Theroux Paul - A Dead Hand - A Crime in Calcutta

"About the friend."

WE HIGH-STEPPED past squatting groups of men who were bright-eyed with fatigue, clawing with skinny hands at their bowls of food, yellow gravy and blue, gluey-looking vegetables — Howrah station again, the Night Mail to Mugalsarai and Mirzapur. Howard led the way, excusing himself in chatty Bengali, past the men who were licking their fingers and lapping their palms with gummy tongues. Seeing us, perhaps hoping for a tip, the conductor showed us to our compartment. Howard was efficient in using the available space — the hooks, the shelves, the water-bottle holder. We sat facing each other across the little table, and the coach jumped with a clang, shoving us against the cushions, then settled and slid clicking past the platform and into the suburbs.

"Ever read Nirad Chaudhuri?" Howard asked. "He's great on Calcutta. He talks about how the land around the city looks 'poisoned to death.' And the countryside is like 'a mangy bandicoot bitten by a snake.'"

I was staring out the window at the small battered tenements on the mudflats, wondering how to begin.

"What's wrong?" he asked, probably because I hadn't commented on the colorful Chaudhuri quotes.

"I have something to tell you."

He sat back in his seat and cupped his hands in a hospitable gesture. "Go on," he said. "We have plenty of time. Trains are great places for confessions."

I said, A few weeks ago, I got a letter at my hotel…"

"It's an amazing story," he said, an hour or so later, as we were stopped at Dhanbad.

I had told him everything — almost everything. I had left out the tantric massages and the caresses in the fragrant vault of the Lodge. I had left out my pleasuring her, avoiding any mention of the sacred spot on her lotus flower or my wand of light. That part was unexplainable and made me seem needy or obsessed, weak, easily manipulated, susceptible to Mrs. Unger's attention — all true. I played up her philanthropy, the lost children, the goat sacrifice, the visit to Nagapatti in distant Silchar. I tried to describe the relationship between Charlie and Rajat, but I confessed that I didn't understand them at all. Howard found it all fascinating and didn't ask for more details. As for Mrs. Unger's disclosure that she was black, what was the point? I was not capable of verifying this unexpected assertion.

The last straw was my witnessing the American woman taking the child Usha away, almost certainly adopting her, something that Mrs. Unger had always said she deplored.

In telling him my story, I felt the growing humiliation that many people must feel when, in a quiet moment, they relate to a logical and contented soul the details of an irrational attachment. Only when I spoke to him (and remembered much more that I was too ashamed to tell) did I see the extent of my recklessness, and I wondered how big a fool I'd been.

Howard said, "But it seems odd that she should ask you to investigate. I mean, why you?"

"She said she liked my writing," I said. "I know that sounds lame. But she also thinks I have influential friends."

"Like who?"

"You."

He laughed. "That's us. Crime busters."

"There was no crime that I could see. There was only a misunderstanding. When I started, I didn't think she really bought Rajat's story. I didn't buy it either. It sounded preposterous. A corpse turning up in a hotel room in the dead of night? Crazy."

"This is Calcutta," Howard said, "where all things are possible."

"Rajat seemed the excitable type. Looking for drama. Maybe it was a way of getting attention. So I thought. Then I met Mina."

"The one who was slapped around and fired."

"And the one who brought me the dead hand," I said. "She verified the story of the corpse. So Rajat must have been telling the truth."

"Why didn't you tell that to Mrs. Unger?"

"Because around the same time I got the piece of carpet. I needed to deal with that. I wanted something more. You know the rest."

"About Mrs. Unger denying she'd been to Mirzapur in U.P., yes. But maybe the chowkidar got it wrong. There's a Mirzapur up in Murshidabad, and another Mirzapur near Dacca. I checked. Maybe he was just guessing about where she'd gone."

I liked his challenges. He was forcing me to think clearly. I said, "Let's see if the answer's in this Mirzapur."

But how could I tell him what I felt — that her touching me had told me something, that I didn't know how sincere she was until she put her hands on me that last time. The falsity was in her fingers, and it had alarmed me; her power now seemed dangerous, even fatal. Howard was so rational I had no way of explaining my suspicions to him.

"Here's a printout of the factories," he said, taking a sheet of paper from a file folder. "We'll find more when we get there. We're meeting a Mr. Ghosh there. He's said to be helpful — he's from the area."

Howard was the perfect traveling companion. Calm, accepting, uncomplaining, and he spoke Bengali. He didn't judge me. He said he had been a Peace Corps volunteer long ago, and it showed: he was resourceful and curious. He was taking a professional interest in my problem, but he was also a friend.

Perhaps because we were two ferringhis traveling alone, the conductor didn't put any Indians in our compartment when the train stopped at Burdwan and Asansol and Dhanbad. Indians who boarded the train at those places filled the other compartments. And now I was used to the routine: the snack seller with his tray, the bookseller with his stack, the drink seller with his bucket of bottles, the man taking dinner orders. We had left Howrah at sunset. By eight we were eating from our food trays—"bird flu on a skewer," Howard said of the kebab. Then he lay down and read the second volume of Doris Lessing's autobiography, and I read my most recent pages of "A Dead Hand," detailing my relationship with Mrs. Unger, up to our return from Assam, when she was still unambiguously a good person — not saintly but greathearted, robust, always positive, the energetic soul of philanthropy and good works; a nurturer, the woman with healing hands. She was protective and sensual and vitalizing, "Ma" in every sense.

I wanted to write more, but everything I'd discovered about Mrs. Unger, everything I'd seen, I now understood was an idealized portrait of a woman protecting her son's friend. Where I'd seen light I now saw shadow; where I'd seen generosity I now saw self-interest; and the contradictions jarred me. These new details made her more human but harder to understand. I had loved being with Mrs. Unger. I'd felt safe, even adored. I'd been able to count on her. Now I was doubtful. I didn't want her to touch me, and when she had I'd recoiled, and wasn't sure why.

I couldn't tell any of this to Howard. Anyway, this inner history of my relationship had very little to do with identifying the source of the carpet in Mirzapur.

Returning from the toilet — always a dose of reality on an Indian train — I remarked on how full the coach was, many of the passengers squatting in the vestibule outside the toilet, on the wet floor.

"Most of them are yatris , pilgrims, going to Varanasi. They'll be getting off at Mugalsarai — it's not far from there to the holy city. They'll be doing pujas and cremations and immersing themselves in Mother Ganga."

"It's a nice thought, purifying yourself in a holy river."

"But when you see the river you think only of disease. It's full of half-burned body parts and ashes and cow shit. Sludge and dead flowers. The Indian paradox. It doesn't matter that the river is muddy and putrid, it's still sacred."