A Dead Hand Read online

  As a change from the Hastings's food, I occasionally went to the New Cathay, on Chowringhee, an old-style Calcutta Chinese eatery with a high ceiling hung with fans that cooled a loyal clientele. I wondered what Mrs. Unger would say of me hunched over a plate of chili chicken and rice. It was another place where I knew I would never bump into another foreigner, where the food and beer were cheap, and I could convince myself, as I often did in Calcutta, that I was living inaccessibly in the city's past.

  I discovered what residents knew, that all life is there, the hawkers, the touts, the prostitutes, the Anglo-Christian enclaves, the shopkeepers, the vegetable sellers, the families, the running boys, the shouting men. The women and pretty girls tiptoed past the piles of garbage, and some in saris picked through the trash heaps in lanes, and one of these was European Asylum Lane. To locals it was an open-air theater of activity; they didn't notice the decrepitude, the stinks, the sewers. And so I learned a lesson, that I should do the same, and count my blessings.

  Now and then, from deep within the glowering façade of a house, or issuing from high up on a tenement balcony draped with drying laundry, I heard the loud voices of adults and the protesting squawks of children. I knew instinctively that parents were in an unstoppable fit of scolding, growing hotter. I never heard these voices in public, but often these angry howls were the voice-overs of my evening walks, people quarreling indoors in the heat. I was reminded of my own childhood, of being humiliated by my puritanical mother for something I'd said or done thoughtlessly—her raging at me. I felt no rancor; I smiled for my good luck in having met Mrs. Unger.

  These walks gave me more confidence. I wondered how much this was due to my having known the now unapproachable Ma. I suspected a great deal. I admired anyone, especially an American, who could live for a long time in this disorderly place and not complain or make a drama out of it. On the contrary, Mrs. Unger had nothing but praise for the city.

  The old splintered and pitted buildings matched my frame of mind; they looked eaten away and incomplete, yet I saw glimpses of their former glory. I was in my element; I was past it. I was decayed and aging. The cracks showing through the peeling paint, the dirty shutters, the windows opaque with dust, the dead bulbs, the flickering neon, the wobbling rickshaws and beat-up taxis, all like a dream of failure, reflected just how I felt about myself.

  One day on my way to the Roxy Bar, my walk through New Market took me near the Hotel Ananda. It had been more than a week since my last, unsatisfactory visit, and as I approached I saw the manager on the wide upper step, sitting in the characteristic Bengali way, all his weight on his left hip and left hand, with his left leg drawn up and his right foot planted on the step, his dhoti draped.

  I stopped and greeted him. If he had smiled and waved I might have walked on. But he glowered at me, with the dark beaky scowl that Indian men assume in displeasure and defiance—as though they're imitating a crow-like demon face they've seen in a temple. The man's look of contempt made me pause, reminding me of how unhelpful, even obstructive, he'd been before. I remembered his rudeness.

  As I walked up the stairs he tipped back slightly, still eyeing me with malice.

  "Remember me?"

  Instead of replying, he sharpened his look of malevolence, and this he managed by narrowing his eyes and defying me with a twitch of his hooked nose.

  "I was hoping to have another look at your guest register."

  "Not available."

  "Just one particular page. To examine it for a singular notation."

  One of the consequences of being among Bengalis was that I'd begun to talk this way, hoping to be understood.

  "Not possible."

  As he said it, and before I could mount the top step and tower over him, he gathered his dhoti around his legs and got to his feet. He began to withdraw into the narrow lobby of the Ananda, his arms folded. He had hairy ears, and when he opened his mouth to spit a red gob against his own wall I saw that his teeth had been reddened and eroded from betel chewing. His face and his teeth resembled the rotted façade of his hotel.

  I saw a glass-fronted refrigerator just off the lobby. "And I'll have a Thums Up, please."

  "Twelve rupees."

  I gave him the ragged bills and helped myself to a bottle, opening it—because he made no gesture to help—with the church key hanging on a string. Now, with the bottle, I had a pretext to linger.

  But he had gone behind the counter with the grille that looked to me like a ticket window.

  "So you can't show me the register?"

  "Confidential," he muttered.

  I saw just beneath the counter a gleaming head of hair, with a part that revealed a pale scalp.

  "Is that you, Mina?" I asked.

  The hair moved and a young woman raised her face to me, squirmed slightly, and said, "Mina not here."

  "What happened to Mina?" I asked the manager.

  "No longer employed. Now you must go."

  "I haven't finished this," I said, sloshing the liquid in the bottle of Thums Up.

  "Finish outside."

  "What if I want a room?"

  "If you want to book room, provide passport details and money in advance. If not, you can go."

  "May I ask your name?"

  "I am manager, Bibhuti Biswas."

  "Mr. Biswas, what happened to Mina?"

  His mouth went square. His teeth were discolored pegs, black and red. His ears were not just hairy at the edges but with twists of hair bristling from the ear holes. He had the dark, squashed, beaky face of a crow.

  "Get out."

  "Why should I?"

  This rude back-and-forth in the small hot space at the ticket window made the young woman crouching behind the counter visibly nervous. Her boss was agitated. The afternoon sun streaming through the dirty windows half blinded me.

  As much to her as to him I said, "Can you tell me where Mina lives?"

  Banging down a wooden yardstick on his desk with a slap, the manager rounded the counter in three strides, almost crow-hopping, and began to bark, showing his teeth again.

  "I must ask you to kindly vacate premises."

  "What's the problem?" I tried to keep calm, but I had seen Indians like him go berserk in a matter of seconds, so I was ready to jump.

  "I shall call constable forthwith."

  "Listen, this is in a good cause."

  "Bosh," he said, pressing one knuckle into his nose, but I noticed that in his other hand he still held the yardstick, hiding it in the folds of his dhoti.

  "Never mind."

  I walked back to my hotel, liking the city less, believing my amateur sleuthing to be futile, and planning my departure—mentally moving out of India. I went to the front desk to look at the railway timetable, and seeing me, Ramesh Datta, the clerk, began to smile. But he was smiling at something or someone behind me.

  "Your car, sir."

  I turned and, standing near a pillar, as if to take up less room and not intrude, Balraj, the driver, doffed his peaked cap and bowed.

  This time on the way to the Lodge I looked for landmarks. I wanted to remember the way. When we were stopped in heavy traffic, beggars pressed their faces against the window and made eating gestures, anxiously motioning to their mouths, patting their bellies, pleading. Turning away, I missed the landmarks, yet even when I could concentrate, I doubted that I'd be able to find the route again. We went from lane to lane, squeezed through alleys, and though each of them had its name in Bengali and English on an enamel plate bolted to the walls of corner buildings, I was not able to see any of them clearly. Calcutta was another Indian city where, as soon as I was away from a main thoroughfare, I was lost. And not just lost but transported, seeming to negotiate an alternate, sunken city, a Calcutta underworld from which there was no clear pattern and no escape, another level of the city existing in ghastly light diffused by risen dust.

  At the edge of a traffic-choked intersection was the big decaying mansion, the courtyard with the cracked founta
in, the broken wall, the wide split-bamboo blinds, the flight of steps, the fluted columns.

  In her purple and gold sari, Mrs. Unger stood almost regally at the top of the stairs, hands together.

  "Welcome."

  The sari shimmered as she straightened. Her hair was pulled back, she wore gold bangles at her wrists, and her face looked very pale among the Indians who flanked her like retainers.

  "Thanks for sending the car."

  "I was told you were inquiring after me."

  Inquiring after me was one of her Anglicisms, and an understatement. I was not desperate for her attention, but I'd been curious to know what she really felt about me. I was afraid of falling deeper, becoming so smitten that I risked getting lost in her big billowing personality, so swaddled in her affections that I'd be blinded and stifled. If I were to be stifled—I was tempted—I had to know that she was the real thing.

  "I wonder if you'd like a tour of the Lodge."

  "I'd love it." It frightened me to think that to know her better I would have agreed to anything she suggested.

  She turned to reenter the mansion, and as she did, she beckoned to a child standing shyly by the carved stone balustrade of the wide porch. He hurried to her, a skinny boy in blue shorts and a gray shirt, and she took his hand.

  "This is Jyoti," she said.

  "Hello, Jyoti. How are you?"

  "I am well, uncle. Thank you."

  He had a soft but certain voice, and he stood very straight, his head erect, his arms at his sides in a posture of obedience. From his shallow breathing and the shutter-blink of his eyelashes I could see that he was nervous, yet he had been so schooled in manners that he knew how to stand his ground. He was poised as a dutiful underling is poised. He knew better than to slouch; he was alert, polite, watchful without seeming worried. And somehow his anxiety only enhanced these traits, because for all his frailty he showed courage. Though he might have been older, and he seemed serious, even careworn, he didn't look more than ten or eleven—a small unswerving soldier. And I liked being called uncle.

  "How long have you been here?"

  "Eight months, uncle."

  "Do you like living at the Lodge?"

  "I am flourishing, uncle. Thanks be to her goodness. Ma is our mainstay."

  I could have said the same.

  Mrs. Unger said, "I'd love to take credit for Jyoti's success, but you see he's done it all himself. I can only give these children the tools. They have to learn how to use them. It's all up to them. And Jyoti is a senior boy now, one of the prefects. Aren't you, Jyoti?"

  "Yes, Ma."

  "Jyoti is one of the cleverest boys in the Lodge. He came to us as a street child. He was living in a cardboard box in a bustee at Sonagachi."

  I knew the place. I had put it on one of my evening walks, the red-light district near Sealdah railway station, where whores painted like clowns leered sadly from second-story windows. So a little color for me had been pure misery for Jyoti, whose mother might have lived and worked behind one of those windows.

  "I could see he had great promise. Think of the horrors he's seen in his short life."

  I couldn't imagine the life of a child in the streets of that debauched district of Calcutta—the drinking, the fights, the shouting, the contending men. Somehow this child had retained his humanity. But his pained eyes were those of a much older person, wounded and weary. He might have been a bit uneasy as he stood facing me, but his early years had made him unshockable.

  "I'd love to help him in some way," I said.

  "Don't you see? He doesn't need help. Do you, Jyoti?"

  "No, Ma."

  "He has everything he needs."

  "Yes, Ma," he said, and smiled, and I saw only a flicker of doubt on his lips, as you get when sad people smile.

  "Isn't he a big boy?"

  Maybe in Calcutta. He seemed to me undersized and skinny, his legs like sticks, his skin dusty and dry from poor nutrition.

  "A street child," Mrs. Unger said. "We're nursing him back to health. He'll be fine."

  "How long have you been running this orphanage?"

  "We never use that word." She was stern and seemed offended. "This is a home, a household. We live together as a family."

  The child Jyoti stood slightly apart. He had a mouse face, batlike ears, a tiny head, and narrow shoulders, and he was barefoot in his shorts.

  "How many children do you have here?"

  "We can accommodate sixty or more, but they have to be separate, boys and girls. They grow, they move on, we bring others into the family."

  We passed a classroom where small girls in white dresses were working at tables, drawing pictures on sheets of paper in colored crayon.

  "I emphasize the arts and language skills. Most of these children were rejected by their mothers, who couldn't look after them for one reason or another. Some were orphaned or abducted or from poor parents who left them here because they know the reputation of my foundation. They might die otherwise. Here is the kitchen."

  Two women in white cotton smocks and white caps were stirring tureens of dahl, another woman was slapping chapatis and frying them on a smooth stovetop. At another table a woman was sorting chickpeas, looking for pebbles.

  "Nutritious food, that's the secret," Mrs. Unger said. "We are entirely Ayurvedic here. All vegetarian. We have an Ayurvedic doctor on the staff."

  We came to a circular staircase. She called to a young boy dressed in blue shorts and a gray shirt, the same sort of school uniform as Jyoti, who ran to him. Then she started up the stairs.

  "This was the mansion of one of the great English families," Mrs. Unger said as she got to the landing, and we looked down at the large room. "It was a total wreck when I found it seven years ago, but we're slowly bringing it back. Charlie and Rajat are helping in the restoration. Look at those teak handrails and spindles and that wood paneling. It's very early and well worth preserving."

  "More rehab," I said.

  "That's the word. I want to be a lifesaver." She pointed left and right as we walked. "Bedrooms, dorms, showers."

  The big upper rooms were partitioned, and along the walls were bunk beds, in the center rows of little cots. The ceilings were twelve feet high in some rooms, with fans hanging from vertical pipes.

  "Boys here, and"—she was still walking along the corridor—"over here, girls."

  "What sort of ages are they?" I asked.

  "We take them young. We encourage them. We train them and then they enter the great world."

  I was impressed by the orderliness of the place, the way Mrs. Unger ran it like a kindly headmistress; but when I praised her she dismissed it, as if out of modesty. Yet I babbled and praised her more. I wanted to please her, and though I intended to exaggerate her generosity, I realized that I didn't have to. What she was engaged in was a powerful example of philanthropy, using her own money, not soliciting funds, to create a safe place for lost children.

  I told her that.

  "Thank you," she said. "I like that—'lost children.' I'd like to work that into my brochure. Sometimes when they come here they're angry, nearly uncontrollable. The world has been cruel to them. But we try to reassure them. We feed them and give them clean conditions and make them feel secure."

  "How do you do that?"

  "By loving them," she said simply. "Sometimes I just hold them, wrap my arms around them. I can feel all the tension go away."

  I wanted to be held like that. Here I was, alone in India; I could relate to the lost children, bewildered in the city. I could understand a child being soothed in Mrs. Unger's arms. I had been held by her—the magic fingers—and I wanted more.

  "Call it a safe haven," she said.

  It was serene and orderly and swept clean. The place actually worked.

  We had arrived at the back of the mansion, a room I remembered that gave onto the garden. From here and around the rear courtyard I recognized as the spa area—the massage room I'd been in, the steam room, the showers and plun
ge baths, and on an upper balcony some lounge chairs where, after the exertions of a massage or a scrubbing or a sauna, a person could lie down and snooze.

  Two men lay sleeping there, their faces covered with towels, their legs stretched out. They were as still as corpses.

  "Charlie and Rajat," Mrs. Unger said. "I love to see them together."

  That first evening I'd met her, she'd said, "I never know what I ought to do," and "They're in charge." And I'd seen her as the uncertain mother, being gently bossed by her son and his friend. Now I knew better, but I was more than ever touched by her kindness.

  Here as elsewhere in the mansion were men in white pajamas standing like orderlies, or like sentries. They greeted Mrs. Unger with a show of respect, not looking her in the eye but, in a habit of esteem, half bowing—and I would not have been surprised to see them drop to their knees and abase themselves, touch the hem of her sari and bleat in submission. I thought this because one of them actually made as if to do it, startling me as he knelt and rolled his whole body forward at her feet in genuflection.

  "The garden," she said, stepping past the servant, extending her arm, indicating palms and bushes and red lilies and thick, pale tree roots surrounding a pool of glittering water.

  "The massage rooms are down there, aren't they?"

  "That's right. Bottom of the stairs."

  "I really enjoyed the experience," I said.

  She smiled, but vaguely. Had I interrupted her train of thought? She said without much emotion, "I'm so glad."

  "I kind of thought we were headed there."

  "All in good time," she said.

  Was she teasing me? It was hard to tell. It was not as though this tour was frivolous. The more I saw, the more I was convinced that this was a large project—the size of the house, the number of children, the order of it, both as a school and a refuge, entirely self-sufficient, with a clinic and a spa.