A Dead Hand (30 page)

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.

My mouth was dry from having uttered the little girl's name. I lay on the hard mattress, in the dusty air, in the smell of the mildewed carpet, the chipped paint on the chairs, the scratched varnish of the desk, the accumulated fur on the wardrobe mirror, the threadbare curtains, the grime on the blue petals of the plastic flowers on the dresser, my cheese sandwich souring on its plate, the bread warping as it went stale. Even in the darkness the room was warm with decay, every item of furniture giving off its distinctive smell, and with all that there was the insistent stink of the street. The whole of Calcutta lay hot and ripe against my face.

The smells kept me awake, and in this density of bad air there was the burned-toast hum of old cigarette smoke. Twisted on my bed like a castaway, my nerves alight, I was hungry and yet disgusted by the thought of food. The furniture, picked out in its smells and its shadows, shimmered too from the sulfurous yellow of the street lamps at the corner of Sudder Street.

That was why, when I saw the door of the wardrobe flicker forth—the long narrow mirror on the door catching the light from the street—I took it to be just another nightmare effect of those yellow lamps. But no, the mirror was still moving in one direction, catching on its edge the reflection of my pale popeyed face. I didn't breathe, I didn't move. My body was convulsed with anxiety, tangled in the damp sheets. I was still fully clothed. The mirror glinted, seemed to wink at me, swung out wider, and then came the tuneless clang of the wire hangers inside the wardrobe, like cheap wind chimes stirred by a light breeze.

Swelling like blobby ectoplasm—the sight was unearthly—a crouching shadow bobbed and rippled toward the door of my room as I watched in horror. I'd double-locked the door after Ramachandra left so that I wouldn't be interrupted in my writing. That seemed so innocent now. The handle resisted with a click, the shadow grunted, then whined, frustrated air straining in its sinuses, another little whinny of regret. Something in those sounds spoke of weakness.

I sprang out of bed and rushed at the figure, which was half shadow, half substance, and easily knocked it down with a thump. I was prepared to push again, but the lumpy shadow began pleading in a shrieky girlish whisper.

"Please don't hurt me. Please."

It was a male voice. My eyes were used to the dark; his were not. He lay tumbled to the floor like a small bundle.

"What are you doing here?"

He was still pleading through his fingers, his hands over his face. I pulled at his hands and his cell phone dropped to the floor. I knew it was a cell phone because it had opened when I snatched at him, and it was lit and lying at a convenient angle on the floor to illuminate Rajat, curled into a ball and whimpering.

"I'm hurt. I've broken something."

But he wasn't hurt. He was cowering, afraid that, standing over him, I'd kick him, which was what I wanted to do.

"Please let me go."

He spoke with an odd decorum, and rather softly, because he did not want to rouse anyone in the hotel. He remained on the floor, obstinate, stupid in fear. I switched on the overhead light, and under the shadows of the turning fan blades Rajat lay, so like a scrawny carcass that I was at once reminded of my mission: identifying the small body in the other hotel room.

"Tell me why you came here."

He covered his face and whimpered into his fingers.

"Never mind. I know. You're looking for any incriminating evidence that I've found. You suspect I've got something on you."

"No." It was less a distinct word than a groan of misery, something like
Aw.

"You invited me to visit the Lodge to see Mrs. Unger so you'd have time to come here and search my room."

That
Aw
again, more anguished.

"But you didn't count on my coming back early—" I stopped myself before telling him that my session with Mrs. Unger was a turnoff that left me so doubtful and suspicious I'd hurried back to my room. Now I had a whiff of mothballs rising from him.