A Dead Hand (32 page)

"Ever read Nirad Chaudhuri?" Howard asked. "He's great on Calcutta. He talks about how the land around the city looks 'poisoned to death.' And the countryside is like 'a mangy bandicoot bitten by a snake.'"

I was staring out the window at the small battered tenements on the mudflats, wondering how to begin.

"What's wrong?" he asked, probably because I hadn't commented on the colorful Chaudhuri quotes.

"I have something to tell you."

He sat back in his seat and cupped his hands in a hospitable gesture. "Go on," he said. "We have plenty of time. Trains are great places for confessions."

I said, A few weeks ago, I got a letter at my hotel..."

"It's an amazing story," he said, an hour or so later, as we were stopped at Dhanbad.

I had told him everything—almost everything. I had left out the tantric massages and the caresses in the fragrant vault of the Lodge. I had left out my pleasuring her, avoiding any mention of the sacred spot on her lotus flower or my wand of light. That part was unexplainable and made me seem needy or obsessed, weak, easily manipulated, susceptible to Mrs. Unger's attention—all true. I played up her philanthropy, the lost children, the goat sacrifice, the visit to Nagapatti in distant Silchar. I tried to describe the relationship between Charlie and Rajat, but I confessed that I didn't understand them at all. Howard found it all fascinating and didn't ask for more details. As for Mrs. Unger's disclosure that she was black, what was the point? I was not capable of verifying this unexpected assertion.

The last straw was my witnessing the American woman taking the child Usha away, almost certainly adopting her, something that Mrs. Unger had always said she deplored.

In telling him my story, I felt the growing humiliation that many people must feel when, in a quiet moment, they relate to a logical and contented soul the details of an irrational attachment. Only when I spoke to him (and remembered much more that I was too ashamed to tell) did I see the extent of my recklessness, and I wondered how big a fool I'd been.

Howard said, "But it seems odd that she should ask you to investigate. I mean, why you?"

"She said she liked my writing," I said. "I know that sounds lame. But she also thinks I have influential friends."

"Like who?"

"You."

He laughed. "That's us. Crime busters."

"There was no crime that I could see. There was only a misunderstanding. When I started, I didn't think she really bought Rajat's story. I didn't buy it either. It sounded preposterous. A corpse turning up in a hotel room in the dead of night? Crazy."

"This is Calcutta," Howard said, "where all things are possible."

"Rajat seemed the excitable type. Looking for drama. Maybe it was a way of getting attention. So I thought. Then I met Mina."

"The one who was slapped around and fired."

"And the one who brought me the dead hand," I said. "She verified the story of the corpse. So Rajat must have been telling the truth."

"Why didn't you tell that to Mrs. Unger?"

"Because around the same time I got the piece of carpet. I needed to deal with that. I wanted something more. You know the rest."

"About Mrs. Unger denying she'd been to Mirzapur in U.P., yes. But maybe the chowkidar got it wrong. There's a Mirzapur up in Murshidabad, and another Mirzapur near Dacca. I checked. Maybe he was just guessing about where she'd gone."

I liked his challenges. He was forcing me to think clearly. I said, "Let's see if the answer's in this Mirzapur."

But how could I tell him what I felt—that her touching me had told me something, that I didn't know how sincere she was until she put her hands on me that last time. The falsity was in her fingers, and it had alarmed me; her power now seemed dangerous, even fatal. Howard was so rational I had no way of explaining my suspicions to him.

"Here's a printout of the factories," he said, taking a sheet of paper from a file folder. "We'll find more when we get there. We're meeting a Mr. Ghosh there. He's said to be helpful—he's from the area."

Howard was the perfect traveling companion. Calm, accepting, uncomplaining, and he spoke Bengali. He didn't judge me. He said he had been a Peace Corps volunteer long ago, and it showed: he was resourceful and curious. He was taking a professional interest in my problem, but he was also a friend.

Perhaps because we were two
ferringhis
traveling alone, the conductor didn't put any Indians in our compartment when the train stopped at Burdwan and Asansol and Dhanbad. Indians who boarded the train at those places filled the other compartments. And now I was used to the routine: the snack seller with his tray, the bookseller with his stack, the drink seller with his bucket of bottles, the man taking dinner orders. We had left Howrah at sunset. By eight we were eating from our food trays—"bird flu on a skewer," Howard said of the kebab. Then he lay down and read the second volume of Doris Lessing's autobiography, and I read my most recent pages of "A Dead Hand," detailing my relationship with Mrs. Unger, up to our return from Assam, when she was still unambiguously a good person—not saintly but greathearted, robust, always positive, the energetic soul of philanthropy and good works; a nurturer, the woman with healing hands. She was protective and sensual and vitalizing, "Ma" in every sense.

I wanted to write more, but everything I'd discovered about Mrs. Unger, everything I'd seen, I now understood was an idealized portrait of a woman protecting her son's friend. Where I'd seen light I now saw shadow; where I'd seen generosity I now saw self-interest; and the contradictions jarred me. These new details made her more human but harder to understand. I had loved being with Mrs. Unger. I'd felt safe, even adored. I'd been able to count on her. Now I was doubtful. I didn't want her to touch me, and when she had I'd recoiled, and wasn't sure why.

I couldn't tell any of this to Howard. Anyway, this inner history of my relationship had very little to do with identifying the source of the carpet in Mirzapur.

Returning from the toilet—always a dose of reality on an Indian train—I remarked on how full the coach was, many of the passengers squatting in the vestibule outside the toilet, on the wet floor.

"Most of them are
yatris
, pilgrims, going to Varanasi. They'll be getting off at Mugalsarai—it's not far from there to the holy city. They'll be doing pujas and cremations and immersing themselves in Mother Ganga."

"It's a nice thought, purifying yourself in a holy river."

"But when you see the river you think only of disease. It's full of half-burned body parts and ashes and cow shit. Sludge and dead flowers. The Indian paradox. It doesn't matter that the river is muddy and putrid, it's still sacred."

"It makes them feel better."

"Right. And the goddess that wrecks and destroys is also the goddess of creation—Kali, the inaccessible." He had stopped reading the Lessing book but still held it, his finger in the pages. "You know the line from
Out of Africa
? Africa, amongst the continents, will teach it to you: that God and the Devil are one, the majesty coeternal, not two uncreated but one uncreated.' A very Indian way of looking at the world."

"But in India we're on the outside looking in."

"So true. What was that expression you used in one of your pieces? 'Romantic voyeur.'"

I liked his quoting me after quoting Karen Blixen, not for the aptness of what I said but for the reassurance that if he remembered what I had once written, he was on my side. I needed a friend because we were strangers here, walking through this populous country, on this crowded train, in the bazaars and at the temples, and borne along by the mob, never able to penetrate, never belong, always kept apart as spectators. He was a consular officer; he actually dated his ex-wife, who was at the embassy in Delhi; and he took an interest in Calcutta. But what excuse did I have? Really, I had no business here.

Never in my life had I been in a place that I found at once so worthy of study, so dense, so superficially exotic, with people so likable and talkative, that was at the same time so impenetrable, even repellent. The more I tried to engage, the more I was excluded. Every activity in India, every Indian, every scene, said,
You don't belong here
and
You will never understand
, but never explicitly said,
Go home.
For a foreigner, living in India required complete surrender. We were not rejected, we were mildly tolerated, because foreigners in India always had a use.

"I could watch this for a year and still not understand," I'd said to Mrs. Unger at the Kali temple in Gauhati.

"There is nothing to be understood in India," she'd said. "Only to be accepted."

That had been something else that attracted me to her. Of all the foreigners I met in India, she was the one who was most at home. It was not her sari or her hennaed feet, not even her pieties, though they stuck in my mind: "Ida and Pingala must come into balance to allow the kundalini to rise in the Sushumna channel," or "The skills and benefits of White Tantra practices increase one's ability to master Red Tantra." Nor was it her ability to live among the people and flourish. It was her certainty and her calmness, almost a way of breathing ("pranayama," she would have said) that made her brave.

"Anyone who has not learned to hate India has not spent enough time here. You can never love India—you will be destroyed."

"What then?"

"Respect India as you would a tiger. If not, you'll be eaten alive." Another time, "India is elephantine."

She did not fear anyone in India. Yet most foreigners—Howard and I, for example—were so careful as to seem timid. Mrs. Unger was bold, another of her maternal qualities. She was a protector.

Or so I had thought. I was headed to Mirzapur to find out if any of this was true.

We rocked through the night, and at dawn most of the passengers got out at Mugalsarai, as Howard had predicted. The chai seller ladled milky tea into plastic cups for us, and two hours later we arrived in Mirzapur.

Mr. Ghosh had found our coach and stood outside as we descended to the platform.

"Welcome, welcome."

He carried a briefcase and an umbrella, and seemed, for our purposes, to be overdressed—a suit jacket, a tie, heavy shoes; burdened by the clothes, but it was a uniform. He was defining himself in the Indian way, to impress us with his seriousness, the important weight of his clutter, and he wore two lapel pins. A smudge of yellow dust glittered on his forehead. Emblems of power.

"Good journey?"

Howard said, "Excellent. And we are honored to be here."

"Honor is mine. I am honored to be your guide."

He made no move to take our bags—that was the job of the porter. It would not have occurred to him even to offer. He fluttered his hands at a ragged man, who dived at us and snatched the bags.

"We must have a cup of tea," he said. "Tearoom is adjacent on station platform. We can discuss program."

He unbuckled his briefcase in the tearoom and brought out a map of Mirzapur. This he flattened on the splashed tablecloth while explaining that it was already out of date.

"We're looking for a particular carpet factory," I said.

"So many are there. Big are there. Small are there." He snapped his fingers at a waiter. "What about cakes? What about eatables? Have you breakfasted?"

"Nothing for me," I said, and Howard signaled by raising his hands that he was content.

"What is factory name?"

"I don't know the name, but here's a piece of carpet from it. At least I think it is."

Mr. Ghosh handled it casually, as something valueless, and hardly looked at it. He smiled the smile of the Indian pedant I'd met many times, who enjoyed telling me a thing was impossible, or had no meaning, or could not be properly understood by a non-Indian. Mrs. Unger always had a prompt reply for such people, but I was at a loss.

"No, no, no, no," he was saying.

An Indian man of this sort got more pleasure out of saying that something was impossible than offering to be helpful. Here we had just arrived after fourteen hours on the train and he was telling us we were wasting our time. Being obstructive inflated his importance.

"Many factories make this carpet. It is standard design."

"But we suspect this factory exports goods to America," Howard said.

Seeming to gloat over our naïveté, Mr. Ghosh said, "All factories export to America."

"Maybe we should go back to Calcutta," I said, to see what he would say.

"I can initiate suitable inquiries." He shrugged and looked again at the piece of carpet. "I can chalk it in."

It would have ruined his pleasure to see us depart early, and he could only be compensated if we stayed. If a thing seemed too easy, Mr. Ghosh was of negligible importance. The idea was for him to strike a balance between the impossible and the negotiable.

Howard knew how to handle him. He thanked Mr. Ghosh for meeting us. He expressed the hope that we would find what we were looking for. He said that we were delighted to be in Mirzapur, famous for its textiles, a legend in the carpet industry.

This elaborate politeness had the effect of arousing Mr. Ghosh's civic pride and helping him relax, even if he was not disarmed. Howard was being properly appreciative, but I could see that Mr. Ghosh viewed me (accurately) as impulsive.

I said, "We think there might be child labor involved."

"Child labor is so common." Mr. Ghosh looked defiant.

"One of these children might be dead."

"Who lives forever?" he said, and smiled, pleased with his reply.

"But he was a child."

"Even children die."

"This child might have died in the factory."

He grinned his pedantic grin and rested on the handle of his umbrella. "It is not nursery. It is factory."

"Backbreaking work."

"Excuse me, good sir. Not at all. Weaving work is done with fingers only. Children tie knots. As a Mirzapurian, I am familiar with this work."

"Many children?"

"Lakhs, sir."

Then we drank our tea in silence. Mr. Ghosh had gained the advantage. Instead of guiding us, he was elaborating the difficulties.