by Paul Theroux
"I didn't want to live among black people, who seemed to resent me. I wanted to pass for a white person. I didn't want black baggage, and I didn't want my family bringing me down. I lived alone. I finished my degree, and on the way I met a lovely man and married him. He'd been married before—was a widower—and he had a small son. That was fine with me, because I knew I didn't want any children of my own.
"Harold died. The boy, Chalmers, became more my companion than my son. Then I married Ralph Unger, the Anglo-American—the late, unlamented Ralph. He resented Charlie. You can see how fond Charlie is of me. I think I've done a good job. I was left a lot of money, and I realized how lucky I'd been. I resolved never to marry again and to use the money in the best possible way. Well, you've seen what I've done at the Lodge."
In the course of speaking she'd turned away from me toward the window, where night had fallen and only pinpricks of light flashed, lanterns in those bamboo huts or stammers of flame from cooking fires. She'd spoken without much emphasis, almost without emotion, a statement rather than a confession.
"So now you know my secret."
I thought of myself as unshockable, yet when she'd finished her story I was speechless. As with a real shock, I had no questions, no answers either, only a dumb gaping funk in the half-light of the railway compartment, and my unvoiced self-recrimination: I thought I'd heard everything, and now this. I didn't doubt her, I doubted myself.
Also (even worse), that accompanying doubt in which, with one shattering revelation, the whole logical and obvious world becomes deceptive—suddenly, nothing was what it seemed. A lot of people would subscribe to that cliché. I certainly did, only half believing it. But presented with the evidence, I could only sigh. I felt like a fool, as though in a shell game she'd shown me a pearl under a cup and moved the cup among two others while I watched, and lifted it, and the pearl was gone—and she lifted another cup, and there was the pearl, but a new one, black and more beautiful. And I hadn't a clue.
"I know you wouldn't lie to me," I said. "But I don't see it."
"If only you could see my mother or my brothers," she said almost wistfully.
"I just see you."
"I'm like them."
I could not imagine her in any other way. I could neither recast her as black nor find any feature that was different from my own.
"Anyway, now you know why I was so moved by that woman at Howrah station. That man in a sari. That's how I feel most of the time. Like an impostor."
"I'm glad you told me."
"I can see that you're shocked."
"No," I said, and wondered how convincing I sounded. "I'm happy. You trust me with the truth. I want to show you that I'm worthy of that trust."
A knock at the door—the conductor to punch our tickets, the meal seller behind him with boxes of food. Mrs. Unger dealt with them, speaking Bengali. After they'd gone, she took out the food she'd brought in tiffin tins, a cylinder of stacked containers, rice and dahl and vegetables and yogurt. Eating off trays on our laps was the mundane ritual I needed to bring me back to reality, though we ate mostly in silence.
"I'm glad I'm here," I said afterward.
"Good. There's lots of things I need you to do. Lots of ways to help. Now it's bedtime, but there's only room for one person on these berths. Let's turn in. We'll be in Gauhati at seven. We'll talk then."
She called the sleeping-car attendant—barefoot, wild hair, popeyed, hungry for baksheesh —and he unrolled the bedding and made our beds. He got his tip, and after he'd gone, I kissed her lightly on the cheek. I thought I would agonize all night. But rocked by the train I slept and dreamed of her.
11
"BODOLAND," SHE SAID, looking up as the train, going rap-rap-rap, raced past an embankment of palm trees, banana groves, more bamboo huts, and women washing clothes in a creek, four of them, side by side.
I remembered what she'd told me, and I felt somehow like a conspirator. But because of it I had never felt closer to her. Taking me into her confidence, she had made me feel that I mattered to her. She never used the word "love," but I felt nothing but love for her. It was always bhoga for her, the intense sexual pleasure of the tantric massage.
I said, "I'd do anything for you."
She kept her gaze at the window. "Bodoland looks so peaceful. Look at those lily ponds and the children playing. You'd never know that Bodos have a liberation front. That these smiling people commit murder, blow up bombs. That they have the true pedigree—they are aristocrats. That they're angry."
"I didn't know. How would I? They look content."
"People write about landscapes like this and because they're so far from home they feel they have to make it pretty. Look, it's not pretty at all. It's not ugly. It's a great featureless emptiness, an awfulness of trapped people and peasant misery. You gape at it. It gapes back at you."
She was drinking a cup of tea, smiling out the window as I lay in my berth.
"Who would want to possess it or blow it up? Who could possibly care that much? Yet they do, in their multitudes." She was still smiling. "It's not the weirdness of humanity. It's the weirdness of the Indian personality. And the way people write about them. The travel books! The novels!"
Hearing this, I thought back to the garden of the Fairlawn and winced at recalling how I had been subjected to the scrutiny of that flitting, pitiless man.
"There isn't a single truthful book about India. There are long-winded family romances. And whimsical novels. And the experimental junk. India reveals itself, but no one looks closely. It's a culture of evasions. This country is very dirty. It's impossible to tell the truth here. The truth is forbidden, especially in writing. Anyway, a truthful book about India would be unbearable—about spite, venom, cruelty, sexual repression, incest, and meaningless crimes."
That also made me recall the Fairlawn, the newspaper cuttings about infanticide and servants murdering their employers and the Monkey Man. I mentioned this to Mrs. Unger.
"That's nothing," she said. "There are monsters and freaks all over India. Real monsters, grotesque freaks. No one writes about them. No one sees them. They write about buffoons—the Monkey Man! They praise the call centers and the steel mills. 'We have computers!' They write about happy families, not about child-strangling, the mobs, rural suicide, the bombs on trains and in marketplaces where people are blown to bits. 'What a colorful bazaar!' Nothing about the savage crowds and bombs. Nothing about diseases." She smiled her bitter smile. "They're content. And they're furious too." She canted her head. "See those purple hills?"
"Yes."
"Bhutan," she said. "We'll be in Gauhati soon. That's the Brahmaputra River, though you can only see the embankment. We have a hotel in Gauhati." She turned away from the window and smiled at me over her cup of tea. "You might do something for me there."
On a long curve, the compartment filled with light that warmed the stale air, and Mrs. Unger lit a stick of incense to freshen it. I stepped out to use the mucky toilet, and on the way, passing the propped-open door, I was surprised by the cool breeze eddying in the vestibule, and the sight of fog lying in patches, like large gray wisps of wool, unraveling and ghosting across the freshly plowed fields. The river—mostly sandbanks here—was visible through the thicknesses of bamboo, in wide clumps. I could see women setting off across the smooth dunes, past the beached boats and black hulks, with basins of laundry on their heads, seeking the watercourse that was hidden from view in this dry season. Then the tea gardens, then the low hills.
I was hoping after all this time for something substantial. It was not a pretty landscape. It was a chewed and ruinous one, a floodplain in a time of drought, before the monsoon. Gauhati rushed upon us, a progression of well-made shacks rising to humble shops and three-story slapped-together buildings. I was back in the compartment, tugging the bags from the upper berth. Mrs. Unger sat calmly. She touched my shoulder to restrain me.
"We're being met. The porters will take care of this."
And, as
she spoke, a man in a wool hat with a sign saying UNGER appeared outside the window of our coach as we drew into Gauhati station.
"That funny little man is ours."
She greeted him in Bengali, with Namashkar and the usual how-are-you that I was beginning to learn, Apni keman achen? And she must have asked him his name, because he replied, "Ravi Baruha, madam, speaking English."
"Our bags are right inside, compartment ten."
Ravi Baruha nodded to his own lackey, who rushed in for the bags and soon was balancing one on his head and one in each hand, Baruha leading the way.
"We want to visit the Kamakhya temple later this morning, and tomorrow we're on the train to Silchar."
This was news to me—not just the temple, but Silchar. I was reminded that I was in her hands.
"Train departs eight A.M. for Lumding," Baruha said. "Change for Silchar."
"I have the tickets."
"Long journey, madam."
"We are on a mission." She nodded at me.
Outside the station, we boarded a van. I sat next to the driver, and the porter crouched in the narrow space at the back, tangled in the luggage. Baruha said, "New hotel. Just open. Many facilities."
But I listened without interest, for all this time, since early morning, since Bodoland, I'd been deep in thought, glancing at Mrs. Unger and, when she was turned away, studying the nape of her neck, the texture of her hair, the gleam of her skin, her slender hands, her feet in her sandals, her profile, her pretty mouth, remembering what she had told me. I'm black was a mystery to me.
I was used to gazing at her, but this was in adoration. I was lost in a new kind of scrutiny, but all I saw was what I had seen before: the face, the body of the woman I loved, if anything paler and prettier than ever, a loveliness and purity I wanted to hold, because in holding her, I was holding all her good works. I yearned to put my mouth on her—not so strange a desire. It was the elemental hunger all passionate lovers feel, something almost cannibalistic, the intensity of tantric bhoga.
"Indians have a genius for making something new look fifty years old," she said under her breath as we entered the hotel. "They never quite finish and it's never quite right. All of India is a work in progress. Do I mean progress? Never mind."
At the front desk, the clerk said, "We've been expecting you. We've put you in our Palace Suite. Good journey?"
"Excellent. Thank you for asking."
After the paperwork and the porter and the rackety elevator with its gates of steel mesh, we were shown to a suite that overlooked a sports ground—some boys playing cricket, the crack of the bat, scattered shouts. Mrs. Unger pulled the curtains.
We were alone at last in the half-dark. I had the sense in this new setting that we were strangers. I was plunged into a self-conscious silence. I didn't know what to say. I desired her, but how to begin? Lying across from her in the opposite berth in the rocking train all night had confused me. I was tongue-tied and felt awkward, not to say tormented.
But she knew that. She could always assess a situation and was never at a loss for words.
"First a bath," she said. "And then the temple. After that, you might give me a massage. You know how. That's how I learned, by getting one from a dakini. Do you feel up to it?"
"Dakini?" Where had I heard that word?
"Priestess, healer," she said. "Never mind the words. Tantra is full of them. But it's the deeds that matter."
Priestess was an apt word for her. It was how I had seen her at Kalighat, in a rapture after the goat sacrifice. I held her. Instead of kissing her I pressed my head against hers and felt the blood pounding at my skull.
We took showers separately and afterward went down to the hotel lobby. The driver Ravi Baruha signaled to us with a wobble of his head that he was in attendance.
I had imagined Gauhati to be a small riverside town, but it was a sprawling city in bad repair, with tucked-away bazaars and slow-moving traffic, bicycle rickshaws and old buses wreathed in diesel fumes. The wide river was so shrunken in these months before the monsoon that it seemed like a shallow lake streaked with low islands of sand. The streets smelled of earth and oil and had a tang that reminded me of bark mulch.
"Fancy bazaar," Ravi Baruha said in the Bengali way, bajjar. "Big and famous. Pan bazaar. Many attendees."
The temple crowned a rocky hill just outside the busy part of the city. The area was one of Gauhati's landmarks—scenic in the Indian sense, meaning that it was a magnet for mobs and vandalism. "Scenic" in India always implied blight.
It seemed to me a Mrs. Unger observation, but when I said this to Mrs. Unger, she gave me one of her I-couldn't-agree-less smiles.
"You're looking at surfaces," she said. "Always a mistake in India. You're distracting your mind with all the wrong things. You could say this road is a mess"—our car had begun to climb the steep road of loose boulders and litter and yellow wilted trees; it was a mess— "but this is the way to the holy temple, a holy road. We're so lucky. I love those ragged prayer flags and those faded pennants."
"I wish I had your gift for seeing into things."
"Close your eyes, maybe. You'll see more."
But I didn't, because the sharp bends and the steepness were making me feel carsick.
"Go as far as you can," she said as Baruha parted the crowd by tapping his horn.
He dropped us at a barrier near the crest of the hill. Beyond it and above, past the food stalls and the relic sellers and the ice cream vendors and the hawkers of posters, fluttering flags and marigolds and strings of plastic beads, all this kitsch, was a stone fortress and a gateway, the entrance to the rambling temple complex.
The way that Mrs. Unger stiffened from her aversion to mobs was so extreme it bordered on horror. It made me wonder why she'd come to India, where every street was crowded; the whole of India was a mob. And when she murmured about her dislike of Indians in a mass, surging toward her, she seemed to become small and fragile, to visibly shrink; and she wanted me to care. Yet I kept thinking that she was like a visitor to Alaska complaining of the cold.
The Indian mob to her was a dark creature. More than a pushing tide of toothy men, it seemed to represent a menacing intelligence, a monster loose on the street, all its many limbs thrashing toward her. She was the victim of this predator that rippled through traffic, stopping cars, reaching for her with grasping hands. I always think they want to devour me.
Even the yelling we heard from three streets away, a distinct syncopation of shouting, angry laughter, and screechy chants—it might have been a wedding party—this commotion was a mob to her. And that roar of voices and slapping feet quieted her and made her withdraw. She always took my hand in her hot damp fingers and held on.
"I never have any idea of what they're saying. Zindabad, yes, 'long live,' but long live what? They always seem to be destroyers."
I agreed, yet she seemed to thrive in India, and I wondered what it was she saw that I didn't.
"Kamakhya temple," Mrs. Unger said, still gripping my hand. "The grieving Lord Shiva carried the corpse of his beloved Kali on his shoulders as he danced across the earth. The gods were appalled. Vishnu intervened and chopped the dead Kali into fifty-one fragments. Wherever a body part landed, a temple was built. One of her little toes came to earth at Kalighat. I wonder if you can guess which part of her body landed here?"
We were passing through the gateway, past pillboxes and low towers of red-smeared stone. Holy men, looking regal yet dispossessed or disinherited, sat upright before brass bowls as pilgrims hurried forward excitedly. The temple had the look of a hill fort, the remnants of one: a perimeter wall and parapets, the stonework like battlements around its enclosures. It was well protected, its chapels like sentry boxes, with images carved in deep relief into the black blocks and, as a form of veneration, wiped with paste that had crusted in the heat.
"That's a hint," Mrs. Unger said.
The goddess was depicted on the side of one shrine as the carving of a woman squatting wi
th her legs open, the thick lips of her swollen genitals exposed and gaping. All around us, devotees—women mainly—were chanting and praying.
I said softly, "Was it Kali's vulva that dropped here?"
"Yes, her yoni," Mrs. Unger said. She paused in front of the bold carving, the wide-apart legs. "Isn't it marvelous? A whole temple dedicated to it. That's why this is the most sacred of the tantric pilgrimage sites."
"What's happening here?"
"The goddess is showing her yoni, inviting a puja."
"What kind of prayer would that be?"
"An adoring mouth," she said, and pursed her lips in a kiss. "Adoring fingers on the sacred spot."
Beyond this stone shrine was a pavilion, open sides, tile roof. Men and women crowded into it as though at a sideshow. We joined them, and a gleeful yelp went up as a bare-chested priest brought his hacker down on a black goat's head, just as I had seen at Kalighat. The head toppled onto the bloody floor—a puddle of blood six feet across, the grateful praying watchers standing at the edge of it, their feet splashed with the blood, rejoicing at the sight of the beheading.
"Do you know how lucky we are to be here?" Mrs. Unger said.
I followed her into a smoky stifling temple, and she squatted and put money into a basket. Priests sitting cross-legged blessed her as she lit sticks of incense. She was intent, kneeling, concentrating on a shadowy cloth-covered image, murmuring prayers.
I had no idea what to do. It was far from anything I knew about India. In this remote place, midmorning in the heat of another Kali temple, I was like a child who had been taken to a place of pilgrimage by his mother. I would have gone out of the temple, but I didn't dare to lose sight of Mrs. Unger, didn't want to stray. I was clinging to her, feeling helpless and a bit dazed by the clouds of incense, with the passivity of an anxious child.
I had been startled by her rapture at Kalighat; I was equally impressed by the intensity of her devotion here, because I was used to seeing her in charge. And she was prayerful here, bowing down, offering pieties in an unexpected posture, compact, submitting to whatever image was hidden there, covered by a cloth.