A Dead Hand (18 page)

He smiled. "Or you."

"But you're interested and I'm not."

"Stop piggling with your samosa, Howard!" he said.

Howard licked the flakes of pastry from his fingers and said, "Piggling?"

"Piggling, piggling!"

Theroux thought he was fooling me with this sudden distraction, but I knew that teasing Howard was his way of throwing me off, because he had become self-conscious in his serious questions about Mrs. Unger. His teasing also showed how confident he was with Howard, who was obviously his friend, and it was a way of excluding me.

"You're not interested in missing children?" he asked.

"I'm not interested in Mrs. Unger."

And again, in denying her I was revealing more than I cared to, and he knew it. He was jealous of my access. He knew something, and I wasn't cooperating. I began to eat a samosa, wondering if he would ask me anything more about Mrs. Unger. But he simply smiled and nibbled peanuts.

"How much longer will you be in Calcutta?" I asked.

"I have no idea," he said. A flat-out lie. "How about you?"

"Who knows?" Another lie.

We were writers lying to each other, as writers do. The greater the writer, the bigger the lies. Why are they incapable of telling the truth? I say "they" because I had no illusions. Secretive, protective of their ideas, keeping close, trying to throw you off. ("Stop piggling!") And yet at that moment, realizing that I was lying, I began to think that I might have a real idea. That I might be a writer.

A writer of magazine pieces, of stories, I had no pretensions to writing books. Theroux didn't want me to know him, didn't want anyone to know him, which was why he did nothing but pretend to write about himself, never quite coming clean, offering all these versions of himself until he disappeared into a thicket of half-truths he hoped was art.

Later, what I remembered most clearly were his eyes, searching, inquisitive, evasive, probing, a bit sad and unsatisfied, trying to see beneath the surface and inevitably misremembering or faulty, because you can't know everything. He was like someone trying to see in the dark.

I was convinced that he knew I was close to Mrs. Unger, and he had tried everything to get me to disclose it. He wanted to know what I knew. But it was my story. I had given him nothing, yet he made me intensely uncomfortable, and as I sat there saying nothing, I felt he was taking something from me. I was like one of those tribesmen who believe that photographers will take their soul by snapping a picture. He gave me that feeling.

But worse than that, I felt undermined. I said, "Now I really do have to go."

"Great meeting you, especially here," Theroux said with a theatrical sweep of his hand at the Fairlawn garden. I knew he didn't mean it, or perhaps he really had divined something of what I knew of Mrs. Unger.

Howard said, "Keep in touch."

I was exposed. Howard had set me up. Now he knew another side of me, and Theroux, who hadn't known me at all, knew me better than I wanted him to. I was not just uncomfortable, I was diminished, made smaller by his attention. He had helped himself to a slice of my soul.

This smirking, intrusive, ungenerous, and insincere man was jumping to conclusions about me, making up his mind and forming fatal errors out of his impatience and knowingness. I hated his horrible attempt at appreciation as he sat smugly inside his pretense of surprise. He was someone who could not accept things for what they were and be at peace. He needed to tease, to provoke, to get me to react, as though—so to speak—he had a mallet in his hand and was constantly rapping my knee, like a doctor testing for a reflex. But that image is too kind. He was more like someone poking a wary animal. It was not only cruel, but the torment evoked an uncharacteristic and untrue reaction. What right did he have, and why did he want to know about Mrs. Unger?

All this time, penetrating the garden from the street, the wall of sound, constant in Calcutta, the traffic and the shouts, the bicycle bells, people calling to each other, every word like a warning in the city that was never silent. No matter where I was, the street noise, the reminder that Calcutta was dense with restless people, where the stinks were so sharp they seemed audible, the diesel fumes of taxis and buses, the reek of garbage, of shit, of risen dust that was also like a high-pitched whine, the vibration of dirt, the sweetish tang of decay, the presence of oil smoke from the lamps and candles of veneration. The only place that was truly silent and fragrant was Mrs. Unger's vault.

Just before I left them, Theroux had said to me, "But if you do see her, if you do get close to her somehow, you're a very lucky guy. It would be a gift."

And so I crept away among the tables.

Their high spirits as they saw me off did not mask their seriousness. And I knew they remained in the garden of the Fairlawn to talk about me. They were saying: A lightweight, a trimmer, an evader—what's he hiding, why is he lingering here? Howard was humane and not a mocker, but he was curious, and he had a diplomat's love of postmortems. He was the good cop. He had used Theroux as an invasive tool to draw me out.

I told myself that I didn't care what they thought. What bothered me was that in his questions, his sideways looks, and his insincere postures, especially his pretense of agreeing with me, Theroux had held up a mirror. In the end he was no more than that, a mirror, showing me my own face and feelings, making me intensely self-conscious. He was doing what writers do, reminding me of who I was.

He had made a reputation out of fooling other people, yet he didn't fool me. He made me confront myself, my failure, as he flashed back my reflection in the writer's mirror that he hid behind. I was like him in some ways. I was the lazy, idle, pleasure-loving side of this man. He pretended to be casual, but he was intense and never at rest, forever uninvolved. I was the procrastinator. He knew that I wasn't driven and competitive like him, and I knew that he envied me for my involvement with Mrs. Unger. I also knew that he was going to write about me, about meeting me, and that he'd get everything wrong.

So much for Theroux and his false intimacies. What Howard didn't know about the mirror was that it was cracked. It was the deep flaw in all writers' mirrors. In most of them—in Theroux's for sure—you saw the writer's boiled eyes, staring wildly through the crack.

As I lost myself in traffic and people at Hogg Market, I kept thinking: I lied to him. I denied everything. He made me do it, and he knew I was lying. But I didn't care. I had Mrs. Unger to return to.

A few days later, Howard called and said, "He's gone."

I knew whom he meant and was glad that I didn't have to see again the man who had shown me who I really was.

S
OMEHOW
—
WAS
IT
SOMETHING
I ate at the Fairlawn?—I fell ill. I had eaten a samosa, not much, but just a nibble of something foul could lay you low in Calcutta. "Tummy trouble" did not begin to describe my complaint. I had cramps, a headache, muscle pains, an unslakable thirst, and a case of the runs that convinced me that I was slowly dying a drizzling death, a liquefaction from within that would reduce me in a short time to no more than a stain on the sheet. I tried to rehydrate with salted water, but still I drizzled. And I was in pain so severe, and was so weak, I could hardly speak. Three days of this, then I was able to stand without feeling dizzy, though I felt like a shrunken and arthritic old man.

"I think I had amebic dysentery," I said to Howard afterward.

"Probably just diarrhea," he said.

"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?"