A Dead Hand Read online

  "I knew you would."

  Another surprise: after that bewitchment she was all business. But she was full of surprises.

  Feeling hot and damp from the long sleep, I took a shower, dressed, and hurried downstairs, eating a banana on the way.

  "You shouldn't eat bananas," she said. "Not with your body type."

  "What's my body type?"

  "Pitta. Fire and water."

  "What should I eat?"

  "Figs." She was smiling. She assumed a dancer's posture. "Melons."

  I heard the words as I stared at her body. And I was thinking how lucky I was to have this woman in my life, appearing in the lobby of my hotel on this sunny morning. She was dressed in a white sari, her shawl over her head instead of draped on her shoulder. She was arrayed like a Madonna, her face framed by the folds of her shawl; but even so, as a figure of holiness she had an aura of sensuality, something about the way she stood, then the slope and glide of her walk, her short swift steps, a way of moving her hands, her slender beckoning fingers. She touched me softly as I passed, and when I paused to savor the moment, I saw the curve of her hips, a rotation, slipping beneath her sari.

  I did not ask her where we were going. I obeyed the rule.

  "Madam?" Balraj was steering into the flow of honking cars.

  "Kalighat."

  As we moved slowly along Chowringhee, I glanced at my watch. It was not yet seven-thirty. That accounted for my drowsiness, and I had the slight hangover I often got when I worked late writing. But this feeling was welcome. I had actually written six pages. Yet in this dense traffic, crawling through the heat—and it would be stinking hot in a few hours—I realized she must have woken me at seven or a little before. I had been so eager to see her I hadn't minded the early hour.

  "I know that name, Kalighat."

  "One of the sacred places," she said. "We have something important to do there."

  I loved her for saying "we." I was elated and reassured, because that's how I wanted her to think of me, as a friend, as an ally. More than that, as a partner.

  "That's wonderful," I said, meaning everything. "What does bhoga mean?"

  "Tantric term. Intense physical desire."

  I had to turn away from her. I looked out the window. We passed Mehboob Panwallah and Eatery, the name assuming an irrelevant importance because I was glancing at the signboard as she spoke.

  "What do you do when you're on your own?"

  She asked big questions bluntly. I could have told her about Parvati and her poems, that empty flirtation. Or about Howard and his consular stories (You could use that), the shuttling life I lived between jobs and cities and magazine pieces, the occasional radio item, my ill-fated TV travel show, my life of procrastination—the opposite of her life of action and commitment. But all that had stopped.

  "Not much," I said. I wondered if I dared to tell her, because in telling her I was exposed; I'd have no more secrets. Yet she would know if I was lying, and she was so truthful herself it seemed unworthy to try to deceive her. I wanted her to trust me. I had wooed enough women in the past to know that only a woman's trust—and hope—led to sex.

  Mrs. Unger was staring at me with her pale eyes, which were dark in a dark room, greenish in candlelight, gray in daylight like this; and I could see from the cast of her lips, the set of her jaw, the way her eyeteeth bulked against her lips, that she expected me to say more.

  "I think of you when I'm on my own," I said. I had told women this many times without meaning it, but I meant it now, in a desperate way. "That's all I think about—how long it will be before I see you again. And I wonder what you're doing. Please don't laugh."

  She touched my hand. "That's so tender."

  "It's a little pathetic too."

  She laughed, and held on.

  "Because I think of myself as a big strong man," I said in a joking tone, but I meant what I said. I hardly recognized the man I'd become. I'd been planning to leave Calcutta around now, and here I was, in suspense at my hotel, making notes, avoiding friends, waiting to be summoned by Mrs. Unger, reduced to a needy boy.

  "That means a lot to me," she said.

  I hoped that she'd say that that was how she felt too when she was on her own, thinking of me. But I wanted her to be truthful. I could not phrase it as a question.

  I said, "I'd be happy if you thought of me now and then."

  "I think of you always." She was a little too prompt, as though observing a form of politeness. Yet she wasn't lying: I could feel her sincerity in her fingers, the way she held my hand. "I think we have a special bond."

  A person's hand can be like a lie detector. In hers I felt no tremble of deception, only a but, something unspoken at the end of her statement.

  As though answering a question I hadn't asked, she went on, "I need you to know everything."

  "That's what I want."

  "It'll take time," she said. "If you're patient"—she paused, looked out the window, the Calcutta Zoo on the right, the viceroy's mansion, another of Calcutta's decayed wedding cakes, now the National Library up ahead on the right behind a big white sign—"you'll see."

  "I often think about that letter you sent me."

  "My invitation."

  "It was more than that. You wanted me to help you save Rajat from being implicated in that business. The corpse in his hotel room."

  Her face became paler and less animated with thought. She said, "I still want you to help. Poor Rajat must not be compromised. It would destroy him."

  If I'd had anything to report I would have told her then—that I'd visited the hotel twice, been rebuffed the second time, and discovered that the girl who'd helped me had been assaulted and fired; that I'd met her in the Park Street Cemetery and she'd given me a severed hand. But I had no positive news, only these inconclusive events.

  "I want to do everything I can to protect him," she said. "I think the world of him."

  We were on back streets, among villas and walled compounds, some of them very grand, others almost romantic in their decrepitude, covered in vines, set in large gardens. And street dwellers and hovels too, as in the most expensive of Calcutta's neighborhoods. Yet this one was substantial, with a thinner flow of traffic.

  "This place looks familiar."

  "Alipore."

  "It resembles your neighborhood," I said. And I realized it was her neighborhood.

  She didn't reply. But any of these villas could have been hers.

  "I'm glad you think of me," I said, because I wanted her to say it again. I couldn't ask. It was often hard to obey her injunction against asking questions.

  "Yes. But you're a strong, independent person, so you know how strange it is to need someone else."

  I wanted to say I'm not strong anymore.

  "Charlie sees it. I think he's a little jealous."

  "He has his life," I said, because I couldn't say He has Rajat.

  She looked out the window as though glimpsing an answer. "It'll do him good. I don't interfere."

  "I thought Charlie worked for you."

  "He helps with my foundation. But he attends to his own affairs."

  That was typical of her confident ambiguity. His own affairs could have meant anything.

  "I'm so busy with my charities I hardly have time for anything else. I mean, besides the foundation there's my school, my clinic, the refuge. Well, you know. Keeping up with the funding and the accounting is a full-time job. And there's so much more. This is Calcutta!"

  The sidewalks we were passing, in spite of the elegant villas behind the high walls, were thronged with women and children. At this spot, as she finished speaking, women in red and yellow saris worked on a building site, carrying gravel out of a pit, emptying one basket at a time in a heap by the side of the road—construction workers, dressed as if for a folk festival.

  "I want to make an impact. I want to do something for these people. I don't want to be another tourist in India."

  She spoke in an urgent whisper, no
t in the valiant and weary way of a philanthropist, boasting of her charity. Her sincere undertone of modesty moved me and filled me with longing.

  I had never known any woman like her. Such a woman, I was thinking selfishly, was so truthful, so loyal to her principles, she would never leave me. She would love and nurture me, would be a companion and a caring friend, would look after me with the attention she gave to the lost children. And that same passion could be translated to the bedroom, where generosity mattered most.

  "It's always like this."

  She was speaking of the traffic, denser as we moved into narrower streets, among older buildings and shops, a neighborhood of pedestrians and auto-rickshaws, a place with the look of a bazaar, not residential except in the broadest sense, for people seemed to be living everywhere, in lean-tos and shanties and on blankets by the side of the road. Many of these people were hawkers, selling beads and relics and garlands of marigolds, or were squatting among piles of fresh flowers, stringing them together. The car was slowing, a steel barrier across the road ahead.

  "Blockages," Balraj said.

  "We'll walk from here. Deka hobey."

  I was glad to get out of the cramped back seat, and I thought, not for the first time, that Indian drivers had the best seat; the esteemed passengers in the rear had no legroom at all. As I swung the door open (Balraj was attending to Mrs. Unger) I was surrounded by men offering to guide me or to sell me necklaces and holy lockets. Mrs. Unger waved them off and led me, as a mother shepherds a small boy, keeping a few steps ahead, past the fruit sellers and the stalls into a narrow lane.

  "Look."

  In the distance, an opening between two poor huts, a squalid creek with muddy, littered banks, where some women were scrubbing pots in the filthy water, and others—women and children—were picking through an enormous pile of garbage that had been dumped by the riverside.

  "The holy Ganga."

  She was still walking with confidence, striding past the men importuning her.

  "And there."

  The sign of the old, low, pale yellow building was lettered Missionaries of Charity—Mother Teresa's Home for the Sick and Dying Destitutes. With shuttered windows and crumbling sills and cracked stucco, it could have been an old school or a warehouse.

  "You can look in."

  "Voyeurism," I said, but another sign caught my eye: The greatest aim of human life is to live at peace with God—Mother.

  Mrs. Unger saw it too. She said, "Poor Agnes. I wonder if she achieved her aim of finding peace with God. She certainly found peace with millionaires and celebrities. How she loved visiting New York. She went to Palm Beach once and dazzled everyone. Goodness, what did she do with all that money? She certainly didn't spend it on that sad building."

  "It does look ramshackle."

  "Compare it with my Lodge," Mrs. Unger said.

  "I see what you mean."

  "You know why she established herself here?" she went on. "So she could be a permanent defiance of the temple." She indicated a parapet and a gilded cupola. "That's the temple."

  She set her jaw and continued walking stiffly in her determined way through the milling crowds and the occasional beeping car. Wagons, auto-rickshaws, cows, shoppers, beggars, holy men, and saddhus—she parted the crowd, and I followed as though being carried into my childhood.

  Then I took her hand, and instead of consoling fingers I felt a sudden snatching grip, too tight, too hot, too damp, not leading me but pressing for support, her nails digging like a raptor clinging to meat. She wouldn't release me.

  "Those people," she said of the mob. She had gone pale. Her features were sharpened by anxiety and she wore a half-smile of fear. "I always think they want to devour me."

  She had cut through the crowd without looking left or right. This apparent confidence, which was bravado, making no eye contact, had made her seem imperious.

  But her hand told me the truth as she hung on. No one would have guessed that she'd noticed the crowd, though her hand resolved itself into a small panicky animal. It was not until we were past all those jostling people that she slackened her hold and began again to talk calmly.

  "You only hear about one side of the little woman," she said. "The saintly side."

  "I suppose there was another side."

  "With a saint? Always. A ghastly one," Mrs. Unger said in a subdued way, as if in sympathy.

  "That building's famous as her hospice, though."

  "And it's a glorified morgue," she said, and seemed torn, "because she adored suffering." She held her breath as we passed another staring knot of people. "I wonder who she was when she was alone. I think she had no faith except in herself. Nothing wrong with that, but like most crowd pleasers she didn't know when to stop."

  "That seems a little harsh."

  "I don't deny her charity. But she spent very little of the millions she was given. She believed that poverty made people better, but it can make them vicious. The Vatican has the money, all those windbags and pedophiles. Little Agnes was an egotist." Mrs. Unger was still gripping my hand, tapping her emotion into it. "I don't fault her for leaving her order of nuns and starting her own band of sisters. She needed to be in charge. It's understandable that she was self-invented—it's always the way with so-called saints. Saints are always on their own journey. Agnes was."

  "How do you know?"

  "I knew her. I helped her." Mrs. Unger was smiling, passing between a pair of imploring beggars. I glanced away from their cupped hands. "She had doubts, you know. But I forgive her for being an atheist, poor thing. God had pretty much abandoned her. Instead of faith, she had a feral willpower and a love of failure and death and, excuse me"—she waved away a man on a bicycle—"poverty and illness. Absolutely loved them, all these miseries that concentrate a person's mind on salvation. 'Save me,' people screamed at her, and that hopeless scream turned her head. Well, of course it would. Who would not be attentive to people so desperate, especially if you can build a reputation on it."

  "How well did you know her?" I asked.

  "I sometimes think I'm the only person on earth who truly understood her. She was tiny. Unphysical. She was well aware of the effect her little pickled face and twisted body had on other people. Famous people loved posing with her."

  I tried to imagine Mrs. Unger and Mother Teresa side by side, but it seemed a preposterous pairing. I suspected that Mother Teresa would not have been terrified by the mob, as Mrs. Unger obviously was.

  "She was preoccupied with death. I have only cared about the living, about children who have their whole life ahead of them," Mrs. Unger said. "She wanted to give people an easy death. Is that an accomplishment? What about giving them sixty years of useful life? But no, that didn't interest Agnes."

  I said, "Where are we going?"

  But she was too engrossed in this memory of Mother Teresa to answer.

  "I can ignore all that, but what I cannot ignore is her hideous posturing and her need to be noticed. Is that saintly? She lived for people to see her. She asked for money, but she believed that wealth was the source of evil. She needed witnesses. There's the difference. I don't want attention. I need no witnesses. I gave her money."

  Then she smiled—the smile of ill humor—and waved her hand in the direction of Mother Teresa's home.

  "And what's left? Only that obvious anachronism, the house of death."

  Ahead of her, a bearded man in a long white shirt and homespun khadi vest recognized her and looked eager.

  "Yes, madam, here," and he gestured in invitation.

  "Apni keman achen?"

  "Bhalo achhi. Health is good, madam. I have been waiting you, madam."

  The front of his shop was open—no wall. It was not a shop in the usual sense, but rather an open-sided pen with a tile roof. In a fenced enclosure with an earthen floor there were about a dozen black bleating goats. They were small, most of them, with glossy coats, making sad little cries, each one tethered with a rope around its neck. They nibbled at fodde
r, grass that had been stacked in a cradle.

  The bearded man tugged one of the goats away from the others and heaved it off the ground, holding it in his arms. But Mrs. Unger walked past him—in her white diaphanous sari, in the reeking goat pen, she seemed suspended above the trampled floor.

  "This one," she said, indicating a small, bewildered-looking goat that stood staring up at her, not bleating. The animal looked cuddly and confident, even a bit defiant.

  "He's cute," I said.

  "The blackest. Dam koto?"

  "One thousand rupees, madam."

  Handing him a block of notes that had a paper band around it, she kept her eyes on the chosen goat.

  "A brave little thing," she said.

  What happened next happened fast. We crossed the lane, passed Mother Teresa's hospice again, and walked up another lane, entering the precincts of the temple she'd shown me earlier. A young man carried her goat tightly against his chest. Seeing her, some men at the temple cleared the way, shoving people, then nagging me to take my shoes off.

  As I sat on a bench, untied my shoes, and slipped them off ("And sockings, sar"), Mrs. Unger stepped out of her sandals and went to the back of the temple. I found her surrounded by chanting, sweaty-faced men near a walled enclosure—just walls, no roof. She wore a necklace of flowers, and the goat too was garlanded like a beloved pet. The chanting of the men became louder in their excitement.

  A man inside the enclosure wearing an apron-like skirt stood over a drum and began to smack it, a snare-drum sound of syncopation that got the crowd of men stamping. The drummer's arms were flecked with red. The sound and the louder chanting seemed to make the day hotter. My shirt was stuck to my back, and my head was burning.

  Speaking in what I took to be Bengali, Mrs. Unger directed the man with the goat to enter the walled enclosure. The man walked through clusters of flowers and what looked like fresh paint on the stone floor, where a barefoot priest stood, streaked with ashes and daubs of holy vermilion on his forehead and cheeks.

  The goat began to bleat as its head was jammed between two upright stone stakes the height of a wicket, its neck pushed hard against a stump. The drumming grew louder. The priest touched his fingers to his lips and then caressed the goat's head. He raised a long curved knife, and without pause he struck down, like a butcher dividing a side of meat, and with the same thunk as the blade hit solid wood.