Theroux Paul - A Dead Hand - A Crime in Calcutta

"Howard is a great friend," he said. "He left me a message on my voice mail. I hope I haven't kept you waiting."

He must have known he had. I'd been downstairs for almost half an hour.

"I want you to look at this," I said, and was glad to see, as I spoke, that he stepped behind me to shut his office door.

He hardly reacted when he opened the pouch. Then he frowned and stroked his mustache. He did not remove the dead hand, as I had done. He looked at it closely through the clear plastic wrapper.

"I will not ask you how this body part has come to be in your possession. I shall assume that you came by it honestly, or happened upon it. Hooghly is teeming with body parts of incomplete cremations. My good wife and I encountered a human leg one day at Tolly's Nullah."

"So you understand."

"I shall log it in as DNA rather than evidence. What is it you require?"

"I want to know the age. The sex. Most of all, the fingerprints. I'd like to identify who it is."

After he had agreed, and I had left the office, walking to calm myself, I thought: And who am I? Please tell me who I am and what I'm doing.

Then all that changed.

THE SMOKY HALF-DARK room, Mrs. Unger's vault, was arranged as though for a Black Mass. The only light was the flame of one fragrant candle, near a stick of incense burning in a dish before a fierce-faced goddess. The air was ripe with the gummy odor of hot oil. Saturated with this same oil, I lay face-down on the table of heavy wood, which was shaped like ancient altars I had seen in the Middle East — in Syria and Jordan — at which animals were slaughtered and offered as sacrifices. This one was also scooped out at the end and gouged with grooves, so that blood could drain from the beheaded animal. I was surrendering, I was offering myself up. I was happy.

I was calm because — how can I describe this without sounding mawkish? — I was convinced of Mrs. Unger's goodness, her pure intentions, her great works among the poor and the innocent in Calcutta. And yet I was also invigorated by her passion. I wanted her to know how I felt. She had been testing me — in a way, everything she did or said was a test of my sincerity. She had sent me a letter, she had introduced me to her son and his friend, she had taken me for a meal, she had massaged me with her healing hands. And then she had made me wait, tormented me, met me again, said Ask no questions, and finally she'd shown me the interior of her mansion, the house of lost children.

I had cooperated. I could not have refused. I was smitten with her, half in love but also afraid, because in my life (and she seemed to know this) I had not loved anyone without having been wounded. Love was power and possession, love caused pain: you were never more exposed than when you were in love, never more wounded; possession was an enslavement, something stifling.

Then Mrs. Unger had summoned me to her vault, and I felt at last that she needed me, perhaps not as much as I desired her, but desire was never equal. Maybe that accounted for its intensity, the tantalizing difference making me eager, while her holding back a little, or at least her not matching my passion, made me overstate mine and want more from her.

This sounds like a power struggle, and I suppose most passion amounts to that, but it is of an overwhelming kind in which both parties are satisfied. It just wasn't possible to be an equal in desire, nor to play the same role: there was always a giver and a receiver. I mentioned earlier the paradoxes and contradictions of the wealthy. Mrs. Unger embodied some of those contradictions and reminded me of all the conflict I felt when faced with a rich person. I looked at one of these people and knew I did not matter. I did not feel there was anything I could give her, and then I realized that my gift to her was my submission. It is the ultimate gift to any powerful person. Over the weeks of this semicourtship she had managed to strip me of the last traces of my resistance, all my hesitation, all my questions.

She had asked me if I planned to stay in Calcutta.

I'll do whatever you want me to do, I'd said.

That was the posture she required: unconditional surrender.

It took no effort on my part. I wanted to do whatever she wished of me; I wanted her to use me. She was virtuous and I was not, and to prove it, here I was on the sacrificial altar, flat on my face, stark naked.

I didn't hear her enter the vault. I heard the door latch being lifted like a nail scratch, the bolt thrown decisively. Then I became aware of a powerful odor of flowers filling the room, a perfume that hovered at my face and heated my scalp, a sweetness that was like an anesthetic, the aroma humming and thickening in the air that half stifled me and made me dizzy. And being in the vault was like being inside her body.

The silken sari lapped against my arm and slipped against my shoulder and brushed my cheek. I wanted to eat it. I felt a light touch, her fingers on my head as though anointing it, and fingertips on my naked back, tracing my spine. I had started to raise my head when I felt the pressure of her hand. But I was too dazed by the strong perfume to do much except lie there on the altar-like table and receive her touch.

She did not say a word, yet her hands on me spoke, prodding me with her thumbs, pressing her knuckles into my backbones, interrogating my flesh with her fingers. She held my head, lifted and twisted it until my neck seemed to swivel on crusted grains of sugar. She pinched my neck the way a cook flutes pastry, and even in my drugged state it hurt. She massaged my ears, beginning with the rims and working slowly toward the lobes. Head, neck, shoulders, spine — she clasped me and seemed to penetrate my body, digging to the attachments of my muscles.

All this time I lay flat and face-down on the hot oiled wood of the sacrificial table.

She gently lifted my right arm, dug her fingers into the muscles starting at my shoulder, and pressed so hard she could have been using pliers, inching downward to my wrist. The pressure was painful, perhaps the more so because I could hear her breathing as she made an effort. And when she slipped to my hand and held it and pushed the meat and muscle of my palm apart, using her thumb on the bones, I was almost overcome by a feeling I could not tell was pleasure or pain.

I worked with this hand. My right hand was the instrument of action and creation — holding a pen, making love. It contained the soul of my handshake, it was a weapon, it fed me and consoled me when I stroked my cheek or clasped my chin or rubbed my eyes: my life scored in its lines, my labor in its calluses. This hand was my writing instrument.

She seemed to know how important this hand was to me as she separated each muscle in my palm and used her fingertips to find the small bones beneath, finally cracking the joints finger by finger.

I give you my hand, lovers say at a betrothal. It was exactly what I felt. She had picked up my hand, massaged it, pulled it apart, heated it with her own hand, and made it her own.

She lifted my other arm and did the same, breaking down the muscle, disconnecting the bones, taking me to pieces muscle by muscle, a ritual of separation and connection, a kind of bloodless surgery.

I had not realized how strong she was. In the dark, feeling the sharpness of her touch, I was like a child in the hands of a giantess — small, not weak but overwhelmed. She shifted to stand at the end of the table and placed the crown of my head just above her knees and clasped it, thrusting as she worked on my back.