by Paul Theroux
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 o
ld 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.