A Dead Hand

  The goat's bleating ceased like an interrupted hiccup as its head tumbled to the stone floor, coming to rest at the base of the wicket, blood bubbling and spurting from the raw ragged meat of the neck and spilling onto the blossoms, puddling near the priest's feet.

  I had gasped in the act of saying "Please, no," but everyone around me was screeching with delight. Even in the open air I felt suffocated, as if I was in a small room. Though I had seen dead animals, flattened squirrels on the road, and human corpses in coffins, I had never seen any creature slaughtered. A live thing bulged with blood, and now all the blood was puddled on the stone floor. My head hurt; I felt it in my guts; I wanted to vomit.

  Mrs. Unger bent low to kiss the carcass of the black goat, and when she straightened up she was smeared with blood, red streaks on her shawl.

  A shrill cry went up (Joi Kali!), joyous, cruelly triumphant, as she lifted her blood-smeared shawl from her head and draped it over the posts of the execution rack, along with a garland of blood-red lilies. The bystanders rushed forward, their bare feet slapping and skidding on the blood, and stuck their faces into the sticky folds of the shawl.

  The carcass of the headless goat was hoisted on a hook. Using the same hacker, the priest skinned and swiftly butchered it, carving it into bloody chunks and joints on a platter, then directed it to be taken away.

  The look on Mrs. Unger's face was one of rapture, gleaming with sweat, the ringlets of her hair gummed to her cheeks, and she offered her face to the priest, who in one gesture of his dripping hand marked her forehead with a fingertip of blood.

  Murmuring, her face a mask of ruddied passion, she raised her eyes to the temple window, her mouth half open—as I had seen women in the throes of desire—her hands clasped, breathing deeply. She was speaking like a priestess possessed, but her words were drowned out by the chants and shrieks of the people who had watched the sacrifice.

  Before we left, she led me into the temple. We shuffled past an inside window where the image of the goddess Kali, gleaming black and brightly marked, stared with orange lozenge eyes from a stack of blossoms and offerings. I was briefly frightened, jostled by the mob in this stifling place of incense and flowers and dishes of money and frantic pilgrims, who were twitching with gestures of devotion, and gasping, seeming to eat the air, all of them smiling wildly at the furious image.

  8

  HER SLIGHTLY BLOODSTAINED white sari billowed as she swept through the Kalighat bazaar, past the beggars and the flower sellers and the fruit stalls, the beseeching holy men, the clattering rickshaws, the beeping motorbikes. From the sounds alone you knew you were in another century—bicycle bells, the clop of pony hooves on cobblestones, the chatter of a sewing machine, the clang of a hammer on an anvil, the bang and bump of wooden wagon wheels.

  Though her hand was hot, clutching mine like that of a panicked child, she seemed utterly serene. Now I knew that beneath Mrs. Unger's impassive strength and certainty, she was wary of the big screeching mob. Well, who wouldn't be? But I was impressed by her bluff, showing nothing but indifference. She was unfazed, and even in this filthy street of the market, she appeared to take no notice of the men trying to get her attention. More than that, she looked fulfilled and a little fatigued, with a wan smile, spent, but with a glow like sexual relief on her face, lips apart, her eyes shining with pleasure though her face was rather pale.

  Passing a heap of blossoms, the blood-colored lilies I'd been seeing, I remarked on the redness. I tried to let go to touch the petals, but her fingers gripped me harder.

  "Hold me," she said, and as if to cover her fear she added, "The shonali lily, Kali's favorite."

  Because she didn't hesitate, and kept walking slightly ahead of me, pulling me onward, I saw how the bottom of her sari was soaked with a narrow red profile, a stripe of blood in a crimson hem where it had touched the floor of the sacrifice enclosure. And the light hairs on her arm prickled with tiny droplets of blood, more like dew than gore. If I hadn't seen where she'd been, I would have guessed that she'd brushed against fresh paint. It was vivid red in places, in other spots going brown.

  "The puja was for luck," she said, "and to bless us in our next venture."

  That "us" cheered me. Seeing her car in the distance, Balraj leaning next to it, she raised her hand. Balraj put on his chauffeur's cap, straightened it, and scrambled inside. But it took him several minutes to reach us through the crowd.

  I now knew that Mrs. Unger was uneasy on the street, yet she didn't betray it; she didn't look at anyone in the crowd. Her gaze was lifted to the gold bulge on the top of the Kali temple roof while she held my hand. And that was something else I knew: she needed me.

  If you had money in India, I was thinking again, you never had to wait. Some people like Mrs. Unger never waited, while others did nothing but wait to be summoned, to open a door; many obeyed without a command, acting when the person with money or power appeared, as though these underlings operated from a motion sensor.

  I must not forget that, I thought; if I take this attention for granted, I'll be like the money people, presumptuous and priggish. In this respect Mrs. Unger was like the rest of them, expecting to be waited on, impatient when there was a delay. But at least she had the grace not to comment on it. She said nothing to me, but I could tell from the way she held herself that she was mentally drumming her fingers—beautiful fingers. It seems to be a feature of impatience that a person cannot speak, or at least hold an animated conversation, while she is waiting in this way—too preoccupied by the suspense and annoyance to hold or express a complete thought, and seemingly deafened by annoyance too.

  This, and her fear of the mob, made Mrs. Unger human to me. I welcomed her lapses. I needed to be reassured that she wasn't perfect because usually—and especially when I was away from her—I felt she was faultless. Her apparent perfection intimidated me and reminded me of my weakness.

  In the car, she said, "We're crossing the river. You've been over there, of course."

  "To Howrah. To the Botanical Gardens."

  "Howrah's cleaner these days, but the gardens are a mess—terribly neglected. Luckily those trees don't need much attention, but it's turning into a jungle. Please let me finish"—I had started to speak—"we'll be going past it. This is the Vidyasagar Bridge."

  We had gone up the ramp and around the high curve to the first span. Looking back, I could see Eden Gardens and the sports stadium; looking forward, the misleading green on the far bank of the river—misleading because it hid another crowded bustee, crammed with hovels and old shophouses.

  "It's amazing. You drive and drive in India and you expect to see the countryside at some point. But no, it's just more city, the great sprawl of India, the bloated village."

  Mrs. Unger shook her head at my saying this. "I try not to see crowds anymore. I look for individuals who need help." She touched the bloodstain on her hem; it had dried to thin flakes which she brushed off. "If you look closely at India's human features it's not so frightening."

  I considered this assertion and thought the opposite. If you looked closely at India's human features, the country was far more frightening. The starved eyes, the yellow teeth, people's bones showing through their skin, dusty feet in plastic sandals, the urgency in their postures, always contending. But Mrs. Unger spoke with authority, and she knew more than I did. I saw doomed people where she saw life and hope, because I was doing nothing and she was bringing help.

  She was calm in the car, although the traffic was so heavy again we hardly moved once we were off the bridge.

  "Where are we?"

  "Blockages," Balraj said. "Shibpur."

  Mrs. Unger said nothing, just shifted in her seat and peered ahead without any discernible emotion. After a while, inching forward, we saw the cause of the holdup, a dead cow in the road, like something lightly upholstered, an old piece of bony furniture that had collapsed and lay broken, a single line of traffic detouring around it. A policeman blew his shrill whistle, managing the co
unterflow, jerking his arms in semaphore.

  "Shame," Balraj said, glancing at the carcass, hipbones and ribs and splayed-out legs, the dead animal looking as if it had dropped from the sky and flattened on impact.

  Mrs. Unger gave no directions. Balraj knew where he was going. Soon he turned off the road and toward a large stucco wall with a rusted pair of iron gates eight feet high that blocked the sight of whatever lay within.

  The car hardly slowed down as a man in khaki stepped from his sentry box and went to the gate, shot the big bolt, and pushed it open, first the left door, then the right, another example of someone in India whose job it was to watch and wait—hours, days—for the moment when the sahib arrived.

  We entered a park-like compound on a gravel drive, passing shade trees and small flower beds where gardeners knelt and yanked at weeds. In the distance, at the head of the drive, I saw several large tile-roofed buildings. I expected to see students. The gardens and the size of the buildings and the serenity gave the impression of a small college campus. Yet apart from the gardeners and some other groundskeepers there was no one in sight.

  "It's another world," I said, thinking of the traffic and the hovels outside the wall.

  "These are my warehouses and godowns," Mrs. Unger said, but she wasn't looking at them. She was facing ahead where a white van was parked in front of a one-story building, a little schoolhouse that looked as if it might hold a set of classrooms.

  After we parked and were walking past the first warehouse, I saw that the big front door was open, a long-bodied truck backed up to a loading dock.

  "So it really is a warehouse."

  "Export merchandise. No point in looking at it. It's all packed and ready to be shipped." She was still walking toward the smaller building. "That's for the American market. My shops, mainly. But I supply high-end retailers too."

  "It's a big operation," I said, hoping she'd tell me more.

  "This is only a corner of it. I have factories in other places. Most of what I make would be too expensive to manufacture in Calcutta. I don't have the space here."

  I smiled as Mrs. Unger revealed her practical side, speaking of outsourcing and overhead and infrastructure and cost-per-unit yield. The woman I had seen as single-mindedly spiritual, advocating Ayurvedic cures and whole foods, who had spent hours in the deep interior of her Lodge in (I supposed) Alipore, massaging me, making me hers, was also a shrewd businesswoman, brisk with facts.

  More gardeners knelt at the flower beds near the smaller building, grubbing with skinny fingers around the clumps of pink and purple impatiens. They greeted Mrs. Unger respectfully and settled lower, averting their eyes, as though abasing themselves, letting her pass.

  Another man in khaki stood at the door to the one-story building, someone else to anticipate our approach and snatch the door open. So it happened: Mrs. Unger didn't break her stride, the door was swung open, and in we went.

  "You're late."

  It was Charlie. He kissed her—a bit too warmly, perhaps as a way of defying me. He was dressed Indian-style in a long white kurta smock, tight white trousers, black slippers.

  "Traffic," she said. "And we stopped for a puja."

  Charlie said, "You're bloodstained as usual."

  "Where are they?" she asked, stepping past him.

  "Right through here. It's the best we could do."

  Charlie did not acknowledge me. Had he been busy, I might not have minded. I knew what it was like to be preoccupied. But he was standing in his handsome self-satisfied posture—the Indian clothes made him seem more confident—as if modeling, and without looking at me. Turning aside, he ignored me with such abruptness I knew it had to be deliberate.

  "This is a lovely old building," I said, making a remark just to see whether he'd respond.

  He didn't, and both their backs were turned now, mother and son. I stood alone, gaping, and because he had snubbed me I felt conspicuous for having said something so banal.

  Mrs. Unger seemed suddenly fretful—I understood she was busy and couldn't blame her. This was the business that financed her good works. But Charlie's indifference to me seemed calculated. His resentment was palpable, emanating like a bad smell. It was both possessive and antagonistic, a stink of rejection and annoyance, a hatefulness that warned me against coming too close.

  I tried again, another remark, out of sheer malice, because his hostility was so blatant. I said, "These floorboards are solid teak and so wide. Imagine the age of the trees, the size of them. Probably centuries old."

  A boring observation, just chatter, which was precisely what I intended—another test. And it had the effect I expected—nothing, or rather Charlie's effort at expressing nothing. It was more trouble for him to make it obvious that he was ignoring me than for me to make these silly observations.

  Perhaps I wasn't playing. Perhaps I really did resent his taking his mother's full attention, as he resented my being there. He had his rights as a son, but I adored the woman and I had rights too. I was at least owed the recognition that his mother also cared for me, in a way he couldn't share.

  Mother and son, touching, conferring, jostling, excluded me, while I watched from five steps behind. I thought that it was probably impossible to get between them or share their confidence. I thought too that whatever arrangements I made with Mrs. Unger, I would always be regarded as an intrusion by her son. I could never be close to both of them, but that was all right with me. I had no interest in him, and as Mrs. Unger herself had said, Charlie had Rajat.

  The other oddity I noticed (and all this happened within a few minutes of my entering the funny old schoolhouse building) was that she was different here, as she had been different in the car, and again at the temple, and different from my memory of her in her fragrant vault at the Lodge. In every new context she revealed a new aspect of her personality, and at times a new personality. I was reminded of the boldness of her letter to me, her fluttering submissiveness over drinks when I'd first met her, her beguiling assertiveness in the massage room. At the Kali temple and just afterward, she had seemed regal, trailing her bloodstained sari through Kalighat. And now here, mother and manager, all business, headed through the big pair of doors to the holding pen.

  Holding pen was how it seemed to me. This impression was emphasized by the mass of small children among the scattering of crouching women. Sometimes a mother can hold a child in her arms in such a way as to present the child as a shield. A few of these women did that, held the children in attitudes of protection, but protecting themselves, hovering, cowering behind these anxious-looking kids.

  Only an hour or so before, I had seen something like this in the market at Kalighat, the sight of small tethered goats bunched together in fear and bleating like children. Both were about the same size too. The glossy sleekness and innocence of the goats were echoed by the scrubbed faces of these sweet-faced children, so tiny, so clean, so wide-eyed in terror. The mothers (they had to be mothers; no one else would have held them so tenderly) also looked fearful, raising their faces to the imposing foreign woman in her white sari, the tall young man in the kurta beside her with his hand resting lightly on her elbow, his expensive sunglasses propped pretentiously on his head. He was prematurely losing his hair at the crown, and I felt this was his way of disguising the fact, a balding man's obvious ruse.

  So I did not see children, I saw small, intimidated, and bewildered goats, a great murmuring roomful of them, fearing sacrifice, anticipating their beheading. I was ashamed of myself for thinking this. It was the sort of gloomy intimation I often had in India, among so many people they seemed not just doomed but expendable; bewildered, existing only to die.

  This awful thought was unfair of me and unworthy of Mrs. Unger, who sacrificed herself every day to help such people. I try not to see crowds anymore. I look for individuals who need help, she had said. I needed to remind myself of her honesty and her effort, this beautiful woman who ran an orphanage, a school, a clinic, and an Ayurvedic spa. I was a me
re bystander, a tourist, a hack, a voyeur. Even Charlie, in his weird self-lmportance and snobbery, was a more sympathetic and worthy person than I was, roaming the streets and whining about my writer's block.

  Charlie was greeting the women, introducing his mother, making his way through the crowd of children, most of whom were held by their mothers, many seated on the wooden floor, some of them standing, staring at the tall woman.

  They fell silent as Mrs. Unger walked among them, all their faces turned to her. At the far side of the room I noticed Rajat and, still feeling conspicuous, I went over to him to say hello.

  "Quite a crowd," I said, another banality, but socializing depended on banalities. The point of a platitude was to appear un-threatening, even a little dim.

  "The monthly intake, but fewer than usual."

  "So this is a regular event?"

  "Once a month. It's not that many. Ma won't take them all. She'll be disappointed."

  "I'm amazed she has room for them."

  "There's a monthly release too. It almost balances out." He was looking past me and across the room at Mrs. Unger. "Ma's been to the temple."

  "How do you know?"

  "Spatter," he said, hissing the word. "Bloodstained kind of suits her."

  I turned away from him to look.

  "It's a good color for Ma." Then he spoke as though reading the label of a chip on a color chart. "Dried blood."

  I could not read Indian faces. I could not tell what emotion lay behind his expression. He stared at me, his lips fixed in a sort of smile that had no mirth in it, only (as I guessed) a sly contempt for my ignorance—another snub, perhaps.

  In order to see his expression change, I said, "I've been to the hotel."

  He went on staring. He said, "Oh?"