A Dead Hand
A CRIME IN CALCUTTA
Paul Theroux
* * *
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT
BOSTON • NEW YORK
2010
* * *
Copyright © 2010 by Paul Theroux
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Theroux, Paul.
A dead hand : a crime in Calcutta / Paul Theroux.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-547-26024-2
1. Americans—India—Fiction. 2. Calcutta (India)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3570.H4D43 2010
813'.54 —dc22 2009014083
Book design by Brian Moore
Printed in the United States of America
DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The author is grateful for permission to reprint lines from the
poetry of Tishani Doshi, copyright © Tishani Doshi, 2006.
Part I
1
THE ENVELOPE HAD no stamp and only my name underlined on the front; it had somehow found me in Calcutta. But this was India, where big pink foreigners were so obvious we didn't need addresses. Indians saw us even if we didn't see them. People talked grandly of the huge cities and the complexity, but India in its sprawl seemed to me less a country than a bloated village, a village of a billion, with village pieties, village pleasures, village peculiarities, and village crimes.
A letter from a stranger can be an irritation or a drama. This one was on classy Indian handmade stationery, flecks of oatmeal in its weave and reddish threads like blood spatter, with assertive handwriting in purple ink. So I dramatized it, weighed it in my hand, and knifed it open slowly, as though I was being watched. In populous Calcutta, city of deformities, my being watched was highly likely. But how did anyone know I was at the Hotel Hastings, east of Chowringhee, in an obscure lane off Sudder Street, in every sense buried alive?
I happened to be looking for a story, but Calcutta had started to creep on my skin, and I had even begun to describe how the feel of this city in its exhalations of decay in the months before the monsoon was like the itch you experience when you empty an overfull vacuum cleaner's dirt bag, packed with hot grit and dead hair and dust bunnies and dander, and you gag and scratch at the irritation and try to claw the tickle and stink off your face—one of my arresting openings.
As I was rereading the letter to see if it was authentic, a wasp began to swing in short arcs and butt the windowpane, seeing only daylight. I opened the window to release it, but instead of flying out, it drowsed to another window and butted it—stupid!—then settled on my damp arm. I flicked at it. It made an orbit around my head and finally, though I'd tried to save it, did not fly out the window but seemed to vanish somewhere in my room, where it would buzz and sting me in the night.
I remembered how my friend Howard at the American consulate had asked me the day before if I'd ever been married. I said, "No, and I'm at that stage in my life when I no longer see a woman and say to myself, 'Maybe she's the one for me.'"
Pretty good answer, I thought. I was surprised at my own honesty. For years I had told plausible lies, saying that I was too busy with work, the travel pieces I wrote. I used to enjoy musing, "Maybe she's the one." But travel had absorbed me. It was so easy for a writer like me to put off the big decision—not a travel writer but a traveling writer, always on the move, always promising a book. I had disappointed two women back in the States, and after I left I became one of those calculated enigmas, self-invented, pretending to be spiritual but ruthlessly worldly, full of bonhomie and travel advice, then giving people the slip when they got to know me too well or wanted more than I was willing to give. I no longer regretted the missed marriage, though I had a notion that I should have fathered a child. Now, too late, I was another evasive on-the-roader who spread himself thin, liking the temporary, the easy excuses, always protesting and moving on. I have to be in Bangkok on Monday! As if the matter was urgent and difficult. But Bangkok was a lovely hotel, beers with other complacent narcissists like me, and a massage parlor, the best sex—hygienic and happy and anonymous, blameless relief.
You're a nomad, people said to me. It was partly true—if you know anything about nomads, you know they're not aimless. They are planners and savers, entirely predictable, keeping to well-established routes. I also had a nomad's sometimes startling receptivity to omens.
The day of the letter, for example, was eventful—strange portents, I thought. First the wasp, then the sight of a twisted paralytic child on Chowringhee creeping on hands and knees like a wounded animal, a new species of devolving human, reverting to all fours. And that afternoon my dancer friend, the willowy Parvati, revealing for the first time that she was adept in a kind of Indian martial art called kalaripayatu, and "I could break your arm, but I could also set it, because if one knows how to injure, one must also know how to heal." Parvati wrote sensual poems, she played the tabla, she wanted to write a novel, she wasn't married, and I was happy knowing her because I never wondered, "Maybe she's the one for me."
That same day, my friend Howard at the U.S. consulate told me about the children disappearing from the streets, kidnapped to work in brothels or sweatshops, or sold to strangers.
"And get this"—he knew an expat couple with a young child who could never find their amah at home. The amah explained, "We walk in park." The child was very calm when he was with the nanny, and the nanny was upscale: gold bangles, an iPod, always presents for the kid. "I saving money." But one day on their way home at an odd hour in a distant neighborhood the couple saw their nanny panhandling in traffic, another bhikhiri at an intersection, holding their infant son—a classic Bengali beggar, pathetic in her tenacity. And the child, who was drooling and dazed, was drugged with opium.
"Maybe you can use it," Howard said, as people do with writers. Oddly enough, I just did, but it was the letter that changed everything. The letter was obviously from a woman, obviously wealthy.
***
Rich people never listen, and that was why I preferred the woman's letter in my hand rather than having her bray into my face, one of those maddening and entrapping monologues: "Wait. Let me finish!" I could read the letter in peace. Something about it told me that if the woman who wrote it had been with me, she would talk nonstop. And given the nature of the facts in the letter—a dead body in a cheap hotel room, a frightened guest, his fleeing, the mystery—I needed a clear head, and silence, and time to think. She was asking a favor. I could reach a wiser decision if I made my judgment on the basis of facts alone—the form of her appeal, her handwriting, the whole tone of the letter, rather than being attracted or repelled by the guilefulness of the woman herself, believing that the written word is more revealing than a face.
I knew she was rich from the gold-embossed Hindu symbol on the letterhead and the expensive paper. I knew she was an older woman from her handwriting alone; a younger person would have scribbled or sent me an e-mail. Wealth was evident in her presumptuous and casual tone, even her slipshod grammar, the well-formed loops in her excellent penmanship. The envelope had been hand-delivered to me at my hotel.
"Post for you, sir," Ramesh Datta, the desk clerk, said, handing it over. He too was impressed by the plumpness of the thing: a long letter, a big document, a sheaf of words, as though it represented witchery or wealth, an old-fashioned proposition.
Amazing most of all to be holding an actual three-page letter, written in purple ink on thick paper, like an artifact, and e
ven the subject and the peripheral details were old-fashioned: a rich woman's wish, a corpse, a shocked hotel guest in Calcutta just after the Durga Puja festival.
Dear Friend, it began.
I heard your marvelous talk last night at the American cultural center and wanted to come up afterwards to speak to you, but you were surrounded by admirers. Just as well. It's better to put this in writing, it's serious, and I'm not sure how you can help but I've read your travel articles, so I know that you know quite a bit about the world and especially about India, which is my problem.
You see what I mean about the grammar and the presumption?
My son loves your writing and in a way you're responsible for his coming to India. I think he's read everything you've written. He has learned a lot from you and so have I. I have to admit I get a little jealous when he talks about you, but the truth is that the written word is so persuasive he feels as if he knows you, and I guess I do too. Consider yourself one of the family. We have read many of your travel pieces, and shared them with our globe-trotting friends.
A little bit about me. I am an entrepreneur, with homes in New York and Palm Beach, and my hobby for many years was interior decoration—doing it for my friends. They encouraged me to start my business. Doing something you love is always a good way of being successful and I think it happened to me. My son joined me in the business. By the way, I have always felt that it would be a wonderful challenge to decorate a writer's studio—I'd love to do yours.
I come to India to oversee my charity, which is to do with children's welfare, and also to look for fabrics—linens, silks, fine cottons, floor coverings and textiles of all kinds, old and new. I often do walls in fabric, cover them with a lovely silk, it's become a signature with me. I am buying at the moment. I could show you some really exquisite pieces.
Now comes the hard part. First I need your utmost discretion. I am asking you to respect my confidence. I am writing to you because, based on your close relationship with the U.S. Consulate, I feel you can be trusted. It is also incredible luck that we are both in Calcutta at the same time, as though somehow preordained, our paths crossing like this. If it turns out that you have no interest in what I have to say next, please destroy this letter and do nothing more and—regretfully—I will never communicate with you again.
But I am counting on you to help me. Given your wide experience as a traveler, I don't think there is anyone else who could be as effective as you in this sensitive matter.
Here is the problem. My son's dearest friend, who is an Indian, believes he is in serious trouble. He normally stays with us, but because we were traveling and buying after Durga Puja he was staying at a guesthouse near Chowringhee, not a very nice place but you know what fleapits these little Indian hotels can be. He was there for a few days and then, like a scene from one of your stories, he woke up one night and found a corpse in his room—a dead boy on the floor. He was frantic. He had no idea how it had gotten there. He didn't know what to do. If he told the hotel they would accuse him of murder. How could he explain the presence of this dead body?
He then did a very silly thing, or at least he said he did. He packed his things and left without checking out, and he hid. Calcutta as you can imagine is not a hard place to hide in. I have spoken to him about this but the fact is that he is terribly afraid of what will happen to him if he is found and somehow connected with that dead body.
Of course I am also worried that my son will be associated with this business and my worst nightmare would be for my son to end up in an Indian jail.
We are planning to leave India at the monsoon, but first I want to make sure that my son's friend is safe. I could not live with myself if I abandoned this poor boy. I know I have the resources to help him and it would be criminal if I did not do so.
I have given you no names or dates or helpful facts. This is deliberate. I must use discretion. If you think you can help and want to know more, please get in touch with me at my cell phone number above and perhaps we can have a chat. Perhaps at the Grand? Given the parameters of my problem, I would not blame you if you just tore up this letter and went your merry way. If that is so, thank you for reading this far. Bottom line, whatever you decide, my son and I will continue to read you.
Warmly,
Merrill Unger (Mrs.)
2
SHOULD I HAVE BURNED the letter? I didn't. I kept it. I reread it. I was, as jokers say about wines, amused by its presumption.
Even with the boasting, the bad grammar, the clichés, and that awful word "parameters," I was flattered. The handmade paper, the letterhead, the handwriting, it all fascinated me. Had it been a man's letter, I might have tossed it aside. But it was from an American woman, with the lovely name Merrill, in Calcutta like me, offering me a story. And I was far from home with time on my hands, needing a story. My lectures were done: "Your time is your own from now on," Howard, the public affairs officer, said. It seemed like a hint that I should pursue Parvati. She was lovely and gifted, but her whole life lay ahead of her, and mine was mainly in the past.
Yet it seemed that a little vacation had opened up, with the uncertainty and emptiness—and, I felt, pointlessness—of holidays, which in foreign places always left me at loose ends. Because the consulate had sponsored my talks at Calcutta schools and colleges, I had been looked after up until now. I didn't like the thought of having to fill my days with occasions. Why not have a drink with this Mrs. Unger?
I was not persuaded by the letter; it seemed too colorful not to be a setup. But I was curious. I had nothing else to do. This was a blank period in my trip, and in my life. My hand had gone dead too; after that arresting opening about the atmosphere having the tickle and itch of a bulging vacuum cleaner bag, I could not continue. I'd thought I had something to write. I'd never had a dead hand before. I assumed that any day now the mood would strike me, but so far my head was empty. I endured the racket of the city from my cheap hotel and fantasized about places like the Oberoi Grand, and I smiled and didn't write and felt mind-blind.
At my age, after all that hack work, it was possible that my condition was permanent. The young feel an affliction but always assume they'll overcome it: a young person encounters an obstacle or a block yet never believes it can last, in fact cannot even imagine extinction or utter failure. I had felt that, but no longer felt the warmth of this hope. Now I knew that the climacteric occurs and there is no going back, you're losing it, it's downhill all the way. Your poor eyesight does not improve, there is no hope of your ever matching your earlier stride, and you won't regrow that hair. For the writer I was, there was a chance that the barren period would continue, that I was written out, that I had nothing more, and worse, because the work I had done was not much good, I'd never have a chance to redeem myself. It was probably over.
This sense of diminishing hopes had been with me ever since I'd come to India, when Howard had asked, "What are you working on?" I hadn't the heart to say "Nothing." I said, "I've got an idea," and that brought me low—my lying always made me sad and self-pitying. Why was I telling him a lie? Because the truth would have shamed me. Obviously having an idea mattered to me or else I wouldn't have concocted a lie. I was not fatally wounded; it was simpler and a lot less dramatic than that: I had nothing to say, or if I did have something, I had no way of saying it. "Dead hand" was a devastating expression for writer's block, but in my case it seemed a true description of what I was facing, a limpness akin to an amputation.
One of my writer friends, a real writer, a writer of good novels, knew Nelson Algren, the great chronicler of Chicago. No one talks about him now, but his books were celebrated once, and electrifying to me. Just the sonorous titles— The Man with the Golden Arm, A Walk on the Wild Side—I heard these titles and thought he had to be a writer to his fingertips. Algren was a Chicagoan himself. He'd had an early and voluptuous success. He'd had an affair with Simone de Beauvoir, in effect making Jean-Paul Sartre a cuckold. He was a great gambler. He was a lone wolf. He'd
had an enviable career. He lived simply in a small apartment, but even so he invited my friend and his wife to stay with him on their visit to Chicago.
On the first morning, seeing Algren sitting alone at his kitchen table having a cup of coffee, reading the newspaper, the wife said, "Are you one of these writers who gets up early and does all his work before breakfast?"
Algren smiled sadly and said, "Nope. I'm one of these writers who doesn't write anymore."
I dialed the number of Mrs. Merrill Unger's cell phone.
"Mrs. Unger's line." A young man's voice, not Indian, but a bit put-on and overformal, making me feel like a petitioner. "Who is calling?"
I told him. He seemed even less interested, did not reply with a word, merely grunted.
"It's for you, Ma," I heard him say.
"Good. You got my letter. When can we meet?"
Her first words—no greeting, all business, a bossy-sounding woman with a deep ensnaring voice.
I said, "I'm staying at the Hastings."
"I have no idea where that is. Why don't you come over to the Oberoi tonight? We can have a drink and go on from there."
This was all too urgent and stern for me, much too insistent. I also felt—like a kind of echo—that she had an audience, some people listening to her auntyness, and that her tone was meant to impress them as much as to dominate me, taking charge and making me do all the work. The Hastings was a comfortable enough hotel; it was snobbish posturing on her part to dismiss it.
Though I had nothing to do, I said, "I'm pretty busy. Tonight's out of the question."
"Tomorrow, then." That same bossy, overconfident tone.
I almost said Forget it. "I'll check my diary."
"What are you waiting for? Check it, then."
I didn't trust myself to say anything except "I'm looking."