Theroux Paul - A Dead Hand - A Crime in Calcutta

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?