A Dead Hand by Paul Theroux Page B

carpet and brought upstairs, perhaps in the darkness, lugged into the room and unrolled. Rajat had woken and seen it, the corpse on the floor, and had fled.
    "So my friend wasn't imagining it?"
    "You not tell Mr. Bibhuti Biswas, sir, that you speak to me. He be so angry."
    "He's not your boss anymore."
    "He be terrible to me again, beating me. He knowing my residence in
bustee
in Tollygunge. I have new job."
    "What doing?"
    "Sweeper, sir."
    This tore at my heart—the bruised face, the skinny fingers tugging at her shawl. Helpless and ashamed, I gave her two five-hundred-rupee notes.
    "God bless you, sir."
    She reached into the folds of her shawl and took out a small cloth shoulder bag and set it on her lap. She plucked open the knots on the flap and slid out a plastic pouch that was taped shut.
    "Not be fearful, sir, please."
    "Why should I be fearful?" I had started to smile, but her bruised face sobered me.
    "It be so strange to you. You must not cry out. It is very important. It is all that is left. The only thing." She spoke slowly, annoyingly so. She was nodding as she put the plastic pouch into my hand. "You will be knowing what to do."
    "Shall I open it now?"
    "After I gone, sir. I can't bear look it again. It is terrible thing indeed."
    She flung her shawl around her face, pinched it at her chin so that only her eyes showed, then she bowed, said "Bless you, sir" again, and slipped between the gravestones and the many angels and was gone.
    I held the soft pouch. I was skeptical: Indians loved drama; their natural element was hyperbole. They lived in words—words were kinder and more habitable than the
bustees.
Mrs. Unger was like that too. So I picked at the lightly taped parcel with the feeling that I was being trifled with in the Indian way:
It be so strange to you. You must not cry out.
    I did not cry out at once. I thought: A piece of meat, how odd in vegetarian India.
    But then I saw the small fingers, the tiny fingernails, almost reptilian, the lined palm, the severed wrist bone, the ragged flesh bound by a piece of string. A human hand—a dead hand, stiff and gray. And I let out a cry, as though someone had stabbed me, and twisted the knife.
    With this thing in my possession I knew I could not leave Calcutta.
    Had I been in a house, I would have hidden the dead hand in a distant room, or in a box in the basement, or in an attic trunk. There was something creepy about carrying this horrible thing back with me to my bedroom in the Hotel Hastings. I kept thinking of the yellow fingernails, the neatly severed wrist tied with string. Wherever I put it in my room, I would never be more than six feet away from it. I could not put it in a drawer or in the closet—the cleaning woman would find it. So I locked it in the side pocket of my duffel bag, using my little padlock. Because the pocket was small I could see where it swelled, could almost make out the contour of the dead knuckles—my eye was constantly drawn to the bulge.
    Who was it? Someone who had only worked, who had never laughed, who was forgotten, someone perhaps more useful dead than alive; a sad soul. My memory of the thing woke me in the night. I imagined it flexing to be free, trying to claw out of the side pocket. Even liberated, saved from cremation, it was no more than a stiffened hand, a little paw that had been detached from a body.
    Severed, in its discolored plastic bag, it was pathetic, needing attention. I felt a severe sense of obligation. In spite of being so small it imposed a great weight, holding me here in Calcutta, pleading to be identified. It was my secret and my responsibility. I had been entrusted with it. Mina knew how valuable it was, but she could not have known how much it mattered to me—how it reproached me. I wished I had never seen it, because I knew now that it obligated me. I had seen hands like this many times in Calcutta—just like this, stuck into my face as I sat in traffic, or imploring me as I