A Dead Hand Read online

  "I haven't seen the Jerry Delfont byline lately," he said. That irritating verbal mannerism. I winced, hearing my full name again. "Usually you're everywhere."

  "I've been pretty busy," I said, and I knew from the forced encouragement tightening in his expression that he didn't believe me. I hadn't been busy at all, not in any way he would have understood.

  "Are you on an assignment?"

  "In a way," I said, and we both knew that this meant no.

  The form and tone of a person's question often indicates that he wants to be asked the same question. "Have you been to Bhutan?" means "Ask me about Bhutan. I've just been there." But his manner wasn't like that. He didn't want to answer any questions. He was the interrogator, at the periphery, behind the light.

  And with each question came a compliment.

  "I always look for your pieces in magazines. They're so topical."

  "I try to keep on the move," I said.

  "You travel light. I envy you."

  Another canny reference. "Travel Light" was one of my magazine columns.

  "You do a lot of TV" he said.

  Was this a gibe? It seemed so.

  Howard said, "I hadn't realized that."

  "I was on cable. It's not the same as network TV."

  "You're good at it," Theroux said. "You should do more of it. You could have your own travel show."

  I took this to mean I wasn't much of a writer, that my real talent lay in gabbing to a camera. Maybe he didn't mean that. But the problem in talking to him was that I wasn't sure exactly what he meant. I was sure that all this time he was verbally dancing around, using a magician's misdirection while peering at me.

  "You do TV don't you?"

  "No," he said. "Never. I wouldn't be any good at it." Was this a compliment or a putdown?

  "How long have you been in Calcutta?" he asked.

  "About a month. Maybe more. I've lost track of time."

  "That's travel at its best," he said, sounding pompous and self-important. "The open-ended thing—no view to going home."

  "Since I don't have a home, it's pretty easy," I said, to set him straight.

  "Footloose."

  "Not really. I have a tenant in my place in New York. I use the rent money to travel."

  And I thought: Goddamn, why did I give him this information?

  "How about you?" I said. "Where do you live?"

  "It's hard to say. I've never been happy living exclusively in one place. And we Americans are not natural expatriates, even writers like us."

  Utterly evasive, and writers like us was just a way of patronizing me. He wrote books, I wrote magazine pieces; but by referring to us both as writers, he was grandly including me in his company. Did he really think I believed him?

  He was older than I imagined but affected a kind of eager curiosity that I associated with someone younger—someone on the make. And that was another irritant. But mostly it was his inquisitive eyes that I minded.

  "We have some Americans here that almost qualify as expats," Howard said. "Indian visas and work permits are problematical, but there are some Americans in India who might regard themselves as residents."

  Though I knew what he was driving at, I didn't help him.

  "Missionaries," Theroux said. "Indians hate Christian God botherers. Now and then they persecute them. It's funny, we've got all sorts of Hindu proselytizers in the U.S. Remember that sex-mad guru with all the Rolls-Royces and funny hats?"

  "Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh," I said.

  "Bhagwan means 'god,'" Theroux said. "He promoted himself to god!"

  Howard said, "It's used in a different sense, kind of an honorific."

  "Whatever," Theroux said. "It was tantric sex he was selling, to cast a sexual spell over his flock. I associate him with polymorphous perversity. And visa fraud."

  "Anyway, he's dead," I said.

  "The Americans who come to Calcutta tend to be philanthropists," Howard said. "An awful lot of them started out working as volunteers with Mother Teresa. It was almost a rite of passage, part of the India tour. Seeing the sights, then a few weeks feeding the incurables."

  "Mother Teresa believed that poverty was a good thing," I said, trying to remember what Mrs. Unger had said.

  "Funnily enough, she collected millions in donations," Theroux said.

  Howard said, "I see these people all the time."

  "Thoreau said, find a do-gooder and you'll see that at bottom there's something wrong with his life. 'If he has committed some heinous sin and partially repents, what does he do? He sets about reforming the world.' Why else do pop stars and celebrities get involved in these causes? Their lives are so miserable. The things they do are so worthless, so meretricious and overpaid. They need to atone, to make themselves look better. And being bossy do-gooders feeds their vanity."

  He had become animated, and seemed uncharacteristically sincere as he became vexed.

  I said, "Maybe they want to give their lives meaning. I did a piece on Liz Taylor. She really cares about AIDS research, and she's raised a lot of money—millions."

  "I guess that's what happens to actresses who can't get a part in a movie anymore," Theroux said. He was poking one finger into a plate of peanuts on the table, stirring them, a way to show me that he had no interest in what I was saying. "Know what these are called in Bengali? Cheena badam. Chinese almonds. But they're peanuts. What does that tell you about pretensions here?"

  I said, "Liz Taylor's using her fame for a good cause."

  "With all respect, Jerry, that's what they all say, all these lame high-profile mythomaniacs."

  "What's wrong with doing good?"

  "They're not doing good. They're promoting themselves. They think money is the answer, but they have so much money they should know that money is not the answer. They're doing harm. Here, have some Chinese almonds."

  "So what's the answer?"

  "Like the guru said, What's the question?"

  "Mrs. Unger isn't high-profile," Howard said.

  At last, after all this time, her name. It had been hovering over the conversation for the past fifteen minutes.

  Theroux turned to me. "What do you think?"

  I went vague. "About what?"

  "Mrs. Unger."

  I sipped my beer and tried to look indifferent. I said, "I don't really know her."

  Howard reacted to this with just the slightest hitch of his spine, a straightening, a fractional head-bob, and I knew that Theroux had registered the involuntary twist of Howard's reaction as well as my own flat denial. I should not have denied her. Both men knew I was lying, but worst of all Theroux pretended to believe me. His bland expression of credulity was like contempt for me, the heartless and unblinking gaze of a hunter lining up a prey animal through a gun sight—an animal that has just revealed a weakness, a slowness, a limp, perhaps.

  "I can tell you a few things about her," Theroux said. "She stays below the radar. She's been married two or three times. She first came to Calcutta about ten years ago, like many others, to work at the Kalighat hospice with Mother T. Got disillusioned by Mother. Drifted to the establishment next door."

  "The Kali temple?" Howard said.

  "Right. She's said to be a practitioner." While Theroux talked, he hardly seemed to look at me, yet he was monitoring me closely. "It's said that she's a dakini, a kind of priestess, and that she taught tantric massage to a French actress who'd come out to work with Mother T. The actress later had an affair with a big Hollywood tycoon and bewitched this rich guy with Mrs. Unger's tantric method. How about that for a story?"

  "Why don't you write it?"

  "Why don't you?" Theroux said. "Oh, sorry, that's right—you don't know her." He peered at me for a reaction before adding, "Look her up. She's never been interviewed, yet she runs one of the largest private charities in Calcutta. She'd be a huge 'get'—isn't that what they say on TV about people in demand?"

  "I don't do much TV these days."

  "I thought you said you
were pitching a new travel show. She'd be perfect for a Calcutta segment."

  "Or a chapter in one of your books."

  "I have plenty of material," he said. "You want material? Hey, I got it."

  He reached into his briefcase and became absorbed in leafing through a folder of newspaper cuttings, sorting them.

  "I love these Calcutta stories. They're like urban myths. There's a woman here, Mrs. Chakraverti, who calls herself a witch and supposedly had an affair with Elvis. She advertises her powers. Or the crazed woman two weeks ago at Howrah who was jealous of her sister-in-law, so she threw her baby in a pond when no one was looking. Two cases like this in one week! Also"—he was holding a flimsy cutting—"lately, servants have been teaming up with dacoits to rob their employers, sometimes murdering them. There was a case recently in Ballygunge, just down the road. The newspapers came out with a story on how to know whether your servants are planning to kill you. I love this stuff."

  "I just read the matrimonial classifieds," Howard said.

  "Me too," Theroux said. "Or what about the abduction classifieds?"

  He was not looking at me and yet, even turned aside, his body was like an instrument measuring my reactions.

  "'Search for kidnapped girl,'" Theroux read. "'Sumita Chandran, ten, four feet five inches, kidnapped on twelve Feb. at Howrah.' Or 'Anikat, eight months old, missing since January.' 'Sultana, five, disappeared in 2007. Nitesh Kumar, seven. Prafula, five.'" He closed the folder. "Forty-four thousand children missing every year. Eleven million Indian children are designated as 'abandoned.'"

  Howard said, "They end up in the sex trade, or as adoptees. Or in the sweatshops."

  "Mrs. Unger helps them," Theroux said. "One of the few who cares. That's the story. That's why I'm interested."

  I decided not to respond, but he seemed to register even this resistance.

  "I wish I could find her," he said.

  "That shouldn't be too hard for you."

  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 th
e 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.

  10

  SOMEHOW —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.