Theroux Paul - A Dead Hand - A Crime in Calcutta

Mrs. Unger's hands swept over me, pressing, smoothing, finding my muscles and the spaces between them. I mentioned earlier that Mrs. Unger's tantric massage was not a sexual act but rather the drawn-out promise of one, foreplay as an end, always trembling on the brink. This produced a tremulous ecstasy that I could compare only to a rapture of strangulation: I was suffocated in a delirious choking as she ran her magic fingers over me.

But today it wasn't working. I could not pretend that it was. Instead of being relaxed by her touch, or aroused, I ached with apprehension.

"You're resisting."

"No — I like it." But I knew I sounded insincere.

"I can tell by the position of your toes."

"Maybe it's my stomach. I ate some odd-tasting bhajjis for lunch."

"Blame the bhajjis," she said. "You need to taste something sweeter." She let go of me. "Get up, slowly. You'll be a little dizzy, so be careful."

She helped me off the table and steered me to the shower. The light was on in the shower, and it must have been bright because when I was done and I reentered the massage room, I could barely see. The taper burning in the dish of oil gave no light. I could not see Mrs. Unger anywhere.

I felt my way to the table and touched her foot, then traced my hand up her naked leg. She was lying face-up on the table, and now I could see that her head was tilted, her back arched, her body upraised in offering, a posture of surrender.

"Ma," I said. I had never spoken the word before.

"Baby." She took my head in both hands and guided it downward, between her fragrant thighs. "Yoni puja — pray, pray at my portal."

She was holding my head, murmuring "Pray," and I did so, beseeching her with my mouth and tongue, my licking a primitive form of language in a simple prayer. It had always worked before, a language she had taught me herself, the warm muffled tongue. But today she sensed a difference, my diminished will. Bodies revealed much more than words ever could.

"Next time, call me first, or wait for me to call you," she said, releasing me and turning on her side. "You said you had a breakthrough in Rajat's problem. I want you to bring me good news."

"I have some solid leads."

"We can't let that poor boy suffer an injustice," she said. When I didn't reply, she said, "You told me you'd gone to the hotel. Is there something you should tell me?"

I could have told her about the fierce manager, about Mina, about the dead hand and the piece of carpet. But whom would I be telling? She was someone else. I was sensing a different, darker side — or if not darker, then evasive. I did not know this woman. I couldn't make love to her. I couldn't tell her what I knew. She was not the same woman I had known.

And I thought, She's American! I could have imagined being bewildered by an Indian, by her indirection or secrecy. But I knew Americans. Or thought I did. I'm black didn't explain anything.

Rajat had said, "This is a pleasant surprise." She had pretended so, but I was not convinced. It was nothing she had said. My doubt arose from the air around her, the vibration, most of all from her hands and fingers — the truth was apparent in her flesh; mine too, probably. The truth was a throbbing in the blood, nothing to do with words or protestations. It was a quality of pressure in her fingertips that told me that part of her was absent, something untrue in the touch.

"I have to go," I said.

"So soon? You just got here. We've only begun."

I slipped off the table, which I always thought of as an altar, and now it seemed like a sacrificial table. I began to dress as she stood over me. I was careful not to say anything, because she was as shrewd an interpreter of the spoken word as she was of flesh and blood.

At the door, she touched me, saying, "There's something you're not telling me."

I kissed her, thinking to reassure her, and in kissing her I felt that I was revealing to her everything I wanted to keep to myself.

NOW I WAS AS irritable and bent as everyone else in Calcutta, this deranged city of trapped air and fallen grandeur where in the hot, premonsoon month of May it was as stuffy in the streets as it was in any room. Sooner than I expected, within an hour or so of having left with Rajat, I was back at the Hastings, wondering, What just happened?

Rajat had suggested that I go with him to the Lodge, and I'd been tempted, as always, by the anticipation of Mrs. Unger's vault: luxuriating in the thought of her healing hands, her penetrating fingers. I'd been roused by the very idea of seeing her. And then, unexpectedly, I'd seen the American woman tugging the small girl away from the Lodge and Mrs. Unger insisting she was glad to see me. Yet the woman's rudeness ("Any more questions?") and the pressure of Mrs. Unger's touch disturbed me. I'd felt almost a hostility in her hands, and having experienced this odd side of Mrs. Unger, I was confused. It had been a mistake to go. Who was that American woman? Who was that child? Who was Mrs. Unger now? Her hands had been hard and cold, holding me in an almost strangulatory way.

And it had been an interruption of my work. I resented Rajat's intrusion, his urging me, his reassurances; and I was angry with myself for having allowed myself to be tempted. I should have known he was insincere from his having ordered tea and not drunk any of it.

I needed to write, to compose myself. In the seclusion of my room, hiding from the harsh late-afternoon light and the hubbub rising from the street, I sat half dressed under the quacking dustcovered ceiling fan. For the first time, doubting her — and so doubting myself — I had time on my hands. And in this solitude I saw the little girl's vacant face and hesitant posture, her skinny legs stiffened in reluctance. I had once seen her in Mrs. Unger's lap. I am her mother.

Rather than continue "A Dead Hand," this appreciation of Mrs. Unger, I broke off the narrative and wrote Who is she? and began to describe this new experience of Mrs. Unger's vault — not a refuge but a kind of trap where I felt like an imprisoned stranger.

What made writing this all the weirder was that I felt uncomfortable in my own hotel room. I didn't usually write here. I was unused to sitting in semidarkness, facing a dirty windowpane, hearing the quack and croak of the fan above my head. Usually I sat on the top-floor verandah, above the familiar stink of traffic, the noise of horns and bicycle bells and people calling to each other — the muffled screeches of Calcutta that thickened the air.

My room disturbed me, and it was more than the scummy spookiness I felt in most hotel rooms, a heaviness of old dust and dead echoes, of the sediment of bare feet and bad breath, the nerves of all the previous occupants. The smell amounted almost to a sound, a sort of humming high-pitched whine of spectral presences — much worse in Calcutta than in other places, the layers of chipped paint, the crusted rugs and sticky varnish, the windows opaque from scabs of dirt on the glass.

Adding to this itch, as I sat at my little table I noticed a dresser drawer pulled out an inch. That was annoying because I was careful about shutting doors and pushing in drawers. The thought of rats or mice kept me scrupulous: I'd once jerked open a drawer in an Indian hotel and seen a rat sniffing and scuttling across my socks.

This discomfort and unease slowed my writing. Yet writing was the only way I knew to puzzle out the feelings I had, about Mrs. Unger and the small girl and the ambiguity of Rajat's mixed signals. I almost laughed at the thought that it was Mrs. Unger who was the subject of this effort, and it was she, through her tantric massage, who had returned me to writing and given me a new vitality. Even so, I had to force myself to write, jamming my ballpoint onto my notebook pages.