Theroux Paul - A Dead Hand - A Crime in Calcutta

"This city doesn't change," Howard was saying.

And I had to admit that, stalling, uttering clichés myself, I was doing the same to Theroux, sizing him up.

Meeting a writer in the flesh is always a letdown, since the image you have from the writing is formed from loaded or misleading words. On the page the writer is an intelligence, an efficient and fluent being, clear-sighted and alert: the reader invents a face for this man. In the flesh the writer is usually misshapen, overcautious, or hesitant; fallible in the way that flesh is fallible; bruised, squinting, older and shorter than you expect — even, quite often, unbalanced. I met Hunter Thompson once at a party in New York and he seemed timid and oversensitive and insane, like a crazy child. Writers never resemble the jacket photo. They are always smaller and heavier. Theroux's hair was thinner, but no writer's hair looks in the least like the hair in his photograph.

This fox in prose looked hot and obvious, fleshier than his picture, not vulpine at all but preoccupied, flexing his fingers in a displacement activity to use his hands, as though he wanted to be writing down what I was saying or making notes. In spite of the humidity he wore a rough-spun cotton khadi vest and baggy trousers, a collarless shirt, leather walking shoes, no socks, an expensive watch. His round-lensed horn-rim glasses were the type Indians called "Netaji spectacles," after the glasses popularized by the nationalist Netaji Bose. Though he smiled pleasantly enough, his eyes were busy behind his specs, too busy, always on me, up and down the whole time. I was reassured that he appeared older than his picture; he'd lost his looks, if indeed he'd ever had them; but he was sinewy with determination, that ruthlessness I mentioned before. He was friendly in a way that bothered me, because I knew he didn't mean it and must want something.

"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.