Theroux Paul: A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta

"She never asks for money," Rajat said.

"I think we know why," I said.

"We'll be watching her," Howard said. "Someone from the commercial section. After all, she's one of ours."

"She deserves a prize for cleverly avoiding a murder charge. I can't think of anywhere but India where she'd be possible."

The driver pulled off the road and parked by a drooping cow. He opened our doors and then stood by the car, guarding it. We walked slowly, gasping in the humid heat, through the weeds and low shrubs along a narrow path to the ghat. Three holy men sat cross-legged on the platform at the entrance, under an archway draped with fresh flowers. The men were gaunt and nearly naked, their faces set at us, their foreheads smeared with yellow paste. They did not blink at the flies darting around their long, matted, and tangled hair.

Bowing low, Parvati stuffed some rupees into their brass jars. I did the same as she spoke to one of them.

"He asks if you have the body part."

"The hand. It's here."

I had wrapped it in a white cloth and tied it like a bundle, a makeshift shroud. Only I knew that it was stiff, claw-like, yellow, sealed in a plastic bag. A pickled hand.

The saddhu Parvati had been speaking to gathered himself and picked up a brass tray. He had loose wrinkled skin, like seasoned leather, a loincloth like a diaper, and necklace strings of heavy amber beads. He offered the tray to me. I put the cloth bundle on it.

With solemn grace, he brought this to one of the other old men and presented it reverently while the man muttered over it. Then he walked onto the ghat, holding the tray like a waiter serving dessert. Raising his arms, he tipped the tray, allowing the little bundle to slide onto the top of the pile of dry sticks, which were arranged as though for a campfire.

We watched from the embankment as the three saddhus began chanting, deep and clear, almost melodious, a kind of droning with intermittent grunts that repeated and increased in speed and volume.

"I've never been this close to a cremation before," Howard said.

Rajat snapped pictures. Parvati prayed, her head down — she seemed to be weeping softly. One of the holy men, still chanting, brought a flaming torch from a smoldering fire at the bank near where we stood. He whirled the ember, intensifying the flame, then poked it under the firewood until some of the smaller kindling caught and crackled. Then he added the torch to the noisy blaze.

The small white bundle lay on the uprushing fire. The licks of flame were like silk on this gray day. Then the thing seemed to tremble, and to blacken without burning, and finally it lighted, becoming thicker, fattened with flames. It glowed red like a large coal, keeping its shape but growing gauzy and insubstantial, withering like a tangle of whitened thread.

Maybe I imagined it — maybe it was the crack of the dry wood — but I thought I heard the dead hand itself speak, as if in the cooking it was given life by the blaze. I saw the hand outlined clearly as the cloth burned away. It was the last image I saw in the heat, the shadow of a hand that moved, jerked, and clutched its fingers in the flames before it was consumed in a fizz of fire.

We all stared at it as it swelled to a light and cobwebby puffball of ash, bobbing lightly on the charred wood, emptied by the heat.

"Gone," Howard said.

"No. Only changed form," Parvati said — the Indian comeback, the sort of tease that kept Hindus faithful. She was still praying, still weeping softly. Rajat crept near her, his eyes glistening in sympathy as though sharing her grief.

"She gave you a lot of trouble," Howard said.

I knew whom he was talking about.

"She did me a huge favor," I said.

"I've heard about her favors."

"I'll tell you sometime."

He was smiling. His smile full of teeth was asking what? But he looked up and seemed to forget his question, because from the low, woolly-dark sky came the first drops of the monsoon.

Stinging drops of rain: I had never thought that rain could hurt so much.

Back at the Hastings, fresh from the burning ghat, I was relieved, knowing it was over. Time to leave.

"Post, sir," Ramesh Datta said. "A runner has brought it just now."

An envelope. I recognized the handwriting, the ink, the dense handmade paper, like cloth. I brought it to my room and meditated on it. The handwriting was self-regarding. I hated seeing my name written in purple ink. I did not want to think what was in it — money, a miracle, praise, or blame. I didn't need her anymore.

I borrowed an umbrella from Ramachandra and walked to the Hooghly. Down Sudder, up Nehru, left on Ochterlony to the Esplanade, and then along Eden Garden Road to the river and Babu Ghat. It was the route of one of my old walks in the city, when I'd felt lost, waiting to be summoned by Mrs. Unger. I paused in the downpour and flung the envelope into the river, setting it adrift in the greasy current with the flotsam of old fruit, rotting coconuts, curls of plastic, and sliding like scum from the ghats upriver, the buoyant ashes of human remains.

That ending, though true to the facts, now seems a little conventional. Other stories about India close with a cremation and the rain coming down hard — and you're left to imagine the finality of the downpour, the sweep of water like a curtain on the last act.

The real torrent didn't hit Calcutta until a week later, and by then I was somewhere else, writing this book. Mrs. Unger inspired it. She inspired much more, gave me the vitality to write it, and taught me tantra — gave me the hands, the fingers, the energy.

I mentioned at the beginning that I had disappointed two women in my life, and I suggested that I'd stopped looking for anyone else. But in the course of writing this book I met another woman, someone nearer my age. She'd had her share of disappointments too, and at first she was wary of me. We became friends, partners, and at last lovers. I knew how to please her, in ways she'd never known, and my pleasing her was a kind of teaching too. She returned the favor. I spent more time in the States and grew to like it more. Almost a whole year passed. We traveled, this woman and I. We bought a house together. I had learned to give myself, which is the beginning of love.

I look down at my hand, my fingers wrapped on the pen, poking at this last page, and I think of Mrs. Unger, like an old flame, who gave me everything. But I didn't have to thank her for it, didn't have to be grateful. She was the illness and the cure, like a force of nature; life and death, the rain that gave hope, that flooded and drowned too; the pleasure and the pain.