A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta

7

SLASHES OF DAYLIGHT as white hot stripes dazzled at the slats of my blinds. I had always regarded this light as a reminder that I was in Calcutta; now this brightness was like an apparition of Mrs. Unger. She was warmth and light to me, she was my reason for being in the city, she was life to me — my first thought as I drew a breath that morning, feeling her fingers on my hands. I yawned and sat on the edge of my bed, limp but rested after the deep sleep.

The telephone rang. I guessed who it might be. I fumbled with the receiver as though I'd just settled to earth. The room phones at the Hastings were heavy black Bakelite specimens with stiff twisted cords, phones that had been junked as obsolete everywhere else in the world, but in Calcutta nothing was obsolete. Before I could say anything, I was jarred by a man's voice.

"Dr. Mukherjee here, speaking from police headquarters."

"Yes. Do you have any news about the, um, item?"

"Just a preliminary report regarding fingerprints."

"What did you find?"

"Better question. What did we not find?" he said, pleased with himself for being paradoxical. "I have some issues to address. I will need to see you in person."

"Anytime."

"I am booked up. Next week is better than this," he said. "Do you know occupation of the deceased?"

"I have no idea."

"Could it have been masonry? Tilery? Bricklaying? I have some general notions. Ironmongery?"

I smiled at the old word "ironmongery" in the old crusty voice on the old bulky telephone. It was the Indian illusion, as though I were speaking to someone on an antique line that stretched to the distant past.

"But Dr. Mukherjee, this was a child."

His voice rising in protest, he said, "Child can be manual laborer. Why not, sir?"

"In India."

"India and elsewhere."

I considered this. "Is that all you can tell me?"

"We are proceeding with further tests, as scheduled. Please come next week for consultation."

I was bewildered by his call. To restore my mood, the lightness I'd felt on waking, I worked on my diary after breakfast and for most of the day, writing a description of the massage Mrs. Unger had given me. But it was more than a massage: it was an act of possession. All my hesitation left me when I wrote about it, and it seemed as I reconstructed the episode that I had not only regained my ability but in the writing began to understand what had happened to me, the transformation. And I thought how she had made that day important, and she had given me this day too, a day of writing. So, as she had done for me, in her work in Calcutta she gave her lost children time and hope.

I found I could sit quietly now. I felt no urgency to leave Calcutta nor even to leave the hotel. I was content; she had calmed me. I understood her better as a humanitarian — a mother figure — giving reassurance. It was not a matter of money but rather of a depth of feeling. It amazed me that she was hardly known.

The following morning, another blazing day, the phone rang again, this time before I was fully awake. I took it to be Dr. Mooly Mukherjee with an update, but it was Mrs. Unger.

"I'm downstairs in the lobby. Don't be too long — we need to be somewhere fairly soon. And we've got a big day ahead of us. Have you been sleeping well?"

I made an appreciative sound. She was a glow at the other end of the line. I could not clearly recall her face.

"I knew you would."

Another surprise: after that bewitchment she was all business. But she was full of surprises.

Feeling hot and damp from the long sleep, I took a shower, dressed, and hurried downstairs, eating a banana on the way.

"You shouldn't eat bananas," she said. "Not with your body type."

"What's my body type?"

"Pitta. Fire and water."

"What should I eat?"

"Figs." She was smiling. She assumed a dancer's posture. "Melons."

I heard the words as I stared at her body. And I was thinking how lucky I was to have this woman in my life, appearing in the lobby of my hotel on this sunny morning. She was dressed in a white sari, her shawl over her head instead of draped on her shoulder. She was arrayed like a Madonna, her face framed by the folds of her shawl; but even so, as a figure of holiness she had an aura of sensuality, something about the way she stood, then the slope and glide of her walk, her short swift steps, a way of moving her hands, her slender beckoning fingers. She touched me softly as I passed, and when I paused to savor the moment, I saw the curve of her hips, a rotation, slipping beneath her sari.

I did not ask her where we were going. I obeyed the rule.

"Madam?" Balraj was steering into the flow of honking cars.

"Kalighat."

As we moved slowly along Chowringhee, I glanced at my watch. It was not yet seven-thirty. That accounted for my drowsiness, and I had the slight hangover I often got when I worked late writing. But this feeling was welcome. I had actually written six pages. Yet in this dense traffic, crawling through the heat — and it would be stinking hot in a few hours — I realized she must have woken me at seven or a little before. I had been so eager to see her I hadn't minded the early hour.

"I know that name, Kalighat."

"One of the sacred places," she said. "We have something important to do there."

I loved her for saying "we." I was elated and reassured, because that's how I wanted her to think of me, as a friend, as an ally. More than that, as a partner.

"That's wonderful," I said, meaning everything. "What does bhoga mean?"

"Tantric term. Intense physical desire."

I had to turn away from her. I looked out the window. We passed Mehboob Panwallah and Eatery, the name assuming an irrelevant importance because I was glancing at the signboard as she spoke.

"What do you do when you're on your own?"

She asked big questions bluntly. I could have told her about Parvati and her poems, that empty flirtation. Or about Howard and his consular stories (You could use that), the shuttling life I lived between jobs and cities and magazine pieces, the occasional radio item, my ill-fated TV travel show, my life of procrastination — the opposite of her life of action and commitment. But all that had stopped.

"Not much," I said. I wondered if I dared to tell her, because in telling her I was exposed; I'd have no more secrets. Yet she would know if I was lying, and she was so truthful herself it seemed unworthy to try to deceive her. I wanted her to trust me. I had wooed enough women in the past to know that only a woman's trust — and hope — led to sex.

Mrs. Unger was staring at me with her pale eyes, which were dark in a dark room, greenish in candlelight, gray in daylight like this; and I could see from the cast of her lips, the set of her jaw, the way her eyeteeth bulked against her lips, that she expected me to say more.

"I think of you when I'm on my own," I said. I had told women this many times without meaning it, but I meant it now, in a desperate way. "That's all I think about — how long it will be before I see you again. And I wonder what you're doing. Please don't laugh."

She touched my hand. "That's so tender."

"It's a little pathetic too."

She laughed, and held on.

"Because I think of myself as a big strong man," I said in a joking tone, but I meant what I said. I hardly recognized the man I'd become. I'd been planning to leave Calcutta around now, and here I was, in suspense at my hotel, making notes, avoiding friends, waiting to be summoned by Mrs. Unger, reduced to a needy boy.

"That means a lot to me," she said.

I hoped that she'd say that that was how she felt too when she was on her own, thinking of me. But I wanted her to be truthful. I could not phrase it as a question.

I said, "I'd be happy if you thought of me now and then."

"I think of you always." She was a little too prompt, as though observing a form of politeness. Yet she wasn't lying: I could feel her sincerity in her fingers, the way she held my hand. "I think we have a special bond."

A person's hand can be like a lie detector. In hers I felt no tremble of deception, only a but, something unspoken at the end of her statement.

As though answering a question I hadn't asked, she went on, "I need you to know everything."

"That's what I want."

"It'll take time," she said. "If you're patient" — she paused, looked out the window, the Calcutta Zoo on the right, the viceroy's mansion, another of Calcutta's decayed wedding cakes, now the National Library up ahead on the right behind a big white sign—"you'll see."

"I often think about that letter you sent me."

"My invitation."

"It was more than that. You wanted me to help you save Rajat from being implicated in that business. The corpse in his hotel room."

Her face became paler and less animated with thought. She said, "I still want you to help. Poor Rajat must not be compromised. It would destroy him."

If I'd had anything to report I would have told her then — that I'd visited the hotel twice, been rebuffed the second time, and discovered that the girl who'd helped me had been assaulted and fired; that I'd met her in the Park Street Cemetery and she'd given me a severed hand. But I had no positive news, only these inconclusive events.

"I want to do everything I can to protect him," she said. "I think the world of him."

We were on back streets, among villas and walled compounds, some of them very grand, others almost romantic in their decrepitude, covered in vines, set in large gardens. And street dwellers and hovels too, as in the most expensive of Calcutta's neighborhoods. Yet this one was substantial, with a thinner flow of traffic.

"This place looks familiar."

"Alipore."

"It resembles your neighborhood," I said. And I realized it was her neighborhood.

She didn't reply. But any of these villas could have been hers.

"I'm glad you think of me," I said, because I wanted her to say it again. I couldn't ask. It was often hard to obey her injunction against asking questions.

"Yes. But you're a strong, independent person, so you know how strange it is to need someone else."

I wanted to say I'm not strong anymore.

"Charlie sees it. I think he's a little jealous."

"He has his life," I said, because I couldn't say He has Rajat.

She looked out the window as though glimpsing an answer. "It'll do him good. I don't interfere."

"I thought Charlie worked for you."

"He helps with my foundation. But he attends to his own affairs."

That was typical of her confident ambiguity. His own affairs could have meant anything.

"I'm so busy with my charities I hardly have time for anything else. I mean, besides the foundation there's my school, my clinic, the refuge. Well, you know. Keeping up with the funding and the accounting is a full-time job. And there's so much more. This is Calcutta!"

The sidewalks we were passing, in spite of the elegant villas behind the high walls, were thronged with women and children. At this spot, as she finished speaking, women in red and yellow saris worked on a building site, carrying gravel out of a pit, emptying one basket at a time in a heap by the side of the road — construction workers, dressed as if for a folk festival.

"I want to make an impact. I want to do something for these people. I don't want to be another tourist in India."

She spoke in an urgent whisper, not in the valiant and weary way of a philanthropist, boasting of her charity. Her sincere undertone of modesty moved me and filled me with longing.

I had never known any woman like her. Such a woman, I was thinking selfishly, was so truthful, so loyal to her principles, she would never leave me. She would love and nurture me, would be a companion and a caring friend, would look after me with the attention she gave to the lost children. And that same passion could be translated to the bedroom, where generosity mattered most.

"It's always like this."

She was speaking of the traffic, denser as we moved into narrower streets, among older buildings and shops, a neighborhood of pedestrians and auto-rickshaws, a place with the look of a bazaar, not residential except in the broadest sense, for people seemed to be living everywhere, in lean-tos and shanties and on blankets by the side of the road. Many of these people were hawkers, selling beads and relics and garlands of marigolds, or were squatting among piles of fresh flowers, stringing them together. The car was slowing, a steel barrier across the road ahead.

"Blockages," Balraj said.

"We'll walk from here. Deka hobey."

I was glad to get out of the cramped back seat, and I thought, not for the first time, that Indian drivers had the best seat; the esteemed passengers in the rear had no legroom at all. As I swung the door open (Balraj was attending to Mrs. Unger) I was surrounded by men offering to guide me or to sell me necklaces and holy lockets. Mrs. Unger waved them off and led me, as a mother shepherds a small boy, keeping a few steps ahead, past the fruit sellers and the stalls into a narrow lane.

"Look."

In the distance, an opening between two poor huts, a squalid creek with muddy, littered banks, where some women were scrubbing pots in the filthy water, and others — women and children — were picking through an enormous pile of garbage that had been dumped by the riverside.

"The holy Ganga."

She was still walking with confidence, striding past the men importuning her.

"And there."

The sign of the old, low, pale yellow building was lettered Missionaries of Charity — Mother Teresa's Home for the Sick and Dying Destitutes. With shuttered windows and crumbling sills and cracked stucco, it could have been an old school or a warehouse.

"You can look in."

"Voyeurism," I said, but another sign caught my eye: The greatest aim of human life is to live at peace with God — Mother.

Mrs. Unger saw it too. She said, "Poor Agnes. I wonder if she achieved her aim of finding peace with God. She certainly found peace with millionaires and celebrities. How she loved visiting New York. She went to Palm Beach once and dazzled everyone. Goodness, what did she do with all that money? She certainly didn't spend it on that sad building."

"It does look ramshackle."

"Compare it with my Lodge," Mrs. Unger said.

"I see what you mean."

"You know why she established herself here?" she went on. "So she could be a permanent defiance of the temple." She indicated a parapet and a gilded cupola. "That's the temple."

She set her jaw and continued walking stiffly in her determined way through the milling crowds and the occasional beeping car. Wagons, auto-rickshaws, cows, shoppers, beggars, holy men, and saddhus — she parted the crowd, and I followed as though being carried into my childhood.

Then I took her hand, and instead of consoling fingers I felt a sudden snatching grip, too tight, too hot, too damp, not leading me but pressing for support, her nails digging like a raptor clinging to meat. She wouldn't release me.

"Those people," she said of the mob. She had gone pale. Her features were sharpened by anxiety and she wore a half-smile of fear. "I always think they want to devour me."

She had cut through the crowd without looking left or right. This apparent confidence, which was bravado, making no eye contact, had made her seem imperious.

But her hand told me the truth as she hung on. No one would have guessed that she'd noticed the crowd, though her hand resolved itself into a small panicky animal. It was not until we were past all those jostling people that she slackened her hold and began again to talk calmly.

"You only hear about one side of the little woman," she said. "The saintly side."

"I suppose there was another side."

"With a saint? Always. A ghastly one," Mrs. Unger said in a subdued way, as if in sympathy.

"That building's famous as her hospice, though."

"And it's a glorified morgue," she said, and seemed torn, "because she adored suffering." She held her breath as we passed another staring knot of people. "I wonder who she was when she was alone. I think she had no faith except in herself. Nothing wrong with that, but like most crowd pleasers she didn't know when to stop."

"That seems a little harsh."

"I don't deny her charity. But she spent very little of the millions she was given. She believed that poverty made people better, but it can make them vicious. The Vatican has the money, all those windbags and pedophiles. Little Agnes was an egotist." Mrs. Unger was still gripping my hand, tapping her emotion into it. "I don't fault her for leaving her order of nuns and starting her own band of sisters. She needed to be in charge. It's understandable that she was self-invented — it's always the way with so-called saints. Saints are always on their own journey. Agnes was."

"How do you know?"

"I knew her. I helped her." Mrs. Unger was smiling, passing between a pair of imploring beggars. I glanced away from their cupped hands. "She had doubts, you know. But I forgive her for being an atheist, poor thing. God had pretty much abandoned her. Instead of faith, she had a feral willpower and a love of failure and death and, excuse me" — she waved away a man on a bicycle—"poverty and illness. Absolutely loved them, all these miseries that concentrate a person's mind on salvation. 'Save me,' people screamed at her, and that hopeless scream turned her head. Well, of course it would. Who would not be attentive to people so desperate, especially if you can build a reputation on it."

"How well did you know her?" I asked.

"I sometimes think I'm the only person on earth who truly understood her. She was tiny. Unphysical. She was well aware of the effect her little pickled face and twisted body had on other people. Famous people loved posing with her."

I tried to imagine Mrs. Unger and Mother Teresa side by side, but it seemed a preposterous pairing. I suspected that Mother Teresa would not have been terrified by the mob, as Mrs. Unger obviously was.

"She was preoccupied with death. I have only cared about the living, about children who have their whole life ahead of them," Mrs. Unger said. "She wanted to give people an easy death. Is that an accomplishment? What about giving them sixty years of useful life? But no, that didn't interest Agnes."

I said, "Where are we going?"

But she was too engrossed in this memory of Mother Teresa to answer.

"I can ignore all that, but what I cannot ignore is her hideous posturing and her need to be noticed. Is that saintly? She lived for people to see her. She asked for money, but she believed that wealth was the source of evil. She needed witnesses. There's the difference. I don't want attention. I need no witnesses. I gave her money."

Then she smiled — the smile of ill humor — and waved her hand in the direction of Mother Teresa's home.

"And what's left? Only that obvious anachronism, the house of death."

Ahead of her, a bearded man in a long white shirt and homespun khadi vest recognized her and looked eager.

"Yes, madam, here," and he gestured in invitation.

"Apni keman achen?"

"Bhalo achhi. Health is good, madam. I have been waiting you, madam."

The front of his shop was open — no wall. It was not a shop in the usual sense, but rather an open-sided pen with a tile roof. In a fenced enclosure with an earthen floor there were about a dozen black bleating goats. They were small, most of them, with glossy coats, making sad little cries, each one tethered with a rope around its neck. They nibbled at fodder, grass that had been stacked in a cradle.

The bearded man tugged one of the goats away from the others and heaved it off the ground, holding it in his arms. But Mrs. Unger walked past him — in her white diaphanous sari, in the reeking goat pen, she seemed suspended above the trampled floor.

"This one," she said, indicating a small, bewildered-looking goat that stood staring up at her, not bleating. The animal looked cuddly and confident, even a bit defiant.

"He's cute," I said.

"The blackest. Dam koto?"

"One thousand rupees, madam."

Handing him a block of notes that had a paper band around it, she kept her eyes on the chosen goat.

"A brave little thing," she said.

What happened next happened fast. We crossed the lane, passed Mother Teresa's hospice again, and walked up another lane, entering the precincts of the temple she'd shown me earlier. A young man carried her goat tightly against his chest. Seeing her, some men at the temple cleared the way, shoving people, then nagging me to take my shoes off.

As I sat on a bench, untied my shoes, and slipped them off ("And sockings, sar"), Mrs. Unger stepped out of her sandals and went to the back of the temple. I found her surrounded by chanting, sweaty-faced men near a walled enclosure — just walls, no roof. She wore a necklace of flowers, and the goat too was garlanded like a beloved pet. The chanting of the men became louder in their excitement.

A man inside the enclosure wearing an apron-like skirt stood over a drum and began to smack it, a snare-drum sound of syncopation that got the crowd of men stamping. The drummer's arms were flecked with red. The sound and the louder chanting seemed to make the day hotter. My shirt was stuck to my back, and my head was burning.

Speaking in what I took to be Bengali, Mrs. Unger directed the man with the goat to enter the walled enclosure. The man walked through clusters of flowers and what looked like fresh paint on the stone floor, where a barefoot priest stood, streaked with ashes and daubs of holy vermilion on his forehead and cheeks.

The goat began to bleat as its head was jammed between two upright stone stakes the height of a wicket, its neck pushed hard against a stump. The drumming grew louder. The priest touched his fingers to his lips and then caressed the goat's head. He raised a long curved knife, and without pause he struck down, like a butcher dividing a side of meat, and with the same thunk as the blade hit solid wood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"To Howrah. To the Botanical Gardens."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Where are we?"

"Blockages," Balraj said. "Shibpur."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"So it really is a warehouse."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You're late."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The monthly intake, but fewer than usual."

"So this is a regular event?"

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

"I'm amazed she has room for them."

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

"How do you know?"

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

I turned away from him to look.

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

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

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

He went on staring. He said, "Oh?"

"The Ananda," I said.

"You told me that already."

"I went back again."

Now his smirk seemed pasted on. Was he ridiculing me for making this second visit? His eyes were blank and emotionless. I had no idea.

"I just want to forget all about it. It was a terrible experience."

"There was one detail you forgot to tell me."

"I told you everything." He seemed to be defying me by not blinking.

"You didn't mention how the dead boy got to your room."

"I don't know how he got there. Obviously someone brought him to the room while I was asleep."

"Brought him how?"

"I have no clue."

"You didn't see what he was wrapped in?"

In a harsh whisper he said, "He was naked."

Was Rajat being obstinate? I didn't want to help him with the word "carpet."

"You just saw him and nothing else?"

"What else would there be? Isn't a dead boy enough?"

Now I could read his expression: it was tight with the memory of seeing the dead boy, his eyes damp with fear, his lips twitching on his murmuring mouth. I would have felt sorry for him except that I was the one who had been assigned the task of proving whether what he said was true.

Across the room, Mrs. Unger had bent to pick up a child from its mother's arms. She spoke to the woman, reassuring her as she stroked the child's head — a little girl in a ragged purple dress that reached to her bare feet. As she hoisted her I could see how skinny the child was, gaunt and hollow-eyed, with the dull dry skin of malnutrition, the bright eyes of fever, and a lassitude that made her limp and compliant in Mrs. Unger's arms.

Carrying the child like a symbol of authority, looking even more like a mother, Mrs. Unger greeted the other mothers, spoke to their children. She shifted the child to the crook of one arm, and the fact that she was holding her this way seemed to make her more approachable. She walked around the room, stepping among the seated and kneeling children.

"Namashkar" she was saying, and "Apni keman achen?" — hello and how are you? in Bengali.

They were fine, they said, Bhalo achhi, or more often, just okay, Thik achhey.

She patted the child she carried, or swung her and shifted her like a doll. I guessed the little girl to be six or so, but an Indian child that size could have been older. Poverty diminished them, shrunk them, gave them extraordinary bodies, spindly legs or swollen bellies. Some children had faces like old men, and some of the mothers looked like haggard girls.

Rajat was following her progress through the room. He said, "She's thinking, Why aren't there more of them? But it's not that easy." He watched her stoop to speak to a group of anxious children. "She knows just how to calm them."

"Why should they be afraid?"

Now he became unreadable again, with an expression that seemed like contempt for my ignorance, another snub for the big, uncomprehending foreigner.

He went on praising Mrs. Unger, but I was thinking how he'd called her bloodstained ("It's a good color for Ma"), and I could not take my eyes off the dark blood on the hem of her white sari, the blood that was dried and crusted on her feet.

Shaking her head, looking disapproving, she was deep in discussion with Charlie. He was taller, so he had to stoop slightly, and it was easy to tell that she was the authority figure.

"I'm sorry," Charlie said to her as I drew close to them.

Still holding the child, she headed for the door, and I took this as a signal that I should follow.

"Bye, Mother."

Another snub to me, because at this point I was right behind her, leaving the room. She had given me the big soft basket that served as her handbag.

In the car, she said, "Charlie hates me."

"He has his life," I said, another banality. I did not know anything.

The small girl sat between us in the back seat.

"That seemed a good turnout."

"Not good at all. The room should have been full. Think of all the children who are not there, who missed this chance. It breaks my heart."

She seemed entirely unselfish speaking this way, wanting more work, seeing her role in terms of rescue. And I had my selfish thought again: a woman so concerned with human welfare will look after me. That was how she had seemed to me, like a benefactor. I had known her as someone wholly committed to giving. She hugged the small girl.

"Her name is Usha," she said. "Isn't she sweet? It means 'dawn.'"

"Was that her mother in the room?"

Mrs. Unger smiled at me, as if I had said something very foolish.

"I am her mother."

9

WAS IT POSSIBLE to desire anyone more than I desired Mrs. Unger? I didn't think so, even in middle age, after all my lessons in love. I had never felt this way, utterly abstracted and dependent, like a small boy clinging to his mother. It was love of a rarefied kind: I was her devotee. I had nothing to offer her except my loyalty. She had everything to offer me. When I could not see her I felt mournful, almost ill. Yet I preferred to be alone rather than with other people — Howard or Parvati. It seemed disloyal to spend time with anyone else. This devotion was the sort that deprived a person of family and friends; they were no use — worse, they were an intrusion. And I needed my secret.

Howard persisted. He called to arrange meetings. Could I talk to the Theosophical Society? Could I give a lecture at the university in Burdwan? What about the Book Week in Ballygunge?

Normally I might have said yes, but somehow his requests appalled me, shamed me, made me sad.

"I can't, I'm really sorry," I said, and was almost tearful, thinking: I have nothing to say to anyone. I am empty.

"I've got some great stories for you," he said.

He liked telling me the more colorful ones ("You could use this in an article"). One was about two American Foreign Service officers, both of them men, who were involved in a murder-suicide. "It happened in Equatorial Guinea, but maybe you could give it an Indian background." Another was about an American consul's wife who sang Tagore songs and had a cult-like following. "Maybe something in the water here — a lot of foreign women get goddess complexes." And there was the Monkey Man: "A large monkey roams neighborhoods, causing mayhem. He killed a commissioner on the roof terrace of his residence. A bunch of vigilantes went out to catch Monkey Man. There were hundreds of Monkey Man sightings. People are still terrified of Monkey Man — possibly a hairy man, possibly a huge monkey. Wouldn't that make a great short story?"

It was the sort of thing people had been saying to me my whole writing life. If only he knew the fantastic narrative I was living with Mrs. Unger, for which I had no vocabulary.

The rattling bell on my old room phone nagged me. I hoped it was Mrs. Unger. It was Howard, and I was at once suspicious. Skilled at getting people to say yes, he had a special, softly insistent yet deferential voice for eliciting agreement. He was used to dealing with difficult people — stubborn Bengalis, pompous matrons, commissars of the Communist Party of Bengal, obnoxious State Department types — and though he was now a public affairs officer, he had served time as an assistant consul, dealing with any number of mendacious visa applicants.

"Paul Theroux wants to see you. He's in Calcutta."

"I've never met him," I said. "How does he know I'm here?"

"I told him. He's a huge fan." That had to be bull. "I mentioned that you once asked about Mrs. Unger." Before I could dismiss this, he said, "He also asked about her."

My whole body went slack. I felt my throat constrict, my voice go small.

"Is that why he's here?"

"I don't think so." Howard put on more of his special "selling" voice. "He was supposed to open the Calcutta Book Fair, but it was scrubbed at the last minute over a lawsuit by some local people who said it would create pollution. Isn't that funny? You might be able to use that in a story."

But I was still thinking of He also asked about her, and I was too numb to reply.

"We were having a drink at his hotel yesterday, and out of the blue he said, 'Does the name Merrill Unger mean anything to you?'"

In a voice I barely recognized I said, "What did you say?"

"I said that I knew someone else who'd asked me the same question."

I could not speak. Since I'd met her, I'd felt I had her to myself — and she had me. We were each other's secret. Even her sly inquisitive son could not have known what went on between us. We met covertly, by assignation, and she worked her tantric magic on me in semidarkness, by the light of flickering oil lamps in her vault at the Lodge.

Foolishly, early on, I'd dropped her name to Howard, not realizing that he'd remember. I thought I'd been so offhand. But as a Foreign Service officer he was alert to the slightest suggestion of any new fact or query. His job was to know as much as possible about the Americans in Calcutta, to keep track of them, to make connections. He didn't know much about Mrs. Unger, so on this slender association he wanted to find out more. Arranging a meeting, putting me in touch with someone like Theroux, he might find something out — about us, about her. I had taken Howard to be a friend, but no matter how casual he seemed, a diplomat is never off duty. His first duty was to the flag, and keeping the flag waving was his job.

"I don't know him," I said. "I've never met him."

"This is your chance."

Howard was shrewd, but he had no idea of the antagonisms that exist among writers.

Howard's geniality masked his calculating mind. On the pretext of a chance meeting, the reactive chemistry of bringing people together, he would find out more about me and Theroux and Mrs. Unger. It was the triangulation of the diplomatic world, holding a party ("Have another drink!") to see what information could be shaken loose.

I didn't want to cooperate or let myself be suckered into this. Mrs. Unger was my secret, my mission, my single reason for staying in Calcutta. I was in possession of the dead hand that might pluck open the door to the truth. Yet Howard had been helpful to me, and kind; I needed favors from him in this dense and difficult city. So I had to agree, but I warned myself in advance to be cautious, to give nothing away. More than saving myself, I wanted to protect Mrs. Unger from this notoriously prying man.

What I knew about Theroux was what everyone knew about him. He was known for being intrusive, especially among the unsuspecting — strangers he met on trains, travelers who had no idea who he was, people thinking out loud in unguarded moments. I suspected that much of what he wrote was fiction, since he'd started his writing life as a novelist. And I knew the temptation to improve quotations or to dramatize chance encounters and far-off landscapes, to make people and places more exotic. But he was too explicit to be convincing. Life was seldom so neat, and never neat in a city like this. I indulged in a little fictionalizing myself, but I always felt this coloration was in a good cause. Like most writers, he was ruthless in using whomever he met.

I resented his book sales and his bonhomie and his breezy manner. From his work you could see he was the sort of writer who smiled and encouraged you to chatter and afterward wrote a pitiless account of the conversation, playing up his knowingness. He was not cruel, but he was unsparing. He noticed everything — the scuffed shoes, the pot belly, the clichés — traveling the world, generalizing and jumping to conclusions. "In the Pacific the chief is usually the man whose T-shirt is not quite as dirty as everyone else's" — that sort of thing.

I prized my anonymity — Theroux did as well, though he had a reputation for using it to blindside the unsuspecting. As a traveler I did not want any witnesses to my experiences. It was my privilege as a writer to write about myself without someone looking over my shoulder. In short, and for the love of God, I did not want this man to know me.

What every traveler craves, what every writer needs, is the illusion that he or she is a solitary discoverer, whether of actual or imagined territory. This is obviously a conceit, but it is necessary to preserving the mood that allows a writer to make a place his own. Theroux was proprietorial about the places he described. If he was in Calcutta, he'd want to own it. But I had put in too much time and effort here to hand it over to him or share it. I wanted to own Calcutta. I wanted Mrs. Unger to be mine. I didn't want to give information. I didn't want to be witnessed.

If I refused to meet him he'd be suspicious, and Howard would be annoyed with me. If I agreed to meet him, I risked giving myself away and putting my relationship with Mrs. Unger in jeopardy. But it seemed I had no choice.

Suppressing my fury, I said, "Maybe we could meet for a drink. I'm pretty busy."

I didn't want a drink, I wasn't busy, I badly missed Mrs. Unger, and here I was condemned to meet someone who was apparently competing with me — to talk about her while all I wanted was to see her.

"Great. He's staying at the Fairlawn."

Typical of someone looking for "color" instead of the truth (as I was). The Fairlawn occupied a decaying mansion. It was a Calcutta institution in every sense, run by the domineering Mrs. Smith and her family: stodgy food, mutton chops and boiled cabbage, and bossy waiters. In any other city it would have passed for colorful and fun; in Calcutta it seemed joyless, even menacing, the sort of place Theroux might use as a setting for his Indian fictions, which put me on guard. The Fairlawn was within walking distance of the Hastings, near Madge Lane. I'd passed it going to the Indian Museum. I avoided staying in such places, and instead got a comp room at a luxury hotel that was willing to trade a room night for a mention in one of my travel pieces. But I had not written anything, so I'd run out of welcomes.

Wanting to get this over with, I said I'd have to meet them the next day. Howard agreed so quickly that I suspected that Theroux's wish to see me was not casual at all. He was determined to corner me. He wanted something from me. And so I was again forewarned.

"Say five, drink time," Howard said. "He's a good guy. You'll like him."

This sounded like an order. It also made me suspicious. And I hated hearing Howard praise him.

The next afternoon, entering the courtyard garden of the Fairlawn, seeing them under the striped umbrellas, I decided to surprise them. There are two methods of meeting nosy, hyperalert strangers like this. One is walking up to them from the front door, smiling as you advance. The other is approaching from behind, the wrong door. The disadvantage of encountering them head-on is that they have time to study you, to size you up, to think of questions, to assess your movements — a person's gait and posture can be so easy to read, and such a giveaway. He'd be able to scrutinize what I was wearing, my shirt, my shoes. Footwear often figured in his descriptions. Coming from behind, I'd surprise him and prevent him from making any calculations.

That was what I did, slipped in through the side door, detoured around the trees, sidled past the other tables where people were drinking, and passed behind the two men. I was deliberately early on this hot afternoon, to catch them off-guard.

"Hi, Howard," I said, bursting into view, stepping in front of them and taking a seat. I could see that I'd startled them. They were drinking Kingfishers and facing the main door, expecting me to emerge and make a long revealing walk to their table.

"This is Paul Theroux," Howard said, seeming rattled by my sudden appearance. He signaled to a waiter and tapped his bottle of Kingfisher, meaning one was needed for me.

"Jerry, great to meet you at last." The at last had to be insincere, as though he'd been wanting to meet me for years. I knew this could not be so. "What brings Jerry Delfont to Calcutta?"

The use of someone's full name to a person's face in a question like this has always annoyed me for being stagy, an interviewer's mannerism — more insincerity. And the more depressed I became about my failure as a writer, the more I hated my name, so this was not simply annoying but hurtful.

"This and that. Just passing through. How about you?"

"Same here. Passing through. I'm one of those people Kipling described who spend a few weeks in India, walk around this great Sphinx of the Plains, and write books about it, denouncing it or praising it as their ignorance prompts. In other words, no big plans. You?"

"No plans at all," I said. "Waiting for the monsoon is about all."

"I know what you mean. I'll be glad when it starts. This heat is awful."

"It's hard to work in it," Howard said.

Theroux said, "I'm not doing any work. Jerry?"

"I wish. Too hot."

Forgive this banal dialogue, which by the way continued a little longer. The reason I write down the empty phrases is that I want to show how oblique Theroux was with me, oblique while seeming genial and forthcoming. He was condescending and evasive; he gave me no information; nor did I give him any.

All this time — I suppose it was a technique he'd learned as a traveling writer — he was observing me closely. His words meant nothing, but while he talked to hold my attention he was able to study me, the very thing I'd hoped to avoid. He glanced at my shoes, my linen trousers, my loose linen shirt, and he was trying to guess my age, to judge my evasions, as if looking for a weakness. His relaxed posture was meant to reassure me, but his twitching eyes were those of a predator.

"This city doesn't change," Howard was saying.

And I had to admit that, stalling, uttering clichés myself, I was doing the same to Theroux, sizing him up.

Meeting a writer in the flesh is always a letdown, since the image you have from the writing is formed from loaded or misleading words. On the page the writer is an intelligence, an efficient and fluent being, clear-sighted and alert: the reader invents a face for this man. In the flesh the writer is usually misshapen, overcautious, or hesitant; fallible in the way that flesh is fallible; bruised, squinting, older and shorter than you expect — even, quite often, unbalanced. I met Hunter Thompson once at a party in New York and he seemed timid and oversensitive and insane, like a crazy child. Writers never resemble the jacket photo. They are always smaller and heavier. Theroux's hair was thinner, but no writer's hair looks in the least like the hair in his photograph.

This fox in prose looked hot and obvious, fleshier than his picture, not vulpine at all but preoccupied, flexing his fingers in a displacement activity to use his hands, as though he wanted to be writing down what I was saying or making notes. In spite of the humidity he wore a rough-spun cotton khadi vest and baggy trousers, a collarless shirt, leather walking shoes, no socks, an expensive watch. His round-lensed horn-rim glasses were the type Indians called "Netaji spectacles," after the glasses popularized by the nationalist Netaji Bose. Though he smiled pleasantly enough, his eyes were busy behind his specs, too busy, always on me, up and down the whole time. I was reassured that he appeared older than his picture; he'd lost his looks, if indeed he'd ever had them; but he was sinewy with determination, that ruthlessness I mentioned before. He was friendly in a way that bothered me, because I knew he didn't mean it and must want something.

"I haven't seen the Jerry Delfont byline lately," he said. That irritating verbal mannerism. I winced, hearing my full name again. "Usually you're everywhere."

"I've been pretty busy," I said, and I knew from the forced encouragement tightening in his expression that he didn't believe me. I hadn't been busy at all, not in any way he would have understood.

"Are you on an assignment?"

"In a way," I said, and we both knew that this meant no.

The form and tone of a person's question often indicates that he wants to be asked the same question. "Have you been to Bhutan?" means "Ask me about Bhutan. I've just been there." But his manner wasn't like that. He didn't want to answer any questions. He was the interrogator, at the periphery, behind the light.

And with each question came a compliment.

"I always look for your pieces in magazines. They're so topical."

"I try to keep on the move," I said.

"You travel light. I envy you."

Another canny reference. "Travel Light" was one of my magazine columns.

"You do a lot of TV" he said.

Was this a gibe? It seemed so.

Howard said, "I hadn't realized that."

"I was on cable. It's not the same as network TV."

"You're good at it," Theroux said. "You should do more of it. You could have your own travel show."

I took this to mean I wasn't much of a writer, that my real talent lay in gabbing to a camera. Maybe he didn't mean that. But the problem in talking to him was that I wasn't sure exactly what he meant. I was sure that all this time he was verbally dancing around, using a magician's misdirection while peering at me.

"You do TV don't you?"

"No," he said. "Never. I wouldn't be any good at it." Was this a compliment or a putdown?

"How long have you been in Calcutta?" he asked.

"About a month. Maybe more. I've lost track of time."

"That's travel at its best," he said, sounding pompous and self-important. "The open-ended thing — no view to going home."

"Since I don't have a home, it's pretty easy," I said, to set him straight.

"Footloose."

"Not really. I have a tenant in my place in New York. I use the rent money to travel."

And I thought: Goddamn, why did I give him this information?

"How about you?" I said. "Where do you live?"

"It's hard to say. I've never been happy living exclusively in one place. And we Americans are not natural expatriates, even writers like us."

Utterly evasive, and writers like us was just a way of patronizing me. He wrote books, I wrote magazine pieces; but by referring to us both as writers, he was grandly including me in his company. Did he really think I believed him?

He was older than I imagined but affected a kind of eager curiosity that I associated with someone younger — someone on the make. And that was another irritant. But mostly it was his inquisitive eyes that I minded.

"We have some Americans here that almost qualify as expats," Howard said. "Indian visas and work permits are problematical, but there are some Americans in India who might regard themselves as residents."

Though I knew what he was driving at, I didn't help him.

"Missionaries," Theroux said. "Indians hate Christian God botherers. Now and then they persecute them. It's funny, we've got all sorts of Hindu proselytizers in the U.S. Remember that sex-mad guru with all the Rolls-Royces and funny hats?"

"Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh," I said.

"Bhagwan means 'god,'" Theroux said. "He promoted himself to god!"

Howard said, "It's used in a different sense, kind of an honorific."

"Whatever," Theroux said. "It was tantric sex he was selling, to cast a sexual spell over his flock. I associate him with polymorphous perversity. And visa fraud."

"Anyway, he's dead," I said.

"The Americans who come to Calcutta tend to be philanthropists," Howard said. "An awful lot of them started out working as volunteers with Mother Teresa. It was almost a rite of passage, part of the India tour. Seeing the sights, then a few weeks feeding the incurables."

"Mother Teresa believed that poverty was a good thing," I said, trying to remember what Mrs. Unger had said.

"Funnily enough, she collected millions in donations," Theroux said.

Howard said, "I see these people all the time."

"Thoreau said, find a do-gooder and you'll see that at bottom there's something wrong with his life. 'If he has committed some heinous sin and partially repents, what does he do? He sets about reforming the world.' Why else do pop stars and celebrities get involved in these causes? Their lives are so miserable. The things they do are so worthless, so meretricious and overpaid. They need to atone, to make themselves look better. And being bossy do-gooders feeds their vanity."

He had become animated, and seemed uncharacteristically sincere as he became vexed.

I said, "Maybe they want to give their lives meaning. I did a piece on Liz Taylor. She really cares about AIDS research, and she's raised a lot of money — millions."

"I guess that's what happens to actresses who can't get a part in a movie anymore," Theroux said. He was poking one finger into a plate of peanuts on the table, stirring them, a way to show me that he had no interest in what I was saying. "Know what these are called in Bengali? Cheena badam. Chinese almonds. But they're peanuts. What does that tell you about pretensions here?"

I said, "Liz Taylor's using her fame for a good cause."

"With all respect, Jerry, that's what they all say, all these lame high-profile mythomaniacs."

"What's wrong with doing good?"

"They're not doing good. They're promoting themselves. They think money is the answer, but they have so much money they should know that money is not the answer. They're doing harm. Here, have some Chinese almonds."

"So what's the answer?"

"Like the guru said, What's the question?"

"Mrs. Unger isn't high-profile," Howard said.

At last, after all this time, her name. It had been hovering over the conversation for the past fifteen minutes.

Theroux turned to me. "What do you think?"

I went vague. "About what?"

"Mrs. Unger."

I sipped my beer and tried to look indifferent. I said, "I don't really know her."

Howard reacted to this with just the slightest hitch of his spine, a straightening, a fractional head-bob, and I knew that Theroux had registered the involuntary twist of Howard's reaction as well as my own flat denial. I should not have denied her. Both men knew I was lying, but worst of all Theroux pretended to believe me. His bland expression of credulity was like contempt for me, the heartless and unblinking gaze of a hunter lining up a prey animal through a gun sight — an animal that has just revealed a weakness, a slowness, a limp, perhaps.

"I can tell you a few things about her," Theroux said. "She stays below the radar. She's been married two or three times. She first came to Calcutta about ten years ago, like many others, to work at the Kalighat hospice with Mother T. Got disillusioned by Mother. Drifted to the establishment next door."

"The Kali temple?" Howard said.

"Right. She's said to be a practitioner." While Theroux talked, he hardly seemed to look at me, yet he was monitoring me closely. "It's said that she's a dakini, a kind of priestess, and that she taught tantric massage to a French actress who'd come out to work with Mother T. The actress later had an affair with a big Hollywood tycoon and bewitched this rich guy with Mrs. Unger's tantric method. How about that for a story?"

"Why don't you write it?"

"Why don't you?" Theroux said. "Oh, sorry, that's right — you don't know her." He peered at me for a reaction before adding, "Look her up. She's never been interviewed, yet she runs one of the largest private charities in Calcutta. She'd be a huge 'get'—isn't that what they say on TV about people in demand?"

"I don't do much TV these days."

"I thought you said you were pitching a new travel show. She'd be perfect for a Calcutta segment."

"Or a chapter in one of your books."

"I have plenty of material," he said. "You want material? Hey, I got it."

He reached into his briefcase and became absorbed in leafing through a folder of newspaper cuttings, sorting them.

"I love these Calcutta stories. They're like urban myths. There's a woman here, Mrs. Chakraverti, who calls herself a witch and supposedly had an affair with Elvis. She advertises her powers. Or the crazed woman two weeks ago at Howrah who was jealous of her sister-in-law, so she threw her baby in a pond when no one was looking. Two cases like this in one week! Also" — he was holding a flimsy cutting—"lately, servants have been teaming up with dacoits to rob their employers, sometimes murdering them. There was a case recently in Ballygunge, just down the road. The newspapers came out with a story on how to know whether your servants are planning to kill you. I love this stuff."

"I just read the matrimonial classifieds," Howard said.

"Me too," Theroux said. "Or what about the abduction classifieds?"

He was not looking at me and yet, even turned aside, his body was like an instrument measuring my reactions.

"'Search for kidnapped girl,'" Theroux read. "'Sumita Chandran, ten, four feet five inches, kidnapped on twelve Feb. at Howrah.' Or 'Anikat, eight months old, missing since January.' 'Sultana, five, disappeared in 2007. Nitesh Kumar, seven. Prafula, five.'" He closed the folder. "Forty-four thousand children missing every year. Eleven million Indian children are designated as 'abandoned.'"

Howard said, "They end up in the sex trade, or as adoptees. Or in the sweatshops."

"Mrs. Unger helps them," Theroux said. "One of the few who cares. That's the story. That's why I'm interested."

I decided not to respond, but he seemed to register even this resistance.

"I wish I could find her," he said.

"That shouldn't be too hard for you."

He smiled. "Or you."

"But you're interested and I'm not."

"Stop piggling with your samosa, Howard!" he said.

Howard licked the flakes of pastry from his fingers and said, "Piggling?"

"Piggling, piggling!"

Theroux thought he was fooling me with this sudden distraction, but I knew that teasing Howard was his way of throwing me off, because he had become self-conscious in his serious questions about Mrs. Unger. His teasing also showed how confident he was with Howard, who was obviously his friend, and it was a way of excluding me.

"You're not interested in missing children?" he asked.

"I'm not interested in Mrs. Unger."

And again, in denying her I was revealing more than I cared to, and he knew it. He was jealous of my access. He knew something, and I wasn't cooperating. I began to eat a samosa, wondering if he would ask me anything more about Mrs. Unger. But he simply smiled and nibbled peanuts.

"How much longer will you be in Calcutta?" I asked.

"I have no idea," he said. A flat-out lie. "How about you?"

"Who knows?" Another lie.

We were writers lying to each other, as writers do. The greater the writer, the bigger the lies. Why are they incapable of telling the truth? I say "they" because I had no illusions. Secretive, protective of their ideas, keeping close, trying to throw you off. ("Stop piggling!") And yet at that moment, realizing that I was lying, I began to think that I might have a real idea. That I might be a writer.

A writer of magazine pieces, of stories, I had no pretensions to writing books. Theroux didn't want me to know him, didn't want anyone to know him, which was why he did nothing but pretend to write about himself, never quite coming clean, offering all these versions of himself until he disappeared into a thicket of half-truths he hoped was art.

Later, what I remembered most clearly were his eyes, searching, inquisitive, evasive, probing, a bit sad and unsatisfied, trying to see beneath the surface and inevitably misremembering or faulty, because you can't know everything. He was like someone trying to see in the dark.

I was convinced that he knew I was close to Mrs. Unger, and he had tried everything to get me to disclose it. He wanted to know what I knew. But it was my story. I had given him nothing, yet he made me intensely uncomfortable, and as I sat there saying nothing, I felt he was taking something from me. I was like one of those tribesmen who believe that photographers will take their soul by snapping a picture. He gave me that feeling.

But worse than that, I felt undermined. I said, "Now I really do have to go."

"Great meeting you, especially here," Theroux said with a theatrical sweep of his hand at the Fairlawn garden. I knew he didn't mean it, or perhaps he really had divined something of what I knew of Mrs. Unger.

Howard said, "Keep in touch."

I was exposed. Howard had set me up. Now he knew another side of me, and Theroux, who hadn't known me at all, knew me better than I wanted him to. I was not just uncomfortable, I was diminished, made smaller by his attention. He had helped himself to a slice of my soul.

This smirking, intrusive, ungenerous, and insincere man was jumping to conclusions about me, making up his mind and forming fatal errors out of his impatience and knowingness. I hated his horrible attempt at appreciation as he sat smugly inside his pretense of surprise. He was someone who could not accept things for what they were and be at peace. He needed to tease, to provoke, to get me to react, as though — so to speak — he had a mallet in his hand and was constantly rapping my knee, like a doctor testing for a reflex. But that image is too kind. He was more like someone poking a wary animal. It was not only cruel, but the torment evoked an uncharacteristic and untrue reaction. What right did he have, and why did he want to know about Mrs. Unger?

All this time, penetrating the garden from the street, the wall of sound, constant in Calcutta, the traffic and the shouts, the bicycle bells, people calling to each other, every word like a warning in the city that was never silent. No matter where I was, the street noise, the reminder that Calcutta was dense with restless people, where the stinks were so sharp they seemed audible, the diesel fumes of taxis and buses, the reek of garbage, of shit, of risen dust that was also like a high-pitched whine, the vibration of dirt, the sweetish tang of decay, the presence of oil smoke from the lamps and candles of veneration. The only place that was truly silent and fragrant was Mrs. Unger's vault.

Just before I left them, Theroux had said to me, "But if you do see her, if you do get close to her somehow, you're a very lucky guy. It would be a gift."

And so I crept away among the tables.

Their high spirits as they saw me off did not mask their seriousness. And I knew they remained in the garden of the Fairlawn to talk about me. They were saying: A lightweight, a trimmer, an evader — what's he hiding, why is he lingering here? Howard was humane and not a mocker, but he was curious, and he had a diplomat's love of postmortems. He was the good cop. He had used Theroux as an invasive tool to draw me out.

I told myself that I didn't care what they thought. What bothered me was that in his questions, his sideways looks, and his insincere postures, especially his pretense of agreeing with me, Theroux had held up a mirror. In the end he was no more than that, a mirror, showing me my own face and feelings, making me intensely self-conscious. He was doing what writers do, reminding me of who I was.

He had made a reputation out of fooling other people, yet he didn't fool me. He made me confront myself, my failure, as he flashed back my reflection in the writer's mirror that he hid behind. I was like him in some ways. I was the lazy, idle, pleasure-loving side of this man. He pretended to be casual, but he was intense and never at rest, forever uninvolved. I was the procrastinator. He knew that I wasn't driven and competitive like him, and I knew that he envied me for my involvement with Mrs. Unger. I also knew that he was going to write about me, about meeting me, and that he'd get everything wrong.

So much for Theroux and his false intimacies. What Howard didn't know about the mirror was that it was cracked. It was the deep flaw in all writers' mirrors. In most of them — in Theroux's for sure — you saw the writer's boiled eyes, staring wildly through the crack.

As I lost myself in traffic and people at Hogg Market, I kept thinking: I lied to him. I denied everything. He made me do it, and he knew I was lying. But I didn't care. I had Mrs. Unger to return to.

A few days later, Howard called and said, "He's gone."

I knew whom he meant and was glad that I didn't have to see again the man who had shown me who I really was.

10

SOMEHOW — WAS IT SOMETHING I ate at the Fairlawn? — I fell ill. I had eaten a samosa, not much, but just a nibble of something foul could lay you low in Calcutta. "Tummy trouble" did not begin to describe my complaint. I had cramps, a headache, muscle pains, an unslakable thirst, and a case of the runs that convinced me that I was slowly dying a drizzling death, a liquefaction from within that would reduce me in a short time to no more than a stain on the sheet. I tried to rehydrate with salted water, but still I drizzled. And I was in pain so severe, and was so weak, I could hardly speak. Three days of this, then I was able to stand without feeling dizzy, though I felt like a shrunken and arthritic old man.

"I think I had amebic dysentery," I said to Howard afterward.

"Probably just diarrhea," he said.

"How do you know?"

"It's only amebic when you see a fifty-dollar bill on the floor of your bedroom and can't pick it up. By the way, Parvati wants you to call."

I was still waiting for Mrs. Unger, for the pleasure of entering her vault. In the meantime, half in flirtation, half in friendliness — so it seemed; what did I know? — Parvati kept me up to date with her doings. I needed the distraction, but it was awkward merely being near Parvati these days. I was obscurely repulsed to be next to someone virginal, with her pale fragrance of innocence, like the smell of soap, someone fresh out of a bath — and my head still ringing with the ripe, almost wolfish odors of ecstasy from Mrs. Unger. After the overwhelming sensuality of this woman, being with Parvati was like being with a child: nothing to say, no common language. It was as though I was violating an old taboo.

To me, unmarried Indian women were like schoolgirls, in their good humor and with their restrictions. There was a line in Indian friendship that was never crossed, at least with an Indian woman. Casual meetings were out of the question, nothing physical was permitted, no touching, not even an air kiss. Any talk of physicality was forbidden. It wasn't possible for me to be alone with an Indian woman, and a mere chaste and discreet stroll on the Maidan needed supervision. I had never held Parvati's hand. She performed the sexiest dances, her body swaying, her hips thrusting, her hands in the air, her eyes flashing like a coquette; yet off the dance floor she reasserted her virginity and was untouchable. And that was not the worst torment for me.

"I want to learn sexy things," she said to me on one of those days when I wanted to be with Mrs. Unger.

"Like what?"

"Whistling. Through my teeth, very shrill. Like hailing a taxicab."

"Teach me how to break someone's arm using kalaripayatu and I'll show you how to whistle."

She laughed and made a martial arts gesture, and as she parried, she said, "I want to know how to drink whiskey. I want to know algebra. Sexy, man things."

This frivolous conversation was permissible because we were at a party on the rooftop verandah of the consul general, the place filled with people. And far from this frivolity, somewhere in Calcutta, Mrs. Unger was attending to her lost children, mothering them, saving lives. It was the opposite of the world of morbidity at Mother Teresa's anteroom of death, tucking old people into bed for the big sleep.

So I was almost ashamed to be at a party, but Parvati was like a younger sister, as most desirable Indian women seemed — innocent, forbidden, but burdened with responsibilities. As Indian men never ceased to be boys, Indian women seemed to me creatures without an adolescence, passing from small giggling girls to clucking middle-aged matrons. I felt protective and forgiving toward Parvati, but I had never seen any future for us, even as friends. Her parents would find her a marriageable man of her caste, and I would have to respect the Indian taboo against a man's being friendly with someone's wife.

But with Mrs. Unger's philanthropy and unselfish effort on my mind, I was usually disturbed by Parvati's talk of poetry and dance. Her obsession with art and music could be jarring. She invited me to her dance recitals, fluttered her lovely eyelashes, and told me all the places she wanted to go. She did yoga every day and was sympathetic to my recent struggle to write. She was always working on a poem, sometimes several at once, with a deftness I envied. She wrote sensual poetry. She passed the poems to me, folded, like money she owed me, always handwritten in her graceful script.

One, about becoming a dancer, ended with the lines

So when I'm home, lying vanquished

In my own bed, searching for what is slow

And lonely, I pare my knees apart, point my toes.

Another contained the image

…the muted lisp

Of morning's tongue pushes against the sky.

"What do you think?"

"What do I think? Coruscating."

She laughed. She said she wanted to loan me a book by a Bengal novelist. "Pop by my flat. You must read Sarat Chandra Chatterji."

Though Howard had told me she lived with her parents, I took this to mean that the flat was hers. It might have been. On a side street near a mosque in Shobhabazar in north Calcutta, it was four flights up on a landing that faced the minarets and a building draped with drying laundry. The dark staircase smelled of disinfectant and cooking. I was breathless from the climb when I knocked. An old woman opened the door, her harassed face puffy with the heat, a servant judging from the way she was dressed, wrapped in a plain cotton sari and barefoot.

"Won't be a minute!" Parvati called from an adjacent room that was blocked by a folding screen.

"Chai? Pani?" the old woman asked as she plucked at her gauzy sari.

"I'm fine," I said, and clarified it by gesturing with my hands. An offering of water in Calcutta had sinister implications for me. The very word "water" was like poison.

An inner door clicked open. I expected Parvati, but from the reaction of the servant, compact, cringing, I took the woman approaching to be her mother. She straightened to appraise me. She was not old, but I saw no resemblance to Parvati. She was darker, heavier, flatfooted in gold sandals, wearing rings on her toes, and she twisted her wrist bangles as she frowned at me. She was clearly disappointed, as though I was hardly human, a peculiar animal, a pest.

"You are alone?"

What did that mean? I was still standing. I said, "Yes."

"Your employment is American consulate?"

"Not exactly." What had Parvati told her, and why wasn't she here to help me? "I do a little writing. I was giving lectures at various places around Calcutta, sponsored by the consulate. Maybe that's what you were thinking of."

She waggled her head. "Please sit. You won't have tea?"

Helpless, not knowing how to deal with the silence in the shadowy room, I said, "Thanks. I think I will."

"Ragini, chai," she said to the servant, who stood to the side, still cringing. And seating herself across from me, she said, "And how are you knowing Parvati?"

"Through her poetry, of course."

"Tcha." This was less a word than a way of sucking her teeth.

"And her classical dancing."

"Tcha."

Behind me, I saw as a flash in a mirror, the outer door opened — a sight of laundry and minarets — and a man came in, obviously fresh from work and heat; a crease of disturbance on his face made him seem like an escapee. He glanced at me with undisguised alarm and disapproval, as if he'd encountered an intruder. His leather briefcase was bulgy and bruised, and although the day was hot he wore a dark wool jacket and a shirt and tie. He unbuttoned his jacket but did not remove it. His heavy clothes seemed like armor and gave him an air of pugnacity, as though he were dressed for combat. Not taking his coat off seemed hostile.

The woman spoke to him in Bengali. I caught the word "Parvati" and guessed at what she might be saying.

This man (her father, I assumed) could have been my age, yet in his stern, heavy-faced way, his brows and his hooked beak making him look owlish, he seemed much older — out of shape, fattish, with delicate hands; fleshy, with the air of a clerk in baggy pants and thick-soled shoes. I thought how in travel, especially in India, I met people from an earlier time, another era.

"You're the chap from the consulate?"

I smiled at his wife, hoping she'd set him straight. But she stared at me and said nothing.

"No. As I said," and smiled at the woman, "I'm just passing through."

I wanted to say And don't worry, I don't want to marry your daughter.

We sat, the three of us, in three chairs, in hot, silent formality, as the lilting voice began in the mosque's crackling loudspeaker, calling the faithful to prayer.

The man looked unloved but like someone who'd always been obeyed. Certain Indian men seemed to me like this. No matter how accomplished and successful, they remained like big hairy boys, ungrateful and tantrum-prone and spoiled.

The servant Ragini set the teacups down on side tables as the man muttered to her. She cringed and turned that reflex into a bow.

It was as though I'd come for an interview, and before any questions were asked, the interviewer had written me off as unsuitable. They saw me as a bad man, not just a thief but a thief from another world. I had traveled all over, but I could not remember a time when I'd been seen this way, implausible and tainted.

"Kinda hot," I said. The man glanced away from me; the woman rocked her body a little. The call to prayer was still crackling. "Monsoon's coming."

They were like sentinels. Their silence made me stupid. Worse than my coming to ask a favor, or to see Parvati, I was here to steal from them, to rob them of the only thing that had value in this place, not their daughter but their daughter's honor; to steal her virginity and leave her bleeding.

"Sorry to intrude," I said.

They sipped their tea, which was more offensive to me than replying.

I was intruding on them. I had no business there. Had I been a young Bengali man, a potential suitor, they would have been chatty. But I was all wrong, an alien.

"Which part of America?" the woman asked.

"New York."

"Crime," the woman said with satisfaction, her earrings trembling. "So dirty. So dangerous."

The man waggled his head in agreement, as we sat in the heat, breathing diesel fumes and listening to the roar from the street and the howl from the mosque.

I did not belong in the privacies of Calcutta, only in the big public stew with the mob that swallowed everyone up. No one belonged here. How had Mrs. Unger managed? But she was afraid of mobs.

"My husband has been to America. Punch?"

"For a conference. Workshops."

His name was Punch? I said, "Parvati tells me you teach at the university."

"Indeed," the man said, and no more.

"What do you teach?"

"Faculty of English studies."

"My favorite subject. I've done some teaching myself. What period?"

"Seventeenth century. Recusant poets and dissenters. Thomas More to Ben Jonson."

"You write too?"

"For the journals." Jarnels.

I had nothing to offer. Recusant poets? I was a barbarian, here to steal his daughter. And now, at last, I heard her.

"Sorry to keep you waiting," she said. "I see you met Daddy and Mummy. I was dealing with a computer meltdown."

"I was just about to leave," I said. "If you've got the book."

"Oh, please, don't go. Have some more tea."

"If he has business elsewhere, let him go," her father said.

And so Parvati handed me the book, and I thanked them and left, descending the stairs to lose myself in the anonymity of an alien in the streets, where I belonged.

The effect of that brief stop at Parvati's — never to be repeated — was that I wanted to leave India. It was all very well to be a sightseer here, but their reaction told me that I was unwelcome. I knew that I could exist with other writers and tourists in the superficial world of Calcutta, struggling on the surface with the other short-timers and sensationalists. I didn't know the language, as Howard did, but I was so infatuated as to be lost with Mrs. Unger.

And I had the dead hand. That was the only thing that kept me here. It represented the innermost India, a pathetic trophy and the key to a mystery I had not yet solved. If I could have taken it with me, I would have gone. But I had to stay here and protect it, to attach it to its owner, whoever that might be.

Parvati's parents disapproved of me, as they would any man who cast his shadow over her and darkened her chances of a good match. They would certainly have hated me if they'd known how I spent my days longing for Mrs. Unger. Parvati would have been devastated too.

I would have gladly said to them, "That woman is the noblest person I've met in India — an ideal in your own terms! She asks for nothing. She uses her own money and all her time to improve the lives of Indian children."

The rest had to remain my secret. It was just not possible for anyone to imagine the physicality of my craving, how I was touched by her and yearned for more of it. How I longed to be alone with her. What it was like to be held by her, her hot dark breath at my ear: Do you want me to stop?

For Parvati, despite her sensual poems, my associating with Mrs. Unger would have been a crime.

All this was simultaneous, and I couldn't tell Parvati of Mrs. Unger, or vice versa. And Mrs. Unger made me strong enough to be able to endure the wait until she was free to see me. I liked having her as a secret, and I knew it was desire because nothing else mattered and everything seemed possible. It even seemed logical that I should be sitting in a very ordinary hotel on a back street in Calcutta, waiting to be summoned by a woman I had known for three weeks, who had introduced herself in a teasing letter she never now alluded to — had perhaps forgotten.

Another party at the consul general's, for some visiting academics, Howard making the introductions, Parvati in a green silk sari trimmed with gold, others dressed the same, in silks like extravagant plumage. I was uneasy in the presence of beautiful Indian women who arrayed themselves like courtesans, with nose jewels and dangly earrings, extending their slender arms, gold bangles jingling, and offering nothing but teasing fragrance. I resented the ancient rules of courtship that framed their lives and made them inaccessible.

Parvati was like that, a challenge, as radiant as they were, but wiser. "They're pukka Brahmins," she told me when I asked about her parents.

That was a coded way of suggesting that I was unclean to them. She confirmed that though her father's name was Surendranath, he was known as Punch. Then she sized me up and said, "You're not here, as usual."

Odd that even in her detached way — she hardly knew me — she could be so perceptive.

"Where am I?"

"You're far away." She put a folded poem in my hand.

I opened it and read the first lines:

In you, a single blue country

Laid bare of inconsistencies.

A bone of truth caught in a cage of fire.

"A love poem," I said. "It's very good. It's a dream. You're amazing. You're a brilliant poet. You practice martial arts. You do seductive dances. And you live with your parents. How is that possible?"

"It's the Indian way. If I marry I'll probably live with my parents. I don't have any brothers. My sister's still in college. Who'll look after them?"

"What do you mean if you marry?"

"I hold views on marriage," she said.

"Thank you for this poem. I want to see all your poems."

But even saying that, I felt disloyal to Mrs. Unger. I didn't want to be there. I was more uncomfortable with Parvati's good poems than her weak ones.

But it was true, as she had said, that I was far away. A woman in her detached, somewhat elevated position was extra-sensitive to a lapse in my attention, the more so because we were unphysical. She was more alert to gesture and tone, to the pulses in the air around me, than a hugger or a hand holder would have been. This was the upside of Indian romance: without sex, fascinated in virginal alertness, every other instinct was sharpened, almost to the point of hysteria. She knew from my eyes, the way I breathed, my posture, the tiniest inflection, from my very odor, perhaps, that my heart was somewhere else. In an overformal society where insincerity was the norm, where most relationships, including marriage, were based on polite or hostile untruths, Parvati was expert in seeing through my meaningless compliments and evasions.

Compared to this, being held by Mrs. Unger while I lay naked on the wooden table was the real world. With her, every word mattered and was unambiguous. We spoke the same language. We were free. She was generous and humane and was mistress of the great Lodge, shelter to abused and abducted children. Next to this, poems and dances were trifles of showing off, mere niceties with the subtext Look at me!

And Mrs. Unger had love left over for me. No, I don't want you to stop. That was my yearning, lavish, frank, risky, naked, physical, un-Indian. Don't stop.

As I hoped, Mrs. Unger summoned me about a week after the long day at the Kali temple and the compound at Shibpur, a few days after my unsettling meeting with Theroux at the Fairlawn. Balraj drove me to the Lodge. I caught his glance in the rear-view mirror as we entered the back street of villas.

"Alipore?"

"Alipore."

She met me at the door holding a small girl by the hand.

"Recognize her?"

I couldn't remember the Indian name. I said, "Daylight."

"Usha. Dawn. See how happy she is?" She led me into the Lodge. "The other children are here. They're settling down nicely. They feel right at home."

With that, she let go of Usha's hand and took mine, but with a tightening insinuation in her grip. I wanted to nuzzle her hand, the way a dog licks its mistress's fingers. Love is a yearning to clutch and hold, to be clutched and held.

The Lodge was alive: children's voices rang in the room and upstairs the drumming of running feet, the shriek of laughter; the aromas of cooking and flowers; the monotone of chanted mantras, repetitious and soothing, a kind of holy gargling. It was cool here too, and the high perimeter wall muffled the sound of traffic. This was the other world that I longed for and had found, not exotic at all, not the gaudy and overformal India but a version of home — secure and safe in the embrace of this lovely woman.

We descended to her vault without speaking. I took my clothes off while Mrs. Unger lit the candles and adjusted the volume of the Indian chants. I lay face-down in the heat, and she traced the contours of my body with her fingers for some minutes. After that, she began digging her knuckles into my shoulders, now and then pouring hot oil on my back. She was able to penetrate deep within me, reaching to the meat of my muscles, taking her time. She worked on my head, my face, and my jaw, squeezing her thumb in the declivities of my shoulders, and it seemed to me that her unhesitating fingers and hands were following familiar paths along the length of my body, because her confident touching reassured me.

"I need you to turn over."

So I did, and she slipped a damp cloth over my eyes. She bent over me — I felt the cool sweep of her hair linger on my skin. In a refinement that was new to me, she began to nibble and lick at my nipples, and to chafe the areolas with her fingertips.

"Do you want me to stop?"

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

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

"Was I asleep?"

"For quite a while."

"Sorry."

"I love watching you sleep."

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

"Will you do me a favor?"

"Yes. Anything."

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

"Anything," I said.

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

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

"Go on…"

"Charlie will hate me even more."

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

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

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

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

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

"Age? Sex?"

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

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

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

"Not possible in this happenstance."

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

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

"I don't understand."

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

"They've been tampered with!"

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

"What are you saying?"

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

"So you didn't find anything?"

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

"What shall I do?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"She wanting two hundred, madam."

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

"What is that language?"

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

"What about?"

"She say she not normal, madam."

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

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

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

"She not well," Balraj said.

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

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

"That's true. Go on."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A grubby transvestite looking for a handout."

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

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

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

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

"Then don't tell me."

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

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

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

"In your vault."

"Darkness reveals who we really are."

"I hope so."

"But now you know I have a secret."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Nothing could possibly change my feelings for you."

"You might find it shocking."

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

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

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

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

"I'm black," she said simply.

"You're not."

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

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

"I know I don't look it, but I am. If you were black, you'd know it immediately. I can pass for white among whites, but I can't pass for white among blacks. We have ways of knowing."

The obvious question was on my face.

"We black people."

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

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

"You don't have to tell me."

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

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

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

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

"I didn't want to live among black people, who seemed to resent me. I wanted to pass for a white person. I didn't want black baggage, and I didn't want my family bringing me down. I lived alone. I finished my degree, and on the way I met a lovely man and married him. He'd been married before — was a widower — and he had a small son. That was fine with me, because I knew I didn't want any children of my own.

"Harold died. The boy, Chalmers, became more my companion than my son. Then I married Ralph Unger, the Anglo-American — the late, unlamented Ralph. He resented Charlie. You can see how fond Charlie is of me. I think I've done a good job. I was left a lot of money, and I realized how lucky I'd been. I resolved never to marry again and to use the money in the best possible way. Well, you've seen what I've done at the Lodge."

In the course of speaking she'd turned away from me toward the window, where night had fallen and only pinpricks of light flashed, lanterns in those bamboo huts or stammers of flame from cooking fires. She'd spoken without much emphasis, almost without emotion, a statement rather than a confession.

"So now you know my secret."

I thought of myself as unshockable, yet when she'd finished her story I was speechless. As with a real shock, I had no questions, no answers either, only a dumb gaping funk in the half-light of the railway compartment, and my unvoiced self-recrimination: I thought I'd heard everything, and now this. I didn't doubt her, I doubted myself.

Also (even worse), that accompanying doubt in which, with one shattering revelation, the whole logical and obvious world becomes deceptive — suddenly, nothing was what it seemed. A lot of people would subscribe to that cliché. I certainly did, only half believing it. But presented with the evidence, I could only sigh. I felt like a fool, as though in a shell game she'd shown me a pearl under a cup and moved the cup among two others while I watched, and lifted it, and the pearl was gone — and she lifted another cup, and there was the pearl, but a new one, black and more beautiful. And I hadn't a clue.

"I know you wouldn't lie to me," I said. "But I don't see it."

"If only you could see my mother or my brothers," she said almost wistfully.

"I just see you."

"I'm like them."

I could not imagine her in any other way. I could neither recast her as black nor find any feature that was different from my own.

"Anyway, now you know why I was so moved by that woman at Howrah station. That man in a sari. That's how I feel most of the time. Like an impostor."

"I'm glad you told me."

"I can see that you're shocked."

"No," I said, and wondered how convincing I sounded. "I'm happy. You trust me with the truth. I want to show you that I'm worthy of that trust."

A knock at the door — the conductor to punch our tickets, the meal seller behind him with boxes of food. Mrs. Unger dealt with them, speaking Bengali. After they'd gone, she took out the food she'd brought in tiffin tins, a cylinder of stacked containers, rice and dahl and vegetables and yogurt. Eating off trays on our laps was the mundane ritual I needed to bring me back to reality, though we ate mostly in silence.

"I'm glad I'm here," I said afterward.

"Good. There's lots of things I need you to do. Lots of ways to help. Now it's bedtime, but there's only room for one person on these berths. Let's turn in. We'll be in Gauhati at seven. We'll talk then."

She called the sleeping-car attendant — barefoot, wild hair, popeyed, hungry for baksheesh — and he unrolled the bedding and made our beds. He got his tip, and after he'd gone, I kissed her lightly on the cheek. I thought I would agonize all night. But rocked by the train I slept and dreamed of her.

11

"BODOLAND," SHE SAID, looking up as the train, going rap-rap-rap, raced past an embankment of palm trees, banana groves, more bamboo huts, and women washing clothes in a creek, four of them, side by side.

I remembered what she'd told me, and I felt somehow like a conspirator. But because of it I had never felt closer to her. Taking me into her confidence, she had made me feel that I mattered to her. She never used the word "love," but I felt nothing but love for her. It was always bhoga for her, the intense sexual pleasure of the tantric massage.

I said, "I'd do anything for you."

She kept her gaze at the window. "Bodoland looks so peaceful. Look at those lily ponds and the children playing. You'd never know that Bodos have a liberation front. That these smiling people commit murder, blow up bombs. That they have the true pedigree — they are aristocrats. That they're angry."

"I didn't know. How would I? They look content."

"People write about landscapes like this and because they're so far from home they feel they have to make it pretty. Look, it's not pretty at all. It's not ugly. It's a great featureless emptiness, an awfulness of trapped people and peasant misery. You gape at it. It gapes back at you."

She was drinking a cup of tea, smiling out the window as I lay in my berth.

"Who would want to possess it or blow it up? Who could possibly care that much? Yet they do, in their multitudes." She was still smiling. "It's not the weirdness of humanity. It's the weirdness of the Indian personality. And the way people write about them. The travel books! The novels!"

Hearing this, I thought back to the garden of the Fairlawn and winced at recalling how I had been subjected to the scrutiny of that flitting, pitiless man.

"There isn't a single truthful book about India. There are long-winded family romances. And whimsical novels. And the experimental junk. India reveals itself, but no one looks closely. It's a culture of evasions. This country is very dirty. It's impossible to tell the truth here. The truth is forbidden, especially in writing. Anyway, a truthful book about India would be unbearable — about spite, venom, cruelty, sexual repression, incest, and meaningless crimes."

That also made me recall the Fairlawn, the newspaper cuttings about infanticide and servants murdering their employers and the Monkey Man. I mentioned this to Mrs. Unger.

"That's nothing," she said. "There are monsters and freaks all over India. Real monsters, grotesque freaks. No one writes about them. No one sees them. They write about buffoons — the Monkey Man! They praise the call centers and the steel mills. 'We have computers!' They write about happy families, not about child-strangling, the mobs, rural suicide, the bombs on trains and in marketplaces where people are blown to bits. 'What a colorful bazaar!' Nothing about the savage crowds and bombs. Nothing about diseases." She smiled her bitter smile. "They're content. And they're furious too." She canted her head. "See those purple hills?"

"Yes."

"Bhutan," she said. "We'll be in Gauhati soon. That's the Brahmaputra River, though you can only see the embankment. We have a hotel in Gauhati." She turned away from the window and smiled at me over her cup of tea. "You might do something for me there."

On a long curve, the compartment filled with light that warmed the stale air, and Mrs. Unger lit a stick of incense to freshen it. I stepped out to use the mucky toilet, and on the way, passing the propped-open door, I was surprised by the cool breeze eddying in the vestibule, and the sight of fog lying in patches, like large gray wisps of wool, unraveling and ghosting across the freshly plowed fields. The river — mostly sandbanks here — was visible through the thicknesses of bamboo, in wide clumps. I could see women setting off across the smooth dunes, past the beached boats and black hulks, with basins of laundry on their heads, seeking the watercourse that was hidden from view in this dry season. Then the tea gardens, then the low hills.

I was hoping after all this time for something substantial. It was not a pretty landscape. It was a chewed and ruinous one, a floodplain in a time of drought, before the monsoon. Gauhati rushed upon us, a progression of well-made shacks rising to humble shops and three-story slapped-together buildings. I was back in the compartment, tugging the bags from the upper berth. Mrs. Unger sat calmly. She touched my shoulder to restrain me.

"We're being met. The porters will take care of this."

And, as she spoke, a man in a wool hat with a sign saying UNGER appeared outside the window of our coach as we drew into Gauhati station.

"That funny little man is ours."

She greeted him in Bengali, with Namashkar and the usual how-are-you that I was beginning to learn, Apni keman achen? And she must have asked him his name, because he replied, "Ravi Baruha, madam, speaking English."

"Our bags are right inside, compartment ten."

Ravi Baruha nodded to his own lackey, who rushed in for the bags and soon was balancing one on his head and one in each hand, Baruha leading the way.

"We want to visit the Kamakhya temple later this morning, and tomorrow we're on the train to Silchar."

This was news to me — not just the temple, but Silchar. I was reminded that I was in her hands.

"Train departs eight A.M. for Lumding," Baruha said. "Change for Silchar."

"I have the tickets."

"Long journey, madam."

"We are on a mission." She nodded at me.

Outside the station, we boarded a van. I sat next to the driver, and the porter crouched in the narrow space at the back, tangled in the luggage. Baruha said, "New hotel. Just open. Many facilities."

But I listened without interest, for all this time, since early morning, since Bodoland, I'd been deep in thought, glancing at Mrs. Unger and, when she was turned away, studying the nape of her neck, the texture of her hair, the gleam of her skin, her slender hands, her feet in her sandals, her profile, her pretty mouth, remembering what she had told me. I'm black was a mystery to me.

I was used to gazing at her, but this was in adoration. I was lost in a new kind of scrutiny, but all I saw was what I had seen before: the face, the body of the woman I loved, if anything paler and prettier than ever, a loveliness and purity I wanted to hold, because in holding her, I was holding all her good works. I yearned to put my mouth on her — not so strange a desire. It was the elemental hunger all passionate lovers feel, something almost cannibalistic, the intensity of tantric bhoga.

"Indians have a genius for making something new look fifty years old," she said under her breath as we entered the hotel. "They never quite finish and it's never quite right. All of India is a work in progress. Do I mean progress? Never mind."

At the front desk, the clerk said, "We've been expecting you. We've put you in our Palace Suite. Good journey?"

"Excellent. Thank you for asking."

After the paperwork and the porter and the rackety elevator with its gates of steel mesh, we were shown to a suite that overlooked a sports ground — some boys playing cricket, the crack of the bat, scattered shouts. Mrs. Unger pulled the curtains.

We were alone at last in the half-dark. I had the sense in this new setting that we were strangers. I was plunged into a self-conscious silence. I didn't know what to say. I desired her, but how to begin? Lying across from her in the opposite berth in the rocking train all night had confused me. I was tongue-tied and felt awkward, not to say tormented.

But she knew that. She could always assess a situation and was never at a loss for words.

"First a bath," she said. "And then the temple. After that, you might give me a massage. You know how. That's how I learned, by getting one from a dakini. Do you feel up to it?"

"Dakini?" Where had I heard that word?

"Priestess, healer," she said. "Never mind the words. Tantra is full of them. But it's the deeds that matter."

Priestess was an apt word for her. It was how I had seen her at Kalighat, in a rapture after the goat sacrifice. I held her. Instead of kissing her I pressed my head against hers and felt the blood pounding at my skull.

We took showers separately and afterward went down to the hotel lobby. The driver Ravi Baruha signaled to us with a wobble of his head that he was in attendance.

I had imagined Gauhati to be a small riverside town, but it was a sprawling city in bad repair, with tucked-away bazaars and slow-moving traffic, bicycle rickshaws and old buses wreathed in diesel fumes. The wide river was so shrunken in these months before the monsoon that it seemed like a shallow lake streaked with low islands of sand. The streets smelled of earth and oil and had a tang that reminded me of bark mulch.

"Fancy bazaar," Ravi Baruha said in the Bengali way, bajjar. "Big and famous. Pan bazaar. Many attendees."

The temple crowned a rocky hill just outside the busy part of the city. The area was one of Gauhati's landmarks — scenic in the Indian sense, meaning that it was a magnet for mobs and vandalism. "Scenic" in India always implied blight.

It seemed to me a Mrs. Unger observation, but when I said this to Mrs. Unger, she gave me one of her I-couldn't-agree-less smiles.

"You're looking at surfaces," she said. "Always a mistake in India. You're distracting your mind with all the wrong things. You could say this road is a mess" — our car had begun to climb the steep road of loose boulders and litter and yellow wilted trees; it was a mess— "but this is the way to the holy temple, a holy road. We're so lucky. I love those ragged prayer flags and those faded pennants."

"I wish I had your gift for seeing into things."

"Close your eyes, maybe. You'll see more."

But I didn't, because the sharp bends and the steepness were making me feel carsick.

"Go as far as you can," she said as Baruha parted the crowd by tapping his horn.

He dropped us at a barrier near the crest of the hill. Beyond it and above, past the food stalls and the relic sellers and the ice cream vendors and the hawkers of posters, fluttering flags and marigolds and strings of plastic beads, all this kitsch, was a stone fortress and a gateway, the entrance to the rambling temple complex.

The way that Mrs. Unger stiffened from her aversion to mobs was so extreme it bordered on horror. It made me wonder why she'd come to India, where every street was crowded; the whole of India was a mob. And when she murmured about her dislike of Indians in a mass, surging toward her, she seemed to become small and fragile, to visibly shrink; and she wanted me to care. Yet I kept thinking that she was like a visitor to Alaska complaining of the cold.

The Indian mob to her was a dark creature. More than a pushing tide of toothy men, it seemed to represent a menacing intelligence, a monster loose on the street, all its many limbs thrashing toward her. She was the victim of this predator that rippled through traffic, stopping cars, reaching for her with grasping hands. I always think they want to devour me.

Even the yelling we heard from three streets away, a distinct syncopation of shouting, angry laughter, and screechy chants — it might have been a wedding party — this commotion was a mob to her. And that roar of voices and slapping feet quieted her and made her withdraw. She always took my hand in her hot damp fingers and held on.

"I never have any idea of what they're saying. Zindabad, yes, 'long live,' but long live what? They always seem to be destroyers."

I agreed, yet she seemed to thrive in India, and I wondered what it was she saw that I didn't.

"Kamakhya temple," Mrs. Unger said, still gripping my hand. "The grieving Lord Shiva carried the corpse of his beloved Kali on his shoulders as he danced across the earth. The gods were appalled. Vishnu intervened and chopped the dead Kali into fifty-one fragments. Wherever a body part landed, a temple was built. One of her little toes came to earth at Kalighat. I wonder if you can guess which part of her body landed here?"

We were passing through the gateway, past pillboxes and low towers of red-smeared stone. Holy men, looking regal yet dispossessed or disinherited, sat upright before brass bowls as pilgrims hurried forward excitedly. The temple had the look of a hill fort, the remnants of one: a perimeter wall and parapets, the stonework like battlements around its enclosures. It was well protected, its chapels like sentry boxes, with images carved in deep relief into the black blocks and, as a form of veneration, wiped with paste that had crusted in the heat.

"That's a hint," Mrs. Unger said.

The goddess was depicted on the side of one shrine as the carving of a woman squatting with her legs open, the thick lips of her swollen genitals exposed and gaping. All around us, devotees — women mainly — were chanting and praying.

I said softly, "Was it Kali's vulva that dropped here?"

"Yes, her yoni," Mrs. Unger said. She paused in front of the bold carving, the wide-apart legs. "Isn't it marvelous? A whole temple dedicated to it. That's why this is the most sacred of the tantric pilgrimage sites."

"What's happening here?"

"The goddess is showing her yoni, inviting a puja."

"What kind of prayer would that be?"

"An adoring mouth," she said, and pursed her lips in a kiss. "Adoring fingers on the sacred spot."

Beyond this stone shrine was a pavilion, open sides, tile roof. Men and women crowded into it as though at a sideshow. We joined them, and a gleeful yelp went up as a bare-chested priest brought his hacker down on a black goat's head, just as I had seen at Kalighat. The head toppled onto the bloody floor — a puddle of blood six feet across, the grateful praying watchers standing at the edge of it, their feet splashed with the blood, rejoicing at the sight of the beheading.

"Do you know how lucky we are to be here?" Mrs. Unger said.

I followed her into a smoky stifling temple, and she squatted and put money into a basket. Priests sitting cross-legged blessed her as she lit sticks of incense. She was intent, kneeling, concentrating on a shadowy cloth-covered image, murmuring prayers.

I had no idea what to do. It was far from anything I knew about India. In this remote place, midmorning in the heat of another Kali temple, I was like a child who had been taken to a place of pilgrimage by his mother. I would have gone out of the temple, but I didn't dare to lose sight of Mrs. Unger, didn't want to stray. I was clinging to her, feeling helpless and a bit dazed by the clouds of incense, with the passivity of an anxious child.

I had been startled by her rapture at Kalighat; I was equally impressed by the intensity of her devotion here, because I was used to seeing her in charge. And she was prayerful here, bowing down, offering pieties in an unexpected posture, compact, submitting to whatever image was hidden there, covered by a cloth.

It was weird and enigmatic. Indian gods and goddesses could look ferocious, but nothing I had seen in India could compare with the fierce spell cast by this shrouded foot-high figure that was a brooding mummy-wrapped bundle. The very folds in the blank cloth exhausted me with fear. I could not imagine what lay beneath this terrifying shroud.

Her veneration seemed to invigorate her. Though we returned to the hotel in silence, she was excited, expectant, eager to be alone with me. I knew this without her saying anything. It was noon, yet our suite was so dark I fumbled locking the door, and when I turned I saw her lying face-down on the bed.

By her touch, in a vault just as dark, she had taught me the way to proceed. And so I began. Touching her, I realized she was naked, not wearing her white silk sari, as it had seemed: this was her warm flesh, her characteristic odor, not floral perfume but something heavier and more animal. She smelled of vines, of ripeness, of cut-open fruit, of a stickiness I could taste.

Tentatively at first, and then with more command, I moved my fingers from zone to zone, the seven chakras: the dome of her head, her brow, her ears, her throat, her heart, her belly, the base of her spine. The idea was to work slowly, to insinuate with my fingers, to find the organs and massage them; to reach the inner meat of the muscle, where the nerves lived; to apply gentle pressure to stir the blood. I worked on her body as she had worked on mine. When my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I saw the bottle of warm oil on the side table, and I used it on her.

She was still face-down. I had found her heart and throat and belly by reaching beneath her, by stroking and using the flat of my hand while pushing from above, enclosing her between my palms.

"Yes," she said several times, and it was more a groan of satisfaction than a whole word; but even so, she said no more than that.

I knew I was doing it well because of the way she sighed, whimpering slightly to encourage me. That was when I straddled her — as she had straddled me — and worked down her backbone to her buttocks, caressing them, clapping my hands against them. I was surprised by the ripple of her hard bum muscles, the way she could clench and release.

All this took more than an hour, and might have been closer to two. I was excited, so far from Calcutta, in this semiruin of a city sprawling by the low duney banks of the river, in this nearly empty hotel. Thrilled, seated on her long slender body, as pale as those dunes, my knees containing her, my knuckles against the globes of her glutes. I tried to remember everything she had done to me, repeating these moves on her. A grateful receiver of her adoring attention, I had become a methodical and scrupulous masseur. She had shown me the way.

"An hour or two isn't enough," she'd said to me once. It took an hour just to warm up and two hours at least to achieve bhoga—delight. And so I went on riding her, smoothing her, oiling her, and pushing her with my palms, plying her chakras with my fingertips — the first time I'd ever touched her in this way. I loved her sighs of acceptance and the way she turned slippery, her whole body, like a great oily reptile I was riding, digging my elbows into her buttocks, and (another of her techniques) using my chin and my mouth on the base of her spine, feeling the warmth radiate throughout her body.

Even in the half-light of the hotel room, all the blinds drawn, she glowed. I remembered her saying in the train, I'm black. I gloried in it for being our secret. I was a monkey clinging to a goddess, desperate to please her.

"Now," she said after a long while of my caresses, and I dismounted, crouching beside her, as she shifted and rolled over, naked, arms to her sides, her legs parted.

She used both hands, her clutching fingers, to spread her sex like a flower. Or so it seemed to me as I watched, like an opening lotus with reddened and thickened petals.

"Find the sacred spot," she said in a whisper. "Search for it slowly."

Obeying her, I stroked her beautiful blossom very gently until I had opened it further and my fingers were slick. And I knew when I'd found it, because I had seen her before captured by ecstasy.

"Yoni puja."

I must have faltered — she knew I was baffled.

"Pray with your mouth," she said softly.

And so there I lay, for the longest time, like a mating insect, until at last, rapturous and writhing on the bed, she sighed. She let out a long groan as dramatic as a death rattle, almost as deep as grief, and at the same time clapped her thighs to my ears.

We slept, and when I woke I didn't know where I was. I began to marvel that we were still in India, in distant Gauhati, but she shushed me and turned me over. She worked on me in much the same way that I'd done to her, devoting two or more tantric hours to my pleasure. It was a great novelty and a relief to be with her alone, uninterrupted, in this far-off place: no car, no driver, no waiting to be summoned or sent away.

Midway through the massage, she applied delicate pressure and held me, as though suspended on a lengthening wire of sexual tension — a pulsing of energy, a rippling of sexual health, not an orgasm but something akin to skimming lightly, feeling intense pleasure, a swelling just short of bursting. At that point, with my temperature way up, she stroked the base of my spine, as she had done before, as I had done to her. But this time I sensed the release of an expanding plume of warmth from my lower back, and it spread through me, as if she was pouring hot oil over me. Seeing how I seemed to soar, she whispered, "Kundalini."

By the time she was done, night had fallen, and we lay entwined, exhausted, the light of passing cars now and then raking the walls of the room.

In the darkness before dawn, we woke and bathed and packed our bags. At this hour, some people were already mopping floors and poking the corridor walls with long-handled dusters.

"We have an early train," she said. "It'll be all day to Lumding and then overnight to Silchar."

"Wouldn't it be quicker by car?"

"We'd never reach Silchar. We'd be stopped at a roadblock and robbed, or killed." She was smiling. "We're off the map here. This is the land of rebels and goondas and tribals. It's dangerous, even deadly. That's why it's so full of life." Before I could say anything, she added, "You have the gift. You have the hands."

"You gave me the gift."

"You knew how to receive it."

She had a mother's touch. And no wonder she was able to help all those children, I was thinking — restore them to life and give them hope and purpose.

We left Gauhati at eight, on the day train to Lumding, the coaches half empty. We drowsed through the day in our own compartment. Lumding, just a junction in the bruised green hills, appeared in the early evening. We were late. No time to linger on the platform; the night express to Silchar was standing at the station. The conductor, glad to see us, with a wink for baksheesh, showed us to our compartment. It was an old sleeping car, and though I could not see any food or people, it smelled of stale food and human bodies. But our beds were made, and the door locks worked.

The train labored all night, hooting through the hills of southern Assam. I couldn't see much outside, but I could sense a landscape of trees and streams. The air at our open window was murky in the deep valleys, cooler on the slopes, thickened with a dusty leafiness of sour jungle. Most of the passengers were in the front coaches, the hard seats, the floor littered with peanut shells and fruit peels, trapped-looking faces behind barred windows, Assamese in shawls, tribal people in embroidered vests, wearing necklaces of red beads.

In the darkness of the night, listening to the anvil-clang of the train on the tracks, I sensed that she was awake.

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

"I'll take that as a compliment."

"When I first met you, I thought, Here's a woman who's never had to struggle. Yet you've done nothing but struggle."

"There's no end to it, ever."

The clanking of the train worked this sentence into my head. After a while I said, "I want to help you."

"You have no idea what that means to me."

"I'm devoted to you," I said, relieved to be able to say it.

It was not love. The power and uncertainty I associated with love I did not feel with Mrs. Unger. I didn't want anything in return: I wanted to serve her, needed for her to accept my attention. I was grateful to her for making any suggestion to me, thankful for her request — the feeling I associated with a son for his mother. Sentiments I'd never felt for my own mother, I felt for her. I wanted to obey her.

"Anything," I said.

"The time will come," she said. Then her breathing became regular, as I listened; and I slept too.

At dawn we were among low, mostly bald hills, the old train rolling on the scooped and flattened outskirts of Silchar. Shallow valleys and tea estates, each one well planted with slopes of deep green bushes, as orderly as a botanical garden, all the bushes trimmed like topiary. Where the land was flat there were corrugations of newly plowed fields. The tea pickers were visible on some of the slopes, looking as if they were tidying the bushes.

Empty and green, the valleys gaped at the crawling train, and the whole scene had a sunlit grandeur until, at growing intervals, I saw the hovels of farmers, the skinny children, the careworn women washing the breakfast pots in a muddy creek.

Mrs. Unger was also watching, but unlike me she was not judging or trying to sum the place up. I was making notes for my scratchy diary, while her attention was witness, concentration intensified by memory — nothing new for her but the shock (so it seemed to me) of seeing something familiar. It was the expression I had seen on her face the first time I met her, how I'd felt about myself when I thought, ruthlessly worldly. But I had been wrong. Hers was the face of compassion and understanding in the presence of suffering.

"But it's beautiful too," I said, in the way I sometimes thought out loud, the fragment of a reflection.

She knew what I meant. "Yes, but better enjoy it while it lasts. Silchar is another story."

Silchar station at ten in the morning was the usual Indian free-for-all, passengers relieved to be out of their hot three-tier coaches where they had sat all night among peanut shells and banana peels. They scuttled across the tracks pursued by porters and rickshaw touts and hawkers with buckets of cookies. Busy rats, most of them plump and bold, nosed amid the litter on the line, making the scraps of paper and plastic bags quiver as they swarmed.

As at Gauhati, we were met, this time by a shy young man in a tweed jacket. He stepped out of the crowd and introduced himself, sounding as if he was about to sell us something.

"Mrs. Unger, I am Sudeep. I will be your guide. May we fetch your luggage?"

Snarling, he summoned a porter, stern with this underling, then smiled at us and led the way down the platform and out to the front of the station, where a car was waiting.

"You got my message?" Mrs. Unger asked in the car.

"Indeed so, madam. All is in readiness."

I stared at them, hoping for an explanation, but they continued to speak in generalities.

"And the situation hasn't changed?"

"Situation, madam. Still very much same situation."

I lost interest in their generalities as the old car we were riding in began to shake — and to shake my head with it. The car tipped and banged on the broken road, the potholes four feet across and some of them deep enough to swallow half a tire.

"Is this a back street?"

"Main thoroughfare, sir. Mahatma Gandhi Road."

It was a ruin. We bumped among scooters and bullock carts and cycle-rickshaws, their bike bells tinkling. The shops along this main road were one story, paint peeling, signs faded, not many shoppers. I had thought Gauhati to be a step into the past, but Silchar was a stride into the distant past.

"We are cut off," Sudeep was saying, replying to something Mrs. Unger had said, and he was also answering an unasked question of mine. "But air is fresh. Cool climate. Very healthy."

In the dusty air, the shophouses tilted sideways on the sloping main street, which was worse than unpaved. It had been paved and shattered, potholes all over it, and its only smoothness was beaten earth. The cycle-rickshaws toppled along it, their skinny drivers standing on their pedals. The place was so poor there were no obvious beggars — no one to beg from, though many people stopped and stared, seeing Mrs. Unger and me alighting from the car.

"So, it's arranged for this evening?" she asked Sudeep.

"All arranged. You will find me here."

The hotel's bare lobby and plastic plants were being dusted by a woman in a green smock. Mrs. Unger dealt with the check-in formalities, and once again I felt I was being mothered, shepherded, paid for. We went upstairs, took showers, then had a meal in the hotel's dining room — the only diners, perhaps the only guests in the place. Afterward, Mrs. Unger said she wanted a nap.

We lay together on the bed. The accumulated fatigue of the trip to Lumding and the night train to Silchar had knocked me out, and knocked her out too, but just before she subsided into sleep she murmured, "Baby," and touching my face, "baby."

When we woke, night was falling, dusk at the windows, and I heard bike bells and crow squawks and the cries of hawkers.

"Find Sudeep downstairs," she said. "I'll be down in a little while."

Sudeep was of course standing in the lobby, in the posture of a sentry, awaiting his orders.

"You are coming from?"

"Calcutta. Have you been there?"

"I have not been to mainland at all," he said.

"Mainland?"

"Indeed, never. Only to Shillong and Gauhati."

That was new to me, but since we were so far east, like an island surrounded by Bangladesh and Burma, it seemed appropriate to refer to greater India as the mainland.

"All is in readiness," he said to Mrs. Unger when she came downstairs.

In the car, I tried to count the days since we'd left Calcutta, but the nights in the train, and the days of massage and sleep, defeated me. Perhaps four days — or was it five? All this time we'd penetrated deeper into Assam, the landscape growing stranger, leafier in the valleys, where the tea bushes provided a sort of continuity. But the orderliness of the tea estates was misleading. The villages had grown poorer and smaller, and Silchar, like a dead end, was weighted and slowed by its decay.

But Sudeep was upbeat. "It is crossroads," he was saying. "So many lorries passing hither and thither. We are vibrant. But there are dacoits on the road to Imphal. Goondas as well. Shillong also treacherous. Extremists are there."

"Where are we going now?"

Mrs. Unger said nothing. Sudeep said, "As requested, Nagapatti."

I felt it was some sort of test of loyalty, though I would have agreed to go anywhere with her. As we had gone farther into Assam, we had reached a new stage in our relationship. She must have seen that I was devoted, utterly loyal too, and dependent on her.

Mrs. Unger was doing me a great favor. She was bringing me into her world. I saw it as an initiation for which I had to be suitably passive. She had taken me by the hand and brought me by degrees to this remote town, which reflected a deeper intimacy between us. In the hotel in Gauhati she had encouraged me to stroke her as she lay, legs open, like the image of Kali I'd seen at the temple. She had hardly spoken, yet her posture was a physical expression of trust. She had luxuriated in my caresses, but I was the acolyte and she the priestess who had liberated me and shown me the way.

Now we were banging along the back streets of Silchar, the potholes deeper and more jarring in the dark. Oil lamps hung from stalls but illuminated nothing but themselves. The road ahead was black. We went about half a mile, not far, though we went slowly, almost at walking speed, and when we came to a road junction, Sudeep told the driver to stop.

"We will proceed by foot."

The road stank of mud and cow shit and motor oil, and the light was so poor it was hard to see where to walk. Again I marveled at Mrs. Unger's boldness. She was unfazed — white sari, white shawl, sandals — seeming to glide along the back street.

"I know where we are. Nagapatti is down that lane."

She set off confidently, Sudeep just behind her, and I was at the rear. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark I could make out the contours of the lane, the lurking boys, stray dogs; some men squatting before a brazier of reddened coals, drinking tea, glanced up, muttering as we passed.

Luminous in her sari, Mrs. Unger glowed like an angel, her shawl over her head, moving quickly, her feet hardly seeming to touch the ground. And yet when she saw more people in the road, backlit by their fires, she took my hand.

"Madam," Sudeep said, his voice rising in a cautioning tone.

But we were ten steps ahead of him. She paused, turned to the right, and walked down another lane, where a head-high bamboo barrier had been erected. The thing was flimsy but effective. It blocked the opening of a narrow road: you had no idea what went on behind it. As she slipped past this barrier, she let go of my hand. I followed her. Then she stopped and stood looking down the lane, saying nothing yet serenely triumphant.

The lane was well lit — more than well lit: it was highly illuminated by bright lights and open fires. It was busy, a sort of market scene full of standing and crouching people. Looking closely, I saw that all of them were women — not women but girls and children grouped around the wood fires that were burning on both sides of the lane, in front of the shops and the houses, as far as I could see. The girls, and even the older children, hundreds of them, were garishly made up with red lipstick and blue eye kohl, wearing thin blouses in the chilly air, warming themselves by the fire.

Smoke and flames and the close-together bungalows and huts; girls around the fires, girls on the verandahs, girls leaning on the railings and crouched on the steps. Some had vicious faces, but most looked pathetic and lost. A few of the smaller girls were holding babies, and other small girls, hardly more than twelve or thirteen, kneeling near the lanterns, pursed their lips at me and smiled wickedly.

In the smoky air, a whole long lane of child prostitutes and transvestites. An old fat hag was seated just inside one open doorway, attended by a retinue of little whores, painting the fat woman's toenails or massaging her feet.

"I've never seen anything like it," I said lamely. "It's like a vision of hell."

"You're shocked again," Mrs. Unger said. She looked unmoved; she seemed almost jubilant. "It's not hell. Hell — if you believe in it — is forever. But these girls can be rescued. That's why I'm here. Do you think I'm slumming? A few years ago I came here. I've been back many times. See those old women eyeing me? They know I'm going to hurt their business. But I'm willing to bargain with them."

I was thrilled to think that Mrs. Unger had come here to help these girls — more lost souls. As I considered this, a hand had taken hold of my elbow — a good grip; I couldn't shake it loose. I looked down into the tiny pleading face and desperate eyes of a girl who could not have been more than fifteen. She tugged at me and licked at her lips with a little darting tongue.

Mrs. Unger was turned away. She said, "I don't see any customers."

Sudeep helped me detach the girl's hand from my elbow, but she went on trying to snatch at me.

"It is their misfortune, sir."

"Who are they?"

"Tribals, sir. From the mountains, sir. Nagaland. Some are Mizos and whatnot. They are awaiting the lorry drivers. But your friend — madam — will help them find their freedom."

A few were gesturing to me, calling out, beckoning, striking the poses of coquettes.

"We'll come back tomorrow to negotiate," Mrs. Unger said. She seemed vitalized, her eyes shining with flames. "But I wanted you to see it like this — at night, with the fires. You have to admit this place is full of energy."

Our arrival had silenced them and made them watchful. Who could this foreign-looking woman be in her white sari? And what of that foreign man who stood stunned and staring? After a while their chattering resumed, perhaps conjecturing who we were. We walked the length of the lane, girls on both sides, so many of them, all of them in makeup — powdered faces, rouged cheeks, smeared mouths, blue and green eye shadow, their hair fixed with combs; but even so, they looked like schoolgirls dressed for a pageant or a school play that was about to begin. Most of them were barefoot, but some tottered on high heels they'd not yet mastered. They called out, they grabbed my arm and pinched my hand, and a few begged money from Mrs. Unger, who walked slowly among them — tall, in her elegant sari, utterly calm, offering soothing words. She had never looked more like a priestess.

Sudeep caught up with us at the far end of the lane. He said, "I have addressed a few of women. They are agreeable to negotiations."

But Mrs. Unger was looking at me. "See?" she said. "It's possible to bring a little hope. Even here."

The next day I accompanied her to Nagapatti again. Even in daylight the place looked vicious, the girls wearier, the fires smokier. The firelight of the night before had lent it an air of debauched glamour. But today the sky was overcast and clammy, and the lane stank of woodsmoke. The incense stung my nose. I could see the girls' skinny legs and dirty feet, and some of the small children were crying miserably.

It was my job to sit outside and turn away potential customers while Mrs. Unger and Sudeep negotiated to obtain the release of certain girls. Only one man wandered by, unshaven and dirty, a truck driver probably.

"Come later," I said, and he was so surprised that he shrugged and obeyed.

I stared at a bewildered girl, who stared back at me. I didn't know what to say. She went on staring and then made a kissing noise at me. She cupped a breast with one hand and touched herself with the other.

Flustered, I said, "See that nice woman?"

The girl clung to my leg. Her fingernails were bitten and painted pink.

"That nice woman is going to help you."

Still she held on to my leg and leered at me.

That evening we flew back to Calcutta. I had not realized it was possible to go so far.

12

AND, AT LAST, I began to write. I surprised myself at the ease of it. I thought I'd been lost, done with the written word. But no, I was at work again. I had something to write about, and I had the energy.

Most people thought of me — probably think of me still — as an adventurous traveler, welcoming hardship, willing to take risks, going to extremes to find the subject of a magazine piece. The hard and lonely life of a wanderer. "Your amazing tales." I was, for most of my readers — for many people who knew me — invisible. My career had been made out of a series of calculated vanishings, inspiring people to imagine what I was up to. Stick around too long and get cozy and conversational and people realize you're human.

If you go far enough, if you stay away long enough, people imagine the worst and begin suffering the hardship on your behalf, and they credit you — they certainly credited me — with stamina and ingenuity. So the distant traveler acquires a kind of power — and more than power, virtue — for the very fact of being away, mooching around in inhospitable countries. Heat, dust, swamps, bad roads, mobs, skinny children, scolding men, nasty boys, mushy food, rats, roaches. I did nothing to dispel the notion. I became the conspicuous absentee. The fact was that I usually stayed in good hotels, and sometimes great hotels, the sort of luxury that can exist only in countries where people are servile and underpaid.

Remove Mrs. Unger and her magic fingers from the trip to Assam; remove the happy hotels and the helpful servants — the guides, the dhobis with a bag of my laundry, Mr. Baruha sitting next to the driver, Sudeep awaiting orders; remove the comforts, don't mention the pleasures, and what's left is the grubby train, the bamboo huts, "Bodoland," the slum urchins, and the child whores in Nagapatti — the horrors of travel without any compensations.

But my traveling life had been all about compensations. I would never have lived in this wandering way if the pleasures had not outweighed the difficulties — I mean, far outweighed them. I hadn't chosen my life out of a desire to confront danger but rather because I was lazy and evasive, ducking out or moving on whenever I felt like it, whenever something was expected of me, when I had to be grown-up and accountable.

I lived like a prince, which is to say I had no responsibilities, and at the same time I was (as a traveler) credited with being a hero. I mentioned at the beginning of this story how I had managed to live my life this way, pretending to be big and busy—"I have to be in Bangkok next week" — while merely looking for outlets for my pleasure-seeking.

I had come to Calcutta out of pure idleness, not to write but to give lectures. Howard had invited me; the American consul general was my sponsor. Bengalis were highly literate, and most of the ones I met spoke English well — so well that they wouldn't stop talking. My lectures were simple. The Indians in the audience sat waiting for me to finish (sometimes impulsively interrupting) and then took turns talking, not questions but long, ponderous pronouncements about art and life. In their vain and wordy pretensions (harmless, really; I found them lovable) they wanted to be regarded as thinkers, challenging whatever I said, this verbose show of wisdom being the embodiment of the Indian ideal, the philosopher, the sage. Their love of discussion was comic, especially in Calcutta, which was falling apart as all the Bengalis went on yakking, yakking, yakking.

I was no different. I was an evader and a fraud in much the same way and for many of the same reasons. Why make hard decisions and assume responsibilities if you can procrastinate by yakking? Talking was the answer, and in my case had displaced my writing. Writing was difficult. Talking about writing was a low and profitless form of discourse, and probably the laziest.

I traveled because I was idle, I talked because I had nothing to write, I moved on or ducked out when someone asked me a searching question. And I was averse to being near anyone who was creative. Parvati, for example. She was full of energy, she wrote poems, she danced, she practiced martial arts, she was lovely and unmarried: she exhausted me. I was envious and dispirited when I was with her. Maybe I saw something of my younger self in her and was ashamed to see I was no longer creative.

It is very hard for an older writer, tired and out of ideas, to be in the presence of a young writer, especially a gifted one, who is full of hope. I praised Parvati's image of the muted lisp of morning's tongue pushing against the sky, but really, I hated it for its brilliance. The better Parvati's poems, the more graceful her dancing, the sadder I became — sad for myself, in the selfish way of someone who suspects his creative life is at an end. It was unfair to Parvati for me to behave this way. I consoled myself by protecting her, keeping my feelings to myself.

She can't have known that I avoided her out of envy and self-disgust. Still she called me, invited me (with a chaperone) to tea, and e-mailed me her new poems. She insisted I go to a dance recital. I went because the theater was so near to my hotel, but the provocative beauty of her dancing — the lovely virgin stroking the air with sensual fingers — made me so melancholy that I had to leave.

The next day she demanded to know why I'd slipped out of the auditorium early. She had come to the Hastings with two girlfriends who stood guard in the lobby while we sat whispering in my corner of the upstairs verandah.

"Didn't you realize I was dancing for you?"

Feeling obligated, I said, "But I have nothing to give you."

"I only want your friendship," she said, "that's all. Can you imagine what life is like for someone like me in India?"

"You're a great beauty, you're gifted. You have everything."

"I'm an unmarried thirty-two-year-old — that's on the verge of being an old bag. You laugh!" — who wouldn't? — "I told you I have views on marriage. Want to hear them?"

"Of course" — though I didn't.

"Good, because no Indian man wants to hear them. My parents don't want to hear them. India doesn't want to hear them."

"Tell me."

"This is the most unromantic country on earth," she said. "Never mind sex outside marriage — there's no romance either. No hand holding, no kisses. How I would love to kiss someone I loved. But I can't. We are a trapped and frustrated people."

"I see that, but maybe it's what makes your poems so steamy. Your dancing too."

"Maybe, because I'm dying and deprived, but it's not worth it. I want to live, and when I meet someone like you I think real life is somewhere else."

"But you're a wonderful writer."

"I'd rather live more and write less."

As she spoke, her beauty dissolved. I no longer saw her as a figure of loveliness. She became a voice, a passionate and sad one, and she was now real to me.

I said, "But what does any of this have to do with marriage?"

"India has a market economy," she said. "There are no suitors here, only customers. The little chap that shows up at my house with his parents as a prospective husband is a customer. His parents are shopping for a bride. I'm the goods — damaged goods. They want to see my teeth, they want to read my horoscope. They might want to make an arrangement. Money's involved — big money sometimes. You've seen the adverts."

"Matrimonial classifieds. I love reading them."

"I hate them. I hate the system. They're like coded versions of the personal ads you get in the American papers. 'Friendly guy would like to meet young pretty girl'—except in India it's for keeps. And what would my advert say?"

"I wonder."

"'Over-the-hill Bengali woman, not looking for anyone.'"

"You write poetry. You dance. And what about your martial arts?"

"They're not a plus in a culture that wants cookery and childbearing. My mother-in-law would burn my poems. I wouldn't be able to dance — married women don't do such things. And a talent in martial arts is not a recommendation for a prospective bride."

"So what do you want?"

"To dance for you."

"I like that."

"And to meet a man who has a life of his own. Not possessive. A partner. Maybe gay."

That day she left me a poem about being eight years old and running into the sea, with the lines

The sea pulls me in around the ankles,

Grabs the sand from underneath, shows me

A glimpse of my life, what it will be like later.

What I am trying to describe here is the situation I was in before I met Mrs. Unger and in the early days of my getting to know Mrs. Unger. I can't say "friendship" or "love affair" because she loomed so large, and I felt myself to be her inferior in every way, as a traveler, as an Indophile — intellectually, and morally most of all.

I began to change, to see myself and the world differently by knowing Mrs. Unger, by seeing her work. The trip to Assam was the defining journey. I, who thought of travel as evasion, had found that travel, as Mrs. Unger did it, was purposeful. But more than that, in the course of the journey I had come to know her and to depend on her to such an extent that I lost the selfishness that had prevented me from seeing the world clearly. She had re-leased me, and the person she was seemed so unusual, I knew I had someone to write about, someone real.

Calcutta had been a blur. She had helped me to see its true face and to understand it. Her house in Alipore was full of life — the life of children being taught, fed, protected. I was like one of those children: she had rescued me in the same way. I understood their joy and their relief; they were safe, they were happy, they had something to live for.

Assam had been a revelation. The train trip had been liberating. I kept replaying her story about being black, and how she had told me that after we'd been accosted by the fierce she-man. Gauhati, the Brahmaputra River, the Kali temple, the journey to Silchar by way of Lumding, the tea estates and the slums, and at last, like a vision of hell, the child whores of Nagapatti — all of it was new to me, the hyperreality of India I had never guessed at before. But writing about it would have been impossible without the steadying and inspirational presence of Mrs. Unger, who helped me make sense of it all. She had brought me to these scenes; she had shown me this spectacle; she had penetrated this world and by making use of it had taught me how to use it. An important experience of this trip had been her tantric massage, her healing hands on me, the locating of my creative energy, the release of my kundalini.

That would have made me laugh before. "She helped me find my kundalini" — the American searcher, usually a woman, who, turning India into an opportunity for navel gazing, becomes a licensed busybody. Injunctions like "Out of the mind and into the heart." But I wasn't laughing anymore.

She was a woman of action. I know I have portrayed her so far as a rather humorless and passionate woman, a compulsive do-gooder, overwhelming me with her personality. But I was a small, peripheral part of her life — I saw just how small on this trip. This revelation was a spur to me. I had come to the end of my writing life, so it seemed, because the only subject I had was myself. The mistake my sort of writer made was to falsify my travels, pretending to be an adventurer when I was merely indulging myself as a tourist. My imagination had shriveled and my writing had dried up, and when I did make an effort to write something, I was aware that I was repeating myself. No wonder I envied Parvati, whose writing was so vibrant. I had a dead hand.

But now I had a subject, someone I would have found impossible to invent, and no one knew her as I did. She had few vulner-abilities, but they went deep. She was human, and her frailties helped me know her better. Her closest secret was her fear of the mob, her anxiety whenever she saw large numbers of people, the packed-together crowd that seemed to her like a many-headed creature. Her fear was so fundamental it was like a fear of India, and a form of guilt, like that of a fugitive seeing an angry mob and expecting it to pounce. I always think they want to devour me. She reacted to mobs, seeming to struggle, and afterward she was weakened, as if just the sight of so many people was an exertion.

She managed this fear in a way I had seen many foreigners do. She had chosen her own India. She'd invented an India that suited her, and when the crowd got to be too much, she escaped to her simpler, spiritual vault. She confined her movements to specific places; she looked for safe corners; she avoided the bazaars and markets and mobs.

As for food, she was fussy to the point where she would sometimes refuse to eat; rather than eat something doubtful, she would not eat at all. That point where a religious person becomes rigidly observant, when piety becomes stubbornness and even paranoia. "Take that foul dish away," she might say to a waiter. She sounded imperious and sure of herself, but I knew better: she was afraid, and when she was afraid she slipped into her Englishness. That foul dish.

She must have guessed that I saw beneath her certainties, that I understood her fears; and that made her cling to me. I'd seen her cry. In anyone else, crying was an extension of laughter. With Mrs. Unger, crying was a form of collapse. I'd seen it only once, but it was so anguished and final I felt she'd never get over it, never return from it, never be the same again. Perhaps she needed me too.

Mrs. Unger was a character in all senses of the word, multidimensional, someone I admired especially for her ability to create. Out of the bustees of Calcutta and the chawls of Assam, the exploited girls on the back street and the lost children in the slums, she was giving life. It was a species of rescue, an act of will. She was the person a writer longs to meet, because she was someone almost unimaginable — a good person, not a saint but a woman of action and vision, and for me (I wasn't quite sure how to describe this part) an object of desire, someone adorable. She had given me hope.

The animal sacrifices she had made in Kalighat and encouraged in Gauhati were not aberrations. They were life-giving — that's what sacrifice is, a profound offering, an enhancement. I saw the glittering blade, heard the heartbeat tapped out on the drum, saw the warm black goat jammed between two posts and, in a flash, its head struck from its body, the blood pouring onto the blossoms and the muck of the stone floor of the slaughterhouse. That blood released me. The sight of it stayed with me. Life sprang from blood; life went on.

And I remembered how Mrs. Unger's white sari was never without the slight stain of blood, a dark stripe at the hem or a blood spatter on the lower part of her sari that looked like freckles, the same size and brownish color, a sort of umber. It was visible only close up, but I knew it was blood — blood that made her white sari whiter, purer.

I sat on the upper verandah of the Hastings and wrote the beginnings of what I imagined might be a novella, something I'd call "A Dead Hand." I needed to fictionalize, to give myself latitude to invent. The title was one that it seemed had been chosen for me, because, unable to write, I'd felt I had a dead hand. And the moment an actual dead hand had come into my possession, I recaptured my ability to write. I was now awakened, in the live hands of Mrs. Unger. I kept her name for my main character because I didn't intend to take any liberties with her.

In the first pages I wrote about receiving the old-fashioned letter, about meeting Mrs. Unger at the Oberoi Grand, the invitation to the Lodge in Alipore, and the experience in her vault, her healing hands. The very word "vault" was evocative to me and represented the passion and secrecy of our meetings. She had admitted me to her vault in every sense.

I was privileged to write about that rarest of beings, a thoroughly good person who had found a way of using her fortune to improve people's lives. She didn't preach, she hadn't founded an order of nuns, she wasn't a celebrity — she avoided all publicity. She was practically unknown. I freely surrendered to her; I wanted to belong to her. As a result, I had a character; I even had a narrative. She had healed me too. The sight of the child whores, the tribals on the back street in Nagapatti, was something I would never forget. Analyzing my feelings, I began to see that, though I was horrified by the small girls' selling themselves, I was also fascinated and aroused to think that, for a pittance, I could have had any of them. And that unworthy feeling helped me distinguish between the expression of mindless lust and the elevating desire I now knew. I would not have experienced any of this except for the intervention of Mrs. Unger.

Almost as satisfying as her good works was her beauty. At first, I had seen her as rather severe, almost forbidding, holding court, a little too majestic with Charlie and Rajat on either side of her. But time softened that image and deepened my understanding. She had clear skin with a rosy blush on it, and her hair, drawn back Indian-style, gave her an impressive forehead above her piercing eyes. The Calcutta heat kept moisture on her glowing face, and the tropical sunlight emphasized the sculpted planes and angles of her skull. Her nose was sharp, like an instrument of inquiry; her lips were full and soft. She was slightly bucktoothed, and her side teeth were prominent, so her lips were usually parted, making her expression more sexual, somewhat hungrier. Her breasts were lifted against her billowing shawl and loose sari, her nipples like subtle pegs against the silk. I loved her slender feet, with a stippled floral pattern that might have been painted or tattooed.

Even wearing sandals she was almost as tall as me. She walked purposefully and yet upright, with grace, like a dancer, but a tall one, singular and strong. Parvati would have seemed like a schoolgirl next to her. Mrs. Unger had a way of holding her left wrist with her right hand, turning the bangles and the gold cuff with her fingers as she spoke, as though the jewelry were an outward symbol of her power or a badge of her authority. She wore an anklet, a gold chain; she had gold rings on some of her fingers, and a nose jewel, a ring with a pea-sized diamond at her right nostril. Yet these jewels were warm, the gold like flesh.

She was perfumed, trailing a sweetness that was so enticing I wanted to taste her, to lick her shoulders, to eat her — and she must have known that, because she had allowed it, had urged me to go deeper, to penetrate her not with my wand of light (her expression) but by insinuating myself inside her. Yet to think that this woman was so lovely within, had such a good heart, a great soul — this was all the inspiration I needed to write. In the days after our return from Assam, in the steamier premonsoon heat, I was reborn as a writer.

In this unlikely place for a rebirth, the shaded upper verandah of the Hotel Hastings, above the thickened dust of its lane off Sudder Street, I was given new life. I was happy. I was grateful too. I had thought my creative life was over; I was ashamed to be pretending that I was a writer. That thought must have kept me traveling: I didn't want to stay anywhere long enough for someone to see how little I wrote, how futile I felt. "I've got to be in Bangkok," or "I'm going to Vietnam in a few days," or "I have an assignment" — the restless movement, a pretense of being busy, kept everyone from seeing that I had nothing to write, that travel was my habit of evasion, and like all habits a dreary repetition, a folding and refolding of feeling, a diminishment. All habits are tinged with sadness, for being habits.

Everything had changed. I loved writing about Mrs. Unger. I enjoyed recapturing the pleasure of being with her. I described her lips, the hair that straggled on the nape of her neck and was always the same, uncombable, the fingers that had touched me, the skeletal angles of her jaw and the glow around her eyes. Re-creating her, I was aroused, and the form my arousal took was a visceral happiness.

As an outsider, the traveling writer sees only surfaces. I was a recommender of hotels, a sampler of meals, a tester of comforts. I had described disturbance before, and the derangement of the world, the appearances of places I'd skimmed across. But I had never known a whole worthy person; I had always doubted that such a person existed. Everyone I knew was just getting by. They were like me, tenuously attached to chaotic societies, but we were parasites, living life outside, in bars, in hotel lobbies, hiding in big cities or at the edges of villages, at the beach, on the verandah with our feet up, calling for another drink, more peanuts. Lives with no further purpose than survival and sex. So that was my subject. I had no idea where I was going and neither did my friends. Writing about these uncertain people was a way of writing about myself.

Now I had Mrs. Unger — her energy, her certainty and sensuality, her sense of direction, her self-esteem. Unlike the other Americans I knew, she never dramatized her being in India. I had never met anyone with that amount of restraint. She didn't boast about her charity; she was generous without being conspicuous. She was content. Writing about her lifted my spirits. I was back in the world again. I had a wonderful reason for staying on in Calcutta — no need to slip away. I was at last proud of what I was doing, writing a true account of a meditation on virtue.

Through the dead hand, as if this withered yellow thing had pointed the way, I had discovered something new and unanticipated. I wrote fifty or sixty pages. No one had ever written about anyone like her. She was not a sentimental do-gooder wishing herself on the poor, or helping old people to die, praising their suffering and their poverty, but rather a glamorous woman quietly improving the lives of lost children.

Howard called: "You still here?" Parvati called: "What are you up to?" I didn't say. "A Dead Hand" was my secret. And I had much more to write — I hadn't written about Theroux's intrusion, the train trip, "I'm black," Assam, Nagapatti. All that lay ahead, so much experience to draw upon. I was absorbed in this long story, and I saw that, though happiness was the rarest of subjects, happiness had liberated me. I thought of nothing else but doing full justice to Mrs. Unger and my luck in having opened the wrong door and met her.

I was so concentrated in this work that I forgot everything else. I made no plans. I saw Mrs. Unger a few times, always quietly, always in the incense-filled vault of the Lodge. She massaged me with the tantric pressure of prolonged and unexpected touching, adoration of the fingertips — and all of it these days was a further lesson in how I was to touch her. The best of tantra, taking turns.

And, after such caresses, I always went back to my work refreshed.

This was about two weeks of sustained creativity, the happiest period of my writing life I had ever known. And it ended as suddenly as it began.

"Packet for you, sir," Ramesh Datta, the desk clerk, said one day as I went down to lunch after a morning's work, just as many weeks before he had said, "Letter for you, sir."

He said it casually, and because of that I didn't take it seriously. Something from Parvati was what I thought, with a kind of irritation — a very good poem. I'd have to read it and respond.

But it wasn't that at all. It was something else entirely, and it reminded me of everything I'd forgotten.