A Dead Hand (16 page)

"
Namashkar
" she was saying, and "
Apni keman achen?
" —hello and how are you? in Bengali.

They were fine, they said,
Bhalo achhi,
or more often, just okay,
Thik achhey.

She patted the child she carried, or swung her and shifted her like a doll. I guessed the little girl to be six or so, but an Indian child that size could have been older. Poverty diminished them, shrunk them, gave them extraordinary bodies, spindly legs or swollen bellies. Some children had faces like old men, and some of the mothers looked like haggard girls.

Rajat was following her progress through the room. He said, "She's thinking, Why aren't there more of them? But it's not that easy." He watched her stoop to speak to a group of anxious children. "She knows just how to calm them."

"Why should they be afraid?"

Now he became unreadable again, with an expression that seemed like contempt for my ignorance, another snub for the big, uncomprehending foreigner.

He went on praising Mrs. Unger, but I was thinking how he'd called her bloodstained ("It's a good color for Ma"), and I could not take my eyes off the dark blood on the hem of her white sari, the blood that was dried and crusted on her feet.

Shaking her head, looking disapproving, she was deep in discussion with Charlie. He was taller, so he had to stoop slightly, and it was easy to tell that she was the authority figure.

"I'm sorry," Charlie said to her as I drew close to them.

Still holding the child, she headed for the door, and I took this as a signal that I should follow.

"Bye, Mother."

Another snub to me, because at this point I was right behind her, leaving the room. She had given me the big soft basket that served as her handbag.

In the car, she said, "Charlie hates me."

"He has his life," I said, another banality. I did not know anything.

The small girl sat between us in the back seat.

"That seemed a good turnout."

"Not good at all. The room should have been full. Think of all the children who are not there, who missed this chance. It breaks my heart."

She seemed entirely unselfish speaking this way, wanting more work, seeing her role in terms of rescue. And I had my selfish thought again: a woman so concerned with human welfare will look after me. That was how she had seemed to me, like a benefactor. I had known her as someone wholly committed to giving. She hugged the small girl.

"Her name is Usha," she said. "Isn't she sweet? It means 'dawn.'"

"Was that her mother in the room?"

Mrs. Unger smiled at me, as if I had said something very foolish.

"I am her mother."

W
AS
IT
POSSIBLE
to desire anyone more than I desired Mrs. Unger? I didn't think so, even in middle age, after all my lessons in love. I had never felt this way, utterly abstracted and dependent, like a small boy clinging to his mother. It was love of a rarefied kind: I was her devotee. I had nothing to offer her except my loyalty. She had everything to offer me. When I could not see her I felt mournful, almost ill. Yet I preferred to be alone rather than with other people—Howard or Parvati. It seemed disloyal to spend time with anyone else. This devotion was the sort that deprived a person of family and friends; they were no use—worse, they were an intrusion. And I needed my secret.

Howard persisted. He called to arrange meetings. Could I talk to the Theosophical Society? Could I give a lecture at the university in Burdwan? What about the Book Week in Ballygunge?

Normally I might have said yes, but somehow his requests appalled me, shamed me, made me sad.

"I can't, I'm really sorry," I said, and was almost tearful, thinking: I have nothing to say to anyone. I am empty.

"I've got some great stories for you," he said.

He liked telling me the more colorful ones ("You could use this in an article"). One was about two American Foreign Service officers, both of them men, who were involved in a murder-suicide. "It happened in Equatorial Guinea, but maybe you could give it an Indian background." Another was about an American consul's wife who sang Tagore songs and had a cult-like following. "Maybe something in the water here—a lot of foreign women get goddess complexes." And there was the Monkey Man: "A large monkey roams neighborhoods, causing mayhem. He killed a commissioner on the roof terrace of his residence. A bunch of vigilantes went out to catch Monkey Man. There were hundreds of Monkey Man sightings. People are still terrified of Monkey Man—possibly a hairy man, possibly a huge monkey. Wouldn't that make a great short story?"

It was the sort of thing people had been saying to me my whole writing life. If only he knew the fantastic narrative I was living with Mrs. Unger, for which I had no vocabulary.

The rattling bell on my old room phone nagged me. I hoped it was Mrs. Unger. It was Howard, and I was at once suspicious. Skilled at getting people to say yes, he had a special, softly insistent yet deferential voice for eliciting agreement. He was used to dealing with difficult people—stubborn Bengalis, pompous matrons, commissars of the Communist Party of Bengal, obnoxious State Department types—and though he was now a public affairs officer, he had served time as an assistant consul, dealing with any number of mendacious visa applicants.

"Paul Theroux wants to see you. He's in Calcutta."

"I've never met him," I said. "How does he know I'm here?"

"I told him. He's a huge fan." That had to be bull. "I mentioned that you once asked about Mrs. Unger." Before I could dismiss this, he said, "He also asked about her."

My whole body went slack. I felt my throat constrict, my voice go small.

"Is that why he's here?"

"I don't think so." Howard put on more of his special "selling" voice. "He was supposed to open the Calcutta Book Fair, but it was scrubbed at the last minute over a lawsuit by some local people who said it would create pollution. Isn't that funny? You might be able to use that in a story."

But I was still thinking of
He also asked about her,
and I was too numb to reply.

"We were having a drink at his hotel yesterday, and out of the blue he said, 'Does the name Merrill Unger mean anything to you?'"

In a voice I barely recognized I said, "What did you say?"

"I said that I knew someone else who'd asked me the same question."

I could not speak. Since I'd met her, I'd felt I had her to myself—and she had me. We were each other's secret. Even her sly inquisitive son could not have known what went on between us. We met covertly, by assignation, and she worked her tantric magic on me in semidarkness, by the light of flickering oil lamps in her vault at the Lodge.

Foolishly, early on, I'd dropped her name to Howard, not realizing that he'd remember. I thought I'd been so offhand. But as a Foreign Service officer he was alert to the slightest suggestion of any new fact or query. His job was to know as much as possible about the Americans in Calcutta, to keep track of them, to make connections. He didn't know much about Mrs. Unger, so on this slender association he wanted to find out more. Arranging a meeting, putting me in touch with someone like Theroux, he might find something out—about us, about her. I had taken Howard to be a friend, but no matter how casual he seemed, a diplomat is never off duty. His first duty was to the flag, and keeping the flag waving was his job.

"I don't know him," I said. "I've never met him."

"This is your chance."

Howard was shrewd, but he had no idea of the antagonisms that exist among writers.

Howard's geniality masked his calculating mind. On the pretext of a chance meeting, the reactive chemistry of bringing people together, he would find out more about me and Theroux and Mrs. Unger. It was the triangulation of the diplomatic world, holding a party ("Have another drink!") to see what information could be shaken loose.

I didn't want to cooperate or let myself be suckered into this. Mrs. Unger was my secret, my mission, my single reason for staying in Calcutta. I was in possession of the dead hand that might pluck open the door to the truth. Yet Howard had been helpful to me, and kind; I needed favors from him in this dense and difficult city. So I had to agree, but I warned myself in advance to be cautious, to give nothing away. More than saving myself, I wanted to protect Mrs. Unger from this notoriously prying man.

What I knew about Theroux was what everyone knew about him. He was known for being intrusive, especially among the unsuspecting—strangers he met on trains, travelers who had no idea who he was, people thinking out loud in unguarded moments. I suspected that much of what he wrote was fiction, since he'd started his writing life as a novelist. And I knew the temptation to improve quotations or to dramatize chance encounters and far-off landscapes, to make people and places more exotic. But he was too explicit to be convincing. Life was seldom so neat, and never neat in a city like this. I indulged in a little fictionalizing myself, but I always felt this coloration was in a good cause. Like most writers, he was ruthless in using whomever he met.

I resented his book sales and his bonhomie and his breezy manner. From his work you could see he was the sort of writer who smiled and encouraged you to chatter and afterward wrote a pitiless account of the conversation, playing up his knowingness. He was not cruel, but he was unsparing. He noticed everything—the scuffed shoes, the pot belly, the clichés—traveling the world, generalizing and jumping to conclusions. "In the Pacific the chief is usually the man whose T-shirt is not quite as dirty as everyone else's"—that sort of thing.

I prized my anonymity—Theroux did as well, though he had a reputation for using it to blindside the unsuspecting. As a traveler I did not want any witnesses to my experiences. It was my privilege as a writer to write about myself without someone looking over my shoulder. In short, and for the love of God, I did not want this man to know me.

What every traveler craves, what every writer needs, is the illusion that he or she is a solitary discoverer, whether of actual or imagined territory. This is obviously a conceit, but it is necessary to preserving the mood that allows a writer to make a place his own. Theroux was proprietorial about the places he described. If he was in Calcutta, he'd want to own it. But I had put in too much time and effort here to hand it over to him or share it. I wanted to own Calcutta. I wanted Mrs. Unger to be mine. I didn't want to give information. I didn't want to be witnessed.

If I refused to meet him he'd be suspicious, and Howard would be annoyed with me. If I agreed to meet him, I risked giving myself away and putting my relationship with Mrs. Unger in jeopardy. But it seemed I had no choice.

Suppressing my fury, I said, "Maybe we could meet for a drink. I'm pretty busy."

I didn't want a drink, I wasn't busy, I badly missed Mrs. Unger, and here I was condemned to meet someone who was apparently competing with me—to talk about her while all I wanted was to see her.

"Great. He's staying at the Fairlawn."

Typical of someone looking for "color" instead of the truth (as I was). The Fairlawn occupied a decaying mansion. It was a Calcutta institution in every sense, run by the domineering Mrs. Smith and her family: stodgy food, mutton chops and boiled cabbage, and bossy waiters. In any other city it would have passed for colorful and fun; in Calcutta it seemed joyless, even menacing, the sort of place Theroux might use as a setting for his Indian fictions, which put me on guard. The Fairlawn was within walking distance of the Hastings, near Madge Lane. I'd passed it going to the Indian Museum. I avoided staying in such places, and instead got a comp room at a luxury hotel that was willing to trade a room night for a mention in one of my travel pieces. But I had not written anything, so I'd run out of welcomes.

Wanting to get this over with, I said I'd have to meet them the next day. Howard agreed so quickly that I suspected that Theroux's wish to see me was not casual at all. He was determined to corner me. He wanted something from me. And so I was again forewarned.

"Say five, drink time," Howard said. "He's a good guy. You'll like him."

This sounded like an order. It also made me suspicious. And I hated hearing Howard praise him.

The next afternoon, entering the courtyard garden of the Fairlawn, seeing them under the striped umbrellas, I decided to surprise them. There are two methods of meeting nosy, hyperalert strangers like this. One is walking up to them from the front door, smiling as you advance. The other is approaching from behind, the wrong door. The disadvantage of encountering them head-on is that they have time to study you, to size you up, to think of questions, to assess your movements—a person's gait and posture can be so easy to read, and such a giveaway. He'd be able to scrutinize what I was wearing, my shirt, my shoes. Footwear often figured in his descriptions. Coming from behind, I'd surprise him and prevent him from making any calculations.

That was what I did, slipped in through the side door, detoured around the trees, sidled past the other tables where people were drinking, and passed behind the two men. I was deliberately early on this hot afternoon, to catch them off-guard.