The Elephanta Suite by Paul Theroux Page A

the other world, the sounds from the hidden place, another illusion?
    "Amazing story, eh?" Audie said.
    She stared at him.
What story?
was in her smile.
    "About that guy Sanjeev. The Lord of Death. Kind of an Appointment in Samarra thing."
    Beth said, "I didn't know what he was talking about. Anyway, didn't you say he was a quack?"
    "It doesn't really matter if he's a quack. He makes me feel better."
    "You said his story keeps changing."
    "I like that he could talk a dog off a meat wagon," Audie said. "And I sometimes think I'm a quack. When I was on a board, I never wanted to admit when I was wrong. Lots of times I thought: I'm a phony."
    She stared at him again, distancing herself with a smile.
    He said, "Don't you ever think that?"
    "About you?"
    "About yourself." Normally he became hot and impatient when he needed to clarify something obvious to her—she could be so slow sometimes. But he wasn't impatient now; he was sympathetic and mild.
    "Never," she said. And she thought: I have never believed I was a phony. If anything, I felt more real than anyone ever took me for. There was more to me than they realized or cared about. To those people who looked at her and thought
wife
or
woman,
she wanted to say,
I am more than anything you see.
    Â 
    Now it was early afternoon. She was reading by the pool, on the platform under the trees, hidden by a hedge from anyone who happened to be in the lounge chairs—but there was no one there, or at the pool. And Audie was at a treatment. She had ordered a lemonade and a grilled vegetable sandwich, but had only sipped at the drink and eaten just a bite of the sandwich.
    With an accompanying thump, something landed behind her, the sandwich was snatched, and she flinched, raising her arms, and saw the monkey bound away. In her instant memory it was a monkey; at the moment of muddled confrontation she had seen the thing as a hairy hostile child—like one of the mocking boys she'd seen at Hanuman Nagar—and she was too panicked to scream, though her hands were raised to protect her face and breasts.
    After leaping into the biggest of the trees, the monkey found a branch, grasped it with his feet, and began to gnaw at the sandwich, scattering vegetables. These were seized by other monkeys—six or seven—no, more, maybe a dozen, big and small, more insolent than afraid, with a malevolent patience, a defiance that she identified—just a hunch, something about the set of their jaws, the biting faces—as the courage of hunger.
    They moved toward her without a sound, scarcely seeming to touch the deck boards in their tumbling, noiseless flowing at her, their wicked faces twitching. She opened her mouth to shout but could not make a sound.
    Their hair prickled on her body, the dampness itched as it scraped at her legs. They had pinched more of the loose vegetables that had been lying on the deck, poked them into their mouths, yet kept their eyes on her.
    She knew they wanted to eat her face, push her legs apart and knock her over, squat on her breasts and stink. The stink was in the air, preceding them as they pushed toward her.
    She covered her face with one arm, flung her other arm across her breasts, and went numb from the waist down, as in a dream where she found her legs so slow as to be crippled. She wished she could scream as she saw that the monkeys, perhaps twenty of them now, were about to overwhelm her with their dirty paws and wet teeth.
    The crack of something landing in their midst—a heavy clattering stick—startled her, and the monkeys fell back. Then another stick landed with a thump, and a man hurried past Beth shouting, "Shoo! Shoo!" Holding his sandals in his hands, the man waved his arms, still shouting, physically thrusting the creatures away, into the trees, finally picking up the sticks he had thrown and flinging them again, until at last the monkeys retreated and were out of sight.
    As the man had advanced, Beth had stepped back,