Life Changing Travel

Paul Theoroux’s “The Gateway of India” is a travel story that illustrates how travel can be transformative. The protagonist changes from being down, recently divorced, and an uncaring American moneyman to a happier and more spiritual person.

In the beginning,  Dwight Huntsinger is an American businessman whose life changes on his business trip to India. On his first trip he does not touch any Indian food because he does not think of it as food but poison. He’s been recently divorced and is not in the best state of his personal life when he is forced to go through “a week of Indian hell—a secular hallucinatory underworld of actual grinning demons and foul unbreathable air.” Dwight, absolutely disgusted, frightened, and appalled, basically hates India even though he stays at the best and the most luxurious hotel and spends most of his time inside. In this misery and suffering, however, is money and wealth. Once he returns home, he is assigned to go back to India, “not a place to enjoy but one to endure, like going down a dark hole to find jewels.”

On this second trip, he encounters a polite and submissive woman, her children, and an old man, who he later suspects them as having been acting as a team to exploit money from wealthy Americans like himself. Just like Dwight goes to India, a place where you can make anything, to make money, the people of India work to make money from these foreigners who come to their country to exploit.  The experience he has in this isolated Indian place that the auntie of the street children he saves makes him feel debauched and aroused; “he felt he belonged here and could not remember how long he’d been in Mumbai or when he was supposed to leave, and didn’t care.” With women described as “submissive and polite, bowing to him, he [feels] powerful and at the same time annoyed with himself for even caring.” Far away from home, he says thing s he would not have said back home without thinking. Meeting Indru, his life changes even more so, manipulatively arranging to go back to India. When he returns to Boston office, he is regarded “as a real traveler and risk taker” and people give “him credit for enduring the discomfort, talk[] only of illness and misery, and sa[y] he was a kind of hero[,] congratulat[ing] him on the deals he’d done.”

From having been fearful and hateful of India, Dwight changes and grows to love the country; from seeing India as a representation of everything negative, “chaos and night,” he decides to stay at the end while his friend Shah leaves to America…