The Elephanta Suite by Paul Theroux

multicolored barrier lay in the distance, a head-high barricade.
    No, it was a solid mass of men jammed together like a wall across the narrow road. They were waving sticks, perhaps the men were shouting too, but there was no sound. The windows of the car were shut, and what the Blundens saw resembled the India they had seen from the car on their first day. But these men were bearded and angry, and the sunlight made it all much worse.
    "Turn around!" Audie shouted.
    Shocked into his own language, Dr. Nagaraj was yapping with fear. He slowed the car and struggled with the steering wheel, attempting a U-turn. But the road was too narrow, and seeing he could go no farther, he began to jiggle the loose gearshift. When he looked back to reverse the car, his face was close to the Blundens', gleaming in terror.
    "Get us the hell out of here!"
    "Oh, God." Dr. Nagaraj winced at the
pock-pock
of stones hitting the car, the sound on its metal as of teeth and claws.

The Gateway of India

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 unbreathable 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,