by Paul Theroux
Had I been in a house, I would have hidden the dead hand in a distant room, or in a box in the basement, or in an attic trunk. There was something creepy about carrying this horrible thing back with me to my bedroom in the Hotel Hastings. I kept thinking of the yellow fingernails, the neatly severed wrist tied with string. Wherever I put it in my room, I would never be more than six feet away from it. I could not put it in a drawer or in the closet—the cleaning woman would find it. So I locked it in the side pocket of my duffel bag, using my little padlock. Because the pocket was small I could see where it swelled, could almost make out the contour of the dead knuckles—my eye was constantly drawn to the bulge.
Who was it? Someone who had only worked, who had never laughed, who was forgotten, someone perhaps more useful dead than alive; a sad soul. My memory of the thing woke me in the night. I imagined it flexing to be free, trying to claw out of the side pocket. Even liberated, saved from cremation, it was no more than a stiffened hand, a little paw that had been detached from a body.
Severed, in its discolored plastic bag, it was pathetic, needing attention. I felt a severe sense of obligation. In spite of being so small it imposed a great weight, holding me here in Calcutta, pleading to be identified. It was my secret and my responsibility. I had been entrusted with it. Mina knew how valuable it was, but she could not have known how much it mattered to me—how it reproached me. I wished I had never seen it, because I knew now that it obligated me. I had seen hands like this many times in Calcutta—just like this, stuck into my face as I sat in traffic, or imploring me as I walked around the city, the cupped hand of a beggar.
At my lowest points at night, studying the bulge in my duffel bag, I knew who this sad neglected figure was who'd been bundled up and brought to the room. It was me. I knew whose this dead hand was. It was mine.
Mrs. Unger had said early on that she needed to see me. Now she seemed to be ignoring me. That paradox wounded me, but what could I do about it? Only obey. Ask no questions.
I called Howard at the consulate, hoping that he would help me identify the dead hand, as I assumed Mina wished me to do.
"I need a favor."
"This is why I'm here, to grant favors to itinerant Americans."
"It's serious. I want you to put me in touch with a forensics expert. I have an item that needs examining, in confidence."
"Tell me what you've got and I'll let you know."
"A dead hand." I had said it so softly I had to repeat it three times before he understood.
"Is this a figure of speech?"
"A human hand. Rather small. No joke. I need to know more about it."
When he realized I was serious, he became solemn and a bit chastened. He swallowed hard and said, "You want to see my friend Dr. Mooly Mukherjee at police HQ. I'll call him and tell him you're coming."
The next day, following directions to Bazar Street, near Dalhousie Square, I presented myself at the main police station and, after a long wait, was brought upstairs by a chowkidar to meet Dr. Mooly Mukherjee. He was big-bellied with a full mustache and the brisk, confident manner of a medical man.
"Howard is a great friend," he said. "He left me a message on my voice mail. I hope I haven't kept you waiting."
He must have known he had. I'd been downstairs for almost half an hour.
"I want you to look at this," I said, and was glad to see, as I spoke, that he stepped behind me to shut his office door.
He hardly reacted when he opened the pouch. Then he frowned and stroked his mustache. He did not remove the dead hand, as I had done. He looked at it closely through the clear plastic wrapper.
"I will not ask you how this body part has come to be in your possession. I shall assume that you came by it honestly, or happened upon it. Hooghly is teeming with body parts of incomplete cremations. My good wife and I encountered a human leg one day at Tolly's Nullah."
"So you understand."
"I shall log it in as DNA rather than evidence. What is it you require?"
"I want to know the age. The sex. Most of all, the fingerprints. I'd like to identify who it is."
After he had agreed, and I had left the office, walking to calm myself, I thought: And who am I? Please tell me who I am and what I'm doing.
Then all that changed.
6
THE SMOKY HALF-DARK room, Mrs. Unger's vault, was arranged as though for a Black Mass. The only light was the flame of one fragrant candle, near a stick of incense burning in a dish before a fierce-faced goddess. The air was ripe with the gummy odor of hot oil. Saturated with this same oil, I lay face-down on the table of heavy wood, which was shaped like ancient altars I had seen in the Middle East—in Syria and Jordan—at which animals were slaughtered and offered as sacrifices. This one was also scooped out at the end and gouged with grooves, so that blood could drain from the beheaded animal. I was surrendering, I was offering myself up. I was happy.
I was calm because—how can I describe this without sounding mawkish?—I was convinced of Mrs. Unger's goodness, her pure intentions, her great works among the poor and the innocent in Calcutta. And yet I was also invigorated by her passion. I wanted her to know how I felt. She had been testing me—in a way, everything she did or said was a test of my sincerity. She had sent me a letter, she had introduced me to her son and his friend, she had taken me for a meal, she had massaged me with her healing hands. And then she had made me wait, tormented me, met me again, said Ask no questions, and finally she'd shown me the interior of her mansion, the house of lost children.
I had cooperated. I could not have refused. I was smitten with her, half in love but also afraid, because in my life (and she seemed to know this) I had not loved anyone without having been wounded. Love was power and possession, love caused pain: you were never more exposed than when you were in love, never more wounded; possession was an enslavement, something stifling.
Then Mrs. Unger had summoned me to her vault, and I felt at last that she needed me, perhaps not as much as I desired her, but desire was never equal. Maybe that accounted for its intensity, the tantalizing difference making me eager, while her holding back a little, or at least her not matching my passion, made me overstate mine and want more from her.
This sounds like a power struggle, and I suppose most passion amounts to that, but it is of an overwhelming kind in which both parties are satisfied. It just wasn't possible to be an equal in desire, nor to play the same role: there was always a giver and a receiver. I mentioned earlier the paradoxes and contradictions of the wealthy. Mrs. Unger embodied some of those contradictions and reminded me of all the conflict I felt when faced with a rich person. I looked at one of these people and knew I did not matter. I did not feel there was anything I could give her, and then I realized that my gift to her was my submission. It is the ultimate gift to any powerful person. Over the weeks of this semicourtship she had managed to strip me of the last traces of my resistance, all my hesitation, all my questions.
She had asked me if I planned to stay in Calcutta.
I'll do whatever you want me to do, I'd said.
That was the posture she required: unconditional surrender.
It took no effort on my part. I wanted to do whatever she wished of me; I wanted her to use me. She was virtuous and I was not, and to prove it, here I was on the sacrificial altar, flat on my face, stark naked.
I didn't hear her enter the vault. I heard the door latch being lifted like a nail scratch, the bolt thrown decisively. Then I became aware of a powerful odor of flowers filling the room, a perfume that hovered at my face and heated my scalp, a sweetness that was like an anesthetic, the aroma humming and thickening in the air that half stifled me and made me dizzy. And being in the vault was like being inside her body.
The silken sari lapped against my arm and slipped against my shoulder and brushed my cheek. I wanted to eat it. I felt a light touch, her fingers on my head as though anointing it, and fingertips on my naked back, tracing my spine. I had started to raise my he
ad when I felt the pressure of her hand. But I was too dazed by the strong perfume to do much except lie there on the altar-like table and receive her touch.
She did not say a word, yet her hands on me spoke, prodding me with her thumbs, pressing her knuckles into my backbones, interrogating my flesh with her fingers. She held my head, lifted and twisted it until my neck seemed to swivel on crusted grains of sugar. She pinched my neck the way a cook flutes pastry, and even in my drugged state it hurt. She massaged my ears, beginning with the rims and working slowly toward the lobes. Head, neck, shoulders, spine—she clasped me and seemed to penetrate my body, digging to the attachments of my muscles.
All this time I lay flat and face-down on the hot oiled wood of the sacrificial table.
She gently lifted my right arm, dug her fingers into the muscles starting at my shoulder, and pressed so hard she could have been using pliers, inching downward to my wrist. The pressure was painful, perhaps the more so because I could hear her breathing as she made an effort. And when she slipped to my hand and held it and pushed the meat and muscle of my palm apart, using her thumb on the bones, I was almost overcome by a feeling I could not tell was pleasure or pain.
I worked with this hand. My right hand was the instrument of action and creation—holding a pen, making love. It contained the soul of my handshake, it was a weapon, it fed me and consoled me when I stroked my cheek or clasped my chin or rubbed my eyes: my life scored in its lines, my labor in its calluses. This hand was my writing instrument.
She seemed to know how important this hand was to me as she separated each muscle in my palm and used her fingertips to find the small bones beneath, finally cracking the joints finger by finger.
I give you my hand, lovers say at a betrothal. It was exactly what I felt. She had picked up my hand, massaged it, pulled it apart, heated it with her own hand, and made it her own.
She lifted my other arm and did the same, breaking down the muscle, disconnecting the bones, taking me to pieces muscle by muscle, a ritual of separation and connection, a kind of bloodless surgery.
I had not realized how strong she was. In the dark, feeling the sharpness of her touch, I was like a child in the hands of a giantess—small, not weak but overwhelmed. She shifted to stand at the end of the table and placed the crown of my head just above her knees and clasped it, thrusting as she worked on my back.
Naked under her hands, I could easily have been a child, not just a young boy but an infant, lying there receiving a mother's attentions. But instead of an innocent caress, I wanted something explicit, dominant, and sensual. I had yearned to be touched. I loved her hands and the way heat radiated from the soft skin of her silks, and I longed to be touched more, harder, with more assertion. She lingered on the small of my back, caressed me, and made an elaborate business of finding the muscles in my buttocks, pouring hot oil on them and plucking at them and grinding her fists in them, using both hands until my body was flattened against the table.
She briefly let up. My skin chafed, tingling, and short of breath I was aware of her movement in the room, a disturbance of the perfume, little wisps and eddies of the warm odor at my ears.
Inhaling through her nose, she gripped my shoulders and with a sudden upsweep of her sari got onto the table, straddled me, her knees at my sides. Then she lay lengthwise against me, fitting herself to my back and legs, her chin resting lightly on the nape of my neck, her silks like flesh, the warm weight of her slender body holding me captive.
Like a mother, like a lover, she lay there for a long time, pressing closer, using her arms and elbows, squeezing the breath out of me, imprinting herself on my body. She slowly insinuated herself against me, preventing me from making the slightest movement. I could sense her breathing, her hot mouth open on my neck. I loved her soft body on me, her knees against the backs of my legs. She pressed so hard it was as if she were forcing the life out of me, displacing me, inhabiting me.
I was helpless the whole time. I had done nothing but receive her attention. She was maternal, but more than that: she entered that intimate zone of mothering that is also erotic. Still she lay on top of my naked body, subtly stroking it, using her whole body, confining me until I was overcome with the heat of her breath and the heavy perfume and her flesh vibrant on me with the pulsing of her blood, massaging me with her heartbeat. I did not sleep. Instead I died. No dreams.
I came to life lying face-up, blinking in the light of candle flames. She was holding my head. I was groggy, I couldn't speak. She touched my face, my lips, my eyes.
"You're mine."
She could tell from her fingertips against my head that I was too happy to reply.
"That was amazing."
"Bhoga," she said, and then, "There's something I want you to see. But not now."
I knew better than to ask when.
She led me through the shadowy corridors of the mansion, and as always I heard the sound of children's voices, the slap and scuff of their feet, the scrape of chair legs, the clink of cabinet doors, and the deeper voices of women, nagging, warning, and drawling reprimands.
The car was parked near the broken fountain, Balraj beside it in the same squatting posture as I'd last seen him. He stood and opened the door for me.
"Don't take a bath," she said from the top of the stairs. "It would wash off all the fragrances and oils. Just rest and drink water. You'll need to rehydrate."
"Traffic," Balraj said as we sat becalmed among hundreds of honking cars and trucks and auto-rickshaws.
Too tired to reply, I nodded at his eyes in the rear-view mirror. Later, after he dropped me at the Hastings, I drank a pitcher of water and slept for ten hours. She had imprinted herself so intimately on me that the whole night I felt her flesh against me, her spirit within me, the touch of her hands, her breath on my neck, her weight, and the cool liquid silkiness of her sari, her skin on my skin, her bones against my bones.
I was not sleeping alone: she was still with me, her odor, her warmth, her womanhood on me, the throb of her blood. I could feel her so distinctly that when I finally awoke I was surprised to find myself alone.
Yet she existed within me. She had insinuated herself there, her spirit lived inside me, I could still feel the pressure of her body. She was palpable, I could taste and smell her, she had left an impression on every part of me, as a physical presence, as a mental image that glowed like a dark flame in my mind. I understood this lightness of soul as something exquisite that strengthened me. I thought: This justifies everything. But I was too superstitious to give it a name.
Part II
7
SLASHES OF DAYLIGHT as white hot stripes dazzled at the slats of my blinds. I had always regarded this light as a reminder that I was in Calcutta; now this brightness was like an apparition of Mrs. Unger. She was warmth and light to me, she was my reason for being in the city, she was life to me—my first thought as I drew a breath that morning, feeling her fingers on my hands. I yawned and sat on the edge of my bed, limp but rested after the deep sleep.
The telephone rang. I guessed who it might be. I fumbled with the receiver as though I'd just settled to earth. The room phones at the Hastings were heavy black Bakelite specimens with stiff twisted cords, phones that had been junked as obsolete everywhere else in the world, but in Calcutta nothing was obsolete. Before I could say anything, I was jarred by a man's voice.
"Dr. Mukherjee here, speaking from police headquarters."
"Yes. Do you have any news about the, um, item?"
"Just a preliminary report regarding fingerprints."
"What did you find?"
"Better question. What did we not find?" he said, pleased with himself for being paradoxical. "I have some issues to address. I will need to see you in person."
"Anytime."
"I am booked up. Next week is better than this," he said. "Do you know occupation of the deceased?"
"I have no idea."
"Could it have been masonry? Tilery? Bricklaying? I have some g
eneral notions. Ironmongery?"
I smiled at the old word "ironmongery" in the old crusty voice on the old bulky telephone. It was the Indian illusion, as though I were speaking to someone on an antique line that stretched to the distant past.
"But Dr. Mukherjee, this was a child."
His voice rising in protest, he said, "Child can be manual laborer. Why not, sir?"
"In India."
"India and elsewhere."
I considered this. "Is that all you can tell me?"
"We are proceeding with further tests, as scheduled. Please come next week for consultation."
I was bewildered by his call. To restore my mood, the lightness I'd felt on waking, I worked on my diary after breakfast and for most of the day, writing a description of the massage Mrs. Unger had given me. But it was more than a massage: it was an act of possession. All my hesitation left me when I wrote about it, and it seemed as I reconstructed the episode that I had not only regained my ability but in the writing began to understand what had happened to me, the transformation. And I thought how she had made that day important, and she had given me this day too, a day of writing. So, as she had done for me, in her work in Calcutta she gave her lost children time and hope.
I found I could sit quietly now. I felt no urgency to leave Calcutta nor even to leave the hotel. I was content; she had calmed me. I understood her better as a humanitarian—a mother figure—giving reassurance. It was not a matter of money but rather of a depth of feeling. It amazed me that she was hardly known.
The following morning, another blazing day, the phone rang again, this time before I was fully awake. I took it to be Dr. Mooly Mukherjee with an update, but it was Mrs. Unger.
"I'm downstairs in the lobby. Don't be too long—we need to be somewhere fairly soon. And we've got a big day ahead of us. Have you been sleeping well?"
I made an appreciative sound. She was a glow at the other end of the line. I could not clearly recall her face.
