A Dead Hand (23 page)

"We have an early train," she said. "It'll be all day to Lumding and then overnight to Silchar."

"Wouldn't it be quicker by car?"

"We'd never reach Silchar. We'd be stopped at a roadblock and robbed, or killed." She was smiling. "We're off the map here. This is the land of rebels and
goondas
and tribals. It's dangerous, even deadly. That's why it's so full of life." Before I could say anything, she added, "You have the gift. You have the hands."

"You gave me the gift."

"You knew how to receive it."

She had a mother's touch. And no wonder she was able to help all those children, I was thinking—restore them to life and give them hope and purpose.

We left Gauhati at eight, on the day train to Lumding, the coaches half empty. We drowsed through the day in our own compartment. Lumding, just a junction in the bruised green hills, appeared in the early evening. We were late. No time to linger on the platform; the night express to Silchar was standing at the station. The conductor, glad to see us, with a wink for
baksheesh
, showed us to our compartment. It was an old sleeping car, and though I could not see any food or people, it smelled of stale food and human bodies. But our beds were made, and the door locks worked.

The train labored all night, hooting through the hills of southern Assam. I couldn't see much outside, but I could sense a landscape of trees and streams. The air at our open window was murky in the deep valleys, cooler on the slopes, thickened with a dusty leafiness of sour jungle. Most of the passengers were in the front coaches, the hard seats, the floor littered with peanut shells and fruit peels, trapped-looking faces behind barred windows, Assamese in shawls, tribal people in embroidered vests, wearing necklaces of red beads.

In the darkness of the night, listening to the anvil-clang of the train on the tracks, I sensed that she was awake.

"I've never known anyone like you," I said.

"I'll take that as a compliment."

"When I first met you, I thought, Here's a woman who's never had to struggle. Yet you've done nothing but struggle."

"There's no end to it, ever."

The clanking of the train worked this sentence into my head. After a while I said, "I want to help you."

"You have no idea what that means to me."

"I'm devoted to you," I said, relieved to be able to say it.

It was not love. The power and uncertainty I associated with love I did not feel with Mrs. Unger. I didn't want anything in return: I wanted to serve her, needed for her to accept my attention. I was grateful to her for making any suggestion to me, thankful for her request—the feeling I associated with a son for his mother. Sentiments I'd never felt for my own mother, I felt for her. I wanted to obey her.

"Anything," I said.

"The time will come," she said. Then her breathing became regular, as I listened; and I slept too.

At dawn we were among low, mostly bald hills, the old train rolling on the scooped and flattened outskirts of Silchar. Shallow valleys and tea estates, each one well planted with slopes of deep green bushes, as orderly as a botanical garden, all the bushes trimmed like topiary. Where the land was flat there were corrugations of newly plowed fields. The tea pickers were visible on some of the slopes, looking as if they were tidying the bushes.

Empty and green, the valleys gaped at the crawling train, and the whole scene had a sunlit grandeur until, at growing intervals, I saw the hovels of farmers, the skinny children, the careworn women washing the breakfast pots in a muddy creek.

Mrs. Unger was also watching, but unlike me she was not judging or trying to sum the place up. I was making notes for my scratchy diary, while her attention was witness, concentration intensified by memory—nothing new for her but the shock (so it seemed to me) of seeing something familiar. It was the expression I had seen on her face the first time I met her, how I'd felt about myself when I thought,
ruthlessly worldly.
But I had been wrong. Hers was the face of compassion and understanding in the presence of suffering.

"But it's beautiful too," I said, in the way I sometimes thought out loud, the fragment of a reflection.

She knew what I meant. "Yes, but better enjoy it while it lasts. Silchar is another story."

Silchar station at ten in the morning was the usual Indian free-for-all, passengers relieved to be out of their hot three-tier coaches where they had sat all night among peanut shells and banana peels. They scuttled across the tracks pursued by porters and rickshaw touts and hawkers with buckets of cookies. Busy rats, most of them plump and bold, nosed amid the litter on the line, making the scraps of paper and plastic bags quiver as they swarmed.

As at Gauhati, we were met, this time by a shy young man in a tweed jacket. He stepped out of the crowd and introduced himself, sounding as if he was about to sell us something.

"Mrs. Unger, I am Sudeep. I will be your guide. May we fetch your luggage?"

Snarling, he summoned a porter, stern with this underling, then smiled at us and led the way down the platform and out to the front of the station, where a car was waiting.

"You got my message?" Mrs. Unger asked in the car.

"Indeed so, madam. All is in readiness."

I stared at them, hoping for an explanation, but they continued to speak in generalities.

"And the situation hasn't changed?"

"Situation, madam. Still very much same situation."

I lost interest in their generalities as the old car we were riding in began to shake—and to shake my head with it. The car tipped and banged on the broken road, the potholes four feet across and some of them deep enough to swallow half a tire.

"Is this a back street?"

"Main thoroughfare, sir. Mahatma Gandhi Road."

It was a ruin. We bumped among scooters and bullock carts and cycle-rickshaws, their bike bells tinkling. The shops along this main road were one story, paint peeling, signs faded, not many shoppers. I had thought Gauhati to be a step into the past, but Silchar was a stride into the distant past.

"We are cut off," Sudeep was saying, replying to something Mrs. Unger had said, and he was also answering an unasked question of mine. "But air is fresh. Cool climate. Very healthy."

In the dusty air, the shophouses tilted sideways on the sloping main street, which was worse than unpaved. It had been paved and shattered, potholes all over it, and its only smoothness was beaten earth. The cycle-rickshaws toppled along it, their skinny drivers standing on their pedals. The place was so poor there were no obvious beggars—no one to beg from, though many people stopped and stared, seeing Mrs. Unger and me alighting from the car.

"So, it's arranged for this evening?" she asked Sudeep.

"All arranged. You will find me here."

The hotel's bare lobby and plastic plants were being dusted by a woman in a green smock. Mrs. Unger dealt with the check-in formalities, and once again I felt I was being mothered, shepherded, paid for. We went upstairs, took showers, then had a meal in the hotel's dining room—the only diners, perhaps the only guests in the place. Afterward, Mrs. Unger said she wanted a nap.

We lay together on the bed. The accumulated fatigue of the trip to Lumding and the night train to Silchar had knocked me out, and knocked her out too, but just before she subsided into sleep she murmured, "Baby," and touching my face, "baby."

When we woke, night was falling, dusk at the windows, and I heard bike bells and crow squawks and the cries of hawkers.

"Find Sudeep downstairs," she said. "I'll be down in a little while."

Sudeep was of course standing in the lobby, in the posture of a sentry, awaiting his orders.

"You are coming from?"

"Calcutta. Have you been there?"

"I have not been to mainland at all," he said.

"Mainland?"

"Indeed, never. Only to Shillong and Gauhati."

That was new to me, but since we were so far east, like an island surrounded by Bangladesh and Burma, it seemed appropriate to refer to greater India as the mainland.

"All is in readiness," he said to Mrs. Unger when she came downstairs.

In the car, I tried to count the days since we'd left Calcutta, but the nights in the train, and the days of massage and sleep, defeated me. Perhaps four days—or was it five? All this time we'd penetrated deeper into Assam, the landscape growing stranger, leafier in the valleys, where the tea bushes provided a sort of continuity. But the orderliness of the tea estates was misleading. The villages had grown poorer and smaller, and Silchar, like a dead end, was weighted and slowed by its decay.

But Sudeep was upbeat. "It is crossroads," he was saying. "So many lorries passing hither and thither. We are vibrant. But there are
dacoits
on the road to Imphal.
Goondas
as well. Shillong also treacherous. Extremists are there."

"Where are we going now?"

Mrs. Unger said nothing. Sudeep said, "As requested, Nagapatti."

I felt it was some sort of test of loyalty, though I would have agreed to go anywhere with her. As we had gone farther into Assam, we had reached a new stage in our relationship. She must have seen that I was devoted, utterly loyal too, and dependent on her.

Mrs. Unger was doing me a great favor. She was bringing me into her world. I saw it as an initiation for which I had to be suitably passive. She had taken me by the hand and brought me by degrees to this remote town, which reflected a deeper intimacy between us. In the hotel in Gauhati she had encouraged me to stroke her as she lay, legs open, like the image of Kali I'd seen at the temple. She had hardly spoken, yet her posture was a physical expression of trust. She had luxuriated in my caresses, but I was the acolyte and she the priestess who had liberated me and shown me the way.

Now we were banging along the back streets of Silchar, the potholes deeper and more jarring in the dark. Oil lamps hung from stalls but illuminated nothing but themselves. The road ahead was black. We went about half a mile, not far, though we went slowly, almost at walking speed, and when we came to a road junction, Sudeep told the driver to stop.

"We will proceed by foot."

The road stank of mud and cow shit and motor oil, and the light was so poor it was hard to see where to walk. Again I marveled at Mrs. Unger's boldness. She was unfazed—white sari, white shawl, sandals—seeming to glide along the back street.

"I know where we are. Nagapatti is down that lane."

She set off confidently, Sudeep just behind her, and I was at the rear. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark I could make out the contours of the lane, the lurking boys, stray dogs; some men squatting before a brazier of reddened coals, drinking tea, glanced up, muttering as we passed.

Luminous in her sari, Mrs. Unger glowed like an angel, her shawl over her head, moving quickly, her feet hardly seeming to touch the ground. And yet when she saw more people in the road, backlit by their fires, she took my hand.

"Madam," Sudeep said, his voice rising in a cautioning tone.

But we were ten steps ahead of him. She paused, turned to the right, and walked down another lane, where a head-high bamboo barrier had been erected. The thing was flimsy but effective. It blocked the opening of a narrow road: you had no idea what went on behind it. As she slipped past this barrier, she let go of my hand. I followed her. Then she stopped and stood looking down the lane, saying nothing yet serenely triumphant.

The lane was well lit—more than well lit: it was highly illuminated by bright lights and open fires. It was busy, a sort of market scene full of standing and crouching people. Looking closely, I saw that all of them were women—not women but girls and children grouped around the wood fires that were burning on both sides of the lane, in front of the shops and the houses, as far as I could see. The girls, and even the older children, hundreds of them, were garishly made up with red lipstick and blue eye kohl, wearing thin blouses in the chilly air, warming themselves by the fire.

Smoke and flames and the close-together bungalows and huts; girls around the fires, girls on the verandahs, girls leaning on the railings and crouched on the steps. Some had vicious faces, but most looked pathetic and lost. A few of the smaller girls were holding babies, and other small girls, hardly more than twelve or thirteen, kneeling near the lanterns, pursed their lips at me and smiled wickedly.

In the smoky air, a whole long lane of child prostitutes and transvestites. An old fat hag was seated just inside one open doorway, attended by a retinue of little whores, painting the fat woman's toenails or massaging her feet.

"I've never seen anything like it," I said lamely. "It's like a vision of hell."

"You're shocked again," Mrs. Unger said. She looked unmoved; she seemed almost jubilant. "It's not hell. Hell—if you believe in it—is forever. But these girls can be rescued. That's why I'm here. Do you think I'm slumming? A few years ago I came here. I've been back many times. See those old women eyeing me? They know I'm going to hurt their business. But I'm willing to bargain with them."

I was thrilled to think that Mrs. Unger had come here to help these girls—more lost souls. As I considered this, a hand had taken hold of my elbow—a good grip; I couldn't shake it loose. I looked down into the tiny pleading face and desperate eyes of a girl who could not have been more than fifteen. She tugged at me and licked at her lips with a little darting tongue.

Mrs. Unger was turned away. She said, "I don't see any customers."

Sudeep helped me detach the girl's hand from my elbow, but she went on trying to snatch at me.

"It is their misfortune, sir."

"Who are they?"

"Tribals, sir. From the mountains, sir. Nagaland. Some are Mizos and whatnot. They are awaiting the lorry drivers. But your friend—madam—will help them find their freedom."

A few were gesturing to me, calling out, beckoning, striking the poses of coquettes.

"We'll come back tomorrow to negotiate," Mrs. Unger said. She seemed vitalized, her eyes shining with flames. "But I wanted you to see it like this—at night, with the fires. You have to admit this place is full of energy."