Theroux Paul - A Dead Hand - A Crime in Calcutta

Balraj said in a respectful but cautioning way, "Please listen to her speak, madam."

Seeming to marvel at Balraj's audacity, Mrs. Unger softened. " Namashkar. Apni keman achen? "

"She not well," Balraj said.

The woman clutched her ragged sari with heavy sunburned hands and turned her beaky face on Mrs. Unger. She began to shout, showing red teeth and dark gums.

"She say she wanting money. You have money."

"That's true. Go on."

"She having no money. She say, 'I not normal.' She say, 'God make me different, not like you. People treating me in bad way because I not normal.'"

The rough-looking beggar woman was becoming angrier as she spoke. I had seen many panhandlers. They repeated the same phrases, pleading for food, and "No mother, no father!" But this one was giving a speech, denouncing Indians, proclaiming her abnormality, and all of it seemed threatening, her voice harsh with menace.

Because I did not understand anything she said, I looked closer, scrutinizing her, and saw that she was not a woman. She was a man, middle-aged, wrinkled, and graceless, clownish in a torn sari, with big filthy feet and swollen hands, a wooden comb jammed into his matted hair, and still demanding money, beginning to shriek, showing his green gummy tongue.

"If you don't give, madam, she will open sari and make nuisance and shame." Balraj, in his panic, was reaching into his own pocket for rupees. "She will show private parts."

But Mrs. Unger had summed him up herself and was counting hundred-rupee notes. Seeing her, the man — I no longer saw a woman in this sari — became calmer and licked the spittle from his lips and reached out, his big hostile hand like a weapon.

"That's more than you asked for. Onek dhonnobad, " Mrs. Unger said.

After the strange creature whined his mild thanks— " Dhonnobad. Thik achhi " — and touched the money to his forehead; after Balraj got off and saluted us from the platform; after the whistle blew and the train set off into the late-afternoon sun, Mrs. Unger shut the compartment door and took the seat facing me and spoke in a subdued voice.

"I'm glad that happened. That was extraordinary." She was silent for a while, breathing softly. "I needed that."

I began to say something about the Hindu concept of maya, illusion; about the Jain word anekantvad , "the many-sidedness of reality." In beetling and practical India, where everyone occupied a narrow slot in society, this obliqueness and vagueness and evasion, ill-informed observation, arcane philosophy reduced to the sort of chitchat that foreigners like me made in India, usually thirdhand, "Someone was telling me…" But I didn't complete the thought.

She had been smiling, but the smile slackened, and her eyes glistened and went out of focus. Very slowly her smile broke, her face softening as though a thought was crawling beneath the loose skin of her features. It was the sort of expression you see just before a shout, a face about to swell with laughter. Several attitudes rose and fell until I no longer recognized her helplessness. The face of someone you've never seen cry before is shocking because it seems another face entirely, and you can't imagine why it is so cracked and ugly and weak.

Mrs. Unger lifted her hands and began to sob into them. I made a move to sit beside her to console her, but she must have seen me through her fingers, and she waved me back.

She seemed to draw great anguished breaths from deep within herself, sorrowing with her whole body. I said nothing. I watched her weep, hoping she'd understand that my close attention represented the sympathy I felt. But it was more than sympathy. It was fear too, seeing this strong woman reduced to helpless tears — and why?

The train clanked over those loose rails at level crossings that are so frequent at the fringes of big Indian cities. Mrs. Unger still sat across from me, upright, her knees together, her lovely hands resting on them, facing me but not seeing me, her eyes large and so unfocused as to be luminous, tears streaking her cheeks. Then she took out her bag and, using her mirror, dabbed at her face and tidied her dampened hair.

"That was perfect. I'd wondered how to begin. But that was the right beginning."

A grubby transvestite looking for a handout."

Her reddened eyes found me. "A person living two lives."

She said it softly, correcting me, not in any melodramatic way but with an intensity that seized my attention.

"You have something you want to tell me. Something serious."

"I don't really want to. It's better when secrets are kept."

"Then don't tell me."

"I feel I have to. You know too much already."

"Do I?" I felt I knew very little about her, but that I had no right to ask for more.

"You know what I'm like in the dark — with you, alone."

"In your vault."

"Darkness reveals who we really are."

"I hope so."

"But now you know I have a secret."

"The only part that bothers me is that it's somehow related to that strange person, the man in women's clothes. So what are you saying?"

I was more than bothered; I was seriously alarmed. I had never seen Mrs. Unger naked, and for all I knew — and I felt utterly ignorant and credulous — Mrs. Unger could have been Mr. Unger.

She didn't blink. She was staring at me as if to say I defy you to see what it is that's strange about me. It's right in front of your face. She wasn't mocking, yet a smile was implied, as a pinhole of light in her eyes, a glitter of that same defiance.

This was all a little too playful for me. Anyone can face you and say I'm not what I seem, guess my secret , torment you by forcing you to guess. It was a cruel way of making a fool of you, wringing an admission — but of what?

"I think it would be good if we didn't have any secrets," I said.

"Not good. My secrets sustain me," she said.

I said, "I've never known anyone who was so forthright."

"I'm talking about one secret," she said. "I wonder how you'll take it."

"Nothing could possibly change my feelings for you."

"You might find it shocking."

"I want to be shocked," I said, daring myself. "I want to share your shocking secret."

It be so strange to you. You must not cry out , Mina Jagtap had said, passing me the dead hand.

Mrs. Unger smiled at me the way an older person smiles at someone much younger, that You'll learn smirk of superiority. I became very nervous and thought: Is she going to tell me she's a man?

In my anxiety I looked out the window for relief and saw that the sun was at the level of the palm trees in the middle distance. A half hour out of Calcutta and we were already in the countryside, a chewed-up landscape of trees with shredded foliage and small straw-roofed bamboo huts and the usual biblical scenes of robed women carrying water jars and boys herding goats and men in turbans leaning to steady wooden plows that were pulled by sleek black buffalo. The daylight dimmed as we watched, the lamps not yet lit in the train, and in this gathering dusk Mrs. Unger became calmer and more certain.

"I'm black," she said simply.

"You're not."

"I'm black," she insisted. In a low voice she added, almost in sorrow, "I hate confessions. They're so stagy."

I sat back, flattened against the seat cushion, so I did not appear to be staring.

"I know I don't look it, but I am. If you were black, you'd know it immediately. I can pass for white among whites, but I can't pass for white among blacks. We have ways of knowing."

The obvious question was on my face.

"We black people."

She had become very serious and somewhat vexed, as though exasperated at having to explain something so complicated to someone so simple. Certainly she'd gotten my attention, and because I didn't know what to say or where to look, I was just gabbling.