A Dead Hand

by Paul Theroux

  "How do you know?"

  "It's only amebic when you see a fifty-dollar bill on the floor of your bedroom and can't pick it up. By the way, Parvati wants you to call."

  I was still waiting for Mrs. Unger, for the pleasure of entering her vault. In the meantime, half in flirtation, half in friendliness—so it seemed; what did I know?—Parvati kept me up to date with her doings. I needed the distraction, but it was awkward merely being near Parvati these days. I was obscurely repulsed to be next to someone virginal, with her pale fragrance of innocence, like the smell of soap, someone fresh out of a bath—and my head still ringing with the ripe, almost wolfish odors of ecstasy from Mrs. Unger. After the overwhelming sensuality of this woman, being with Parvati was like being with a child: nothing to say, no common language. It was as though I was violating an old taboo.

  To me, unmarried Indian women were like schoolgirls, in their good humor and with their restrictions. There was a line in Indian friendship that was never crossed, at least with an Indian woman. Casual meetings were out of the question, nothing physical was permitted, no touching, not even an air kiss. Any talk of physicality was forbidden. It wasn't possible for me to be alone with an Indian woman, and a mere chaste and discreet stroll on the Maidan needed supervision. I had never held Parvati's hand. She performed the sexiest dances, her body swaying, her hips thrusting, her hands in the air, her eyes flashing like a coquette; yet off the dance floor she reasserted her virginity and was untouchable. And that was not the worst torment for me.

  "I want to learn sexy things," she said to me on one of those days when I wanted to be with Mrs. Unger.

  "Like what?"

  "Whistling. Through my teeth, very shrill. Like hailing a taxicab."

  "Teach me how to break someone's arm using kalaripayatu and I'll show you how to whistle."

  She laughed and made a martial arts gesture, and as she parried, she said, "I want to know how to drink whiskey. I want to know algebra. Sexy, man things."

  This frivolous conversation was permissible because we were at a party on the rooftop verandah of the consul general, the place filled with people. And far from this frivolity, somewhere in Calcutta, Mrs. Unger was attending to her lost children, mothering them, saving lives. It was the opposite of the world of morbidity at Mother Teresa's anteroom of death, tucking old people into bed for the big sleep.

  So I was almost ashamed to be at a party, but Parvati was like a younger sister, as most desirable Indian women seemed—innocent, forbidden, but burdened with responsibilities. As Indian men never ceased to be boys, Indian women seemed to me creatures without an adolescence, passing from small giggling girls to clucking middle-aged matrons. I felt protective and forgiving toward Parvati, but I had never seen any future for us, even as friends. Her parents would find her a marriageable man of her caste, and I would have to respect the Indian taboo against a man's being friendly with someone's wife.

  But with Mrs. Unger's philanthropy and unselfish effort on my mind, I was usually disturbed by Parvati's talk of poetry and dance. Her obsession with art and music could be jarring. She invited me to her dance recitals, fluttered her lovely eyelashes, and told me all the places she wanted to go. She did yoga every day and was sympathetic to my recent struggle to write. She was always working on a poem, sometimes several at once, with a deftness I envied. She wrote sensual poetry. She passed the poems to me, folded, like money she owed me, always handwritten in her graceful script.

  One, about becoming a dancer, ended with the lines

  So when I'm home, lying vanquished

  In my own bed, searching for what is slow

  And lonely, I pare my knees apart, point my toes.

  Another contained the image

  ...the muted lisp

  Of morning's tongue pushes against the sky.

  "What do you think?"

  "What do I think? Coruscating."

  She laughed. She said she wanted to loan me a book by a Bengal novelist. "Pop by my flat. You must read Sarat Chandra Chatterji."

  Though Howard had told me she lived with her parents, I took this to mean that the flat was hers. It might have been. On a side street near a mosque in Shobhabazar in north Calcutta, it was four flights up on a landing that faced the minarets and a building draped with drying laundry. The dark staircase smelled of disinfectant and cooking. I was breathless from the climb when I knocked. An old woman opened the door, her harassed face puffy with the heat, a servant judging from the way she was dressed, wrapped in a plain cotton sari and barefoot.

  "Won't be a minute!" Parvati called from an adjacent room that was blocked by a folding screen.

  "Chai? Pani?" the old woman asked as she plucked at her gauzy sari.

  "I'm fine," I said, and clarified it by gesturing with my hands. An offering of water in Calcutta had sinister implications for me. The very word "water" was like poison.

  An inner door clicked open. I expected Parvati, but from the reaction of the servant, compact, cringing, I took the woman approaching to be her mother. She straightened to appraise me. She was not old, but I saw no resemblance to Parvati. She was darker, heavier, flatfooted in gold sandals, wearing rings on her toes, and she twisted her wrist bangles as she frowned at me. She was clearly disappointed, as though I was hardly human, a peculiar animal, a pest.

  "You are alone?"

  What did that mean? I was still standing. I said, "Yes."

  "Your employment is American consulate?"

  "Not exactly." What had Parvati told her, and why wasn't she here to help me? "I do a little writing. I was giving lectures at various places around Calcutta, sponsored by the consulate. Maybe that's what you were thinking of."

  She waggled her head. "Please sit. You won't have tea?"

  Helpless, not knowing how to deal with the silence in the shadowy room, I said, "Thanks. I think I will."

  "Ragini, chai," she said to the servant, who stood to the side, still cringing. And seating herself across from me, she said, "And how are you knowing Parvati?"

  "Through her poetry, of course."

  "Tcha." This was less a word than a way of sucking her teeth.

  "And her classical dancing."

  "Tcha."

  Behind me, I saw as a flash in a mirror, the outer door opened—a sight of laundry and minarets—and a man came in, obviously fresh from work and heat; a crease of disturbance on his face made him seem like an escapee. He glanced at me with undisguised alarm and disapproval, as if he'd encountered an intruder. His leather briefcase was bulgy and bruised, and although the day was hot he wore a dark wool jacket and a shirt and tie. He unbuttoned his jacket but did not remove it. His heavy clothes seemed like armor and gave him an air of pugnacity, as though he were dressed for combat. Not taking his coat off seemed hostile.

  The woman spoke to him in Bengali. I caught the word "Parvati" and guessed at what she might be saying.

  This man (her father, I assumed) could have been my age, yet in his stern, heavy-faced way, his brows and his hooked beak making him look owlish, he seemed much older—out of shape, fattish, with delicate hands; fleshy, with the air of a clerk in baggy pants and thick-soled shoes. I thought how in travel, especially in India, I met people from an earlier time, another era.

  "You're the chap from the consulate?"

  I smiled at his wife, hoping she'd set him straight. But she stared at me and said nothing.

  "No. As I said," and smiled at the woman, "I'm just passing through."

  I wanted to say And don't worry, I don't want to marry your daughter.

  We sat, the three of us, in three chairs, in hot, silent formality, as the lilting voice began in the mosque's crackling loudspeaker, calling the faithful to prayer.

  The man looked unloved but like someone who'd always been obeyed. Certain Indian men seemed to me like this. No matter how accomplished and successful, they remained like big hairy boys, ungrateful and tantrum-prone and spoiled.

  The servant Ragini set the teacups down on side
tables as the man muttered to her. She cringed and turned that reflex into a bow.

  It was as though I'd come for an interview, and before any questions were asked, the interviewer had written me off as unsuitable. They saw me as a bad man, not just a thief but a thief from another world. I had traveled all over, but I could not remember a time when I'd been seen this way, implausible and tainted.

  "Kinda hot," I said. The man glanced away from me; the woman rocked her body a little. The call to prayer was still crackling. "Monsoon's coming."

  They were like sentinels. Their silence made me stupid. Worse than my coming to ask a favor, or to see Parvati, I was here to steal from them, to rob them of the only thing that had value in this place, not their daughter but their daughter's honor; to steal her virginity and leave her bleeding.

  "Sorry to intrude," I said.

  They sipped their tea, which was more offensive to me than replying.

  I was intruding on them. I had no business there. Had I been a young Bengali man, a potential suitor, they would have been chatty. But I was all wrong, an alien.

  "Which part of America?" the woman asked.

  "New York."

  "Crime," the woman said with satisfaction, her earrings trembling. "So dirty. So dangerous."

  The man waggled his head in agreement, as we sat in the heat, breathing diesel fumes and listening to the roar from the street and the howl from the mosque.

  I did not belong in the privacies of Calcutta, only in the big public stew with the mob that swallowed everyone up. No one belonged here. How had Mrs. Unger managed? But she was afraid of mobs.

  "My husband has been to America. Punch?"

  "For a conference. Workshops."

  His name was Punch? I said, "Parvati tells me you teach at the university."

  "Indeed," the man said, and no more.

  "What do you teach?"

  "Faculty of English studies."

  "My favorite subject. I've done some teaching myself. What period?"

  "Seventeenth century. Recusant poets and dissenters. Thomas More to Ben Jonson."

  "You write too?"

  "For the journals." Jarnels.

  I had nothing to offer. Recusant poets? I was a barbarian, here to steal his daughter. And now, at last, I heard her.

  "Sorry to keep you waiting," she said. "I see you met Daddy and Mummy. I was dealing with a computer meltdown."

  "I was just about to leave," I said. "If you've got the book."

  "Oh, please, don't go. Have some more tea."

  "If he has business elsewhere, let him go," her father said.

  And so Parvati handed me the book, and I thanked them and left, descending the stairs to lose myself in the anonymity of an alien in the streets, where I belonged.

  The effect of that brief stop at Parvati's—never to be repeated—was that I wanted to leave India. It was all very well to be a sightseer here, but their reaction told me that I was unwelcome. I knew that I could exist with other writers and tourists in the superficial world of Calcutta, struggling on the surface with the other short-timers and sensationalists. I didn't know the language, as Howard did, but I was so infatuated as to be lost with Mrs. Unger.

  And I had the dead hand. That was the only thing that kept me here. It represented the innermost India, a pathetic trophy and the key to a mystery I had not yet solved. If I could have taken it with me, I would have gone. But I had to stay here and protect it, to attach it to its owner, whoever that might be.

  Parvati's parents disapproved of me, as they would any man who cast his shadow over her and darkened her chances of a good match. They would certainly have hated me if they'd known how I spent my days longing for Mrs. Unger. Parvati would have been devastated too.

  I would have gladly said to them, "That woman is the noblest person I've met in India—an ideal in your own terms! She asks for nothing. She uses her own money and all her time to improve the lives of Indian children."

  The rest had to remain my secret. It was just not possible for anyone to imagine the physicality of my craving, how I was touched by her and yearned for more of it. How I longed to be alone with her. What it was like to be held by her, her hot dark breath at my ear: Do you want me to stop?

  For Parvati, despite her sensual poems, my associating with Mrs. Unger would have been a crime.

  All this was simultaneous, and I couldn't tell Parvati of Mrs. Unger, or vice versa. And Mrs. Unger made me strong enough to be able to endure the wait until she was free to see me. I liked having her as a secret, and I knew it was desire because nothing else mattered and everything seemed possible. It even seemed logical that I should be sitting in a very ordinary hotel on a back street in Calcutta, waiting to be summoned by a woman I had known for three weeks, who had introduced herself in a teasing letter she never now alluded to—had perhaps forgotten.

  Another party at the consul general's, for some visiting academics, Howard making the introductions, Parvati in a green silk sari trimmed with gold, others dressed the same, in silks like extravagant plumage. I was uneasy in the presence of beautiful Indian women who arrayed themselves like courtesans, with nose jewels and dangly earrings, extending their slender arms, gold bangles jingling, and offering nothing but teasing fragrance. I resented the ancient rules of courtship that framed their lives and made them inaccessible.

  Parvati was like that, a challenge, as radiant as they were, but wiser. "They're pukka Brahmins," she told me when I asked about her parents.

  That was a coded way of suggesting that I was unclean to them. She confirmed that though her father's name was Surendranath, he was known as Punch. Then she sized me up and said, "You're not here, as usual."

  Odd that even in her detached way—she hardly knew me—she could be so perceptive.

  "Where am I?"

  "You're far away." She put a folded poem in my hand.

  I opened it and read the first lines:

  In you, a single blue country

  Laid bare of inconsistencies.

  A bone of truth caught in a cage of fire.

  "A love poem," I said. "It's very good. It's a dream. You're amazing. You're a brilliant poet. You practice martial arts. You do seductive dances. And you live with your parents. How is that possible?"

  "It's the Indian way. If I marry I'll probably live with my parents. I don't have any brothers. My sister's still in college. Who'll look after them?"

  "What do you mean if you marry?"

  "I hold views on marriage," she said.

  "Thank you for this poem. I want to see all your poems."

  But even saying that, I felt disloyal to Mrs. Unger. I didn't want to be there. I was more uncomfortable with Parvati's good poems than her weak ones.

  But it was true, as she had said, that I was far away. A woman in her detached, somewhat elevated position was extra-sensitive to a lapse in my attention, the more so because we were unphysical. She was more alert to gesture and tone, to the pulses in the air around me, than a hugger or a hand holder would have been. This was the upside of Indian romance: without sex, fascinated in virginal alertness, every other instinct was sharpened, almost to the point of hysteria. She knew from my eyes, the way I breathed, my posture, the tiniest inflection, from my very odor, perhaps, that my heart was somewhere else. In an overformal society where insincerity was the norm, where most relationships, including marriage, were based on polite or hostile untruths, Parvati was expert in seeing through my meaningless compliments and evasions.

  Compared to this, being held by Mrs. Unger while I lay naked on the wooden table was the real world. With her, every word mattered and was unambiguous. We spoke the same language. We were free. She was generous and humane and was mistress of the great Lodge, shelter to abused and abducted children. Next to this, poems and dances were trifles of showing off, mere niceties with the subtext Look at me!

  And Mrs. Unger had love left over for me. No, I don't want you to stop. That was my yearning, lavish, frank, risky, naked, physical, un-Ind
ian. Don't stop.

  As I hoped, Mrs. Unger summoned me about a week after the long day at the Kali temple and the compound at Shibpur, a few days after my unsettling meeting with Theroux at the Fairlawn. Balraj drove me to the Lodge. I caught his glance in the rear-view mirror as we entered the back street of villas.

  "Alipore?"

  "Alipore."

  She met me at the door holding a small girl by the hand.

  "Recognize her?"

  I couldn't remember the Indian name. I said, "Daylight."

  "Usha. Dawn. See how happy she is?" She led me into the Lodge. "The other children are here. They're settling down nicely. They feel right at home."

  With that, she let go of Usha's hand and took mine, but with a tightening insinuation in her grip. I wanted to nuzzle her hand, the way a dog licks its mistress's fingers. Love is a yearning to clutch and hold, to be clutched and held.

  The Lodge was alive: children's voices rang in the room and upstairs the drumming of running feet, the shriek of laughter; the aromas of cooking and flowers; the monotone of chanted mantras, repetitious and soothing, a kind of holy gargling. It was cool here too, and the high perimeter wall muffled the sound of traffic. This was the other world that I longed for and had found, not exotic at all, not the gaudy and overformal India but a version of home—secure and safe in the embrace of this lovely woman.

  We descended to her vault without speaking. I took my clothes off while Mrs. Unger lit the candles and adjusted the volume of the Indian chants. I lay face-down in the heat, and she traced the contours of my body with her fingers for some minutes. After that, she began digging her knuckles into my shoulders, now and then pouring hot oil on my back. She was able to penetrate deep within me, reaching to the meat of my muscles, taking her time. She worked on my head, my face, and my jaw, squeezing her thumb in the declivities of my shoulders, and it seemed to me that her unhesitating fingers and hands were following familiar paths along the length of my body, because her confident touching reassured me.

  "I need you to turn over."

  So I did, and she slipped a damp cloth over my eyes. She bent over me—I felt the cool sweep of her hair linger on my skin. In a refinement that was new to me, she began to nibble and lick at my nipples, and to chafe the areolas with her fingertips.