A Dead Hand (3 page)

"I could spend the rest of my life in India," Charlie said.

"But Calcutta is a powder keg," Rajat said.

Mrs. Unger said, "Don't you love it when Indians use those words?"

"The city is toxic." And I heard Mrs. Unger murmur the word as
doxic.
"When I was young," Rajat said, "I had terrible skin. It was the sweat and dirt of Bengal. I'm from Burdwan, about two hours from here. My face was a mess. My father got a job teaching in Calcutta, and as soon as I got here my skin cleared up."

"You were going through adolescence."

"I was ten!" he shrieked. "I hate dirt. The last time I was in America my skin broke out."

"What you needed was a salt scrub and some pure food. Your mother should have known better. I'll take care of you."

"My poor mother," Rajat said. "All she did was fuss around my father and try to please him. He was a typical spoiled Indian man who couldn't do anything."

"And you're not?"

"Obviously I am living my own life in my own fashion," Rajat said.

He spoke a bit too loudly, in a broad accent, too assertively, and then in his echo in a broader accent.

Merrill Unger said, "I never had that problem with Ralph Unger."

"Ma had him killed," Charlie said.

Mrs. Unger smiled and said, "It was not of my doing. He simply popped off. There is justice in all events."

"But he thought Ma was poisoning him."

"He had a rich imagination," Mrs. Unger said. "His great fault was that he was an Anglophile. That's why he hated India. But he couldn't live in England either—Anglophiles never can. He sat around complaining that the empire was finished."

"I think I might have liked him," Rajat said.

"You are a deluded and perverse young man," Mrs. Unger said with a smile, and I noticed that sarcasm always brought out her brightest smile. "Ralph's other fault was his diet. Know-it-alls and bullies eat so badly. He was a big carnivorous lout, a rather sad man, really, if you looked at him objectively, something I never did. I watched him eat himself to death. Is that insensitive? He never listened to me. He thought I was frivolous and faddish. He didn't realize that he could have saved himself." She leaned over to look at my eyes, my whole face. "Most people don't realize it."

"I try to be a vegetarian here," I said, feeling that a reply was expected of me.

"It's way beyond that. Have you seen an Ayurvedic doctor and had a thorough checkup?"

"I've been pretty busy."

"I keep forgetting you're a celebrated writer."

"Just articles. I keep meaning to write a book."

"You need creative energy for that. Have you done anything about your kundalini?"

Charlie said, "Isn't mother a doll?"

Rajat shook himself in his chair like a shivering girl, seeming to giggle with his body, and said, "I'm one of those people who does all his reading on the Internet. But I've seen your magazine articles all over Charlie's flat."

"You don't know what you're missing," Mrs. Unger said to Rajat, so firmly as to sound like a reprimand. She turned to me. "I've learned so much from you. I'm so grateful."

"Very kind of you to say so."

She said, "If only I could give something back to you. I'd be so happy."

"This is enough," I said. "Sitting and talking like this. If I hadn't met you, I'd probably have just stayed in my room, read a little, and gone to bed early."

They stared at me as though I were being insincere, and my statement hanging in this silence began to droop the way exaggerations do.

"But I thought there was another reason for my being here," I said.

As I spoke, Mrs. Unger seemed to swell—to straighten, anyway—and Rajat to shrink. In growing smaller he became darker, more distinct and brittle and conspicuous. All the while a kind of suppressed and silent hilarity trembled through the three of them, a tension, as just before someone breaks out laughing in intense and mirthless embarrassment. As Rajat's face tightened, his knees together, the shrinking man twisting his hands, Charlie looked bored and slack. He stuck his legs out so they touched the table and jarred the pot of flowers and a carafe of water.

"Do you want to tell him," Mrs. Unger said, "or shall I?"

Rajat twitched a little, as if at a spectral buzzing around his head, then said in a thin voice, "Go ahead."

"Rajat believes he has a little problem," she said in a soothing voice.

"Not so little," Rajat said in a whisper, clutching his knees.

"May I continue?" Mrs. Unger said, smiling her severe smile. She went on in a breathy, actressy way that was just short of satire. "Rajat had an unfortunate experience, and as a result he did a very silly thing. Am I right?"

He nodded and looked at his hands, his fingers crooked around his bony knees. Charlie reached over to pat his shoulder, as Mrs. Unger had done earlier.

"What was the unfortunate experience?" I asked, though I remembered some details from the letter and the words "dead boy on the floor."

"He found something in his room, didn't you, love?"

"Found it?"

"It turned up in the night," he said.

"You woke up and there it was?"

He rotated his head in the Indian way, meaning yes, biting his lip, looking fearful.

"Tell him what it was," Mrs. Unger said.

Rajat moistened his lips and said, "Body."

The word
bhodee
spoken by this Indian sounded sacred and awesome in its density, like a slab of terrifying meat.

"What was the silly thing you did?" I asked.

"He ran away," Mrs. Unger said, and then quickly, in a practical voice, "I don't blame him. I would have done the same myself. And I would have found myself in the same position Rajat is in right now." She smiled at him. "In a pickle."

Rajat covered his face with his hands, his skinny fingers over his eyes.

"Where did this happen?"

"Right here. Calcutta. In a hotel. A very cheap hotel, I'm afraid," Mrs. Unger said.

"It's clean, anyway," Rajat said.

"Except for the corpses that now and then turn up."

"Ma, please," Charlie said.

Rajat clasped his cheeks and looked as if he might cry.

"I'm stating a fact."

"Did you report it to the police?" I asked.

"We don't trust the police," Mrs. Unger said. "Can you imagine how one would be compromised? I mean, if the story were true."

"I could tell you stories, doll," Charlie said to me.

"Look at him, poor boy," Mrs. Unger said. "He doesn't know what to do."

Anxious and compact in his misery, Rajat sat looking glassy-eyed, almost tearful.

"Was it anyone you knew?" I asked, not knowing where to go with this.

"I never thought to ask that question," Mrs. Unger said. "You see? I knew you'd be a shrewd judge of this business."

But it seemed the wrong question. Rajat began to stifle a sob, and then he let go, covering his face again and weeping into his hands.

The show of emotion, his red eyes brimming with tears in this public place, unnerved me. I said, "How can I help?"

"You see? I felt sure he'd be willing," Mrs. Unger said.

"I have no idea what to do," I said.

"Take an interest, as you would a situation in one of your marvelous stories," she said. "The important thing is that this must not be linked to poor Rajat."

"Don't you think the best thing would be simply to let the whole matter go away? I mean, just forget it ever happened?"

She smiled again, and I realized that the only times she smiled were when she was being sarcastic or when she disagreed with something that was said. Her smile threw me at first, since it indicated the opposite of what she was saying; but as soon as I got used to it I was charmed. She had a beautiful smile.

"Someone knows," she said. "More than one person, most likely. They have something on poor Rajat. He is open to blackmail. He has already suffered crank telephone calls."

"What did they say?" I asked her, but she inclined toward Rajat.

"Nothing," he said. He swallowed, his eyes widening. "Just rang off."

"Maybe wrong numbers."

Mrs. Unger beamed one of her brightest, most contrary smiles.

"I wouldn't know where to begin," I said.

"Let's drop it," she said. "You're being honest. That means a lot to me. We shouldn't burden you with this sordid business."

"I wish I could help."

"You've listened. Your sympathy is an enormous reassurance. And I think it helps that we've been able to talk about it."

I said, "It might be better if you didn't say anything."

She smiled her disagreeing smile and said, "Shall we drop it?"

Sathya the waiter stepped into that silence. "Fresh drinks?"

As so often happens, the waiter's appearance to take an order became the occasion for Rajat and Charlie to get up and say they had to go.

Mrs. Unger just watched them with her pale indifferent eyes. She didn't (as I expected her to) urge them to stay. She said, "Please do be careful, Chalmers."

"He is knowing his way around," Rajat said.

She smiled at that, and as soon as they were gone, her manner became more relaxed, less formal, less motherly, less queenly, all the qualities I now recognized because they were absent. People can seem a bit deflated when they're grateful and frank—she did. She said, "I really mean it. I've learned so much from your writing. I'd love somehow to be able to pay you back for all the pleasure you've given me."

I almost said, I've come to Calcutta to write a story but I have nothing to write. Give me something. But I said, "Don't even think about it."

"But you see, I have something specific in mind."

I said nothing, merely tried to imitate the indifferent glance she had given her son and Rajat.

"Does Chalmers look healthy to you?"

"In the pink," I said. It was true—he was tall, not thin but slender, with a blushy unsunned face and long light hair swept back, and even his languid way of sitting suggested contentment and good health. Although he did not physically resemble his mother, his disposition matched hers: all-seeing, finding a severe humor in the strain of India.

"In the pink because Ma knows best," she said. "Let me take you to dinner. It's not healthy to eat late. I know just the place. It will be the first step."

I said yes. I was glad that Charlie and Rajat were gone. Now I could give all my attention to Mrs. Unger. I liked the sudden change in her, from motherly to mildly flirtatious, while still making all the moves.

"Don't be shocked," she said in the taxi. "Foreigners are always being shocked in India for the wrong reasons. Of course it's dirty here. Of course people are poor and the traffic is atrocious. And of course the restaurant we're going to is very humble. But the food is pure."

I had been all over India, and I knew Calcutta a little, but even so I might have been shocked at the restaurant if she had not said that in the taxi. I did not recognize it as a restaurant. It was a ground-level room, with a verandah open to the street and the crowd, just above a storm drain. Four bare tables, no other people. A man in a gauzy white dhoti with the caste marks of a priest raised his arms and clasped his hands in welcome—some obscure tattoos on his wrists.

"Madam, madam." He showed respect without servility as Mrs. Unger swept past him and sat at one of the tables, as though she were entering the Four Seasons rather than this room filled with the noise and smells of the Calcutta back street.

"I hope we're not too late."

"Never too late."

"This is my friend. He's a famous writer."

"Welcome, sir."

I sat opposite Mrs. Unger. A barefoot boy in shorts and a white shirt approached carrying a basin and a pitcher. Mrs. Unger washed her hands in the basin, the boy pouring water over them, and following her example, I did the same.

"There's no menu," she said. "This is really a private home. We'll have whatever his wife prepares. But I assure you it will be good for you."

Very soon, the old priestly-looking man in the dhoti stood near our table as a girl set down a tray of dishes and arranged them before us: bowls of lentils and mushy peas, bowls of cooked gluey okra and deep green spinach-like leaves, a stainless steel tureen of thin soup with a fragrant aroma, a mound of brown rice on a plate. Glasses of
nimbu pani,
lime water. That was all. The old man gestured over it and then scuffed away.

"This is what you need. Clean food."

I spooned some of the okra and spinach and rice onto my plate and tasted. Its bland and earthen hum lingered in my nose. I wondered how much of it I'd be able to force myself to eat.

"I'm surprised. No spices."

"Ayurvedic. Most Indians eat far too many spices. Too much garlic and onion, tons of salt, way too much ghee butter and oil. They love sweets—they're like children. Did you see that man? He does two hours of yoga every morning. But most Indians get no exercise at all. Probably the unhealthiest people in the world."

I was staring, because she was eating delicately but with gusto, and because she seemed so sure of herself.

"Really?"

"Yes. They have all the answers, but they just ignore them. This is an Indian meal, yet how many Indians eat it regularly? They eat junk and rich food, or else they're starving and hardly eat at all. Have you ever seen people so unhealthy? I don't mean poor Indians. The poor eat better than the rich ones. Poor Indians eat lentils and roti and rice and green vegetables. The rich eat butter and sweets. Look at the shapes of Indians—the rich man's belly, the rich woman's butt. They get no exercise, they play no sports."

"Cricket," I said.

"That's not a sport. It's a game that hardly requires fitness. Apart from the man that throws the ball, it's mostly standing around. You never see an Indian kicking a ball or running. Punjabis are tall. But where are the basketball players? Where are the marathoners? Over a billion people and they can't win an Olympic medal."

"I did a story on this once. They average about one medal in each Olympics."

"One!" she screamed. "In what sport?"