Theroux Paul - A Dead Hand - A Crime in Calcutta

That also made me recall the Fairlawn, the newspaper cuttings about infanticide and servants murdering their employers and the Monkey Man. I mentioned this to Mrs. Unger.

"That's nothing," she said. "There are monsters and freaks all over India. Real monsters, grotesque freaks. No one writes about them. No one sees them. They write about buffoons — the Monkey Man! They praise the call centers and the steel mills. 'We have computers!' They write about happy families, not about child-strangling, the mobs, rural suicide, the bombs on trains and in marketplaces where people are blown to bits. 'What a colorful bazaar!' Nothing about the savage crowds and bombs. Nothing about diseases." She smiled her bitter smile. "They're content. And they're furious too." She canted her head. "See those purple hills?"

"Yes."

"Bhutan," she said. "We'll be in Gauhati soon. That's the Brahmaputra River, though you can only see the embankment. We have a hotel in Gauhati." She turned away from the window and smiled at me over her cup of tea. "You might do something for me there."

On a long curve, the compartment filled with light that warmed the stale air, and Mrs. Unger lit a stick of incense to freshen it. I stepped out to use the mucky toilet, and on the way, passing the propped-open door, I was surprised by the cool breeze eddying in the vestibule, and the sight of fog lying in patches, like large gray wisps of wool, unraveling and ghosting across the freshly plowed fields. The river — mostly sandbanks here — was visible through the thicknesses of bamboo, in wide clumps. I could see women setting off across the smooth dunes, past the beached boats and black hulks, with basins of laundry on their heads, seeking the watercourse that was hidden from view in this dry season. Then the tea gardens, then the low hills.

I was hoping after all this time for something substantial. It was not a pretty landscape. It was a chewed and ruinous one, a floodplain in a time of drought, before the monsoon. Gauhati rushed upon us, a progression of well-made shacks rising to humble shops and three-story slapped-together buildings. I was back in the compartment, tugging the bags from the upper berth. Mrs. Unger sat calmly. She touched my shoulder to restrain me.

"We're being met. The porters will take care of this."

And, as she spoke, a man in a wool hat with a sign saying UNGER appeared outside the window of our coach as we drew into Gauhati station.

"That funny little man is ours."

She greeted him in Bengali, with Namashkar and the usual how-are-you that I was beginning to learn, Apni keman achen? And she must have asked him his name, because he replied, "Ravi Baruha, madam, speaking English."

"Our bags are right inside, compartment ten."

Ravi Baruha nodded to his own lackey, who rushed in for the bags and soon was balancing one on his head and one in each hand, Baruha leading the way.

"We want to visit the Kamakhya temple later this morning, and tomorrow we're on the train to Silchar."

This was news to me — not just the temple, but Silchar. I was reminded that I was in her hands.

"Train departs eight A.M. for Lumding," Baruha said. "Change for Silchar."

"I have the tickets."

"Long journey, madam."

"We are on a mission." She nodded at me.

Outside the station, we boarded a van. I sat next to the driver, and the porter crouched in the narrow space at the back, tangled in the luggage. Baruha said, "New hotel. Just open. Many facilities."

But I listened without interest, for all this time, since early morning, since Bodoland, I'd been deep in thought, glancing at Mrs. Unger and, when she was turned away, studying the nape of her neck, the texture of her hair, the gleam of her skin, her slender hands, her feet in her sandals, her profile, her pretty mouth, remembering what she had told me. I'm black was a mystery to me.

I was used to gazing at her, but this was in adoration. I was lost in a new kind of scrutiny, but all I saw was what I had seen before: the face, the body of the woman I loved, if anything paler and prettier than ever, a loveliness and purity I wanted to hold, because in holding her, I was holding all her good works. I yearned to put my mouth on her — not so strange a desire. It was the elemental hunger all passionate lovers feel, something almost cannibalistic, the intensity of tantric bhoga.

"Indians have a genius for making something new look fifty years old," she said under her breath as we entered the hotel. "They never quite finish and it's never quite right. All of India is a work in progress. Do I mean progress? Never mind."

At the front desk, the clerk said, "We've been expecting you. We've put you in our Palace Suite. Good journey?"

"Excellent. Thank you for asking."

After the paperwork and the porter and the rackety elevator with its gates of steel mesh, we were shown to a suite that overlooked a sports ground — some boys playing cricket, the crack of the bat, scattered shouts. Mrs. Unger pulled the curtains.

We were alone at last in the half-dark. I had the sense in this new setting that we were strangers. I was plunged into a self-conscious silence. I didn't know what to say. I desired her, but how to begin? Lying across from her in the opposite berth in the rocking train all night had confused me. I was tongue-tied and felt awkward, not to say tormented.

But she knew that. She could always assess a situation and was never at a loss for words.

"First a bath," she said. "And then the temple. After that, you might give me a massage. You know how. That's how I learned, by getting one from a dakini. Do you feel up to it?"

" Dakini? " Where had I heard that word?

"Priestess, healer," she said. "Never mind the words. Tantra is full of them. But it's the deeds that matter."

Priestess was an apt word for her. It was how I had seen her at Kalighat, in a rapture after the goat sacrifice. I held her. Instead of kissing her I pressed my head against hers and felt the blood pounding at my skull.

We took showers separately and afterward went down to the hotel lobby. The driver Ravi Baruha signaled to us with a wobble of his head that he was in attendance.

I had imagined Gauhati to be a small riverside town, but it was a sprawling city in bad repair, with tucked-away bazaars and slow-moving traffic, bicycle rickshaws and old buses wreathed in diesel fumes. The wide river was so shrunken in these months before the monsoon that it seemed like a shallow lake streaked with low islands of sand. The streets smelled of earth and oil and had a tang that reminded me of bark mulch.

"Fancy bazaar," Ravi Baruha said in the Bengali way, bajjar. "Big and famous. Pan bazaar. Many attendees."

The temple crowned a rocky hill just outside the busy part of the city. The area was one of Gauhati's landmarks — scenic in the Indian sense, meaning that it was a magnet for mobs and vandalism. "Scenic" in India always implied blight.

It seemed to me a Mrs. Unger observation, but when I said this to Mrs. Unger, she gave me one of her I-couldn't-agree-less smiles.

"You're looking at surfaces," she said. "Always a mistake in India. You're distracting your mind with all the wrong things. You could say this road is a mess" — our car had begun to climb the steep road of loose boulders and litter and yellow wilted trees; it was a mess— "but this is the way to the holy temple, a holy road. We're so lucky. I love those ragged prayer flags and those faded pennants."

"I wish I had your gift for seeing into things."

"Close your eyes, maybe. You'll see more."

But I didn't, because the sharp bends and the steepness were making me feel carsick.

"Go as far as you can," she said as Baruha parted the crowd by tapping his horn.