Theroux Paul - A Dead Hand - A Crime in Calcutta

"An hour or two isn't enough," she'd said to me once. It took an hour just to warm up and two hours at least to achieve bhoga —delight. And so I went on riding her, smoothing her, oiling her, and pushing her with my palms, plying her chakras with my fingertips — the first time I'd ever touched her in this way. I loved her sighs of acceptance and the way she turned slippery, her whole body, like a great oily reptile I was riding, digging my elbows into her buttocks, and (another of her techniques) using my chin and my mouth on the base of her spine, feeling the warmth radiate throughout her body.

Even in the half-light of the hotel room, all the blinds drawn, she glowed. I remembered her saying in the train, I'm black. I gloried in it for being our secret. I was a monkey clinging to a goddess, desperate to please her.

"Now," she said after a long while of my caresses, and I dismounted, crouching beside her, as she shifted and rolled over, naked, arms to her sides, her legs parted.

She used both hands, her clutching fingers, to spread her sex like a flower. Or so it seemed to me as I watched, like an opening lotus with reddened and thickened petals.

"Find the sacred spot," she said in a whisper. "Search for it slowly."

Obeying her, I stroked her beautiful blossom very gently until I had opened it further and my fingers were slick. And I knew when I'd found it, because I had seen her before captured by ecstasy.

"Yoni puja."

I must have faltered — she knew I was baffled.

"Pray with your mouth," she said softly.

And so there I lay, for the longest time, like a mating insect, until at last, rapturous and writhing on the bed, she sighed. She let out a long groan as dramatic as a death rattle, almost as deep as grief, and at the same time clapped her thighs to my ears.

We slept, and when I woke I didn't know where I was. I began to marvel that we were still in India, in distant Gauhati, but she shushed me and turned me over. She worked on me in much the same way that I'd done to her, devoting two or more tantric hours to my pleasure. It was a great novelty and a relief to be with her alone, uninterrupted, in this far-off place: no car, no driver, no waiting to be summoned or sent away.

Midway through the massage, she applied delicate pressure and held me, as though suspended on a lengthening wire of sexual tension — a pulsing of energy, a rippling of sexual health, not an orgasm but something akin to skimming lightly, feeling intense pleasure, a swelling just short of bursting. At that point, with my temperature way up, she stroked the base of my spine, as she had done before, as I had done to her. But this time I sensed the release of an expanding plume of warmth from my lower back, and it spread through me, as if she was pouring hot oil over me. Seeing how I seemed to soar, she whispered, "Kundalini."

By the time she was done, night had fallen, and we lay entwined, exhausted, the light of passing cars now and then raking the walls of the room.

In the darkness before dawn, we woke and bathed and packed our bags. At this hour, some people were already mopping floors and poking the corridor walls with long-handled dusters.

"We have an early train," she said. "It'll be all day to Lumding and then overnight to Silchar."

"Wouldn't it be quicker by car?"

"We'd never reach Silchar. We'd be stopped at a roadblock and robbed, or killed." She was smiling. "We're off the map here. This is the land of rebels and goondas and tribals. It's dangerous, even deadly. That's why it's so full of life." Before I could say anything, she added, "You have the gift. You have the hands."

"You gave me the gift."

"You knew how to receive it."

She had a mother's touch. And no wonder she was able to help all those children, I was thinking — restore them to life and give them hope and purpose.

We left Gauhati at eight, on the day train to Lumding, the coaches half empty. We drowsed through the day in our own compartment. Lumding, just a junction in the bruised green hills, appeared in the early evening. We were late. No time to linger on the platform; the night express to Silchar was standing at the station. The conductor, glad to see us, with a wink for baksheesh , showed us to our compartment. It was an old sleeping car, and though I could not see any food or people, it smelled of stale food and human bodies. But our beds were made, and the door locks worked.

The train labored all night, hooting through the hills of southern Assam. I couldn't see much outside, but I could sense a landscape of trees and streams. The air at our open window was murky in the deep valleys, cooler on the slopes, thickened with a dusty leafiness of sour jungle. Most of the passengers were in the front coaches, the hard seats, the floor littered with peanut shells and fruit peels, trapped-looking faces behind barred windows, Assamese in shawls, tribal people in embroidered vests, wearing necklaces of red beads.

In the darkness of the night, listening to the anvil-clang of the train on the tracks, I sensed that she was awake.

"I've never known anyone like you," I said.

"I'll take that as a compliment."

"When I first met you, I thought, Here's a woman who's never had to struggle. Yet you've done nothing but struggle."

"There's no end to it, ever."

The clanking of the train worked this sentence into my head. After a while I said, "I want to help you."

"You have no idea what that means to me."

"I'm devoted to you," I said, relieved to be able to say it.

It was not love. The power and uncertainty I associated with love I did not feel with Mrs. Unger. I didn't want anything in return: I wanted to serve her, needed for her to accept my attention. I was grateful to her for making any suggestion to me, thankful for her request — the feeling I associated with a son for his mother. Sentiments I'd never felt for my own mother, I felt for her. I wanted to obey her.

"Anything," I said.

"The time will come," she said. Then her breathing became regular, as I listened; and I slept too.

At dawn we were among low, mostly bald hills, the old train rolling on the scooped and flattened outskirts of Silchar. Shallow valleys and tea estates, each one well planted with slopes of deep green bushes, as orderly as a botanical garden, all the bushes trimmed like topiary. Where the land was flat there were corrugations of newly plowed fields. The tea pickers were visible on some of the slopes, looking as if they were tidying the bushes.

Empty and green, the valleys gaped at the crawling train, and the whole scene had a sunlit grandeur until, at growing intervals, I saw the hovels of farmers, the skinny children, the careworn women washing the breakfast pots in a muddy creek.

Mrs. Unger was also watching, but unlike me she was not judging or trying to sum the place up. I was making notes for my scratchy diary, while her attention was witness, concentration intensified by memory — nothing new for her but the shock (so it seemed to me) of seeing something familiar. It was the expression I had seen on her face the first time I met her, how I'd felt about myself when I thought, ruthlessly worldly. But I had been wrong. Hers was the face of compassion and understanding in the presence of suffering.

"But it's beautiful too," I said, in the way I sometimes thought out loud, the fragment of a reflection.

She knew what I meant. "Yes, but better enjoy it while it lasts. Silchar is another story."

Silchar station at ten in the morning was the usual Indian free-for-all, passengers relieved to be out of their hot three-tier coaches where they had sat all night among peanut shells and banana peels. They scuttled across the tracks pursued by porters and rickshaw touts and hawkers with buckets of cookies. Busy rats, most of them plump and bold, nosed amid the litter on the line, making the scraps of paper and plastic bags quiver as they swarmed.