A Dead Hand

  "Do you want me to stop?"

  My voice was a croak of encouragement as the heaviness of her hair continued to spill like a silken shawl across my stomach. Her hands were all over me, four hands it seemed, or more than four, and as she touched she made me weightless, lifting me off the table in a prolonged ritual of levitation. She went lower, her hands and lips—multiple mouths—taking possession of me, not giving what I wanted, but offering urgent promises. She anticipated what I wanted, which was a pleasure beyond desire, something like a refinement of gluttony, sucking the life from me, all the while soothing me with a satisfied purring in her throat.

  I was folded into darkness, then came suddenly awake as though in a new room. I yanked the towel off my eyes.

  "Was I asleep?"

  "For quite a while."

  "Sorry."

  "I love watching you sleep."

  My body was heavy. I lay, unable to move, while Mrs. Unger caressed my head, her sari like a wisp against my skin.

  "Will you do me a favor?"

  "Yes. Anything."

  She laughed. "You don't know what it is."

  "Anything," I said.

  "I want to go to Assam. Will you go with me?"

  "Yes. Anytime." I was going to elaborate but stopped myself, and she heard the catch of qualification in my voice.

  "Go on..."

  "Charlie will hate me even more."

  "He hates Indian trains." She pinched me affectionately. "You sound as if you care, and I know you don't. But why should you?"

  Because I was not sure when I'd be back in Calcutta, I took a taxi the next day to Dalhousie Square and walked to police headquarters to see Dr. Mooly Mukherjee. I deliberately had not brought Howard along. I wanted to receive the news of the child's identity in confidence. In the lobby, I was given a badge and ushered to his office as before by a chowkidar, strutting with ceremony in front of me.

  "Do come in," Dr. Mukherjee said warmly, inviting me to sit. He shut his office door, stroking his mustache as he did so.

  His friendly manner should have indicated that Dr. Mukherjee had good news, but I had been in Calcutta long enough to find his smile ominous. His warmth meant that he had no news, that he knew nothing; he was going to break it to me gently that the dead hand was a riddle.

  He was smiling as he said, "Normally, body part can provide us masses of information and usable data. This"—he held the plastic pouch with his thumb and forefinger—"is one of those rare instances when we can find out very little. It is a mystery."

  "Age? Sex?"

  "Certainly male child. Maybe ten years of age. Could be a bit more or less."

  "Is there any way you can match the fingerprints?"

  He smiled under his mustache, lifting it with his smile, because the news was so unusual.

  "Not possible in this happenstance."

  "Because you don't have matching fingerprints on file?"

  "Because," and he smiled again, "body part is not having fingerprints."

  "I don't understand."

  "Fingertips perfectly smooth. Not a single whorl or loop."

  "They've been tampered with!"

  "Not at all, in my opinion," he said. "That is why I inquired as to occupation. In some trades fingerprints are abraded. Masonry work. Men who make mud and clay images for puja. Rough carpentry. Tilery. Ironmongery. Pavers—lads making roads."

  "What are you saying?"

  "Such people lose fingerprints by process of abrasion. Instead of print, smoothness is there. As I said previously." He sighed, seeming irritated by my bewilderment. "This person was perhaps engaged in just such occupation. These are the fingers of a hand worker, someone using his fingers many hours a day. Brickwork. Who can say?"

  "So you didn't find anything?"

  "You are entirely mistaken, sir. What we did not find is very revealing. This body part is interesting for what is not there."

  "What shall I do?"

  "Keep safely. It is a piece of a larger puzzle. You need more pieces." He tapped his finger on his desktop and wagged his head knowingly. "Cholche cholbe, we say in Bengali. Keep on—it continues."

  "The rest of the body was cremated, I understand."

  "Possibly other pieces of puzzle will occur in other forms."

  I took the plastic pouch from him; he had been gesturing with it. Out of respect, I didn't want to put it into my pocket. It seemed offensive even to be holding it.

  "I examine many pieces of evidence in the course of my investigations," Dr. Mooly Mukherjee said. "Spectacles can seem sad—one imagines the person's eyes. Shoes or sandals—the foot always leaves a distinct imprint or shape. I have had occasion to examine human ears, the result of violent altercations. Bite wounds—the dentition is apparent, a reminder of our animal nature. But this, sir, this small boy's severed hand with its indication of hard manual labor, is the saddest thing. It says nothing and it says everything. It is like a holy relic. It is a most melancholy object."

  He spoke with dramatic pauses, stroking his mustache, speaking to the window, a kind of oration, and when he had finished, he stepped to the door and opened it.

  "Left at pillar. End of hall to the staircase. Please leave ID badge with receptionist." He indicated with a downward swipe of his hand that he had something more to say. "Ultimately, I should be immensely relieved to hear that body part underwent decent cremation, with proper puja, in fullness of time."

  No fingerprints on the dead hand. As if the skinny, half-mummified little thing were not melancholy enough, this news made it seem sadder in its anonymity, like a corpse without a face.

  "It's what I used to do," Mrs. Unger said a few days later, the afternoon sun showing in streaks of dust-glow beneath the great open canopy of Howrah station. Balraj supervised a porter who carried her large bag on his head, my smaller one in his right hand, and our basket of water bottles and tiffin tins in his left. She had the tickets; she'd even hired bedrolls for us both.

  "Platform jix," Balraj said with a glance at the departure board.

  She said, "Let's go before the crowds get there." She snatched at my hand and I felt all her anxiety at being in public, exposed to the mob. Though her grip was hot and tight, her nails sharp, when she spoke again she sounded casual. "I like arriving fifteen minutes before departure. And there's no one here to frisk me."

  "I want to frisk you. I want to pat you down."

  Inclining her head so that Balraj couldn't hear, she said, "That might not be enough."

  I was elated. We rarely talked like this—the facetious and forgiving innuendo that lovers use. But today was something special. It was our first night together, and on an express train to Gauhati in Assam.

  "This way, madam. What bogie, madam?"

  "Looks like ten," she said, lifting her ticket to verify it.

  Balraj passed this information to the porter and snapped at him to hurry. He seemed impatient, and now I saw why. We were being watched by a hard-faced woman in a filthy sari, her face smeared with makeup, her big feet in broken sandals. Her hair was matted and thick with dirt. She whined a little, and she nodded to get our attention, seeming to peck at us with her sharp nose.

  Even beyond the barrier at platform six the ugly woman followed, legs wide apart, carrying a shoulder bag. Mrs. Unger saw her but said nothing, and when the woman tried to get closer, Balraj blocked her way.

  We found our coach and our compartment, a four-berth sleeper. She said, "Don't worry, I paid for the other two berths, so we'll have it all to ourselves." The berths were narrow and unpromising. I could not imagine lying next to her on one of these badly padded shelves.

  An aggrieved and nagging voice just outside in the corridor made me look up. It was the ugly woman— bhikhiri, Balraj said, a beggar, and he stood in front of her, screening us, as the porter swung our bags onto the upper berths.

  "Sorry, madam," Balraj said, apologizing for the gabbling woman.

  "Give her some rupees," Mrs. Unger said. And to the woman, "Dam k
oto?"

  "She wanting two hundred, madam."

  Mrs. Unger smiled at the amount. The woman was still talking in her scratchy voice. She seemed to be threatening, and her reddened eyes looked hostile.

  "What is that language?"

  "Assamese, madam. She wanting to speak to you."

  "What about?"

  "She say she not normal, madam."

  Mrs. Unger reacted sharply, made a face, shook her head, then said, "How unfortunate. But how does it happen that she's in first class? I think we should call the conductor."

  Balraj said in a respectful but cautioning way, "Please listen to her speak, madam."

  Seeming to marvel at Balraj's audacity, Mrs. Unger softened. "Namashkar. Apni keman achen?"

  "She not well," Balraj said.

  The woman clutched her ragged sari with heavy sunburned hands and turned her beaky face on Mrs. Unger. She began to shout, showing red teeth and dark gums.

  "She say she wanting money. You have money."

  "That's true. Go on."

  "She having no money. She say, 'I not normal.' She say, 'God make me different, not like you. People treating me in bad way because I not normal.'"

  The rough-looking beggar woman was becoming angrier as she spoke. I had seen many panhandlers. They repeated the same phrases, pleading for food, and "No mother, no father!" But this one was giving a speech, denouncing Indians, proclaiming her abnormality, and all of it seemed threatening, her voice harsh with menace.

  Because I did not understand anything she said, I looked closer, scrutinizing her, and saw that she was not a woman. She was a man, middle-aged, wrinkled, and graceless, clownish in a torn sari, with big filthy feet and swollen hands, a wooden comb jammed into his matted hair, and still demanding money, beginning to shriek, showing his green gummy tongue.

  "If you don't give, madam, she will open sari and make nuisance and shame." Balraj, in his panic, was reaching into his own pocket for rupees. "She will show private parts."

  But Mrs. Unger had summed him up herself and was counting hundred-rupee notes. Seeing her, the man—I no longer saw a woman in this sari—became calmer and licked the spittle from his lips and reached out, his big hostile hand like a weapon.

  "That's more than you asked for. Onek dhonnobad," Mrs. Unger said.

  After the strange creature whined his mild thanks— "Dhonnobad. Thik achhi" —and touched the money to his forehead; after Balraj got off and saluted us from the platform; after the whistle blew and the train set off into the late-afternoon sun, Mrs. Unger shut the compartment door and took the seat facing me and spoke in a subdued voice.

  "I'm glad that happened. That was extraordinary." She was silent for a while, breathing softly. "I needed that."

  I began to say something about the Hindu concept of maya, illusion; about the Jain word anekantvad, "the many-sidedness of reality." In beetling and practical India, where everyone occupied a narrow slot in society, this obliqueness and vagueness and evasion, ill-informed observation, arcane philosophy reduced to the sort of chitchat that foreigners like me made in India, usually thirdhand, "Someone was telling me..." But I didn't complete the thought.

  She had been smiling, but the smile slackened, and her eyes glistened and went out of focus. Very slowly her smile broke, her face softening as though a thought was crawling beneath the loose skin of her features. It was the sort of expression you see just before a shout, a face about to swell with laughter. Several attitudes rose and fell until I no longer recognized her helplessness. The face of someone you've never seen cry before is shocking because it seems another face entirely, and you can't imagine why it is so cracked and ugly and weak.

  Mrs. Unger lifted her hands and began to sob into them. I made a move to sit beside her to console her, but she must have seen me through her fingers, and she waved me back.

  She seemed to draw great anguished breaths from deep within herself, sorrowing with her whole body. I said nothing. I watched her weep, hoping she'd understand that my close attention represented the sympathy I felt. But it was more than sympathy. It was fear too, seeing this strong woman reduced to helpless tears—and why?

  The train clanked over those loose rails at level crossings that are so frequent at the fringes of big Indian cities. Mrs. Unger still sat across from me, upright, her knees together, her lovely hands resting on them, facing me but not seeing me, her eyes large and so unfocused as to be luminous, tears streaking her cheeks. Then she took out her bag and, using her mirror, dabbed at her face and tidied her dampened hair.

  "That was perfect. I'd wondered how to begin. But that was the right beginning."

  A grubby transvestite looking for a handout."

  Her reddened eyes found me. "A person living two lives."

  She said it softly, correcting me, not in any melodramatic way but with an intensity that seized my attention.

  "You have something you want to tell me. Something serious."

  "I don't really want to. It's better when secrets are kept."

  "Then don't tell me."

  "I feel I have to. You know too much already."

  "Do I?" I felt I knew very little about her, but that I had no right to ask for more.

  "You know what I'm like in the dark—with you, alone."

  "In your vault."

  "Darkness reveals who we really are."

  "I hope so."

  "But now you know I have a secret."

  "The only part that bothers me is that it's somehow related to that strange person, the man in women's clothes. So what are you saying?"

  I was more than bothered; I was seriously alarmed. I had never seen Mrs. Unger naked, and for all I knew—and I felt utterly ignorant and credulous—Mrs. Unger could have been Mr. Unger.

  She didn't blink. She was staring at me as if to say I defy you to see what it is that's strange about me. It's right in front of your face. She wasn't mocking, yet a smile was implied, as a pinhole of light in her eyes, a glitter of that same defiance.

  This was all a little too playful for me. Anyone can face you and say I'm not what I seem, guess my secret, torment you by forcing you to guess. It was a cruel way of making a fool of you, wringing an admission—but of what?

  "I think it would be good if we didn't have any secrets," I said.

  "Not good. My secrets sustain me," she said.

  I said, "I've never known anyone who was so forthright."

  "I'm talking about one secret," she said. "I wonder how you'll take it."

  "Nothing could possibly change my feelings for you."

  "You might find it shocking."

  "I want to be shocked," I said, daring myself. "I want to share your shocking secret."

  It be so strange to you. You must not cry out, Mina Jagtap had said, passing me the dead hand.

  Mrs. Unger smiled at me the way an older person smiles at someone much younger, that You'll learn smirk of superiority. I became very nervous and thought: Is she going to tell me she's a man?

  In my anxiety I looked out the window for relief and saw that the sun was at the level of the palm trees in the middle distance. A half hour out of Calcutta and we were already in the countryside, a chewed-up landscape of trees with shredded foliage and small straw-roofed bamboo huts and the usual biblical scenes of robed women carrying water jars and boys herding goats and men in turbans leaning to steady wooden plows that were pulled by sleek black buffalo. The daylight dimmed as we watched, the lamps not yet lit in the train, and in this gathering dusk Mrs. Unger became calmer and more certain.

  "I'm black," she said simply.

  "You're not."

  "I'm black," she insisted. In a low voice she added, almost in sorrow, "I hate confessions. They're so stagy."

  I sat back, flattened against the seat cushion, so I did not appear to be staring.

  "I know I don't look it, but I am. If you were black, you'd know it immediately. I can pass for white among whites, but I can't pass for white among blacks. We have ways of knowing." br />
  The obvious question was on my face.

  "We black people."

  She had become very serious and somewhat vexed, as though exasperated at having to explain something so complicated to someone so simple. Certainly she'd gotten my attention, and because I didn't know what to say or where to look, I was just gabbling.

  "It would be much easier if you didn't say anything." She was rocking forward as the coach rocked, the train turning by a wide river. And then her face trembled as we banged over an iron bridge. "It's not a long story."

  "You don't have to tell me."

  "Just listen," she said in a mother's firm tone. "I was born in Georgia. I won't tell you where; you've never heard of it. I was one of seven children. I wish you could have seen us together. There weren't two of us who looked alike. I was second oldest. The eldest, my brother Ike, was quite dark and had black features. Then there was me. Number three had tightly curled reddish hair. Number four was pale, with dark hair. And so on.

  "My grandmother was black, my mother—her daughter—was dark. My father was white. But never mind all these distinctions. We were a black family living in a black township, and all of us kids went to a black school. Everyone knew our pedigree—it's the country way. Georgia was still segregated then, and I hated it. I'll spare you the details.

  "I wanted to go to college up north, to get away from all this. So after high school I applied to a college in Boston. My local church arranged for me to stay with a family in the Roxbury area. They ran a sort of boarding house. A few days after I arrived, the woman of the house said to me, 'You think you're better than we are, white-looking and uppity, but you're nothing but a little black girl just like us. Just like us—and don't you forget it.'

  "I thought to myself: Did I come all the way from Georgia to end up in a segregated part of Boston, in the same sort of place I just left? I stayed for one semester and then went to New York City. It wasn't easy, but it's a big city and I just disappeared there, as people do. And the barriers weren't so rigid.