Having broken my ‘travel reading’ teeth on Theroux’s nicely atmospheric The Great Railway Bazaar and The Old Patagonian Express, I find myself startled by his latest novel...

The Elephanta Suite shocks.  
The book consists of three separate novellas, each featuring a separate set of  encounters with India. The first is set in a luxury spa at the foothills of the Himalayas. Here middle-aged American tourists Audie and Beth Blunden lose themselves in a lotus-eating kind of bliss. But outside, beyond the barbed wires of the spa, Audie finds “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”. It’s this India that eventually does the two hapless tourists in. Lulled by lust over Anna and Satish, the couples’ demurely deferential masseurs, Beth and Audie Blunden blunder towards disaster.

Hotshot lawyer Dwight (in the second novella) finds himself a similar snare, drawn in by a sensual spider as if he were a mesmerised fly. Dwight chooses a hotel room in Mumbai (the ‘Elephanta Suite’) instead of a spa, to hide himself from the “Indian hell— a secular hallucinatory underworld of actual grinning demons and foul, unbreathable air.” 

Discovering, in his freshly divorced state, the degrading delights of underage girls on the Colaba streets, Dwight is totally done in. He is usurped in his outsourcing business by (naturally) an Indian subordinate. Dwight is then dumped. Far from town, at a strange Swamiji’s ashram, having been divested of everything he came to India with.

‘English pretensions’
Yet more outsourcing outrages in the third novella, where, backpacker Alice takes in the spiritual comforts of a Swamiji’s ashram at Bangalore and teaches call centre employees English on the quiet (“Swamiji doesn’t like us dibble-dabbling in the town” says Priyanka , a rich runaway from an abusive marriage who irritates Alice for her English pretension and her “haughty well brought up way of speaking”). But, as Alice will soon find out, teaching American English to young Indians has its perils “It made them more familiar even obnoxious (whereas) speaking Hindi they bowed their heads, they were deferential, they sounded elaborate and oblique and evasive.”
Read these three stories and the writing is clear. Look out, Theroux is saying, the outsourcing monster is out to gobble you. Follow its trail to a country where cloak yourself as you will, in a luxury suite, a spa or an ashram, it will eventually get you. Mordor-like, its millions will assault you. They will steal, they will murder and they will rape.

Don’t believe other peoples’ novels. The problem with those novels is, as Alice the backpacker reflects, “they did not describe the India she had encountered, or the people she had met. Where were those families? The novels described a tidier India, full of ambitions, not the India of pleading beggars or weirdly comic salesman or people so pompous, they were like parodies”.

The Elephanta Suite has no such niceties. The stalking, always-talking nosey-parker Indians are described in ways that would put Forster, Kipling, (and significantly) Naipaul and his Area of Darkness to shame.
Sonya Dutta Choudhury