Audie Blunden and his wife Beth are staying in a lodge above a village in the foothills of the himalayas. It's called Agri, a former maharaja's residence, a baronial mansion and in the Bamboo Grove the spa building, the pool, the palm trees, the yoga Pavilion, glowing in spotlights, the whole place crowning the summit of the Hill.
Audie is rich, so this character feels entitled. He feels entitled to helping himself to women's bodies too, and feels no burden to his conscious to lying to them to get what he wants out of them.
"His love for Beth was sincere. He had said he'd loved these women, but the word never got out of the bedroom. He had desired them and could spend an entire afternoon in a hotel room with them, but it was an evaporating passion -- he shrank at the thought of sitting across the table from them for an hour to have a meal. In his life, though he had searched, he had never met a woman who felt the same, who could separate desire from love. The women he'd known combined these feelings. For them, desire was love, and it was also the promise of a future. Desire was hope, a house, children, a car, a vacation, new shoes, even grandchildren. But for him desire had a beginning and an end -- no middle, no future, only it's ungraspable evaporation. The end that seemed so natural to him was seen by the women as a betrayal. But worse than "I hate you" was that rejected face, that abandoned posture, the disappointment, the tears.

Shatoosh, made from the neck hair yanked out from a kind of antelope that is an endangered species, is a kind of scarf that rich women like to possess. Beth Blunden is no better of a character than her husband is. She goes to the front desk of the lodge and asks if they know where she can get a shatoosh. One of the workers, an ayurvedic doctor, takes them into the village below the lodge. This is where Beth can find her scarf made out of the hair yanked cruelly from the neck of an endangered species.
"After Dr nagaraj dismissed the driver, the three walked the rest of the way up the hill. Audie asked the cost of the scarves. Dr nagaraj seemed relieved and mentioned the price, and he smiled as $5,000 was counted into his hand. 'A great bargain, sir. And you are so lucky. This antelope is almost extinct.' "

Dwight huntsinger is a kind of business man that helps American Rich boys connect with the cheapest labor from india. Outsourcing jobs, is what it's called. It's the reason why the United States is turning into a third world country, And China is the New world superpower. He's the third despicable American character plundering india, in the author's book, because he can. He uses the Indian women, who give their bodies because they are desperate for money, and tries to kid himself that he truly cares about them.
"... How her father touched her -- the shame of it; how her mother beat her, blaming her, and her father sent her away to her auntie's village; how her auntie locked her in an unlit room with the grain sacks and the rats; how, when Indru went to the police, they didn't believe her; how the village boys threw bricks of cowshit at her, and when her uncle happened by to rescue her, he drove her on his motorbike to the river bank, where he dragged her through the bamboo.
'He touch me here, he touch me down here on my privates, he bite me with his teeth and call me dirty dog.'
they were harrowing stories, the more terrifying for the factual way she told them, lying on her back on the string bed, her fingertips grazing her body to indicate where she had been violated. She seemed to understand how they seized Dwight's attention and silenced him. And some evenings when he looked distracted, his gaze drifting to the window, sleepy and satisfied, she would prop herself on one elbow and drop her voice and show him a scar on her wrist, whitish on her dark skin.
'One Uncle tie me with ropes. He say, "is a game.' I be so scare. He take my sari. He say, "I no hurt you."
And what she told him next in that soft voice was more powerful to him than the racket at the window. He took a deep breath and gagged and thought, not a success at all -- it's a failure.
The smell of failure in India wasn't only Indian failure. It was a universal smell of human weakness, the stink of humanity, his own failure too. His firm of lawyers was bringing so many people down."

Dwight's own marriage was a short failure.
"At last he saw his divorce as a triumph. No one else did, which was another reason he was happy to be in india. Perhaps failure was the severest kind of truth. His work was a punishment and a wrecking ball: he took manufacturing away from American companies and brought it to india. The American manufacturers hated him -- and they failed; the Indian companies were cynical, knowing that if they could not produce goods cheaply enough, they would be rejected. Every success meant someone's failure. He could not take any pride in that process: he was part of it."

Listen to this disgusting scene:
"The way she got to her feet in pretty Little stages, first lifting her head to face him, tossing her braid aside, then raising herself by digging her fingers into his knees for balance, almost undid him. Then she was peeling off his shirt as he approached the charpoy. He watched her shimmy out of her dress, using her shoulders. When her dress dropped to her ankles she stepped out of it, kicking the door closed with one foot.
'I know what you want,' she said as he took her head, cupping her ears, and moved it like a melon on his lap."
( )

This collection of 3 short stories (Monkey Hill, The Gateway to India, and The Elephant God) does not encourage me to travel to India. The Indian people are portrayed as submissive but always watching and scheming. The contrast between the rich and the poor is stark. None of the characters in these 3 novellas fare very well even though they think (at least initially) that India has expanded their lives in startling ways. Characters include Audie and Beth Blunden and Dr. Nagaray at the Angi spa, Dwight Huntsinger and Dr. Shah in Mumbai, and Alice and Amitabh in Bangalore. Each main character runs into trouble when he/she becomes closely involved with Indian citizens. ( )

Not a book to comfortably enjoy. ( )

Theroux is not...well...cheery, but at its best this reminded me a little of Graham Greene or the best of Somerset Maugham. What happens to folks when they step (or imagine that they can step...or are pushed) out of their normal lives? ( )

In these three slightly linked novellas, Theroux takes us beyond the usual culture shock stories, but yet the stories are not about India, only set in India. His characters are American tourists, not even expats, and because we readers must see the world as they do, it becomes difficult for Theroux to signal to us what they are misunderstanding or not seeing. It's the same problem Forster and many others faced when describing the foreign experience in India to an audience of foreigners who don't know any better. As a result, Theroux’s prose is at times overly expository, presumably because he can't expect an American reader to recognize place names, know about temple/mosque conflicts, Jains, etc. Additionally, one could tick with a pencil the places where Theroux must have realized that some detail was needed for plot later on and so added it in with a clunk.

Meanwhile, the plots themselves strain under a strange tension. All three novellas seem at first to be ironic but relatively sympathetic to the protagonists, who are all one way or another blind not only to the realities of India but to their own needs and distorted relationships. But then the plots pick up speed and veer into the macabre. It’s like starting with Forster and ending with Saki. The endings are satisfying, but so obviously artful that the tales lose, in retrospect, any plausibility.

Maybe the lack of plausibility is a good thing, since Theroux's stereotypes (crafty Jains, violent Muslims, stupid nouveaux riches, etc), although updated to the current century, are still flat and ugly.