight was amazed that after that anyone would take the same risk twice, going through that shredder.

Eventually they disengaged. He was surprised, because at that point he had become comfortable, seeing her on weekends and going to movies. She asked how he was doing. With his new frankness—the divorce had made him blunt—he told her, “This is good. I’m happy.” Maureen said, “It’s not good. I can’t stand this anymore. I don’t want to see you. I’m starting to really dislike you.”

Was it because he was happy again? If so, she succeeded in making him miserable by saying this. That was his reason for saying, “I’m going to India,” in the look-what-you’re-making-me-do tone of voice.

At last he saw his divorce as a triumph. No one else did, which was another reason he was happy to be in India. Perhaps failure was the severest kind of truth. His work was a punishment and a wrecking ball: he took manufacturing away from American companies and brought it to India. The American manufacturers hated him—and they failed; the Indian companies were cynical, knowing that if they could not produce goods cheaply enough, they would be rejected. Every success meant someone’s failure. He could not take any pride in that process: he was part of it.

The old woman pimping the children to passersby: he recognized himself in her. And in Indru too. Her stories were painful, but the experiences had damaged her so badly, her endearments were meaningless. Yet he belonged with her, not in the Elephanta Suite but in the oddly bare room, a stinky alley outside the window. In that human smell like the odor of sorrow he saw his connection to India.

He stopped blaming Maureen, and he could hardly blame Indru for anything. Human frailty implied human strength. Most of the world is poor and weak, beset by the strong.

A young man with an unpronounceable name began visiting Indru’s apartment; one evening he seemed reluctant to leave. He was from the countryside, he said. Willage. Then he visited more often. But he looked more confident and better dressed than a villager, and he frowned at Indru in a proprietary way. He was sometimes impatient to leave the place with Indru (“Let we go marketing”). He nagged her in their own language, which wasn’t Hindi—Dwight had asked. Indru sometimes replied in English, sulking and saying, “Not chivvy me” or “I fed up!”

“My brother,” she said. She left Dwight in the apartment and went out. He looked out the window and saw them—not holding hands but walking close together, touching shoulders, a kind of intimacy. He was rueful, but it was better to know, and he’d been so hurt by his shattered marriage he had kept from committing himself to her. Giving her money when she said “Ring money gone” was his way of possessing her, since it had more value to her than to him. The Indian deals were making him wealthy.

Dwight was startled one evening when he went to the flat and, before he could turn the key in the lock, the door was opened by a small pretty girl, also in the sort of white dress Indru wore. Why?

“I am work at hair and nail salon.”

Another one, younger than Indru—sixteen? seventeen? who could tell?—who said she was from Indru’s village. Her name was Padmini. She did menial jobs in the two-room apartment in return for a place to sleep. Dwight believed the salon story because her nails were lovely—polished and pointed—and she wore fresh makeup and a hairstyle that always interested him, because unlike most Indian girls, her hair was cut short, boyishly. Dwight remarked on it.

“I bob it,” Padmini said, plumping her lips prettily.

Dwight said, “Is that her brother?”

Padmini joined him at the window, standing close, as Indru and the young man with the unpronounceable name turned the corner toward Chowpatty.

“I am not know, sir.”

She was frightened. “Not know” meant she knew, and that the answer was yes, or else she would have said no, because as a villager, she too was a relative.

Dwight smiled. She was slow to smile back, yet she did so. He gave her to understand that they were conspirators, both being manipulated by Indru. He thought of kissing her, as a test, but didn’t—they seemed to resist that. Was it his breath? But she let him hold her loosely, allowing him to grope. His touching Padmini quieted her; with his hands on her, she stayed still and seemed to purr, like a cat being belly-scratched.

He knew that, had he wished, he could have gone further—and Indru must have guessed at the situation she had created by inviting Padmini to stay, by leaving Dwight and the girl alone in the place. Indru was worldlier than she let on—they all were; they had to be to survive.

And he had become reckless. More than that, he was debauched—the word that had seemed like hyperbole before was appropriate now. He had never known such sexual freedom, had not realized that it was in him to behave like this. It was India, he told himself; he would not have lived like this back in the States. All he had to do was leave India and he would be returned to the person he’d been before—forty-something, oblique in business deals, cautious with women, cynical of their motives, not looking for a wife, still smarting from his divorce, even a bit shy, and, like many shy men, prone to laughing too loudly and making sudden gauche remarks, of which “You bet your sweet ass” was one.

His sexual experiences in India had opened his eyes and given him insights. The world looked different to him. That business about “my brother” had not fooled him, nor had it discouraged him. It gave him another opportunity, for the next time the brother appeared and took Indru away on some obscure errand, Dwight beckoned to Padmini and drew her down to the charpoy.

“No,” she said, and when he began to tug at her clothes—the white dress she wore for work at the nail salon—she resisted, turned away, and covered her face.

“Okay,” he said. He sat up and swung around, putting his feet on the floor.

No meant no. He would not use force on a woman—had never done so in his life. Any suggestion of intimidation killed his desire. But when he got up from the charpoy Padmini rolled over onto her back and smiled at him in confusion.

“You no like me,” she said.

“I like you too much,” he said.

But she just laughed and yanked at the tops of her knee socks and tossed her head, and when he gave her money that day she took it reluctantly, as though acknowledging that she didn’t deserve it.

He continued to give Indru money. He suspected that she was giving it to the young boy she called her brother. Deceits and failures and betrayals, but it was part of the India he had come to understand. He belonged here. He had found his level.

Although India advertised itself as a land of sensuality, he had regarded that as hype. They were trying to sell tickets. And where were the sensualists? The businessmen were two-faced and so shifty they turned the women into scolds. Most of the people he’d met had been too angry—pestering and puritanical—with red-rimmed and tormented eyes. If they’d been liberated, they wouldn’t have been such agitated nags. They scowled, they carped, they pushed, they honked their horns. Serenity seemed unattainable. The way the bosses screamed at their underlings, the shrill orders a manager gave a secretary, the bullshit, the buck-passing, the cruel teasing, the racism, hating each other much more than they hated foreigners—it all revealed to Dwight a culture of both punishment and sexual frustration, for the two always went together.

Long ago, as a youth, as a law student, he had once behaved that way himself—on edge because he’d been unsuccessful with women. His first trip to India had reminded him of that—everything wrong, the yelling crowds, the food, the bad air, and the women were either virginal, with their eyes downcast, or married and plump and indifferent, in both cases impossible. The predatory divorcée or widow was just desperate, with no option except to be devious, and scheming turned him off. The society was packed too tight, jammed and impenetrable, and all a stranger could do was drift hopelessly around its dusty edges.

Or so he had thought. He was wrong about this—wrong about everything, wrong in all his assumptions. India was sensual. If India seemed puritanical, it was because at the bottom of its puritanism was a repressed sensuality that was hungrier and nakeder and more voracious than anything he’d known. The strict rules kept most people in their place, yet there were exceptions everywhere, and where there were exceptions, there was anarchy and desire. If India had a human face, it was that of a hungry skinny girl, starved for love, famished for money.

From his first encounter at the Gateway of India, when the canny woman had tricked him with the elaborate scam involving the old man and the children, Dwight had seen India differently, accommodated himself to it, and begun to live a double life. He had sunk to the bottom and entered a new level of the Indian experience—the low life of the truly desperate. Although Shah said, “I ring you at your hotel last night—you not there,” Dwight explained that he had shut off his phone, and he was certain that Shah did not know he was elsewhere, living his other life in the grubby flat in Chowpatty. And he was glad, because he was not able to explain what he was doing and who he had become. His relationship with Indru in the two tiny rooms was equally unexplainable.

When you could not explain your absences, when you were living your secrets and were happier living them than you’d ever been, you were leading a double life. He knew that. He also knew that in living this way you had to accustom yourself to telling lies and remembering them and building on them, so that a whole world of obvious and gabbling falsehood was a front for the hidden and wordless reality. Something else he discovered about the double life: you began to lose track of your identity—at least he did. Someone said, “Huntsinger!” and his instinctive reaction was to think, Who?

How had it happened? Was it the sex, the young women, all the layers of living in India—the rooms, the religion, the castes, the crowds, the city of twenty million? His first visit to India had been a suspension of his life. Most Americans he knew went to India holding their nose, did what had to be done—found a contractor who would produce goods for one-fifth the U.S. price—and returned home, resumed living, fearing to be called back. That had been him once.

But he had found a life in India, or rather two lives: Indru’s little flat and the Elephanta Suite, the life of hidden, vitalizing sexuality that he was still learning and the boardroom existence he knew well, the world of contracts, competitive pricing, manufacturing, and outsourcing, the easy task of finding people who could produce good-quality samples—that is, copy the American sample at their own expense—and then signing them up, saying, “We’ll grow together.”

The most recent deal was with a maker of blue jeans in Poona—he looked so hopeful, so eager to please, with suitcases of swatches and samples. Look at pocket formation, look at seams, quality, double stitching. We can supply unlimited units. It is a good pant.

“What about a buck twenty-nine a pair, delivered,” Dwight said.

Shah conferred with the man and then turned to Dwight. “He can manage. Do you not agree, Mr. Hund?”

“Deal.” And later he said, “It’s like shooting tuna fish in a can.”

Shah smiled in bewilderment—how did you explain?—and Dwight was reminded of the days when he had feared Indian food, how he’d come with a case of tuna fish in cans with pop-off lids, which he’d eaten standing over the sink in his hotel bathroom.

Now he ate the food, most of it, not just the enamel plates of it that Indru and Padmini prepared, which they ate sitting on the floor of her little apartment, but also the dishes that Shah habitually ate. Adhering to the Jain rule of not eating any living thing, keeping to leaves and grains and lentils, Dwight had not been sick once. The idea was to keep it simple—no fish, no meat, no roots. He liked the okra dishes that Shah called bindi, the channa and gram, the rice cakes, the chapatis, the pooris. He ate no cold food, nothing from the street, nothing that had sat uncovered, no salads, nothing that had to be washed. Lettuce was fatal, so was water—water was a source of illness in India. Fruit that he had not peeled himself he didn’t eat.

He and Shah usually presided over a ceremonial meal in a restaurant as a way of sealing a contract. The deal with the blue jeans manufacturer was one of these, in a restaurant called the Imperial, a pleasant place near Church Gate. Dwight was asked to order first, and he glanced at the menu. Dine Like a Maharajah, it said. Chunks of mutton steeped in a savory broth and Slow-roasted chicken in a clay tandoor oven and Thick fillet of pomfret, Kerala style, with coconut milk in a spicy sauce. He clapped the menu shut and handed it to the waiter.

“Just a dish of dhal makni, some yogurt, and rice.”

“Will that be all, sir?”

“Unless you have bindi.”

The waiter wagged his head yes.

And someone at the table said, “Mr. Shah, you are a bad influence on our friend from America.”

“Oh, yes, exceedingly bad.”

Everyone except Dwight and Shah ordered from the menu.

“The sali boti is justifiably famous. Mutton and fried potatoes. Much talked about.”

Shah made a pained face.

“The prawns here are also very good, I’m told.”

“I don’t take prawns,” Shah said.

“I understand they raise their own chickens.”

“I don’t take.”

“The fish is flown in fresh from Kochi.”

Shah smiled as the men were served enormous portions of meat and fish, while he and Dwight dabbed at their simple portions like a pair of monks.

Dwight was complimented on his choice of diet, which was seen as a way of life, not as an affectation; it was a humble and healthy way of experiencing India. Almost without realizing it he’d become dependent on the food.

“No coffee for me,” he said at the end of the meal.

“Nor me,” Shah said. He frowned, as though preparing to deliver unwelcome news. “Doxins.”

Dwight nodded in agreement, feeling at ease and slightly superior to the meat-eating Indians. He looked around the overdecorated restaurant. It was elegant, but a gamy aroma of roasted meat hung in the air, along with the incense and the mildewed air conditioning. He looked closely at the other tables and noted with satisfaction that he was the only non-Indian in the place.

He tried to imagine what Maureen would say had she seen him looking so at home in the Imperial. “I’m going to India” didn’t sound suicidal anymore; it meant “I don’t need you.” Had Sheely or Kohut been in the restaurant with him they’d be wigging out—frightened, rigid with culture shock, dying to go back to the hotel, or on their cell phones reconfirming their flights home so as not to have to stay a moment longer. Beyond the dumb arrogance of mere bigotry, they would be terrified and angry, hating the place and the people. Dwight knew: he had once felt that way himself, like India’s victim.

That memory shamed him. How could a prosperous American lawyer with a first-class plane ticket feel that way, surrounded by the poorest people in the world?

Yet his partners would never have done what he was doing—sitting among Indian businessmen, scooping dhal with the torn-off ear of a flaky poori, spooning yogurt, nibbling the slippery bindi. He did not know anyone in the office who would have sat so comfortably here. He was pleased with himself; he’d proven to be strong. India no longer scared him—rather the opposite: it aroused him, made him feel engaged with the world, most of all made him feel powerful.

In that confident mood after the dinner at the Imperial he shook hands with the businessmen. He could look them in the eye and tell them that he was enjoying himself in India and mean it.

“You are welcome, sir,” one of them said.

“I’m learning so much,” Dwight said. “And I feel I have a lot to offer, too.”

After the men thanked him and left, Shah said, “Shall we walk?”

“I was going to get a taxi.”

“Taj Hotel is just that side.”

But Dwight had not planned to go to his hotel. He was headed to Chowpatty, to see Indru as usual. All through dinner he had imagined her waiting for him, lying in the charpoy, watching the little TV set he’d bought for her, Padmini squatting nearby, their faces bluish in the light from the screen.

“Good idea,” Dwight said. “Let’s walk.”

The walk was a delay, but he felt close to Shah—the man was his guide, his partner, his benefactor, his friend. Yet he could not imagine disclosing to Shah the facts of the other life he was leading. No one must know what he seldom thought of himself: it was better that his secret remain almost a secret to himself, at least something unpacked and unexamined.

How did you go about examining it, anyway? Words weren’t enough. That had been the trouble with his brief marriage, with life in general: no matter how much you told you were only hinting at the truth. There was always too much to tell in the allotted time. He thought he’d known Maureen before they were married. What a doll, he’d thought. She’d been like a party guest who’d shown up in his life, anxious to please, eager to be a friend, grateful to find a kindred spirit, someone to talk to, and so she’d been quick to agree, appreciative of his attention, polite, undemanding, good company. Dwight had been relieved, thinking, We’ve got so much in common.

Eight months of courtship convinced him they were a perfect match. He was unhesitating in proposing to her. Then came the planning for the wedding, and a different Maureen appeared, a fretful and uncertain woman, prone to fits of anger, moody, argumentative. Or was it him? Perhaps it wasn’t the details of the arrangements but the fact of the wedding looming in the months ahead.

“I don’t suppose your parents could get involved?” he asked.

“We’re too old for that!”

He was forty, she was thirty-eight; they felt conspicuous in their ages. Dwight said, “It’ll be fine.”

“No, no! You always say that!”

He thought “You always” was a dangerous way to start a sentence.

“The lettering is all wrong. It has to be raised. The ribbon is a cheesy look. Don’t you see?”

Early days—they were discussing the invitation. She had revealed herself to be a perfectionist. But perfection is unattainable; the trait makes you unhappy. Never mind the invitation. He worried about his own imperfections.

“We have to get it right” was her cry. “It’ll do” was his. Dwight was satisfied with the passable, which infuriated her. The church service, the bridesmaids’ dresses, the flowers, the reception, the music, the guest list—it all became so contentious that by the time it was over and they were married, and they knew each other’s personalities so much better, they were convinced they’d made a mistake.

No, that wasn’t true. He could not say at what point the marriage had begun to fail. It was only his cynical liking for ironic symmetry that made him think that it had started to falter as soon as they said “I do.” But whatever he might say about it was no more than a fragment. There was too much to tell; you didn’t know someone until you were living under the same roof, sharing space in the same room, in the same bed, naked, for a long time. Then you knew, not from anything that was said, but by the way someone smelled and breathed and murmured, by rubbing against the other person, and being rubbed.

That was how he had gotten to know Indru, and that first girl Sumitra, and now Padmini. He had not possessed them, he had helped them through a crisis—and a crisis was a daily event in India. Explain this to Shah? Impossible.

They were still walking. Shah had never suggested a walk before, never offered his companionship that way. And what made it odder was that they were in a district of new nightclubs and bars. They were passing the awnings, the lurid lights at the windows, the music blaring through the curtains at the door. They glimpsed people dancing, smelled incense, saw the grubby red carpet at each entrance, unrolled as a welcome. Out front, the bold young men who worked at these places, seeing two men in business suits, stepped forward.

“Mister—very nice club. Good premises.” And lunging at Dwight because he was still walking: “Sir, nice girls. As you wish. Pop music. Drinks. Eatables.”

Though Dwight had slightly slackened his gait, Shah kept walking at the same speed.

“For some people, that is reality,” Shah said.

Another awning, more young men, a pretty girl in a red sari standing just inside the door. Club Durga. An image of the blackish-faced goddess with her necklace of skulls he’d remembered from Sumitra’s room, as Sumitra danced beneath it.

“Kali,” Shah said. “Durga, the inaccessible.”

Dwight said, “I just remembered that I got an e-mail today from my firm. They’re talking about my flying back to chair a seminar on doing business in India.”

“How did you respond?”

“I said, ‘If I come to the meeting, I’ll have to stop doing business in India. I’ll lose some deals.’”

“I can keep the parties cooling their heels,” Shah said. And then, “This was never here before.”

He meant the lane off the main road, which was brightly lit, thick with clubs, loud music, taxis dropping off well-dressed men. Dwight knew: bar girls, rotten whiskey, pimps. He passed this way often; it was one of his shortcuts.

“You know what is the meaning of ‘phenomenal distinction’?” Shah asked.

“Something like differentiating between the look of things.”

“Not just look. Also sound, odor, flavor, touch,” Shah said. He waved his hand in the direction of the nightclubs. “Better to leave behind all phenomenal distinctions. Like those.”

Did Shah suspect something? Dwight said, “But that’s the way things are.”

“You mean reality?”

“More or less.”

“No, that is only appearance.”

And Dwight thought: In the idlest conversation in India, wading through platitudes, deep water was never far off. He said, “You are making the usual big distinction between appearance and reality.”

Shah wagged his head, but it didn’t mean yes. He started to speak but had to pause, because the music was deafening. When they had passed that noisy doorway, he resumed, saying, “Both appearance and reality are merely names.”

“That’s a quibble,” Dwight said. “Of course they’re names.”

“But reality is many-sided,” Shah said.

Dwight slowed his pace again, and made a face, and said, “Never heard that one before.”

“Is Jain, also Buddhist concept.” He looked for a reaction on Dwight’s face before adding, “I am eclectic in spiritual matters. My Mahavira was a contemporary of Buddha. Both preached about karma. You know karma.”

“Karma is a kind of luck, eh?”

“Not luck. Karma is deeds. Karma is particles that can build up by wrong action. Especially passion.”

The mention of passion would have made Dwight suspicious, even defensive, except that Indians were always mentioning it. Meat was a cause of it, and so was alcohol and loose women.

“You’re saying karma is matter?”

“Indeed so. It is almost visible. Better not to allow the mind to dwell on worldly thoughts. The world gives false messages, distracts with sounds, odors, flavors. Touching, too, can be harmful, a way of acquiring karmans.”

What was he driving at, and why now? Dwight put it down to this sleazy neighborhood of clubs and bars and obvious lowlife. He said, “Just—do what then?”

“Develop a clear pure mind by not accepting appearances of things. And observe the Three Jewels.” He used his fingers, flipping one upright and then the others. “Right belief. Right knowledge. Right conduct.”

“That’s deep,” Dwight said. “I should tell the partners.”

“It would do them much good.”

“I mean, we could include it in that seminar they want to give about doing business in India.”

Shah nodded, but his nod seemed to mean “maybe.” He said, “Seminar is a practical matter. I have myself created a packet of materials for helping to understand business practices here.”

“A business manual?”

“Let us say guidelines.”

They were still walking. The Taj was ahead, its distinctive entrance, the palms, the perimeter walls that were meant to keep panhandlers away, the big bearded Sikh in his topheavy turban, his gold braid and frock coat, saluting a departing guest.

“Ever been to the States?”

“Not yet.”

“You know what I think?” Dwight said. “You should go to the States, not me. You can run the seminar. They’re holding it at a great hotel in Boston. Wonderful food and hospitality. The weather’s perfect at this time of year. They’ll look after you. And it’s money. The people who attend are all potential clients.”

“I cannot,” Shah said, but what made it unconvincing was his smile, the activity behind his eyes: he was reflecting with pleasure on going to the States. Dwight had seen that look on the faces of other Indians, a glow of anticipation at the very mention of America.

“You’re perfect. You’ve got all the papers lined up.”

“Packet of materials,” Shah said.

“The guidelines! This is a big deal for the firm. They see it as a way of attracting clients, easing them into thinking about outsourcing. We’re not giving away any secrets, just intending to convince them that we know what we’re talking about.”

“The attendees?”

“Yeah. Show them our track record. Sign them up.”

Though he did not say anything just then, Shah had become animated, his face twitching with interest as he’d listened. Dwight could tell when Shah was thinking: his thought process was observable as a subtle throbbing of veins beneath his features.

“How will you manage here?”

“I’ll be fine. You’ve been a great teacher. You’ve given me lots of wisdom. ‘Don’t accept the appearances of things.’ That’s great.”

“It is from Diamond Sutra,” Shah said.

The word “diamond” caught his attention, and he squinted at Shah.

“The idea of fundamental reality is merely name only. Material world is not material. Money is not money. World is not world.”

“Right,” Dwight said uncertainly.

“Words cannot express truth,” Shah said. “That which words express is not truth.”

“You just lost me.” But he thought, Yes, words were not enough.

Now they were at the driveway of the hotel, well lighted, the tall sturdy Sikh doorman opening the door of an expensive car to allow a little man in a dark suit to step out.

“Come to dinner at my home,” Shah said. “It will be a humble meal, but your presence will do us a great honor.”

5

Instead of going up to the Elephanta Suite, Dwight lingered in the lobby, and when he was certain that Shah was on his way home, he signaled for the Sikh to hail him a taxi, and he went to Chowpatty—not the lane, but nearby. He didn’t want anyone to know the address, not even a taxi driver.

Inside, the stairwell reeked of urine and garbage. A rat on the stairs was not startled by his stamping but only crouched and became compact, twitching its whiskers in a way that reminded Dwight of Shah’s active thinking. It was a familiar rat—you got to recognize them, Dwight thought; the stinks, too. Or was it all false? Appearances were meaningless, phenomenal distinctions were misleading, and this great smelly cloud of shit was just an illusion.

Indru’s outer door was made of rusted iron grating like the slammer on a prison cell, for security and for the air, though the air was sour even here on the third-floor landing.

She had heard him. She approached the door holding a circular brass tray with a flame burning in a dish of oil. And while Padmini unlocked the steel door and swung it open and made a namaste with her clasped hands, Indru passed the flame under Dwight’s chin and applied a dot of paste to his forehead.

“You are welcome,” Indru said.

He kicked off his shoes and followed her to the second room. It was open to the alley, the TV sets of the neighbors, the smell of spices and boiled vegetables, the whine of traffic, horns beeping, distant music that always seemed to evoke for Dwight an atmosphere of strangulation.

“Don’t put the light on,” he said. “Just keep that candle.”

“Deepak,” Indru said. “Is how we make pure the air. Shall I wash feet?”

“That would be very nice.”

Somehow Padmini had heard. She brought a basin of warm water and a cloth and set it down before him. Still watching, she backed away as Indru began gently to massage his bare feet in the water.

“Have you eat?”

But he didn’t hear. He was watching her head, her hair, her swinging braid that slipped against his legs like a long tassel as she knelt before him. She was so intent on her task, canted forward, narrow shoulders working, that he could look down to the small of her back, her white dress tightened against her buttocks.

“That’s fine.”

“Not quite finish.”

“Stop,” he said. His throat constricted, his face went hot. “Close the door, please.”

The way she got to her feet in pretty little stages, first lifting her head to face him, tossing her braid aside, then raising herself by digging her fingers into his knees for balance, almost undid him. Then she was peeling off his shirt as he approached the charpoy. He watched her shimmy out of her dress, using her shoulders. When her dress dropped to her ankles she stepped out of it, kicking the door closed with one foot.

“I know what you want,” she said as he took her head, cupping her ears, and moved it like a melon on his lap.

He lay there in the half-dark, the wick of the oil lamp flickering in its dish on the floor by the washbasin, and he thought of how different his life was now. And what about Indru? She seemed happy. He had come home to her; she had been waiting for him. She was grateful—he could sense it from the warmth of her mouth, her eager lips.

He had done her more than a good turn; he had rescued her—rescued Padmini too, and if that young man did not happen to be her brother but another lover, he was helping that fellow as well. But who in the other world would understand? It was impossible to explain. That which words express is not truth—right! He would be seen as a sensualist, an exploiter, another opportunist in India. No, he was a benefactor.

In his rapture, with Indru’s palms flattened against his thighs, his sighing with pleasure, he was sentimental and told himself that there was no other place he wished to be.

Warmed by this thought, luxuriating in where he lay, he raised his eyes and saw past Indru’s head, past her braid coiled on the dampness of her bare back, to the door of the room, the shadow of Padmini in profile against the vertical bar of light where the door was ajar. One bright eye shone in the light of the oil lamp. He said nothing—could she see his face?—and it was a long time before the door silently shut, squeezing the light, and by then Indru was too frenzied to notice.

Afterward, he drew her into his arms and thought, Yes, their benefactor.

“That is my father,” Shah was saying, holding a framed photograph.

The old man in the silver frame was bearded, very thin, gripping a walking stick, carrying a cloth bundle.

“All his worldly possessions.”

The ascetic and rather starved face contrasted sharply with the elegant frame, the polished side table on which it rested with other silver-framed pictures—more of the old man—the cut-glass lamp, the linen tablecloth, the candlesticks.

And Dwight sat at a table that had been set with delicate porcelain plates thin as eggshells, linen napkins, gold-trimmed salvers, crystal goblets. But there were yellow lentils in the plates, beans in the salvers, water in the goblets.

“Please take some more dhal,” Mrs. Shah said. “It’s a family recipe. Tarka dhal—very creamy, you see.”

She was a lovely woman, younger than her husband, with a smooth serious face and a slightly strained manner, a kind of concern that Dwight understood as the effort of being hospitable to a big American stranger who had a reputation for bluntness. Shah must have warned her, but Shah was much more confident these days.

“And this,” she said, serving him with silver pincers what looked like a flattened muffin, “this is my mother’s uttapam.”

“Delicious,” Dwight said. “I’m not eating meat ever again.”

“Thank you,” Mrs. Shah said. She rang a bell and a young woman entered with a bowl of rice. As the woman stood next to Dwight, serving him, he had one thought in his mind. These days, when he met a woman in India, he thought, Would I? To this one, he nodded and smiled, thinking, Yes, I would.

“My father was a businessman,” Shah said, glancing at the framed photograph as he spoke. “He started as an accountant, then created a firm and eventually had a huge business—bought his building, branched out into real estate and investment. He did very well. My brother and I had a privileged upbringing. But as he got older he prepared himself, and at last he embarked on his journey.”

“Where did he go?”

“Not where, but how, is the question. He walked, he slept on the ground. He begged for alms, holding bowl. He wished to be come a saint. It was his aim.”

“Renounced everything?”

“Completely,” Shah said. “Not so, my dear?”

Mrs. Shah tipped her head in regret.

“Obeying the mahavratas,” Shah said. “The big vows. No injury. No lying. No stealing. Chastity. Lacking all possessions. Meditation and praying only. And walking to the shrines, day and night, begging for food.”

Now Dwight looked at the picture of the wealthy investor, who out of piety had reinvented himself as a beggar. Dwight said, “It’s quite a trajectory.”

“Jain trajectory—Buddhist too,” Shah said. “My brother and I looked after my mother. And my turn will come.” He suddenly became self-conscious and smiled at his wife. “Then my son will look after my wife. It is our way.”

“In this other picture he’s wearing a mask,” Dwight said.

“So as not to breathe in microbes and fleas.”

“So as not to get sick?”

“So as not to kill them. Ahimsa. Not killing a life, even flea’s life.”

“I get you.”

“I will share with you some literature about our beliefs,” Shah said. “We are not extreme—not like the Digambara, who are sky-clad.”

“Sky-clad, meaning …?”

“Nakedness. They go about mortifying themselves in the nakedness state. No one on earth could live more simply. But we are Svetambara. We follow the tenets of our faith. It is ancient, I tell you—older than your Christianity, from long before.”

“Maybe you can tell me about it sometime.”

“We have sweetened curd for dessert,” Mrs. Shah said, ringing the servant bell again.

“I anticipate being a saddhu myself—giving up the world. Just wandering, as my father wandered. He was so contented.”

“I guess that’s an Indian solution to life.”

“No. It was penance. He was not pure previously. I am not pure.” He smiled at Dwight, who read in Shah’s smile, And you?

Dwight saw himself with a wooden staff and a loincloth and a turban, striding down a dusty road in the sunlight in sandals, eating an apple—did they eat apples? Birds sang, a fragrant breeze cooled his face, he carried a bowl full of flower petals. He smiled, mocking himself with this image, knowing that he would be visiting Indru later.

Shah’s apartment was luxurious, with gilt-framed mirrors and brocade cushions on a white sofa that could have held five people, a thick carpet—he’d left his shoes at the door—windows like walls with panes of glass that went from floor to ceiling, and a balcony that gave onto Mumbai, from this height a magical-looking city of twinkling lights and toy cars.

The food could not have been simpler, yet it had been served on the thinnest porcelain; even the bell that Mrs. Shah rang to summon the serving girl looked precious. The colored portraits on the walls could have been deities, objects of veneration, as well as a valuable collection of paintings.

All this time, Shah was talking about Jainism, atonement, penance, poverty.

“Nirjara—process of atonement,” he said. “Ahimsa—respect for all living things, great and small, all jiva, all life and soul.”

The mention of living things great and small made Dwight think of his partners in Boston. He said, “Have you given any thought to my proposal? I’ve cleared it with the firm. They’re pretty excited.”

“I have reflected deeply on it,” Shah said. He kept a studied tone of reluctance in his voice that Dwight recognized as an eagerness he didn’t want to show. “I will accept. I will do my level best.”

To match Shah’s tone, Dwight was subdued when he quietly thanked him, but inside he was rejoicing. He wouldn’t have to make the long trip back to Boston. Shah would be perfect for the business seminar.

Leaving Shah’s apartment, plunging back into the city, he was reminded that it had been the second time he’d been inside the house of a wealthy Indian. Like the big soft apartment of Winky Vellore, it was a refuge. All of India had been shut out, more than from the fastness of the Elephanta Suite. At Shah’s, India almost did not exist, except in the paintings and photographs of Shah’s father, the wandering holy man, and the talk of atonement. The apartment had shone with polished silver and white porcelain and crisp linen on the gleaming table.

Now Dwight recalled that music had been playing softly, the sounds of string instruments, the soft chanting, the odd and irregular harmonies. And the big glass doors had been shut so that Mumbai was its lights and shadows, and it had sparkled, silent and odorless, far below. What floor had they been on? It seemed that they’d hovered at a great height in the splendor of a glass tower. And he knew he would always remember the experience for its comfort, the softness of Mrs. Shah, the beauty of the serving girl, the glint of the silver in the candlelight. Mumbai had looked like a city of crystal.

Now he was at Indru’s, in the stew of stinks and harsh voices from the lane, in the cement stairwell—his secret, his hiding place. Approaching the building, he’d heard a groan and looked aside and saw a cow, visible because of its pale hide, sounding human and helpless in its distress.

He kicked the stairs as he climbed, to scatter the rats, and when he got to Indru’s landing he tapped a coin on the iron bars of the outer door.

Padmini scuffed forward, unlocked the door, held the round brass tray with the oil lamp flickering in its dish. On tiptoes the small thin girl stretched to apply the mark with her thumb.

“Never mind that.”

She stared, her eyes shining in the firelight. On the days she worked at the salon her hair was lovely, her makeup like a mask, her nails thickly varnished.

“Where’s Indru?”

Padmini hesitated, then said, “Brother come.”

Dwight shut the door. He lifted the tray from Padmini’s hands. In the sounds of the traffic, the yakking voices of television sets, car doors slamming, the loud blatting of motorbikes, he heard the moaning of the cow suffering in the alley.

He waved his hand at the dark insects and white moths strafing the naked bulb above his head. He shot the bolt in the door, and when he turned Padmini was gone.

“Where are you?”

From deep in the far room, “Here, sir.”

She was squatting cross-legged in the back room, on the mattress that was spread on the floor, where she slept—not even a string bed, but what did that matter? The only light was the light from the street, filtered through a high dirty window.

Padmini was indistinct. He tried to read her expression, to see her posture. He thought, Reality is many-sided.

“Is bolt in door?”

“Yes.”

A quality of air, no more than a ripple, told him she had relaxed, hearing that. But when he held her she stiffened, like someone about to take a leap. She wouldn’t let him kiss her, though she allowed him to touch her. She seemed to grow limp as he did so, murmuring in her throat, and still the cow moaned in the alley.

6

In Shah’s absence, Dwight kept himself scarce. He spent less time in the boardroom, and when he was there he avoided looking down the long table for a view of the Gateway of India. Huge though it was, even when he did accidentally glance in that direction, he hardly saw it. The three-portaled archway did not loom for him anymore. Too much had happened to him for the thing to seem important in his life. It was just another monument in a country that was cluttered with monuments.

Unwelcome visitors were another reason for his keeping away. Incredibly, he was regarded as the expert on India now.

“I’d like to pick your brain,” people said in phone calls. That meant his dispensing free advice over a hotel lunch to another nervous American on his first visit to India.

And the odd thing was that when Dwight spoke to these newcomers, he said unexpected things, surprising himself in his opinions.

A man named Todd Pinsker visited. He was a Hollywood lawyer—he’d done a contract with Ralph Picard from the Boston office; he was passing through Mumbai on his way to Rajasthan for a luxury vacation. As a favor to Ralph, Dwight saw him for a drink at the Taj.

“And this is my son, Zack,” Pinsker said. “He’s making a movie.”

The boy’s smug expression matched his clumsiness. He wore a baseball cap backward, sat with his legs sticking out, and demanded that the waiter remove the ice from his drink.

“Ice can make you sick,” he said. “I mean, you can get a bad ice cube.”

“He’s got this dynamite idea,” the boy’s father said. “Sort of meld the Bollywood idea with an American movie. I mean, get some major talent from the States and shoot it here.”

“I have no contacts at all in the movie industry,” Dwight said. “I’m contracting for U.S. companies who want to outsource here.”

“That’s Zack’s project,” the man said. “I want to set up a concept restaurant in Manhattan. I’ve got some backing in L.A. I’m looking for ideas here, for a theme. Maybe headhunt a chef.”

“Wish I could help you. I don’t even eat in restaurants anymore,” Dwight said. He wondered, Is this true? And he surprised himself again by saying, “I mean, I’m a committed vegetarian.”

“That’s cool,” the man said, but his squint gave away his caution.

“Following kind of a Jain thing,” Dwight said.

That got Zack’s attention. “A Jain thing? Those people that don’t kill bugs?”

“Ahimsa,” Dwight said in almost a whisper, because the boy’s voice was so loud. “It’s part of the philosophy—non-killing.”

“Vegetarian options would play a big part in this restaurant,” the man said. “I’ve just got to meet some people. Have you been to Rajvilas?”

“No. I’ve hardly been out of Mumbai.”

“Clinton stayed there,” the boy said, and sucked on his glass of Coke.

Dwight became impatient. This father and son were annoying him with their presumption. They were both trying to get rich, do some business, use the Indians as everyone else did.

“You won’t have a problem finding what you want here,” he said. “Whatever it is. Everyone gets what they want. But at the same time you’re going to find something you didn’t bargain for.”

“Is that some kind of warning?”

“I suppose it is,” Dwight said. He thought: Where is this coming from? Why am I saying this? But without any effort, and hardly knowing what was coming next, he said, “But it’s a fact. India’s cheap, so it attracts amateurs and second-raters and opportunists. Backpackers. Little Leaguers. Because India’s desperate, Indians do most of the work for you.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?”

“Depends,” Dwight said. “Indians never lose. No matter how well you think you’re doing, they’re doing better. You’re glad because you can get a pair of blue jeans for a buck twenty-nine. But eighty cents of that is profit for them.”

“I’m trying to put a restaurant together. Zack’s doing a movie.”

“You’ll get it done. And you’ll get something else you never expected. The Indian extra. The Indian surprise.”

He knew he was being enigmatic; he was not even sure what he was saying. Certainly he was warning them, but he didn’t like them enough to explain the warning in detail. What alarmed him was, having given no thought to these opinions before, they seemed to be bubbling up from his unconscious. Maybe I am warning myself?

After an hour, he said he had an appointment. They swapped business cards—even the punk kid Zack had one. And then Dwight took a taxi to Indru’s. Probably that was what he meant when he mentioned the Indian surprise.

It was true that Indians did most of the work. And there were plenty of manufacturers eager to service clients—too many of them, perhaps, and they were ruthless with each other. They were persistent with him and tended to call his cell phone at all hours, offering to cut deals. It was no good for him to say, “You can’t do an end run on the tendering process,” because they didn’t understand the metaphor, and anyway, backstabbing was a standard business practice, even part of the culture, with real backs and real knives.

But Dwight had always found someone suitable to make the product—not movies or concept restaurants, time-wasting negotiations that brought together those natural allies, the dreamer and the bullshitter. He preferred deals for making plastic buckets, rubber gaskets, leisure wear, nylon plumbing fixtures, sports shoes, electronic components. The insulated wire that was a crucial part of a spark plug—no one wanted to make them in the States anymore, but Shah had found a man in Hyderabad, a former rope maker, who had retooled his shop to make the wire for a few dollars a spool. That kind of thing. The hard part was the contract, the final wording, the up-front payments, the penalty clauses, and for that he needed Shah’s scrupulous shit-detecting Jain eye.

“Still following up some contacts here,” Shah e-mailed, and it sounded like procrastination.

Fine. Dwight handed off the competing Indians to his secretary, Miss Chakravarti. Indians understood delegating. “I can do it, sir,” they’d say, and give the job to someone else, a menial, and that menial would delegate it to someone lower. And Dwight had more time, because he found that an e-mail or a letter, if left unanswered, became stale and less important as time passed, and soon diminished to something so thin and tentative it was easy for him to delete it. Filing it or keeping it fresh made it into an artificial demand.

Time was the test of any demand. He had never in his life felt the passage of time so palpably as he had in India. And he had concluded that, really, nothing was urgent—nothing at all. Maybe nothing mattered.

Now and then he forwarded a message to Shah, still in Boston. “You have given me a wonderful opportunity,” Shah e-mailed. And he stayed on.

On most days, but especially on weekends, Indians walked along Chowpatty Beach, a great expanse of tainted shoreline—dirty sand, sodden litter, scummy water, beached plastic—where it was always low tide. These days, with more time on his hands, Dwight walked along the beach with Indru, and sometimes with Padmini. He saw no other foreigners doing this, and thought, Maybe I’m not a foreigner anymore.

They walked, he bought them ice cream, they sat on the benches, they used the promenade, they gazed at the Malabar Hill beyond the bay, the mansions, the villas. They looked at the sea, which seemed idyllic, but Dwight knew—and so did the unbuoyant, non-swimming Indians—that it was polluted, and that if you looked closely you’d see that the sea water had the yellow-gray color and deadly fizz of battery acid.

Strolling made Indru talkative. “My mother treat me so harsh,” she said. “My father touch me. Shame for him.”

She was provoked to tell her stories whenever there was a lull in the conversation. Usually she spoke without emotion, lapping an ice cream cone, as she was doing now.

“My granny lock me in the dark room.”

“So you said.”

“After he make me naked, Father say, ‘Go away, you bad girl.’”

“I remember. You went to the police. They didn’t believe you.”

“Police not believe me at all. ‘You are talking blue lies.’ They take me to the village sarpanch. He touch my privates. Oh, my God.”

She spoke without anger, rotating the ice cream on its cone, licking her fingers when it dripped.

“And the boys in the village were cruel,” Dwight said.

“They throw things at me. They throw kanda. The cow dung women make for the fires, they throw at me.”

The same stories, in their way tragic, perhaps, but hearing them so often irritated him. He had been moved the first time. By now he knew them by heart. He could recite them verbatim, and what was more annoying that that? They became parodies. Apart from the stories of cruelty and abuse, which he only half believed (she told them a new way each time, and sometimes improved on them, with variations and discrepancies and gaps), Indru had no other conversation.

Obviously, she had remembered how, the first time, he had listened; how she had captured his attention, silenced him with her stories, a Scheherezade of sadism.

They were an important justification for him—for seeing her, being kind to her, sleeping with her—the poor kid, how she’d suffered. He needed the stories. They gave him the right to sleep with her and to be her benefactor.

She needed them too, for without the stories she was just a wayward girl in Mumbai, filling in at a hair and nail salon and lazily looking for someone to pay her way.

“My uncle, so cruel. He touch me and threaten me.”

“He had a motorcycle. He gave you a ride. He took you to a riverbank and raped you.”

“His friend also did things to me.”

That was a new twist. Dwight said, “Give it a rest, Indru.”

The trouble was that, bored by the stories—he had been outraged before—his own behavior seemed crass. She was not a victim he was helping but rather an opportunist overdramatizing her past.

He doubted the stories, not just because she told them without feeling; she seemed to repeat them because of his reaction to them. She believed they were the key to his sympathy, and they had been, but not on the twentieth retelling.

“What about you, Padmini? Any family problems?”

“No problem. I happy.”

“They beat Padmini at nail salon,” Indru said with indignation, as though looking to create drama.

“I spill nail varnish on customer sari,” Padmini said. And she began to laugh. “She so angry!”

“Did they really beat you?” Dwight asked.

“Oh, yes, but customer refuse to pay. She get out of chair and say goodbye and hurry out to street and rickshaw wallah hit her—whoof!—and she plop down. Ha!”

The memory of the angry customer being struck by a rickshaw was stronger than the memory of being beaten.

Padmini didn’t look for sympathy, which was probably why he liked her, and why, when Indru’s brother showed up and took Indru out, Dwight didn’t mind: he had Padmini, who was younger and prettier and, in her way, shrewder. Because she didn’t ask for anything, he gave her money and presents, and he was less inclined to give Indru presents, since she asked for them constantly these days.

Indru believed that her horror stories helped, but all they did was diminish her, turn her into a figure of melodrama, make her impossible to love and hard to like. Yes, he could pity her, but there were a billion others worthy of pity.

Both were living off him. Indru had stopped working. And Padmini worked less often. And when Indru asked Dwight for money or a present, he suspected that she was asking on behalf of her brother. Even Padmini admitted that she sent some of Dwight’s money home to her parents in the village.

That made him think. Behind Indru and Padmini, radiating outward from the two-room apartment, were more people living off them, each girl with a family, each family a village, each village a hierarchy, like the sarpanch whom Indru had mentioned—a great assortment of hungry people with their hands out. He was supporting them all, yet he could not call himself a benefactor.

Indian money was peculiarly filthy, the frayed little ten rupee notes, the tattered hundreds; a stack of bills looked like a pile of dirty rags. The money smelled of all the people who had fingered it and used it. The thought of this killed his desire, and he began to see Indru and Padmini as two lazy girls, older and cleverer than they looked. He saw himself as even lazier, or worse—credulous and weak. As he saw their cynicism, he liked himself less. He feared that one day he would come to despise them.

Meanwhile Shah—so he said in an e-mail—had gone to Disney World in Orlando. He had visited New York City, where he had a cousin. He’d found clients all over New England. He’d been invited to Harvard Business School, to speak informally at a seminar. Kohut had given a dinner party for him in Sudbury. “Autumn leaves,” Shah reported, “magnificent colors.” And “I trust all is well, Mumbai-side.”

Was it? These walks along Chowpatty Beach, because they were interludes, because they required conversation, were revealing and proved to Dwight that he was kidding himself. He was a man who had discovered sex in India and thought it was magic. But it was an illusion, the consequence of his having power and money in a land of desperation. Sex was a good thing, because sex had an end, and when his desire died he saw he’d been a fool. But now, with more power and less conviction, his passion diminished to casual playing, and he took more risks.

Seeing a boy with a CD player and headphones, Indru said, “Buy me one of those.”

“What will you do with it?”

“Listen music.”

“Maybe,” he said, to tease her, and saw she was agitated with greed. He said to Padmini, “Do you want one too?”

Her whisper was so soft he could scarcely hear it, yet he knew her vibrant lips were saying yes.

“But what will you give me?”

He was ashamed. He had no right to feel powerful when he said this, making the request like a greedy king addressing his subjects, asking, How do you intend to please me?

They were at the beach, another of their Sunday strolls, watched by groups of chattering boys who were attracted by the pretty girls, curious about the tall white man in the Indian shirt and kadi vest of homespun, which Dwight had begun to wear since Shah’s departure for the States.

Padmini glanced at Indru, who was smirking and looking coy, as though challenging Padmini to give the right answer.

“Sir, we will be good to you,” Padmini said.

Indru laughed and skipped ahead. Her laugh got the attention of an old woman who was walking in the opposite direction. Dwight looked up at Indru and saw the woman. He wouldn’t have noticed her at all except that she hesitated and stared at him.

She had not changed. She was fat and slow, wearing a billowing sari banded with gold embroidery, gold bangles on her wrists, brown-gray hair, with a shawl thrown over it.

For a moment Dwight wondered how she’d singled him out—but of course, he was the only white man on the beach. He was glad that Indru and Padmini had gone ahead. The old woman’s unfriendly smile was like mockery.

“Hello,” he said.

Instead of replying, the woman called out sharply. Amid the crowd of beach strollers, three figures hurried over—the little girl, the young boy, and the tall skinny dancer in her Gypsy dress. He recognized them only because the old woman was there. The boy was taller but thinner, with a resentful face; the little girl wore a new dress but seemed sickly, hollow-eyed, with lipstick and eye shadow, a parody of a whore. Sumitra, the dancer, looked at him with hatred. She was bony and her hair was full and frizzed, with dry patches on her strangely hairy arms and lines in her face, as though she’d become old. In the way they stared, they seemed brutalized and rude.

The old woman gabbled in Hindi. Dwight knew she must have been saying, It is the man. You remember him from the Gateway of India?

Were they speculating on whether they could con him again, somehow entice him?

“Nice to see you,” Dwight said.

But as he made a move to go, they crowded him and blocked his way.

With a yelp, a passing boy called out to his friends, and Dwight thought how suddenly stupid the boy became in his eagerness. The other boys hurried over, attracted by the odd public scene: the yakking old woman, the scruffy Gypsy-looking children, the white man—the towering, isolated white man. In just seconds there were more spectators, all boys, laughing, perhaps suspecting trouble—that slack-jawed look of anticipation was also moronic. Dwight had seen this before in India, how subtle and crafty Indians could be individually, how ignorant and obvious in a large crowd.

At that moment, in what seemed to him a standoff, Dwight heard a screech.

“Yaaagh!” Another animal noise—Indru’s shriek, and followed by Padmini, Indru broke through the cluster of people.

She snatched at Dwight’s hand, and a jeering cry went up from the boys. But Indru screamed at them, something that had to be worse than “go away,” because they howled back at her.

Glancing around to make his escape, Dwight saw the old woman smile. It was a sour smile of contempt. Even she recognized what he was now, and she began to mutter defiantly. What was she saying? Something wicked about him to these foolish boys.

Dwight stepped back while Indru continued to yell at the boys. She wasn’t like a girl anymore, she was a howling woman with big reddish teeth in her wide-open mouth.

Now the old woman, who seemed fearless and slightly superior, was saying something sly to Indru—vile words, they had to be, because Indru spat at her, a gob of reddish saliva that darkened in a streak on the old woman’s sari. The boys laughed and punched the air in delight.

“Come on,” Dwight said, and pulled Indru away as the old woman craned her neck and screamed.

Indru said, “That auntie say she know you. You give her money. You bad man.”

When they had crossed the expanse of Chowpatty sand and were back on the sidewalk, Dwight said, “I am a bad man!”

He was disgusted with himself. He deserved this humiliating scene at the public beach on a busy Sunday, with the horrible boys watching, the cowshit, the yellow froth at the sea’s edge, the poisonous water, the spectacle of a predatory American confronted by the victims he had paid off.

I am a bad man had shocked Indru into silence. She merely followed him to the apartment block, and when they got there, Dwight shook his head. He saw that Padmini was just catching up with them, still looking flustered from the business at the beach.

“No,” he said.

“Yes,” Padmini said. She took his big hand in her small one.

That gave him some strength. He climbed the stairs slowly, feeling weak.

In the room, while Indru watched, Padmini said, “We be good to you.”

The words made him sad, but she had turned away and dropped her sari, and now her little brown made-up face made him sad, her skinny neck, the fuzz of hair on her lower back, the tight globes of her buttocks.

Indru had taken most of her clothes off. She lay on the charpoy wearing a sarong, her heavy breasts hanging, one to the left, one to the right. There was something lewd in the asymmetry, and the way she lolled, half propped up, watching Padmini bend to pick up her sari and fold it.

Dwight tried to laugh, but he was numb all over. The thought that saved him was: I created this. I brought these people here. I gave them my wedding ring to rent the place—it’s all mine. And so I can do whatever I want.

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.

“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.”

“I will be extremely busy,” Shah said. “I need a few days. I’ll give you details of the shipment, bill of lading, whatever. It will be coming by lorry from Chennai to the bonded warehouse. You’ll have to see to the paperwork.”

“Paperwork” was an ominous term in India. So were “bill of lading” and “bonded warehouse.” Dwight saw in advance the clipboards, the carbon paper, the inventory numbers, the perforated certificates, the seals to be broken, the forms to be filled out in triplicate, the coarse smelly paper, “you must apply for permit,” and at the end of it all, baksheesh.

“Payment will be made by wire transfer from a bank in Baltimore, Maryland.”

What? But he did do it. The chore took five days, back and forth to the warehouse in Bhiwandi, an hour by taxi from the Taj Hotel.

“Why Bhiwandi?” he had asked.

“Because it is adjacent to Grand Trunk Road.”

All this time—negotiating for the release of the shipment of rice, moving it from Bhiwandi to a secure facility nearer the railway junction at Kalyan, following Shah’s specific instructions—Dwight had the feeling he was working for Shah. And what he was doing any office manager could have done—Manoj Verma, Dinesh Patel, Sarojini Dasgupta, Miss Chakravarti, any of them. The other, better question was: What did a consignment of rice have to do with client business? Agricultural products had never been a priority. Five days of this bafflement went by without his setting eyes on Shah. Maybe he was at home, in his lovely apartment, dining off his porcelain?

The phone rang at midnight.

“Hund?”

What happened to “Mr. Hund”?

“It’s kinda late.”

“I am just now proceeding from the airport, speaking on mobile. Sorry to wake you. I wasn’t sure you’d be in your room.”

“Where else would I be at this hour?”

Shah didn’t answer. He said, “Just to thank you for your assistance with consignment of food grains. It is not entirely billable, but I will compensate you.”

“You’ll pay me for moving that ton of rice?”

He intended to sound sarcastic. Literal-minded Mr. J. J. Shah said, “Indeed, for facilitating in business just concluded.”

“The rice?”

“The visit of Chappie.”

“I don’t get it.”

“John Chapman Thaw. Harvard prof. He’s putting some of his people into Bangalore to study IT and related areas. It will benefit us with tech transfer. He is amply funded, but a humble and humane individual.”

“I’d like to meet him,” Dwight said.

“Chappie and tech team have just departed. I saw them off. Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt.”

Dwight tried to draw a breath, but his concentration was too intense, the air too thin, his punctured lungs would not inflate, for he had begun to understand.

“Gone?”

“I would have introduced you, but his schedule was jam-packed.”

He still said wisit and shed-jewel, yet he was a different man, and this was the proof of it. While I’ve been dealing with a ton of rice in forty-pound sacks, Dwight thought, Shah has been wining and dining this Harvard professor and his team. An American contact, an important lead, has come and gone, and I haven’t seen him. How had this happened? Dwight was not angry, he was sad. He felt the bewilderment of a younger brother, a rejected suitor, an excluded bystander, a bypassed partner. And the silly name “Chappie” rankled.

“I must hasten home,” Shah said. “We meet tomorrow.”

It was not like Shah to exclude him from a negotiation. And it was absurd that Shah had taken the initiative to give Dwight five days’ unpaid work while he shepherded the Harvard team around Mumbai. And Dwight was his boss! Yet Dwight was grateful. For those five days he had worked at this menial task. He had not gone to a club. He had not called Indru or Padmini. He had hardly thought of them. He had felt not virtuous—he was certainly not virtuous—but serious, and he understood the fatigue that creates a passivity that empties the mind and gives access to spirituality, the trance state induced by routine that helps in the practice of meditation.

“Many thanks,” Shah said the next day at Jeejeebhoy Towers before the usual meeting—a parade of eager manufacturers with ring binders of products, a lining up of contracts.

Shah was his old submissive self, deferring to Dwight and calling him “Mr. Hund.”

The last deal of the day involved a process for applying a rubberized coating to metal roof racks—not just the pieces that were fixed to the car, but kayak cradles, bike holders, attachments for skis and ski poles. This created an enormous inventory, since many of the racks and clamps were unique to a specific model of car.

Shah itemized the list of attachments and fittings, wetting his thumb and moving through the clipboard of papers. Two companies would be involved, a steel fabricator and the rubber coater. Shah knew about carbon quotients, potential bruising, the matrix of the rubber solution, even the windage—resistance of the carrier on the car roof.

Dwight looked on in admiration, forgiving Shah for putting him to all that trouble with the rice shipment, which was obviously a dodge—Shah didn’t want him to meet the Harvard team, for whatever reason. Never mind. Dwight was grateful to him for the days of pious mindless toil. He had almost forgotten his debauchery.

At the end of the day, Shah saw the businessmen to the door. Then he turned to Dwight and said, “Now we will go on our spiritual journey.”

8

“What’s that?” Dwight asked when the driver opened the trunk of the car. It was early morning, just after dawn, a sourness of damp streets, women scraping twig brooms in gutters. Out of the corner of his eye, Dwight saw two girls with enormous backpacks walking up the driveway. They had stringy hair and sandals. One was very pretty, the other one heavy, with a beautiful smile, saying, “This is unreal.” American girls: he envied them their innocence and wondered what their Indian surprise might be.

“Sack of rice,” Shah said. “Symbol of gift. Remainder will go by train.”

“Will go where?”

“Mahuli,” Shah said. “Adjacent to Mahabaleshwar.”

“Is that where we’re going?”

“Indeed so. We take luncheon at Poona and proceed to Mahabaleshwar, for Mahuli. You have checked out of hotel?”

“I’m going to miss that suite.”

Then they were on the road, sitting side by side in the back seat of the small car. The driver fought the other cars, jockeyed for position in the traffic, and once they were clear of Mumbai—it took over an hour—he struggled to pass the big filthy trucks that hogged the road, staring at Horn Please. Living in Mumbai could be horrible, but nothing was worse than a journey like this.

On the first open stretch of road, Dwight’s head cleared. He was able to recall the obvious thought that had occurred to him in the confusion of the previous day.

“You didn’t introduce me to those Harvard people.”

“Chappie?”

The silly name sounded even sillier the solemn way that Shah uttered it. Dwight said, “And his team.”

“They will prove to be excellent partners. Don’t think of Harvard as a mere college. It is a billion-dollar business, a tremendous source of contracts and expertise. Pay dirt. And skill sets, my God!”

Something he has just found out, and is preaching, is something I’ve known since I got into this business, Dwight thought. Yet he was glad for Shah’s enthusiasm, because that always implied willingness, and “pay dirt” made him smile.

“But you didn’t introduce me.”

“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.

“I don’t know,” Dwight said, not replying to a question but summing up every doubt in his head.

“In India we have answers. Real answers. That is Indian strength. It is our spiritual heritage. Never ‘I don’t know.’ Always ‘I can know.’”

“I wish I did.”

“It was my late father’s lesson to me, dear man, when he set off on his journey to be holy. A lack of holiness impedes enlightenment.”

It was the voice Shah used in the boardroom when he was speaking to the wholesalers—the plastic fabricators, the rubber people, the textile men. He was the wordiest man Dwight had ever met, but he could also be blunt, with his lawyer’s love of precision. He was that way now. He was saying, “Excess of karmic particles.”

“I’m listening,” Dwight said.

“Process we call nirjara. I have mentioned this to you in connection with my late father. Cessation of passionate action.”

“I think I know what that means.”

“Also fasting.” Shah splayed his fingers and enumerated. “Eating properly. Solitude. Mortification. Meditation. Study. Atonement.” He tugged at his thumb. “Renunciation of ego.”

The list could have seemed intimidating and demanding, but because it was different from anything he’d known, and a new thought, Dwight found it restful to contemplate.

“You will see,” Shah said, pointing ahead.

The land was hillier, emptier, with mountains showing in the distance like low clouds. What farms they saw, hacked into the hillsides, were even smaller than the ones they’d passed earlier. The corrugations of newly plowed gardens lay against the slopes. Farther on, a scene of almost biblical simplicity: women drawing water at a well, one with a clay pot on her shoulder, in an orange sari, and another woman heading up a dusty path in thin sandals, a flock of goats bleating at her.

“You see? We are leaving the world behind,” Shah said. “Soon we will be in Mahabaleshwar.”

It was twilight when they got to the edge of the town. Dwight could make out more hills beyond these, and in the car’s headlights, people walking in the road, boys in white shirts, men in dhotis. He expected the car to stop now that they were in the town, but the driver kept going, past the lighted shops and into the darkness of the winding road, toward the solitude of the overhanging forest.

“Pratapgarh,” Shah said, tapping the car window. And after a few minutes, “Mahuli.”

He spoke in Hindi to the driver, who began to brake and then turned into a long driveway that rocked the car.

“We have arrived.”

No lights, no sign of a building, just a dark place on an even darker road. And when they got out of the car the air was cool and damp. All that Dwight saw was the sky thickening with night, pierced by scattered pinholes of stars.

“I can’t see anything.” Yet the shadows were perfumed with incense.

“Tomorrow you will see everything.”

Preceded by a flame, a woman appeared, holding a platter on which an oil lamp flickered. She rotated the flame under Dwight’s chin, as Indru and Padmini had done, and marked his forehead with paste.

“Welcome,” she said.

Without thinking, merely reacting to her, Dwight fell to his knees and touched her feet in a single fluid movement, and while he knelt with his head bowed, tears of gratitude and relief blurred his vision.

Shah made no sound, and yet—how was this?—Dwight could tell that the man approved, that he was delighted and proud of him.

“What did you just say?” Dwight asked as he got to his feet, hearing Shah speak to a man in a white robe who seemed to materialize behind the woman with the flaming platter.

“I told him, ‘Swamiji, this man has brought you a gift.’”

Dwight brushed his eyes with the back of his hand. “What are you talking about?”

Now the light from the trunk of the car was illuminating a tall gateway he had not seen before, yet had passed through. The driver was directing a young man to lift it—the Indian chain of command: a driver was not a carrier.

“The rice. A full ton of it.”

“I didn’t do that,” Dwight said.

“Collecting the money in America was the easy part. Buying it was simple. The hard business was shifting it. The paperwork, the supervision, the permits and signatures. So it is your gift.”

Dwight had resented his unpaid work in dealing with the rice shipment; he had even suspected Shah of fobbing off this chore onto him to keep him away from the visiting Harvard team. He now saw the design in the whole effort. He could take credit: it hadn’t been easy.

“Swamiji is thanking you,” Shah said.

“Who is he?”

“He too is a passage maker,” Shah said. The old man was still speaking. “He is inviting us to eat. But before we go in to take some food, he must ask you to give him your mobile phone.”

“Glad to get rid of it.” He rummaged in his pockets.

“All electronic devices,” Shah said.

Dwight handed over his cell phone, then his BlackBerry.

“He is asking if you have a computer.”

“Laptop’s in my briefcase.”

“Shall I put it in my safekeeping?” Shah said.

“Go ahead.”

“As you saw, I too am a passage maker.”

Dwight felt lighter, out of touch, relaxed. Nothing would ring or buzz; nothing would interrupt him. He followed the two men to the dining area, feeling happy.

They ate from clay bowls, by candlelight, in a cool clean room, seated on mats.

“Swami says again he is grateful for the rice,” Shah said. “He is asking if you are Christian.”

“I spent a lot of time in church when I was a boy,” Dwight said.

The old man and Shah spoke awhile in Hindi, and then Shah said, “He is complimenting you. He knows Jesus Christ. Jesus, who said, ‘If you want to be perfect, go and sell everything you have and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in Heaven.’”

“That’s nice,” Dwight said, feeling that he was hearing it for the first time.

“My late father did so,” Shah said.

Now the old man was speaking—a shock to hear him speaking English.

“There was something that Jesus did not say.”

“What did Jesus leave out?”

“He did not describe world of ego—fleeting world.”

“I thought he did.”

“Not at all,” the old man said.

Shah was beaming, the flames lighting his face. Dwight waited for more.

“What is the world?” The old man gestured toward the door—toward Mumbai, Dwight guessed, where his own memories were so painful. “It is almost nothing, do you not agree?”

Dwight said, “It was something to me.”

“But do you sincerely want to leave it behind?”

“Very much.”

“That will not be hard if your heart is right.”

“What is it then?” Dwight asked, and realized, hearing the reverence in his tone, that he had become a student, an initiate. He had surrendered his will, and was happy.

“It is a falling star,” the old man said. “It is a bubble in a stream. A flame in the wind. Frost in the sun. A flash of lightning in a summer cloud.”

Dwight was too moved to speak. He blinked—tears maybe, or maybe he was overcome by the perfume in the incense that thickened the air.

“A phantom in a dream,” the old man said. “Why are you rising, sir?”

Dwight did not answer. He knelt and bowed his head and touched the old man’s feet, feeling a surge of energy in his fingers that jolted his wrists and stiffened his arms.

“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.