Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | DAD FICTION THE | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
The Elephanta Suite
Author Notes
Paul Edward Theroux was born on April 10, 1941 in Medford, Massachusetts and is an acclaimed travel writer. After attending the University of Massachusetts Amherst he joined the Peace Corps and taught in Malawi from 1963 to 1965. He also taught in Uganda at Makerere University and in Singapore at the University of Singapore.
Although Theroux has also written travel books in general and about various modes of transport, his name is synonymous with the literature of train travel. Theroux's 1975 best-seller, The Great Railway Bazaar, takes the reader through Asia, while his second book about train travel, The Old Patagonian Express (1979), describes his trip from Boston to the tip of South America. His third contribution to the railway travel genre, Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China, won the Thomas Cook Prize for best literary travel book in 1989. His literary output also includes novels, books for children, short stories, articles, and poetry. His novels include Picture Palace (1978), which won the Whitbread Award and The Mosquito Coast (1981), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Theroux is a fellow of both the British Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Geographic Society. His title Lower River made The New York Times Best Seller List for 2012. Currently his 2015 book, Deep South , is a bestseller.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The dismayed, disoriented American travelers in this trio of stereotype-shattering novellas from Theroux (following Blinding Light) lament the missing "solemn pieties" and "virtuous peasants" of the India they read about in novels. In "Monkey Hill," a wealthy ugly American-type husband and wife take pampered health spa treatment at the foot of the Himalayas to be their due. But when the couple presume that the sybaritic care they're paying for includes invitations for sex with masseurs and waiters, their idyllic holiday takes a tragic turn. In "The Gateway of India," a fast-track Boston capitalist finds his loathing for the squalor of Mumbai's slums tempered by how easy it is to buy the affections of young women; meanwhile, his once obsequious Indian assistant is usurping his power. In "The Elephant God," a college graduate on her own encounters a young man whose call-center mastery of American dialect somehow rewires him from overly friendly striver to malevolent stalker. These unsettling tales about American travelers at odds with India's complexities are linked through passing references, but what they share most is a transformative menace that takes the place of spiritual succor. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Theroux's latest book is a trio of short novellas, each featuring Americans on a path of discovery in India. A pampered couple explores a bit too far off a luxury spa in search of extramarital trysts, a businessman reluctant to venture outside his hotel becomes a slave to his passions in the slums of Mumbai, and an itinerant college grad living in an ashram befriends an elephant but cannot shake the affections of a creepy local. Although they purport to be intertwined, beyond casual character references and thematic similarities, these three stories have little to do with each other. Still, certain aspects do reverberate throughout the whole: the shockingly quick path from desire to oblivion; the seductive qualities of a foreign land that easily lends itself to self-reinvention; and the sickening reality of a society that makes a living as a parasite on those it draws in with its intoxicating beauty. Above all, Theroux is fascinated by the moment when travel ceases to be a trip and becomes, often with horrifying results, life in all its splendor and depravity. At times tender and at times savage, Theroux's confidence in his craft and a masterful sensibility of foreign lands lead, as always, to quietly stunning results.--Chipman, Ian Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
In Paul Theroux's novellas, Americans are freed or destroyed by India. PAUL THEROUX is the thinking person's James Michener, a globe-hopping chronicler of distant lands whose stories, some reported, some invented, aim to inform and broaden, not merely engage, and permit the armchair voyager to stamp new visas in his intellectual passport. Theroux delivers richer prose than Michener, subtler insights and slyer dilemmas, but he resembles the late mass-market master of narrative geography by treating societies as his true protagonists while giving his characters (in his novels, at least) the auxiliary role of inciting, observing or acting out the conflicts latent in their surrounding cultures. Art for art's sake isn't Theroux's bag, and it needn't be, of course. He likes to lecture a little between the lines, to show off the artifacts gathered during his travels and speculate on their significance. Theroux's new book of three novellas, "The Elephanta Suite," is his attempt - brought off with mixed results but distinguished by worthy intentions and sturdy tradecraft - to display and explain contemporary India in all its swarming, seductive, anachronistic, disorienting dynamism. India's contradictions seem to interest him most, especially its peculiar combination of ancient ascetic spirituality and information-age commercialism. Over here an ashram or a temple devoted to the quest for inner enlightenment or the veneration of Hindu gods, across the way a modern call center that fields complaints from Home Depot customers. Theroux hints in the book that India's native novelists - or at least those who've won wide acceptance in America - have failed in some way to convey their country's complexities, perhaps by emphasizing its picturesque folkways and exotic domestic customs as a way of enchanting Western readers. Theroux presumes to correct this situation by stripping some romance from the place. The first novella, "Monkey Hill," belongs to that genre of ominous travel stories typified by Paul Bowles's "Sheltering Sky." Take two decadent Yankees, goes the recipe, send them abroad in search of kicks and watch with mounting trepidation as their blindness to cultural nuances, their first-world illusions of invulnerability and their reckless sensuality lure them into dark and fatal corners where their traveler's checks and consulates can't save them. The blithe, doomed hedonists in this case are Beth and Audie Blunden, a rich couple who've come to India to recharge their depleted Type-A metabolisms at an Ayurvedic spa. This serene little Xanadu of holistic healing stands, securely walled off, atop a hill below which lies a hard-luck village racked by political and religious turmoil involving a shrine to Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god, that has displaced a Muslim mosque. The Blundens are oblivious to this strife. They're too busy being purged of toxins and having their chakras unclogged by submissive Indian therapists. The novella's action is oddly passive in that it largely consists of yoga sessions and massages during which the Blundens meditate about the essence of their erotic natures and the vagaries of their complicated marriage. Soon enough, they grow infatuated with two of the spa's attractive young Indian staff members. Furtive liaisons are arranged and, step by apprehensive step, the blundering Blundens descend the hill from their sanitary sanctuary into the grimy alleys of the village. In Kipling's time East was East and West was West, and never the twain should meet, but in Theroux's new India, where jumbo-jetloads of Americans arrive every day to do business and do the guru-tour, such meetings happen all the time. Inevitably, some of them don't end well. When the Blundens are lulled by their rubdowns at the spa into believing that deeper contacts can be experienced (at bargain prices) in the slums beyond its gates, their destruction is certain and comes as no surprise. When a writer immerses two standard Ugly Americans in a mob of central-casting hungry natives, he may as well be boiling an egg. Just set the timer and wait three minutes. The problem with "Monkey Hill," though, is that the heat is set too low and the cooking takes too long. The Blundens' interludes on the massage table and in the yoga room have the effect of slowing time even further. By the time the author finally serves up his pampered baby boomers to the starving native masses - the way of all flesh in such morality tales of Western arrogance - our hunger for their destruction has turned to surliness. Die already, you pampered brats. Go, cannibals! What's most frustrating of all, though, is Theroux's decision to halt the story just as the longed-for violence begins, a breach of narrative dramatic law. Shorter massages and a longer riot, please. The most satisfying novella of the collection, "The Gateway of India," adheres to a storytelling formula almost as familiar as the one in "Monkey Hill": an identity swap between a pair of opposites, each of whom comes to covet the other's traits and tire of his own. Theroux's skills as a researcher and amateur anthropologist are put to good effect here as he traces a shy, germaphobic young Boston lawyer's introduction to Indian business practices, Indian sexual morality and, over time, after many misadventures, the principles of Jainism, an ancient religious sect devoted to vegetarianism, austerity and radical gentleness toward other creatures, including insects and even microbes. Dwight Huntsinger's shift from global capitalist to solitary seeker, from tool to disciple, commences in Mumbai, where he's nailing down outsourcing deals for his firm's clients. He's scared to eat the funny-looking food, he's frustrated by the Indian lawyers' obsession with contractual minutiae and he's overwhelmed by the sight of the great throngs visible from the windows of tall, air-conditioned buildings. Mumbai, to a man of Dwight's temperament, is hell. "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." WHEN his firm forces Dwight to make a second trip, the teeming city grabs him by the sleeve and drags him down into its reeking depths. It culturally rapes him, in a sense, and, astonishingly, he enjoys it, particularly after taking as a mistress a street-smart young waif who frees his blocked libido in return for money he's glad to pay and ethical compromises he's happy to make. One of Theroux's running theses about India is that it punishes those who stand apart from it but transfigures those who fully submit to it. What looks like a cesspool of concentrated misery can be, for those who bravely bathe in it, an existential baptismal font. India doesn't cleanse people of their sins so much as revive their elemental humanity. For inhibited, neurotic Dwight, this means enabling him to sin and, later on, when his vices attract the notice of his strict Jainist colleague, Shah, to acknowledge the pain they've caused him and seek serenity. That Shah sets Dwight on the straight path just as he's straying from it himself (having returned from his first trip to America, Shah is wearing a tie in Harvard colors and brimming with ambition and greedy schemes) is a twist that Michener might have envied but probably couldn't have brought off so naturally. It's also Theroux's retort to Kipling, who didn't foresee that free trade and easy travel would help the East and West not only to meet but, in some ways, to exchange their essences. India, Theroux seems to say, punishes those who stand apart from it but transfigures those who submit to it. Walter Kirn is a regular contributor to the Book Review. His latest novel is "The Unbinding."
Guardian Review
Paul Theroux, objecting to Americans' ineligibility for the Booker prize, once said: "The year that really annoyed me was when that Polish woman, who happened to have been married to a Sikh and lived in India, won it." The "Polish woman" was Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a Briton born in Germany to Jewish parents (one of whom was Polish) who fled to England in 1939. Her husband, the architect Cyrus Jhabvala, is Parsi not Sikh. Theroux's approach to India in his latest book is no less cavalier. The Elephanta Suite , named after the most expensive set of rooms in a luxury Mumbai hotel, consists of three tenuously linked stories involving Americans visiting India. They get what one character terms 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 unrecognisable." Theroux's gaze takes in hi-tech call centres and ayurvedic spas. Yet, with its rapacious beggars and mercenary swamis, this book revisits territory Jhabvala's fiction explored with greater subtlety some 30 years ago, in which westerners find their delusions about India and themselves ironically overturned. In "Monkey Hill" a middle-aged couple, Audie and Beth Blunden, linger at a health spa to pursue secret trysts with young "massage therapists". While the husband is inspired by yogic meditation to curb his perennial lechery ("You're a good girl. I want you to stay that way"), his wife opts for her first fling but is left "unsatisfied and feeling assaulted". Frozen out by the hotel management, the couple face a stone-throwing Muslim mob, "bearded and angry", incensed by the razing of a mosque on the site of an ancient Hindu temple. In "The Gateway of India", Dwight Huntsinger, a just-divorced Boston lawyer chasing outsourcing deals in Mumbai, is lured to a child prostitute, then loses himself in a debauched menage with two conspiring teenage girls. "He would be seen as a sensualist, an exploiter, another opportunist in India. No, he was a benefactor." Yet as his shame deepens, he renounces the world and heads for an ashram, leaving an aspiring Indian colleague to take his wallet and his place. In the final story, "The Elephant God", a young backpacker, Alice, "the pretty girl's plain friend", gets a job in Bangalore teaching American accent and intonation to call centre workers in Electronics City ("Electrahnics Siddy"). But as her pupils undergo a personality change through acquiring American speech, becoming "more familiar, even obnoxious", she is stalked and raped by her co-worker Amitabh - "her personal creation, a big blorting babu with a salesman's patter". Theroux's favoured methods include broad satire and parody, glib reversals and homing in on the grotesque ("he chewed with his mouth open - heedlessly spraying masticated apple flesh"). India to the Blundens is "not a country but a creature, like a monstrous body crawling with smaller creatures, pestilential with people - a big horrific creature, sometimes angry and loud, sometimes passive and stinking, always hostile, even dangerous". For Dwight, "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". He notes "how subtle and crafty Indians could be individually, how ignorant and obvious in a large crowd". The line between characters' views and authorial vision is unclear. But so many of these opinions are left unqualified that they colour the book. Of course, this may be less about a place than about self-deluding outsiders who are themselves types: feckless husbands and downtrodden wives; "pretty" girls and "plain" virgins. India provides the backdrop against which they test their mettle, face their moral failings and have crises of conscience - their own heart of darkness. Yet it also appears to blame for the emotions it stirs. Americans who imagine them selves free are ambushed by a voracious, conspiratorial society in which they are conspicuous and threatened. This makes for a curiously oldfashioned book. The perils of going native are ironically flagged. Alice could be a 19th-century heroine as she faces taxi drivers outside a station, "resolute, yet fearing that someone would touch her". In an enduring though unenlightening plot convention, the western women who show openness or independence are sexually assaulted. After decades of polyphonic fiction from and about the subcontinent, it is strange to read such a complacently one-sided view, in which the locals are objects of lust, curiosity or ridicule but their inner lives remain closed. The novels Alice had read "seemed concocted to her now, and besieged in up-close India all she thought of was Hieronymus Bosch, turtle-faced crones, stumpy men, deformed children". One, "much praised, by an Indian woman who lived in the States, did not describe the India she had encountered, or the people she had met. Where were these families? The novels described a tidier India, full of ambitions, not the India of pleading beggars or weirdly comic salesmen, or people so pompous they were like parodies." For any traveller to imagine that they have uncovered the real India, to which its citizens remain blind, is surely itself a delusion. To order The Elephanta Suite for pounds 17.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-jaggitheroux.1 In "Monkey Hill" a middle-aged couple, Audie and Beth Blunden, linger at a health spa to pursue secret trysts with young "massage therapists". While the husband is inspired by yogic meditation to curb his perennial lechery ("You're a good girl. I want you to stay that way"), his wife opts for her first fling but is left "unsatisfied and feeling assaulted". Frozen out by the hotel management, the couple face a stone-throwing Muslim mob, "bearded and angry", incensed by the razing of a mosque on the site of an ancient Hindu temple. In the final story, "The Elephant God", a young backpacker, Alice, "the pretty girl's plain friend", gets a job in Bangalore teaching American accent and intonation to call centre workers in Electronics City ("Electrahnics Siddy"). But as her pupils undergo a personality change through acquiring American speech, becoming "more familiar, even obnoxious", she is stalked and raped by her co-worker Amitabh - "her personal creation, a big blorting babu with a salesman's patter". - Maya Jaggi.
Kirkus Review
Three brilliant, loosely concatenated stories, all set in India and all about spiritual quests. Theroux (Blinding Light, 2005, etc.) places his characters in positions in which they are forced either to see or to discover ambiguity and paradox in their experience in and around Mumbai. In the first story, "Monkey Hill," Audie and Beth Blunden are enjoying a spa vacation in India, and while a part of them wants the elitist experience of separation and comfort offered by the posh amenities at Agni, an Indian resort where every desire for personal comfort is anticipated, another part of them craves the chaos and perhaps even danger of the "real" India, represented by the teeming confusion of Hanuman Nagar, the local village. They get increasingly reckless as they breech barriers separating Indian from westerner. The next story, "The Gateway of India," follows the adventures of American lawyer Dwight Huntsinger, who is sent unwillingly on a business trip to India but who discovers India as a locus of his personal heart of darkness, where shameful desires can be realized and acted upon. Eventually, however, he discovers that the ancient culture of India does in fact disclose real answers to spiritual questions, and Dwight realizes the truth that "a lack of holiness impedes enlightenment." At the end of the novella he finds himself in the unlikely, but dramatically convincing, position of becoming a holy man. The final story, "The Elephant God," finds Alice Durand, a recent graduate of Brown University, teaching Indian "outsourcers" to speak with credible American accents. After she is stalked and then violated by one of her students, she realizes she must create her own "justice" to counter a stonewalling legal system hostile to young western women traveling alone. Whether they realize it or not, Theroux's characters are all seekers, and all of them wind up on paths much different from those they originally imagined. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The title refers both to a set of luxurious hotel rooms and to the complementary nature of the three novellas in this collection. Each story involves self-centered American tourists encountering India, all carrying heavy emotional baggage they hope to discard amid the excitement of new and, to them, exotic surroundings. The results are devastating. In "Monkey Hill," a prosperous couple lingering at a luxurious yoga spa succumbs to dangerous temptations. A proper New England executive on assignment in Mumbai deliberately courts degeneracy in "The Gateway of India." "The Elephant God" finds a plain young woman abandoning her search for enlightenment to engineer a hideous revenge on a sexual bully. Theroux's often praised sense of place is in top form here, as is his sometimes mordant view of the human condition. Stunning cinematic descriptions of Indian locales accompany darkly comic characterizations of flawed men and women on both sides of the East-West culture divide. Buy wherever the author is in demand. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/07.]-Starr E. Smith, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Monkey Hill 1 They were round-shouldered and droopy-headed like mourners, the shadowy child-sized creatures, squatting by the side of the sloping road. All facing the same way, too, as though silently venerating the muted dirty sunset beyond the holy city. Motionless at the edge of the ravine, they were miles from the city and the wide flat river that snaked into the glow, the sun going gray, smoldering in a towering heap of dust like a cloudbank. The lamps below had already come on, and in the darkness the far-off city lay like a velvety textile humped in places and picked out in squirts of gold. What were they looking at? The light dimmed, went colder, and the creatures stirred. "They're almost human," Audie Blunden said, and looked closer and saw their matted fur. With a bark like a bad cough, the biggest monkey raised his curled tail, lowered his arms, and thrust forward on his knuckles. The others, skittering on smaller limbs, followed him, their tails nodding; and the distinct symmetry of the roadside disappeared under the tumbling bodies as the great troop of straggling monkeys moved along the road and up the embankment toward the stringy trees at the edge of the forest. "They scare me," Beth Blunden said, and though the nearest monkey was more than fifteen feet away she could feel the prickle of its grubby fur creeping across the bare skin of her arm. She remembered sharply the roaring baboon in Kenya which had appeared near her cot under the thorn trees like a demon, its doggy teeth crowding its wide-open mouth. The thing had attacked the guide's dog, a gentle Lab, bitten its haunch, laying it open to the bone, before being clubbed away by the maddened African. That was another of their trips. "I hate apes," Beth said. "They're monkeys." "Same thing." "No. Apes are more like us," Audie said, and in the darkness he covertly picked his nose. Was it the dry air? "I think it's the other way around." But Audie hadn't heard. He was peering into the thickening dusk. "Incredible," he said in a whisper. "I think they were watching the sunset, just lingering for the last warmth of the sun." "Like us," she said. And Beth stared at him, not because of what he'd said but the way he'd said it. He sounded so pompous chewing on this simple observation. They traveled a lot, and she had noticed how travel often made this normally straightforward man pretentious. They were at the edge of a low summit, one of the foothills of the Himalayas, above the holy city. Farther up the ridge from where they were staying--a health spa called Agni--on a clear day they could see snow- topped peaks. They had come to Agni for their health, planning to stay a week. The week passed quickly. They stayed another, and now they renewed their arrangement from week to week, telling themselves that they'd leave when they were ready. They were world travelers, yet they'd never seen anything like this. Still, the file of monkeys hurried up the road with a skip-drag gait, the big bold monkey leader up front, now and then barking in his severe cough-like way. "Good evening." A man emerged from the twilit road, stepping neatly to allow the monkeys to pass by. The Blundens were not startled. Their three weeks here had prepared them. They had not seen much of India, but they knew that whenever they had hesitated anywhere, looking puzzled or even thoughtful, an Indian had stepped forward to explain, usually an old man, a bobble- headed pedant, urgent with irrelevancies. This one wore a white shirt, a thick vest and scarf, baggy pants, and sandals. Big horn-rimmed glasses distorted his eyes. "I see you are in process of observing our monkeys." Like the other explainers, this one precisely summed up what they'd been doing. "Do not be perplexed," he went on. It was true--they had been perplexed. "They are assembling each evening. They are taking last of warmth into bodies." He had the voluptuous and slightly starved way of saying "bodies," giving the word flesh. "I figured so," Audie said. "That's what I said to my wife-- didn't I, Beth?" "They are also looking at smoke and fires at temple in town." That was another thing they'd found. Indians like this never listened. They would deliver a monologue, usually informative but oddly without emphasis, as though it were a recitation, and did not appear to be interested in anything the Blundens had to say. "What temple?" "What town?" the Blundens asked at once. The Indian was pointing into the darkness. "When sun is down, monkeys hasten away--see--to the trees where they will spend night hours, safe from harm's way. Leopards are there. Not one or two, but abundant. Monkeys are their meat." "Meat" was another delicious word, like "body," which the man uttered as if tempted by it, giving it the sinewy density and desire of something forbidden. But he hadn't answered them. "There's leopards here on Monkey Hill?" Audie asked. The old man seemed to wince in disapproval, and Audie guessed it was his saying "Monkey Hill"--but that was what most people called it, and it was easier to remember than its Indian name. "It is believed that Hanuman Giri is exact place where monkey god Hanuman plucked the mountain of herbals and healing plants for restoring life of Rama's brother Lakshman." Yes, that was it, Hanuman Giri. At first they had thought he was answering their question about leopards, but what was this about herbals? "As you can find in Ramayana," the Indian said, and pointed with his skinny hand. "There, do you see mountain beyond some few trees?" and did not wait for a reply. "Not at all. It is empty space where mountain once stood. Now it is town and temple. Eshrine, so to say." "No one mentioned any temple." "At one time was Muslim mosque, built five centuries before, Mughal era, on site of Hanuman temple. Ten years ago, trouble, people invading mosque and burning. Monkeys here are observing comings and goings, hither and thither." "I have a headache," Beth said, and thought, Inwading? Eshrine? "Many years ago," the Indian man said, as though Mrs. Blunden had not spoken--Was he deaf? Was any of this interesting?--"I was lost in forest some three or four valleys beyond here, Balgiri side. Time was late, afternoon in winter season, darkness coming on. I saw a troop of monkeys and they seemed to descry that I was lost. I was lightly clad, unprepared for rigors of cold night. One monkey seemed to beckon to me. He led, I followed. He was chattering, perhaps to offer reassurance. Up a precipitous cliff at top I saw correct path beneath me. I was thus saved. Hanuman saved me, and so I venerate image." "The monkey god," Beth said. "Hanuman is deity in image of monkey, as Ganesh is image of elephant, and Nag is cobra," the Indian said. "And what is your country, if you please?" "We're Americans," Beth said, happy at last to have been asked. "There are many wonders here," the Indian said, unimpressed by what he'd just heard. "You could stay here whole lifetime and still not see everything." "We're up at Agni," Audie said. "The lodge. Just took a walk down here to see the sunset." "Like the monkeys." The Indian wasn't listening. He was scowling at the valley he had described, where the mountain had been uprooted. "How old do you think I am?" he asked. "You will never guess." "Seventy-something." "I am in my eighty-third year. I do yoga meditation every morning for one hour. I have never tasted meat nor alcoholic beverage. Now I will go home and take little dhal and puri and curd, that is all." "Where do you live?" "Just here. Hanuman Nagar." "Your village?" The old man exploded with information. "Township of Hanuman Nagar is substantial, with a market and textiles weaving and sundry spheres of commercial enterprise, including iron mongeries, pot-making, clay-baking, for house tiles, kilns and enameling." "No one mentioned a town," Audie said. "As well as fruit and nut trees. I myself am wholesaling nut meats. Also, as mentioned, Hanuman eshrine. Ancient temple. I bid you good evening." With that he stepped into the darkness. The Blundens walked up the road in the opposite direction, remarking, as they went, on the poise of the old man, his self-possession, his pedantry. How easy it was to jeer at him, yet he had told them several things they hadn't known: the town, its industries, the Hanuman story, the temple business. He was faintly ridiculous, yet you couldn't mock him--he was real. What they had been thinking of as simply Monkey Hill had a history, and drama, an Indian name, and now on that lower slope a neighboring settlement. "Did you understand what he said about the mosque and the temple?" Audie shrugged and said, "Beth, you get these Indians talking and they flog a dead horse into dog food." They had a surprise walking back up the road to the lodge. They passed through a large gateway. They had seen the gateway coming down, but they had not seen the signs: Right of Entry Prohibited Except by Registered Guests and No Trespassing and Authorized Vehicles Only. "This means you!" Audie said, shaking his finger into the darkness. "Get your happy ass out of here!" "You're awful, Butch," Beth said, and giggled because it was dark and they were in India, on this broken road, alone, dust in their nostrils, the obscure sense of smoky air, a smell of burning cow dung, a rocky hillside, and here he was making a joke, being silly. His unruly behavior was usually a comfort; she had loved him for it and regarded it as a form of protection for more than thirty years of marriage. She felt safe in his humor. Beyond the gateway they saw the lights of the lodge and Agni itself, the former maharajah's residence, a baronial mansion, and in the bamboo grove the spa buildings, the pool, the palm trees, the yoga pavilion, glowing in spotlights, the whole place crowning the summit of the hill he had been told was Monkey Hill, though it had a local name too, the one that old Indian had used that they found impossible to remember. Staff members passing them on the path pressed their hands in prayer and said namaste or namaskar, and some of the Tibetans, in an attractive gesture, touched their right hand to their heart. Audie did the same in return and found himself moved by it. At the entrance to the restaurant, Beth saw an Indian couple smile at them. "Namaste," she said, and clapped her hands upright under her chin. "Hi there," the Indian man said. He was quick to put his hand out and pumped Audie's reluctant hand. "I'm Rupesh--call me Bill. This is Deena. Looks crowded tonight." The Indian girl at the door said, "Very crowded. There's a wait, I'm afraid. Unless you wish to share a table." Audie smiled at the girl. The nameplate pinned to her yellow and white sari was lettered Anna. She was lovely--he'd seen her at the spa in the white pajamas the massage therapists wore. "No problem here," the Indian said. "If you don't mind," Beth said. "I could seat you quicker if you sat together," the Indian girl, Anna, said. Audie tried to catch his wife's eye to signal "we'll wait"--eating with strangers affected his digestion--but she had already agreed. He hated to share. He hated the concept, the very word; he had spent his life in pursuit of his own undivided portion of the world. Within minutes of their being seated, the Indian (Bill?) had told him that he lived in Chevy Chase, Maryland; that he owned a company that leased vending machines ("bottled and canned beverages and mineral waters") and his budget projections had never been better; that he had an acre of warehouse space and a large house; that his elderly father lived with them, and he had two children, one attending Georgetown, a boy, economics major, and a daughter, a Johns Hopkins graduate, now a stock analyst for Goldman Sachs, doing very well, loved her work. This was their second day at Agni. They had family in Dehra Dun, one more day and they'd be back in Delhi, preparing to take the direct flight to Newark, a new service, so much better than having to make stops in Frankfurt or London. "Very spiritual here," he said after an awkward pause, having gotten no response from Audie. Audie smiled. How was it possible for people to talk so much that they were oblivious of their listener? Yet Audie was relieved --he didn't want to give out information about himself. He did not want to lie to anyone, and knew that if anyone asked a direct question he would give an evasive or misleading reply. Talkative people made it so easy for him to be anonymous. "What do you do for a living?" he was sometimes asked. "Whole bunch of things," he would reply. "I've got a bunch of companies. I'm involved in some start-ups and rebrandings. We're in housewares. Hard furnishings. White goods. We used to do a lot of mail order, catalogue inventory, and now it's mostly online." The Indian woman said to him, "Where do you live?" "Tough question," Audie said. "This time of year we're usually in our house in Florida. We've got an apartment in New York. We mostly spend our summers in Maine. We've got a condo in Vermont, ski country. Take your pick." But the woman wasn't listening to him. She was talking about her daughter, who lived in New York City and was now twenty-seven and a little overdue to be married. They--mother and father --were in India to meet the parents of a boy they hoped would be a suitable husband. The boy happened to be living in Rochester, New York, where he taught engineering. "Arranged marriage," she said. "Best way." She seemed to be twinkling with defiance, challenging Audie to question her adherence to the custom of arranged marriage. He enjoyed hearing her overselling it. "Rupesh and I were arranged by our parents. Americans find it so funny." She shrieked a little and wobbled her head. "I didn't know his name. Only his horoscope. He was almost stranger to me. Almost thirty years together now!" While insisting on her approval of the custom of arranged marriage, she was also presenting herself as an antique, if not an oddity, and wished to be celebrated that way. She lived in the USA; she had shocked her American friends with this sort of talk and was defying Audie to be shocked. But Audie decided to defy her in return by smiling at her. "Beth was a stranger to me when we met, too," he said. "Picked her up in a bar." He overheard the Indian man--Bill? Rupesh?--say, "vas vesting away" and "his own urine"--and he turned away from the man's disappointed wife. "My father," the man said, glad for another listener. "He was in intensive care at Georgetown Medical Center. They said they couldn't do any more for his condition, which was inoperable cancer of pancreas. 'He will be more comfortable at home.' They were abandoning him, no question. He was wasting. As last resort we saw a yogi. He prescribed the urine cure. My father was instructed to drink a beaker of his own urine first thing in morning. He did so. After a week he grew stronger. Appetite came back. Hunger was there. Thirst was there. Second week, my God, he began to put on weight. Skin better, head clear. Third week he was walking a bit. Balance was there. Two months of this, drinking urine, and body was clear. Doctor said, 'Miracle.'" That was another thing: one minute it was budget projections and stock analysis, the next minute it was horoscopes and arranged marriages and the wonder of drinking your own whiz. "I tell you, India is booming," the man said when Audie did not react. "There is no stopping it. Bangalore is next Silicon Valley. Innovation!" "So I heard," Audie said, "but all I see in India"--and he smiled at the couple--"all I see in India is people reinventing the flat tire." Soon after that the couple smiled, and said they'd enjoyed meeting them, and excused themselves; and only then did Audie take notice of them, because he was unable to tell from their manner whether they were offended and abruptly ducking out or else actually meant what they said. It was a kind of inscrutability he had not associated with Indians. He was impressed. "He seemed nice," Beth said. "Nice doesn't seem like the right word for Indians," Audie said. "It's a little too bland. Lavish, outlandish, pious, talkative, overbearing, in your face, slippery, insincere, holy--I'm thinking they are Indian words. That talk about drinking number one--did you ever hear anything like it?" "I wasn't listening. I thought he was handsome. That's the trouble with you--you expect them to make sense." "What do you do?" "I look at them talking. I don't listen. Didn't you notice he had lovely eyes?" They had gotten up and were leaving the table when they heard a sharp "Hello." An Indian man was bowing, another one who'd materialized next to them. He was carrying a clipboard. "Doctor," Beth said--she had forgotten his name, but he too wore an Agni nameplate, lettered Nagaraj. "Doctor Nagaraj." He had said that he would see them at dinner, and they had forgotten they'd promised they'd see him. But he was unfussed, saying "Not to worry" as they apologized, and again Audie smiled at his inability to read the man's mood--whether or not he minded their having forgotten him. "We've already eaten," Audie said, seeing the waitress approach, and he noticed it was the girl who had seated them, Anna. She held three menus and stood next to the table, looking serene, patient, attentive. She had a pale, round, Asiatic face, like a doll, her hair in a bun, drawn back tight, giving her prominent ears. She was small, quick to smile when she was smiled at. "Is that short for something--maybe Annapurna?" "No, sir. Mother of Mary. I am Christian, sir." "Imagine that." "Anna Hunphunwoshi, sir. From Nagaland, sir. Kohima, sir. Very far, sir." "I've seen you in the spa." "I also do treatments in daytime, sir." "Are you eating, doctor?" Audie said. "Thank you, no. I don't take food after six p.m." He spoke to Anna. "I will take some salted lassi." "We should follow your example," Beth said. "As you wish." "Three of those, Anna, please." "Thank you, sir." She stepped silently away, clutching the menus. "Where did you say you went to medical school?" Audie asked the doctor. "Ayurvedic Institute in Mangalore." "That makes you a doctor?" "Ayurvedic doctor, yes." "Can you practice outside India?" "Where Ayurvedic medicine is licensed, indeed, I can practice Ayurvedic without hindrance," Dr. Nagaraj said. "May I see your right hand, sir?" And when Audie placed his big hand in the doctor's warm slender hand, the doctor said, "Just relax," and scrutinized it, and made some notes on his clipboard. "That Indian script looks like laundry hanging on a clothesline," Audie said. The doctor, intent on Audie's palm, said nothing. And even when the waitress returned with the three tumblers of lassi, he went on studying the big splayed hand. He made more notes and, what was disconcerting to Audie, he wrote down a set of numbers, added more numbers to them, subtracted, multiplied, got a total, then divided it and underlined the result. Still holding Audie's palm, the doctor raised his eyes and did not smile. "You had a hard life until age thirty-five," Dr. Nagaraj said. "You prepared the ground, so to say. Then you reaped rewards. You can be helpful to a politician presently, but avoid it. Next ten years very good for name and fame. Madam?" He offered his hand to Beth, and she placed hers, palm upward, on top of his. "Those numbers," Beth said. "Good dates, bad dates, risky times." "How long will I live?" Audie said. "Until eighty-five, if all is observed," the doctor said without hesitating. He went back to examining Beth's palm and scribbling notes. "I don't want to know how long I'm going to live," Beth said. "Just give me some good news." "Happy childhood, but you have no children yourself," the doctor said. "Next ten years, excellent health. Never trust any person blindly, especially those who praise you. Follow intuition. Invest in real estate. Avoid crowds, smoke, dust." The doctor strained, as if translating from a difficult language he was reading on Beth's palm. "Avoid perfume. No litigation." As the doctor tensed, showing his teeth, Beth said, "That's enough," and lifted her hand and clasped it. Audie glanced at her and guessed that she was also wondering if Dr. Nagaraj was a quack. But that thought was not in her mind. Dr. Nagaraj perhaps sensed this querying, though he seemed calm again. He sipped his lassi, he nodded, he tapped his clipboard. "I took my friend Sanjeev to Rajaji National Park to see the wild elephants. They are my passion. Did you not see my collection of Ganeshes in my office?" "I remember," Beth said. "The elephant figurines on the shelves." "Quite so." The doctor drank again. "We encountered a great herd of elephants in Rajaji. They are not the same as the working domesticated elephants but a separate species. They saw us. We were near the banks of the river. Do you know the expression 'Never get between an elephant and water'?" "No," said Beth. "I guess I do now," said Audie. "The elephants became enraged. I saw the bull elephant trumpeting and I ran and hid in the trees. Sanjeev was behind me, rooted to the spot, too frightened to move." As he spoke the waitress came back, paused at their table, then asked whether there was anything more she could get them. "We're fine," Audie said. When she had gone, Dr. Nagaraj said, "I watched with horror as the huge elephant bore down on Sanjeev, followed by the herd of smaller elephants, raising so much dust. Seeing them, Sanjeev bowed his head and knelt, knowing he was about to die. He couldn't run, he couldn't swim. But he did yoga--bidalasana, cat position, instinctive somehow." Flexing his fingers, making a business of it, Dr. Nagaraj straightened the mat in front of him, tidied the coaster under his glass, then dipped his head and sucked at the lassi. "And what happened?" Audie asked. Dr. Nagaraj went vague, his face slackening, then, "Oh, yes," as he pretended to remember. "The great bull elephant lowered his head as though to charge. But instead of impaling Sanjeev on his tusks as I had expected, the elephant knelt, trapping Sanjeev between the two great tusks. Not to kill him, oh no. I could see it was to protect him from the other elephants trampling him." He seemed on the point of saying more when Beth said that she was exhausted, that she would be a basket case if she didn't get some sleep. "I call that another miracle," Beth Blunden said as they strolled under the starry sky to their suite. Copyright © 2007 by Paul Theroux. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. Excerpted from The Elephanta Suite by Paul Theroux All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.