A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta

13

MY NAME WAS NOWHERE on the little parcel, which was square, too large to fit into my pocket, and thick, yet light, taped on two sides. It was about the size of a sandwich and just as soft. Indian paper is fragile — the wrapper was already bruised and torn at one corner. No stamp, only HOTEL HASTINGS in blue ballpoint in block letters, and slightly grubby, as though someone had carried it by hand. I imagined a boy clutching it in sweaty fingers. Tell them it's for the ferringhi.

I was reminded of Mrs. Unger's letter, the fat envelope that had started me down this road. Had it not been for that letter, I'd be far from Calcutta now. A letter without a stamp seemed to me portentous. I could not imagine what was in this parcel, but I knew it mattered.

"Who brought this?"

"Runner, sir. Small boy."

I did not want to seem too inquisitive. I suspected it was something to be kept secret. I didn't want anyone to know about my private life, my passionate attachment to Mrs. Unger, my resumption of writing. At that point, with the unopened parcel on the lunch table beside my plate, I still believed that my writing life had been revived, that Mrs. Unger was a goddess who had restored my creative vitality.

Although I longed to open the thing, I resisted, fearing witnesses. What if it was bad news? Its unusual size and shape somewhat alarmed me. I was afraid it might contain another melancholy body part, something small and withered. I finished my lunch, pretending to be casual, then I shoved my chair back, stepped outside onto the verandah, and glancing behind me, seeing no one, picked it open.

As the brittle paper wrapper disintegrated in my hand, I held its contents, a square of carpet. It was like a swatch, a store sample, but roughly cut, velvety with a floral design and part of a margin on one side, tightly woven and dusty on the underside. No other obvious markings, though the pattern on the upper side was distinct: green strands, yellow petals, on a deep red background. It had been coarsely scissored, like a bite out of a big rug.

No message. I sat staring at it. My first thought was to search for bloodstains or any identifying marks. I found nothing; even the pattern was unrevealing, not to say banal. But as an unexpected chunk of material, it was so odd as to seem meaningful — that is, a deliberate riddle. I could not at first imagine who'd sent it, but I related it to what I'd been told by Mina at the cemetery: Carpet was parceled. Body was inside.

I sat back and sighed. This was like blunt trauma, a colossal interruption of my writing. My work lay on the table. I knew that I could not return to it until I had solved the problem.

That was the strangest thing of all. During the trip to Assam and in writing about Mrs. Unger, I hadn't thought about Rajat and the hotel, the discovery of the corpse, his running away, and how from the very beginning I'd been asked by Mrs. Unger to solve this mystery and vindicate Rajat. So overwhelmed had I been by her that I'd neglected to follow up on the information I'd found: the rudeness of the Ananda's manager, the details that Mina Jagtap had given me.

How did this parcel find me? The thought fluttered through my mind. But it was naïve of me to wonder. Calcutta was a city almost without tourists. I had been here more than two months, walking the streets and openly asking questions. Though there must have been many foreigners in the city, it sometimes seemed that I was one of about a dozen resident ferringhis. I was easy to spot. That explained how the parcel found me, but not why.

I immediately suspected Mina. Who else? She knew I was inquiring, she'd been fired from the Ananda, so she had a reason to help me. No note: the swatch was self-explanatory — cut from a carpet, probably the one that had held the body.

Wanting to please Mrs. Unger, to remind her that I was still pursuing the problem she had posed to me, I called her cell phone, an emergency number she'd given me. "Emphasis on 'emergency.'" I got one of those messages: The mobile customer is either currently out of service or out of range.

I wanted to show her that I was on the scent. I got into a taxi, with the square of carpet in my briefcase, and went to the Lodge in Alipore. I had never dared to go uninvited before, but today I had an excuse — this ambiguous clue. I could prove that I was busy on her behalf, and grateful to her.

Writers talk to themselves, and traveling writers talk to themselves constantly. People on their way to a meeting prepare their lines. I began to rehearse a little speech in my head.

"See what I've done?" I would say. "You asked me to investigate the bizarre event at the Ananda, and I've obeyed you. I have a few leads. The dead boy was brought to the hotel in a carpet, and I have a piece of that carpet, sent anonymously to me at my hotel, probably by someone who wants me to know the truth. I think it might be a former employee. I've got it right here."

The gate to the courtyard was padlocked, and the courtyard itself was empty. I called out to the chowkidar, who stood in the shade holding his badge of authority, a long thick club.

"Namashkar."

He pretended not to hear, but I kept calling and embarrassed him into coming over.

"Please let me in."

"Cannot." He looked solemn and stubborn but confident, happy to be unhelpful.

"I have to see Ma." Everyone knew her by that name.

"Not available." He smacked the club against his palm, as if to remind me that he was in charge. The club was dark from being handled.

I felt awkward talking to him through the iron bars of the gate, especially here, where I'd always been welcome. I could hear the children screeching inside, some of them singing.

"I'll write Ma a note. You can give the note to her."

I imagined writing I must see you at once. She would forgive me for intruding. I was making progress in solving the mystery. I had a dead hand, I had a piece of carpet, I had a witness.

As I began to scribble my appeal on a page of my pocket notebook, the chowkidar said, "Not here."

"Not in the Lodge?"

"Not in Calcutta."

"Where is she?"

He gestured past the wall with his big club. "Gone to U.P."

You-bee was what he said. I knew he meant Uttar Pradesh.

"Where in U.P.?"

"Pactory. Meerjapur."

"Out of town," "on a buying trip," "away for a bit," "picking up some children," she always said to explain her absences. She never told me where. This was more specific, a factory in Mirzapur. I was not sure where Mirzapur was, but I knew it was not near Calcutta.

In the taxi on the way back to the Hastings, I asked the driver where it was.

"Varanasi side," he said.

"Far?"

"Five hundred twenty kilometers."

"How long to drive?"

"Not drive. Train better. Fourteen hours."

I considered going there so that I could say, "Look what I've got!" But I thought better of it. It would be ridiculous and premature to show up with the dead hand and the piece of carpet. I needed more evidence. I wanted to amaze her, to show her that I cared. I hoped that she'd be pleased, that she'd reward me. I longed to see her smile at me, to touch me with her secret blessing.

At some yellow hour of the Calcutta night, sleepless in the light pollution of street lamps, alone with this problem, I thought: It must have been Mina who sent it. But had she gotten this fragment of carpet from the hotel itself? She wanted to help without being directly implicated. I needed to spend a night at the Ananda.

I hated the sight of the hotel. I associated it with death and deceit. I disliked the manager, Biswas, for his rudeness, for being unhelpful. And he had abused Mina. He'd fired her for showing me the register. And in this hot weather there was no more uncomfortable part of Calcutta than high-density New Market — the milling crowds, the stink and noise of traffic, the litter in the streets. Here were the cheapest hotels, with pompous names: the Savoy, the Ritz, the Astoria, New India, Delight, Krishna Chambers, and among them the Ananda.

Seeing me approach with an overnight bag, the girl sitting just inside the door raised her head and called to someone.

Mr. Biswas loomed behind her, materializing out of the hot shadows, wrapped in the puffy gauze of his dhoti, wearing a khadi vest. I had forgotten how hairy his ears were, how yellow his fingernails, how red his teeth, how sour his expression.

He must have warned the girl to look out for me. It didn't matter. He knew me only as a nuisance. He wasn't seriously threatened; he was annoyed because I hadn't rented a room.

"Remember me?"

"How could I forget you, sir," he said, swelling a little with belligerence.

"I need a room."

"As you wish." He said something to the girl in Bengali, and hearing him, she reached for my bag.

I clung to it. It was ridiculously light — suspiciously so. "Never mind."

"We are here to serve you," Mr. Biswas said. Every word he spoke sounded either sarcastic or insincere.

"A single room. What are your rates?"

"Standard is four hundred. Facing street. Deluxe is more. Surcharge for garden view. Supplement applies to suite."

Mina had told me that Rajat had stayed in number fifteen. I asked for that room.

"Garden view. Six hundred rupees. Payable in advance."

That was about sixteen dollars. I handed over the rupees. Mr. Biswas licked his thumb and counted them, then gave them to the girl. He was eyeing me sideways, working a wad of betel nut in his mouth. He spat a gob of reddened saliva at the side of the doorway, a fresh streak among dried-out drips.

"Passport," he said, and beckoned with his skinny fingers.

We were still standing on the top step of the Ananda. I slipped my passport out of my pocket, held it away from him, and said, "I want it back."

"After transfer of details, full name and visa number."

Only then did he allow me into the hotel. He took his place behind the window of the check-in desk and opened my passport. He pressed it against the desk with the flat of his hand, then spat into a bucket, licked red betel juice from his lips with an even redder tongue, then turned the pages slowly.

"I will send to room."

"I'd rather wait."

He shrugged and went on turning pages, and when he found the page with my India visa he used a key on a bracelet to unlock a drawer beneath the desktop. He slipped out a large bound volume that I recognized as the register and slowly copied my name, my date of birth, my visa number and place of issue. Then he replaced the volume and locked the drawer again.

"Your papers." He handed me my passport.

I had hoped to get a look at the register again, for Rajat's details. No such luck.

"This way, sir," the young girl said.

I followed her up the stairs, liking the way her sari tightened like a sling around her swaying bottom as she climbed. She carried a thin gray towel, a small rectangle of soap wrapped in wax paper, and on one finger the loop of a key, which was wired to a large wooden tag inked with the number fifteen.

"What's your name?"

"Chitra, sir."

"What happened to Mina?"

"Gone, sir. Sacked, sir. I am Mina replacement."

"Why was Mina sacked?"

"She giving manager angerness."

"What happened?"

"He beating her, sir."

"Why did he beat her?"

"I not knowing."

"Where's your home?"

"Assam side, sir."

"I was in Assam recently."

"Are you enjoying, sir?"

"Very much."

"Thank you, sir. Tea gardens beautiful. Also trees. Also Brahmaputra River."

I remembered Mrs. Unger saying, The real aristocrats of the world are the native peoples, the so-called tribals in India, the Mizos, the Nagas in Assam. But all I could recall of Assam was the Kamakhya temple, its floor running with blood; the child whores of Nagapatti; and the hotel room, Mrs. Unger lying beneath my trembling hands. Show me what you've learned from me.

We had come to the second floor. Chitra led me along the corridor, away from the bright front window and the growl of traffic — bells and horns and human cries, a density of noise. She opened the door to number fifteen and paused at the threshold to let me pass.

"Toggle switch for fan here," she said, flipping it, and the overhead fan croaked and began to turn like a heavy bird beginning to rise, groaning on its outstretched wings.

She placed the towel and soap on the bed and stood before me awkwardly, bowing slightly. She had a sad face, and her attempt to smile made it sadder: narrow shoulders, a thin breastless body, bony hands, skinny feet.

I held out some money, two hundred rupees that I had counted on the way up the stairs.

"Thank you, sir." And at once the money disappeared into her sari, as she hid it without looking at it.

"Chitra, I need you to help me."

She stared, fearful, widening her eyes, pressing her lips together.

"I want to look into some other rooms."

She ungummed her lips. "All locked, sir."

"But you can unlock them."

"I cannot, sir."

She looked anguished, and without another word she backed away and shut the door.

I lay on the bed listening intently — would Chitra tell the manager what I had said? I was so anxious that I was rigid, afraid to move lest I miss hearing something; and in this state of nerves I exhausted myself. I slept suddenly, dreamlessly, then woke gasping in the dark, jarred by a slamming door. Still in my clothes, I did not at first have any idea where I was. The bed stank; the dust in my nostrils alarmed me. I had the notion that someone intended to kill me. That was when I opened my cell phone and shone it around the room.

Without turning on the bedside lamp, using only the light from my cell phone, I got up and listened at the door. I could see that it was not yet nine — I'd been sleeping for about two hours. I opened the door carefully and saw that the corridor was in shadow, the only light the reflected glare from the window that gave onto the rear. I crept from one door to the next, noting the numbers, hoping that I'd find one ajar. They were locked and silent. This was not a busy hotel.

The stairwell was in shadow too. Peering down, I could see where the small lobby emitted some light onto the lower landing, but above me was only darkness. I climbed into this darkness, holding up my cell phone, taking care not to make the stairs creak.

I could just make out three numbered doors, one of them partly open. Keeping motionless, listening closely, I tried to determine whether anyone was inside. No voices, no snoring. Putting one foot slowly in front of the other, nudging the door with my knuckles, I eased it open wider.

As I lifted my cell phone it seemed to explode in my hand, jangling — a call. In a panic I stabbed at the answer button to silence it.

A squawk from the room and a rattle of an iron bed frame: a man had risen in the shadowy interior, glowing in his pajamas, flopping forward, and began berating me in Bengali.

"Can you hear me?" came from my phone, a woman's voice.

"Sorry," I said to the advancing man, and into the phone, "Yes, yes."

It was Mrs. Unger. I hurried to the stairs (the Indian in the room still hissing at me) and cupped my hand over my phone. "I have some news."

"What is it? Where are you?"

"In the hotel." I was whispering, padding down the stairs, now at my own landing, hurrying to my room.

"I can't hear you."

"I've made a breakthrough. I've got a very good lead. I can't talk now."

"Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. I need to see you."

"I'll be fascinated to know what you found. It's so important to clear Rajat. I'm sure that he was so upset he was imagining it."

"It's not just that. I want to be with you. I've been missing you. But I'm also doing some good work — writing. I've got you to thank for that."

"I want to energize you."

"You've done that."

"If you don't mind!" A shout from behind a door, the voice of an angry woman.

I was in the corridor outside my room, but excited, hearing Mrs. Unger, I'd begun to raise my voice.

I slipped into my room, saying, "They can hear me. I'll call you back."

"Don't bother. Concentrate on what you're doing. I can tell you're preoccupied."

Mrs. Unger's call could not have come at a worse time, disturbing the man in pajamas whose door was ajar, the shrieking woman in the room across the hall from me. But I was also secretly pleased: Mrs. Unger could see that I was acting on her behalf, going to some trouble for her. She'd interrupted me in the act. I was happy, proving that I wanted to help her. I knew that she was somewhere being virtuous — helping a child, healing someone who was miserable or ill, making a sacrifice. It was important for me to show her that I was on her side. That night, I dreamed of her, but it was an ugly dream, of Mrs. Unger transformed into a demon, and I woke up ashamed and hot.

14

THE POOR IN INDIA wake up early. At dawn everyone looks destitute. It sometimes seems as though they never sleep. I heard rattling in the corridors of the Ananda. In the dusty light I looked out and saw Chitra with a bucket. I found something incongruous about a young woman in a bright flowing sari, draped in yellow, carrying a mop and a sloshing pail. I remembered the women in colorful saris at the building site, lugging gravel in baskets. Chitra looked graceful and out of place. She looked cursed, as if a spell had been cast upon her and she'd found herself with a bucket and a mop.

"Good morning, sir."

"Namashkar, Chitra." She seemed pleased that I'd remembered her name. I watched her as she walked to the end of the corridor, rapped on a door, lifted a key ring from a chain at her waist, and fit a key to the lock.

Moving quickly, I got to the door before she closed it. She began to object, but I put my finger to my lips, shushing her. That made her smile. I then handed her two hundred rupees. She smiled again, and she folded the money into her bodice.

"I'm looking for something," I said softly.

What was I looking for? I hardly knew. A clue, a connection, a floral carpet, something to link the dead child to the hotel. My idea was that I was more likely to find this unknown thing in one of the empty rooms.

I watched Chitra mop the floorboards and the bathroom tiles, filthy mop on dirty floor, shoving scum back and forth. She then used a straw hand broom to whisk the dirty carpet. This was a gesture at cleaning, going through the motions; the carpet was industrial, gray, not woven, nothing special.

What I took to be a stain in the next room she cleaned was a dead mouse, flattened, dried out in death. Chitra swung it by its tail into a plastic bag. In the third room the bed had been stripped to its lumpy and discolored mattress. Chitra seemed not to notice anything, but only to go about her work, slapping the painted wood floor with her filthy mop, whisking the carpet with her old-fashioned broom.

What was I looking for? The answer was: anything. I was sweating with distraction, because everything was a clue, and nothing added up.

"What you are doing, mister?" The yell behind me was like a thump on my head. I turned and saw the manager's furious eyes, his reddened teeth, Mr. Biswas at his craziest. He shifted a lump of spittle-sodden pan from one cheek to the other, then shook his bony fists and began to scold again. "You having no business in private rooms!"

"I lost something."

"I am having a brace of complaints about you — giving a nuisance in the night. You are making me headaches. I can charge-sheet you!"

"I was looking for something."

All this time I was backing away from Mr. Biswas, half enjoying his fury, half fearing it. I wanted to hit him.

"Look somewhere else. Do not look here. You are creating intrusion."

"Okay," I said, and sidled toward my room.

"You must leave," he said. He was screechy and agitated in his loose dhoti, his hair mussed. I guessed that he had just woken up.

"I can't leave."

"Immediately. Take your things and go. Get out."

But I was at my door now. He had startled me at first, but now I was able to compose myself a little.

"I must eject you."

"It's only six-thirty."

"You must go, sir," he said, clamping his mouth shut, though there was a froth of reddened spittle at his lips.

"I paid for breakfast. I'll leave after breakfast."

"I will refund you twenty rupees. You will take breakfast elsewhere."

"I will have breakfast here."

"Then you will take breakfast now, without delay."

This snorting vituperative man, with his fangy face, in his puffy skirts, alarmed me, but also made me think that I was on the trail of this mystery. He was just the sort of bully who'd abet a murder or a disappearance — a sour face, a mean and heartless manner. He had manhandled Mina. He snapped his fingers at Chitra and muttered something in Bengali.

"You will take something to eat. Then you will vacate."

He turned and, holding his dhoti, a bunch of gauze in his fist, a skinny aunt in a frenzy, he descended the stairs, his sandals slapping.

"May I bring tea, sir?" Chitra said.

"Good idea. And a roti."

I lay on my rumpled bed, my heart pounding. The fuss with the manager had unsettled me, because it had been so sudden and because he seemed such a brute. I was out of breath, damp from the heat, trying to imagine Rajat here — the dead boy on the floor, the unrolled carpet. I felt mocked by my helplessness, ashamed of having come here in the absurd presumption that I might be able to puzzle out the mystery. I had found nothing.

But why linger? I was hot and weary from the early-morning confrontation. I took a quick shower — a cold piddle from a rusty pipe — dried myself on the small towel that was as thin as a dishcloth, put on clean trousers and a fresh shirt, folded my pajama bottoms, and stuffed them into my shoulder bag. Bunching my other cargo pants, I felt a bulge. So I emptied the pockets of the grubby rupees, the insubstantial coins, the receipt the manager had given me the evening before, my wallet, my passport, the fraying piece of carpet.

In my amateurish way, looking literally, I'd thought that I might see a carpet at the Ananda with a chunk taken out of it — this chunk a piece of the puzzle. But the carpet in this room, like the carpet in every room I'd seen at the hotel, was gray and dirty. I was a fool, pretending to be a detective.

A knock—"Tea, sir" — and Chitra entered carrying a tray, a pot of tea, a cup, a dish of sugar, a pitcher of milk, a spoon, and a plate of cookies.

"What's that?"

"Milk Bikki, sir. Dry biscuit." She lifted and shook the plate of cookies. "No roti available."

I scraped the piece of carpet out of her way as she lowered the tray to the small table. She faltered, tipping the load, the cup and tea things slipping to the tray's edge and almost toppling. She had looked aside at the square of carpet and whinnied in fear and recognition.

"You know what this is?"

"Mina, sir." She was whispering, retrieving a fallen spoon from the floor.

"Where did she get it?"

"I cut for Mina."

"Where did you cut it? Where did you find it?"

She took a breath. She widened her eyes. She said, "I find everywhere."

I smiled at her reply. "Show me."

She stepped to the door, which she'd left open, and glanced into the hall. Seeing no one, she went to one of the rooms I'd seen her clean and opened the clothes closet. And there on the floor of the closet, cut to fill the space, was a red carpet, identical in color to the square I had, with a yellow loop of the floral design.

I stooped to look at it, but she was paddling the air, beckoning me to a new room. This one too had a carpet in the closet, a large rectangle, obviously part of the same larger carpet.

"All wardrobe, sir."

Two more rooms had similar pieces of the carpet on the floor of the closets. I examined them all quietly and quickly, realizing that I'd made a connection. One of the pieces was seriously stained, brownish; something had seeped into the weave. I removed it and rolled it up and put it into my bag.

"I will thank you not to come back," Mr. Biswas said in the lobby, glaring at me, his hairy ears twitching.

But I smiled. I was happy. I had what I wanted, and had not even realized that it was what I'd been looking for.

"You are not welcome, mister, at this premises."

I waited at a coffee shop near the Hogg Market until nine, then called Howard at the consulate and asked him to meet me for lunch. "Still here!" he said. "I thought we'd got rid of you."

Over noodles and spring rolls at the New Cathay on Chowringhee, I told him I was growing to like Calcutta.

"I'm glad. At first glance it's a horror, but it grows on you. It's a little limiting for a single guy, though. I can't get a date without a chaperone. I've invited my ex-wife back, just to have someone to go to a movie with. How are you making out?"

"I'm doing a favor for a friend."

He stopped eating and said, "In India, 'friend' always means woman."

"It's not Parvati."

"Too bad. She always asks after you."

"She's too good for me."

Howard said, "You always call when you need something. What do you need?"

"I'm sorry."

"I'm just teasing you."

"But I do need something."

"I want to help. With you, I always feel as if I'll end up in a story. That's nice. It'll give me credibility."

"Remember that guy at police headquarters, Dr. Mukherjee? The forensics man. I want to see him again, but I need you to tell him that I'm honest. I've already aroused his suspicions with one piece of evidence."

"I'll vouch for you. I see him all the time. Americans are constantly dying in India, usually old ones, of heart failure. But sometimes young ones in suspicious circumstances. We get Dr. Mukherjee to run the tests and sign the death certificates."

"You'll assure him that I can be trusted?"

"I'll remind him that you're one of us."

"That's really good of you."

"You're an American. You've got a problem. I'm a consular officer. This is my job. Besides, it's too hot to go back to the office."

In the taxi, Howard said casually, "Does this have anything to do with Mrs. Unger?"

"Why do you ask?"

"You mentioned her once a while back," he said. I didn't say anything, so he went on. "Which is odd. I mean, the only other person who asked about her was Paul Theroux. But when we met you at the Fairlawn you said you didn't know her."

"Did you believe me?"

"Yes, but Paul didn't."

"Did that guy really leave? I don't trust him."

"He said he wanted to take the train from Battambang to Phnom Penh."

"He would. The bus is quicker!"

Perhaps hoping to calm me, Howard said, "Mrs. Unger has no profile in Calcutta. She's never in the news. And yet she's here all the time."

"She doesn't like publicity."

"How do you know?"

He was very shrewd, but then, he'd lived in Calcutta for three years. In the nicest way, he'd caught me. I said, "She told me."

He nodded, and though his expression was mild, I could see his eyes in a rapid calculation.

"She's an amazing woman, an incredible philanthropist," I said, but I felt helpless saying this. There was no way I could adequately describe what Mrs. Unger meant to me, and it seemed disloyal merely to mention her name like this. "I respect her privacy. Theroux just wanted to use her."

The receptionist at police headquarters recognized both of us, but she responded more warmly to Howard. He was friendly and memorable, and he spoke first, in a courtly way in Bengali.

"Dr. Mooly Mukherjee. Consular business." He handed her his diplomatic card, stamped with a gold American eagle.

As the receptionist called to announce us, she gave us security tags. Then she beckoned a chowkidar to usher us upstairs.

I began to regret that I'd depended on Howard, because he was now involved in my quest. His presence made me self-conscious, and I had denied knowing her. I knew he was wondering how well I knew Mrs. Unger. But if a crime had been committed, why should I hide it from him? I would probably need him.

The chowkidar knocked on the office door, and hearing a grunt, he showed us in.

"Dr. Mukherjee. Namashkar," Howard said. "Apni keman achen?"

"Top hole, thank you, Mr. Howard."

They talked for a while about a recent case, an American who'd died in Darjeeling. "Heart-related," Dr. Mukherjee said. "Altitude was factor. He left immense debts. It turned out that he was a blighter and a mountebank."

Then Howard said, "And I think you know my friend?"

"Ah, yes," he said, with less enthusiasm, and I knew what he was thinking: he associated me with the dead hand, the sad little thing with no fingerprints.

"I'd like you to test this." I opened the plastic bag and showed him the stained piece of carpet I'd found in the closet at the Ananda Hotel.

"Test for what? For fibers? For DNA?" He stroked his mustache, speaking slowly. "Traces of drugs? Bodily fluids? Gunpowder? Chemicals? Food particles? Hair strands?"

Howard had begun to laugh softly at the litany of questions.

"We are thorough!" Dr. Mooly Mukherjee said, tweaking one tip of his mustache.

"Please test it for everything. There's a suspicious stain on it. Who knows, maybe a bloodstain."

"I will be judge of that," Dr. Mukherjee said, taking up a clipboard that held a printed form. "May I ask origin of carpet sample?"

I squirmed a bit, then said, "It came into my possession."

"You have become a repository of many items," he said. "I can only wonder if they are related. Let's say, 'Of unknown origin.'"

"That's good. How long will it take you to do the tests?"

"For simple tests, a few days. We might have to send it to the lab. Here's my card. I'll write my mobile number." He did so on the back of the card. "Phone me Thursday afternoon. We might have some results then."

"He's a good man," Howard said when we left the building. He was curious, I could tell, resisting the obvious question, being pointedly discreet. And he had not referred to my earlier request, when I had foolishly revealed that I had a dead hand that wanted to be identified.

In the silence, I said, "I can't tell you why I need to know this."

"It's much better that I don't know," Howard said. "I don't want to have to write a report. Knowing things is a big burden in the consular business. Even though I'm a PAO, it puts me under an obligation. I'm glad to help. And I like the evidence."

"That's not evidence. I'm just helping a friend."

But he could see I was being defensive. "The piece of carpet," he said. "It's pure Henry James. The big clue hidden somewhere in the weave. Puzzle it out and you have the answer. You know the story? 'The Figure in the Carpet.'"

"Yes, I do."

"One of the many things I love about Calcutta is its Victorian texture. It's Jamesian. Not just the grandiose architecture, but the people too. Women need chaperones. They don't marry for love. Dr. Mooly Mukherjee is a Victorian figure. His mustache is dated. Even the words he uses. 'Repository.' 'Blighter.' 'Mountebank.'"

Talking this way gave a bigger meaning to our visit to police headquarters, and by linking it to literature, he dignified it. He was right about 'The Figure in the Carpet.' And so although I was looking for bloodstains, or anything criminal, we were able to talk about it in euphemisms, and that helped us to be a little more dignified too.

And it calmed me. We agreed to meet again soon. I could not tell him what I was doing. There was only one person I could tell.

15

I HAD MISSED MRS. UNGER. I had come to depend on seeing her once or twice a week for the sessions of tantric massage, and I had yearned for her while she'd been away — her week in Mirzapur. I was like an old-fashioned woman waiting for a man to call, passive, dependent, helpless. She said that tantra was all-encompassing ancient wisdom that included sex, as it did every aspect of life. Yet for me the massage was not a sexual act but a way of prolonging desire: at its best it had no end, at least not an explosive finality, but rather a tapering glow of intense well-being.

"Better than sex," I'd said to her.

She liked my saying that, yet still I was possessed.

My week in Calcutta without her had allowed me to plan the stay at the Ananda that resulted in my securing the stained piece of carpet from the closet. I guessed that the entire carpet had been cut and distributed throughout the hotel. And now I had the police working on identifying anything that had adhered to it. I had studied the scene of the crime. I'd used my time well, I thought. I'd have news for Mrs. Unger. And now I was able to see her again.

Knowing that I was going to see her later in the day filled me with pleasure. The foreknowledge of desire, the certainty of a meeting, something every lover knows, is a vitalizing power, a source of happiness and optimism. She had that effect on me. She had that effect on everyone she knew, inspiring an eagerness, a willingness to make a sacrifice.

I longed to please her. The greatest gift of love was — without thinking — losing one's ego in a passion for someone else, becoming unselfish, wishing to serve and satisfy that other person, wanting her to smile.

That was easy to do for Mrs. Unger because she gave so much of herself to others. Her goodness, the bigheartedness that made people thrive, motivated me to want to please her in the same way; she sacrificed so much herself that my making a sacrifice for her was a pleasure. The more inconvenienced I was by serving her, the happier I became, because she deserved it.

I found what many lovers find, that it is hard to give anything to someone who is truly generous. Her strength, and perhaps the key to Mrs. Unger's personality, was that she didn't need anything from me, or anyone. Her criticism of Mother Teresa was that she needed to bask, to meet celebrities, to collect money, to be acknowledged. Mrs. Unger scorned all of that. She seemed to exist in an atmosphere of pure kindness and serenity, offering blessings. What could I give her? A clue to the body in the room would be welcome, but not much else. Even that was unselfish on her part, for all she cared about was clearing Rajat's name. "He must not be hurt," she said. "He has a lovely soul. He has fairy energy."

I could see how the children thrived in the Lodge. That was how I felt at my hotel, writing those pages about her, having recaptured the ability to write that I had believed — dreaded — deserted me. She was both the inspiration for those pages and the subject of them. Knowing her, being vitalized by her, touched by her, I was returned to being a writer, and finding that creativity, I had found a self I thought I'd burned out. But no, I'd rediscovered it, and in so doing I'd rediscovered a younger self. She had rejuvenated me. All she said was "Kundalini."

I didn't want to wait to be summoned. I wanted to get a taxi outside the Hastings and ride to Alipore, full of expectation, unbidden, to show my loyalty and love. But I resisted, because the last time I'd done it, she'd been away in Mirzapur, wherever that was.

The night at the Ananda Hotel had interrupted my writing schedule, yet I was able to resume working on the pages of "A Dead Hand," advancing my description of Mrs. Unger and the stories of her philanthropy. She could easily have remained in New York or Palm Beach — she had the money. She could have spent all her time in pure idleness, among the wealthy, going to charity events, looking glamorous. She could have done what Mother Teresa did — hobnobbed with the stars, pretending to be a saint, dining out on her horror stories. But instead, Mrs. Unger, who shunned publicity, was in Calcutta anonymously, enduring the heat and the noise, the unending mob, the crowded sidewalks, the traffic, the squalor. She chose to devote all her energy to neglected children.

This was my subject. While debating whether to visit her unannounced, I kept writing "A Dead Hand."

"Gentleman to see you, sir." I looked up and saw Ramesh Datta, awaiting further instructions.

I didn't want anyone to see me writing. I considered it my secret and my strength, especially these pages.

"I'll be right down."

I assumed it was Howard with news of Dr. Mukherjee's forensic report. But it was Rajat. He'd been sitting in a wicker chair. The chair screeched as he leaped to his feet, recklessly, like a schoolboy when a teacher enters a room.

"I happened to be passing. I thought I'd say hello."

This could not have been true. He'd never dropped in on me before. What was on his mind?

"Nice to see you. Would you like a drink?"

"A cup of tea only."

Ramesh Datta had been standing by listening. He signaled to Ramachandra, who hurried forward.

"Two teas, sir?"

I said to Rajat, "You want a samosa?"

"I am not taking."

"Tea cake?"

"I am not taking."

"Biscuit?" I was asking just to torment him and say the odd words and hear his refusals. "Milk Bikki? Fancy biscuits? Gulabjam? Sweetmeats?"

"I will take unsalted nuts."

"Mineral water for me." I sat down, and Rajat returned to his wicker chair, sitting at the edge of the cushion, his elbows on his knees.

"How are you getting on here?" he asked. "You seem to find the city congenial."

"I like seeing Mrs. Unger. I think you can understand that."

"A gracious and distinctly formidable woman," he said.

Victorian, Howard had said of the Bengalis. I was by now able to take their florid and slightly pretentious phrasing in stride.

"Oh, yes," I said. But I was thinking, She's much more than that.

"I know she charged you with vindicating me," he said. "Have you made any headway?"

He seemed terribly nervous, so nervous he could not manage to be subtle; he was without any guile. He'd come straight to the point.

"I don't see my job as vindicating you."

"What then?"

"I think something like searching for the truth."

I knew this was pompous, but pomposity was a normal mode of discourse in Calcutta. Don't be audacious, Parvati sometimes said to me. Rajat began to speak, but seeing Ramachandra bringing the tea tray, he held off, smiled at the waiter, and did not speak until we were alone again.

"It was the worst experience of my life. Can you imagine waking up in a strange hotel room with a human corpse?"

Instead of answering, I said, "I'm wondering if you made the right decision in running away."

"The alternative was much worse — being implicated in a murder."

"Why do you say murder?"

"That's how it would have been viewed by the law here." His knees were pressed together. He held his teacup with precisely poised fingers. "And I fear scandalmongery. People would spread malicious tales and calumnies about me."

"Why didn't you mention the carpet to Mrs. Unger? Or to me?"

"Was there a carpet? I didn't get a proper look. I told you I was using my cell phone as a torch."

"But the carpet was right there on the floor of your room."

He put the cup down. He said, "When you see a dead person, you don't see anything else. I was transfixed."

That at least made sense.

"Was there any blood?"

"Had I seen blood, it would have obtained a lodgment in my memory," he said. When he was nervous he spoke this way. "But I didn't touch the body. I simply bolted."

"Your big mistake. It makes you look responsible for the death."

"What would you have done?" He picked up his cup, though seemed merely to use it as a prop; he didn't drink.

I thought hard before I answered, because I had been in the Ananda, and I now knew what a spooky place it was, the hot stifling rooms, the menacing corridors, the angry Mr. Biswas with his crow-like face.

"I don't know. But I would have put my trust in Mrs. Unger to get to the bottom of it."

"That's what I have done," he said, his voice breaking. "I don't think she wholly believed me, or else why did she charge you with looking into the case?"

He had not counted on Mrs. Unger's getting in touch with me. And though I had hoped for a lucky break, I had not counted on Mina Jagtap's giving me all this timely help — the dead hand, the fragment of carpet — had not counted on Chitra's recognizing the carpet. All this because of my earlier visit and Mr. Biswas's slapping Mina's face and firing her.

"I'm sure everything will be fine," I said. Only when I spoke did I hear the doubt in my voice. I didn't believe this at all.

"I have to go. I'm supposed to meet Charlie at the Lodge. Thank you for the tea."

He had put sugar in the tea the waiter had poured. He had stirred it. He had even lifted the cup to his lips. But he hadn't drunk any of it. He had not touched the bowl of unsalted cashews. This both annoyed me and made me suspicious. I am uneasy at meals where guests pick at their food or don't eat. I think: Why are they here?

Rajat had not simply dropped in; he had planned this meeting. He was trying to find out what I knew.

"Why don't you come along?" His eyes glistened as his gaze became a kind of pleading.

He was smallish, mousy, with a softness to him; weak and compliant, almost feminine, with large dark eyes — soft and fearful, deep-set with girlish lashes. Yet he was stubbornly like a girl too, unforthcoming. Now and then I asked him a question and he wouldn't reply, just stared, and I thought of old girlfriends. He had slender hands and tiny breakable wrists. In his fragility he reminded me of Mrs. Unger's lost children, the bat-eared boy Jyoti who had been so animated and whom I had looked for my last time at the Lodge. "He has moved on," Mrs. Unger said. "We're so proud of him."

"Is Mrs. Unger there?"

"Oh, yes. She'd love to see you. I'd try her on my mobile, but the battery's flat."

"Ma is not fond of surprises," I said.

"This is a pleasant surprise." He clawed his cuff from his wrist and looked at his watch. "We really should go."

Just the thought of her in her vault sensitized me, made me tremulous. And the Calcutta heat helped too. The day was stifling, the humidity like a cloak, but in the way it slowed me and made me breathless, it was like a foretaste of desire, the same heaviness, the same pulse of blood in my head, a flush of eagerness that I could taste — as though right before a great risky leap — and a dampness on my skin and eyes.

As Rajat talked, more urgently than I'd seen him before, we ambled to the street, where I hailed a taxi. When one pulled up, we got in and Rajat gave directions. After that he fell silent. He began gnawing a finger in misery, his knuckle under his nose.

"Won't she mind this? Our arriving together?"

His eyes, set close, gave him the look of a rodent contemplating cheese on a tray — eager yet hyperalert, the same nibble and the twitching nostrils. Yet his tight smile made him the fidgety embodiment of contradiction.

"Not at all. She of course likes you immensely."

"And she likes you too, Rajat."

"I fear she finds me loquacious," he said. "Even if we arrive together she won't suspect us of plotting."

This unexpected remark surprised me, because it seemed exactly what she might think: I had never arrived at the Lodge with him before. But that was at the periphery of my mind. I was concentrated on one thing, Mrs. Unger's vault: the perfumes, the lamps, her hands, her body slipping against the silk of her sari.

Rajat spoke sharply to the taxi driver.

The man threw up his hands. "Traffic. Too many traffic."

"Are you telling him to hurry?" I asked.

"Don't you want to see Ma?" he said.

I said nothing because I didn't want to be quoted; he seemed to be provoking me. He seemed odder, fussier in the taxi than he had seemed in the Hastings, not drinking his tea.

"Ah." He sighed with relief as the traffic began to move. I knew the feeling. I was relieved too as the taxi coursed through Alipore. I watched for the wall, the gateway, the fountain. Mrs. Unger, at the front door, turned abruptly at the sound of the taxi on the gravel driveway.

"Dear, dear boy," she said to Rajat, and to me, "I've been meaning to call you. You absolutely read my mind."

She embraced him, and at first he stiffened at her touch. Then she patted him and stroked his arms, and as she did so, he relaxed and sighed and surrendered.

"What have you boys been doing?" she asked, and when Rajat didn't answer, she said teasingly to him, "Madam has gone all silent."

Rajat seemed uneasy yet watchful, as he had in the taxi, glancing around, smiling in apprehension. We were standing at the top of the outer staircase, on the carved porch, with its plump balusters, the cracked and ornate entry, chunks of plaster missing from the stair treads, revealing old red brick beneath, like a deep gash, the same raw red, the whiteness surrounding it, like flesh, the Lodge like a noble wounded body.

"I didn't realize you had guests." This was spoken by a woman exiting the Lodge, who took me by surprise. She left the front entrance, taking a gingerly step that made her seem old, the chowkidar holding the door open, Balraj saluting. Now she approached Mrs. Unger.

"These are friends," Mrs. Unger said. "They're family."

The woman — thin, middle-aged, auntyish — was obviously American. She looked like a big insect, bug-eyed in large sunglasses, in an expensive, fitted summer dress. She frowned in the heat from beneath a wide-brimmed straw hat, dabbing her face with a hanky. Over her shoulder was slung a woven bag, not Indian but designer-stylish. She had thin, pale, bony arms and was brisk, in a hurry, in contrast to the child plodding next to her.

She held the hand of this dazed-looking girl in a starched dress and white ankle socks and black shoes — a classier version of the school uniform of the children at the Lodge. I smiled at her, and looking closer I thought I recognized the child. But all Mrs. Unger's children seemed memorable. They were unlike Indian children with parents; they were street children in a house, always seeming somewhat pent-up, trapped, and a little reckless, with searching eyes, tidy in simple uniforms.

This child was almost certainly the little girl who had ridden back to the house with us the day we'd visited the Kali temple and what Rajat had called "the monthly intake."

"I know your name," I said to the little girl. "I just can't think of it at the moment."

The woman said sharply, "We haven't got all day for you to think of it."

I smiled at her rudeness, then turned away. "What's your name, sweetie?" I asked the little girl. But she stepped sideways as though I was menacing her.

"Any more questions?" the woman said, her clumsy sarcasm snarling her delivery. She kept her mouth open, showing me her teeth.

Taken aback, I stared at her, wondering if I should give her a rude answer.

It was a hot afternoon. The woman seemed irritable and hurried. There was an air of confusion and distress that short-timers and foreigners had in Calcutta: a posture, a scowl of discomfort, of actual suffering. She had that look. I said nothing because Mrs. Unger was there, as always a calming presence.

But it was an odd scene: staring Rajat with somewhat triumphant glistening eyes, Mrs. Unger in a gorgeous sari, the cracked porch, the tense, offhand American woman in her big sunglasses with the spittle of "Any more questions?" on her lips, the stunned-looking child who I'd almost recognized, and the brittle echo of "Madam has gone all silent" directed at Rajat. And I was standing uneasily because I'd come unannounced. All of us on the broken stairs of the grand Lodge, and the noise of traffic outside the gate, the yelling children inside the house, the great strangling banyan tree with its roots showing everywhere, in some places seeming to tear the house apart and in other places holding the bricks together with the fingers and claws of its tangled roots.

"I'll be in touch," the woman said. She continued down the stairs and into a waiting car, one of those shiny new hotel cars with a logo on the door and curtained windows and an obsequious driver. The little girl, bewildered, glanced back at Mrs. Unger with a puzzled face.

"I know that kid," I said.

Mrs. Unger smiled. She didn't help me. She hadn't explained the woman or introduced us. Instead, as the car drew away, she sidled next to me and squeezed my arm.

"Charlie's in the office," Mrs. Unger said to Rajat. "He'll be thrilled to see you." After he left, she said to me, "I'm glad you came. I want to get my hands on you." She spoke in a low voice, her cheek on my shoulder. I got a whiff of her perfume, which was heavy, like a secretion of bodily warmth.

It was what I wanted to hear. I resisted kissing her. She seldom kissed, but I wanted badly to kiss her, to throw my arms around her for making me happy. I want to get my hands on you was a male fantasy — my fantasy anyway. It was what I needed, the mothering that had gotten me back to work on "A Dead Hand," a thinly fictionalized portrait of Mrs. Unger in Calcutta.

Children were playing in the outer rooms and some were singing nearby. The odors of cooking food, the slap of bare feet on the wooden floor, the high-pitched laughter. And then, as she shut the doors behind us, Mrs. Unger led me deeper into the house and down to the spa level, which smelled of incense, petals floating in the fountain, and in the damp leafy garden just outside, elephant-eared plants and trailing, gripping roots of the big banyan tree.

"I came to the house while you were away," I said. "I couldn't resist."

Although Mrs. Unger was the model of coolness and poise, I detected disapproval, a shrinking of her being.

"When you were in Mirzapur."

She laughed very hard at that. "I was nowhere near Mirzapur."

"It doesn't matter. I don't even know where it is."

"Neither do I," she said.

"I had a breakthrough with the Rajat mystery," I said. But the only reason I said that was to cover my surprise and somehow (so I thought) save her from embarrassment. I suspected, for the first time since I'd met her, that she was not telling me the truth. Yet she had spoken without any hesitation.

In her aromatic vault, on the table, she worked on me, but something in me refused to cooperate. I felt like clay. Doubt, misgiving, made my flesh inert. I wanted to give my whole being to her, yet a wariness kept me back. All the little hints, her not introducing me to the woman with the child, the woman's sharp retort, my recognizing the child and not remembering her name, Mrs. Unger not reminding me. She had been holding back.

I had never noticed this before, but then I had never visited unannounced. The suddenness produced this disharmony, and it probably hadn't helped that I'd arrived with Rajat. He had seemed to know something I didn't know. I had doubted him, and now I began to doubt myself.

Mrs. Unger's hands swept over me, pressing, smoothing, finding my muscles and the spaces between them. I mentioned earlier that Mrs. Unger's tantric massage was not a sexual act but rather the drawn-out promise of one, foreplay as an end, always trembling on the brink. This produced a tremulous ecstasy that I could compare only to a rapture of strangulation: I was suffocated in a delirious choking as she ran her magic fingers over me.

But today it wasn't working. I could not pretend that it was. Instead of being relaxed by her touch, or aroused, I ached with apprehension.

"You're resisting."

"No — I like it." But I knew I sounded insincere.

"I can tell by the position of your toes."

"Maybe it's my stomach. I ate some odd-tasting bhajjis for lunch."

"Blame the bhajjis," she said. "You need to taste something sweeter." She let go of me. "Get up, slowly. You'll be a little dizzy, so be careful."

She helped me off the table and steered me to the shower. The light was on in the shower, and it must have been bright because when I was done and I reentered the massage room, I could barely see. The taper burning in the dish of oil gave no light. I could not see Mrs. Unger anywhere.

I felt my way to the table and touched her foot, then traced my hand up her naked leg. She was lying face-up on the table, and now I could see that her head was tilted, her back arched, her body upraised in offering, a posture of surrender.

"Ma," I said. I had never spoken the word before.

"Baby." She took my head in both hands and guided it downward, between her fragrant thighs. "Yoni puja — pray, pray at my portal."

She was holding my head, murmuring "Pray," and I did so, beseeching her with my mouth and tongue, my licking a primitive form of language in a simple prayer. It had always worked before, a language she had taught me herself, the warm muffled tongue. But today she sensed a difference, my diminished will. Bodies revealed much more than words ever could.

"Next time, call me first, or wait for me to call you," she said, releasing me and turning on her side. "You said you had a breakthrough in Rajat's problem. I want you to bring me good news."

"I have some solid leads."

"We can't let that poor boy suffer an injustice," she said. When I didn't reply, she said, "You told me you'd gone to the hotel. Is there something you should tell me?"

I could have told her about the fierce manager, about Mina, about the dead hand and the piece of carpet. But whom would I be telling? She was someone else. I was sensing a different, darker side — or if not darker, then evasive. I did not know this woman. I couldn't make love to her. I couldn't tell her what I knew. She was not the same woman I had known.

And I thought, She's American! I could have imagined being bewildered by an Indian, by her indirection or secrecy. But I knew Americans. Or thought I did. I'm black didn't explain anything.

Rajat had said, "This is a pleasant surprise." She had pretended so, but I was not convinced. It was nothing she had said. My doubt arose from the air around her, the vibration, most of all from her hands and fingers — the truth was apparent in her flesh; mine too, probably. The truth was a throbbing in the blood, nothing to do with words or protestations. It was a quality of pressure in her fingertips that told me that part of her was absent, something untrue in the touch.

"I have to go," I said.

"So soon? You just got here. We've only begun."

I slipped off the table, which I always thought of as an altar, and now it seemed like a sacrificial table. I began to dress as she stood over me. I was careful not to say anything, because she was as shrewd an interpreter of the spoken word as she was of flesh and blood.

At the door, she touched me, saying, "There's something you're not telling me."

I kissed her, thinking to reassure her, and in kissing her I felt that I was revealing to her everything I wanted to keep to myself.

16

NOW I WAS AS irritable and bent as everyone else in Calcutta, this deranged city of trapped air and fallen grandeur where in the hot, premonsoon month of May it was as stuffy in the streets as it was in any room. Sooner than I expected, within an hour or so of having left with Rajat, I was back at the Hastings, wondering, What just happened?

Rajat had suggested that I go with him to the Lodge, and I'd been tempted, as always, by the anticipation of Mrs. Unger's vault: luxuriating in the thought of her healing hands, her penetrating fingers. I'd been roused by the very idea of seeing her. And then, unexpectedly, I'd seen the American woman tugging the small girl away from the Lodge and Mrs. Unger insisting she was glad to see me. Yet the woman's rudeness ("Any more questions?") and the pressure of Mrs. Unger's touch disturbed me. I'd felt almost a hostility in her hands, and having experienced this odd side of Mrs. Unger, I was confused. It had been a mistake to go. Who was that American woman? Who was that child? Who was Mrs. Unger now? Her hands had been hard and cold, holding me in an almost strangulatory way.

And it had been an interruption of my work. I resented Rajat's intrusion, his urging me, his reassurances; and I was angry with myself for having allowed myself to be tempted. I should have known he was insincere from his having ordered tea and not drunk any of it.

I needed to write, to compose myself. In the seclusion of my room, hiding from the harsh late-afternoon light and the hubbub rising from the street, I sat half dressed under the quacking dustcovered ceiling fan. For the first time, doubting her — and so doubting myself — I had time on my hands. And in this solitude I saw the little girl's vacant face and hesitant posture, her skinny legs stiffened in reluctance. I had once seen her in Mrs. Unger's lap. I am her mother.

Rather than continue "A Dead Hand," this appreciation of Mrs. Unger, I broke off the narrative and wrote Who is she? and began to describe this new experience of Mrs. Unger's vault — not a refuge but a kind of trap where I felt like an imprisoned stranger.

What made writing this all the weirder was that I felt uncomfortable in my own hotel room. I didn't usually write here. I was unused to sitting in semidarkness, facing a dirty windowpane, hearing the quack and croak of the fan above my head. Usually I sat on the top-floor verandah, above the familiar stink of traffic, the noise of horns and bicycle bells and people calling to each other — the muffled screeches of Calcutta that thickened the air.

My room disturbed me, and it was more than the scummy spookiness I felt in most hotel rooms, a heaviness of old dust and dead echoes, of the sediment of bare feet and bad breath, the nerves of all the previous occupants. The smell amounted almost to a sound, a sort of humming high-pitched whine of spectral presences — much worse in Calcutta than in other places, the layers of chipped paint, the crusted rugs and sticky varnish, the windows opaque from scabs of dirt on the glass.

Adding to this itch, as I sat at my little table I noticed a dresser drawer pulled out an inch. That was annoying because I was careful about shutting doors and pushing in drawers. The thought of rats or mice kept me scrupulous: I'd once jerked open a drawer in an Indian hotel and seen a rat sniffing and scuttling across my socks.

This discomfort and unease slowed my writing. Yet writing was the only way I knew to puzzle out the feelings I had, about Mrs. Unger and the small girl and the ambiguity of Rajat's mixed signals. I almost laughed at the thought that it was Mrs. Unger who was the subject of this effort, and it was she, through her tantric massage, who had returned me to writing and given me a new vitality. Even so, I had to force myself to write, jamming my ballpoint onto my notebook pages.

I broke off around eight-thirty to order tea and a cheese sandwich, the safest meal at this time of night. I was following Mrs. Unger's usual advice. The ghee butter was rancid and the fish was rotten and the vegetables sodden and the rice stale at the end of the day, she said. And the water was undrinkable, having stagnated so long in the heat.

When Ramachandra came with his tray, I said, "Just a friendly reminder. Remember to close the drawers. Like this."

Exaggerating for effect, I shut the partly open drawer.

"Room boy leave open, sar."

"It wasn't Jagdish."

"Sweeper, sar," he said, wagging his head.

The mission in this blame-shifting society was to win at any cost and to be blameless, and the simplest way was to rubbish the underlings. In multilayered India there was always someone lower than you.

To make me small — to make me wrong — Ramachandra then gave me a formal lesson in shutting the drawer. Using the tips of his fingers, spreading his hands, he demonstrated how this ill-fitting and chunky drawer should properly be pushed closed. He acted as if he was manipulating a highly technical apparatus that required balance and acute tolerances — and of course it was a pitted wooden drawer lined with yellowed paper in a dresser that, when it wobbled at his touch, startled a cockroach into skidding across the floor.

I couldn't help laughing, and though Ramachandra was insulted by my laughter, he laughed too, with the humiliated force of a man who would never forgive it, awaiting his chance to laugh at me for some more serious error. Class and caste abuse had made the prideful Bengalis unusually vindictive, and they liked nothing better than situations that would allow them to stand over a supine victim and crow, "I told you so" or "I've got you now."

"Now let us examine other one," he said, reaching for the bottom drawer.

"Don't bother," I said, and put my foot against it.

After Ramachandra left, I felt that this was perhaps my problem with Mrs. Unger. I'd blundered by showing up unannounced, thanks to Rajat. Would she hold it against me? And maybe I had been maneuvered into going by Rajat, who seemed very uneasy with what I might find in my investigations, this shabby business at the Ananda, his running away. What was he hiding?

I was now certain that he'd found himself in the Ananda Hotel room with a dead boy. I had all the evidence. But had the boy been alive on arrival at the hotel? If not, how had he died? And when? And would I ever find out the name of this small unlucky boy whose withered hand I had in my possession?

The dead hand was hidden in the space behind the bottom drawer that Ramachandra had reached for. It was safe. And the cut-off portion of carpet was with Dr. Mooly Mukherjee at police headquarters.

I didn't write about any of this. I had a new and unexpected subject: Mrs. Unger. I had gone to the Lodge this time as though to an assignation, tense with desire, that feeling in the pit of my stomach that was also a yearning in my mouth, an actual thirst, a slight headache, heat behind my eyeballs: desire was an acute form of hunger, and I was seeking relief. I wanted to hold her, I wanted to be held. I was half consumed by anticipated lust.

And it had all gone wrong. First the agitated behavior of Rajat in the taxi, then the sight of the small girl being led away by the cranky American, and finally in the darkness of the vault being touched as if by a stranger. It was nothing Mrs. Unger had said; in fact, she'd tried to reassure me. But something in her fingers told me that she was unwilling, that she hadn't wanted to see me. There was an element of violence in the pressure of her hands, something, as I said, strangulatory. But why? I had never felt this way before with her. In the beginning I'd known uneasiness, perhaps, but never fear. I had the idea that she was debating whether to caress me or throttle me with those powerful fingers.

Someone you know well says or does something unexpected and, no matter how slight, if it is entirely out of character, it is as if you've had a glimpse of a stranger. You've learned something new, something you hadn't guessed — and something this person doesn't know about you. Who is she? I kept thinking. I thought I knew her so well, and here I was utterly baffled. The more she had touched me, the greater my sense that she didn't want me there, that she hadn't expected me, that the deadening pressure of her fingers was hostile, killing my desire and making me want to leave. I sensed a darkness I had never before felt in her vault, and in spite of the oil lamp and the incense I was aware that Mrs. Unger was giving off a bad smell.

She had lain and parted her legs, and as though asking a question or murmuring a prayer, I'd gone down on her. The taste was sour, a slipperiness, the negligent kiss of reluctant lips, an unyielding and impenetrable mouth bulging with teeth.

Now I had worked myself into such a state I couldn't eat the cheese sandwich Ramachandra had brought. I sipped the tea. I was stifled. The trapped air in the room tired me, but there was no point going outside, where the air would be even fouler. The bad light wearied me. I wrote, describing this new Mrs. Unger, and in my description I saw the face of the small girl.

Outside the Hastings the lanterns and dim lights of evening, the fires and flares, made a lurid pattern, as of disease, on the plaster walls of my room. I was too tired to sit in the glary light of the Hastings lobby; I couldn't bear the thought of seeing Ramachandra, who would be overattentive as a way of bullying me. My ballpoint pen was heavy, unsteady in my fingers; my writing faltered.

I lay on my bed. I switched the bedside lamp off to rest my eyes. I dozed. The faces before me were ones I knew but couldn't name — children, not laughing anymore; the small girl. And I slept, dreaming, the world becoming vivid and real, and in my dream were voices.

That was when I sat up and said aloud, "Usha. Dawn."

My face was damp from the heat. I blinked in the darkness. I didn't know how long I'd been asleep, but speaking the name startled me and seemed to pinch some part of my brain, quickening it, waking me up with the girl's name. This flash of insight was a needle-prick of sound that kept me wakeful. I tried to sleep, but remembering the name, connecting it to the child I'd seen in Shibpur and in the taxi (I am her mother) created a stream of images I could not stop. The face became brighter when I shut my eyes. In one of the images I saw the sharp-faced American woman tugging Usha into the car and being rude to me as the small girl opened her mouth in soundless panic — her breath stopped — before being spirited away in an adoption that was more like an abduction. The skinny middle-aged woman did not look at all like a mother but like a dog lover or a socialite.

My mouth was dry from having uttered the little girl's name. I lay on the hard mattress, in the dusty air, in the smell of the mildewed carpet, the chipped paint on the chairs, the scratched varnish of the desk, the accumulated fur on the wardrobe mirror, the threadbare curtains, the grime on the blue petals of the plastic flowers on the dresser, my cheese sandwich souring on its plate, the bread warping as it went stale. Even in the darkness the room was warm with decay, every item of furniture giving off its distinctive smell, and with all that there was the insistent stink of the street. The whole of Calcutta lay hot and ripe against my face.

The smells kept me awake, and in this density of bad air there was the burned-toast hum of old cigarette smoke. Twisted on my bed like a castaway, my nerves alight, I was hungry and yet disgusted by the thought of food. The furniture, picked out in its smells and its shadows, shimmered too from the sulfurous yellow of the street lamps at the corner of Sudder Street.

That was why, when I saw the door of the wardrobe flicker forth — the long narrow mirror on the door catching the light from the street — I took it to be just another nightmare effect of those yellow lamps. But no, the mirror was still moving in one direction, catching on its edge the reflection of my pale popeyed face. I didn't breathe, I didn't move. My body was convulsed with anxiety, tangled in the damp sheets. I was still fully clothed. The mirror glinted, seemed to wink at me, swung out wider, and then came the tuneless clang of the wire hangers inside the wardrobe, like cheap wind chimes stirred by a light breeze.

Swelling like blobby ectoplasm — the sight was unearthly — a crouching shadow bobbed and rippled toward the door of my room as I watched in horror. I'd double-locked the door after Ramachandra left so that I wouldn't be interrupted in my writing. That seemed so innocent now. The handle resisted with a click, the shadow grunted, then whined, frustrated air straining in its sinuses, another little whinny of regret. Something in those sounds spoke of weakness.

I sprang out of bed and rushed at the figure, which was half shadow, half substance, and easily knocked it down with a thump. I was prepared to push again, but the lumpy shadow began pleading in a shrieky girlish whisper.

"Please don't hurt me. Please."

It was a male voice. My eyes were used to the dark; his were not. He lay tumbled to the floor like a small bundle.

"What are you doing here?"

He was still pleading through his fingers, his hands over his face. I pulled at his hands and his cell phone dropped to the floor. I knew it was a cell phone because it had opened when I snatched at him, and it was lit and lying at a convenient angle on the floor to illuminate Rajat, curled into a ball and whimpering.

"I'm hurt. I've broken something."

But he wasn't hurt. He was cowering, afraid that, standing over him, I'd kick him, which was what I wanted to do.

"Please let me go."

He spoke with an odd decorum, and rather softly, because he did not want to rouse anyone in the hotel. He remained on the floor, obstinate, stupid in fear. I switched on the overhead light, and under the shadows of the turning fan blades Rajat lay, so like a scrawny carcass that I was at once reminded of my mission: identifying the small body in the other hotel room.

"Tell me why you came here."

He covered his face and whimpered into his fingers.

"Never mind. I know. You're looking for any incriminating evidence that I've found. You suspect I've got something on you."

"No." It was less a distinct word than a groan of misery, something like Aw.

"You invited me to visit the Lodge to see Mrs. Unger so you'd have time to come here and search my room."

That Aw again, more anguished.

"But you didn't count on my coming back early—" I stopped myself before telling him that my session with Mrs. Unger was a turnoff that left me so doubtful and suspicious I'd hurried back to my room. Now I had a whiff of mothballs rising from him.

"You must have been in that wardrobe a long time."

"Please don't tell Ma."

"That you came here?"

"Or that you found anything to implicate me. I know it looks bad, but" — he rolled over and groaned into the floor—"I did not murder that child."

"Who did?"

He began to speak, he choked up, then he squealed, "I do not know. I had no hand in it."

"Was it Mrs. Unger?"

"Absolutely not," he said, shaking off his tears. "She is pure. She is steeped in nectar!"

Even in the heat, in this harsh light, with Rajat on the floor beneath me, I smiled at this statement, and in my reflex of disbelief I kicked him in the arm.

"Sorry. I couldn't help it."

"Ma helps these poor children," he said, his voice strained from my kick. "She is their mother." He had become a little calmer — was it my kick? "You saw the child when you arrived."

"The little girl being taken away," I said. "Her name is Usha."

"I don't know her name. I only know that she was being taken."

Now I understood. I said, "You wanted me to witness that. You wanted me to watch the American woman take her away from Mrs. Unger."

He didn't say no. He seemed to grow smaller on the floor. He was whimpering again. It seemed that every time I mentioned Mrs. Unger's name he grew fearful.

"It happens all the time," I said. "Mrs. Unger sells them. Doesn't she?"

"There are many," he said. "It is her greatness."

Rajat, still contracting, now a tiny bundle with a head, began to cry.

"You knew I'd see that, and you knew I'd be so preoccupied with Mrs. Unger that you'd be able to search my room. Who did you bribe to get in here?" But he didn't reply. He was still sniveling. "I came back early. I surprised you, and so you hid in the wardrobe. You're lucky I didn't hit you harder, you little shit."

My bullying him made him cry more miserably, and I began to feel sorry for him. He was murmuring "Please."

"I want you to tell me everything you know about Mrs. Unger." I stood over him. His murmuring had grown urgent, as though in a kind of panic he thought I was going to kick him again. This made me feel like a monster, and while it gave me a sense of power I had never felt before, it both embarrassed me and made me feel reckless.

"Ma is good. Ma is generous."

"You're afraid of her, afraid she'll hear you."

"Ma hears everything."

The way he said that made him seem pitiful. I said, "She can't hear you now."

"It is Ma's power," he said, turning his smeared face upward to the light.

"So why did you come here?"

"I wanted" — he swallowed and started again—"'I only wanted to save Charlie."

"From what? From whom?"

But he sniffed and turned his face to the floor.

"You wanted to save yourself. You're a sneak and a liar."

"Yes, I am a sneak. I have taken advantage of you by invading your room. But, sir, I am not a liar."

"Get up," I said.

He struggled to his feet. His face shone with tears and saliva. His greasy hair was pushed sideways, giving him a look of insanity, and his clothes — he was always so neat — were rumpled and twisted.

"Empty your pockets."

I was sorry I asked. What Indians carried in their pockets was so sad: an ID card showing his startled face, a torn bus ticket, a receipt ("From chemist shop, for my acne"), a tube of acne cream, some folded rupees, a few coins, a key chain holding three old keys, a small brass Ganesh on a loop, some gray pills of lint.

"Please don't report me."

"All I care about is the truth," I said. It was the echo of what I'd said to him in the lobby when we were having tea, and it sounded more pompous now. I was glad there was no one around to hear me.

"There is no god higher than truth," Rajat said. I stared at him, smiling again, amazed that he'd managed to say something more pompous than what I'd just said. Even standing bedraggled and defeated in my room, almost clownish in a tragic way, he was capable of being superbly sententious. And he became more serious. "But you will never find the truth here."

"Then why did you break into my room?"

"I wasn't looking for the truth. I was trying to find all those lies that people are telling about me."

"And what about that little girl Usha? Isn't it true that I saw her taken away?"

"I don't know what you saw."

"I could call the police now."

"I beg you not to," he said, and actually assumed the cringing posture of a bhikhiri, a beggar.

"Put that stuff back in your pockets," I said, and as he picked it up, pinching at the lint, I added, "Now get out."

I unbolted and unlocked the door, and, wincing, he slipped out. But he held on to the doorjamb with his skinny fingers, hesitating.

"Please, sir, come with me to the entrance or they will suspect that I broke in. It will make me look so disgraceful."

Surprised by his sudden impudence, I laughed and followed him downstairs to the lobby and the front door, to make this little sneak look honest. The chowkidar was asleep, barefoot in his khakis, his truncheon like a pillow under his head. Rajat thanked me by bowing, making a namashkar with his prayerful hands, and then he fled into the yellow glare of the alley.

He hadn't found the dead hand that I had hidden in the space behind the bottom drawer — I checked this as soon as I got back to the room. He couldn't have found the carpet because it was in Dr. Mooly Mukherjee's lab. But I knew that he had been looking for any evidence I had of the corpse in his room, and to destroy it. He knew that I was on to him.

He had also done me a favor — but why? Though he denied it, he obviously wanted me to see the small girl Usha being taken away. And his saying "There are many," spoken in praise, was really an implied indictment of Mrs. Unger.

What impressed me most in all of this was that in my every encounter with Rajat, he had never said a single negative thing about Mrs. Unger. Not a word of criticism, out of respect, or fear, or both; only the most elaborate gratitude.

I slept badly, and when I woke, gasping in the heat of early morning, I remembered one other drawer I hadn't checked — my desk drawer, where I kept my notes, letters, and receipts in a folder. The letter from Mrs. Unger that had started me on this quest — handmade paper, purple ink, Dear Friend—was gone. Somehow Rajat had thieved it.

In this uncertain time, a few days after that encounter with a darker Mrs. Unger, the dramatic adoption of Usha, and the intrusion of Rajat, I had a call from Howard at the consulate.

"Dr. Mooly Mukherjee has been trying to reach you."

"I'll give him a call."

"I'm kind of curious about the result," Howard said. "That is, if you feel like sharing it."

"I'll let you know."

"I mean, the figure in the carpet."

"Right."

I called Dr. Mukherjee. He said, "It would be a lot easier if you came to HQ."

"Can't you tell me over the phone?"

"I'd rather not."

"Are there bloodstains?"

"As a policeman I have learned not to be too comfortable on the telephone," he said. He pronounced it tellyphone. "Telephones are leaky."

We arranged a time to meet for the following morning. I did not report this to Howard. He called me — somehow he knew about the appointment. He said, "Mind if I come along?" I couldn't refuse: he had helped me find Dr. Mooly Mukherjee.

Dr. Mukherjee welcomed us. "Tea or coffee?" He remarked on the weather. The monsoon was due any day now. He spoke of his family, his daughter's wish to study in the United States, altogether chatty and inconsequential in the Bengali way. At one time I would have felt he was trying to distract us because he had nothing to report. But now I knew that he wanted to engage us because he had something important to say. He was chatting because he wanted our full attention.

The piece of carpet lay in a plastic pouch on his desk like a laboratory specimen, an inked-in label stuck to the outside.

"My youngest, Shona, wants so earnestly to go to America," he was saying, stroking his mustache. "Postgraduate study. Lawrence, in state of Kansas." He said estudy and estate. "I am hoping that Mr. Howard will ask powers-that-be to look favorably on her visa application."

"Dr. Mukherjee has four brilliant daughters," Howard said, avoiding a direct answer.

"With my good wife and my dear mother, that is six women in the household. Petticoat government, you could say."

Bursting to ask, I said, "What did you find on the piece of carpet?"

"Ah, yes, the material evidence," he said, as though he'd forgotten. But his delay was an attempt to be dramatic. He picked up the plastic pouch. He held it in two hands. He said, "This is the curious incident of the dog that didn't bark in the night. You know the reference?"

"Sherlock Holmes."

"'Hound of the Baskervilles'?" Howard said.

"No," Dr. Mukherjee said, and looked delighted. "'Silver Blaze' story. Another clue is the curried mutton. About a racehorse."

"I haven't read that one," I said.

"Interesting not for what is there but for what is not there."

"Bloodstains?"

"No blood. No substantial DNA. Traces of human hair, we think."

"That's all?"

"Food. Oil. Bits of dirt and grit. Better ask" — he tugged at his mustache with his free hand—"what is not there?"

Howard said, "Okay. What's missing?"

Dr. Mukherjee manipulated the plastic pouch so that we could see the edge of the carpet, which was its true edge, with a design and a double-stitched seam. Because this was not the small fragment that Mina had sent me but the bigger stained piece I'd taken from the floor of the closet, it had a complete design and seemed altogether more identifiable.

I said, "Do you mean you can make out the whole design of the carpet from this piece?"

"Of course, but so what?" he said. "Carpets are standard designs. This is floral. Also vines. Maybe a bird on an arbor in the figure." He twitched his mustache as if to reject the notion that the design was important. "Maybe some curry gravy or ghee butter on top side." He showed me the stain. "Vegetable matter."

I was smiling at the expression, and Howard winked, as Dr. Mukherjee turned the carpet over.

"Observe seam."

"I don't see anything."

"Exactly. You see nothing." He was triumphant. "But look closely and you see double stitch and coupon stub."

"Coupon stub?"

"Strip of cloth where label has been torn off."

"Ah, the label's missing," Howard said. "So what does that tell us?"

"That someone doesn't want carpet to be identified," he said. "But they were hasty. Large piece of label is missing. Coupon stub remains in stitching. This strip."

Now he put the plastic pouch down and opened a large manila envelope. He took out a black-and-white photograph that showed a strip of pale cloth with a stitch running through it and smudges of ink beside it.

"What are those squiggles?"

"Squiggles are Devanagari script that has been cut in half by hasty removal of label from stitching."

"But bigger."

"Lab has enhanced script with photographic process. Basic forensic work, nothing special."

"So it tells the manufacturer?"

"Not manufacturer, regrettably. But see—"

He placed another piece of paper next to the bisected script and completed the word.

"— it matches."

"What does it say?"

"Place of origin."

"And that would be?"

"Mirzapur. In U.P."

I frowned, as though in frustration, so as not to reveal the panic I felt.

"You are right to make such a face, sir," Dr. Mukherjee said. "Very many carpets are made in Mirzapur. Mirzapur is carpet mecca."

"So it's a wild goose chase."

"I think otherwise. Useful chase. Some weeks ago you showed me a body part with no fingerprints — all prints abraded. I offered my opinion that this could have been the hand of a brickmaker or a worker in clay."

"I remember."

"It could also have been the hand of a carpet weaver. Making the knots all day, a person can lose his fingerprints. Perhaps the two are related."

Afterward, Howard said, "You seem a little downcast by the news. He didn't find bloodstains. Isn't that a good thing?"

"He found something more important — to me, at least. The Mirzapur connection. And the link with that hand."

"Tons of carpets are made there. You heard him."

"News to me."

"Mirzapur is full of sweatshops."

"I need to go there."

"Tell me why." When I hesitated he said, "You said you were doing a favor for a friend. Is this about the favor?"

"About the friend."

17

WE HIGH-STEPPED past squatting groups of men who were bright-eyed with fatigue, clawing with skinny hands at their bowls of food, yellow gravy and blue, gluey-looking vegetables — Howrah station again, the Night Mail to Mugalsarai and Mirzapur. Howard led the way, excusing himself in chatty Bengali, past the men who were licking their fingers and lapping their palms with gummy tongues. Seeing us, perhaps hoping for a tip, the conductor showed us to our compartment. Howard was efficient in using the available space — the hooks, the shelves, the water-bottle holder. We sat facing each other across the little table, and the coach jumped with a clang, shoving us against the cushions, then settled and slid clicking past the platform and into the suburbs.

"Ever read Nirad Chaudhuri?" Howard asked. "He's great on Calcutta. He talks about how the land around the city looks 'poisoned to death.' And the countryside is like 'a mangy bandicoot bitten by a snake.'"

I was staring out the window at the small battered tenements on the mudflats, wondering how to begin.

"What's wrong?" he asked, probably because I hadn't commented on the colorful Chaudhuri quotes.

"I have something to tell you."

He sat back in his seat and cupped his hands in a hospitable gesture. "Go on," he said. "We have plenty of time. Trains are great places for confessions."

I said, A few weeks ago, I got a letter at my hotel…"

"It's an amazing story," he said, an hour or so later, as we were stopped at Dhanbad.

I had told him everything — almost everything. I had left out the tantric massages and the caresses in the fragrant vault of the Lodge. I had left out my pleasuring her, avoiding any mention of the sacred spot on her lotus flower or my wand of light. That part was unexplainable and made me seem needy or obsessed, weak, easily manipulated, susceptible to Mrs. Unger's attention — all true. I played up her philanthropy, the lost children, the goat sacrifice, the visit to Nagapatti in distant Silchar. I tried to describe the relationship between Charlie and Rajat, but I confessed that I didn't understand them at all. Howard found it all fascinating and didn't ask for more details. As for Mrs. Unger's disclosure that she was black, what was the point? I was not capable of verifying this unexpected assertion.

The last straw was my witnessing the American woman taking the child Usha away, almost certainly adopting her, something that Mrs. Unger had always said she deplored.

In telling him my story, I felt the growing humiliation that many people must feel when, in a quiet moment, they relate to a logical and contented soul the details of an irrational attachment. Only when I spoke to him (and remembered much more that I was too ashamed to tell) did I see the extent of my recklessness, and I wondered how big a fool I'd been.

Howard said, "But it seems odd that she should ask you to investigate. I mean, why you?"

"She said she liked my writing," I said. "I know that sounds lame. But she also thinks I have influential friends."

"Like who?"

"You."

He laughed. "That's us. Crime busters."

"There was no crime that I could see. There was only a misunderstanding. When I started, I didn't think she really bought Rajat's story. I didn't buy it either. It sounded preposterous. A corpse turning up in a hotel room in the dead of night? Crazy."

"This is Calcutta," Howard said, "where all things are possible."

"Rajat seemed the excitable type. Looking for drama. Maybe it was a way of getting attention. So I thought. Then I met Mina."

"The one who was slapped around and fired."

"And the one who brought me the dead hand," I said. "She verified the story of the corpse. So Rajat must have been telling the truth."

"Why didn't you tell that to Mrs. Unger?"

"Because around the same time I got the piece of carpet. I needed to deal with that. I wanted something more. You know the rest."

"About Mrs. Unger denying she'd been to Mirzapur in U.P., yes. But maybe the chowkidar got it wrong. There's a Mirzapur up in Murshidabad, and another Mirzapur near Dacca. I checked. Maybe he was just guessing about where she'd gone."

I liked his challenges. He was forcing me to think clearly. I said, "Let's see if the answer's in this Mirzapur."

But how could I tell him what I felt — that her touching me had told me something, that I didn't know how sincere she was until she put her hands on me that last time. The falsity was in her fingers, and it had alarmed me; her power now seemed dangerous, even fatal. Howard was so rational I had no way of explaining my suspicions to him.

"Here's a printout of the factories," he said, taking a sheet of paper from a file folder. "We'll find more when we get there. We're meeting a Mr. Ghosh there. He's said to be helpful — he's from the area."

Howard was the perfect traveling companion. Calm, accepting, uncomplaining, and he spoke Bengali. He didn't judge me. He said he had been a Peace Corps volunteer long ago, and it showed: he was resourceful and curious. He was taking a professional interest in my problem, but he was also a friend.

Perhaps because we were two ferringhis traveling alone, the conductor didn't put any Indians in our compartment when the train stopped at Burdwan and Asansol and Dhanbad. Indians who boarded the train at those places filled the other compartments. And now I was used to the routine: the snack seller with his tray, the bookseller with his stack, the drink seller with his bucket of bottles, the man taking dinner orders. We had left Howrah at sunset. By eight we were eating from our food trays—"bird flu on a skewer," Howard said of the kebab. Then he lay down and read the second volume of Doris Lessing's autobiography, and I read my most recent pages of "A Dead Hand," detailing my relationship with Mrs. Unger, up to our return from Assam, when she was still unambiguously a good person — not saintly but greathearted, robust, always positive, the energetic soul of philanthropy and good works; a nurturer, the woman with healing hands. She was protective and sensual and vitalizing, "Ma" in every sense.

I wanted to write more, but everything I'd discovered about Mrs. Unger, everything I'd seen, I now understood was an idealized portrait of a woman protecting her son's friend. Where I'd seen light I now saw shadow; where I'd seen generosity I now saw self-interest; and the contradictions jarred me. These new details made her more human but harder to understand. I had loved being with Mrs. Unger. I'd felt safe, even adored. I'd been able to count on her. Now I was doubtful. I didn't want her to touch me, and when she had I'd recoiled, and wasn't sure why.

I couldn't tell any of this to Howard. Anyway, this inner history of my relationship had very little to do with identifying the source of the carpet in Mirzapur.

Returning from the toilet — always a dose of reality on an Indian train — I remarked on how full the coach was, many of the passengers squatting in the vestibule outside the toilet, on the wet floor.

"Most of them are yatris, pilgrims, going to Varanasi. They'll be getting off at Mugalsarai — it's not far from there to the holy city. They'll be doing pujas and cremations and immersing themselves in Mother Ganga."

"It's a nice thought, purifying yourself in a holy river."

"But when you see the river you think only of disease. It's full of half-burned body parts and ashes and cow shit. Sludge and dead flowers. The Indian paradox. It doesn't matter that the river is muddy and putrid, it's still sacred."

"It makes them feel better."

"Right. And the goddess that wrecks and destroys is also the goddess of creation — Kali, the inaccessible." He had stopped reading the Lessing book but still held it, his finger in the pages. "You know the line from Out of Africa? Africa, amongst the continents, will teach it to you: that God and the Devil are one, the majesty coeternal, not two uncreated but one uncreated.' A very Indian way of looking at the world."

"But in India we're on the outside looking in."

"So true. What was that expression you used in one of your pieces? 'Romantic voyeur.'"

I liked his quoting me after quoting Karen Blixen, not for the aptness of what I said but for the reassurance that if he remembered what I had once written, he was on my side. I needed a friend because we were strangers here, walking through this populous country, on this crowded train, in the bazaars and at the temples, and borne along by the mob, never able to penetrate, never belong, always kept apart as spectators. He was a consular officer; he actually dated his ex-wife, who was at the embassy in Delhi; and he took an interest in Calcutta. But what excuse did I have? Really, I had no business here.

Never in my life had I been in a place that I found at once so worthy of study, so dense, so superficially exotic, with people so likable and talkative, that was at the same time so impenetrable, even repellent. The more I tried to engage, the more I was excluded. Every activity in India, every Indian, every scene, said, You don't belong here and You will never understand, but never explicitly said, Go home. For a foreigner, living in India required complete surrender. We were not rejected, we were mildly tolerated, because foreigners in India always had a use.

"I could watch this for a year and still not understand," I'd said to Mrs. Unger at the Kali temple in Gauhati.

"There is nothing to be understood in India," she'd said. "Only to be accepted."

That had been something else that attracted me to her. Of all the foreigners I met in India, she was the one who was most at home. It was not her sari or her hennaed feet, not even her pieties, though they stuck in my mind: "Ida and Pingala must come into balance to allow the kundalini to rise in the Sushumna channel," or "The skills and benefits of White Tantra practices increase one's ability to master Red Tantra." Nor was it her ability to live among the people and flourish. It was her certainty and her calmness, almost a way of breathing ("pranayama," she would have said) that made her brave.

"Anyone who has not learned to hate India has not spent enough time here. You can never love India — you will be destroyed."

"What then?"

"Respect India as you would a tiger. If not, you'll be eaten alive." Another time, "India is elephantine."

She did not fear anyone in India. Yet most foreigners — Howard and I, for example — were so careful as to seem timid. Mrs. Unger was bold, another of her maternal qualities. She was a protector.

Or so I had thought. I was headed to Mirzapur to find out if any of this was true.

We rocked through the night, and at dawn most of the passengers got out at Mugalsarai, as Howard had predicted. The chai seller ladled milky tea into plastic cups for us, and two hours later we arrived in Mirzapur.

Mr. Ghosh had found our coach and stood outside as we descended to the platform.

"Welcome, welcome."

He carried a briefcase and an umbrella, and seemed, for our purposes, to be overdressed — a suit jacket, a tie, heavy shoes; burdened by the clothes, but it was a uniform. He was defining himself in the Indian way, to impress us with his seriousness, the important weight of his clutter, and he wore two lapel pins. A smudge of yellow dust glittered on his forehead. Emblems of power.

"Good journey?"

Howard said, "Excellent. And we are honored to be here."

"Honor is mine. I am honored to be your guide."

He made no move to take our bags — that was the job of the porter. It would not have occurred to him even to offer. He fluttered his hands at a ragged man, who dived at us and snatched the bags.

"We must have a cup of tea," he said. "Tearoom is adjacent on station platform. We can discuss program."

He unbuckled his briefcase in the tearoom and brought out a map of Mirzapur. This he flattened on the splashed tablecloth while explaining that it was already out of date.

"We're looking for a particular carpet factory," I said.

"So many are there. Big are there. Small are there." He snapped his fingers at a waiter. "What about cakes? What about eatables? Have you breakfasted?"

"Nothing for me," I said, and Howard signaled by raising his hands that he was content.

"What is factory name?"

"I don't know the name, but here's a piece of carpet from it. At least I think it is."

Mr. Ghosh handled it casually, as something valueless, and hardly looked at it. He smiled the smile of the Indian pedant I'd met many times, who enjoyed telling me a thing was impossible, or had no meaning, or could not be properly understood by a non-Indian. Mrs. Unger always had a prompt reply for such people, but I was at a loss.

"No, no, no, no," he was saying.

An Indian man of this sort got more pleasure out of saying that something was impossible than offering to be helpful. Here we had just arrived after fourteen hours on the train and he was telling us we were wasting our time. Being obstructive inflated his importance.

"Many factories make this carpet. It is standard design."

"But we suspect this factory exports goods to America," Howard said.

Seeming to gloat over our naïveté, Mr. Ghosh said, "All factories export to America."

"Maybe we should go back to Calcutta," I said, to see what he would say.

"I can initiate suitable inquiries." He shrugged and looked again at the piece of carpet. "I can chalk it in."

It would have ruined his pleasure to see us depart early, and he could only be compensated if we stayed. If a thing seemed too easy, Mr. Ghosh was of negligible importance. The idea was for him to strike a balance between the impossible and the negotiable.

Howard knew how to handle him. He thanked Mr. Ghosh for meeting us. He expressed the hope that we would find what we were looking for. He said that we were delighted to be in Mirzapur, famous for its textiles, a legend in the carpet industry.

This elaborate politeness had the effect of arousing Mr. Ghosh's civic pride and helping him relax, even if he was not disarmed. Howard was being properly appreciative, but I could see that Mr. Ghosh viewed me (accurately) as impulsive.

I said, "We think there might be child labor involved."

"Child labor is so common." Mr. Ghosh looked defiant.

"One of these children might be dead."

"Who lives forever?" he said, and smiled, pleased with his reply.

"But he was a child."

"Even children die."

"This child might have died in the factory."

He grinned his pedantic grin and rested on the handle of his umbrella. "It is not nursery. It is factory."

"Backbreaking work."

"Excuse me, good sir. Not at all. Weaving work is done with fingers only. Children tie knots. As a Mirzapurian, I am familiar with this work."

"Many children?"

"Lakhs, sir."

Then we drank our tea in silence. Mr. Ghosh had gained the advantage. Instead of guiding us, he was elaborating the difficulties.

But Howard was unfazed. He was attentive, sympathetic, deferential.

"We are ignorant visitors," Howard said. "You're the expert. What shall we do?"

Mr. Ghosh took a sip of tea, sloshed it behind his teeth like mouthwash, and swallowed.

"Familiarization is best," he said.

"How do we accomplish that?"

"Windscreen tour."

"Looking out the window?" I asked.

"Of hired motor vehicle."

"How well do you know these factories?"

"From the ground up. Thorough knowledge," he said, "of ins and outs."

"Exactly how many carpet factories are there?"

He became professorial again, leaning on his umbrella. "Are you meaning carpet factories, or factories that create weavings."

It took me a moment to translate vee-vings. I showed him the piece of carpet again. "This sort of thing."

He handled it and removed his eyeglasses. He put on a different pair of glasses and studied the fragment of carpet he had dismissed as worthless some minutes before.

"This is like calling card," he said. "This is like signature."

While he frowned over it, Howard glanced at me. I rolled my eyes. He smiled. I envied Howard his equanimity.

"We are in your capable hands," Howard said.

"It is of some little interest." He nodded at it and turned it in his hands.

"The design?"

"Not at all," he said. "Design says nothing."

"What then?"

"Underside. Backing and stitching. Label has been removed."

"So we were told." I wanted to snatch the piece of carpet away from him and slap it against his head until he howled in pain.

"Made in Mirzapur," Howard said.

"I could have informed you of this fact, sir." He examined his fingernails and took an interest in one thumbnail.

"Would it help if we said we were looking for a carpet factory owned and operated by an American?"

"Several are American-owned." He plucked at the cuffs of his shirt, straightening them in the sleeves of his jacket.

"I mean, an American woman."

Mr. Ghosh looked disappointed. He put the piece of carpet on the table and tucked it into the plastic pouch. His shoulders went slack; he lost his smirk of superiority.

"American Goddess," he said.

18

WHERE WERE THE TREES? Where were the parks? The place was dense and darkish and arterial. In this hot shadowy city of jumbled shops and blatting traffic I had the feeling I sometimes got in Calcutta, that I was passing through the entrails of a huge unhealthy body. Not just the look of the place but a brimming odor of muddy water, a prickle of stagnation; it was the river.

"Formerly this was Cotton Exchange and banking street."

Mr. Ghosh sat beside the driver, nodding and narrating.

"See, house of British merchant."

But it was all a failing semiruin mobbed by hurrying people. Our car was jostled by auto-rickshaws and cycle-rickshaws, by big dusty buses with Horn Please painted on the rear, and by the inevitable skinny cows. We traveled into the crowd of accumulating pedestrians, down side streets, and it really was like circulating inside an enormous, bloated, sprawling organism. Past sewers and sludge, the fruit sellers, old men hawking religious relics, pictures of bright-colored gods with green and blue faces, children selling packets of aspirin. Everyone was selling, no one buying. In this flat city I could see only twenty feet ahead.

The human activity, all the shrieks, the car horns, the hawkers' cries, masked the background, the Mirzapur of crumbling shops and broken pavements. The frenzy obscured the reality, that the city was poisonous and falling apart. But this was the feeling I had in most parts of Calcutta, because I was a visitor with the luxury of making snap judgments, able to move on.

"Look at that balcony," Howard said. "So beautifully carved. And that venerable old man."

His appreciation shamed me. He could see beauty in a peeling green porch, a wicker chair, an old coot in a diaper-tike dhoti. What I noticed was that none of the children was playing; they all looked like little old men.

But I had come here for a practical reason: to find the source of this carpet, to get to the bottom of Mrs. Unger's mystery. I was hot and uncomfortable, groggy from the rattling night on the train. I now resented Mrs. Unger for setting me on this path. I wasn't cut out for investigative reporting. But that shamed me too, for wasn't she a woman who devoted her life to good works? I now remembered what Mr. Ghosh had said.

"Why do you call her the Goddess?"

He didn't answer. He was talking to the driver. I noticed that we were on a slight incline, a sloping road lined with shops and the usual monsoon drain, dry in this season but filled with heaps of paper and plastic trash. Beyond the shops the light was brighter, the sky higher, as though there was a valley on the other side.

I saw distant houses and a brown, deeply scored, stony embankment like a hillside.

"Ganga," Mr. Ghosh said.

This excited Howard, who said, "Where are the ghats?"

"Ghats are there. Pujas are there. See garlands in river."

I saw thick stone piers, pitted with age, porous as bone, worn by the sloshing of the river, and beneath in the slow slip of the water a scum as of garbage and orange peels, sodden castoff marigolds and festering lilies.

"Where are the factories?" I said.

"Temple first. Vindhyachal. Presiding deity Vindhyavasini Devi."

"I don't want to see the temple," I said.

Howard said, "Why don't we let Mr. Ghosh…?"

"I want to see the American factory."

"Two American factories," he said. "Obeetee is major exporter. Long history. Handlooms. Dhurries. Woolen druggets. You are wanting druggets?"

"I am not wanting druggets," I said, and hearing a shriek in my voice tried to calm myself. "I want to see the other one."

"They are abundant," Mr. Ghosh said.

"The Goddess. Why do you call her the Goddess?"

"She is making puja at Kali Khoh temple."

"That's the only reason?"

"And when the business was cracked down, she prevailed over adversity."

"Why the crackdown?"

"Hullaballoo," Mr. Ghosh said. "We go later. In meantime we will visit handloom shop at Obeetee."

Of course for a visit to one of these shops he got baksheesh, and when we bought something he would find out what we paid and would get a commission.

Howard began to say something, but I interrupted.

"We have very little time," I said. "I want to see the American woman's factory. I want to see the carpets. Maybe I'll buy something there and you'll get some rupees."

"They are not proffering commission," he said. "See temple."

"No temple."

Howard said, "How far is the temple?"

"Factory," I said.

"Hotel Janhavi is adjacent. You can book in, bathe body, take some few breakfast eatables."

"Factory," I said.

"You are chiding, sir."

"I am not chiding."

Mr. Ghosh sighed, and with great reluctance he gave the driver a whispered order.

"What my friend means, Mr. Ghosh, is that we'd like to see the factory first, and then we'll look at the temple," Howard said.

"Temple is treasure of Mirzapur. Many yatris come to see Vindhyachal. Then to Astabhuja for goddess Mahasaraswati puja. Then to Kali Khoh for Maa Kali puja. This is holy place! Not merely weavings and carpets and floor coverings and whatnot. It is historical. Thousands of years."

He spoke resentfully, as if he did not want to take us where we wanted to go — my only reason for being in Mirzapur. And, thwarted in doing what he wanted to do, which was to be in charge, he sulked and said nothing while we crawled through traffic. As in Calcutta, traffic was also cows, pushcarts, wagons drawn by oxen and buffalo, auto-rickshaws, and old men on bikes, too maddening to be picturesque.

"Where are we?" Howard asked.

"Station road. Embankment. As requested."

Mr. Ghosh made it clear that he was taking us under protest. The car turned into a side road, and now the river was near enough to bulk in the air as a strong sewer smell. The light was gauzy in this openness. The city fell away at the littered and weedy bank of trampled mud. Beyond the stretch of water was another bank, low houses at the edge of it. Mr. Ghosh groaned and nodded as the car labored in the ruts and the wheels thumped into the potholes.

He said something to the driver. Then, as the car slowed down, "Better we pass on foot."

"How far?"

Instead of answering, he gestured vaguely with the back of his hand. He gathered his umbrella and briefcase, and sighed as he got out of the car.

Ahead was a stucco wall about eight feet high with shards of glass embedded in the top, bristling like crude spikes. The gate was a pair of high steel doors, painted green and stenciled with a number. As I kicked along the dusty path, stumbling on tussocks and loose rocks, I thought: Mrs. Unger comes here?

A man in a heavy suit of fuzzy brown wool like an old-fashioned army uniform stood at the gate. He wore a black beret and carried a shiny black club that he brandished like a truncheon. He had a brass plate pinned to his shirt, official-looking, like the chowkidar at the Lodge.

Mr. Ghosh spoke to him in what I supposed was Hindi, first a greeting, then what sounded like a hectoring explanation.

"Not possible," the guard said in English.

Mr. Ghosh rested on his umbrella, using it as a cane. He spoke again.

The guard made an ambiguous head-bob and repeated, "Not possible."

Mr. Ghosh turned to us and said, "Not open to public."

"Wait a minute," Howard said, becoming decisive. He briskly approached the guard and looked him in the eye. He took out his passport and, nudging Mr. Ghosh aside, held it open the way a policeman shows his badge. He said, "I am from the United States consulate general in Calcutta. Do you see this? We are here on official business. Please open the gate and let us in."

The guard looked at Howard's diplomatic passport. He muttered and then withdrew. After a few minutes another man appeared, this one in shirtsleeves, and he examined the passport. Satisfied that it was genuine, he backed away, and the next sound I heard was the hasp being lifted and the steel bolt shot. The door swung open.

"Coffee, tea?" the man said.

I said no. Howard said yes. We had tea in the man's office. Howard whispered to me that since we were lucky to have gained entry, we had to observe the courtesies.

The man said his name was Joshi. Born in Ahmedabad, he had come to Mirzapur to learn the weaving trade. He was about forty or so, potbellied, with thin arms and a string around his wrist. "I am plant manager. Supervise, yes, I can do. Imitate I cannot. Weaving is very demanding," he said, wagging his head to indicate the depth of his seriousness.

"I suppose it's very technical," Howard said.

"So technical," Mr. Joshi said. "First, design is made. Then master plan, each knot specified. We are having rooms where designers toil. They are pukka artists, no doubt. The weavers read designs. We have yarn, hand-spun. Dyeing vats. All facilities."

"Do any of your carpets look like this?"

I showed him the patch of carpet.

"It seems one of ours," Mr. Joshi said. "We have specific naksha for this. That is, master plan. This pile I recognize too."

"It is like signature, I tell you," Mr. Ghosh said, not to be outdone. "I have informed the American gentlemen of this."

Mr. Joshi worked his thumbnail into the pile. He said, "Not first quality," and smiled. "Not valuable. Not collectible. Third quality. Parlor unit."

"How would this carpet be sold?"

"As export item. Machine-spun yarn. Not vegetable color. Chemical dye. Standard naksha." He flipped it over. He dug his nail into it again, as though determining whether it was edible. "This piece is export only. You found in America?"

"Calcutta," I said.

He stared at the fragment in his hands, then he smiled. "Not possible."

"What if it was taken without your notice, or stolen by an employee?"

"Our employees are living on site. On premises thieving is minimal."

"By some miracle, this carpet ended up in Calcutta. It found its way to a hotel, where it was cut into pieces. That's where I came across it."

"I have no knowledge of this unauthorized usage," Mr. Joshi said.

Howard said, "We'd like to see your workshop."

"Not possible," Mr. Joshi said.

"We'd like to meet your employees."

"Not available." He pretended to be impassive, but I could see he was adamant.

Even Howard, the soul of politeness, hated to be rebuffed. He said, "You are the supervisor, Mr. Joshi?"

"Yes, sir. Plant manager."

"Who is your boss?"

"The sahib, sir."

"We want to meet the sahib."

Mr. Joshi's face became waxen, and he swallowed hard as he seemed to make a rapid calculation that showed in his glistening eyes.

"Sahib very busy, sir."

"Give him this card." Howard handed Mr. Joshi his business card from the consulate, with the American eagle embossed in gold on it. "Please tell him we want a word with him."

Mr. Joshi fingered the card, studied it with his lips.

"Chowkidar has passed me this card already," he said, and then wagged his head, the wobble that meant yes.

After Mr. Joshi left the room, Mr. Ghosh said, "Chap is doing level best."

Howard simply shrugged. "We've come all this way. Why not give it a shot?"

We sat in the tiny office, tired from the long night in the train, weary from the rebuffs. It was hotter here than in Calcutta, the slimy heat of the river thickening the air. We had not washed. We had hardly eaten.

"Better we go to Hotel Janhavi and make telephonic inquiries from there," Mr. Ghosh said.

We did not reply. I was not sure what to do, though what Mr. Joshi had said reassured me. The carpet was definitely from this factory. It had arrived at the Ananda rolled around a dead child and had turned up in Rajat's room. So, some of the pieces fit in some larger scheme, but the scheme itself was a mystery. Who was the boy? Where had he come from? Why had he been brought to the Ananda, and why did the poor boy have no fingerprints? Perhaps the loss of fingerprints was associated with his weaving, as Dr. Mooly Mukherjee had suggested.

All these disjointed speculations should have prepared me for anything, yet I was not prepared for what happened next.

A series of bangs, each one louder than the one before, seemed more jarring in the heat. A door slammed in the hallway, then Mr. Joshi's door was flung open. Charlie Unger stood before us, very red in the face, his white kurta spotless.

"What are you doing here? What do you want?"

A person reveals his true personality in a show of temper. Charlie had never been more than a smirking shadow before, seeming to resent my being with his mother; or he had sulked and been oblique, but always enigmatic. All his talk of liking my writing had not convinced me. Now he was fussed and furious, hands on hips, defying us — defying me, his hating eyes dancing in anger, his lips twisted in disdain, the real Charlie.

"We'd like to look at your factory." It was just an assumption that it was his, but he didn't deny it.

"Does Mother know you're here?"

"In a way, she sent us here."

"That's crap. She would have called." He turned to Howard. "Who are you?"

"You have my card," Howard said. "I'm from the consulate."

"You have no business here."

"As Mr. Joshi probably told you, we want to look around."

"Listen, doll, take your friends and leave. Go back to wherever you belong. You don't belong here."

Howard visibly stiffened at this, yet when he spoke he was calm and exceedingly polite. "Please have another look at my card. You'll see I'm public affairs officer at the consulate. I am answerable to the State Department for the activities of all Americans in my area. Mirzapur is in it, and so is Calcutta. That would include you."

"I have news for you, doll," Charlie said, trying to interrupt.

But Howard continued: "If you want to go on doing business here, you'll show us your factory, your workshops, and your employees. We're not leaving until we see them."

"We're proud of what we're doing. My mother created this whole business from nothing."

"That's admirable."

"We're not breaking any laws."

"Good. Now would you mind showing us around?"

"We're one of the biggest carpet exporters in Mirzapur. We're supporting a lot of families."

He flounced out of Mr. Joshi's office and we followed. Hurrying beside him, Mr. Joshi opened doors and stood aside as Charlie said, "Design room — color plates are made here," and on a low platform a dozen men worked over large sheets of paper tacked to boards, inking patterns in bright colors.

In the next room, men were transferring the colored patterns onto a large piece of graph paper, one square at a time.

"Each square represents one knot," Mr. Joshi said.

The men smiled hello from their workstations, waving shyly as we left, hands on hearts.

"Why is this door locked?" I asked as we walked farther down the narrow corridor.

"Looms," Mr. Joshi said. "The weaving room." And he opened the padlock on the tongue of the hasp. He eased the bolt and opened the door.

"I don't care what you think. We're not ashamed of this," Charlie said.

The door gave onto a large, high-ceilinged room. It could have been a school. I sensed a sudden hush, even over the rattle of the wooden looms. My first thought was that it was a schoolroom, the children small and attentive, all of them barefoot, climbing on benches, clinging to the big looms, some of them knotting yarn or stringing the vertical warps, others crouching, fastening knots, still more hammering, beating the interlocking strings and knots.

That was my first impression, little scholars, silenced by the entrance of the headmaster. But I quickly saw their solemnity, their fear, the intensity of their concentration — they were cowed and compact, like prisoners. It was a prison, a labor camp, filled with wooden frames and clattering; it was a mass of loose ends; it was a confusion of small souls toiling with tiny hands.

"Children," I said. "They're all kids."

I walked over to a loom, and when I approached a boy of ten or twelve he left off plucking at a knot and held up his hands to cover his face, as though he expected me to hit him.

I smiled and stepped back. I said softly, "I know your name."

"Yes, uncle."

"I've forgotten what it is."

"Jyoti, uncle."

The self-possessed boy I had met at the Lodge, mouse face, bat ears, tiny head, narrow shoulders, the little soldier, broken now. Ma is our mainstay. I reached to shake his hand. He extended his hand and I held it softly and turned it so that I could see his fingers. His hand was claw-like, his fingers reddened, the fingertips rubbed raw.

"He has no fingerprints."

But Charlie was smirking, standing next to Howard at the doorway.

"Go away or else I'll call security. Then I'll have you screaming the place down."

"I'm reporting you," Howard said.

"I told you, doll. It's all within the law."

"No, it's not," Howard said.

Charlie said, "Then tell us the names of anyone in this country who's been convicted of using kids. Ha! Get out, doll."

19

FROM THE BEGINNING, my first visit more than six weeks earlier, I had regarded the Lodge of Mrs. Unger in Alipore as a refuge, a place of safety, of health and joy, where she was the protector, the guiding light, the mother of it all — Ma, great soft bosom in this itchy city of sharp edges and contending voices.

Now I saw the Lodge as a dangerous and unhappy place, and Mrs. Unger as the sinister force that tyrannized over it. The smell of it was the smell of the sacred river, in India an odor of sanctity, which was also a whiff of stagnation, an odor of life and of death.

I had come to the Lodge unannounced, but she was waiting for me on the stone porch behind the cracked balusters, flanked by the worn, rain-pitted, almost featureless lions. I tried to imagine what this great neoclassical mansion might have looked like in its heyday, but I could not see it, could not re-create it from this cracked façade and exposed brick, from the burrs and bruises on its fluted columns. It was both monumental and ruinous, like Calcutta, with the same human face, gaping windows, cheeks of fissured stucco, a mouth-like door, open in a hungry appeal like the beggars at car windows at street corners.

"I've been expecting you," Mrs. Unger said. "I thought you'd be here yesterday."

"I had some business to attend to."

Whenever I was away from her, I forgot how lovely she was, her feline features, the cast of her face, her high cheekbones, her full lips, made fuller by her slightly protruding teeth. She was beautiful, stately as a priestess. She had a broad forehead, a tipped-up nose, and greeny gray eyes (depending on the light), and her hair was going prematurely silver in places — though she was younger than me, she seemed much older. Her body so slender in her silken sari, her narrow bony feet stippled with henna.

But this beauty today looked devilish, her smile — her teeth — frightening. Her two side teeth — eyeteeth, I suppose — bulged against her lips when she frowned, and glistened, looking more sinister, when she smiled. She was not tall, but she stood erect and gave the impression of height, and so she seemed dominant.

"I take it you've been successful," she said. "Come inside."

In the Lodge the sounds of children's laughter unnerved me, as if they were at play, scampering at the edge of a precipice.

"I'd rather sit in the garden," I said.

"But I owe you a treatment."

The word struck fear into me now. How easily everything was reversed. Her beauty repelled me; the promise of a treatment was like a threat.

"I look forward to it," I said, hoping she'd believe me.

"Bijoy, bring some tea," she said to an apprehensive servant I had never seen before.

We walked together down the staircase to the side of the house where the garden was luxuriant. The pale trunks of the banyan trees twisted into the brick wall, the insinuating fingers of the long roots, the knuckles of the fatter wrinkled ones, the mossy stones, the gurgle of the fountain — the garden had seemed fertile before, a source of life. Now it was sinister, all of it, the sound of the falling water like a repeated warning.

"Sit," she said, patting a bench.

This moss-covered statuary I had seen from the downstairs lobby, the damp bricks, the paved paths, the fountain at the pool — a marble cow's head at its center, spewing water through its rounded mouth. Mrs. Unger smiled, drawing her lips back, showing her teeth, letting her tongue loll hungrily.

"Tell me what you've found. Put my mind at rest."

Instead of sitting where she had beckoned me with her hand, I took a seat at the far end of the bench so I could look at her. My face was damp from the humid heat of the garden.

"I guess you know I've been to Mirzapur. Charlie must have told you."

"I've heard a number of versions. Charlie's. Mr. Joshi's. Even the redoubtable Mr. Ghosh."

"You're resourceful."

"Not half as resourceful as you," she said. "Ah, here's our tea."

She spoke in her actressy voice, her lines like lines in a play, as when I'd first met her at the Oberoi Grand. And because she seemed so well rehearsed, I was especially on guard.

The waiter in the white uniform spread a cloth over a stone tabletop and set out the tea things. Even those cups and saucers seemed worryingly like props.

"You can go, Bijoy." Mrs. Unger poured the tea into the two cups. "So, was Rajat fantasizing, or was there really a dead body?"

"There was a body."

"In that squalid little room? As he said?"

I wondered if she was putting me on. She was speaking in that same actressy way, as though performing. Even her manner of pouring the tea was a sort of acting, her making a business of it as she spoke.

"Just as he said."

"But surely they must have found the body."

"The body seems to have disappeared."

The other thing I noticed was that this Mrs. Unger was almost a stranger to me. I thought I knew her, but this was someone new, or at least a woman pretending to be someone else, and doing a good job of it.

"Disappeared? The poor thing."

"Yes, it was a small boy."

"I meant poor Rajat," she said, and giggled a little. "So it's true. I wasn't sure whether to believe him. He can be such a fantasist. He was always dancing around me, telling tales." She looked closely at me. "I'm grateful to you for finding out the truth."

She was peering at me from over the rim of her teacup. I stared back at her. She swallowed and put the cup down.

"Now you must report what you found."

"To whom?"

"To the police. To the authorities. To the consulate — you have friends there, I know."

"And what would be the point of that?"

"To hold him responsible. I had thought he was such a little charmer. As I told you, he had fairy energy. I didn't think you'd find anything, but now it seems he's involved in something sinister." She slid closer to me and said, "I knew you'd find out what really happened. You're a wonderful writer. That's why I trusted you, because you know that the aim of all art is to tell the truth."

I was so transfixed by her performance that I did not respond at once. I did not know this woman. But she was half smiling at me with indignant certainty. I saw that she was waiting for an answer.

"I feel I have found out the truth."

"Rajat was lying. Indians do lie all the time, you know. They are forced to lie because their culture is so strict. You never get the truth from them. 'Yes, I'll take care of it.' But they don't. That's why I went to you."

"Rajat wasn't lying," I said.

"The corpse was in his room. He must be exposed. And he said he had nothing to do with the boy's death. Please have some tea."

"It's too hot for tea," I said. What was she raving about? I was hot, sticky in this humid garden, among stifling big-leaved plants and tangled roots, its paths of wet mossy paving stones, the whir of gnats over the standing water, the biting flies and spiders. I did not know where to begin, and I had the idea that she seemed like a different person because she was insane, especially crazy in this precious pose as an actress in a darkly comic drama.

"I'll go with you to the police," she said. "I was a fool to believe his reassurances. I always suspected that he was a malign influence on Charlie."

"Malign" influence, not "bad" influence — that was the sort of pretension you'd hear in a melodrama.

I said, "You told me you didn't trust the police."

"That was to induce you to take the assignment."

I said, "Why do you want me to tell the consulate what I found?"

"It seems to me that they should be told. It should be easy enough to let them know — after all, they're your friends. They should know, as the police should know. Rajat registered under an assumed name at the Ananda. This is very suspicious. He may have had a hand in the death of a child. He must be exposed."

"And if I do it, if I prove that he's connected with the dead boy, the anonymous corpse, he could be charged with murder."

"I don't know," she said, but unconvincingly. "He'd certainly have some explaining to do. But it would be all circumstantial."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because the body is gone, presumably."

"Not entirely."

"What does that mean?" If she was disturbed, she did not show it. She went on sipping tea.

I took a plastic bag out of my briefcase, the bag yellow with formalin, and I pressed it to show her the pickled hand.

She squinted at it with deep curiosity, as though it might be something to eat, and she said without any emotion, "That's disgusting. Is it human? Please put it away."

"Not before I show you a detail."

She winced, wrinkling her nose as I held it close. I said, "See? No fingerprints. That's not unusual in certain trades. Masonry. Bricklaying. Cement work. And weaving. The fingerprints are worn smooth and are just about unreadable. So I've been told by someone who knows."

All this time she had held her teacup at the level of her chin, as if to defend herself from me. Now she put the cup down.

"What are you saying?"

"This is the hand of a ten-year-old boy. The DNA tells a lot, though doesn't tell his name. He was wrapped in a carpet — one of your carpets. Very likely one of your workers."

"Impossible."

"Almost certainly. Mr. Joshi told me that whenever someone dies at your factory, you personally take them to Varanasi to be cremated. I presume that's where this child was headed, until you wrapped him in one of your generic carpets, tore the label off, and sent him to the Ananda, to Rajat's room."

"You can't prove that," she said.

"Maybe not, because you're like all the other foreigners in India — like Indians too. You delegate your jobs. Someone got this gruesome job. My guess is that not even Charlie knew."

She had begun to laugh, but mirthlessly, a stage laugh. She said, "Why would I have asked you to investigate this business if I'd known you could implicate me?"

"Because you hadn't counted on their keeping the carpet, it was such a cheap one. But we're in hard-up Calcutta. They dumped the body, not the carpet. And you hadn't imagined that a suspicious clerk who'd helped dispose of the child — another flunky — would take pity and keep one of the hands."

"You're wrong. Hindus never do that. They would immediately burn a body part."

"Hindus, no. But this was a Christian. And a Naga. They have rather a fetish about body parts."

"I had nothing to do with this. It's preposterous."

"You knew all along what I just found out today at the consulate, that Rajat had applied for a work visa to the U.S. He was intending to emigrate. Had he gotten the visa, he'd be living with Charlie. That is something that seriously bothers you — his competition for Charlie's affection."

She looked at me with a sour expression and said, "Rajat is a kink. I suspect gender identity disorder. He probably wants gender reassignment. You have no idea what these people are like."

I laughed at the terminology. I said, "You concocted a plan to implicate Rajat in a crime. You had a corpse — that was convenient. When Rajat ran away instead of being caught by the hotel, the whole scheme came apart. So you put me on to it, another job delegated, so that you could compromise him. You assumed I'd be able to pin it on Rajat. If he was discredited, his visa application would be turned down. But I was lucky. I found out more than you thought I would."

"I loved little Rajat, until you told me this."

"You hated him. You wanted Charlie for yourself. And now you'll have him, because I'm sure that Rajat will be terrified when he finds out what you've done."

She sat straight, her chin up, looking haughty. "It's beneath me to argue with you. I've done nothing wrong. I haven't broken the law."

She was impenetrable. Even when presented with the evidence of this obvious setup she was unmoved.

"Possibly true. But I'd like to know how this child died."

She sipped a little tea, batting a fly away as she drank, and didn't reply.

"Worked to death, probably," I said. "I saw your factory. It's Dickensian. Little children imprisoned in a factory sweatshop, working on carpets. I saw Jyoti."

She had begun to smile. "This is India," she said.

"Employing children is against the law," I said.

"The law is never enforced because the children need work."

"You're killing them."

"I am saving them!" It was the only time in this conversation that she raised her voice, and this was a shriek of protest.

"And now I know where you get your labor force." As I spoke I could hear the children laughing inside the Lodge. "You take them off the streets. You buy them from villages. Poor places like Nagapatti. You get them healthy, you make them dependent on you, and then you put them to work."

"You don't know anything," she said.

"I'm sure you sell some of them to adoptive parents. When I saw that woman last week, I knew."

"I am saving them," she hissed through her teeth, and I thought how her being slightly bucktoothed was an advantage in her saying something like that, to give it force. "They would die otherwise."

Now she frightened me, because she was without a shred of doubt. Her certainty gave her, if not power, then a demonic energy.

"I thought you had some intelligence, some subtlety," she said. "I had confidence in you. That's why I trusted you with this. But no, you're really hopeless. And you're ungrateful. You have no idea of the good I have done, the things I've accomplished. And not just this Lodge. Many things. Great things."

She spoke with such conviction I almost believed her, but I also knew that a criminal's most useful gift was the ability to lie. It was one of the clearest signs of criminality that such a person had no use for the truth. Yet Mrs. Unger was passionate.

"You think that by making up this preposterous story you've hurt me." She leaned closer. "You can't hurt me. But I could seriously harm you."

I won't give you a chance, I thought, looking her straight in the eye.

She said, "I'm going to do you an enormous favor."

"Really."

"Yes. I'm not going to destroy you. I could do it very easily."

She was calm again; she had regained her composure. She saw that, though I knew the truth about the body in the hotel room, and Rajat would soon know, there was not much I could do to hurt her. She was right: this was India. Child labor was common. The factories were everywhere. And children died.

"You're shocked," she said. "I despise people who come to India and say they're shocked. Especially Americans. What hypocrisy."

If I had been enchanted before by her, I was now disenchanted. Yet having seen her dark side, I was even more astounded by her audacity. She now seemed to me as cruel as she had once seemed kind, and I could not believe that both could exist in the same person, this American woman who affected saris and ran a home for lost children.

I didn't doubt that much of her work was unselfish, that she had (as she said) saved some children. But she saved them only to send them to work in her factory or sell them in adoptions. She wasn't wrong about there being child labor in India. Everyone knew it. But no one suspected her personal involvement. She was a motherly presence in Calcutta, famous because she never asked for donations. And she was persuasive. I could testify to the healing hands, the magic fingers. Gazing at her on this hot afternoon in the deep green shade of her damp and tangled garden, I trembled to think how she had touched me, how I had touched her. How we had lain in each other's arms, knotted in the tantric postures. I had been bewitched.

Her beauty was distinct, but because it frightened me it seemed indistinguishable from ugliness. I thought: There is no such thing as beauty. There is desire and there is fear, and if desire can make a person luminous, fear can make that same person ugly. A lie in a lovely woman's mouth can give her fangs and make her a monster. The very features I had seen as benign and beautiful — the same cast of her face, the lips, the teeth, the breasts, the fingers — I now saw as fierce and deadly.

All this time we'd been talking I kept seeing the hard bone beneath her lovely skin, the hinges of her jaw, the seams of her cranium, the loops of her eye sockets. It was not a face but a skull. I saw her as bones.

"You've failed me," she said. "And I was such a fan. I had such plans for you." She touched my thigh with her outstretched hands, her sharp finger bones on my leg. "That's all right. I'm never surprised to find that people are stupid or wicked. I'm more surprised when they're kind."

I didn't know what to say. I could not deny that she was kind — I'd seen enough examples of her charity. I'd been half in love with her. I was more ashamed of myself, more angry at myself than I was with her, because I saw my weakness reflected in her. Out of vanity and need, I had yearned to please her. I was no better than she was.

"I still wonder why you chose me to look into this crime. Was it just because I'm a writer?"

"Not really."

"What then?"

"Because you're not a writer. You're a hack. No matter what you write, no one will believe you."

She obviously thought that by insulting me I would be hurt, but I was strengthened by my self-disgust. She could not have had a lower opinion of me than I had of myself. At that moment I wanted to kill her, and not just do away with her but stab her repeatedly in the face.

She smiled at me, as if reading my thoughts. Her face lit up — the glow I'd always found irresistible, of pleasure, of love.

"Darling."

I almost responded. But she was looking past me, toward the far end of the garden, where Charlie was standing. I wondered how much of this he'd heard. He twinkled, the way someone does when he's eroticized. As I had once, giddily.

She beckoned to him. He obeyed, walking closer, and when she beckoned again it seemed like her way of dismissing me.

20

THE BURNING GHAT on the Hooghly was about a mile downstream from the Vidyasagar Bridge, which I had crossed with Mrs. Unger on the day we'd visited the Kali temple, when she had taken me to the compound. I had been shocked by the goat sacrifice at the temple. I had been impressed by the intake of orphans at the compound. How was I to know the children, too, would be sacrificed, that they'd end up in her factory or be sold to visiting Americans? Rajat had remarked on the blood that had streaked her sari. Bloodstained kind of suits her.

I thought of that blood today as we turned off the bridge and made our way along the west bank of the river in Howard's consular car, a uniformed driver at the wheel, Howard beside him. I could see the ghat ahead, piled against the embankment like a rotting pier.

"I will talk to the priests," Parvati said. She sat in the middle of the back seat, Rajat on her other side.

Parvati's decencies shamed me, and so did her gifts. She was a pretty girl who lived with her parents; she could dance, play tabla, write poetry, do martial arts — could twist my arms off with a flourish of kalaripayatu. Parvati the beauty was awaiting a suitable match, which her parents would arrange. She was helpful, able, and decorative. I had to admit I hardly knew her, but in any case I was unworthy: she was unattainable. But she was the perfect person for this ritual, a vestal virgin. She wasn't prim today. She knew exactly what to do, and Rajat was a suitable acolyte.

Howard said, "Your friend Mrs. Unger was supposed to be getting an award tonight from the chief minister."

"Don't know anything about it," I said. "What's the award?"

"Humanitarian achievement. She refused it."

Rajat said, "She hates publicity."

Howard said, "Her modesty was much praised. She got more publicity refusing it than she would have gotten by accepting."

"She never asks for money," Rajat said.

"I think we know why," I said.

"We'll be watching her," Howard said. "Someone from the commercial section. After all, she's one of ours."

"She deserves a prize for cleverly avoiding a murder charge. I can't think of anywhere but India where she'd be possible."

The driver pulled off the road and parked by a drooping cow. He opened our doors and then stood by the car, guarding it. We walked slowly, gasping in the humid heat, through the weeds and low shrubs along a narrow path to the ghat. Three holy men sat cross-legged on the platform at the entrance, under an archway draped with fresh flowers. The men were gaunt and nearly naked, their faces set at us, their foreheads smeared with yellow paste. They did not blink at the flies darting around their long, matted, and tangled hair.

Bowing low, Parvati stuffed some rupees into their brass jars. I did the same as she spoke to one of them.

"He asks if you have the body part."

"The hand. It's here."

I had wrapped it in a white cloth and tied it like a bundle, a makeshift shroud. Only I knew that it was stiff, claw-like, yellow, sealed in a plastic bag. A pickled hand.

The saddhu Parvati had been speaking to gathered himself and picked up a brass tray. He had loose wrinkled skin, like seasoned leather, a loincloth like a diaper, and necklace strings of heavy amber beads. He offered the tray to me. I put the cloth bundle on it.

With solemn grace, he brought this to one of the other old men and presented it reverently while the man muttered over it. Then he walked onto the ghat, holding the tray like a waiter serving dessert. Raising his arms, he tipped the tray, allowing the little bundle to slide onto the top of the pile of dry sticks, which were arranged as though for a campfire.

We watched from the embankment as the three saddhus began chanting, deep and clear, almost melodious, a kind of droning with intermittent grunts that repeated and increased in speed and volume.

"I've never been this close to a cremation before," Howard said.

Rajat snapped pictures. Parvati prayed, her head down — she seemed to be weeping softly. One of the holy men, still chanting, brought a flaming torch from a smoldering fire at the bank near where we stood. He whirled the ember, intensifying the flame, then poked it under the firewood until some of the smaller kindling caught and crackled. Then he added the torch to the noisy blaze.

The small white bundle lay on the uprushing fire. The licks of flame were like silk on this gray day. Then the thing seemed to tremble, and to blacken without burning, and finally it lighted, becoming thicker, fattened with flames. It glowed red like a large coal, keeping its shape but growing gauzy and insubstantial, withering like a tangle of whitened thread.

Maybe I imagined it — maybe it was the crack of the dry wood — but I thought I heard the dead hand itself speak, as if in the cooking it was given life by the blaze. I saw the hand outlined clearly as the cloth burned away. It was the last image I saw in the heat, the shadow of a hand that moved, jerked, and clutched its fingers in the flames before it was consumed in a fizz of fire.

We all stared at it as it swelled to a light and cobwebby puffball of ash, bobbing lightly on the charred wood, emptied by the heat.

"Gone," Howard said.

"No. Only changed form," Parvati said — the Indian comeback, the sort of tease that kept Hindus faithful. She was still praying, still weeping softly. Rajat crept near her, his eyes glistening in sympathy as though sharing her grief.

"She gave you a lot of trouble," Howard said.

I knew whom he was talking about.

"She did me a huge favor," I said.

"I've heard about her favors."

"I'll tell you sometime."

He was smiling. His smile full of teeth was asking what? But he looked up and seemed to forget his question, because from the low, woolly-dark sky came the first drops of the monsoon.

Stinging drops of rain: I had never thought that rain could hurt so much.

Back at the Hastings, fresh from the burning ghat, I was relieved, knowing it was over. Time to leave.

"Post, sir," Ramesh Datta said. "A runner has brought it just now."

An envelope. I recognized the handwriting, the ink, the dense handmade paper, like cloth. I brought it to my room and meditated on it. The handwriting was self-regarding. I hated seeing my name written in purple ink. I did not want to think what was in it — money, a miracle, praise, or blame. I didn't need her anymore.

I borrowed an umbrella from Ramachandra and walked to the Hooghly. Down Sudder, up Nehru, left on Ochterlony to the Esplanade, and then along Eden Garden Road to the river and Babu Ghat. It was the route of one of my old walks in the city, when I'd felt lost, waiting to be summoned by Mrs. Unger. I paused in the downpour and flung the envelope into the river, setting it adrift in the greasy current with the flotsam of old fruit, rotting coconuts, curls of plastic, and sliding like scum from the ghats upriver, the buoyant ashes of human remains.

That ending, though true to the facts, now seems a little conventional. Other stories about India close with a cremation and the rain coming down hard — and you're left to imagine the finality of the downpour, the sweep of water like a curtain on the last act.

The real torrent didn't hit Calcutta until a week later, and by then I was somewhere else, writing this book. Mrs. Unger inspired it. She inspired much more, gave me the vitality to write it, and taught me tantra — gave me the hands, the fingers, the energy.

I mentioned at the beginning that I had disappointed two women in my life, and I suggested that I'd stopped looking for anyone else. But in the course of writing this book I met another woman, someone nearer my age. She'd had her share of disappointments too, and at first she was wary of me. We became friends, partners, and at last lovers. I knew how to please her, in ways she'd never known, and my pleasing her was a kind of teaching too. She returned the favor. I spent more time in the States and grew to like it more. Almost a whole year passed. We traveled, this woman and I. We bought a house together. I had learned to give myself, which is the beginning of love.

I look down at my hand, my fingers wrapped on the pen, poking at this last page, and I think of Mrs. Unger, like an old flame, who gave me everything. But I didn't have to thank her for it, didn't have to be grateful. She was the illness and the cure, like a force of nature; life and death, the rain that gave hope, that flooded and drowned too; the pleasure and the pain.