On the night she first lay with him, she remembered, he had menaced her lovingly, swearing to pursue her and take her life, hers and her children’s, if she ever did what she had just so callously done. What empty words men spoke when they had had their way with a woman. He was a weakling, a strutting turkey-cock, a fool. In his place she would have hunted herself down and murdered herself in a gutter, like a dog, so that the shame of it would outlive her.
The letters stopped. But still every night in her dreams he came to her, walking the high wire, jumping rope in the sky, bouncing on air as if it were a trampoline, playing leapfrog with his brothers along the high thin line, pretending to slip on an invisible banana skin, windmilling his arms, saving himself, regaining his balance, then slipping on a second imaginary banana skin and falling in a skillfully chaotic tumble all the way to the ground, a finale that always brought the house down. In her dreams she smiled at his genius but when she woke the smile withered and died.
In short, she could not get her cuckolded husband out of her mind, and because it was impossible to talk to her American lover about anything important she spoke heatedly of “Kashmir” instead. Whenever she said “Kashmir” she secretly meant her husband, and this ruse allowed her to declare her love for the man she had betrayed to the man with whom she had committed the act of treason. More and more often she spoke of her love for this encoded “Kashmir,” arousing no suspicion, even when her pronouns occasionally slipped, so that she referred to his mountains, his valleys, his gardens, his flowing streams, his flowers, his stags, his fish. Her American lover was obviously too stupid to crack the code, and attributed the pronoun slippage to her incomplete command of the language. However he, the ambassador, took careful note of her passion, and was plainly moved when she was at her angriest, when she castigated “Kashmir” for his cowardice, for his passivity in the face of the horrible crimes committed against him. “These crimes,” he asked, reclining on her pillows, caressing her naked back, kissing her exposed hip, pinching her nipple, “these would be actions of the Indian armed forces you’re talking about?” At that moment she decided that the term “Indian armed forces” would secretly refer to the ambassador himself, she would use the Indian presence in the valley as a surrogate for the American occupation of her body, so, “Yes, that’s it,” she cried, “the ‘Indian armed forces,’ raping and pillaging. How can you not know it? How can you not comprehend the humiliation of it, the shame of having your boots march all over my private fields?” Again, those telltale slips of the tongue. Your boots, my fields. Again, distracted by her inflamed beauty, he paid no attention to the errors. “Yes, dearest,” he said in a muffled voice from between her thighs, “I believe I do begin to understand, but would it be possible to table the subject for the moment?”
Time passed. Max Ophuls knew that Boonyi Noman did not love him but at first he shut the knowledge away, blinding himself to its consequences, because she had taken up temporary residence in a tender corner of his heart. He knew she hid a great deal of herself from him, exposing only her body, like a true courtesan, like any common whore, but he agreed with himself to forget this, deceiving himself into believing that she reciprocated what he was pleased to call his love. And he allowed her diatribes on the “occupation” of “Kashmir” to affect his thinking, never suspecting that she was secretly railing against himself and against the ineffectual husband who had failed to come to her rescue. He began to object, in private session and in public speeches, to the militarization of the Kashmir valley, and when the word oppressors passed his lips for the first time the bubble of his popularity finally burst.
Newspaper editorials lambasted him. Here, they said, here beneath all the phony Indiaphile posturing, was just another cheap “cigarette” (this was a slang term meaning a Pak-American, an American with Pakistani sympathies, a play on the name of the Pak-American Tobacco Company), just another uncomprehending gringo. America was trampling over southeast Asia, Vietnamese children’s bodies were burning with unquenchable napalm fire, and yet the American ambassador had the gall to speak of oppression. “America should put its own house in order,” thundered India’s editorial writers, “and stop telling us how to take care of our own land.” It was at this point that Edgar Wood, correctly identifying the source of the ambassador’s problems, decided that Boonyi Noman had to go.
Observe him, this unctuous rodent, this Eager Beaver Wood, this invisible, scurrying oiler of wheels, this subterranean enabler of the visible, this lizard person, this snake at the mountain’s root! A pimp of this ilk, a pander of this water would seem to be ill equipped for the burdensome work of moral disapproval. It is not easy to look down on others when one’s own position lacks elevation. Yet the feat was achieved by the ever-resourceful and duplicitous Wood, who proceeded entirely by inversions. The child of a Bostonian prelate (and therefore a Brahmin of sorts himself), he had turned away from religion at an early age. Having rejected religious observance, he nevertheless continued to harbor a secret love of sanctimony and pomp. Being covertly pompous and sanctimonious, he affected humility and open-minded tolerance. Being humble, he concealed within himself an overweening pride. Being prideful, he offered himself to Max Ophuls as a selfless devotee, an effacer of his own needs, a do-everything, see-nothing man without qualities, a servitor, a low footstool for his high master’s shoe. Thus, though low-natured, he was still able to consider himself high-minded. See him now, coursing through the streets of the Indian capital in a little phut-phut scooter-rickshaw, his white kurta flapping in the wind. Behold the simple chappals on his feet. See him arrive at his residential quarters, and note, if you please, the Indian artworks and memorabilia therein, the Madhubani painting, the Warli tribal art, the miniatures of the Kashmiri and Company schools. Is this not the very picture of a Westerner gone native? Yet this same Wood was privately convinced of the innate superiority of the West, and filled with a shadowy contempt for the nation whose style he sought so assiduously to ape. He was tormented, we may grant him that. Such tergiversations of the soul, such twists in the psyche, such tortuous contradictions between the apparent and the actual, would certainly be painful, we may concede, to endure.
Such a coiled and doubled man-serpent would have been too formidable an adversary for a heavily compromised and largely defenseless young woman in any case, but the truth was that she made his task much easier than he expected; and so, finally, did Max. Things in Delhi had not gone as Boonyi Kaul Noman would have wished. Pink, in her two small lonely rooms, rapidly became the color of her isolation and self-loathing. The blue-white of the neon strip-lighting became the color of judgment, a harsh contemptuous glare that erased shadows and left her no place to hide. And as for the sage-green color of her dance guru’s apartment walls, well, that became the color of her failure. The Odissi master Pandit Mudgal had been scornful of her from the first. He was the guru of Sonal Karnaa and Kumkum Segal! He had taught Alarmel Mansingh! He was the master of Kiran Qunango! No man had done more than he to popularize the Odissi dance form! Where would they all be without him—Aloka Panigrahi, Sanjukta Sarukkai, Protima Mahapatra, Madhavi Mohanty? And now in his mottled old age came this raw, lazy village girl, this kept woman, this nothing. She was a rich American’s toy, and he despised her for that; somewhat he despised himself for taking the Yankee dollars and becoming party to the arrangement, and this, too, he held against her. The lessons had gone badly from the start; nor had there been much subsequent improvement. At length Pandit Mudgal, a thickset man with the physiognomy—and all the sensuality—of an outsized eggplant, told her, “Yes, madam, sex appeal you have, that we can all see. You move and men watch you. That is only one thing. Great mastery requires a great soul and your soul, madam, is damned.” She fled weeping from his sight and the next day the ambassador sent Edgar Wood to tell Mudgal that his salary would be increased—doubled!—if he persevered. Like Charles Foster Kane trying to make a singer out of his discordant wife, Max Ophuls tried to buy what could not be bought, a
nd failed. Jayababu, once long, lean and beautiful and now a dark brinjal of a man, an ill-tempered eggplant, refused the cash.
“I am a man for a challenge,” he told Edgar Wood. “But this girl is not for me. Hers is not the high calling, but the low.”
Max’s attention began to wander after that, though for a long time he refused to acknowledge the change in himself. He stayed away from Boonyi for longer periods. Once or twice he dined privately with his wife. Peggy Ophuls was annoyed with herself for feeling so pleased. She was legendary for her toughness but with him she was always weak. How easily she came back to him, how pathetically she opened her arms and let him slink shamefacedly home! He murmured something about the old days, about the Pat Line or the Lyons Corner House, and at once floods of repressed emotion surged through her body. He did his imitation of the vocal style of Mrs. Shanti Dickens of Porchester Terrace as she relished the day’s crime reports—“Wery wery hawful, sir, hisn’t it? Maybe ’e is heatin’ ’er for ’is tea!”—and tears of laughter stood in the Grey Rat’s eyes. This time had been the hardest of all for her. She had lost him for so long that she had feared she would never get him back. But here he was, coming round to face her again. This was what they had, she told herself, this inevitability. They were built to last. She raised a glass to him and a smile trembled at the corners of her mouth. I am the most deluded woman in the world, she thought. But look at him, here he is. My man.
None of Max Ophuls’s amours ever lasted very long before he came to India. Boonyi had been different. This was “love,” and the nature of love was—was it not?—to endure. Or was that just one of the mistakes people made about love, Max got to wondering. Was he clothing an essentially savage, irrational thing in the garb of civilization, dolling it up in the dress shirt of endurance, the silk trousers of constancy, the frock coat of solicitude and the top hat of selflessness? Like Tarzan the ape man when he came to London or New York: the natural rendered unnatural. But under all the fancy apparel the untamable, unkind reality still remained, a feral thing more gorilla-like than human. Something having less to do with sweetness and tenderness and caring and more to do with spoor and territory and grooming and domination and sex. Something provisional, no matter what sort of treaties you acceded to, signed marriage contracts or private statements of accord.
When he began to speak in this way the matador Edgar Wood understood that the bull was tiring, and sent in the picadors, or, to be precise, the picadoras. The beauties he aimed at Max were carefully selected from the upper echelons of Delhi and Bombay society to make Boonyi look bad. They were wealthy, cultured, accomplished, extraordinary women. They circled him from a distance, then moved closer in. The lances of their flirtatious regard, their graceful motion, their touch, speared him time and time again. He fell to his knees. He was almost ready for the sword.
So perhaps it was her failure to be exceptional as well as beautiful that damned Boonyi, or perhaps it was just the passage of time. Shut away in her pink shame, sometimes for days on end (for the ambassador was an increasingly busy man), with only the opprobrium of her dance master for company, she slid downwards toward ruin, slowly at first and then with gathering speed. The excess of Delhi deranged her, its surfeit of muchness, its fecal odors, its hellish noise, its anonymity, its uncaring crowd of the desperate fighting to survive. She became addicted to chewing tobacco, keeping a little cud of it nestled between her lower molars and her cheek. To pass the empty time she frequently fell ill in a languid, faux-consumptive way, and (more truthfully) suffered often from stress, depression, hypertension, stomach trouble and all the other hysteric ailments, and so as the slow months passed she began to learn about medication, about the capacity of tablets and capsules and potions to make the world seem other than it was, faster, slower, more exciting, calmer, happier, more peaceful, kinder, wilder, better. Pandit Mudgal’s thirteen-year-old hamal, the household boy whom the dance teacher periodically bedded in an offhand, seigneurial manner, led Boonyi deeper into the psychotropical jungle, teaching her about afim: opium. After that she curled herself into the metamorphic smoke whenever she could, and dreamed thickly of lost joy while time, cruelly, continued to pass.
But her narcotic of choice turned out to be food. At a certain point early in the second year of her liberated captivity, she began, with great seriousness and a capacity for excess learned from the devil-city itself, to eat. If her world would not expand, her body could. She took to gluttony with the same bottomless enthusiasm she had once had for sex, diverting the immense force of her erotic requirements from her bed to her table. She ate seven times a day, guzzling down a proper breakfast, then a midmorning plate, then a full luncheon, then a midafternoon array of sweet delicacies, then a hearty dinner, then a second dinner at bedtime, and finally a fridge-raiding gobble in the small hours before dawn. Yes, she was a whore, she admitted to herself with a twist of the heart, but she would at least be an extremely well-fed one.
Of all this her keeper Edgar Wood was fully aware, and in all of it he was wholly complicit. If she was setting out down the road to self-destruction (he reasoned), who was he to prevent her? It saved him the difficulty of steering her down exactly such a path. Without a word to his master he brought her the chewing tobacco that was ruining her smile, filled her little bathroom cabinet with pills to pop, clouded her mind with opium, and above all arranged for food to be cooked and delivered, food by the basketful, the trolleyful, delivered by unmarked car or by a dependable tiffin-runner pushing a laden two-wheeled wooden cart. All this he did with a sober grace that entirely deceived her. She had never trusted him until now, but his immaculate courtesy and her growing list of addictions forged a kind of trust, or at least pushed her to set the issue of his trustworthiness to one side. Pragmatism ruled; he was the only one who could satisfy her now. In a sense, he had become her lover, supplanting the ambassador. He was the one who gave her what she needed.
Edgar Wood himself was far too proper to make any such suggestion. He was simply there to be of assistance, he assured Boonyi. Nothing was too good for the woman the ambassador had chosen to love. She had only to ask. And ask she did. It was as if the nostalgic memory of the Kashmiri “super-wazwaan,” the Banquet of Sixty Courses Maximum, had possessed her and driven her insane. Once she understood that Edgar was prepared to satisfy her every whim she grew increasingly promiscuous and peremptory in her gourmandizing. She sent for Kashmiri food, of course, but also for the tandoori and Mughlai cuisines of north India, the boti kababs, the murgh makhani, and for the fish dishes of the Malabar coast, for the masala dosas of Madras and the fabled early pumpkins of the coast of Coromandel, for the hot pickle curries of Hyderabad, for kulfi and barfi and pista-ki-lauz, and for sweet Bengali sandesh. Her appetite had grown to subcontinental size. It crossed all frontiers of language and custom. She was vegetarian and nonvegetarian, fish- and meat-eating, Hindu, Christian and Muslim, a democratic, secularist omnivore.
Elsewhere in the world it was the summer of love.
Inevitably her beauty dimmed. Her hair lost its luster, her skin coarsened, her teeth rotted, her body odor soured, and her bulk—ah! her bulk—increased steadily, week by week, day by day, almost hour by hour. Her head rattled with pills, her lungs were full of poppies. Soon the pretense of lessons was dropped. The general education she had requested as part of her deal with the ambassador had ceased long ago; she had always been too lazy to be a good student, even in Pachigam. Now the dancing also fell away. Pandit Mudgal stayed downstairs with his young hamal, and Boonyi lived above him in a perpetual daze, with her head in a chemical spin and her belly full of food. Edgar Wood, her candyman, allowed himself to wonder idly if her astonishingly self-destructive behavior might be a deliberate suicide attempt, but quite frankly he wasn’t interested enough in her interior life to pursue the thought. What interested him more was the durability of the ambassador’s feeling for her. Max went on visiting her for a considerable time after she had passed what Edgar Wood privately called t
he point of revoltingness. It must be like sleeping not only on but with a stinking foam mattress, he thought with a fastidious shudder: yeuchh. According to Mudgal’s boy, a voyeuristic youth whom Wood was paying for information, the ambassador liked the Kashmiri woman’s use during lovemaking of her teeth and clawlike nails. Like many others, Edgar Wood had read Max Ophuls’s unusually frank account of his wartime exploits. How strange, he thought, that the famous anti-Nazi should still be aroused by his memory of the sexual preferences of the fascist Ursula Brandt, the Panther, whom he had fucked for the Cause. How very strange that a bloated Kashmiri woman should close that sexual circle, so that he went on needing her services long after she had ceased to be attractive. In the end, however, the break was made; the ambassador stopped visiting Boonyi. “It’s impossible,” he told Edgar Wood. “See that she is taken care of, the poor wretch. What a wreck she has made of herself.”
When the man of power withdraws his protection from a concubine, she becomes like a child abandoned in wolf-infested hills. Mowgli’s adoption by the Seeonee pack is untypical; this is not the way such stories usually develop. Boonyi Noman, prostrate on her groaning bed, gasping beneath the weight of her own body, saw Edgar Wood enter her quarters like a predator, without the civility of a knock or a word of greeting and with murder in his eyes, and understood that the crisis was upon her. It was time to tell him her secret.