A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta

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 even 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."

"He's checking his diary," I heard her say to her listeners, with a note (so I felt) of satire.

My diary was blank. I smiled as I looked at the empty pages and said, "I'm not free until five," and thinking she might be a bigger bore than she sounded, I added, "I might have something to do later."

"Five, then. We'll be on the upstairs verandah."

She hung up before I did, leaving me angry with myself for having weakened and called her. Looking again at the letter, I found it irritating, and I was further irritated by my own curiosity. I was sure I was wasting my time with this bossy old woman. She was not the first person who'd said to me, I have a story for you. In every case I replied, This is a story you must write yourself. I can't help you. I'm sure you can do it justice.

So I was breaking one of my own rules, giving in to this temptation. I told myself that her letter justified my interest. It didn't have the insubstantial scrappiness of an e-mail. It was written in purple ink on heavy paper; it was old-fashioned and portentous. And I had nothing else to do.

Before I told them who I was and why I'd come, the staff at the Oberoi seemed to know me: the saluting Sikh doorman, the flunky in a frock coat ushering me across the lobby to the colonnade lined with palms in big terracotta pots, and more welcomers — the smiling waitress in a blue sari, the man in white gloves holding a tray under his arm, who bowed and swept his arm aside in an indicating gesture, his glove pointed toward the far table where a woman sat like a queen on a wicker throne, a courtier on either side of her.

I was relieved that she was pretty and slim. I had thought she'd be big and plain, mannish and mocking and assertive. One of the young men was an Indian, and for a moment I thought the woman was an Indian too — she wore a sari, her hair was dark and thick. But when I came closer and she greeted me, looking happy, I realized I was wrong. She was an attractive woman, younger than I'd imagined, much prettier than I'd expected, much better natured than she'd sounded in her letter or on the phone.

"At last," the woman said. "It's so wonderful to meet you. I'm thrilled. I'm so glad you came."

She sounded as if she meant it. I thought, She's nice, and was reassured: it might be bearable.

And at that moment, as she smiled and held my hand and improved the drape of her sari by flinging a swag of its end over her shoulder with her free hand, as Indian women did, I realized that she was not just attractive but extremely beautiful — queenly, motherly, even sexual, with a slowness and elasticity in her manner and movements, a kind of strength and grace. I did not feel this in my brain but rather in my body, as a tingling in my flesh.

"Please sit down. I thought you might not come. Oh, what a treat! What will you have to drink?"

The waiter was hovering.

"Beer. A Kingfisher," I said.

"One more of these," one of the young men said.

"I'm fine," the other said — the Indian.

"My son, Chalmers."

"Charlie," he said. "And this is my friend Rajat."

"Should I have another drink?" Mrs. Unger asked. "I never know what I ought to do. Tell me." She winked at me. "They're in charge. I just take orders."

"Go on, Ma," Charlie said.

"It's only jal, water with a little cucumber juice," she said. "One more." The waiter bowed. "This is Sathya. He is far from home. He knows that I am far from home. Maybe that's why he's so kind to me. Onek dhonnobad."

"Dhonnobad, dhonnobad. Kindness is yours, madam," Sathya said. He was a gnome-like figure in a blue cummerbund, and round-shouldered with deference. He bowed again, then hurried off sideways, as though out of exaggerated respect.

"Ma babies him," Charlie said. I was still turning "Chalmers" over in my mind. "He loves it."

"I'm the one who's infantilized," Mrs. Unger said. "That was the great mistake the British made in India. They thought they had the whip hand here. They were waited on hand and foot. They didn't notice that the servants were in charge. It took awhile for the servants to realize they had the power. And then the flunkies simply revolted against the helpless sahibs."

Rajat said, "Our love-hate relationship with the British."

"Why on earth would you love these second-rate people?"

"Institutions," Rajat said. "Education. Judiciary. Commerce."

"India had those institutions when the British were running around naked on their muddy little island."

"Road and rail system," Rajat said, but ducking a little. He was a small, slightly built man in his twenties with fine bones and a compact way of sitting. "Communications."

"Self-serving, so they could keep India under their thumb," Mrs. Unger said. Seeing Sathya returning with a tray of drinks, she said, "Ah!"

Sathya set down her glass of juice and the beer.

Charlie said, "They make their own whiskey. That's a great British institution."

"When Morarji Desai was PM he closed down the breweries and distilleries. They turned to bottling spring water," Rajat said.

"Desai had his own preferred drink," Charlie said. "A cup of his own piss every morning." He stared at me. "Did you know that, doll?"

"Chalmers is trying to shock you," Mrs. Unger said.

Rajat said, "Some people think it has medicinal properties."

"I am one of those people," Mrs. Unger said. "I'm surprised Chalmers doesn't know that."

"Ma is a true Ayurvedic. You won't believe the things she eats and drinks."

"But I draw the line at tinkle, efficacious though it may be. I don't quite think my body is crying out for it."

"Ma has healing hands."

"Magic fingers for Ma," Rajat said.

"I try," Mrs. Unger said. She lifted her slender hands and gazed at them in wonderment, as if seeing them for the first time.

She told me about her earliest visits to India, recalling cities and experiences, but because she didn't drop any dates I could not work out her age. Charlie was in his mid-twenties. I took her to be in her late forties — younger than me but forceful, assertive, more confident and worldly, so she seemed older. Charlie did not look like her at all. He was pale, beaky, floppy-haired, languid, his lopsided mouth set in a sneer.

She talked about her business — textiles and fabrics, being funny about how she was overcharged, lied to, and always having to bribe customs officials — while I looked closely at her and at her attentive son and his Indian friend.

Her opinionated humor and energy made her seem generous. She had a lovely creamy complexion, not just the smoothness of her skin but the shine, a glow of good health that was also an effect of the warm Calcutta evening, a stillness and humidity on the hotel verandah. That slight dampness and light in her face from the heat I found attractive, the way she patted her cheek with a lace hanky, the dampness at her lips, the suggestion of moist curls adhering to her forehead, the dew on her upper lip that she licked with one wipe of her tongue.

"I don't mind the heat," she said. She seemed to know what I was thinking. "In fact, I like it. I feel alive. Saris are made for this weather."

She wore the sari well, the way it draped lightly — her bare arms, her bare belly, her thick hair in a bun. She had kicked off her sandals, and I noticed that one of her bare feet was tattooed in henna with an elaborate floral pattern of dots.

She was a beautiful woman. I was happy to be sitting with her, flattered, as men often are, that a lovely woman was taking notice. The very fact of such a woman being pleasant and friendly made it seem she was bestowing a favor.

That was how I felt: favored. I was relieved too. I had come here because of her urgent letter, and now there was no urgency, just this radiant woman and the two young men.

Charlie said something about shipping a container to San Francisco.

"I don't want to think about shipping," she said. "Fill the whole container and then we'll talk about shipping."

The Indian had gone silent, so I said, "Do you live here?"

"For my sins, yes," Rajat said. "I live in Tollygunge. I'm good for about two weeks in America and then I start to freak out."

"Poor Rajat, you're such a love." Mrs. Unger extended her arm as he was speaking and touched his shoulder, letting her hand slide to his arm, his side, her fingertips grazing his thigh, a gesture of grateful affection. And she smiled, more light on her face, the glow in her eyes too.

"I could spend the rest of my life in India," Charlie said.

"But Calcutta is a powder keg," Rajat said.

Mrs. Unger said, "Don't you love it when Indians use those words?"

"The city is toxic." And I heard Mrs. Unger murmur the word as doxic. "When I was young," Rajat said, "I had terrible skin. It was the sweat and dirt of Bengal. I'm from Burdwan, about two hours from here. My face was a mess. My father got a job teaching in Calcutta, and as soon as I got here my skin cleared up."

"You were going through adolescence."

"I was ten!" he shrieked. "I hate dirt. The last time I was in America my skin broke out."

"What you needed was a salt scrub and some pure food. Your mother should have known better. I'll take care of you."

"My poor mother," Rajat said. "All she did was fuss around my father and try to please him. He was a typical spoiled Indian man who couldn't do anything."

"And you're not?"

"Obviously I am living my own life in my own fashion," Rajat said.

He spoke a bit too loudly, in a broad accent, too assertively, and then in his echo in a broader accent.

Merrill Unger said, "I never had that problem with Ralph Unger."

"Ma had him killed," Charlie said.

Mrs. Unger smiled and said, "It was not of my doing. He simply popped off. There is justice in all events."

"But he thought Ma was poisoning him."

"He had a rich imagination," Mrs. Unger said. "His great fault was that he was an Anglophile. That's why he hated India. But he couldn't live in England either — Anglophiles never can. He sat around complaining that the empire was finished."

"I think I might have liked him," Rajat said.

"You are a deluded and perverse young man," Mrs. Unger said with a smile, and I noticed that sarcasm always brought out her brightest smile. "Ralph's other fault was his diet. Know-it-alls and bullies eat so badly. He was a big carnivorous lout, a rather sad man, really, if you looked at him objectively, something I never did. I watched him eat himself to death. Is that insensitive? He never listened to me. He thought I was frivolous and faddish. He didn't realize that he could have saved himself." She leaned over to look at my eyes, my whole face. "Most people don't realize it."

"I try to be a vegetarian here," I said, feeling that a reply was expected of me.

"It's way beyond that. Have you seen an Ayurvedic doctor and had a thorough checkup?"

"I've been pretty busy."

"I keep forgetting you're a celebrated writer."

"Just articles. I keep meaning to write a book."

"You need creative energy for that. Have you done anything about your kundalini?"

Charlie said, "Isn't mother a doll?"

Rajat shook himself in his chair like a shivering girl, seeming to giggle with his body, and said, "I'm one of those people who does all his reading on the Internet. But I've seen your magazine articles all over Charlie's flat."

"You don't know what you're missing," Mrs. Unger said to Rajat, so firmly as to sound like a reprimand. She turned to me. "I've learned so much from you. I'm so grateful."

"Very kind of you to say so."

She said, "If only I could give something back to you. I'd be so happy."

"This is enough," I said. "Sitting and talking like this. If I hadn't met you, I'd probably have just stayed in my room, read a little, and gone to bed early."

They stared at me as though I were being insincere, and my statement hanging in this silence began to droop the way exaggerations do.

"But I thought there was another reason for my being here," I said.

As I spoke, Mrs. Unger seemed to swell — to straighten, anyway — and Rajat to shrink. In growing smaller he became darker, more distinct and brittle and conspicuous. All the while a kind of suppressed and silent hilarity trembled through the three of them, a tension, as just before someone breaks out laughing in intense and mirthless embarrassment. As Rajat's face tightened, his knees together, the shrinking man twisting his hands, Charlie looked bored and slack. He stuck his legs out so they touched the table and jarred the pot of flowers and a carafe of water.

"Do you want to tell him," Mrs. Unger said, "or shall I?"

Rajat twitched a little, as if at a spectral buzzing around his head, then said in a thin voice, "Go ahead."

"Rajat believes he has a little problem," she said in a soothing voice.

"Not so little," Rajat said in a whisper, clutching his knees.

"May I continue?" Mrs. Unger said, smiling her severe smile. She went on in a breathy, actressy way that was just short of satire. "Rajat had an unfortunate experience, and as a result he did a very silly thing. Am I right?"

He nodded and looked at his hands, his fingers crooked around his bony knees. Charlie reached over to pat his shoulder, as Mrs. Unger had done earlier.

"What was the unfortunate experience?" I asked, though I remembered some details from the letter and the words "dead boy on the floor."

"He found something in his room, didn't you, love?"

"Found it?"

"It turned up in the night," he said.

"You woke up and there it was?"

He rotated his head in the Indian way, meaning yes, biting his lip, looking fearful.

"Tell him what it was," Mrs. Unger said.

Rajat moistened his lips and said, "Body."

The word bhodee spoken by this Indian sounded sacred and awesome in its density, like a slab of terrifying meat.

"What was the silly thing you did?" I asked.

"He ran away," Mrs. Unger said, and then quickly, in a practical voice, "I don't blame him. I would have done the same myself. And I would have found myself in the same position Rajat is in right now." She smiled at him. "In a pickle."

Rajat covered his face with his hands, his skinny fingers over his eyes.

"Where did this happen?"

"Right here. Calcutta. In a hotel. A very cheap hotel, I'm afraid," Mrs. Unger said.

"It's clean, anyway," Rajat said.

"Except for the corpses that now and then turn up."

"Ma, please," Charlie said.

Rajat clasped his cheeks and looked as if he might cry.

"I'm stating a fact."

"Did you report it to the police?" I asked.

"We don't trust the police," Mrs. Unger said. "Can you imagine how one would be compromised? I mean, if the story were true."

"I could tell you stories, doll," Charlie said to me.

"Look at him, poor boy," Mrs. Unger said. "He doesn't know what to do."

Anxious and compact in his misery, Rajat sat looking glassy-eyed, almost tearful.

"Was it anyone you knew?" I asked, not knowing where to go with this.

"I never thought to ask that question," Mrs. Unger said. "You see? I knew you'd be a shrewd judge of this business."

But it seemed the wrong question. Rajat began to stifle a sob, and then he let go, covering his face again and weeping into his hands.

The show of emotion, his red eyes brimming with tears in this public place, unnerved me. I said, "How can I help?"

"You see? I felt sure he'd be willing," Mrs. Unger said.

"I have no idea what to do," I said.

"Take an interest, as you would a situation in one of your marvelous stories," she said. "The important thing is that this must not be linked to poor Rajat."

"Don't you think the best thing would be simply to let the whole matter go away? I mean, just forget it ever happened?"

She smiled again, and I realized that the only times she smiled were when she was being sarcastic or when she disagreed with something that was said. Her smile threw me at first, since it indicated the opposite of what she was saying; but as soon as I got used to it I was charmed. She had a beautiful smile.

"Someone knows," she said. "More than one person, most likely. They have something on poor Rajat. He is open to blackmail. He has already suffered crank telephone calls."

"What did they say?" I asked her, but she inclined toward Rajat.

"Nothing," he said. He swallowed, his eyes widening. "Just rang off."

"Maybe wrong numbers."

Mrs. Unger beamed one of her brightest, most contrary smiles.

"I wouldn't know where to begin," I said.

"Let's drop it," she said. "You're being honest. That means a lot to me. We shouldn't burden you with this sordid business."

"I wish I could help."

"You've listened. Your sympathy is an enormous reassurance. And I think it helps that we've been able to talk about it."

I said, "It might be better if you didn't say anything."

She smiled her disagreeing smile and said, "Shall we drop it?"

Sathya the waiter stepped into that silence. "Fresh drinks?"

As so often happens, the waiter's appearance to take an order became the occasion for Rajat and Charlie to get up and say they had to go.

Mrs. Unger just watched them with her pale indifferent eyes. She didn't (as I expected her to) urge them to stay. She said, "Please do be careful, Chalmers."

"He is knowing his way around," Rajat said.

She smiled at that, and as soon as they were gone, her manner became more relaxed, less formal, less motherly, less queenly, all the qualities I now recognized because they were absent. People can seem a bit deflated when they're grateful and frank — she did. She said, "I really mean it. I've learned so much from your writing. I'd love somehow to be able to pay you back for all the pleasure you've given me."

I almost said, I've come to Calcutta to write a story but I have nothing to write. Give me something. But I said, "Don't even think about it."

"But you see, I have something specific in mind."

I said nothing, merely tried to imitate the indifferent glance she had given her son and Rajat.

"Does Chalmers look healthy to you?"

"In the pink," I said. It was true — he was tall, not thin but slender, with a blushy unsunned face and long light hair swept back, and even his languid way of sitting suggested contentment and good health. Although he did not physically resemble his mother, his disposition matched hers: all-seeing, finding a severe humor in the strain of India.

"In the pink because Ma knows best," she said. "Let me take you to dinner. It's not healthy to eat late. I know just the place. It will be the first step."

I said yes. I was glad that Charlie and Rajat were gone. Now I could give all my attention to Mrs. Unger. I liked the sudden change in her, from motherly to mildly flirtatious, while still making all the moves.

"Don't be shocked," she said in the taxi. "Foreigners are always being shocked in India for the wrong reasons. Of course it's dirty here. Of course people are poor and the traffic is atrocious. And of course the restaurant we're going to is very humble. But the food is pure."

I had been all over India, and I knew Calcutta a little, but even so I might have been shocked at the restaurant if she had not said that in the taxi. I did not recognize it as a restaurant. It was a ground-level room, with a verandah open to the street and the crowd, just above a storm drain. Four bare tables, no other people. A man in a gauzy white dhoti with the caste marks of a priest raised his arms and clasped his hands in welcome — some obscure tattoos on his wrists.

"Madam, madam." He showed respect without servility as Mrs. Unger swept past him and sat at one of the tables, as though she were entering the Four Seasons rather than this room filled with the noise and smells of the Calcutta back street.

"I hope we're not too late."

"Never too late."

"This is my friend. He's a famous writer."

"Welcome, sir."

I sat opposite Mrs. Unger. A barefoot boy in shorts and a white shirt approached carrying a basin and a pitcher. Mrs. Unger washed her hands in the basin, the boy pouring water over them, and following her example, I did the same.

"There's no menu," she said. "This is really a private home. We'll have whatever his wife prepares. But I assure you it will be good for you."

Very soon, the old priestly-looking man in the dhoti stood near our table as a girl set down a tray of dishes and arranged them before us: bowls of lentils and mushy peas, bowls of cooked gluey okra and deep green spinach-like leaves, a stainless steel tureen of thin soup with a fragrant aroma, a mound of brown rice on a plate. Glasses of nimbu pani, lime water. That was all. The old man gestured over it and then scuffed away.

"This is what you need. Clean food."

I spooned some of the okra and spinach and rice onto my plate and tasted. Its bland and earthen hum lingered in my nose. I wondered how much of it I'd be able to force myself to eat.

"I'm surprised. No spices."

"Ayurvedic. Most Indians eat far too many spices. Too much garlic and onion, tons of salt, way too much ghee butter and oil. They love sweets — they're like children. Did you see that man? He does two hours of yoga every morning. But most Indians get no exercise at all. Probably the unhealthiest people in the world."

I was staring, because she was eating delicately but with gusto, and because she seemed so sure of herself.

"Really?"

"Yes. They have all the answers, but they just ignore them. This is an Indian meal, yet how many Indians eat it regularly? They eat junk and rich food, or else they're starving and hardly eat at all. Have you ever seen people so unhealthy? I don't mean poor Indians. The poor eat better than the rich ones. Poor Indians eat lentils and roti and rice and green vegetables. The rich eat butter and sweets. Look at the shapes of Indians — the rich man's belly, the rich woman's butt. They get no exercise, they play no sports."

"Cricket," I said.

"That's not a sport. It's a game that hardly requires fitness. Apart from the man that throws the ball, it's mostly standing around. You never see an Indian kicking a ball or running. Punjabis are tall. But where are the basketball players? Where are the marathoners? Over a billion people and they can't win an Olympic medal."

"I did a story on this once. They average about one medal in each Olympics."

"One!" she screamed. "In what sport?"

"Shooting an air rifle."

"That's my point! You can be a fat air-rifle shooter!" This fact delighted her. "They are weirdly shaped, either stuffed or skinny. Is it sexual? I sometimes think so. Of course, Indian girls can look heartbreakingly beautiful, but the women look fat and frustrated, the men look angry, the boys look wretched and onanistic. The eternal question for an Indian traveler is 'Where will we eat?'"

"Americans say the same thing."

"I know. Americans are fat too, not from frustration but from excess. The poor are fat in America. The rich are thin. It's the awful food there. Not like this."

She was chewing as she spoke, as though to prove her point. "This is so pure. I can see by your slightly puffy eyes that you don't have good kidney function. But after you get a thorough checkup, establish your body type and your chakras, you'll be on the right path."

"You're taking me by the hand, I see."

"It'll do you good. Each of these dishes has value and balance."

I swallowed, trying to convince myself, and said, "I see."

"It's almost sacramental, eating like this. Think of your body."

Her saying that made me conscious of her lovely body, her hand dipping into the rice, making a ball of it, dipping it into the lentils. Thomas Metcalfe, of the governor general's office, could not bear to see a woman eat cheese. I guessed it was not disgust, but probably aroused something in him. Sitting with Mrs. Unger, I realized I loved to watch a pretty woman eat, especially messy food, her trying to be dainty over it and failing, the flecks of food on her lips, the chewing, the neck sinews tightening with a swallow. I could see more: Mrs. Unger's stomach muscles framed by the bodice of her sari and her wraparound. The pleasure of her eating was also the pleasure I took in admiring her good health. She sat upright with strength and grace, using her fingertips on the rice, the dripping okra, the mushy peas. And I was aroused by the small splash of food on her lower lip, her lapping at it like a cat, making the lip gleam.

"I assure you that tonight you'll sleep like a baby."

The old man came over to make sure we had everything we wanted. He chatted cozily but with respect to Mrs. Unger. He directed the girl to refill our glasses of lime water. I struggled to eat a believable portion; the tang of soil lingered on the unsalted, spiceless food.

When the old man had gone, she said, "Do you get regular massages?"

"I wish I did."

"That's what you need."

All this time I had feared that she would ask me again about what she mentioned in her letter, the body in the hotel room, Rajat's worry, the danger for him. But she said nothing more about the letter, which when I had received it seemed so urgent.

"You should have a massage. I know just the place."

She fluttered her fingers in a bowl of water, and as she did so the Indian girl appeared behind her with a towel. After drying her hands, Mrs. Unger took a pen and pad out of her bag and wrote down a name. The purple ink and her loopy handwriting reminded me of her letter.

"Morning is best. Have a light breakfast. Be at this place at ten."

As she gave me the piece of paper, I laughed because she was bossy in such an appealing way, mothering me with concern and care.

She said, "I hope your friends won't mind my taking charge of you."

This seemed to me an odd remark, at once full of confidence, presuming on me. Yet her assurance made me wary. Confident-seeming women often made encumbering statements like this when deep down they were uncertain, the sort of overfamiliar bluster that was easily punctured by a sharp reply.

Instead of embarrassing her by game-playing, I said, as politely as I could, "I wish I knew which friends you mean."

I wasn't offended. I was in Calcutta, living by my wits. I was seriously interested in which people she might mean. But even my polite response made her shy, as though I'd been blunt.

"The folks on Ho Chi Minh Sarani, maybe."

That made no sense to me, and I couldn't help smiling. Yet she was smiling back at me in a kind of challenging suggestion that she knew more than I'd guessed.

"Where's that?"

"The American consulate."

"Is that the name of that blocked-off street?"

"You must have been there many times, you're so popular."

"Yes, but someone else was doing the driving," I said.

"That's the mixed blessing of being in Calcutta. Someone else is always doing the driving."

The ambiguity of this made me pause. I didn't have a reply to it, though I knew I'd remember it. I said, "So that's how you knew where to find me with your letter."

I felt obvious and fooled with the conceit that I'd attributed it to my high visibility as a big pink ferringhi. But she dodged that — this had become a fencing match — and said, "I don't have much to do with those people. But I know how greatly they value you."

"Really?" I said, mildly surprised because I'd never been convinced that Howard took me seriously as a writer. He liked my availability, and that I was willing to give pep talks at colleges at short notice, a volunteer speaker, glad for the per diem, who was not terrified by Calcutta, helping him do his job.

"Oh, yes," Mrs. Unger said. "They're big fans. You know that Indians are very suspicious of the Americans that come out here, especially the ones sponsored by the U.S. government. They have a long history of being patronized. The consulate regards you as a friend who won't let them down."

"And what do they think of you?"

"I don't exist for them. But I'm glad you do. I'm glad your writing means something to them."

Once again I wanted to say: I have no writing, I have a dead hand, I am out of stories, I have stopped believing. And maybe it will never happen. I didn't have much to write about at the best of times, and now it's done. But I had also thought, when I'd reflected on my dead hand: A writer without an idea, without the will or the energy to write, is someone in need of a friend.

Nelson Algren had had friends, cronies, gambling pals, drinking buddies, and though he wrote nothing in his last years, he'd had companions. William Styron did not write anything in the last fifteen years of his life. His dead hand hadn't hastened his death; it had made him immensely gloomy, paranoid, and impatient, longing to write yet incapable of it. But he had been surrounded by a doting family and a loving wife. I had no writing, I had no one, I was alone with my dead hand.

So I said, "I'll be there." Then I said, "Shall I call you Merrill?"

"Call me Ma." And she looked closely at me. "Everyone does."

It was a word that had always made me uncomfortable, so I resisted saying it, yet I allowed myself to be swept up. And it was all unexpected, which was why it was so pleasant: the drink, the meal, and now this appointment for a massage.

I wondered if I looked so idle as to agree to so much at short notice. I hoped she understood that I was interested in her, even if I was bewildered by the story of the corpse in the hotel room. I was glad to have found her, and it seemed — I was sure of this — I was making her happy too. She had praised my work; she knew I had friends at the consulate. She seemed glad I had come. You go away to be anonymous, but sometimes the opposite happens: you excite interest, even in big, villagey India, in the stew of Calcutta.

3

OVER BREAKFAST the next morning on the verandah of my hotel, the Hastings, conscious that I was eating what she'd instructed me to order — a little yogurt, green tea, a slice of mango, a handful of unsalted almonds — I mentally reviewed the meeting with Mrs. Unger — Ma, as I now thought of her. I was grateful to her for giving me something to do in Calcutta, to take my mind off my writing failure and my idleness. I had dreaded being stumped, having to sit in the heat over a blank page. I could not force out a story, and the few words I had written rang false.

Trivial as it was, the appointment she'd made for me had given me a purpose, a destination for the day. I could have called Howard at the consulate, but he had a real job and obligations. I could have met Parvati for tea, providing she was in the company of some of her friends; it was considered indecent for a man like me to meet a virginal Hindu like her alone. She was gifted, with her whole life ahead of her as a dancer, a poet, a practitioner of Indian martial arts. I wished her well, but I knew that not much would change in my life. Old age was not an accumulation of thought and experience but rather the reverse: by writing of my most vivid experiences I had disposed of them. Old age for me was an emptying of the mind.

Old age for me was also a narrowing of possibilities and maybe (as I was beginning to think) a slow dying, parts of the body becoming useless — my empty head, my dead hand. What body part next?

Calcutta was the perfect place to feel like a physical wreck or a failure. Virtually everyone else was much worse off than I was. Maybe that was why I had lingered after my work was done, though I hadn't made anything of my experience in the city. Had I not met Ma the day before, I would have spent the day walking as though in a hot-weather stupor, window-shopping, museum-going, or heading to Howrah station and considering the outbound trains. I had thought of leaving, but having met Ma I was curious and sentimental and dog-like, sniffing at the memory of meeting her and hoping to see her again.

And sitting on the Hastings verandah, the sun dazzling in the slats of the shutters, I remembered more of what she had said at the Oberoi — more than what I have already written. The talk of the British Empire and her Anglophile late husband had led her to talk about the English in general and the royal family in particular.

"They love royalty here too. The British spend half their time lying to themselves about their dysfunctional country. The Indians do the same. I'm not surprised they find common ground. 'We love pageantry,' the British say as they hide behind the flags and the funny-looking hats. And Queenie's the head of the church, the Defender of the Faith — it says so on the money. But look at her. Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous? She's a gilded crock, a posturing old dear who regards Britain as her personal property. Imagine finding spirituality in this little old lady. It's like finding spirituality in a skinny cow, which Indians do."

"If you want to be worshiped, go to India and moo. Isn't that what they say?"

But she wasn't listening. She was saying, "I think the Indians easily came to admire Queen Victoria, because she was the superqueen, the Rajmata. Indians believe in hierarchies and the British model came ready-made, as a big unifying social contraption."

She was speaking slowly but intensely, with the kind of fluency that made me think she'd recited this denunciation many times before, because it was a speech rather than a conversation, and whatever I said was an interruption.

"India's dirty little secret is that they dislike each other and are untrusting. The British are the same — English especially. Can't bear each other. Never talk. Don't even say hello. That's why they're so happy in America, because we believe this fictional version of themselves. They hate their lives. They can only be happy by promoting the myth of the terribly British, and that's only possible overseas, in faraway places like India. Indians have bamboozled Americans too. 'We don't eat animals.' Most of them do! 'We are spiritual, madam.' They worship money!"

"It's true," Rajat had said. "We are so materialistical."

"I suppose it's a commonplace to regard the British royal family as social upstarts."

"I never heard that before," Rajat had said.

"The royal family is bourgeois — if anything, they're lower middle class but with insane pretensions. Prince Philip used to complain to newspaper reporters that he had no money, that he couldn't afford to keep polo ponies, that Buckingham Palace got horrible aircraft noise. That's typical shabby. 'We just don't have the money!' 'We're stuck here in this rackety house!'"

And then: "They get all sorts of freebies, you know. They ask for them. The Duchess of Whimsy goes to New York and stays free at a hotel with her whole parasitical entourage. She does the same in India, and it's even worse because the Raj still exists in the mind of the British royal family. Before any of these royals leaves London, she has her lady in waiting send a memo detailing how many rooms she'll need, usually four or five suites, how many other people have to be accommodated, all the meals she'll want, and the pickup times at the airport for the hotel limos. A list of demands, you see. At the end of her freebie she agrees to appear at a cocktail party and have her picture taken. No money changes hands. It's all grace and favor."

I had not known this. I was impressed and slightly shocked by her version of a royal visit. I took out my almost blank notebook and wrote down what Ma had said.

"Hotels in New York compete to host the British royals and take tea with them. It makes me ashamed to be an American. My late mother-in-law was English. She adored the royals, the Queen especially, that perfectly hideous woman. Isn't it ghastly?"

The "Isn't it ghastly?" I found especially interesting. Whenever Americans denounced the British they always did it with a mimicky British turn of phrase: "take tea with them," "perfectly hideous," "quite disgusting," or the one word "ghastly."

"It's even worse in India. Faded maharajahs and scruffy English aristocrats slobbering over each other and lamenting the loss of the Raj. It's absolutely frightful."

Charlie had said to me, "You shouldn't have gotten Ma on this subject."

But I hadn't. I had only listened and nodded, and she still went on snapping at the subject.

"What a pathetic family, and it's all there in full view, the whole sorry lot of them. You think less of the British just looking at them."

"But they are beneficial for tourism," Rajat said. "Like our maharajahs, faded though they may be."

"Have you ever seen anything that was good for tourism that wasn't a complete blight for everyone else? Here, I think of those superfluous maharajahs chain-smoking and drinking whiskey," Ma said. "In America it's Disneyland. Golf courses. Gambling casinos. Strip clubs. Nothing artistic. The monarchy — all monarchies — are a confidence trick. All they do is diminish people. Yes, I agree, probably good for tourism, like a freak show. But if Queenie was really a freak I'd probably like her a little. She's not. People make excuses for her. 'She works jolly hard.' You know who works jolly hard? Not the greedy Queen, not you or me, but those sweepers out there in Chowringhee. The real aristocrats of the world are the native peoples, the so-called tribals in India, the Mizos, the Nagas in Assam."

"Tell him your vow, Ma," Charlie said.

Ma straightened and said, "I refuse to read about the royals. If there's a story about Queenie's dogs or her children's foolish marriages — have you ever seen so many divorces in a holy family? — anything related to the royals, I turn the page. The headline 'Prince Charles in Skiing Accident' has me thrusting the paper aside. I change channels when they're on the telly."

What was strange about this was that Ma had the vaguely provincial English accent that well-educated Americans sometimes have, and as I mentioned, a put-on English turn of phrase. The words "thrusting" and "telly" and "artistic," which she'd pronounced autistic.

"They are a decaying family," she said. "You can see it in their faces. Inbred, lifeless, people without a point or purpose. I understand why royals are never jailed, why, when the time comes, they are lined up and shot."

"Mother upsets her London friends," Charlie said, his face gleaming in admiration.

"Because I speak the truth. I daresay, most of the British royal family are Germans."

While I smiled at "I daresay," Rajat laughed. He shrieked, "Germans!" Then he said, "Indians are just as false. Sonia Gandhi is Italian."

I pushed my breakfast aside and continued to write this down, delighted to have something for my notebook, glad to have something to do today. And when I was done I took the envelope that I had tucked into the pages. I opened the letter again and glanced through it. I come to India to oversee my charity. What did that mean? And what of the rest, the intrigue at the hotel? I tried to recall whether she had mentioned it over dinner. I remembered more of her rant about the royal family (a detail related to their TV watching), but very little about the letter, which was the reason I'd gone there in the first place. I wrote all that I remembered: Shall we drop it? She tended to the theatrical, but I loved her confidence, a certainty that enhanced her beauty.

I was glad to be relieved of the obligation to solve the crime. And the simple breakfast gave me a feeling of well-being. I lingered on the verandah reading the Statesman with my feet on a hassock. The tang of spices from the shop next door to the Hastings, the rattle and beep of cars jostling with pedicabs on the back lanes, the babble of human voices, mostly hawkers; the sense of life being lived outdoors, the city exposed. Ma had said she'd come to Calcutta for Durga Puja, but that had been months before, and this midwinter weather was perfect, warm days, chilly nights, an aroma of woodsmoke and burning charcoal in the city.

I resisted writing what I could barely put into words, that I'd met someone I liked, who seemed to know my mind, whom I hoped to go on knowing. A rare feeling in life, that one has made a friend. I am not thinking of a love affair, although that is the extreme example of such a feeling. I mean the desire to see a person again, the curiosity, the sense most of all that the person is a generous and vitalizing force — that I will be happier and stronger because of this friendship.

She had made me no promises. She'd said only, "Go to this spa" — had she said "spa"? — "you'll be glad you did." And I concluded that if I did it, obeying her, she would be pleased and want to see me again. She'd want to know how I liked it. She'd want to say See? I was right. You're glad you went.

She wanted to be right. I wanted to report to her that she'd been right. I wanted to obey her. And as on previous occasions in my life, I thought, not in words but in rising wavelets of feeling, like promises of health: If I don't see her again I'll be very disappointed. This eagerness, like a schoolboy crush, made me feel young and happy and a little silly. Out of the chaos and noise of Calcutta, the rejection, the indifference of the Indian mob, I'd found a purpose and someone to like.

I had made up my mind that she was exceptional — generous, motherly, flirtatious, kind, out of the ordinary. She seemed to know me. She seemed to care for me. And she was attractive. Ever since leaving her at the little restaurant — we left separately in taxis — I had begun to miss her.

All this was out of character for me. I am by nature suspicious and solitary, an eavesdropper not a buttonholer. The rich don't interest me, and for the rich, usually, people without money are of little account. I hate the way the rich cut corners. I can't stand their timidity. I hate their whining about the high cost of living or how little money they have, for the indirection of the rich is their incessant howl that they're poor.

But the new emotion in me, a nostalgia for attachment, made me feel better. I had the sense of unfamiliar sentiments being uncovered in me, like discovering a taste for a certain wine or a forgiveness for an old slight. I was thrilled to feel something new. It was knowledge, a surprise, and I was grateful because it came with a distinct optimism. Something new might be something to write about, another reason not to feel old.

"Your car is here, sir."

I looked up and saw the desk clerk, Ramesh Datta. What car? I hadn't ordered a car. I was reminded of the suddenness of the letter he'd brought me. I looked beyond the verandah and there it was, a black Ambassador with yellow curtains, an Indian in a white uniform standing next to it, awaiting orders. I hurried downstairs.

"You're looking for me?"

The man in uniform made a wing-flap of his arm and gave me a little salute. "Transport to Lodge, sir."

Another surprise, more pleasure, life becoming easier, the sort of thing one hopes for in India, usually in vain.

"My appointment's not until ten."

"I will wait, sir, and proceed at your pleasure."

"I appreciate that."

"Therefore I will bide my time," he said. "Cool heels."

That was another thing about India: the huge number of people whose job it was to stand and wait for those few who kept them waiting. Most were drivers, idle beside the car until the owner flashed into view and made an impatient gesture. But they were also door openers, secretaries, personal assistants, cooks, receptionists, every conceivable job description reduced to the level of flunky.

In my month of giving lectures in and around Calcutta I'd had to wait for people to show up — the sponsor, the audience, the person introducing me. And now I was someone for whom a flunky waited. This role did not suit me; it made me feel conspicuous and anxious, but I told myself that I had not asked for the car and driver.

"Who sent you?"

"Ma."

In all Indian legends, in every ancient narrative, the god or goddess has a vehicle. For Durga it is a lion, for Vishnu the eagle Garuda, for Shiva the bull. In this odd-looking pantheon Ganesh, the elephant god, rides on a mouse, Kali on a demon corpse. Ma had an Ambassador Nova with stringy curtains.

Chauffeur-driven cars rarely arrived at the Hotel Hastings, and when they did, they never lingered. For the first time since checking in I became an object of interest, not whispers but earnest glances. The staff seemed relieved. If I happened to be someone of substance, I might be a tipper. The ability to provide baksheesh was the principal determiner of a person's worth in India.

That chimed with the feeling within me that had surfaced this morning — that I was someone else today, not perhaps a whole new person but an aspect that had been slumbering inside me had been awakened, someone new to me. This smiling creature was sitting up and wagging his tail, open-mouthed and eager.

Still with a twitch of obligation, a sense that I wanted to please Ma, I put down my newspaper and went out to the car that was parked in the lane next to the hotel.

"You know where we're going?"

"Lodge, sir."

"What's your name?"

"Balraj, sir. Thank you, sir."

He swung open the door for me, then took his place at the wheel, jamming his peaked cap more firmly on his head. We were soon lost in traffic. I had not recognized the name of the spa — or lodge? I'd planned to show it to a taxi driver. I had a general idea of the main streets, but Balraj took side streets, back lanes, and alleys, jostling with bicycles, auto-rickshaws, and now and then hand-pulled rickshaws — as though wheeled off the pages of a Victorian print of old Calcutta, every detail intact. Barrows too, the ancient kind: I saw hairy legs and thick wooden spokes in wooden wheels. When the car slowed down people peered in the window at me, their faces pressed against the glass.

"Not far, sir."

I had not said a word. Balraj had the driver's instinct for a passenger's anxiety, but I also presumed that his reassurance was his way of bucking for a tip.

The lanes were becoming narrower, the car slowing to fit through them, but at the point where I expected Balraj to speed up and pull away from a high wall of cracked stucco, he swung the car sharply, and as he did, an iron gate with rusty spikes suddenly opened and Balraj drove between a pair of flaking whitewashed pillars. A man rushed forward to open my door.

"Where are we?"

"Lodge, sir."

An old three-story plaster and brick villa, modified mock Georgian, Indian style, with porches, fluted columns, a high portico, slatted blinds, and a date at the base of a plinth, 1892. It could have been a school or a rotting hospital, but probably — this being Calcutta — it had once been the residence of a tycoon, a jute merchant or tea magnate. A fountain in the courtyard, its centerpiece a nymph in the act of emptying a water jar, was dry and the nymph was missing one arm. Two rusted urns held geraniums. A fresher eye than mine, someone new to Calcutta, would have seen the villa as derelict, but I knew that it was a usable antique: it was clean and orderly, the courtyard swept, the flowers watered, all of them deep red lilies. To one side was a gateway with a garden of shade trees visible beyond it. This was one of those Indian time warps that I had stepped into many times but without surrendering to it, because I was the traveling writer who always had to leave early the next morning for a new place. I kicked off my shoes and mounted the steps.

A man in a white smock and leggings stood barefoot at the doorway, a woman beside him in a white sari. She held the usual tray with a flame, passed it under my chin, and applied a red thumbprint to my forehead.

"Welcome to the Lodge, sir."

"Lovely place."

"Your home, sir," the man said.

I followed them inside and through a high-ceilinged lobby, across a marble floor. The ruinous outside was not repeated here: the interior was whole and cool, with painted murals of classical European landscapes on the walls of the lobby — Palladian villas set amid tall poplars, deer and birds in a pastoral scene, a great sweep of bay, perhaps Naples, all of these faded paintings blurred with an overlay of dust.

I had seen a few spas in India; this was not like any of them. The ruin on the outside did not suggest anything hygienic, and the lobby here was more suited to stuffed shirts and evening gowns. In this newer incarnation I would have said it was a school — for the odors alone, with the whiff of chalk dust in the air, the tang of varnished desks and mildewed books, the battered woodwork, the baseboards looking kicked and bumped. I imagined children jostling here. And I could hear voices: the singsong of children's laughter, the sounds of their playing, reciting, the shrieky rat-a-tat of childish taunts. And more, the tapping of feet — the peculiar dry scuff and thump of bare soles; the fleeting shapes — faces at door cracks, faces at the spindles in the upper galleries, the contending screeches of small boys, the imploring voices of little girls. Because I could not see any of them clearly, they seemed to be especially numerous, a whole mansion of murmuring children, Interrupted from time to time by the odd dull nag of an older woman.

The unseen but vibrant presence of life, an intimation of children, made me uncomfortable. I felt I'd entered by the wrong door, somewhere I didn't belong.

I looked at the man who was leading me through the cool, odorous — smell of damp mop on old tile — corridors, and I hoped to be reassured. I wanted him to say Never mind them, or to explain what the voices were.

He didn't say anything, not even his name. He didn't smile, or if he did, I could not see it beneath his mustache. He had the face-forward and rather resigned and glazed expression of an Indian menial doing his duty. That is, both submissive and slightly haughty.

We turned into another corridor — fleeting shapes of children — and then went through a latched door to an annex of the old building. A woman waiting at the door handed me a parcel, like a delivery of hotel laundry, and the man said, "You can change in there. Wear robe only and cloth slippers. Valuables will be deposited in this container" — he indicated a basket on a shelf—"for containing only. No one will disturb."

When I stepped into the changing room, he left and so did the woman. I shut the door and changed quickly, took off my watch and put it with my wallet into the basket. Just then, a knock at the door: he seemed to know that I was done.

"This way, sir."

"Where to?"

"To vault."

What he said was wait, and the word thrilled me. He led me deeper into the Lodge, past adjoining rooms and narrowing corridors to a heavy door. Behind this door was a room with a long wooden table in the center, a shower in one corner, a stool in another corner. The tiny smoke trail rising from a taper in a dish must have accounted for the fragrant and dizzying aroma.

Two young men in the room bowed to me, their hands clasped in a gesture of namaste. The taller of the two motioned me to the stool where the other had already begun to crouch.

This second man washed my feet with lukewarm water, massaging my toes, rubbing them gently, cupping my heels. It was more than mere pouring water and soaping; it was not an empty ritual but rather an act of purification, a slow and thorough cleansing of the flesh of my feet, making them live — reminding me that I had two feet.

"Table, sir."

These laconic directions were all I got. I could not tell whether they knew a whole English sentence. But it didn't matter. They had removed my robe and my wrap, and I lay face-down on the table, feeling exposed. My first thought, the fearful one, was that I was to be killed: I was in the helpless posture of an animal on a slab. I lay like a human sacrifice, blind to my captors, my ass in the air.

One of them hosed me with a fine spray while the other scrubbed me with a mild abrasive — salt, I realized. Each of them wore cloth mitts, and they worked the salt over my body the way you scour a pot. This went on for a while, their rocking me with scrubbing motions.

I was possessed by a strange sensation, as though I was not human at all but an enormous vegetable or a dumb animal being cleaned. I gave myself up to it and was amazed at their conscientious scrubbing, the chafing of their mitts. Then they sprayed all the salt off me, and I heard the gulp of the excess water in the drains.

When all the salt had been removed from my body and the table, one of them gave me a towel and helped me to a sitting position.

"Take time, sir."

He knew I was dizzy from their pummeling. Was this what Ma had meant when she'd said, You'll be a new man? I dried myself and stood up on the wooden slats of the floor. One of the men draped a robe over my shoulders, the other tied the cords in front.

"This way, sir."

Down the hall to a new room, a dry table as sacrificial-seeming as the last but with a more pungent odor, like sesame oil, and a burning smell too. An oil lamp, a sacred statue in a shrine garlanded with marigolds.

I lay on the table, again face-down, but I saw one of them take a brass pot from a squat, stove-like heater, and he poured hot oil on my back and buttocks and calves, and he worked it into my muscles. He dripped it into my hair, massaged my scalp, and proceeded from there to my feet. I felt like a piece of meat being marinated for the pot.

Some minutes of this, then, "Thank you, sir," and they left me alone in the warm room that was thick with the scent of oil.

4

NAKED IN THIS STRANGE interior room in an old ripe-smelling mansion in a district of Calcutta, I began to mock myself, thinking: This is what happens when you surrender. I didn't really know where I was. Somehow curiosity and vanity had led me here, and a sentiment I thought I had outgrown, the greed for experience, agreeing to the suggestions of a beautiful stranger. That willingness had served me before when I needed something to write about.

I did not know what would happen next. Mine was an act of faith, or stupidity — I was a credulous fool. The car had been sent, like a vehicle in a ghost story or an Indian myth, and I had gotten in and allowed myself to be transported here. Now I lay, literally with my dick in my hand, in the posture of submission, alone and bare-assed, like a big buttered man on an altar.

Yet I was not alarmed. The hot oil had calmed me. Coated in it, I was warmed and relaxed, the lamp flickering in the aroma of sesame and ghee. The only light came from the flame wagging on the wick in the oil lamp. The last identifiable sound I'd heard was the door's decisive click as the masseurs had departed. I wasn't sorry: I didn't like being touched by a man. But I wasn't surprised. In puritanical caste-crazed India it was unusual for a woman in a spa to attend to male clients.

I must have dozed. The whole business had been soporific. With my head covered by a folded towel, I was dimly aware — perhaps in shallow dreams, or in adjacent rooms — of the murmur of life nearby, like a children's chorus, vaguely taunting and competing as children's voices seem to do. My body was penetrated by the vibrations of busy lives, the shuffle of small feet, the contentious cries of kids, the whole huge house pulsing around this small room, the vault.

And I thought, or dreamed: This is not like any spa I've ever seen, in India or anywhere else. The muted life, the deliberate pauses, the silences of a spa were unavailable here. This was like being in a household — a large one — or a schoolhouse or (the thought occurred to me as a grotesquerie) a big throbbing body. I had the absurd thought that I'd been swallowed whole by a monstrous creature and that I was in the belly of this monster. But it was an Indian beast, accommodating and warm, its blood pounding in my ears, and still the shrieks and calls of children echoing in the walls.

When I woke, Mrs. Unger was beside me.

She seemed to inhabit a vapor, a fragrant cloud filled with the aroma of flowers and also of Indian spices, mingled oils, and perfumes. She was warmth and softness and a kind of light too. This sounds hyperbolic. I supposed I was overreacting to her because I was so relieved to see her. She brushed my shoulder, the caress of warm skin or silk against my side. I lifted my head a little and saw she was wearing a purple sari. She was moving her hands, palms downward, paddling the air over my body as though warming them like fingers over a fire, and in another motion lifting them in a gesture of levitation, and then making a flourish with them as though she was earnestly searching, my body the object of her dowsing motions.

"Just breathe normally," she said, and that was all she said for a while.

Still I lay naked, slick with oil, imagining that I could feel her fluttering hands. I was glad she was there, not just relieved that she was not an Indian masseur but delighted to see her again. Since the previous day I'd been thinking about her — involuntarily, she shimmered in my memory — and I'd even had a vivid dream of her in which she smiled at me, then turned around and was someone else, a demon version of her bewitching side. The everyday horrors on an Indian street or in an average temple make this sort of nightmare a common occurrence. Without speaking, but (in the manner of dreams) knowing what I wanted, I tried to get her to turn again so I could behold that sensual side of her.

"Trying to see where you need work," she was saying with banal practicality over my feverish memories. Her hands were still active in the air, hovering as if receiving signals with her fingers and palms.

"Where did you come from?"

She didn't answer. With a frown in her voice, she said, "Yes, you do need work. Upper trapezius muscles. Very tight."

Hearing that pleased me. I wanted her to stay. I wanted her attention.

"Now I'm going to ask you to turn over."

I skidded slightly as I rolled onto my back. Then I felt the warmth and weight of a towel over my pelvic area; she tucked the ends under my buttocks, so I was decent. A moment later she placed a damp cloth over my eyes. In the darkness I became more aware of the music in the room — a sitar, a warbling flute, and in bursts the pok-pok of tabla drums.

Now I felt her confident fingers on me. She was holding my toes, one by one, explaining softly, "This is your shoulder" — the small toes—"very tense," and working her way from toe to toe, "your neck, your ears," and gripping my big toe, "your head." She dug her nails into the sole of each foot and lifted it, applying pressure. After a minute or so, the same refrain, "You need work."

The very pressure of her fingers relaxed me. She took my right arm and kneaded it from the shoulder downward, my biceps, my forearm, my wrist, my palm, each finger, being thorough, squeezing hard at times, just this side of pain; and then the other arm. She worked my head, my ears, my neck, my face, sometimes caressing me, more often probing, finding a muscle, twisting hard to awaken it and leaving it vibrant with heat.

She said little more, though I could sense her breathing, both as a sighing softness in the air and a pressure against me, the swelling of her midsection of bare skin between the sari and the bodice.

All she said was "Don't help me — relax," as she went lower, lifting my legs, bending each one, stretching and flexing them, my feet, my ankles. She pinched all the muscles from my ankle upward, tracing them and working her knuckles against them, to my thigh; then gripping my inner thigh and making it a bundle of muscle meat, twisting it, and as she did brushing my penis with the backs of her hands, though (this thought burning like a hot circuit in my mind) giving the thing no direct attention.

That was the thickening query, stirring under the towel, the dumb "What now?" that made it so awkward to be a man, the dog-like obviousness of it. But if she noticed, she didn't say so, intent upon warming my thighs, and muscle by muscle taking possession of every part of my body.

An hour or more of this, though I had lost track of time — it could have been two hours. I was keenly aware that she knew what she was doing. Her touch was sure; she knew each muscle and every connector and bit of gristle in me. And she knew — how could she not? — what effect she was having on me. But apart from her incidental brushings and touches, she did not take hold of my penis, which was not erect but swelling.

All her massaging with her querying fingers had been working toward my center, seeming to push energy into my groin. I wanted to say Touch me there, but there was something delicious in the delay. Of course I wanted more. I supposed that much was visible, but I was also eager to see what would come next, for as she massaged me, and as I became more relaxed and grateful, I had the impression of her as a person of immense power and authority.

Healing hands, her son had said. Magic fingers, Rajat had said. She hadn't denied it. She had lifted her hands and admired them. I had smiled then, but I wasn't smiling now. She was inflicting pain on me, at the periphery of my groin, pushing hard, and as she did, her hair must have come undone, because I could sense the cool sweep of her loose tresses on my aching muscles.

After a while, in a stupor of ecstasy, I did not feel her hands on me. I seemed to be floating. Her arms were extended above my body, and she was paddling with her hands again, palms-down.

"Better," she said, leaning over me. "But I can still feel tightness here and here."

"Good."

"Not good," she said.

"So I'll have to come back."

"If you want to."

"I want to."

"Are you sure?"

This testing was a little like the massage — a questioning pressure, a tentative flirting, a deeper return, that teased me and gave me pleasure.

"Please."

When had I ever pleaded before? But I meant it. Nothing else seemed to matter. Her silence was also a form of pressure.

"This place is magic," I said, to encourage her to speak to me.

Her muted laugh, more like the contraction of a muscle, made me wary, almost fearful of what she'd say next.

"You don't even know where you are," she said with the energy of that same suppressed laughter. "And you don't know me."

"I want to know. I want to come back." I must have sounded like an overeager child. I lay naked and oily on the table.

"I know exactly what you want," she said. I did not see her move, though she must have because the flame of the oil lamp had begun to shimmy.

She put a robe over my shoulders, and I slipped off the table, stood unsteadily, and tied the cords. She, who had loomed over me and had seemed so powerful, now stepped aside, looking almost fragile.

I wanted to convince her of my sincerity and my worth, but I was out of ideas. I knew I was in subterranean Calcutta, but above ground the chaos in the city echoed the chaos in my mind. Perhaps that was why I wanted to come back to this vault. I yearned to see her again. This need gave me a vague sense of obligation, as though I owed her for her good will, the close attention of her hands. She had touched me. I wanted somehow to repay her so that I could return.

"What's the name of the hotel?"

"The hotel?"

"Where Rajat had the problem."

"Where Rajat claims he had a problem," she said, correcting me and putting her hand on my arm, a mother's caress of consolation. She went on, "Never mind that. It's Rajat's affair. I'm sure you have plenty of more important things to do."

"I have some spare time." I wanted to say more, that I had nothing but time, that I was grateful for her attention precisely because I had failed to make anything of my visit, that I had nothing to write about, nothing in my head, and only the slightest desire to make notes. Looking at the hotel would help me kill one of my vacant hours.

She saw the earnest, perhaps pathetic willingness on my face and looked almost pityingly at me.

"You'd be doing Rajat an enormous favor," she said.

"I want to do you a favor too."

"We're a happy little constellation," she said. "You could be part of it."

"I'd like that."

"It's, um, a shabby little hotel called the Ananda, behind New Market — the Hogg Market."

"The corpse just turned up in the room?"

"I have no idea. Rajat was hysterical. He'd been traumatized. All I know is that is what he told me, that he saw the dead person and he ran."

"When did this happen?"

"It was three weeks ago. Charlie and I were out of Calcutta then. That's why Rajat was in the hotel. He was waiting for us to come back."

"So you don't know more than that?"

Her obstinate smile of disapproval had never looked brighter.

"Don't you see?" She was beaming at my stupidity, pushing the door open to take me back to the lobby of the mansion and the waiting car. "That's why we were counting on you."

All this kindness and consideration — the car, the driver, the masseurs, Mrs. Unger's surprise appearance, the massage, the teasing conversation about the hotel, then the car again, the driver again — seemed so generous and helpful, anticipating my desires.

But when it was over and I was back on my verandah with (at Mrs. Unger's suggestion) a glass of mango juice, I realized that I'd been manipulated. Every move had been planned, and I had allowed myself to be exposed — manipulated in every sense, exposed in every sense.

When you're alone in a distant city, floating as foreigners do, and someone is kind, the kindness is magnified and so is your gratitude. If you're a man and that kind person is a woman, you might feel you've been touched by an angel.

A first-time traveler might have been smitten. I was not. I had been traveling too long not to be suspicious of such attention. I had not forgotten that this had all come about because Mrs. Unger had asked me a favor. She had been specific at first, but had gotten me to the Lodge and into her hands by a deft series of moves, the way someone might try to sell you something expensive — in the very manner an Indian might sell you a carpet. "Have a cup of tea, sir. No need to buy, just look…"

I was almost persuaded. But some people are so smooth, their very persuasiveness is suspect, again like the Indian in the carpet emporium who marshals so many arguments in favor of the value of the thing he's trying to sell you, you are convinced it's a fake.

It was hard for me in the midst of this to see Mrs. Unger as an American. The finely draped sari and the meticulous henna tattoos on her feet impressed me, but I'd seen other Americans with that studied appearance. Her haughtiness and her decisive manner made me listen, but something else bothered me — her presumption. She wanted me to do her a favor; she, like her Indian counterpart, wouldn't take no for an answer. And there was the sequence of events, from the drink at the Oberoi to today, her hands on me. She had planned everything, as an angel might, as someone diabolical too, and she'd thought I hadn't noticed her calculation.

The very skill of the manipulation made me doubtful, the way the sweetest words can make you shrink in fear. I won't hurt you can sound terrifying. I did not want to fall too fast. Mrs. Unger seemed to know a lot about me. Your friends at the consulate. She knew my work and where I lived, and she probably knew that I was living hand-to-mouth. But what she didn't know, because wealthy people never seemed to know this, was that I had all the time in the world. I didn't want to be possessed by her.

I did not hear from her after that. Not a word. After the imploring letter, the pleasant meeting, the magic fingers — nothing. She had occupied two full days of my time in Calcutta and now I spent a day waiting, feeling uncomfortable, in suspense and sensing rejection.

She had teased me, made me feel helpless, invited me to the inner room of her strange mansion, which I thought of as Mrs. Unger's vault; and now she was inaccessible. I know what you want was a tease, but truthful. It put me all the more in her power, because she knew, because she denied me.

That night I made some notes, something to the effect that the first infatuation of a love affair is a delusion of possession. Nothing else matters. And about how I enjoyed the feeling for its making me youthful. But I also knew that it made me obvious and foolish, even ridiculous, because I was middle-aged and out of ideas.

With time on my hands, I decided to investigate her request by paying a visit to the Ananda Hotel.

The Ananda was one of many narrow, decaying four-story hotels on a side street off New Market. A persistent beggar, a woman with a baby, pleaded with me, dogging me for a whole block, moving as quickly in bare feet as I did in sturdy shoes. I was reminded of Howard's story of the nanny who used her boss's child for begging. I got rid of her with five rupees, and seeing my money a tout shouldered me aside, chanting, "Shawls, pashminas, scarves — for you, sir, shahtoosh," while another tout with a skinny sweaty face howled, "What you want, sir? Anything!"

What I wanted was to get a clear view of the Ananda as I dodged oncoming traffic and the march of pedestrians. Approaching the hotel, I was spotted by a man sitting in front of the Taj Palace, another flophouse, who said, "Try here, sir. Best price."

But I kept going, up the stairs and into the incense stink and gloom of the Ananda, its lobby no more than an entryway with a window like that in a ticket office. A calendar, a blotter, a bell. I rang the bell.

A thin small woman appeared, and instead of a sari she wore a faded pink dress with a white collar, her hair plaited into one thick braid which lay on her back.

"Good afternoon, sir."

"Do you have any vacant rooms?"

"Yes, sir. Single. Double. Garden view. Family suite. Which, sir?"

"I'm not sure. Can I see some?"

Without replying she plucked some keys from hooks on a board just inside the ticket window. Following her up the stairs — no elevator — I asked her her name.

"Mina, sir."

"Christian?"

"Indeed, sir."

"What's your family name?"

"Jagtap, sir."

"Thanks for helping me, Mina."

"Pleasure, sir."

The first room was small and stifling. She showed me the bathroom, the plastic shower stall, the closet, the cot.

"Double is next door."

The double was only a little bigger, with two cots separated by a low table, on which a vase held two extravagant plastic blooms. I found these rooms depressing and almost frightening in their rankness, with the tang of mice and roaches, airless and entrapping.

"This hotel was mentioned by someone I know."

"Thank you, sir."

"He had a little problem when he was here." I had looked at the calendar. Three weeks ago, Mrs. Unger had said. That was the weekend of the seventh. I said, "Around the seventh or so. Did anything unusual happen then?"

"No, sir."

"It might help if I knew what room he was in."

"Nothing unusual, sir. Not on premises."

"Let's go downstairs, Mina."

At the ticket window she replaced the keys on the hooks. "Which room do you wish to book, sir?"

"I'm not sure. It's not for tonight. Some other time." She shrugged and turned away. I said, "Mina, I need to see your guest register."

The big old-fashioned clothbound ledger lay out of reach on a shelf, just inside the window.

"Cannot, sir. Register contains confidential information."

What annoyed me was the efficient way she dismissed my request, with a perfectly formulated phrase in good English. It was an Indian rebuff, articulate and final.

But I said, "Do you have a brother, Mina?"

"Three, sir."

"What if one of them was missing? What if your mother was desperate to know his whereabouts? Wouldn't you want someone to help you?"

"Sir" — and she looked anguished—"register cannot be shown to general public for examination without manager's permission."

"Mina, I don't want to examine it. I only want to look at one page." I could see her weaken, a slackening in her shoulders, a tilt of her head. "Please. Just the page showing the weekend of the seventh."

Without speaking, she slid the ledger onto the counter under the grille. She opened it, wet her thumb, and whittled away at the corners of the pages, and when she found the right page she glanced behind her in the direction of the manager's office and propped the book open before me.

Five days were shown. This was not a busy hotel. I was looking for Rajat's name. I wanted to find his room, the rate, any information under Remarks, his home address, anything. All the names I saw were Indian. His name was not there. I turned the page.

"You said weekend seventh."

"I may have been mistaken."

But there was no Rajat on that page either. I turned back to the week before the seventh.

"Please, sir."

I was running my finger under each name, seeing "Rajat" nowhere, when Mina snatched the register away. At that moment, the front door opened and a man in a white kurta glared at me with blazing eyes, his calculations as obvious as the tremor on his face and his fierce discolored teeth. His sudden anger convulsed him and gave him a neuralgic gait.

"He demanded to see, sir." Mina was breathless with panic.

In one limping movement the man stepped behind the counter and with a furious uppercut slapped the register shut. He shoved it onto a high shelf and pushed Mina aside — bumped her with his arm — his eyes wide, his lower lip jutting beneath his nose.

"I was checking the rates," I said.

"Rates are not there. Rates are here," he said, tapping the glass of the counter with a yellow fingernail. Under the glass was a small card with columns, headed Room Rates — Daily — Weekly — Monthly. "Register is strictly confidential." He spoke as though in stereo, in two directions, to Mina and me.

I thanked him, but as I was leaving I heard him shout — a bawling in Bengali, the sort of rage I'd heard before in India, uninhibited indignation, pure fury, always a man screaming at a woman.

That night back at the Hastings, I called Howard on his cell phone. He said he was working late at the consulate.

"You still here?" he asked.

I knew he was teasing me, but I was bothered by the seriousness that lay beneath his teasing, because I could not easily explain why I had lingered in Calcutta. I had given him the idea that I was going to make my way south and then eventually west to Mumbai, where I'd be catching a direct flight back to the States.

"Doing a little work," I said. This much was true. I'd written those lines about the air in Calcutta reminding me of the times I'd emptied a vacuum cleaner bag; I'd made those notes about Mrs. Unger's opinions; I'd started a journal that might form the basis of a story, one of those idle, meandering, time-filling, and self-important diaries that love-struck people keep when they have no one to console them. Calcutta Diary I'd written on the lozenge-shaped front label, hoping it would enliven my dead hand.

Howard said, "Parvati was asking about you."

The gifted Parvati, another inaccessible woman, whose very presence was a reminder that I was old and pale and out of ideas.

"How is she?" I asked, hoping I sounded interested.

"Why don't you ask her?"

Just hearing her name, and talking to Howard, I realized how much I had to conceal. In the four days since seeing Howard and Parvati, a great deal had happened: the letter from Mrs. Unger, the meeting with her and her son and Rajat at the Oberoi Grand, the massage at the Lodge, the rebuff at the Ananda, and my gloom caused by (I guessed) thwarted desire.

"Anyway, it's nice to hear from you," he said.

"I had a question."

"Shoot."

I said (the big lie I had rehearsed), "I had an e-mail from someone in the States saying that I should look up a certain American in Calcutta. I was wondering if you'd heard of her."

"Try me."

"Mrs. Unger. I think her name is Merrill."

"Philanthropist," Howard said. "With all that that implies."

"Please don't be enigmatic."

"I am being enigmatic. I am indulging in ambiguity. And you notice I am using the historical present, Bengali style."

"So do you know her?"

"Only heard about her. Bossy, wealthy, motherly, famous for her saris. I had the idea that she came here originally to work with the Missionaries of Charity, Mother Teresa's outfit. But that might be wrong. I know she has her own outfit, mainly humanitarian. She works with street kids, orphans. She relates to Indians — that's the secret of her success. Other people find her unapproachable."

"So she's well known."

"Well known for her independence. She avoids us."

"Why would that be?"

"Low profile. It's not odd for Americans in India. Lots of them come here to connect, or to indulge themselves for all sorts of reasons. A lot of them are looking for outsourcing, joint partnerships, high-tech ventures, cheap labor. And some are looking for spirituality, even sainthood. Maybe a few are looking for both."

"I thought you had to keep tabs on Americans here."

"Mrs. Unger is entirely self-funded. Famous for not asking for donations. She doesn't have to file a financial statement because she isn't accountable to anyone. So we have no idea how extensive her foundation is. That's one way of keeping secrets — pay for the whole thing yourself. It's also one way of being a saint."

I had begun to scribble some of this on a piece of paper, thinking I'd add it to my diary, and I'd become so preoccupied, I'd fallen silent.

"Are you there?" Howard asked. "How long are you going to be around? Maybe we could get together."

"Not sure. I'll let you know," I said, and I knew I sounded as squirmy and evasive as I felt.

I hung up, regretting that I'd told him anything. To my shame, I now knew how desperate I was, how badly I needed to talk to someone, just to reassure myself that I wasn't dreaming.

Infatuated, needy, helpless: I was a middle-aged fool, but I didn't know how to rid myself of the feeling except by seeing Mrs. Unger again. I'd even begun to think of her as Ma. From what Howard had said, she seemed almost unknowable, deliberately secretive; but that was part of her attraction for me. A woman with secrets suited me and seemed to represent a kind of sensuality I craved. Perhaps I was one of her secrets. She certainly was one of mine.

All these speculations were time killers. Another full day went by without my hearing a word from her. A full day in Calcutta in a cheap hotel, with nothing to do, was like a week anywhere else. I stewed and, interrupting my reverie, Parvati called.

"Howard said you were still in Calcutta."

"I have a little work to do." The same lie, sounding lamer.

"You were asking about Mrs. Unger, he said."

Now I really hated myself for having called him.

"Someone in the States was inquiring about her. I was just passing on the message." Blah-blah.

"She's rather controversial."

"Oh?" But this was not what I wanted to hear.

"Some people think she's practically a saint."

"Really."

"And some don't."

"I'm sure the answer lies somewhere in between."

Parvati laughed. "This is Calcutta. Both could be true. What say we meet?"

I hesitated. I said, "I've got this work…"

She became intensely self-conscious, as though I'd rebuffed her — and I suppose I had.

"I shouldn't have been so forward. You're busy, I understand. It's an unwarranted intrusion on your time. I'm so sorry. Believe me, I know all about filling the unforgiving minute."

One of the aspects of Indians I loved most was that they had the language for every occasion. It was still possible to be subtle, even sinuous, in a conversation, probably as a result of the weirdly Victorian verbosity, using politeness and amplification and elaborate excuses and courtesies.

I was sure of this when, unable to stand the silence any longer, I went to the Oberoi and prowled around, hoping to see Mrs. Unger. I would have gone to the Lodge, except that I had no idea where it was: I'd gone in her car, been driven there through the maze of streets, and been driven back. I didn't recognize any landmarks, and so the location of her villa was yet another of her secrets.

As I crossed the lobby on my way out, I glanced at the armchairs on the verandah and saw Rajat sitting alone over a drink. He recognized me but hardly reacted.

"I was looking for—" I didn't know how to finish. I stammered at saying her name. I said, "The grande dame."

"Ma."

He looked small and miserable. I wanted to see Mrs. Unger, but I could also tell Rajat about my visit to the Ananda. Feeling lucky from my encounters with Mrs. Unger, I was disposed to help him, out of superstition, for my luck to continue.

In his bewilderment, Rajat reminded me of how I had felt on the day I'd received the letter from Mrs. Unger, when I'd had nothing in my head — no ideas, no desire, just a vacancy of spirit. I wasn't sad; I was too insubstantial to be possessed even of sadness. I didn't matter, I'd felt invisible, and everything I'd done in my life had seemed pointless. I had kept myself from making any kind of commitment because of my writing, and now I had no writing. I'd sacrificed for nothing. Mrs. Unger had rescued me. I could return the favor by doing something for Rajat.

I knew that bewilderment and sense of being lost. By a series of deliberate choices and a horrible accident — if the corpse story was true — he'd arrived nowhere and saw nothing ahead of him but emptiness. It was like a grim parable of recognition, the time in your life when you feel there's a corpse in your room — and it's you. With my sense of having a dead hand, this morbidity suited my mood.

"I've been to the Ananda," I said.

He hung his head. "I know what you must think — a terrible place."

It was exactly what I'd thought. A dump, just the sort of hotel where you'd find something shocking in your room. He saw the acknowledgment on my face.

"It's not as bad as it looks," he said. "Charlie recommended it to me. He was on a buying trip with Ma and he suggested I stay there while they were away. He doesn't like me to stay at his flat at the Lodge."

"You stay there?"

"Now and again. When Ma's away."

I did not ask the obvious question: When Ma's away? I sat down.

"He seems a nice guy."

"He's fantastic."

I did not pursue that either. A waiter approached. I waved him away. I said, "Rajat, tell me exactly what happened at the hotel."

He looked at his shoes and did not speak for a full minute, one of those silences you take to be obstinate and pathological, or perhaps tactical. A minute is a long time. I was on the point of saying "Look, forget it" when he took a deep breath and began to speak.

"I put off checking in as long as I could, because I really didn't want to stay there alone. That New Market area is colorful if you're with someone, but when you're on your own it's scary — noisy, full of boisterous people, heavy traffic. I finally checked in around five-thirty."

"What day was this?"

"The eighth. It was a Saturday. The manager looked darkly at me. He was glowering."

"Any idea why?"

"Probably because I had no luggage. Just a little shoulder bag with hardly anything in it. He asked how long I was going to stay. I said, 'I'm not sure,' because Ma hadn't given a return date."

"Did you register under your own name?"

He didn't reply at once. Another of those silences that seemed stagy until he began to speak and sounded tormented.

"It's a little complicated. We never use our names when on foundation business. It's Ma's idea. So many people want to pry into her affairs. They're jealous of her humanitarianism and good works."

"What name did you use?"

"My usual one. Krishnaji."

I tried to recall if I'd seen such a name on the register. "What room were you in?"

"I honestly don't remember."

"How many flights up?"

"One, I think. The first floor. A good-sized room facing the rear of the building. It was noisy and the stifling air kept me awake for a long time."

"So you managed to fall asleep?"

"Yes. I don't know for how long. It was still dark when I woke up. I opened my mobile phone to see the time. It was four-something."

"You saw that on your phone?"

"Phone gives day and time. And that was when — see, mobile phone is also like torch. It's adequately bright. I sensed something in the room. Something strange. I shone the phone around, walked a bit, and tripped over a bundle, or so I thought."

Reliving the moment made him pause.

"And?"

"And I shone the light down and saw the body."

"Describe it."

"Small, pale, naked — a boy of about ten or eleven. It was terrifying. His eyes open, his mouth open."

"You knew he was dead?"

"No question. Limp. Lifeless. Looking like clay, a bluish color. Or that color may have been an effect of my light."

"Any blood?"

"None that I could see."

"Did you turn on the light?"

"No, I was too scared. I had my mobile phone as torch, as I said."

"What did you do next?"

"Gathered up my things from the bathroom, put them in my little bag, and went downstairs. No one at the desk, just a chowkidar at the door. I slipped out and went to the market, where some people were setting up their stalls for the day ahead. It was still dark."

"Did anyone see you?"

He shook his head and said, "As far as I know." But he had become ashen. "You can't imagine what it's like to find yourself in the same room as a dead person. I was so terrified I called Charlie. He was with Ma in Uttar Pradesh. He was wonderful. Ma too. They came back to Calcutta that same day."

"But you didn't tell the police."

"It would have been much worse if we had. We didn't tell anyone. I had no idea that you knew until you showed up that night here. To be honest, I was a little surprised that Ma told you."

I didn't say so, but I was surprised myself. Why had she told me? I was a writer who sits at home inventing crimes, not someone who goes into the wider world encountering them.

And then Rajat smiled. But he was not smiling at me. He was looking past me. I turned and saw Charlie walking toward us. He greeted Rajat by bending toward him and giggling, and then he glanced at me and said hello, just that one word.

"I was asking Rajat about the hotel."

"The drama," Charlie said in a disbelieving tone. "You have no idea, doll. Shall we go?"

Rajat got up from his chair, but I stayed seated. It was clear that they had business elsewhere and that I was superfluous.

"How's your mother?" I asked.

"Fabulous, as always."

I wanted to ask him more, but his tone indicated that he had no interest in me — perhaps guessed that I was desperate. But here I was, trying to help his friend Rajat with a problem his mother had suggested I solve. Why didn't they ask me to join them? They had been so friendly when I'd been with them with Mrs. Unger present. But she had been different too.

Sitting there in this awkwardness while they stood over me, I felt perversely that Charlie did not in the least resemble his mother. He was dark, she was light; his hair was curly, hers was straight. Though she was slight and small-boned, she gave the impression of power; he was tall, yet he seemed weak and tricky to me. I resented him, especially this offhandedness. The social inferiority that I'd felt as a child in New York resurfaced in India, with all its snobbish inversions and semipolite rebuffs. I began to hate these two young men looming over me — Rajat too, for the way he had brightened seeing Charlie. To me he had shown only his bewildered gloom, and I had been fool enough to care about him.

"Ma is probably at the Lodge," Rajat said.

But of course I had no idea where it was, and I was too insulted to ask them directions.

"Thanks for your help," I said, meaning Up yours.

I guessed Charlie was being competitive, resenting my interest — another of Mother's friends trying to monopolize her time, maybe interested in her money. He had behaved like a rival with barely disguised aggression. So I watched them walk out of the verandah and through the lobby. And I thought, as I had many times in my life: What am I doing here?

Humiliated, I decided to leave Calcutta. This was all a horrible mistake. I had been misled and was feeling like a fool. I'd been away too long, I'd begun to drift, I needed to either put myself to work or accept the fact that some travel yields nothing but unrewarding repetition. I had overstayed my visit, and in the unreality of being in such an odd place I had gotten a little sentimental and susceptible. This was often the case — go far enough and something happens, a transformation, the traveler's pleasure and dilemma, an effect of solitude and strangeness. You begin to turn into someone else.

5

AND THE CITIES change too — or rather, after a time they reveal themselves. Calcutta, I came to understand, was a city that anyone could see had been made by human hands. Other cities are well cemented and engineered, all seamless surfaces. Calcutta was roughly plastered and painted; the Corinthian columns, the Ionic capitals, the rounded balusters and porticos, and much else that seemed like marble was really whitewashed wood. It was not beautiful but its handmade look gave it a human face, which is also a look of impermanence, if not frailty. The handiwork was evident in its patches, its irregular bricks, the botched painting, the clumsy flourishes in the carpentry, like the sad lacy panels on some house fronts, the lopsided designs, the mismatched joints, the tottering staircases. Nothing was square, nothing was plumb. Peering closely at this bulging and buckling city, I saw the hasty joinery, the hardened putty, the rusty nails, and I thought: A barefoot man did that with an old hammer in his skinny hand.

There was one other thing I had not seen at first, something that had slowly come into focus over this spell of living at the Hastings. It was a revelation I'd never had at the five-star hotels where I usually stayed free in return for writing about them. Nothing was new in Calcutta, at least nothing looked new, because every structure in this huge handmade city looked skeletal. Nothing new that worked: no new buildings, no new roads, even the street signs on the renamed roads looked ancient — Free School Street was Mirza Ghalib Road, Wellesley Street was Rafi Ahmed Kidwai. The city went on growing, yet it still looked rickety and ruinous, and in areas of faded elegance and dramatic misery a bad smell lingered, haunted and human.

I wondered whether I should leave, to be myself again. In order to ponder this, to think clearly, I took long walks down the side streets and alleys, zigzagging to the river by Eden Gardens, or making my way northward in the maze that lay to the east of Chowringhee, the motley neighborhood called Taltala. I had the pleasure, rare in the world, of strolling in a baroque antiquity. But more than strolling: enveloped by a kind of revisitation that I had known only in dreams, of living in India's past, part Raj, part ruin, which was the present in this unreconstructed city.

Solitary, looking for companionship, or simply to sit among like-minded drinkers, I stopped in bars. Indian bars, usually all male, and dark, could be depressing, and the rattle of the air conditioners lowered my spirits further. But I circulated and found some that cheered me up. The Oly Pub on Park Street I liked for being scruffy, and its seediness matched my mood. I indulged myself in that most un-Indian of activities, something that would have shocked Mrs. Unger, eating the Oly's famous beefsteak. It pleased me to watch the way they poured me a whiskey by measuring it in large or small jiggers, the barra peg or chota peg. Upstairs among the younger clientele there were sometimes women drinkers, which would have been unheard of in New Delhi or Madras but not in the Calcutta I had begun to find congenial. Now and then I would see a rat in the Oly, and one night I saw two huge rats crossing from one side of the room to the other, showing no more hurry than any of the drifters or drinkers there.

On the first floor of the Roxy Cinema, behind the Oberoi Grand, where I'd first met Mrs. Unger, was the Roxy Bar, where there was no chance of meeting her and where in the evenings I listened to live music from Bollywood films. The drinkers here, a step down from the Oly's, were mainly lowly clerks and drudges, people with little education but with enough extra money for a bottle or two of beer. The waiters in bow ties and white shirts were the only formal aspect of the Roxy. In my self-dramatizing way, I fantasized that it would be a good place for someone like me to have a secret rendezvous.

As a change from the Hastings's food, I occasionally went to the New Cathay, on Chowringhee, an old-style Calcutta Chinese eatery with a high ceiling hung with fans that cooled a loyal clientele. I wondered what Mrs. Unger would say of me hunched over a plate of chili chicken and rice. It was another place where I knew I would never bump into another foreigner, where the food and beer were cheap, and I could convince myself, as I often did in Calcutta, that I was living inaccessibly in the city's past.

I discovered what residents knew, that all life is there, the hawkers, the touts, the prostitutes, the Anglo-Christian enclaves, the shopkeepers, the vegetable sellers, the families, the running boys, the shouting men. The women and pretty girls tiptoed past the piles of garbage, and some in saris picked through the trash heaps in lanes, and one of these was European Asylum Lane. To locals it was an open-air theater of activity; they didn't notice the decrepitude, the stinks, the sewers. And so I learned a lesson, that I should do the same, and count my blessings.

Now and then, from deep within the glowering façade of a house, or issuing from high up on a tenement balcony draped with drying laundry, I heard the loud voices of adults and the protesting squawks of children. I knew instinctively that parents were in an unstoppable fit of scolding, growing hotter. I never heard these voices in public, but often these angry howls were the voice-overs of my evening walks, people quarreling indoors in the heat. I was reminded of my own childhood, of being humiliated by my puritanical mother for something I'd said or done thoughtlessly — her raging at me. I felt no rancor; I smiled for my good luck in having met Mrs. Unger.

These walks gave me more confidence. I wondered how much this was due to my having known the now unapproachable Ma. I suspected a great deal. I admired anyone, especially an American, who could live for a long time in this disorderly place and not complain or make a drama out of it. On the contrary, Mrs. Unger had nothing but praise for the city.

The old splintered and pitted buildings matched my frame of mind; they looked eaten away and incomplete, yet I saw glimpses of their former glory. I was in my element; I was past it. I was decayed and aging. The cracks showing through the peeling paint, the dirty shutters, the windows opaque with dust, the dead bulbs, the flickering neon, the wobbling rickshaws and beat-up taxis, all like a dream of failure, reflected just how I felt about myself.

One day on my way to the Roxy Bar, my walk through New Market took me near the Hotel Ananda. It had been more than a week since my last, unsatisfactory visit, and as I approached I saw the manager on the wide upper step, sitting in the characteristic Bengali way, all his weight on his left hip and left hand, with his left leg drawn up and his right foot planted on the step, his dhoti draped.

I stopped and greeted him. If he had smiled and waved I might have walked on. But he glowered at me, with the dark beaky scowl that Indian men assume in displeasure and defiance — as though they're imitating a crow-like demon face they've seen in a temple. The man's look of contempt made me pause, reminding me of how unhelpful, even obstructive, he'd been before. I remembered his rudeness.

As I walked up the stairs he tipped back slightly, still eyeing me with malice.

"Remember me?"

Instead of replying, he sharpened his look of malevolence, and this he managed by narrowing his eyes and defying me with a twitch of his hooked nose.

"I was hoping to have another look at your guest register."

"Not available."

"Just one particular page. To examine it for a singular notation."

One of the consequences of being among Bengalis was that I'd begun to talk this way, hoping to be understood.

"Not possible."

As he said it, and before I could mount the top step and tower over him, he gathered his dhoti around his legs and got to his feet. He began to withdraw into the narrow lobby of the Ananda, his arms folded. He had hairy ears, and when he opened his mouth to spit a red gob against his own wall I saw that his teeth had been reddened and eroded from betel chewing. His face and his teeth resembled the rotted façade of his hotel.

I saw a glass-fronted refrigerator just off the lobby. "And I'll have a Thums Up, please."

"Twelve rupees."

I gave him the ragged bills and helped myself to a bottle, opening it — because he made no gesture to help — with the church key hanging on a string. Now, with the bottle, I had a pretext to linger.

But he had gone behind the counter with the grille that looked to me like a ticket window.

"So you can't show me the register?"

"Confidential," he muttered.

I saw just beneath the counter a gleaming head of hair, with a part that revealed a pale scalp.

"Is that you, Mina?" I asked.

The hair moved and a young woman raised her face to me, squirmed slightly, and said, "Mina not here."

"What happened to Mina?" I asked the manager.

"No longer employed. Now you must go."

"I haven't finished this," I said, sloshing the liquid in the bottle of Thums Up.

"Finish outside."

"What if I want a room?"

"If you want to book room, provide passport details and money in advance. If not, you can go."

"May I ask your name?"

"I am manager, Bibhuti Biswas."

"Mr. Biswas, what happened to Mina?"

His mouth went square. His teeth were discolored pegs, black and red. His ears were not just hairy at the edges but with twists of hair bristling from the ear holes. He had the dark, squashed, beaky face of a crow.

"Get out."

"Why should I?"

This rude back-and-forth in the small hot space at the ticket window made the young woman crouching behind the counter visibly nervous. Her boss was agitated. The afternoon sun streaming through the dirty windows half blinded me.

As much to her as to him I said, "Can you tell me where Mina lives?"

Banging down a wooden yardstick on his desk with a slap, the manager rounded the counter in three strides, almost crow-hopping, and began to bark, showing his teeth again.

"I must ask you to kindly vacate premises."

"What's the problem?" I tried to keep calm, but I had seen Indians like him go berserk in a matter of seconds, so I was ready to jump.

"I shall call constable forthwith."

"Listen, this is in a good cause."

"Bosh," he said, pressing one knuckle into his nose, but I noticed that in his other hand he still held the yardstick, hiding it in the folds of his dhoti.

"Never mind."

I walked back to my hotel, liking the city less, believing my amateur sleuthing to be futile, and planning my departure — mentally moving out of India. I went to the front desk to look at the railway timetable, and seeing me, Ramesh Datta, the clerk, began to smile. But he was smiling at something or someone behind me.

"Your car, sir."

I turned and, standing near a pillar, as if to take up less room and not intrude, Balraj, the driver, doffed his peaked cap and bowed.

This time on the way to the Lodge I looked for landmarks. I wanted to remember the way. When we were stopped in heavy traffic, beggars pressed their faces against the window and made eating gestures, anxiously motioning to their mouths, patting their bellies, pleading. Turning away, I missed the landmarks, yet even when I could concentrate, I doubted that I'd be able to find the route again. We went from lane to lane, squeezed through alleys, and though each of them had its name in Bengali and English on an enamel plate bolted to the walls of corner buildings, I was not able to see any of them clearly. Calcutta was another Indian city where, as soon as I was away from a main thoroughfare, I was lost. And not just lost but transported, seeming to negotiate an alternate, sunken city, a Calcutta underworld from which there was no clear pattern and no escape, another level of the city existing in ghastly light diffused by risen dust.

At the edge of a traffic-choked intersection was the big decaying mansion, the courtyard with the cracked fountain, the broken wall, the wide split-bamboo blinds, the flight of steps, the fluted columns.

In her purple and gold sari, Mrs. Unger stood almost regally at the top of the stairs, hands together.

"Welcome."

The sari shimmered as she straightened. Her hair was pulled back, she wore gold bangles at her wrists, and her face looked very pale among the Indians who flanked her like retainers.

"Thanks for sending the car."

"I was told you were inquiring after me."

Inquiring after me was one of her Anglicisms, and an understatement. I was not desperate for her attention, but I'd been curious to know what she really felt about me. I was afraid of falling deeper, becoming so smitten that I risked getting lost in her big billowing personality, so swaddled in her affections that I'd be blinded and stifled. If I were to be stifled — I was tempted — I had to know that she was the real thing.

"I wonder if you'd like a tour of the Lodge."

"I'd love it." It frightened me to think that to know her better I would have agreed to anything she suggested.

She turned to reenter the mansion, and as she did, she beckoned to a child standing shyly by the carved stone balustrade of the wide porch. He hurried to her, a skinny boy in blue shorts and a gray shirt, and she took his hand.

"This is Jyoti," she said.

"Hello, Jyoti. How are you?"

"I am well, uncle. Thank you."

He had a soft but certain voice, and he stood very straight, his head erect, his arms at his sides in a posture of obedience. From his shallow breathing and the shutter-blink of his eyelashes I could see that he was nervous, yet he had been so schooled in manners that he knew how to stand his ground. He was poised as a dutiful underling is poised. He knew better than to slouch; he was alert, polite, watchful without seeming worried. And somehow his anxiety only enhanced these traits, because for all his frailty he showed courage. Though he might have been older, and he seemed serious, even careworn, he didn't look more than ten or eleven — a small unswerving soldier. And I liked being called uncle.

"How long have you been here?"

"Eight months, uncle."

"Do you like living at the Lodge?"

"I am flourishing, uncle. Thanks be to her goodness. Ma is our mainstay."

I could have said the same.

Mrs. Unger said, "I'd love to take credit for Jyoti's success, but you see he's done it all himself. I can only give these children the tools. They have to learn how to use them. It's all up to them. And Jyoti is a senior boy now, one of the prefects. Aren't you, Jyoti?"

"Yes, Ma."

"Jyoti is one of the cleverest boys in the Lodge. He came to us as a street child. He was living in a cardboard box in a bustee at Sonagachi."

I knew the place. I had put it on one of my evening walks, the red-light district near Sealdah railway station, where whores painted like clowns leered sadly from second-story windows. So a little color for me had been pure misery for Jyoti, whose mother might have lived and worked behind one of those windows.

"I could see he had great promise. Think of the horrors he's seen in his short life."

I couldn't imagine the life of a child in the streets of that debauched district of Calcutta — the drinking, the fights, the shouting, the contending men. Somehow this child had retained his humanity. But his pained eyes were those of a much older person, wounded and weary. He might have been a bit uneasy as he stood facing me, but his early years had made him unshockable.

"I'd love to help him in some way," I said.

"Don't you see? He doesn't need help. Do you, Jyoti?"

"No, Ma."

"He has everything he needs."

"Yes, Ma," he said, and smiled, and I saw only a flicker of doubt on his lips, as you get when sad people smile.

"Isn't he a big boy?"

Maybe in Calcutta. He seemed to me undersized and skinny, his legs like sticks, his skin dusty and dry from poor nutrition.

"A street child," Mrs. Unger said. "We're nursing him back to health. He'll be fine."

"How long have you been running this orphanage?"

"We never use that word." She was stern and seemed offended. "This is a home, a household. We live together as a family."

The child Jyoti stood slightly apart. He had a mouse face, batlike ears, a tiny head, and narrow shoulders, and he was barefoot in his shorts.

"How many children do you have here?"

"We can accommodate sixty or more, but they have to be separate, boys and girls. They grow, they move on, we bring others into the family."

We passed a classroom where small girls in white dresses were working at tables, drawing pictures on sheets of paper in colored crayon.

"I emphasize the arts and language skills. Most of these children were rejected by their mothers, who couldn't look after them for one reason or another. Some were orphaned or abducted or from poor parents who left them here because they know the reputation of my foundation. They might die otherwise. Here is the kitchen."

Two women in white cotton smocks and white caps were stirring tureens of dahl, another woman was slapping chapatis and frying them on a smooth stovetop. At another table a woman was sorting chickpeas, looking for pebbles.

"Nutritious food, that's the secret," Mrs. Unger said. "We are entirely Ayurvedic here. All vegetarian. We have an Ayurvedic doctor on the staff."

We came to a circular staircase. She called to a young boy dressed in blue shorts and a gray shirt, the same sort of school uniform as Jyoti, who ran to him. Then she started up the stairs.

"This was the mansion of one of the great English families," Mrs. Unger said as she got to the landing, and we looked down at the large room. "It was a total wreck when I found it seven years ago, but we're slowly bringing it back. Charlie and Rajat are helping in the restoration. Look at those teak handrails and spindles and that wood paneling. It's very early and well worth preserving."

"More rehab," I said.

"That's the word. I want to be a lifesaver." She pointed left and right as we walked. "Bedrooms, dorms, showers."

The big upper rooms were partitioned, and along the walls were bunk beds, in the center rows of little cots. The ceilings were twelve feet high in some rooms, with fans hanging from vertical pipes.

"Boys here, and" — she was still walking along the corridor—"over here, girls."

"What sort of ages are they?" I asked.

"We take them young. We encourage them. We train them and then they enter the great world."

I was impressed by the orderliness of the place, the way Mrs. Unger ran it like a kindly headmistress; but when I praised her she dismissed it, as if out of modesty. Yet I babbled and praised her more. I wanted to please her, and though I intended to exaggerate her generosity, I realized that I didn't have to. What she was engaged in was a powerful example of philanthropy, using her own money, not soliciting funds, to create a safe place for lost children.

I told her that.

"Thank you," she said. "I like that—'lost children.' I'd like to work that into my brochure. Sometimes when they come here they're angry, nearly uncontrollable. The world has been cruel to them. But we try to reassure them. We feed them and give them clean conditions and make them feel secure."

"How do you do that?"

"By loving them," she said simply. "Sometimes I just hold them, wrap my arms around them. I can feel all the tension go away."

I wanted to be held like that. Here I was, alone in India; I could relate to the lost children, bewildered in the city. I could understand a child being soothed in Mrs. Unger's arms. I had been held by her — the magic fingers — and I wanted more.

"Call it a safe haven," she said.

It was serene and orderly and swept clean. The place actually worked.

We had arrived at the back of the mansion, a room I remembered that gave onto the garden. From here and around the rear courtyard I recognized as the spa area — the massage room I'd been in, the steam room, the showers and plunge baths, and on an upper balcony some lounge chairs where, after the exertions of a massage or a scrubbing or a sauna, a person could lie down and snooze.

Two men lay sleeping there, their faces covered with towels, their legs stretched out. They were as still as corpses.

"Charlie and Rajat," Mrs. Unger said. "I love to see them together."

That first evening I'd met her, she'd said, "I never know what I ought to do," and "They're in charge." And I'd seen her as the uncertain mother, being gently bossed by her son and his friend. Now I knew better, but I was more than ever touched by her kindness.

Here as elsewhere in the mansion were men in white pajamas standing like orderlies, or like sentries. They greeted Mrs. Unger with a show of respect, not looking her in the eye but, in a habit of esteem, half bowing — and I would not have been surprised to see them drop to their knees and abase themselves, touch the hem of her sari and bleat in submission. I thought this because one of them actually made as if to do it, startling me as he knelt and rolled his whole body forward at her feet in genuflection.

"The garden," she said, stepping past the servant, extending her arm, indicating palms and bushes and red lilies and thick, pale tree roots surrounding a pool of glittering water.

"The massage rooms are down there, aren't they?"

"That's right. Bottom of the stairs."

"I really enjoyed the experience," I said.

She smiled, but vaguely. Had I interrupted her train of thought? She said without much emotion, "I'm so glad."

"I kind of thought we were headed there."

"All in good time," she said.

Was she teasing me? It was hard to tell. It was not as though this tour was frivolous. The more I saw, the more I was convinced that this was a large project — the size of the house, the number of children, the order of it, both as a school and a refuge, entirely self-sufficient, with a clinic and a spa.

She had said, I want you to know me. At the time her words seemed like procrastination. But now I'd seen enough to know that she was someone of real substance. She was an idealist, and she was kind; she was motherly, yet she had the efficiency and command of a businesswoman — all the qualities of a nurturer.

We had arrived at a downstairs lobby that fronted onto the garden. The moss-covered statuary, the damp bricks on the paved paths, the pool with its fountain — a marble cow's head spewing water from the pipe at its rounded mouth, a gurgling that seemed to cool the garden.

"Tea?" Mrs. Unger said.

"Perfect." But I would have said that to anything she suggested.

"It's herbal. One of our own blends. Mint and neem paste."

"I'd love some. Maybe with ice."

"We never use ice."

"Oh?"

"Think what ice would do to your system," she said, and before I could reply, she went on, "Traumatize it." A man in white pajamas was hovering. "Two pots of tea."

"Yes, madam."

"You run the whole place alone?"

"Charlie and Rajat are an enormous help."

"I'm amazed that you have no outside funding."

"I could use more funding, but I don't want the strings. It would mean interference. This place runs smoothly because I'm alone."

She talked about the running of the house, the staffing of the clinic, the spa, the school; but as always I was distracted by her beauty, her fresh face, her full lips, the way her eyeteeth bulged against them, her thick dark hair drawn back and held in a braid, the dangly gold hoops attached to the lobes of her tightly rolled ears, her long neck, her breasts that were defined even in the mass of twisted silk of her sari and shawl. Her hands — the arousing hands that had brought me to a pitch of delirium. Her words had never meant as much to me as her hands; her words were so abstract or esoteric as to be meaningless. But her hands had been all over me, every bit of my body, inside me. She had remade me with her hands, made me her own.

I was listening to her describe the work she did as a philanthropist, and I marveled, but I could not erase from my mind the pleasure she had given me as I'd lain naked under her hands. Yet she had not alluded to the episode. She'd given me no relief, only filled me with a kind of desire I'd thought was unattainable.

"I've never met anyone like you," I said.

"That could mean anything."

"I'm trying to compliment you."

"Thank you. It may seem an odd thing for me to say, but I don't think anyone is really able to know another person completely. We try, but — maybe it's best that way."

"You said you wanted me to know you. You wanted to know me."

"Know me better. Know you better. Not know completely. That's hopeless."

"What's the point?"

"Isn't it fun trying?"

"Frustrating," I said.

The tea had come; the servant had been noiseless. Mrs. Unger didn't say anything more. She allowed the man to pour us each a cup of the fragrant tea.

Forming in my head was the line I was looking forward to your healing hands — your magic fingers. It sounded pathetic and corny as I silently rehearsed it. But it was what I felt. I wanted more. Sitting there in dumb yearning for her, I felt like a monkey, with a monkey's hunger.

But I said, "You sent me a letter, remember? It was about a dead body in a hotel — very dramatic. I thought you wanted me to help you."

I couldn't tell her that I'd talked to Rajat, that I had paid two visits to the Ananda Hotel: I had no results. Next to this accomplished woman I felt inept, and I had no news.

"I was wondering if you remembered the letter."

"How could I forget it? I still have it — an actual letter, not an e-mail. Purple ink on handmade paper. Are you sorry you sent it to me?"

"Not at all." She spoke with utter certainty.

"Then what do you want me to do?"

"Ask no questions."

"Then what?"

She stared at me, looking triumphant, as though she'd trapped me. And of course she had.

"No more questions," I said.

"I was wondering if you were planning to stay in Calcutta."

No questions. I said, "I'll do whatever you want me to do."

"Nothing more today," she said, and with a gesture she signaled for Balraj to drive me back to the Hastings.

You might think — I certainly thought — her cool smile and distant manner would put me off and perhaps rebuff me to the point where I'd develop another social circle in Calcutta, or (as I had briefly planned) leave the city altogether. The opposite was the case. At the outset, she'd said that she knew I was close to the consulate. Though she didn't know Howard, she probably believed I was another consulate partygoer. She imagined that I mattered to those people.

Yet I'd seen them less and less because of her, and her days of remoteness had made me more dependent on her. Her not mentioning the letter made me memorize it; her distance had kept me in suspense. I had longed for her to call me. I had not been able to call her, nor could I lurk near her Lodge, because I had no idea where it was in this city of lanes and back alleys. I had desired her, she had been inaccessible, and I had been helpless — a pathetic way for a grown man to behave, and something new to me.

I had told myself that I didn't want her love, that I saw no future for us, that I thought her son and his friend were a little odd and off-putting. What did I want, then?

I was lying in bed that night, tuning my shortwave radio, trying to get the news from the wider world. I surprised myself by speaking out loud.

"More," I said.

Alone, I became inward and analytical, taking altogether too much notice of my dreams, as solitary people do, hoping for good omens, hoping for hope. Lately I dreamed of narrow escapes, of making my way across the ramparts of very high walls and having to descend the narrowest and steepest staircases, with no handrail, a great emptiness on either side, tiptoeing, dizzy and fearful. Yet I never fell, in all the variations of this vertigo. The clack of the ceiling fan, the rattle of the blinds, the voices in the street, and the bright morning sun only added to the tormenting effects in the dream.

I never suspected Mrs. Unger of being a tormentor. She was busy. I was not busy at all. There was not a day I spent in Calcutta in my moping that I did not think how virtuous she was, working every day to improve the lives of those children, and how selfishly I spent my time, helping no one. I thought often of the bat-eared boy Jyoti: how much she had done for him, how she had saved him — the sort of street child I saw every day in Calcutta and simply hurried past, not wanting to think of his fate. I did not regard myself as worthy enough for her to care. I deserved to wait. Ask no questions was a conundrum, but it was an order I deserved. My patient waiting was the proof of my loyalty. I was not in love, but something deeper took hold of me, a peculiar form of devotion, a need for her to protect me. And I knew that others must have felt the same — the lost children, for example.

Maybe I was one of them.

One of the sunnier remarks of a gloomy German philosopher is that the only way of knowing a person is to love without hope.

The other effect of my solitude was that the diary I had started had become the repository of all these thoughts, even a kind of narrative. Keeping a diary is often an unmistakable sign of desperation. It was a log of my feelings, a chronology of incidents (including the ones I have described here), and an account of time passing. It served its purpose: I had nothing else to write; it kept me busy at night and reminded me of my pain.

I go for walks, I wrote. I look for the man I once was. I believe that by wandering I might find him wandering here. I need to soothe myself in this uncertainty. I want something to write about. Walking in the big decaying yet eternal-seeming ruin of the city helps me meditate on the past and gives me the hope that I might find the man I had once been — confident in a strange country, so anonymous as to be invisible, living the muffled and spectral existence of a traveler, ghosting from street to street in the endless decrepitude, unseen. I expect to come face to face with myself.

What a shock, then, in this mournful scribbling, in my mood of anonymity, one afternoon to be touched physically in the street. It was not the sleeve-tug of the beggar or the tout but a hard pinch, skin to skin, by the pincers of a skinny person's fingers. I pulled my hand away.

"Take, sir."

"No."

"Please, sir."

A thin-faced girl in a shawl was urging me to accept a piece of folded paper from her. I imagined she was selling something or that she was trying to distract me so that my pocket could be picked. This was why, when she touched me, I shoved my hands into my pockets and clutched my wallet and keys, pressing my arms to my sides. Or I'd take the paper and she would say, "No mother, no father. Please, you give me, sir."

But she said, "Mobile number, sir."

"I don't want it."

"Mina, sir."

That stopped me. And now I recognized this nervous girl in the shawl as the new clerk from the Ananda, the head of gleaming hair that had bobbed beneath the counter.

I accepted the paper. Without a pause, she drew her shawl tighter and darted away, dodging oncoming pedestrians, slipping past a man with a barrow piled with coconuts and children's sandals.

It always amazed me to see an Indian run — sprint in this traffic, through the crowds, into the heat. Yet they often ran, and the poorer and more ragged they were, the faster they went, knees pumping, feet slapping. Foreigners never ran in India.

I unfolded the paper. I walked a bit, then stepped into a doorway, dialed the number, and cupped my hand over the phone. I heard ringing, then gabble. I could not understand a word. I said into the din, "Mina?"

"Yes, here."

"Someone just gave me your number."

"My friend. I am knowing."

"What do you want?"

"Pass information."

"Okay. Let's meet."

"Tomorrow, teatime."

"My hotel. The Hastings."

"Cannot hotel, sir."

"What about the Roxy, or the Oly Pub?"

"Cannot Roxy. Go to Eden Teashop. Middleton Row at Park Street. Teatime."

I had to ask her to repeat this several times.

Finally she said, "Taxi will know."

"Will I recognize you?"

"I will find you, sir."

Of course, the big pink ferringhi would be obvious.

As Mina had predicted, the taxi driver knew the precise place, a small bakery and café with some trays of Indian sweets in the window and more in a glass case under a counter inside. I had last seen Mina wearing a pink dress, so I was confused when I went in at the appointed time — I took it to be four — and didn't see a woman who resembled her. No dresses, only saris.

Seating myself in the corner, with a good view of the door, I ordered tea from a waiter and cautiously looked around. Three tables were occupied. My tea was served. I sipped it. I read a section of the Statesman that was lying on a nearby chair, and when after thirty minutes or more I did not see Mina, I paid the bill and left. I wondered what had gone wrong. I turned into Park Street and kept walking.

The heat, the stink, the diesel fumes, the noise, all combined to thicken the steamy air and burden me. How could people run in this air? I had stepped briskly onto the sidewalk but slowed my pace, with the heat on my shoulders, my head ringing from the smells. It was exhausting to be in the middle of so much human activity — so much futility, so it seemed — the people pressed against me and stepping on my feet. It wearied me to be touched and jostled at every step.

I was bumped. I turned to object and saw a woman wrapped in a sari hovering at my side.

"Mina?"

"Indeed, sir."

"I waited for you at the teashop."

"I could not enter in. I saw a relation of Mr. Bibhuti Biswas inside. I waited nearby, at the godown."

"So where shall we go?"

"Continue footpath this side to cemetery."

The Park Street Cemetery — I'd been there before on one of my reflective strolls. We walked, Mina and I, without speaking, she keeping slightly ahead of me. When we got to the cemetery gates she moved quickly onto one of the gravel paths at the side and vanished among the tombstones. I did not hurry. I had lost her, but I counted on her to find me. I plodded like a tourist. Deeper into the cemetery, where the tombs were like obelisks and pyramids, the vaults like little villas and classical bungalows, I saw her sitting on a mourner's bench near a big broken tomb — Doric columns, a marble wreath, a winged angel, and bold croaking ravens in the trees and hopping on the ground.

"Mina."

"Yes, sir. Here, sir. Thank you."

"Thank you for getting in touch."

"Sorry for the hue and cry, sir. I could not reveal myself."

"You're wearing a sari. I was expecting you in a dress."

I took a seat beside her and now, as she adjusted her shawl to speak, I could see her face. One whole side was swollen and bruised. Her left eye was rimmed with dark skin, the eye itself reddened, the white of the eye blood-drenched.

"What happened to you?"

"Mr. Bibhuti Biswas administered a beating, sir."

She slipped her shawl off her forearm and I saw bruises there, welts, red and crusted, black broken patches on her dark skin.

"I breaking the rules, sir. He beat me with a lathi, sir. He calling me kangali. Bhikhiri. Other bad names. Then he say, 'Tumi kono kajer na — tumi ekdom bekar!'"

This outpouring of Bengali left me glassy-eyed, and I was stunned into staring at her.

"'You totally useless. Totally worthless.' Then he sack me."

"That's awful."

"Very bad. What I can do? But I knowing why you come to Ananda Hotel. I knowing about your friend."

"That there was a dead body in his room?"

"Dead boy, sir. Rolled in carpet, sir. Like tumbaco in beedee."

"You saw it?"

"When they taking it away, we all knowing. Mr. Bibhuti Biswas say Chup karo. Not say anything! But it is human child, sir. One of God's children."

"What could have happened to him?"

"I cannot know how he dead."

"No. I mean, how did they dispose of him?"

"Disposing in pieces, sir. So horrible. I was witness. They used very sharp dah."

"I mean, in the carpet?"

"Not carpet afterward. Crate, sir. Steamer trunk, so to say. Maybe in the river. Or in municipal dustcart."

"We'll never find him."

"So many people die in Calcutta, sir."

"Some of them are right here."

In the stillness of the cemetery, behind the thick perimeter walls, among the high monuments and the ornate inscriptions, the fluted columns and the statuary.

"But I am liking to come here."

"For the tombstones?"

"For the angels, sir. See them."

Angels kneeling at prayer, angels on plinths in repose. Angels with their wings spread — some of the wings clipped, other angels beheaded — angels sounding trumpets. They were cracked and battered, some of them carved in stone, others in marble, and in this city of peeling paint most of them were mottled or mossgrown, but they were angels nonetheless. The angels put me in mind of the dead boy in the room.

"But how did he get there?" I asked. Mina was staring at me, her good eye registering concern. "The boy. In the hotel. In the room."

"I duty manager."

"At the desk?"

"Yes. It was a parcel delivery."

I smiled at the explanation, as I had smiled at duty manager. "They delivered a dead body?"

"A carpet, sir. I sign for it, sir. The carpet was dispatched to room of your friend."

"What room?"

"Fifteen. Garden view."

"Where was the body?"

"Carpet was parceled. Body was inside."

Now I saw it: the skinny child rolled in the carpet and brought upstairs, perhaps in the darkness, lugged into the room and unrolled. Rajat had woken and seen it, the corpse on the floor, and had fled.

"So my friend wasn't imagining it?"

"You not tell Mr. Bibhuti Biswas, sir, that you speak to me. He be so angry."

"He's not your boss anymore."

"He be terrible to me again, beating me. He knowing my residence in bustee in Tollygunge. I have new job."

"What doing?"

"Sweeper, sir."

This tore at my heart — the bruised face, the skinny fingers tugging at her shawl. Helpless and ashamed, I gave her two five-hundred-rupee notes.

"God bless you, sir."

She reached into the folds of her shawl and took out a small cloth shoulder bag and set it on her lap. She plucked open the knots on the flap and slid out a plastic pouch that was taped shut.

"Not be fearful, sir, please."

"Why should I be fearful?" I had started to smile, but her bruised face sobered me.

"It be so strange to you. You must not cry out. It is very important. It is all that is left. The only thing." She spoke slowly, annoyingly so. She was nodding as she put the plastic pouch into my hand. "You will be knowing what to do."

"Shall I open it now?"

"After I gone, sir. I can't bear look it again. It is terrible thing indeed."

She flung her shawl around her face, pinched it at her chin so that only her eyes showed, then she bowed, said "Bless you, sir" again, and slipped between the gravestones and the many angels and was gone.

I held the soft pouch. I was skeptical: Indians loved drama; their natural element was hyperbole. They lived in words — words were kinder and more habitable than the bustees. Mrs. Unger was like that too. So I picked at the lightly taped parcel with the feeling that I was being trifled with in the Indian way: It be so strange to you. You must not cry out.

I did not cry out at once. I thought: A piece of meat, how odd in vegetarian India.

But then I saw the small fingers, the tiny fingernails, almost reptilian, the lined palm, the severed wrist bone, the ragged flesh bound by a piece of string. A human hand — a dead hand, stiff and gray. And I let out a cry, as though someone had stabbed me, and twisted the knife.

With this thing in my possession I knew I could not leave Calcutta.

Had I been in a house, I would have hidden the dead hand in a distant room, or in a box in the basement, or in an attic trunk. There was something creepy about carrying this horrible thing back with me to my bedroom in the Hotel Hastings. I kept thinking of the yellow fingernails, the neatly severed wrist tied with string. Wherever I put it in my room, I would never be more than six feet away from it. I could not put it in a drawer or in the closet — the cleaning woman would find it. So I locked it in the side pocket of my duffel bag, using my little padlock. Because the pocket was small I could see where it swelled, could almost make out the contour of the dead knuckles — my eye was constantly drawn to the bulge.

Who was it? Someone who had only worked, who had never laughed, who was forgotten, someone perhaps more useful dead than alive; a sad soul. My memory of the thing woke me in the night. I imagined it flexing to be free, trying to claw out of the side pocket. Even liberated, saved from cremation, it was no more than a stiffened hand, a little paw that had been detached from a body.

Severed, in its discolored plastic bag, it was pathetic, needing attention. I felt a severe sense of obligation. In spite of being so small it imposed a great weight, holding me here in Calcutta, pleading to be identified. It was my secret and my responsibility. I had been entrusted with it. Mina knew how valuable it was, but she could not have known how much it mattered to me — how it reproached me. I wished I had never seen it, because I knew now that it obligated me. I had seen hands like this many times in Calcutta — just like this, stuck into my face as I sat in traffic, or imploring me as I walked around the city, the cupped hand of a beggar.

At my lowest points at night, studying the bulge in my duffel bag, I knew who this sad neglected figure was who'd been bundled up and brought to the room. It was me. I knew whose this dead hand was. It was mine.

Mrs. Unger had said early on that she needed to see me. Now she seemed to be ignoring me. That paradox wounded me, but what could I do about it? Only obey. Ask no questions.

I called Howard at the consulate, hoping that he would help me identify the dead hand, as I assumed Mina wished me to do.

"I need a favor."

"This is why I'm here, to grant favors to itinerant Americans."

"It's serious. I want you to put me in touch with a forensics expert. I have an item that needs examining, in confidence."

"Tell me what you've got and I'll let you know."

"A dead hand." I had said it so softly I had to repeat it three times before he understood.

"Is this a figure of speech?"

"A human hand. Rather small. No joke. I need to know more about it."

When he realized I was serious, he became solemn and a bit chastened. He swallowed hard and said, "You want to see my friend Dr. Mooly Mukherjee at police HQ. I'll call him and tell him you're coming."

The next day, following directions to Bazar Street, near Dalhousie Square, I presented myself at the main police station and, after a long wait, was brought upstairs by a chowkidar to meet Dr. Mooly Mukherjee. He was big-bellied with a full mustache and the brisk, confident manner of a medical man.

"Howard is a great friend," he said. "He left me a message on my voice mail. I hope I haven't kept you waiting."

He must have known he had. I'd been downstairs for almost half an hour.

"I want you to look at this," I said, and was glad to see, as I spoke, that he stepped behind me to shut his office door.

He hardly reacted when he opened the pouch. Then he frowned and stroked his mustache. He did not remove the dead hand, as I had done. He looked at it closely through the clear plastic wrapper.

"I will not ask you how this body part has come to be in your possession. I shall assume that you came by it honestly, or happened upon it. Hooghly is teeming with body parts of incomplete cremations. My good wife and I encountered a human leg one day at Tolly's Nullah."

"So you understand."

"I shall log it in as DNA rather than evidence. What is it you require?"

"I want to know the age. The sex. Most of all, the fingerprints. I'd like to identify who it is."

After he had agreed, and I had left the office, walking to calm myself, I thought: And who am I? Please tell me who I am and what I'm doing.

Then all that changed.

6

THE SMOKY HALF-DARK room, Mrs. Unger's vault, was arranged as though for a Black Mass. The only light was the flame of one fragrant candle, near a stick of incense burning in a dish before a fierce-faced goddess. The air was ripe with the gummy odor of hot oil. Saturated with this same oil, I lay face-down on the table of heavy wood, which was shaped like ancient altars I had seen in the Middle East — in Syria and Jordan — at which animals were slaughtered and offered as sacrifices. This one was also scooped out at the end and gouged with grooves, so that blood could drain from the beheaded animal. I was surrendering, I was offering myself up. I was happy.

I was calm because — how can I describe this without sounding mawkish? — I was convinced of Mrs. Unger's goodness, her pure intentions, her great works among the poor and the innocent in Calcutta. And yet I was also invigorated by her passion. I wanted her to know how I felt. She had been testing me — in a way, everything she did or said was a test of my sincerity. She had sent me a letter, she had introduced me to her son and his friend, she had taken me for a meal, she had massaged me with her healing hands. And then she had made me wait, tormented me, met me again, said Ask no questions, and finally she'd shown me the interior of her mansion, the house of lost children.

I had cooperated. I could not have refused. I was smitten with her, half in love but also afraid, because in my life (and she seemed to know this) I had not loved anyone without having been wounded. Love was power and possession, love caused pain: you were never more exposed than when you were in love, never more wounded; possession was an enslavement, something stifling.

Then Mrs. Unger had summoned me to her vault, and I felt at last that she needed me, perhaps not as much as I desired her, but desire was never equal. Maybe that accounted for its intensity, the tantalizing difference making me eager, while her holding back a little, or at least her not matching my passion, made me overstate mine and want more from her.

This sounds like a power struggle, and I suppose most passion amounts to that, but it is of an overwhelming kind in which both parties are satisfied. It just wasn't possible to be an equal in desire, nor to play the same role: there was always a giver and a receiver. I mentioned earlier the paradoxes and contradictions of the wealthy. Mrs. Unger embodied some of those contradictions and reminded me of all the conflict I felt when faced with a rich person. I looked at one of these people and knew I did not matter. I did not feel there was anything I could give her, and then I realized that my gift to her was my submission. It is the ultimate gift to any powerful person. Over the weeks of this semicourtship she had managed to strip me of the last traces of my resistance, all my hesitation, all my questions.

She had asked me if I planned to stay in Calcutta.

I'll do whatever you want me to do, I'd said.

That was the posture she required: unconditional surrender.

It took no effort on my part. I wanted to do whatever she wished of me; I wanted her to use me. She was virtuous and I was not, and to prove it, here I was on the sacrificial altar, flat on my face, stark naked.

I didn't hear her enter the vault. I heard the door latch being lifted like a nail scratch, the bolt thrown decisively. Then I became aware of a powerful odor of flowers filling the room, a perfume that hovered at my face and heated my scalp, a sweetness that was like an anesthetic, the aroma humming and thickening in the air that half stifled me and made me dizzy. And being in the vault was like being inside her body.

The silken sari lapped against my arm and slipped against my shoulder and brushed my cheek. I wanted to eat it. I felt a light touch, her fingers on my head as though anointing it, and fingertips on my naked back, tracing my spine. I had started to raise my head when I felt the pressure of her hand. But I was too dazed by the strong perfume to do much except lie there on the altar-like table and receive her touch.

She did not say a word, yet her hands on me spoke, prodding me with her thumbs, pressing her knuckles into my backbones, interrogating my flesh with her fingers. She held my head, lifted and twisted it until my neck seemed to swivel on crusted grains of sugar. She pinched my neck the way a cook flutes pastry, and even in my drugged state it hurt. She massaged my ears, beginning with the rims and working slowly toward the lobes. Head, neck, shoulders, spine — she clasped me and seemed to penetrate my body, digging to the attachments of my muscles.

All this time I lay flat and face-down on the hot oiled wood of the sacrificial table.

She gently lifted my right arm, dug her fingers into the muscles starting at my shoulder, and pressed so hard she could have been using pliers, inching downward to my wrist. The pressure was painful, perhaps the more so because I could hear her breathing as she made an effort. And when she slipped to my hand and held it and pushed the meat and muscle of my palm apart, using her thumb on the bones, I was almost overcome by a feeling I could not tell was pleasure or pain.

I worked with this hand. My right hand was the instrument of action and creation — holding a pen, making love. It contained the soul of my handshake, it was a weapon, it fed me and consoled me when I stroked my cheek or clasped my chin or rubbed my eyes: my life scored in its lines, my labor in its calluses. This hand was my writing instrument.

She seemed to know how important this hand was to me as she separated each muscle in my palm and used her fingertips to find the small bones beneath, finally cracking the joints finger by finger.

I give you my hand, lovers say at a betrothal. It was exactly what I felt. She had picked up my hand, massaged it, pulled it apart, heated it with her own hand, and made it her own.

She lifted my other arm and did the same, breaking down the muscle, disconnecting the bones, taking me to pieces muscle by muscle, a ritual of separation and connection, a kind of bloodless surgery.

I had not realized how strong she was. In the dark, feeling the sharpness of her touch, I was like a child in the hands of a giantess — small, not weak but overwhelmed. She shifted to stand at the end of the table and placed the crown of my head just above her knees and clasped it, thrusting as she worked on my back.

Naked under her hands, I could easily have been a child, not just a young boy but an infant, lying there receiving a mother's attentions. But instead of an innocent caress, I wanted something explicit, dominant, and sensual. I had yearned to be touched. I loved her hands and the way heat radiated from the soft skin of her silks, and I longed to be touched more, harder, with more assertion. She lingered on the small of my back, caressed me, and made an elaborate business of finding the muscles in my buttocks, pouring hot oil on them and plucking at them and grinding her fists in them, using both hands until my body was flattened against the table.

She briefly let up. My skin chafed, tingling, and short of breath I was aware of her movement in the room, a disturbance of the perfume, little wisps and eddies of the warm odor at my ears.

Inhaling through her nose, she gripped my shoulders and with a sudden upsweep of her sari got onto the table, straddled me, her knees at my sides. Then she lay lengthwise against me, fitting herself to my back and legs, her chin resting lightly on the nape of my neck, her silks like flesh, the warm weight of her slender body holding me captive.

Like a mother, like a lover, she lay there for a long time, pressing closer, using her arms and elbows, squeezing the breath out of me, imprinting herself on my body. She slowly insinuated herself against me, preventing me from making the slightest movement. I could sense her breathing, her hot mouth open on my neck. I loved her soft body on me, her knees against the backs of my legs. She pressed so hard it was as if she were forcing the life out of me, displacing me, inhabiting me.

I was helpless the whole time. I had done nothing but receive her attention. She was maternal, but more than that: she entered that intimate zone of mothering that is also erotic. Still she lay on top of my naked body, subtly stroking it, using her whole body, confining me until I was overcome with the heat of her breath and the heavy perfume and her flesh vibrant on me with the pulsing of her blood, massaging me with her heartbeat. I did not sleep. Instead I died. No dreams.

I came to life lying face-up, blinking in the light of candle flames. She was holding my head. I was groggy, I couldn't speak. She touched my face, my lips, my eyes.

"You're mine."

She could tell from her fingertips against my head that I was too happy to reply.

"That was amazing."

"Bhoga," she said, and then, "There's something I want you to see. But not now."

I knew better than to ask when.

She led me through the shadowy corridors of the mansion, and as always I heard the sound of children's voices, the slap and scuff of their feet, the scrape of chair legs, the clink of cabinet doors, and the deeper voices of women, nagging, warning, and drawling reprimands.

The car was parked near the broken fountain, Balraj beside it in the same squatting posture as I'd last seen him. He stood and opened the door for me.

"Don't take a bath," she said from the top of the stairs. "It would wash off all the fragrances and oils. Just rest and drink water. You'll need to rehydrate."

"Traffic," Balraj said as we sat becalmed among hundreds of honking cars and trucks and auto-rickshaws.

Too tired to reply, I nodded at his eyes in the rear-view mirror. Later, after he dropped me at the Hastings, I drank a pitcher of water and slept for ten hours. She had imprinted herself so intimately on me that the whole night I felt her flesh against me, her spirit within me, the touch of her hands, her breath on my neck, her weight, and the cool liquid silkiness of her sari, her skin on my skin, her bones against my bones.

I was not sleeping alone: she was still with me, her odor, her warmth, her womanhood on me, the throb of her blood. I could feel her so distinctly that when I finally awoke I was surprised to find myself alone.

Yet she existed within me. She had insinuated herself there, her spirit lived inside me, I could still feel the pressure of her body. She was palpable, I could taste and smell her, she had left an impression on every part of me, as a physical presence, as a mental image that glowed like a dark flame in my mind. I understood this lightness of soul as something exquisite that strengthened me. I thought: This justifies everything. But I was too superstitious to give it a name.