A Dead Hand (13 page)

"What did you find?"

"Better question. What did we not find?" he said, pleased with himself for being paradoxical. "I have some issues to address. I will need to see you in person."

"Anytime."

"I am booked up. Next week is better than this," he said. "Do you know occupation of the deceased?"

"I have no idea."

"Could it have been masonry? Tilery? Bricklaying? I have some general notions. Ironmongery?"

I smiled at the old word "ironmongery" in the old crusty voice on the old bulky telephone. It was the Indian illusion, as though I were speaking to someone on an antique line that stretched to the distant past.

"But Dr. Mukherjee, this was a child."

His voice rising in protest, he said, "Child can be manual laborer. Why not, sir?"

"In India."

"India and elsewhere."

I considered this. "Is that all you can tell me?"

"We are proceeding with further tests, as scheduled. Please come next week for consultation."

I was bewildered by his call. To restore my mood, the lightness I'd felt on waking, I worked on my diary after breakfast and for most of the day, writing a description of the massage Mrs. Unger had given me. But it was more than a massage: it was an act of possession. All my hesitation left me when I wrote about it, and it seemed as I reconstructed the episode that I had not only regained my ability but in the writing began to understand what had happened to me, the transformation. And I thought how she had made that day important, and she had given me this day too, a day of writing. So, as she had done for me, in her work in Calcutta she gave her lost children time and hope.

I found I could sit quietly now. I felt no urgency to leave Calcutta nor even to leave the hotel. I was content; she had calmed me. I understood her better as a humanitarian—a mother figure—giving reassurance. It was not a matter of money but rather of a depth of feeling. It amazed me that she was hardly known.

The following morning, another blazing day, the phone rang again, this time before I was fully awake. I took it to be Dr. Mooly Mukherjee with an update, but it was Mrs. Unger.

"I'm downstairs in the lobby. Don't be too long—we need to be somewhere fairly soon. And we've got a big day ahead of us. Have you been sleeping well?"

I made an appreciative sound. She was a glow at the other end of the line. I could not clearly recall her face.

"I knew you would."

Another surprise: after that bewitchment she was all business. But she was full of surprises.

Feeling hot and damp from the long sleep, I took a shower, dressed, and hurried downstairs, eating a banana on the way.

"You shouldn't eat bananas," she said. "Not with your body type."

"What's my body type?"

"
Pitta.
Fire and water."

"What should I eat?"

"Figs." She was smiling. She assumed a dancer's posture. "Melons."

I heard the words as I stared at her body. And I was thinking how lucky I was to have this woman in my life, appearing in the lobby of my hotel on this sunny morning. She was dressed in a white sari, her shawl over her head instead of draped on her shoulder. She was arrayed like a Madonna, her face framed by the folds of her shawl; but even so, as a figure of holiness she had an aura of sensuality, something about the way she stood, then the slope and glide of her walk, her short swift steps, a way of moving her hands, her slender beckoning fingers. She touched me softly as I passed, and when I paused to savor the moment, I saw the curve of her hips, a rotation, slipping beneath her sari.

I did not ask her where we were going. I obeyed the rule.

"Madam?" Balraj was steering into the flow of honking cars.

"Kalighat."

As we moved slowly along Chowringhee, I glanced at my watch. It was not yet seven-thirty. That accounted for my drowsiness, and I had the slight hangover I often got when I worked late writing. But this feeling was welcome. I had actually written six pages. Yet in this dense traffic, crawling through the heat—and it would be stinking hot in a few hours—I realized she must have woken me at seven or a little before. I had been so eager to see her I hadn't minded the early hour.

"I know that name, Kalighat."

"One of the sacred places," she said. "We have something important to do there."

I loved her for saying "we." I was elated and reassured, because that's how I wanted her to think of me, as a friend, as an ally. More than that, as a partner.

"That's wonderful," I said, meaning everything. "What does
bhoga
mean?"

"Tantric term. Intense physical desire."

I had to turn away from her. I looked out the window. We passed Mehboob Panwallah and Eatery, the name assuming an irrelevant importance because I was glancing at the signboard as she spoke.

"What do you do when you're on your own?"

She asked big questions bluntly. I could have told her about Parvati and her poems, that empty flirtation. Or about Howard and his consular stories (
You could use that),
the shuttling life I lived between jobs and cities and magazine pieces, the occasional radio item, my ill-fated TV travel show, my life of procrastination—the opposite of her life of action and commitment. But all that had stopped.

"Not much," I said. I wondered if I dared to tell her, because in telling her I was exposed; I'd have no more secrets. Yet she would know if I was lying, and she was so truthful herself it seemed unworthy to try to deceive her. I wanted her to trust me. I had wooed enough women in the past to know that only a woman's trust—and hope—led to sex.

Mrs. Unger was staring at me with her pale eyes, which were dark in a dark room, greenish in candlelight, gray in daylight like this; and I could see from the cast of her lips, the set of her jaw, the way her eyeteeth bulked against her lips, that she expected me to say more.

"I think of you when I'm on my own," I said. I had told women this many times without meaning it, but I meant it now, in a desperate way. "That's all I think about—how long it will be before I see you again. And I wonder what you're doing. Please don't laugh."

She touched my hand. "That's so tender."

"It's a little pathetic too."

She laughed, and held on.

"Because I think of myself as a big strong man," I said in a joking tone, but I meant what I said. I hardly recognized the man I'd become. I'd been planning to leave Calcutta around now, and here I was, in suspense at my hotel, making notes, avoiding friends, waiting to be summoned by Mrs. Unger, reduced to a needy boy.

"That means a lot to me," she said.

I hoped that she'd say that that was how she felt too when she was on her own, thinking of me. But I wanted her to be truthful. I could not phrase it as a question.

I said, "I'd be happy if you thought of me now and then."

"I think of you always." She was a little too prompt, as though observing a form of politeness. Yet she wasn't lying: I could feel her sincerity in her fingers, the way she held my hand. "I think we have a special bond."

A person's hand can be like a lie detector. In hers I felt no tremble of deception, only a
but,
something unspoken at the end of her statement.

As though answering a question I hadn't asked, she went on, "I need you to know everything."

"That's what I want."

"It'll take time," she said. "If you're patient"—she paused, looked out the window, the Calcutta Zoo on the right, the viceroy's mansion, another of Calcutta's decayed wedding cakes, now the National Library up ahead on the right behind a big white sign—"you'll see."

"I often think about that letter you sent me."

"My invitation."

"It was more than that. You wanted me to help you save Rajat from being implicated in that business. The corpse in his hotel room."

Her face became paler and less animated with thought. She said, "I still want you to help. Poor Rajat must not be compromised. It would destroy him."

If I'd had anything to report I would have told her then—that I'd visited the hotel twice, been rebuffed the second time, and discovered that the girl who'd helped me had been assaulted and fired; that I'd met her in the Park Street Cemetery and she'd given me a severed hand. But I had no positive news, only these inconclusive events.

"I want to do everything I can to protect him," she said. "I think the world of him."

We were on back streets, among villas and walled compounds, some of them very grand, others almost romantic in their decrepitude, covered in vines, set in large gardens. And street dwellers and hovels too, as in the most expensive of Calcutta's neighborhoods. Yet this one was substantial, with a thinner flow of traffic.

"This place looks familiar."

"Alipore."

"It resembles your neighborhood," I said. And I realized it
was
her neighborhood.

She didn't reply. But any of these villas could have been hers.

"I'm glad you think of me," I said, because I wanted her to say it again. I couldn't ask. It was often hard to obey her injunction against asking questions.

"Yes. But you're a strong, independent person, so you know how strange it is to need someone else."

I wanted to say
I'm not strong anymore.

"Charlie sees it. I think he's a little jealous."

"He has his life," I said, because I couldn't say
He has Rajat.

She looked out the window as though glimpsing an answer. "It'll do him good. I don't interfere."

"I thought Charlie worked for you."

"He helps with my foundation. But he attends to his own affairs."

That was typical of her confident ambiguity.
His own affairs
could have meant anything.

"I'm so busy with my charities I hardly have time for anything else. I mean, besides the foundation there's my school, my clinic, the refuge. Well, you know. Keeping up with the funding and the accounting is a full-time job. And there's so much more. This is Calcutta!"

The sidewalks we were passing, in spite of the elegant villas behind the high walls, were thronged with women and children. At this spot, as she finished speaking, women in red and yellow saris worked on a building site, carrying gravel out of a pit, emptying one basket at a time in a heap by the side of the road—construction workers, dressed as if for a folk festival.

"I want to make an impact. I want to do something for these people. I don't want to be another tourist in India."

She spoke in an urgent whisper, not in the valiant and weary way of a philanthropist, boasting of her charity. Her sincere undertone of modesty moved me and filled me with longing.

I had never known any woman like her. Such a woman, I was thinking selfishly, was so truthful, so loyal to her principles, she would never leave me. She would love and nurture me, would be a companion and a caring friend, would look after me with the attention she gave to the lost children. And that same passion could be translated to the bedroom, where generosity mattered most.

"It's always like this."

She was speaking of the traffic, denser as we moved into narrower streets, among older buildings and shops, a neighborhood of pedestrians and auto-rickshaws, a place with the look of a bazaar, not residential except in the broadest sense, for people seemed to be living everywhere, in lean-tos and shanties and on blankets by the side of the road. Many of these people were hawkers, selling beads and relics and garlands of marigolds, or were squatting among piles of fresh flowers, stringing them together. The car was slowing, a steel barrier across the road ahead.

"Blockages," Balraj said.

"We'll walk from here.
Deka hobey.
"

I was glad to get out of the cramped back seat, and I thought, not for the first time, that Indian drivers had the best seat; the esteemed passengers in the rear had no legroom at all. As I swung the door open (Balraj was attending to Mrs. Unger) I was surrounded by men offering to guide me or to sell me necklaces and holy lockets. Mrs. Unger waved them off and led me, as a mother shepherds a small boy, keeping a few steps ahead, past the fruit sellers and the stalls into a narrow lane.

"Look."

In the distance, an opening between two poor huts, a squalid creek with muddy, littered banks, where some women were scrubbing pots in the filthy water, and others—women and children—were picking through an enormous pile of garbage that had been dumped by the riverside.

"The holy Ganga."

She was still walking with confidence, striding past the men importuning her.

"And there."

The sign of the old, low, pale yellow building was lettered
Missionaries of Charity
—
Mother Teresa's Home for the Sick and Dying Destitutes.
With shuttered windows and crumbling sills and cracked stucco, it could have been an old school or a warehouse.

"You can look in."

"Voyeurism," I said, but another sign caught my eye:
The greatest aim of human life is to live at peace with God
—
Mother.

Mrs. Unger saw it too. She said, "Poor Agnes. I wonder if she achieved her aim of finding peace with God. She certainly found peace with millionaires and celebrities. How she loved visiting New York. She went to Palm Beach once and dazzled everyone. Goodness, what did she do with all that money? She certainly didn't spend it on that sad building."

"It does look ramshackle."

"Compare it with my Lodge," Mrs. Unger said.

"I see what you mean."

"You know why she established herself here?" she went on. "So she could be a permanent defiance of the temple." She indicated a parapet and a gilded cupola. "That's the temple."

She set her jaw and continued walking stiffly in her determined way through the milling crowds and the occasional beeping car. Wagons, auto-rickshaws, cows, shoppers, beggars, holy men, and saddhus—she parted the crowd, and I followed as though being carried into my childhood.

Then I took her hand, and instead of consoling fingers I felt a sudden snatching grip, too tight, too hot, too damp, not leading me but pressing for support, her nails digging like a raptor clinging to meat. She wouldn't release me.