A Dead Hand (17 page)

"Hi, Howard," I said, bursting into view, stepping in front of them and taking a seat. I could see that I'd startled them. They were drinking Kingfishers and facing the main door, expecting me to emerge and make a long revealing walk to their table.

"This is Paul Theroux," Howard said, seeming rattled by my sudden appearance. He signaled to a waiter and tapped his bottle of Kingfisher, meaning one was needed for me.

"Jerry, great to meet you at last." The
at last
had to be insincere, as though he'd been wanting to meet me for years. I knew this could not be so. "What brings Jerry Delfont to Calcutta?"

The use of someone's full name to a person's face in a question like this has always annoyed me for being stagy, an interviewer's mannerism—more insincerity. And the more depressed I became about my failure as a writer, the more I hated my name, so this was not simply annoying but hurtful.

"This and that. Just passing through. How about you?"

"Same here. Passing through. I'm one of those people Kipling described who spend a few weeks in India, walk around this great Sphinx of the Plains, and write books about it, denouncing it or praising it as their ignorance prompts. In other words, no big plans. You?"

"No plans at all," I said. "Waiting for the monsoon is about all."

"I know what you mean. I'll be glad when it starts. This heat is awful."

"It's hard to work in it," Howard said.

Theroux said, "I'm not doing any work. Jerry?"

"I wish. Too hot."

Forgive this banal dialogue, which by the way continued a little longer. The reason I write down the empty phrases is that I want to show how oblique Theroux was with me, oblique while seeming genial and forthcoming. He was condescending and evasive; he gave me no information; nor did I give him any.

All this time—I suppose it was a technique he'd learned as a traveling writer—he was observing me closely. His words meant nothing, but while he talked to hold my attention he was able to study me, the very thing I'd hoped to avoid. He glanced at my shoes, my linen trousers, my loose linen shirt, and he was trying to guess my age, to judge my evasions, as if looking for a weakness. His relaxed posture was meant to reassure me, but his twitching eyes were those of a predator.

"This city doesn't change," Howard was saying.

And I had to admit that, stalling, uttering clichés myself, I was doing the same to Theroux, sizing him up.

Meeting a writer in the flesh is always a letdown, since the image you have from the writing is formed from loaded or misleading words. On the page the writer is an intelligence, an efficient and fluent being, clear-sighted and alert: the reader invents a face for this man. In the flesh the writer is usually misshapen, overcautious, or hesitant; fallible in the way that flesh is fallible; bruised, squinting, older and shorter than you expect—even, quite often, unbalanced. I met Hunter Thompson once at a party in New York and he seemed timid and oversensitive and insane, like a crazy child. Writers never resemble the jacket photo. They are always smaller and heavier. Theroux's hair was thinner, but no writer's hair looks in the least like the hair in his photograph.

This fox in prose looked hot and obvious, fleshier than his picture, not vulpine at all but preoccupied, flexing his fingers in a displacement activity to use his hands, as though he wanted to be writing down what I was saying or making notes. In spite of the humidity he wore a rough-spun cotton khadi vest and baggy trousers, a collarless shirt, leather walking shoes, no socks, an expensive watch. His round-lensed horn-rim glasses were the type Indians called "Netaji spectacles," after the glasses popularized by the nationalist Netaji Bose. Though he smiled pleasantly enough, his eyes were busy behind his specs, too busy, always on me, up and down the whole time. I was reassured that he appeared older than his picture; he'd lost his looks, if indeed he'd ever had them; but he was sinewy with determination, that ruthlessness I mentioned before. He was friendly in a way that bothered me, because I knew he didn't mean it and must want something.

"I haven't seen the Jerry Delfont byline lately," he said. That irritating verbal mannerism. I winced, hearing my full name again. "Usually you're everywhere."

"I've been pretty busy," I said, and I knew from the forced encouragement tightening in his expression that he didn't believe me. I hadn't been busy at all, not in any way he would have understood.

"Are you on an assignment?"

"In a way," I said, and we both knew that this meant no.

The form and tone of a person's question often indicates that he wants to be asked the same question. "Have you been to Bhutan?" means "Ask me about Bhutan. I've just been there." But his manner wasn't like that. He didn't want to answer any questions. He was the interrogator, at the periphery, behind the light.

And with each question came a compliment.

"I always look for your pieces in magazines. They're so topical."

"I try to keep on the move," I said.

"You travel light. I envy you."

Another canny reference. "Travel Light" was one of my magazine columns.

"You do a lot of TV" he said.

Was this a gibe? It seemed so.

Howard said, "I hadn't realized that."

"I was on cable. It's not the same as network TV."

"You're good at it," Theroux said. "You should do more of it. You could have your own travel show."

I took this to mean I wasn't much of a writer, that my real talent lay in gabbing to a camera. Maybe he didn't mean that. But the problem in talking to him was that I wasn't sure exactly what he meant. I
was
sure that all this time he was verbally dancing around, using a magician's misdirection while peering at me.

"You do TV don't you?"

"No," he said. "Never. I wouldn't be any good at it." Was this a compliment or a putdown?

"How long have you been in Calcutta?" he asked.

"About a month. Maybe more. I've lost track of time."

"That's travel at its best," he said, sounding pompous and self-important. "The open-ended thing—no view to going home."

"Since I don't have a home, it's pretty easy," I said, to set him straight.

"Footloose."

"Not really. I have a tenant in my place in New York. I use the rent money to travel."

And I thought: Goddamn, why did I give him this information?

"How about you?" I said. "Where do you live?"

"It's hard to say. I've never been happy living exclusively in one place. And we Americans are not natural expatriates, even writers like us."

Utterly evasive, and
writers like us
was just a way of patronizing me. He wrote books, I wrote magazine pieces; but by referring to us both as writers, he was grandly including me in his company. Did he really think I believed him?

He was older than I imagined but affected a kind of eager curiosity that I associated with someone younger—someone on the make. And that was another irritant. But mostly it was his inquisitive eyes that I minded.

"We have some Americans here that almost qualify as expats," Howard said. "Indian visas and work permits are problematical, but there are some Americans in India who might regard themselves as residents."

Though I knew what he was driving at, I didn't help him.

"Missionaries," Theroux said. "Indians hate Christian God botherers. Now and then they persecute them. It's funny, we've got all sorts of Hindu proselytizers in the U.S. Remember that sex-mad guru with all the Rolls-Royces and funny hats?"

"Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh," I said.

"Bhagwan means 'god,'" Theroux said. "He promoted himself to god!"

Howard said, "It's used in a different sense, kind of an honorific."

"Whatever," Theroux said. "It was tantric sex he was selling, to cast a sexual spell over his flock. I associate him with polymorphous perversity. And visa fraud."

"Anyway, he's dead," I said.

"The Americans who come to Calcutta tend to be philanthropists," Howard said. "An awful lot of them started out working as volunteers with Mother Teresa. It was almost a rite of passage, part of the India tour. Seeing the sights, then a few weeks feeding the incurables."

"Mother Teresa believed that poverty was a good thing," I said, trying to remember what Mrs. Unger had said.

"Funnily enough, she collected millions in donations," Theroux said.

Howard said, "I see these people all the time."

"Thoreau said, find a do-gooder and you'll see that at bottom there's something wrong with his life. 'If he has committed some heinous sin and partially repents, what does he do? He sets about reforming the world.' Why else do pop stars and celebrities get involved in these causes? Their lives are so miserable. The things they do are so worthless, so meretricious and overpaid. They need to atone, to make themselves look better. And being bossy do-gooders feeds their vanity."

He had become animated, and seemed uncharacteristically sincere as he became vexed.

I said, "Maybe they want to give their lives meaning. I did a piece on Liz Taylor. She really cares about AIDS research, and she's raised a lot of money—millions."

"I guess that's what happens to actresses who can't get a part in a movie anymore," Theroux said. He was poking one finger into a plate of peanuts on the table, stirring them, a way to show me that he had no interest in what I was saying. "Know what these are called in Bengali?
Cheena badam.
Chinese almonds. But they're peanuts. What does that tell you about pretensions here?"

I said, "Liz Taylor's using her fame for a good cause."

"With all respect, Jerry, that's what they all say, all these lame high-profile mythomaniacs."

"What's wrong with doing good?"

"They're not doing good. They're promoting themselves. They think money is the answer, but they have so much money they should know that money is not the answer. They're doing harm. Here, have some Chinese almonds."

"So what's the answer?"

"Like the guru said, What's the question?"

"Mrs. Unger isn't high-profile," Howard said.

At last, after all this time, her name. It had been hovering over the conversation for the past fifteen minutes.

Theroux turned to me. "What do you think?"

I went vague. "About what?"

"Mrs. Unger."

I sipped my beer and tried to look indifferent. I said, "I don't really know her."

Howard reacted to this with just the slightest hitch of his spine, a straightening, a fractional head-bob, and I knew that Theroux had registered the involuntary twist of Howard's reaction as well as my own flat denial. I should not have denied her. Both men knew I was lying, but worst of all Theroux pretended to believe me. His bland expression of credulity was like contempt for me, the heartless and unblinking gaze of a hunter lining up a prey animal through a gun sight—an animal that has just revealed a weakness, a slowness, a limp, perhaps.

"I can tell you a few things about her," Theroux said. "She stays below the radar. She's been married two or three times. She first came to Calcutta about ten years ago, like many others, to work at the Kalighat hospice with Mother T. Got disillusioned by Mother. Drifted to the establishment next door."

"The Kali temple?" Howard said.

"Right. She's said to be a practitioner." While Theroux talked, he hardly seemed to look at me, yet he was monitoring me closely. "It's said that she's a
dakini,
a kind of priestess, and that she taught tantric massage to a French actress who'd come out to work with Mother T. The actress later had an affair with a big Hollywood tycoon and bewitched this rich guy with Mrs. Unger's tantric method. How about that for a story?"

"Why don't you write it?"

"Why don't you?" Theroux said. "Oh, sorry, that's right—you don't know her." He peered at me for a reaction before adding, "Look her up. She's never been interviewed, yet she runs one of the largest private charities in Calcutta. She'd be a huge 'get'—isn't that what they say on TV about people in demand?"

"I don't do much TV these days."

"I thought you said you were pitching a new travel show. She'd be perfect for a Calcutta segment."

"Or a chapter in one of your books."

"I have plenty of material," he said. "You want material? Hey, I got it."

He reached into his briefcase and became absorbed in leafing through a folder of newspaper cuttings, sorting them.

"I love these Calcutta stories. They're like urban myths. There's a woman here, Mrs. Chakraverti, who calls herself a witch and supposedly had an affair with Elvis. She advertises her powers. Or the crazed woman two weeks ago at Howrah who was jealous of her sister-in-law, so she threw her baby in a pond when no one was looking. Two cases like this in one week! Also"—he was holding a flimsy cutting—"lately, servants have been teaming up with
dacoits
to rob their employers, sometimes murdering them. There was a case recently in Ballygunge, just down the road. The newspapers came out with a story on how to know whether your servants are planning to kill you. I love this stuff."

"I just read the matrimonial classifieds," Howard said.

"Me too," Theroux said. "Or what about the abduction classifieds?"

He was not looking at me and yet, even turned aside, his body was like an instrument measuring my reactions.

"'Search for kidnapped girl,'" Theroux read. "'Sumita Chandran, ten, four feet five inches, kidnapped on twelve Feb. at Howrah.' Or 'Anikat, eight months old, missing since January.' 'Sultana, five, disappeared in 2007. Nitesh Kumar, seven. Prafula, five.'" He closed the folder. "Forty-four thousand children missing every year. Eleven million Indian children are designated as 'abandoned.'"

Howard said, "They end up in the sex trade, or as adoptees. Or in the sweatshops."

"Mrs. Unger helps them," Theroux said. "One of the few who cares. That's the story. That's why I'm interested."

I decided not to respond, but he seemed to register even this resistance.

"I wish I could find her," he said.

"That shouldn't be too hard for you."