The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [157]
“You know why I came here?” Mike was saying. “I came because I lost my job. The economy’s in the toilet, so I thought, what the hell, I’ll go to India. You can’t beat the exchange rate.”
He began to recite a comprehensive list of all the places he’d stayed and things he’d bought for next to nothing. Railway tickets, plates of vegetable curry, huts on the beach at Goa, massages in Bangkok.
“I was in Chiang Mai with the hill tribes—you ever visit the hill tribes? They’re wild. We had this guide who took us into the jungle. We were staying in this hut and one of the guys from the tribe, the medicine man or whatever, he comes over with some opium. It was like five bucks! For a chunk this big. Man, did we ever get stoned.” He turned to Mitchell. “Have you ever had opium?”
“Once,” Mitchell said.
At this Herb’s eyes widened. “That surprises me,” he said. “That really does. I would have thought Christianity would frown on that kind of thing.”
“It depends on the intention of the opium smoker,” Mitchell said.
Herb narrowed his eyes. “Somebody’s feeling a little hostile this morning,” he said.
“No,” said Mitchell.
“Yes. Somebody is.”
If Mitchell was ever going to become a good Christian, he would have to stop disliking people so intensely. But it was maybe asking too much to begin with Herb.
Fortunately, it wasn’t long before Herb got up from the table.
Mike waited for him to get out of earshot. Then he said, “Poona. Sounds like poontang. Having orgies is part of their whole deal. The Bhagwan makes guys wear rubbers. You know what they say to each other? They say, ‘I glove you.’”
“Maybe you should join,” Mitchell said.
“‘I glove you,’” Mike scoffed. “Man. And the chicks buy it. Suck my cock for inner peace. What a racket.”
He snorted again and got up from the table. “I gotta go take a shit,” he said. “One thing I can’t get used to over here? These Asian toilets. Just holes in the floor, all splattery. It’s fucking gross.”
“Different technology,” Mitchell said.
“It’s uncivilized,” Mike opined, and with a wave he exited the dining room.
Left alone, Mitchell drank more tea and looked around the room, at its faded elegance, the tiled veranda full of potted plants, the white columns marred with electrical wires powering the wicker-bladed fans on the ceiling. Two Indian waiters in dirty white jackets scurried among the tables, serving travelers lounging in silk scarves and cotton drawstring pants. The long-haired, ginger-bearded guy directly across from Mitchell was dressed all in white, like John Lennon on the cover of Abbey Road.
Mitchell had always thought he’d been born too late to be a hippie. But he was wrong. Here it was 1983, and India was full of them. As far as Mitchell was concerned, the sixties were an Anglo-American phenomenon. It didn’t seem right that continental Europeans, who had produced no decent rock music of their own, should be allowed to fall under its sway, to frug, to form communes, to sing Pink Floyd lyrics in heavily accented voices. That the Swedes and Germans he met in India were still wearing love beads in the eighties only confirmed Mitchell’s prejudice that their participation in the sixties had been imitative at best. They liked the nudism, the ecology, the sunshine-and-health bits. As far as Mitchell was concerned, Europeans’ relationship to the sixties, as to more and more things nowadays, was essentially spectatorial. They’d looked on from the sidelines and, after a while, tried to join in.
The hippies weren’t the only long-haired figures in the dining room, however. Gazing out from the rear wall was none other than Jesus Christ himself. The mural, which for all Mitchell knew existed in every Salvation Army headquarters around the globe, depicted the Son of Man illuminated by a heavenly beam of light, his piercing blue eyes staring straight out at the diners.
A caption proclaimed:
Christ is the Head of the House.
The Unseen Guest at Every Meal.
The Silent Listener to Every Conversation.
At a long table directly beneath the mural, a large group was gathered.