by Paul Theroux
"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?"
"Shooting an air rifle."
"That's my point! You can be a fat air-rifle shooter!" This fact delighted her. "They are weirdly shaped, either stuffed or skinny. Is it sexual? I sometimes think so. Of course, Indian girls can look heartbreakingly beautiful, but the women look fat and frustrated, the men look angry, the boys look wretched and onanistic. The eternal question for an Indian traveler is 'Where will we eat?'"
"Americans say the same thing."
"I know. Americans are fat too, not from frustration but from excess. The poor are fat in America. The rich are thin. It's the awful food there. Not like this."
She was chewing as she spoke, as though to prove her point. "This is so pure. I can see by your slightly puffy eyes that you don't have good kidney function. But after you get a thorough checkup, establish your body type and your chakras, you'll be on the right path."
"You're taking me by the hand, I see."
"It'll do you good. Each of these dishes has value and balance."
I swallowed, trying to convince myself, and said, "I see."
"It's almost sacramental, eating like this. Think of your body."
Her saying that made me conscious of her lovely body, her hand dipping into the rice, making a ball of it, dipping it into the lentils. Thomas Metcalfe, of the governor general's office, could not bear to see a woman eat cheese. I guessed it was not disgust, but probably aroused something in him. Sitting with Mrs. Unger, I realized I loved to watch a pretty woman eat, especially messy food, her trying to be dainty over it and failing, the flecks of food on her lips, the chewing, the neck sinews tightening with a swallow. I could see more: Mrs. Unger's stomach muscles framed by the bodice of her sari and her wraparound. The pleasure of her eating was also the pleasure I took in admiring her good health. She sat upright with strength and grace, using her fingertips on the rice, the dripping okra, the mushy peas. And I was aroused by the small splash of food on her lower lip, her lapping at it like a cat, making the lip gleam.
"I assure you that tonight you'll sleep like a baby."
The old man came over to make sure we had everything we wanted. He chatted cozily but with respect to Mrs. Unger. He directed the girl to refill our glasses of lime water. I struggled to eat a believable portion; the tang of soil lingered on the unsalted, spiceless food.
When the old man had gone, she said, "Do you get regular massages?"
"I wish I did."
"That's what you need."
All this time I had feared that she would ask me again about what she mentioned in her letter, the body in the hotel room, Rajat's worry, the danger for him. But she said nothing more about the letter, which when I had received it seemed so urgent.
"You should have a massage. I know just the place."
She fluttered her fingers in a bowl of water, and as she did so the Indian girl appeared behind her with a towel. After drying her hands, Mrs. Unger took a pen and pad out of her bag and wrote down a name. The purple ink and her loopy handwriting reminded me of her letter.
"Morning is best. Have a light breakfast. Be at this place at ten."
As she gave me the piece of paper, I laughed because she was bossy in such an appealing way, mothering me with concern and care.
She said, "I hope your friends won't mind my taking charge of you."
This seemed to me an odd remark, at once full of confidence, presuming on me. Yet her assurance made me wary. Confident-seeming women often made encumbering statements like this when deep down they were uncertain, the sort of overfamiliar bluster that was easily punctured by a sharp reply.
Instead of embarrassing her by game-playing, I said, as politely as I could, "I wish I knew which friends you mean."
I wasn't offended. I was in Calcutta, living by my wits. I was seriously interested in which people she might mean. But even my polite response made her shy, as though I'd been blunt.
"The folks on Ho Chi Minh Sarani, maybe."
That made no sense to me, and I couldn't help smiling. Yet she was smiling back at me in a kind of challenging suggestion that she knew more than I'd guessed.
"The American consulate."
"Is that the name of that blocked-off street?"
"You must have been there many times, you're so popular."
"Yes, but someone else was doing the driving," I said.
"That's the mixed blessing of being in Calcutta. Someone else is always doing the driving."
The ambiguity of this made me pause. I didn't have a reply to it, though I knew I'd remember it. I said, "So that's how you knew where to find me with your letter."
I felt obvious and fooled with the conceit that I'd attributed it to my high visibility as a big pink ferringhi. But she dodged that—this had become a fencing match—and said, "I don't have much to do with those people. But I know how greatly they value you."
"Really?" I said, mildly surprised because I'd never been convinced that Howard took me seriously as a writer. He liked my availability, and that I was willing to give pep talks at colleges at short notice, a volunteer speaker, glad for the per diem, who was not terrified by Calcutta, helping him do his job.
"Oh, yes," Mrs. Unger said. "They're big fans. You know that Indians are very suspicious of the Americans that come out here, especially the ones sponsored by the U.S. government. They have a long history of being patronized. The consulate regards you as a friend who won't let them down."
"And what do they think of you?"
"I don't exist for them. But I'm glad you do. I'm glad your writing means something to them."
Once again I wanted to say: I have no writing, I have a dead hand, I am out of stories, I have stopped believing. And maybe it will never happen. I didn't have much to write about at the best of times, and now it's done. But I had also thought, when I'd reflected on my dead hand: A writer without an idea, without the will or the energy to write, is someone in need of a friend.
Nelson Algren had had friends, cronies, gambling pals, drinking buddies, and though he wrote nothing in his last years, he'd had companions. William Styron did not write anything in the last fifteen years of his life. His dead hand hadn't hastened his death; it had made him immensely gloomy, paranoid, and impatient, longing to write yet incapable of it. But he had been surrounded by a doting family and a loving wife. I had no writing, I had no one, I was alone with my dead hand.
So I said, "I'll be there." Then I said, "Shall I call you Merrill?"
"Call me Ma." And she looked closely at me. "Everyone does."
It was a word that had always made me uncomfortable, so I resisted saying it, yet I allowed myself to be swept up. And it was all unexpected, which was why it was so pleasant: the drink, the meal, and now this appointment for a massage.
I wondered if I looked so idle as to agree to so much at short notice. I hoped she understood that I was interested in her, even if I was bewildered by the story of the corpse in the hotel room. I was glad to have found her, and it seemed—I was sure of this—I was making her happy too. She had praised my work; she knew I had friends at the consulate. She seemed glad I had come. You go away to be anonymous, but sometimes the opposite happens: you excite interest, even in big, villagey India, in the stew of Calcutta.
3
OVER BREAKFAST the next morning on the verandah of my hotel, the Hastings, conscious that I was eating what she'd instructed me to order—a little yogurt, green tea, a slice of mango, a handful of unsalted almonds—I mentally reviewed the meeting with Mrs. Unger—Ma, as I now thought of her. I was grateful to her for giving me something to do in Calcutta, to take my mind off my writing failure and my idleness. I had dreaded being stumped, having to sit in the heat over a blank page. I could not force out a story, and the few words I had written rang false.
Trivial as it was, the appointment she'd made for me had given me a purpose, a destination for the day. I could have called Howard at the consulate, but he had a real job and obligations. I could have met Parvati for tea, providing she was in the company of some of her friends; it was considered indecent for a man like me to meet a virginal Hindu like her alone. She was gifted, with her whole life ahead of her as a dancer, a poet, a practitioner of Indian martial arts. I wished her well, but I knew that not much would change in my life. Old age was not an accumulation of thought and experience but rather the reverse: by writing of my most vivid experiences I had disposed of them. Old age for me was an emptying of the mind.
Old age for me was also a narrowing of possibilities and maybe (as I was beginning to think) a slow dying, parts of the body becoming useless—my empty head, my dead hand. What body part next?
Calcutta was the perfect place to feel like a physical wreck or a failure. Virtually everyone else was much worse off than I was. Maybe that was why I had lingered after my work was done, though I hadn't made anything of my experience in the city. Had I not met Ma the day before, I would have spent the day walking as though in a hot-weather stupor, window-shopping, museum-going, or heading to Howrah station and considering the outbound trains. I had thought of leaving, but having met Ma I was curious and sentimental and dog-like, sniffing at the memory of meeting her and hoping to see her again.
And sitting on the Hastings verandah, the sun dazzling in the slats of the shutters, I remembered more of what she had said at the Oberoi—more than what I have already written. The talk of the British Empire and her Anglophile late husband had led her to talk about the English in general and the royal family in particular.
"They love royalty here too. The British spend half their time lying to themselves about their dysfunctional country. The Indians do the same. I'm not surprised they find common ground. 'We love pageantry,' the British say as they hide behind the flags and the funny-looking hats. And Queenie's the head of the church, the Defender of the Faith—it says so on the money. But look at her. Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous? She's a gilded crock, a posturing old dear who regards Britain as her personal property. Imagine finding spirituality in this little old lady. It's like finding spirituality in a skinny cow, which Indians do."
"If you want to be worshiped, go to India and moo. Isn't that what they say?"
But she wasn't listening. She was saying, "I think the Indians easily came to admire Queen Victoria, because she was the superqueen, the Rajmata. Indians believe in hierarchies and the British model came ready-made, as a big unifying social contraption."
She was speaking slowly but intensely, with the kind of fluency that made me think she'd recited this denunciation many times before, because it was a speech rather than a conversation, and whatever I said was an interruption.
"India's dirty little secret is that they dislike each other and are untrusting. The British are the same—English especially. Can't bear each other. Never talk. Don't even say hello. That's why they're so happy in America, because we believe this fictional version of themselves. They hate their lives. They can only be happy by promoting the myth of the terribly British, and that's only possible overseas, in faraway places like India. Indians have bamboozled Americans too. 'We don't eat animals.' Most of them do! 'We are spiritual, madam.' They worship money!"
"It's true," Rajat had said. "We are so materialistical."
"I suppose it's a commonplace to regard the British royal family as social upstarts."
"I never heard that before," Rajat had said.
"The royal family is bourgeois—if anything, they're lower middle class but with insane pretensions. Prince Philip used to complain to newspaper reporters that he had no money, that he couldn't afford to keep polo ponies, that Buckingham Palace got horrible aircraft noise. That's typical shabby. 'We just don't have the money!' 'We're stuck here in this rackety house!'"
And then: "They get all sorts of freebies, you know. They ask for them. The Duchess of Whimsy goes to New York and stays free at a hotel with her whole parasitical entourage. She does the same in India, and it's even worse because the Raj still exists in the mind of the British royal family. Before any of these royals leaves London, she has her lady in waiting send a memo detailing how many rooms
she'll need, usually four or five suites, how many other people have to be accommodated, all the meals she'll want, and the pickup times at the airport for the hotel limos. A list of demands, you see. At the end of her freebie she agrees to appear at a cocktail party and have her picture taken. No money changes hands. It's all grace and favor."
I had not known this. I was impressed and slightly shocked by her version of a royal visit. I took out my almost blank notebook and wrote down what Ma had said.
"Hotels in New York compete to host the British royals and take tea with them. It makes me ashamed to be an American. My late mother-in-law was English. She adored the royals, the Queen especially, that perfectly hideous woman. Isn't it ghastly?"
The "Isn't it ghastly?" I found especially interesting. Whenever Americans denounced the British they always did it with a mimicky British turn of phrase: "take tea with them," "perfectly hideous," "quite disgusting," or the one word "ghastly."
"It's even worse in India. Faded maharajahs and scruffy English aristocrats slobbering over each other and lamenting the loss of the Raj. It's absolutely frightful."
Charlie had said to me, "You shouldn't have gotten Ma on this subject."
But I hadn't. I had only listened and nodded, and she still went on snapping at the subject.
"What a pathetic family, and it's all there in full view, the whole sorry lot of them. You think less of the British just looking at them."
"But they are beneficial for tourism," Rajat said. "Like our maharajahs, faded though they may be."
"Have you ever seen anything that was good for tourism that wasn't a complete blight for everyone else? Here, I think of those superfluous maharajahs chain-smoking and drinking whiskey," Ma said. "In America it's Disneyland. Golf courses. Gambling casinos. Strip clubs. Nothing artistic. The monarchy—all monarchies—are a confidence trick. All they do is diminish people. Yes, I agree, probably good for tourism, like a freak show. But if Queenie was really a freak I'd probably like her a little. She's not. People make excuses for her. 'She works jolly hard.' You know who works jolly hard? Not the greedy Queen, not you or me, but those sweepers out there in Chowringhee. The real aristocrats of the world are the native peoples, the so-called tribals in India, the Mizos, the Nagas in Assam."
