A Dead Hand

by Paul Theroux

  "Tell me what you've found. Put my mind at rest."

  Instead of sitting where she had beckoned me with her hand, I took a seat at the far end of the bench so I could look at her. My face was damp from the humid heat of the garden.

  "I guess you know I've been to Mirzapur. Charlie must have told you."

  "I've heard a number of versions. Charlie's. Mr. Joshi's. Even the redoubtable Mr. Ghosh."

  "You're resourceful."

  "Not half as resourceful as you," she said. "Ah, here's our tea."

  She spoke in her actressy voice, her lines like lines in a play, as when I'd first met her at the Oberoi Grand. And because she seemed so well rehearsed, I was especially on guard.

  The waiter in the white uniform spread a cloth over a stone tabletop and set out the tea things. Even those cups and saucers seemed worryingly like props.

  "You can go, Bijoy." Mrs. Unger poured the tea into the two cups. "So, was Rajat fantasizing, or was there really a dead body?"

  "There was a body."

  "In that squalid little room? As he said?"

  I wondered if she was putting me on. She was speaking in that same actressy way, as though performing. Even her manner of pouring the tea was a sort of acting, her making a business of it as she spoke.

  "Just as he said."

  "But surely they must have found the body."

  "The body seems to have disappeared."

  The other thing I noticed was that this Mrs. Unger was almost a stranger to me. I thought I knew her, but this was someone new, or at least a woman pretending to be someone else, and doing a good job of it.

  "Disappeared? The poor thing."

  "Yes, it was a small boy."

  "I meant poor Rajat," she said, and giggled a little. "So it's true. I wasn't sure whether to believe him. He can be such a fantasist. He was always dancing around me, telling tales." She looked closely at me. "I'm grateful to you for finding out the truth."

  She was peering at me from over the rim of her teacup. I stared back at her. She swallowed and put the cup down.

  "Now you must report what you found."

  "To whom?"

  "To the police. To the authorities. To the consulate—you have friends there, I know."

  "And what would be the point of that?"

  "To hold him responsible. I had thought he was such a little charmer. As I told you, he had fairy energy. I didn't think you'd find anything, but now it seems he's involved in something sinister." She slid closer to me and said, "I knew you'd find out what really happened. You're a wonderful writer. That's why I trusted you, because you know that the aim of all art is to tell the truth."

  I was so transfixed by her performance that I did not respond at once. I did not know this woman. But she was half smiling at me with indignant certainty. I saw that she was waiting for an answer.

  "I feel I have found out the truth."

  "Rajat was lying. Indians do lie all the time, you know. They are forced to lie because their culture is so strict. You never get the truth from them. 'Yes, I'll take care of it.' But they don't. That's why I went to you."

  "Rajat wasn't lying," I said.

  "The corpse was in his room. He must be exposed. And he said he had nothing to do with the boy's death. Please have some tea."

  "It's too hot for tea," I said. What was she raving about? I was hot, sticky in this humid garden, among stifling big-leaved plants and tangled roots, its paths of wet mossy paving stones, the whir of gnats over the standing water, the biting flies and spiders. I did not know where to begin, and I had the idea that she seemed like a different person because she was insane, especially crazy in this precious pose as an actress in a darkly comic drama.

  "I'll go with you to the police," she said. "I was a fool to believe his reassurances. I always suspected that he was a malign influence on Charlie."

  "Malign" influence, not "bad" influence—that was the sort of pretension you'd hear in a melodrama.

  I said, "You told me you didn't trust the police."

  "That was to induce you to take the assignment."

  I said, "Why do you want me to tell the consulate what I found?"

  "It seems to me that they should be told. It should be easy enough to let them know—after all, they're your friends. They should know, as the police should know. Rajat registered under an assumed name at the Ananda. This is very suspicious. He may have had a hand in the death of a child. He must be exposed."

  "And if I do it, if I prove that he's connected with the dead boy, the anonymous corpse, he could be charged with murder."

  "I don't know," she said, but unconvincingly. "He'd certainly have some explaining to do. But it would be all circumstantial."

  "Why do you say that?"

  "Because the body is gone, presumably."

  "Not entirely."

  "What does that mean?" If she was disturbed, she did not show it. She went on sipping tea.

  I took a plastic bag out of my briefcase, the bag yellow with formalin, and I pressed it to show her the pickled hand.

  She squinted at it with deep curiosity, as though it might be something to eat, and she said without any emotion, "That's disgusting. Is it human? Please put it away."

  "Not before I show you a detail."

  She winced, wrinkling her nose as I held it close. I said, "See? No fingerprints. That's not unusual in certain trades. Masonry. Bricklaying. Cement work. And weaving. The fingerprints are worn smooth and are just about unreadable. So I've been told by someone who knows."

  All this time she had held her teacup at the level of her chin, as if to defend herself from me. Now she put the cup down.

  "What are you saying?"

  "This is the hand of a ten-year-old boy. The DNA tells a lot, though doesn't tell his name. He was wrapped in a carpet—one of your carpets. Very likely one of your workers."

  "Impossible."

  "Almost certainly. Mr. Joshi told me that whenever someone dies at your factory, you personally take them to Varanasi to be cremated. I presume that's where this child was headed, until you wrapped him in one of your generic carpets, tore the label off, and sent him to the Ananda, to Rajat's room."

  "You can't prove that," she said.

  "Maybe not, because you're like all the other foreigners in India—like Indians too. You delegate your jobs. Someone got this gruesome job. My guess is that not even Charlie knew."

  She had begun to laugh, but mirthlessly, a stage laugh. She said, "Why would I have asked you to investigate this business if I'd known you could implicate me?"

  "Because you hadn't counted on their keeping the carpet, it was such a cheap one. But we're in hard-up Calcutta. They dumped the body, not the carpet. And you hadn't imagined that a suspicious clerk who'd helped dispose of the child—another flunky—would take pity and keep one of the hands."

  "You're wrong. Hindus never do that. They would immediately burn a body part."

  "Hindus, no. But this was a Christian. And a Naga. They have rather a fetish about body parts."

  "I had nothing to do with this. It's preposterous."

  "You knew all along what I just found out today at the consulate, that Rajat had applied for a work visa to the U.S. He was intending to emigrate. Had he gotten the visa, he'd be living with Charlie. That is something that seriously bothers you—his competition for Charlie's affection."

  She looked at me with a sour expression and said, "Rajat is a kink. I suspect gender identity disorder. He probably wants gender reassignment. You have no idea what these people are like."

  I laughed at the terminology. I said, "You concocted a plan to implicate Rajat in a crime. You had a corpse—that was convenient. When Rajat ran away instead of being caught by the hotel, the whole scheme came apart. So you put me on to it, another job delegated, so that you could compromise him. You assumed I'd be able to pin it on Rajat. If he was discredited, his visa application would be turned down. But I was lucky. I found out more than you thought I would."

&nbs
p; "I loved little Rajat, until you told me this."

  "You hated him. You wanted Charlie for yourself. And now you'll have him, because I'm sure that Rajat will be terrified when he finds out what you've done."

  She sat straight, her chin up, looking haughty. "It's beneath me to argue with you. I've done nothing wrong. I haven't broken the law."

  She was impenetrable. Even when presented with the evidence of this obvious setup she was unmoved.

  "Possibly true. But I'd like to know how this child died."

  She sipped a little tea, batting a fly away as she drank, and didn't reply.

  "Worked to death, probably," I said. "I saw your factory. It's Dickensian. Little children imprisoned in a factory sweatshop, working on carpets. I saw Jyoti."

  She had begun to smile. "This is India," she said.

  "Employing children is against the law," I said.

  "The law is never enforced because the children need work."

  "You're killing them."

  "I am saving them!" It was the only time in this conversation that she raised her voice, and this was a shriek of protest.

  "And now I know where you get your labor force." As I spoke I could hear the children laughing inside the Lodge. "You take them off the streets. You buy them from villages. Poor places like Nagapatti. You get them healthy, you make them dependent on you, and then you put them to work."

  "You don't know anything," she said.

  "I'm sure you sell some of them to adoptive parents. When I saw that woman last week, I knew."

  "I am saving them," she hissed through her teeth, and I thought how her being slightly bucktoothed was an advantage in her saying something like that, to give it force. "They would die otherwise."

  Now she frightened me, because she was without a shred of doubt. Her certainty gave her, if not power, then a demonic energy.

  "I thought you had some intelligence, some subtlety," she said. "I had confidence in you. That's why I trusted you with this. But no, you're really hopeless. And you're ungrateful. You have no idea of the good I have done, the things I've accomplished. And not just this Lodge. Many things. Great things."

  She spoke with such conviction I almost believed her, but I also knew that a criminal's most useful gift was the ability to lie. It was one of the clearest signs of criminality that such a person had no use for the truth. Yet Mrs. Unger was passionate.

  "You think that by making up this preposterous story you've hurt me." She leaned closer. "You can't hurt me. But I could seriously harm you."

  I won't give you a chance, I thought, looking her straight in the eye.

  She said, "I'm going to do you an enormous favor."

  "Really."

  "Yes. I'm not going to destroy you. I could do it very easily."

  She was calm again; she had regained her composure. She saw that, though I knew the truth about the body in the hotel room, and Rajat would soon know, there was not much I could do to hurt her. She was right: this was India. Child labor was common. The factories were everywhere. And children died.

  "You're shocked," she said. "I despise people who come to India and say they're shocked. Especially Americans. What hypocrisy."

  If I had been enchanted before by her, I was now disenchanted. Yet having seen her dark side, I was even more astounded by her audacity. She now seemed to me as cruel as she had once seemed kind, and I could not believe that both could exist in the same person, this American woman who affected saris and ran a home for lost children.

  I didn't doubt that much of her work was unselfish, that she had (as she said) saved some children. But she saved them only to send them to work in her factory or sell them in adoptions. She wasn't wrong about there being child labor in India. Everyone knew it. But no one suspected her personal involvement. She was a motherly presence in Calcutta, famous because she never asked for donations. And she was persuasive. I could testify to the healing hands, the magic fingers. Gazing at her on this hot afternoon in the deep green shade of her damp and tangled garden, I trembled to think how she had touched me, how I had touched her. How we had lain in each other's arms, knotted in the tantric postures. I had been bewitched.

  Her beauty was distinct, but because it frightened me it seemed indistinguishable from ugliness. I thought: There is no such thing as beauty. There is desire and there is fear, and if desire can make a person luminous, fear can make that same person ugly. A lie in a lovely woman's mouth can give her fangs and make her a monster. The very features I had seen as benign and beautiful—the same cast of her face, the lips, the teeth, the breasts, the fingers—I now saw as fierce and deadly.

  All this time we'd been talking I kept seeing the hard bone beneath her lovely skin, the hinges of her jaw, the seams of her cranium, the loops of her eye sockets. It was not a face but a skull. I saw her as bones.

  "You've failed me," she said. "And I was such a fan. I had such plans for you." She touched my thigh with her outstretched hands, her sharp finger bones on my leg. "That's all right. I'm never surprised to find that people are stupid or wicked. I'm more surprised when they're kind."

  I didn't know what to say. I could not deny that she was kind—I'd seen enough examples of her charity. I'd been half in love with her. I was more ashamed of myself, more angry at myself than I was with her, because I saw my weakness reflected in her. Out of vanity and need, I had yearned to please her. I was no better than she was.

  "I still wonder why you chose me to look into this crime. Was it just because I'm a writer?"

  "Not really."

  "What then?"

  "Because you're not a writer. You're a hack. No matter what you write, no one will believe you."

  She obviously thought that by insulting me I would be hurt, but I was strengthened by my self-disgust. She could not have had a lower opinion of me than I had of myself. At that moment I wanted to kill her, and not just do away with her but stab her repeatedly in the face.

  She smiled at me, as if reading my thoughts. Her face lit up—the glow I'd always found irresistible, of pleasure, of love.

  "Darling."

  I almost responded. But she was looking past me, toward the far end of the garden, where Charlie was standing. I wondered how much of this he'd heard. He twinkled, the way someone does when he's eroticized. As I had once, giddily.

  She beckoned to him. He obeyed, walking closer, and when she beckoned again it seemed like her way of dismissing me.

  20

  THE BURNING GHAT on the Hooghly was about a mile downstream from the Vidyasagar Bridge, which I had crossed with Mrs. Unger on the day we'd visited the Kali temple, when she had taken me to the compound. I had been shocked by the goat sacrifice at the temple. I had been impressed by the intake of orphans at the compound. How was I to know the children, too, would be sacrificed, that they'd end up in her factory or be sold to visiting Americans? Rajat had remarked on the blood that had streaked her sari. Bloodstained kind of suits her.

  I thought of that blood today as we turned off the bridge and made our way along the west bank of the river in Howard's consular car, a uniformed driver at the wheel, Howard beside him. I could see the ghat ahead, piled against the embankment like a rotting pier.

  "I will talk to the priests," Parvati said. She sat in the middle of the back seat, Rajat on her other side.

  Parvati's decencies shamed me, and so did her gifts. She was a pretty girl who lived with her parents; she could dance, play tabla, write poetry, do martial arts—could twist my arms off with a flourish of kalaripayatu. Parvati the beauty was awaiting a suitable match, which her parents would arrange. She was helpful, able, and decorative. I had to admit I hardly knew her, but in any case I was unworthy: she was unattainable. But she was the perfect person for this ritual, a vestal virgin. She wasn't prim today. She knew exactly what to do, and Rajat was a suitable acolyte.

  Howard said, "Your friend Mrs. Unger was supposed to be getting an award tonight from the chief minister."

  "Don't know anything abo
ut it," I said. "What's the award?"

  "Humanitarian achievement. She refused it."

  Rajat said, "She hates publicity."

  Howard said, "Her modesty was much praised. She got more publicity refusing it than she would have gotten by accepting."

  "She never asks for money," Rajat said.

  "I think we know why," I said.

  "We'll be watching her," Howard said. "Someone from the commercial section. After all, she's one of ours."

  "She deserves a prize for cleverly avoiding a murder charge. I can't think of anywhere but India where she'd be possible."

  The driver pulled off the road and parked by a drooping cow. He opened our doors and then stood by the car, guarding it. We walked slowly, gasping in the humid heat, through the weeds and low shrubs along a narrow path to the ghat. Three holy men sat cross-legged on the platform at the entrance, under an archway draped with fresh flowers. The men were gaunt and nearly naked, their faces set at us, their foreheads smeared with yellow paste. They did not blink at the flies darting around their long, matted, and tangled hair.

  Bowing low, Parvati stuffed some rupees into their brass jars. I did the same as she spoke to one of them.

  "He asks if you have the body part."

  "The hand. It's here."

  I had wrapped it in a white cloth and tied it like a bundle, a makeshift shroud. Only I knew that it was stiff, claw-like, yellow, sealed in a plastic bag. A pickled hand.

  The saddhu Parvati had been speaking to gathered himself and picked up a brass tray. He had loose wrinkled skin, like seasoned leather, a loincloth like a diaper, and necklace strings of heavy amber beads. He offered the tray to me. I put the cloth bundle on it.

  With solemn grace, he brought this to one of the other old men and presented it reverently while the man muttered over it. Then he walked onto the ghat, holding the tray like a waiter serving dessert. Raising his arms, he tipped the tray, allowing the little bundle to slide onto the top of the pile of dry sticks, which were arranged as though for a campfire.