A Dead Hand (10 page)

"A street child," Mrs. Unger said. "We're nursing him back to health. He'll be fine."

"How long have you been running this orphanage?"

"We never use that word." She was stern and seemed offended. "This is a home, a household. We live together as a family."

The child Jyoti stood slightly apart. He had a mouse face, batlike ears, a tiny head, and narrow shoulders, and he was barefoot in his shorts.

"How many children do you have here?"

"We can accommodate sixty or more, but they have to be separate, boys and girls. They grow, they move on, we bring others into the family."

We passed a classroom where small girls in white dresses were working at tables, drawing pictures on sheets of paper in colored crayon.

"I emphasize the arts and language skills. Most of these children were rejected by their mothers, who couldn't look after them for one reason or another. Some were orphaned or abducted or from poor parents who left them here because they know the reputation of my foundation. They might die otherwise. Here is the kitchen."

Two women in white cotton smocks and white caps were stirring tureens of dahl, another woman was slapping chapatis and frying them on a smooth stovetop. At another table a woman was sorting chickpeas, looking for pebbles.

"Nutritious food, that's the secret," Mrs. Unger said. "We are entirely Ayurvedic here. All vegetarian. We have an Ayurvedic doctor on the staff."

We came to a circular staircase. She called to a young boy dressed in blue shorts and a gray shirt, the same sort of school uniform as Jyoti, who ran to him. Then she started up the stairs.

"This was the mansion of one of the great English families," Mrs. Unger said as she got to the landing, and we looked down at the large room. "It was a total wreck when I found it seven years ago, but we're slowly bringing it back. Charlie and Rajat are helping in the restoration. Look at those teak handrails and spindles and that wood paneling. It's very early and well worth preserving."

"More rehab," I said.

"That's the word. I want to be a lifesaver." She pointed left and right as we walked. "Bedrooms, dorms, showers."

The big upper rooms were partitioned, and along the walls were bunk beds, in the center rows of little cots. The ceilings were twelve feet high in some rooms, with fans hanging from vertical pipes.

"Boys here, and"—she was still walking along the corridor—"over here, girls."

"What sort of ages are they?" I asked.

"We take them young. We encourage them. We train them and then they enter the great world."

I was impressed by the orderliness of the place, the way Mrs. Unger ran it like a kindly headmistress; but when I praised her she dismissed it, as if out of modesty. Yet I babbled and praised her more. I wanted to please her, and though I intended to exaggerate her generosity, I realized that I didn't have to. What she was engaged in was a powerful example of philanthropy, using her own money, not soliciting funds, to create a safe place for lost children.

I told her that.

"Thank you," she said. "I like that—'lost children.' I'd like to work that into my brochure. Sometimes when they come here they're angry, nearly uncontrollable. The world has been cruel to them. But we try to reassure them. We feed them and give them clean conditions and make them feel secure."

"How do you do that?"

"By loving them," she said simply. "Sometimes I just hold them, wrap my arms around them. I can feel all the tension go away."

I wanted to be held like that. Here I was, alone in India; I could relate to the lost children, bewildered in the city. I could understand a child being soothed in Mrs. Unger's arms. I had been held by her—the magic fingers—and I wanted more.

"Call it a safe haven," she said.

It was serene and orderly and swept clean. The place actually worked.

We had arrived at the back of the mansion, a room I remembered that gave onto the garden. From here and around the rear courtyard I recognized as the spa area—the massage room I'd been in, the steam room, the showers and plunge baths, and on an upper balcony some lounge chairs where, after the exertions of a massage or a scrubbing or a sauna, a person could lie down and snooze.

Two men lay sleeping there, their faces covered with towels, their legs stretched out. They were as still as corpses.

"Charlie and Rajat," Mrs. Unger said. "I love to see them together."

That first evening I'd met her, she'd said, "I never know what I ought to do," and "They're in charge." And I'd seen her as the uncertain mother, being gently bossed by her son and his friend. Now I knew better, but I was more than ever touched by her kindness.

Here as elsewhere in the mansion were men in white pajamas standing like orderlies, or like sentries. They greeted Mrs. Unger with a show of respect, not looking her in the eye but, in a habit of esteem, half bowing—and I would not have been surprised to see them drop to their knees and abase themselves, touch the hem of her sari and bleat in submission. I thought this because one of them actually made as if to do it, startling me as he knelt and rolled his whole body forward at her feet in genuflection.

"The garden," she said, stepping past the servant, extending her arm, indicating palms and bushes and red lilies and thick, pale tree roots surrounding a pool of glittering water.

"The massage rooms are down there, aren't they?"

"That's right. Bottom of the stairs."

"I really enjoyed the experience," I said.

She smiled, but vaguely. Had I interrupted her train of thought? She said without much emotion, "I'm so glad."

"I kind of thought we were headed there."

"All in good time," she said.

Was she teasing me? It was hard to tell. It was not as though this tour was frivolous. The more I saw, the more I was convinced that this was a large project—the size of the house, the number of children, the order of it, both as a school and a refuge, entirely self-sufficient, with a clinic and a spa.

She had said,
I want you to know me.
At the time her words seemed like procrastination. But now I'd seen enough to know that she was someone of real substance. She was an idealist, and she was kind; she was motherly, yet she had the efficiency and command of a businesswoman—all the qualities of a nurturer.

We had arrived at a downstairs lobby that fronted onto the garden. The moss-covered statuary, the damp bricks on the paved paths, the pool with its fountain—a marble cow's head spewing water from the pipe at its rounded mouth, a gurgling that seemed to cool the garden.

"Tea?" Mrs. Unger said.

"Perfect." But I would have said that to anything she suggested.

"It's herbal. One of our own blends. Mint and neem paste."

"I'd love some. Maybe with ice."

"We never use ice."

"Oh?"

"Think what ice would do to your system," she said, and before I could reply, she went on, "Traumatize it." A man in white pajamas was hovering. "Two pots of tea."

"Yes, madam."

"You run the whole place alone?"

"Charlie and Rajat are an enormous help."

"I'm amazed that you have no outside funding."

"I could use more funding, but I don't want the strings. It would mean interference. This place runs smoothly because I'm alone."

She talked about the running of the house, the staffing of the clinic, the spa, the school; but as always I was distracted by her beauty, her fresh face, her full lips, the way her eyeteeth bulged against them, her thick dark hair drawn back and held in a braid, the dangly gold hoops attached to the lobes of her tightly rolled ears, her long neck, her breasts that were defined even in the mass of twisted silk of her sari and shawl. Her hands—the arousing hands that had brought me to a pitch of delirium. Her words had never meant as much to me as her hands; her words were so abstract or esoteric as to be meaningless. But her hands had been all over me, every bit of my body, inside me. She had remade me with her hands, made me her own.

I was listening to her describe the work she did as a philanthropist, and I marveled, but I could not erase from my mind the pleasure she had given me as I'd lain naked under her hands. Yet she had not alluded to the episode. She'd given me no relief, only filled me with a kind of desire I'd thought was unattainable.

"I've never met anyone like you," I said.

"That could mean anything."

"I'm trying to compliment you."

"Thank you. It may seem an odd thing for me to say, but I don't think anyone is really able to know another person completely. We try, but—maybe it's best that way."

"You said you wanted me to know you. You wanted to know me."

"Know me better. Know you better. Not know completely. That's hopeless."

"What's the point?"

"Isn't it fun trying?"

"Frustrating," I said.

The tea had come; the servant had been noiseless. Mrs. Unger didn't say anything more. She allowed the man to pour us each a cup of the fragrant tea.

Forming in my head was the line
I was looking forward to your healing hands
—
your magic fingers.
It sounded pathetic and corny as I silently rehearsed it. But it was what I felt. I wanted more. Sitting there in dumb yearning for her, I felt like a monkey, with a monkey's hunger.

But I said, "You sent me a letter, remember? It was about a dead body in a hotel—very dramatic. I thought you wanted me to help you."

I couldn't tell her that I'd talked to Rajat, that I had paid two visits to the Ananda Hotel: I had no results. Next to this accomplished woman I felt inept, and I had no news.

"I was wondering if you remembered the letter."

"How could I forget it? I still have it—an actual letter, not an e-mail. Purple ink on handmade paper. Are you sorry you sent it to me?"

"Not at all." She spoke with utter certainty.

"Then what do you want me to do?"

"Ask no questions."

"Then what?"

She stared at me, looking triumphant, as though she'd trapped me. And of course she had.

"No more questions," I said.

"I was wondering if you were planning to stay in Calcutta."

No questions. I said, "I'll do whatever you want me to do."

"Nothing more today," she said, and with a gesture she signaled for Balraj to drive me back to the Hastings.

You might think—I certainly thought—her cool smile and distant manner would put me off and perhaps rebuff me to the point where I'd develop another social circle in Calcutta, or (as I had briefly planned) leave the city altogether. The opposite was the case. At the outset, she'd said that she knew I was close to the consulate. Though she didn't know Howard, she probably believed I was another consulate partygoer. She imagined that I mattered to those people.

Yet I'd seen them less and less because of her, and her days of remoteness had made me more dependent on her. Her not mentioning the letter made me memorize it; her distance had kept me in suspense. I had longed for her to call me. I had not been able to call her, nor could I lurk near her Lodge, because I had no idea where it was in this city of lanes and back alleys. I had desired her, she had been inaccessible, and I had been helpless—a pathetic way for a grown man to behave, and something new to me.

I had told myself that I didn't want her love, that I saw no future for us, that I thought her son and his friend were a little odd and off-putting. What did I want, then?

I was lying in bed that night, tuning my shortwave radio, trying to get the news from the wider world. I surprised myself by speaking out loud.

"More," I said.

Alone, I became inward and analytical, taking altogether too much notice of my dreams, as solitary people do, hoping for good omens, hoping for hope. Lately I dreamed of narrow escapes, of making my way across the ramparts of very high walls and having to descend the narrowest and steepest staircases, with no handrail, a great emptiness on either side, tiptoeing, dizzy and fearful. Yet I never fell, in all the variations of this vertigo. The clack of the ceiling fan, the rattle of the blinds, the voices in the street, and the bright morning sun only added to the tormenting effects in the dream.

I never suspected Mrs. Unger of being a tormentor. She was busy. I was not busy at all. There was not a day I spent in Calcutta in my moping that I did not think how virtuous she was, working every day to improve the lives of those children, and how selfishly I spent my time, helping no one. I thought often of the bat-eared boy Jyoti: how much she had done for him, how she had saved him—the sort of street child I saw every day in Calcutta and simply hurried past, not wanting to think of his fate. I did not regard myself as worthy enough for her to care. I deserved to wait.
Ask no questions
was a conundrum, but it was an order I deserved. My patient waiting was the proof of my loyalty. I was not in love, but something deeper took hold of me, a peculiar form of devotion, a need for her to protect me. And I knew that others must have felt the same—the lost children, for example.

Maybe I was one of them.

One of the sunnier remarks of a gloomy German philosopher is that the only way of knowing a person is to love without hope.

The other effect of my solitude was that the diary I had started had become the repository of all these thoughts, even a kind of narrative. Keeping a diary is often an unmistakable sign of desperation. It was a log of my feelings, a chronology of incidents (including the ones I have described here), and an account of time passing. It served its purpose: I had nothing else to write; it kept me busy at night and reminded me of my pain.

I go for walks,
I wrote.
I look for the man I once was. I believe that by wandering I might find him wandering here. I need to soothe myself in this uncertainty. I want something to write about. Walking in the big decaying yet eternal-seeming ruin of the city helps me meditate on the past and gives me the hope that I might find the man I had once been
—
confident in a strange country, so anonymous as to be invisible, living the muffled and spectral existence of a traveler, ghosting from street to street in the endless decrepitude, unseen. I expect to come face to face with myself.