“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.