Theroux Paul - A Dead Hand - A Crime in Calcutta

"Employing children is against the law," I said.

"The law is never enforced because the children need work."

"You're killing them."

"I am saving them!" It was the only time in this conversation that she raised her voice, and this was a shriek of protest.

"And now I know where you get your labor force." As I spoke I could hear the children laughing inside the Lodge. "You take them off the streets. You buy them from villages. Poor places like Nagapatti. You get them healthy, you make them dependent on you, and then you put them to work."

"You don't know anything," she said.

"I'm sure you sell some of them to adoptive parents. When I saw that woman last week, I knew."

"I am saving them," she hissed through her teeth, and I thought how her being slightly bucktoothed was an advantage in her saying something like that, to give it force. "They would die otherwise."

Now she frightened me, because she was without a shred of doubt. Her certainty gave her, if not power, then a demonic energy.

"I thought you had some intelligence, some subtlety," she said. "I had confidence in you. That's why I trusted you with this. But no, you're really hopeless. And you're ungrateful. You have no idea of the good I have done, the things I've accomplished. And not just this Lodge. Many things. Great things."

She spoke with such conviction I almost believed her, but I also knew that a criminal's most useful gift was the ability to lie. It was one of the clearest signs of criminality that such a person had no use for the truth. Yet Mrs. Unger was passionate.

"You think that by making up this preposterous story you've hurt me." She leaned closer. "You can't hurt me. But I could seriously harm you."

I won't give you a chance, I thought, looking her straight in the eye.

She said, "I'm going to do you an enormous favor."

"Really."

"Yes. I'm not going to destroy you. I could do it very easily."

She was calm again; she had regained her composure. She saw that, though I knew the truth about the body in the hotel room, and Rajat would soon know, there was not much I could do to hurt her. She was right: this was India. Child labor was common. The factories were everywhere. And children died.

"You're shocked," she said. "I despise people who come to India and say they're shocked. Especially Americans. What hypocrisy."

If I had been enchanted before by her, I was now disenchanted. Yet having seen her dark side, I was even more astounded by her audacity. She now seemed to me as cruel as she had once seemed kind, and I could not believe that both could exist in the same person, this American woman who affected saris and ran a home for lost children.

I didn't doubt that much of her work was unselfish, that she had (as she said) saved some children. But she saved them only to send them to work in her factory or sell them in adoptions. She wasn't wrong about there being child labor in India. Everyone knew it. But no one suspected her personal involvement. She was a motherly presence in Calcutta, famous because she never asked for donations. And she was persuasive. I could testify to the healing hands, the magic fingers. Gazing at her on this hot afternoon in the deep green shade of her damp and tangled garden, I trembled to think how she had touched me, how I had touched her. How we had lain in each other's arms, knotted in the tantric postures. I had been bewitched.

Her beauty was distinct, but because it frightened me it seemed indistinguishable from ugliness. I thought: There is no such thing as beauty. There is desire and there is fear, and if desire can make a person luminous, fear can make that same person ugly. A lie in a lovely woman's mouth can give her fangs and make her a monster. The very features I had seen as benign and beautiful — the same cast of her face, the lips, the teeth, the breasts, the fingers — I now saw as fierce and deadly.

All this time we'd been talking I kept seeing the hard bone beneath her lovely skin, the hinges of her jaw, the seams of her cranium, the loops of her eye sockets. It was not a face but a skull. I saw her as bones.

"You've failed me," she said. "And I was such a fan. I had such plans for you." She touched my thigh with her outstretched hands, her sharp finger bones on my leg. "That's all right. I'm never surprised to find that people are stupid or wicked. I'm more surprised when they're kind."

I didn't know what to say. I could not deny that she was kind — I'd seen enough examples of her charity. I'd been half in love with her. I was more ashamed of myself, more angry at myself than I was with her, because I saw my weakness reflected in her. Out of vanity and need, I had yearned to please her. I was no better than she was.

"I still wonder why you chose me to look into this crime. Was it just because I'm a writer?"

"Not really."

"What then?"

"Because you're not a writer. You're a hack. No matter what you write, no one will believe you."

She obviously thought that by insulting me I would be hurt, but I was strengthened by my self-disgust. She could not have had a lower opinion of me than I had of myself. At that moment I wanted to kill her, and not just do away with her but stab her repeatedly in the face.

She smiled at me, as if reading my thoughts. Her face lit up — the glow I'd always found irresistible, of pleasure, of love.

"Darling."

I almost responded. But she was looking past me, toward the far end of the garden, where Charlie was standing. I wondered how much of this he'd heard. He twinkled, the way someone does when he's eroticized. As I had once, giddily.

She beckoned to him. He obeyed, walking closer, and when she beckoned again it seemed like her way of dismissing me.

THE BURNING GHAT on the Hooghly was about a mile downstream from the Vidyasagar Bridge, which I had crossed with Mrs. Unger on the day we'd visited the Kali temple, when she had taken me to the compound. I had been shocked by the goat sacrifice at the temple. I had been impressed by the intake of orphans at the compound. How was I to know the children, too, would be sacrificed, that they'd end up in her factory or be sold to visiting Americans? Rajat had remarked on the blood that had streaked her sari. Bloodstained kind of suits her.

I thought of that blood today as we turned off the bridge and made our way along the west bank of the river in Howard's consular car, a uniformed driver at the wheel, Howard beside him. I could see the ghat ahead, piled against the embankment like a rotting pier.

"I will talk to the priests," Parvati said. She sat in the middle of the back seat, Rajat on her other side.

Parvati's decencies shamed me, and so did her gifts. She was a pretty girl who lived with her parents; she could dance, play tabla, write poetry, do martial arts — could twist my arms off with a flourish of kalaripayatu. Parvati the beauty was awaiting a suitable match, which her parents would arrange. She was helpful, able, and decorative. I had to admit I hardly knew her, but in any case I was unworthy: she was unattainable. But she was the perfect person for this ritual, a vestal virgin. She wasn't prim today. She knew exactly what to do, and Rajat was a suitable acolyte.

Howard said, "Your friend Mrs. Unger was supposed to be getting an award tonight from the chief minister."

"Don't know anything about it," I said. "What's the award?"

"Humanitarian achievement. She refused it."

Rajat said, "She hates publicity."

Howard said, "Her modesty was much praised. She got more publicity refusing it than she would have gotten by accepting."