by Paul Theroux
"I've never seen anything like it," I said lamely. "It's like a vision of hell."
"You're shocked again," Mrs. Unger said. She looked unmoved; she seemed almost jubilant. "It's not hell. Hell—if you believe in it—is forever. But these girls can be rescued. That's why I'm here. Do you think I'm slumming? A few years ago I came here. I've been back many times. See those old women eyeing me? They know I'm going to hurt their business. But I'm willing to bargain with them."
I was thrilled to think that Mrs. Unger had come here to help these girls—more lost souls. As I considered this, a hand had taken hold of my elbow—a good grip; I couldn't shake it loose. I looked down into the tiny pleading face and desperate eyes of a girl who could not have been more than fifteen. She tugged at me and licked at her lips with a little darting tongue.
Mrs. Unger was turned away. She said, "I don't see any customers."
Sudeep helped me detach the girl's hand from my elbow, but she went on trying to snatch at me.
"It is their misfortune, sir."
"Who are they?"
"Tribals, sir. From the mountains, sir. Nagaland. Some are Mizos and whatnot. They are awaiting the lorry drivers. But your friend—madam—will help them find their freedom."
A few were gesturing to me, calling out, beckoning, striking the poses of coquettes.
"We'll come back tomorrow to negotiate," Mrs. Unger said. She seemed vitalized, her eyes shining with flames. "But I wanted you to see it like this—at night, with the fires. You have to admit this place is full of energy."
Our arrival had silenced them and made them watchful. Who could this foreign-looking woman be in her white sari? And what of that foreign man who stood stunned and staring? After a while their chattering resumed, perhaps conjecturing who we were. We walked the length of the lane, girls on both sides, so many of them, all of them in makeup—powdered faces, rouged cheeks, smeared mouths, blue and green eye shadow, their hair fixed with combs; but even so, they looked like schoolgirls dressed for a pageant or a school play that was about to begin. Most of them were barefoot, but some tottered on high heels they'd not yet mastered. They called out, they grabbed my arm and pinched my hand, and a few begged money from Mrs. Unger, who walked slowly among them—tall, in her elegant sari, utterly calm, offering soothing words. She had never looked more like a priestess.
Sudeep caught up with us at the far end of the lane. He said, "I have addressed a few of women. They are agreeable to negotiations."
But Mrs. Unger was looking at me. "See?" she said. "It's possible to bring a little hope. Even here."
The next day I accompanied her to Nagapatti again. Even in daylight the place looked vicious, the girls wearier, the fires smokier. The firelight of the night before had lent it an air of debauched glamour. But today the sky was overcast and clammy, and the lane stank of woodsmoke. The incense stung my nose. I could see the girls' skinny legs and dirty feet, and some of the small children were crying miserably.
It was my job to sit outside and turn away potential customers while Mrs. Unger and Sudeep negotiated to obtain the release of certain girls. Only one man wandered by, unshaven and dirty, a truck driver probably.
"Come later," I said, and he was so surprised that he shrugged and obeyed.
I stared at a bewildered girl, who stared back at me. I didn't know what to say. She went on staring and then made a kissing noise at me. She cupped a breast with one hand and touched herself with the other.
Flustered, I said, "See that nice woman?"
The girl clung to my leg. Her fingernails were bitten and painted pink.
"That nice woman is going to help you."
Still she held on to my leg and leered at me.
That evening we flew back to Calcutta. I had not realized it was possible to go so far.
12
AND, AT LAST, I began to write. I surprised myself at the ease of it. I thought I'd been lost, done with the written word. But no, I was at work again. I had something to write about, and I had the energy.
Most people thought of me—probably think of me still—as an adventurous traveler, welcoming hardship, willing to take risks, going to extremes to find the subject of a magazine piece. The hard and lonely life of a wanderer. "Your amazing tales." I was, for most of my readers—for many people who knew me—invisible. My career had been made out of a series of calculated vanishings, inspiring people to imagine what I was up to. Stick around too long and get cozy and conversational and people realize you're human.
If you go far enough, if you stay away long enough, people imagine the worst and begin suffering the hardship on your behalf, and they credit you—they certainly credited me—with stamina and ingenuity. So the distant traveler acquires a kind of power—and more than power, virtue—for the very fact of being away, mooching around in inhospitable countries. Heat, dust, swamps, bad roads, mobs, skinny children, scolding men, nasty boys, mushy food, rats, roaches. I did nothing to dispel the notion. I became the conspicuous absentee. The fact was that I usually stayed in good hotels, and sometimes great hotels, the sort of luxury that can exist only in countries where people are servile and underpaid.
Remove Mrs. Unger and her magic fingers from the trip to Assam; remove the happy hotels and the helpful servants—the guides, the dhobis with a bag of my laundry, Mr. Baruha sitting next to the driver, Sudeep awaiting orders; remove the comforts, don't mention the pleasures, and what's left is the grubby train, the bamboo huts, "Bodoland," the slum urchins, and the child whores in Nagapatti—the horrors of travel without any compensations.
But my traveling life had been all about compensations. I would never have lived in this wandering way if the pleasures had not outweighed the difficulties—I mean, far outweighed them. I hadn't chosen my life out of a desire to confront danger but rather because I was lazy and evasive, ducking out or moving on whenever I felt like it, whenever something was expected of me, when I had to be grown-up and accountable.
I lived like a prince, which is to say I had no responsibilities, and at the same time I was (as a traveler) credited with being a hero. I mentioned at the beginning of this story how I had managed to live my life this way, pretending to be big and busy—"I have to be in Bangkok next week"—while merely looking for outlets for my pleasure-seeking.
I had come to Calcutta out of pure idleness, not to write but to give lectures. Howard had invited me; the American consul general was my sponsor. Bengalis were highly literate, and most of the ones I met spoke English well—so well that they wouldn't stop talking. My lectures were simple. The Indians in the audience sat waiting for me to finish (sometimes impulsively interrupting) and then took turns talking, not questions but long, ponderous pronouncements about art and life. In their vain and wordy pretensions (harmless, really; I found them lovable) they wanted to be regarded as thinkers, challenging whatever I said, this verbose show of wisdom being the embodiment of the Indian ideal, the philosopher, the sage. Their love of discussion was comic, especially in Calcutta, which was falling apart as all the Bengalis went on yakking, yakking, yakking.
I was no different. I was an evader and a fraud in much the same way and for many of the same reasons. Why make hard decisions and assume responsibilities if you can procrastinate by yakking? Talking was the answer, and in my case had displaced my writing. Writing was difficult. Talking about writing was a low and profitless form of discourse, and probably the laziest.
I traveled because I was idle, I talked because I had nothing to write, I moved on or ducked out when someone asked me a searching question. And I was averse to being near anyone who was creative. Parvati, for example. She was full of energy, she wrote poems, she danced, she practiced martial arts, she was lovely and unmarried: she exhausted me. I was envious and dispirited when I was with her. Maybe I saw something of my younger self in her and was ashamed to see I was no longer creative.
It is very hard for an older writer, tired and out of ideas, to be in the presence of a young writer, especially a gifte
d one, who is full of hope. I praised Parvati's image of the muted lisp of morning's tongue pushing against the sky, but really, I hated it for its brilliance. The better Parvati's poems, the more graceful her dancing, the sadder I became—sad for myself, in the selfish way of someone who suspects his creative life is at an end. It was unfair to Parvati for me to behave this way. I consoled myself by protecting her, keeping my feelings to myself.
She can't have known that I avoided her out of envy and self-disgust. Still she called me, invited me (with a chaperone) to tea, and e-mailed me her new poems. She insisted I go to a dance recital. I went because the theater was so near to my hotel, but the provocative beauty of her dancing—the lovely virgin stroking the air with sensual fingers—made me so melancholy that I had to leave.
The next day she demanded to know why I'd slipped out of the auditorium early. She had come to the Hastings with two girlfriends who stood guard in the lobby while we sat whispering in my corner of the upstairs verandah.
"Didn't you realize I was dancing for you?"
Feeling obligated, I said, "But I have nothing to give you."
"I only want your friendship," she said, "that's all. Can you imagine what life is like for someone like me in India?"
"You're a great beauty, you're gifted. You have everything."
"I'm an unmarried thirty-two-year-old—that's on the verge of being an old bag. You laugh!"—who wouldn't?—"I told you I have views on marriage. Want to hear them?"
"Of course"—though I didn't.
"Good, because no Indian man wants to hear them. My parents don't want to hear them. India doesn't want to hear them."
"Tell me."
"This is the most unromantic country on earth," she said. "Never mind sex outside marriage—there's no romance either. No hand holding, no kisses. How I would love to kiss someone I loved. But I can't. We are a trapped and frustrated people."
"I see that, but maybe it's what makes your poems so steamy. Your dancing too."
"Maybe, because I'm dying and deprived, but it's not worth it. I want to live, and when I meet someone like you I think real life is somewhere else."
"But you're a wonderful writer."
"I'd rather live more and write less."
As she spoke, her beauty dissolved. I no longer saw her as a figure of loveliness. She became a voice, a passionate and sad one, and she was now real to me.
I said, "But what does any of this have to do with marriage?"
"India has a market economy," she said. "There are no suitors here, only customers. The little chap that shows up at my house with his parents as a prospective husband is a customer. His parents are shopping for a bride. I'm the goods—damaged goods. They want to see my teeth, they want to read my horoscope. They might want to make an arrangement. Money's involved—big money sometimes. You've seen the adverts."
"Matrimonial classifieds. I love reading them."
"I hate them. I hate the system. They're like coded versions of the personal ads you get in the American papers. 'Friendly guy would like to meet young pretty girl'—except in India it's for keeps. And what would my advert say?"
"I wonder."
"'Over-the-hill Bengali woman, not looking for anyone.'"
"You write poetry. You dance. And what about your martial arts?"
"They're not a plus in a culture that wants cookery and childbearing. My mother-in-law would burn my poems. I wouldn't be able to dance—married women don't do such things. And a talent in martial arts is not a recommendation for a prospective bride."
"So what do you want?"
"To dance for you."
"I like that."
"And to meet a man who has a life of his own. Not possessive. A partner. Maybe gay."
That day she left me a poem about being eight years old and running into the sea, with the lines
The sea pulls me in around the ankles,
Grabs the sand from underneath, shows me
A glimpse of my life, what it will be like later.
What I am trying to describe here is the situation I was in before I met Mrs. Unger and in the early days of my getting to know Mrs. Unger. I can't say "friendship" or "love affair" because she loomed so large, and I felt myself to be her inferior in every way, as a traveler, as an Indophile—intellectually, and morally most of all.
I began to change, to see myself and the world differently by knowing Mrs. Unger, by seeing her work. The trip to Assam was the defining journey. I, who thought of travel as evasion, had found that travel, as Mrs. Unger did it, was purposeful. But more than that, in the course of the journey I had come to know her and to depend on her to such an extent that I lost the selfishness that had prevented me from seeing the world clearly. She had re-leased me, and the person she was seemed so unusual, I knew I had someone to write about, someone real.
Calcutta had been a blur. She had helped me to see its true face and to understand it. Her house in Alipore was full of life—the life of children being taught, fed, protected. I was like one of those children: she had rescued me in the same way. I understood their joy and their relief; they were safe, they were happy, they had something to live for.
Assam had been a revelation. The train trip had been liberating. I kept replaying her story about being black, and how she had told me that after we'd been accosted by the fierce she-man. Gauhati, the Brahmaputra River, the Kali temple, the journey to Silchar by way of Lumding, the tea estates and the slums, and at last, like a vision of hell, the child whores of Nagapatti—all of it was new to me, the hyperreality of India I had never guessed at before. But writing about it would have been impossible without the steadying and inspirational presence of Mrs. Unger, who helped me make sense of it all. She had brought me to these scenes; she had shown me this spectacle; she had penetrated this world and by making use of it had taught me how to use it. An important experience of this trip had been her tantric massage, her healing hands on me, the locating of my creative energy, the release of my kundalini.
That would have made me laugh before. "She helped me find my kundalini"—the American searcher, usually a woman, who, turning India into an opportunity for navel gazing, becomes a licensed busybody. Injunctions like "Out of the mind and into the heart." But I wasn't laughing anymore.
She was a woman of action. I know I have portrayed her so far as a rather humorless and passionate woman, a compulsive do-gooder, overwhelming me with her personality. But I was a small, peripheral part of her life—I saw just how small on this trip. This revelation was a spur to me. I had come to the end of my writing life, so it seemed, because the only subject I had was myself. The mistake my sort of writer made was to falsify my travels, pretending to be an adventurer when I was merely indulging myself as a tourist. My imagination had shriveled and my writing had dried up, and when I did make an effort to write something, I was aware that I was repeating myself. No wonder I envied Parvati, whose writing was so vibrant. I had a dead hand.
But now I had a subject, someone I would have found impossible to invent, and no one knew her as I did. She had few vulner-abilities, but they went deep. She was human, and her frailties helped me know her better. Her closest secret was her fear of the mob, her anxiety whenever she saw large numbers of people, the packed-together crowd that seemed to her like a many-headed creature. Her fear was so fundamental it was like a fear of India, and a form of guilt, like that of a fugitive seeing an angry mob and expecting it to pounce. I always think they want to devour me. She reacted to mobs, seeming to struggle, and afterward she was weakened, as if just the sight of so many people was an exertion.
She managed this fear in a way I had seen many foreigners do. She had chosen her own India. She'd invented an India that suited her, and when the crowd got to be too much, she escaped to her simpler, spiritual vault. She confined her movements to specific places; she looked for safe corners; she avoided the bazaars and markets and mobs.
As for food, she was fussy to the point where she would sometimes refuse to eat;
rather than eat something doubtful, she would not eat at all. That point where a religious person becomes rigidly observant, when piety becomes stubbornness and even paranoia. "Take that foul dish away," she might say to a waiter. She sounded imperious and sure of herself, but I knew better: she was afraid, and when she was afraid she slipped into her Englishness. That foul dish.
She must have guessed that I saw beneath her certainties, that I understood her fears; and that made her cling to me. I'd seen her cry. In anyone else, crying was an extension of laughter. With Mrs. Unger, crying was a form of collapse. I'd seen it only once, but it was so anguished and final I felt she'd never get over it, never return from it, never be the same again. Perhaps she needed me too.
Mrs. Unger was a character in all senses of the word, multidimensional, someone I admired especially for her ability to create. Out of the bustees of Calcutta and the chawls of Assam, the exploited girls on the back street and the lost children in the slums, she was giving life. It was a species of rescue, an act of will. She was the person a writer longs to meet, because she was someone almost unimaginable—a good person, not a saint but a woman of action and vision, and for me (I wasn't quite sure how to describe this part) an object of desire, someone adorable. She had given me hope.
The animal sacrifices she had made in Kalighat and encouraged in Gauhati were not aberrations. They were life-giving—that's what sacrifice is, a profound offering, an enhancement. I saw the glittering blade, heard the heartbeat tapped out on the drum, saw the warm black goat jammed between two posts and, in a flash, its head struck from its body, the blood pouring onto the blossoms and the muck of the stone floor of the slaughterhouse. That blood released me. The sight of it stayed with me. Life sprang from blood; life went on.
And I remembered how Mrs. Unger's white sari was never without the slight stain of blood, a dark stripe at the hem or a blood spatter on the lower part of her sari that looked like freckles, the same size and brownish color, a sort of umber. It was visible only close up, but I knew it was blood—blood that made her white sari whiter, purer.