A Dead Hand (22 page)

"Indians have a genius for making something new look fifty years old," she said under her breath as we entered the hotel. "They never quite finish and it's never quite right. All of India is a work in progress. Do I mean progress? Never mind."

At the front desk, the clerk said, "We've been expecting you. We've put you in our Palace Suite. Good journey?"

"Excellent. Thank you for asking."

After the paperwork and the porter and the rackety elevator with its gates of steel mesh, we were shown to a suite that overlooked a sports ground—some boys playing cricket, the crack of the bat, scattered shouts. Mrs. Unger pulled the curtains.

We were alone at last in the half-dark. I had the sense in this new setting that we were strangers. I was plunged into a self-conscious silence. I didn't know what to say. I desired her, but how to begin? Lying across from her in the opposite berth in the rocking train all night had confused me. I was tongue-tied and felt awkward, not to say tormented.

But she knew that. She could always assess a situation and was never at a loss for words.

"First a bath," she said. "And then the temple. After that, you might give me a massage. You know how. That's how I learned, by getting one from a
dakini.
Do you feel up to it?"

"
Dakini?
" Where had I heard that word?

"Priestess, healer," she said. "Never mind the words. Tantra is full of them. But it's the deeds that matter."

Priestess was an apt word for her. It was how I had seen her at Kalighat, in a rapture after the goat sacrifice. I held her. Instead of kissing her I pressed my head against hers and felt the blood pounding at my skull.

We took showers separately and afterward went down to the hotel lobby. The driver Ravi Baruha signaled to us with a wobble of his head that he was in attendance.

I had imagined Gauhati to be a small riverside town, but it was a sprawling city in bad repair, with tucked-away bazaars and slow-moving traffic, bicycle rickshaws and old buses wreathed in diesel fumes. The wide river was so shrunken in these months before the monsoon that it seemed like a shallow lake streaked with low islands of sand. The streets smelled of earth and oil and had a tang that reminded me of bark mulch.

"Fancy bazaar," Ravi Baruha said in the Bengali way,
bajjar.
"Big and famous. Pan bazaar. Many attendees."

The temple crowned a rocky hill just outside the busy part of the city. The area was one of Gauhati's landmarks—scenic in the Indian sense, meaning that it was a magnet for mobs and vandalism. "Scenic" in India always implied blight.

It seemed to me a Mrs. Unger observation, but when I said this to Mrs. Unger, she gave me one of her I-couldn't-agree-less smiles.

"You're looking at surfaces," she said. "Always a mistake in India. You're distracting your mind with all the wrong things. You could say this road is a mess"—our car had begun to climb the steep road of loose boulders and litter and yellow wilted trees; it
was
a mess— "but this is the way to the holy temple, a holy road. We're so lucky. I love those ragged prayer flags and those faded pennants."

"I wish I had your gift for seeing into things."

"Close your eyes, maybe. You'll see more."

But I didn't, because the sharp bends and the steepness were making me feel carsick.

"Go as far as you can," she said as Baruha parted the crowd by tapping his horn.

He dropped us at a barrier near the crest of the hill. Beyond it and above, past the food stalls and the relic sellers and the ice cream vendors and the hawkers of posters, fluttering flags and marigolds and strings of plastic beads, all this kitsch, was a stone fortress and a gateway, the entrance to the rambling temple complex.

The way that Mrs. Unger stiffened from her aversion to mobs was so extreme it bordered on horror. It made me wonder why she'd come to India, where every street was crowded; the whole of India was a mob. And when she murmured about her dislike of Indians in a mass, surging toward her, she seemed to become small and fragile, to visibly shrink; and she wanted me to care. Yet I kept thinking that she was like a visitor to Alaska complaining of the cold.

The Indian mob to her was a dark creature. More than a pushing tide of toothy men, it seemed to represent a menacing intelligence, a monster loose on the street, all its many limbs thrashing toward her. She was the victim of this predator that rippled through traffic, stopping cars, reaching for her with grasping hands.
I always think they want to devour me.

Even the yelling we heard from three streets away, a distinct syncopation of shouting, angry laughter, and screechy chants—it might have been a wedding party—this commotion was a mob to her. And that roar of voices and slapping feet quieted her and made her withdraw. She always took my hand in her hot damp fingers and held on.

"I never have any idea of what they're saying.
Zindabad
, yes, 'long live,' but long live what? They always seem to be destroyers."

I agreed, yet she seemed to thrive in India, and I wondered what it was she saw that I didn't.

"Kamakhya temple," Mrs. Unger said, still gripping my hand. "The grieving Lord Shiva carried the corpse of his beloved Kali on his shoulders as he danced across the earth. The gods were appalled. Vishnu intervened and chopped the dead Kali into fifty-one fragments. Wherever a body part landed, a temple was built. One of her little toes came to earth at Kalighat. I wonder if you can guess which part of her body landed here?"

We were passing through the gateway, past pillboxes and low towers of red-smeared stone. Holy men, looking regal yet dispossessed or disinherited, sat upright before brass bowls as pilgrims hurried forward excitedly. The temple had the look of a hill fort, the remnants of one: a perimeter wall and parapets, the stonework like battlements around its enclosures. It was well protected, its chapels like sentry boxes, with images carved in deep relief into the black blocks and, as a form of veneration, wiped with paste that had crusted in the heat.

"That's a hint," Mrs. Unger said.

The goddess was depicted on the side of one shrine as the carving of a woman squatting with her legs open, the thick lips of her swollen genitals exposed and gaping. All around us, devotees—women mainly—were chanting and praying.

I said softly, "Was it Kali's vulva that dropped here?"

"Yes, her
yoni
," Mrs. Unger said. She paused in front of the bold carving, the wide-apart legs. "Isn't it marvelous? A whole temple dedicated to it. That's why this is the most sacred of the tantric pilgrimage sites."

"What's happening here?"

"The goddess is showing her yoni, inviting a puja."

"What kind of prayer would that be?"

"An adoring mouth," she said, and pursed her lips in a kiss. "Adoring fingers on the sacred spot."

Beyond this stone shrine was a pavilion, open sides, tile roof. Men and women crowded into it as though at a sideshow. We joined them, and a gleeful yelp went up as a bare-chested priest brought his hacker down on a black goat's head, just as I had seen at Kalighat. The head toppled onto the bloody floor—a puddle of blood six feet across, the grateful praying watchers standing at the edge of it, their feet splashed with the blood, rejoicing at the sight of the beheading.

"Do you know how lucky we are to be here?" Mrs. Unger said.

I followed her into a smoky stifling temple, and she squatted and put money into a basket. Priests sitting cross-legged blessed her as she lit sticks of incense. She was intent, kneeling, concentrating on a shadowy cloth-covered image, murmuring prayers.

I had no idea what to do. It was far from anything I knew about India. In this remote place, midmorning in the heat of another Kali temple, I was like a child who had been taken to a place of pilgrimage by his mother. I would have gone out of the temple, but I didn't dare to lose sight of Mrs. Unger, didn't want to stray. I was clinging to her, feeling helpless and a bit dazed by the clouds of incense, with the passivity of an anxious child.

I had been startled by her rapture at Kalighat; I was equally impressed by the intensity of her devotion here, because I was used to seeing her in charge. And she was prayerful here, bowing down, offering pieties in an unexpected posture, compact, submitting to whatever image was hidden there, covered by a cloth.

It was weird and enigmatic. Indian gods and goddesses could look ferocious, but nothing I had seen in India could compare with the fierce spell cast by this shrouded foot-high figure that was a brooding mummy-wrapped bundle. The very folds in the blank cloth exhausted me with fear. I could not imagine what lay beneath this terrifying shroud.

Her veneration seemed to invigorate her. Though we returned to the hotel in silence, she was excited, expectant, eager to be alone with me. I knew this without her saying anything. It was noon, yet our suite was so dark I fumbled locking the door, and when I turned I saw her lying face-down on the bed.

By her touch, in a vault just as dark, she had taught me the way to proceed. And so I began. Touching her, I realized she was naked, not wearing her white silk sari, as it had seemed: this was her warm flesh, her characteristic odor, not floral perfume but something heavier and more animal. She smelled of vines, of ripeness, of cut-open fruit, of a stickiness I could taste.

Tentatively at first, and then with more command, I moved my fingers from zone to zone, the seven chakras: the dome of her head, her brow, her ears, her throat, her heart, her belly, the base of her spine. The idea was to work slowly, to insinuate with my fingers, to find the organs and massage them; to reach the inner meat of the muscle, where the nerves lived; to apply gentle pressure to stir the blood. I worked on her body as she had worked on mine. When my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I saw the bottle of warm oil on the side table, and I used it on her.

She was still face-down. I had found her heart and throat and belly by reaching beneath her, by stroking and using the flat of my hand while pushing from above, enclosing her between my palms.

"Yes," she said several times, and it was more a groan of satisfaction than a whole word; but even so, she said no more than that.

I knew I was doing it well because of the way she sighed, whimpering slightly to encourage me. That was when I straddled her—as she had straddled me—and worked down her backbone to her buttocks, caressing them, clapping my hands against them. I was surprised by the ripple of her hard bum muscles, the way she could clench and release.

All this took more than an hour, and might have been closer to two. I was excited, so far from Calcutta, in this semiruin of a city sprawling by the low duney banks of the river, in this nearly empty hotel. Thrilled, seated on her long slender body, as pale as those dunes, my knees containing her, my knuckles against the globes of her glutes. I tried to remember everything she had done to me, repeating these moves on her. A grateful receiver of her adoring attention, I had become a methodical and scrupulous masseur. She had shown me the way.

"An hour or two isn't enough," she'd said to me once. It took an hour just to warm up and two hours at least to achieve
bhoga
—delight. And so I went on riding her, smoothing her, oiling her, and pushing her with my palms, plying her chakras with my fingertips—the first time I'd ever touched her in this way. I loved her sighs of acceptance and the way she turned slippery, her whole body, like a great oily reptile I was riding, digging my elbows into her buttocks, and (another of her techniques) using my chin and my mouth on the base of her spine, feeling the warmth radiate throughout her body.

Even in the half-light of the hotel room, all the blinds drawn, she glowed. I remembered her saying in the train,
I'm black.
I gloried in it for being our secret. I was a monkey clinging to a goddess, desperate to please her.

"Now," she said after a long while of my caresses, and I dismounted, crouching beside her, as she shifted and rolled over, naked, arms to her sides, her legs parted.

She used both hands, her clutching fingers, to spread her sex like a flower. Or so it seemed to me as I watched, like an opening lotus with reddened and thickened petals.

"Find the sacred spot," she said in a whisper. "Search for it slowly."

Obeying her, I stroked her beautiful blossom very gently until I had opened it further and my fingers were slick. And I knew when I'd found it, because I had seen her before captured by ecstasy.

"Yoni puja."

I must have faltered—she knew I was baffled.

"Pray with your mouth," she said softly.

And so there I lay, for the longest time, like a mating insect, until at last, rapturous and writhing on the bed, she sighed. She let out a long groan as dramatic as a death rattle, almost as deep as grief, and at the same time clapped her thighs to my ears.

We slept, and when I woke I didn't know where I was. I began to marvel that we were still in India, in distant Gauhati, but she shushed me and turned me over. She worked on me in much the same way that I'd done to her, devoting two or more tantric hours to my pleasure. It was a great novelty and a relief to be with her alone, uninterrupted, in this far-off place: no car, no driver, no waiting to be summoned or sent away.

Midway through the massage, she applied delicate pressure and held me, as though suspended on a lengthening wire of sexual tension—a pulsing of energy, a rippling of sexual health, not an orgasm but something akin to skimming lightly, feeling intense pleasure, a swelling just short of bursting. At that point, with my temperature way up, she stroked the base of my spine, as she had done before, as I had done to her. But this time I sensed the release of an expanding plume of warmth from my lower back, and it spread through me, as if she was pouring hot oil over me. Seeing how I seemed to soar, she whispered, "Kundalini."

By the time she was done, night had fallen, and we lay entwined, exhausted, the light of passing cars now and then raking the walls of the room.

In the darkness before dawn, we woke and bathed and packed our bags. At this hour, some people were already mopping floors and poking the corridor walls with long-handled dusters.