by Paul Theroux
"I know your name," I said to the little girl. "I just can't think of it at the moment."
The woman said sharply, "We haven't got all day for you to think of it."
I smiled at her rudeness, then turned away. "What's your name, sweetie?" I asked the little girl. But she stepped sideways as though I was menacing her.
"Any more questions?" the woman said, her clumsy sarcasm snarling her delivery. She kept her mouth open, showing me her teeth.
Taken aback, I stared at her, wondering if I should give her a rude answer.
It was a hot afternoon. The woman seemed irritable and hurried. There was an air of confusion and distress that short-timers and foreigners had in Calcutta: a posture, a scowl of discomfort, of actual suffering. She had that look. I said nothing because Mrs. Unger was there, as always a calming presence.
But it was an odd scene: staring Rajat with somewhat triumphant glistening eyes, Mrs. Unger in a gorgeous sari, the cracked porch, the tense, offhand American woman in her big sunglasses with the spittle of "Any more questions?" on her lips, the stunned-looking child who I'd almost recognized, and the brittle echo of "Madam has gone all silent" directed at Rajat. And I was standing uneasily because I'd come unannounced. All of us on the broken stairs of the grand Lodge, and the noise of traffic outside the gate, the yelling children inside the house, the great strangling banyan tree with its roots showing everywhere, in some places seeming to tear the house apart and in other places holding the bricks together with the fingers and claws of its tangled roots.
"I'll be in touch," the woman said. She continued down the stairs and into a waiting car, one of those shiny new hotel cars with a logo on the door and curtained windows and an obsequious driver. The little girl, bewildered, glanced back at Mrs. Unger with a puzzled face.
"I know that kid," I said.
Mrs. Unger smiled. She didn't help me. She hadn't explained the woman or introduced us. Instead, as the car drew away, she sidled next to me and squeezed my arm.
"Charlie's in the office," Mrs. Unger said to Rajat. "He'll be thrilled to see you." After he left, she said to me, "I'm glad you came. I want to get my hands on you." She spoke in a low voice, her cheek on my shoulder. I got a whiff of her perfume, which was heavy, like a secretion of bodily warmth.
It was what I wanted to hear. I resisted kissing her. She seldom kissed, but I wanted badly to kiss her, to throw my arms around her for making me happy. I want to get my hands on you was a male fantasy—my fantasy anyway. It was what I needed, the mothering that had gotten me back to work on "A Dead Hand," a thinly fictionalized portrait of Mrs. Unger in Calcutta.
Children were playing in the outer rooms and some were singing nearby. The odors of cooking food, the slap of bare feet on the wooden floor, the high-pitched laughter. And then, as she shut the doors behind us, Mrs. Unger led me deeper into the house and down to the spa level, which smelled of incense, petals floating in the fountain, and in the damp leafy garden just outside, elephant-eared plants and trailing, gripping roots of the big banyan tree.
"I came to the house while you were away," I said. "I couldn't resist."
Although Mrs. Unger was the model of coolness and poise, I detected disapproval, a shrinking of her being.
"When you were in Mirzapur."
She laughed very hard at that. "I was nowhere near Mirzapur."
"It doesn't matter. I don't even know where it is."
"Neither do I," she said.
"I had a breakthrough with the Rajat mystery," I said. But the only reason I said that was to cover my surprise and somehow (so I thought) save her from embarrassment. I suspected, for the first time since I'd met her, that she was not telling me the truth. Yet she had spoken without any hesitation.
In her aromatic vault, on the table, she worked on me, but something in me refused to cooperate. I felt like clay. Doubt, misgiving, made my flesh inert. I wanted to give my whole being to her, yet a wariness kept me back. All the little hints, her not introducing me to the woman with the child, the woman's sharp retort, my recognizing the child and not remembering her name, Mrs. Unger not reminding me. She had been holding back.
I had never noticed this before, but then I had never visited unannounced. The suddenness produced this disharmony, and it probably hadn't helped that I'd arrived with Rajat. He had seemed to know something I didn't know. I had doubted him, and now I began to doubt myself.
Mrs. Unger's hands swept over me, pressing, smoothing, finding my muscles and the spaces between them. I mentioned earlier that Mrs. Unger's tantric massage was not a sexual act but rather the drawn-out promise of one, foreplay as an end, always trembling on the brink. This produced a tremulous ecstasy that I could compare only to a rapture of strangulation: I was suffocated in a delirious choking as she ran her magic fingers over me.
But today it wasn't working. I could not pretend that it was. Instead of being relaxed by her touch, or aroused, I ached with apprehension.
"You're resisting."
"No—I like it." But I knew I sounded insincere.
"I can tell by the position of your toes."
"Maybe it's my stomach. I ate some odd-tasting bhajjis for lunch."
"Blame the bhajjis," she said. "You need to taste something sweeter." She let go of me. "Get up, slowly. You'll be a little dizzy, so be careful."
She helped me off the table and steered me to the shower. The light was on in the shower, and it must have been bright because when I was done and I reentered the massage room, I could barely see. The taper burning in the dish of oil gave no light. I could not see Mrs. Unger anywhere.
I felt my way to the table and touched her foot, then traced my hand up her naked leg. She was lying face-up on the table, and now I could see that her head was tilted, her back arched, her body upraised in offering, a posture of surrender.
"Ma," I said. I had never spoken the word before.
"Baby." She took my head in both hands and guided it downward, between her fragrant thighs. "Yoni puja—pray, pray at my portal."
She was holding my head, murmuring "Pray," and I did so, beseeching her with my mouth and tongue, my licking a primitive form of language in a simple prayer. It had always worked before, a language she had taught me herself, the warm muffled tongue. But today she sensed a difference, my diminished will. Bodies revealed much more than words ever could.
"Next time, call me first, or wait for me to call you," she said, releasing me and turning on her side. "You said you had a breakthrough in Rajat's problem. I want you to bring me good news."
"I have some solid leads."
"We can't let that poor boy suffer an injustice," she said. When I didn't reply, she said, "You told me you'd gone to the hotel. Is there something you should tell me?"
I could have told her about the fierce manager, about Mina, about the dead hand and the piece of carpet. But whom would I be telling? She was someone else. I was sensing a different, darker side—or if not darker, then evasive. I did not know this woman. I couldn't make love to her. I couldn't tell her what I knew. She was not the same woman I had known.
And I thought, She's American! I could have imagined being bewildered by an Indian, by her indirection or secrecy. But I knew Americans. Or thought I did. I'm black didn't explain anything.
Rajat had said, "This is a pleasant surprise." She had pretended so, but I was not convinced. It was nothing she had said. My doubt arose from the air around her, the vibration, most of all from her hands and fingers—the truth was apparent in her flesh; mine too, probably. The truth was a throbbing in the blood, nothing to do with words or protestations. It was a quality of pressure in her fingertips that told me that part of her was absent, something untrue in the touch.
"I have to go," I said.
"So soon? You just got here. We've only begun."
I slipped off the table, which I always thought of as an altar, and now it seemed like a sacrificial table. I began to dress as she stood over me. I was careful not to say anything, because
she was as shrewd an interpreter of the spoken word as she was of flesh and blood.
At the door, she touched me, saying, "There's something you're not telling me."
I kissed her, thinking to reassure her, and in kissing her I felt that I was revealing to her everything I wanted to keep to myself.
16
NOW I WAS AS irritable and bent as everyone else in Calcutta, this deranged city of trapped air and fallen grandeur where in the hot, premonsoon month of May it was as stuffy in the streets as it was in any room. Sooner than I expected, within an hour or so of having left with Rajat, I was back at the Hastings, wondering, What just happened?
Rajat had suggested that I go with him to the Lodge, and I'd been tempted, as always, by the anticipation of Mrs. Unger's vault: luxuriating in the thought of her healing hands, her penetrating fingers. I'd been roused by the very idea of seeing her. And then, unexpectedly, I'd seen the American woman tugging the small girl away from the Lodge and Mrs. Unger insisting she was glad to see me. Yet the woman's rudeness ("Any more questions?") and the pressure of Mrs. Unger's touch disturbed me. I'd felt almost a hostility in her hands, and having experienced this odd side of Mrs. Unger, I was confused. It had been a mistake to go. Who was that American woman? Who was that child? Who was Mrs. Unger now? Her hands had been hard and cold, holding me in an almost strangulatory way.
And it had been an interruption of my work. I resented Rajat's intrusion, his urging me, his reassurances; and I was angry with myself for having allowed myself to be tempted. I should have known he was insincere from his having ordered tea and not drunk any of it.
I needed to write, to compose myself. In the seclusion of my room, hiding from the harsh late-afternoon light and the hubbub rising from the street, I sat half dressed under the quacking dustcovered ceiling fan. For the first time, doubting her—and so doubting myself—I had time on my hands. And in this solitude I saw the little girl's vacant face and hesitant posture, her skinny legs stiffened in reluctance. I had once seen her in Mrs. Unger's lap. I am her mother.
Rather than continue "A Dead Hand," this appreciation of Mrs. Unger, I broke off the narrative and wrote Who is she? and began to describe this new experience of Mrs. Unger's vault—not a refuge but a kind of trap where I felt like an imprisoned stranger.
What made writing this all the weirder was that I felt uncomfortable in my own hotel room. I didn't usually write here. I was unused to sitting in semidarkness, facing a dirty windowpane, hearing the quack and croak of the fan above my head. Usually I sat on the top-floor verandah, above the familiar stink of traffic, the noise of horns and bicycle bells and people calling to each other—the muffled screeches of Calcutta that thickened the air.
My room disturbed me, and it was more than the scummy spookiness I felt in most hotel rooms, a heaviness of old dust and dead echoes, of the sediment of bare feet and bad breath, the nerves of all the previous occupants. The smell amounted almost to a sound, a sort of humming high-pitched whine of spectral presences—much worse in Calcutta than in other places, the layers of chipped paint, the crusted rugs and sticky varnish, the windows opaque from scabs of dirt on the glass.
Adding to this itch, as I sat at my little table I noticed a dresser drawer pulled out an inch. That was annoying because I was careful about shutting doors and pushing in drawers. The thought of rats or mice kept me scrupulous: I'd once jerked open a drawer in an Indian hotel and seen a rat sniffing and scuttling across my socks.
This discomfort and unease slowed my writing. Yet writing was the only way I knew to puzzle out the feelings I had, about Mrs. Unger and the small girl and the ambiguity of Rajat's mixed signals. I almost laughed at the thought that it was Mrs. Unger who was the subject of this effort, and it was she, through her tantric massage, who had returned me to writing and given me a new vitality. Even so, I had to force myself to write, jamming my ballpoint onto my notebook pages.
I broke off around eight-thirty to order tea and a cheese sandwich, the safest meal at this time of night. I was following Mrs. Unger's usual advice. The ghee butter was rancid and the fish was rotten and the vegetables sodden and the rice stale at the end of the day, she said. And the water was undrinkable, having stagnated so long in the heat.
When Ramachandra came with his tray, I said, "Just a friendly reminder. Remember to close the drawers. Like this."
Exaggerating for effect, I shut the partly open drawer.
"Room boy leave open, sar."
"It wasn't Jagdish."
"Sweeper, sar," he said, wagging his head.
The mission in this blame-shifting society was to win at any cost and to be blameless, and the simplest way was to rubbish the underlings. In multilayered India there was always someone lower than you.
To make me small—to make me wrong—Ramachandra then gave me a formal lesson in shutting the drawer. Using the tips of his fingers, spreading his hands, he demonstrated how this ill-fitting and chunky drawer should properly be pushed closed. He acted as if he was manipulating a highly technical apparatus that required balance and acute tolerances—and of course it was a pitted wooden drawer lined with yellowed paper in a dresser that, when it wobbled at his touch, startled a cockroach into skidding across the floor.
I couldn't help laughing, and though Ramachandra was insulted by my laughter, he laughed too, with the humiliated force of a man who would never forgive it, awaiting his chance to laugh at me for some more serious error. Class and caste abuse had made the prideful Bengalis unusually vindictive, and they liked nothing better than situations that would allow them to stand over a supine victim and crow, "I told you so" or "I've got you now."
"Now let us examine other one," he said, reaching for the bottom drawer.
"Don't bother," I said, and put my foot against it.
After Ramachandra left, I felt that this was perhaps my problem with Mrs. Unger. I'd blundered by showing up unannounced, thanks to Rajat. Would she hold it against me? And maybe I had been maneuvered into going by Rajat, who seemed very uneasy with what I might find in my investigations, this shabby business at the Ananda, his running away. What was he hiding?
I was now certain that he'd found himself in the Ananda Hotel room with a dead boy. I had all the evidence. But had the boy been alive on arrival at the hotel? If not, how had he died? And when? And would I ever find out the name of this small unlucky boy whose withered hand I had in my possession?
The dead hand was hidden in the space behind the bottom drawer that Ramachandra had reached for. It was safe. And the cut-off portion of carpet was with Dr. Mooly Mukherjee at police headquarters.
I didn't write about any of this. I had a new and unexpected subject: Mrs. Unger. I had gone to the Lodge this time as though to an assignation, tense with desire, that feeling in the pit of my stomach that was also a yearning in my mouth, an actual thirst, a slight headache, heat behind my eyeballs: desire was an acute form of hunger, and I was seeking relief. I wanted to hold her, I wanted to be held. I was half consumed by anticipated lust.
And it had all gone wrong. First the agitated behavior of Rajat in the taxi, then the sight of the small girl being led away by the cranky American, and finally in the darkness of the vault being touched as if by a stranger. It was nothing Mrs. Unger had said; in fact, she'd tried to reassure me. But something in her fingers told me that she was unwilling, that she hadn't wanted to see me. There was an element of violence in the pressure of her hands, something, as I said, strangulatory. But why? I had never felt this way before with her. In the beginning I'd known uneasiness, perhaps, but never fear. I had the idea that she was debating whether to caress me or throttle me with those powerful fingers.
Someone you know well says or does something unexpected and, no matter how slight, if it is entirely out of character, it is as if you've had a glimpse of a stranger. You've learned something new, something you hadn't guessed—and something this person doesn't know about you. Who is she? I kept thinking. I thought I knew her so well, and here I was
utterly baffled. The more she had touched me, the greater my sense that she didn't want me there, that she hadn't expected me, that the deadening pressure of her fingers was hostile, killing my desire and making me want to leave. I sensed a darkness I had never before felt in her vault, and in spite of the oil lamp and the incense I was aware that Mrs. Unger was giving off a bad smell.
She had lain and parted her legs, and as though asking a question or murmuring a prayer, I'd gone down on her. The taste was sour, a slipperiness, the negligent kiss of reluctant lips, an unyielding and impenetrable mouth bulging with teeth.
Now I had worked myself into such a state I couldn't eat the cheese sandwich Ramachandra had brought. I sipped the tea. I was stifled. The trapped air in the room tired me, but there was no point going outside, where the air would be even fouler. The bad light wearied me. I wrote, describing this new Mrs. Unger, and in my description I saw the face of the small girl.
Outside the Hastings the lanterns and dim lights of evening, the fires and flares, made a lurid pattern, as of disease, on the plaster walls of my room. I was too tired to sit in the glary light of the Hastings lobby; I couldn't bear the thought of seeing Ramachandra, who would be overattentive as a way of bullying me. My ballpoint pen was heavy, unsteady in my fingers; my writing faltered.
I lay on my bed. I switched the bedside lamp off to rest my eyes. I dozed. The faces before me were ones I knew but couldn't name—children, not laughing anymore; the small girl. And I slept, dreaming, the world becoming vivid and real, and in my dream were voices.
That was when I sat up and said aloud, "Usha. Dawn."
My face was damp from the heat. I blinked in the darkness. I didn't know how long I'd been asleep, but speaking the name startled me and seemed to pinch some part of my brain, quickening it, waking me up with the girl's name. This flash of insight was a needle-prick of sound that kept me wakeful. I tried to sleep, but remembering the name, connecting it to the child I'd seen in Shibpur and in the taxi (I am her mother) created a stream of images I could not stop. The face became brighter when I shut my eyes. In one of the images I saw the sharp-faced American woman tugging Usha into the car and being rude to me as the small girl opened her mouth in soundless panic—her breath stopped—before being spirited away in an adoption that was more like an abduction. The skinny middle-aged woman did not look at all like a mother but like a dog lover or a socialite.
