A Dead Hand (14 page)

"Those people," she said of the mob. She had gone pale. Her features were sharpened by anxiety and she wore a half-smile of fear. "I always think they want to devour me."

She had cut through the crowd without looking left or right. This apparent confidence, which was bravado, making no eye contact, had made her seem imperious.

But her hand told me the truth as she hung on. No one would have guessed that she'd noticed the crowd, though her hand resolved itself into a small panicky animal. It was not until we were past all those jostling people that she slackened her hold and began again to talk calmly.

"You only hear about one side of the little woman," she said. "The saintly side."

"I suppose there was another side."

"With a saint? Always. A ghastly one," Mrs. Unger said in a subdued way, as if in sympathy.

"That building's famous as her hospice, though."

"And it's a glorified morgue," she said, and seemed torn, "because she adored suffering." She held her breath as we passed another staring knot of people. "I wonder who she was when she was alone. I think she had no faith except in herself. Nothing wrong with that, but like most crowd pleasers she didn't know when to stop."

"That seems a little harsh."

"I don't deny her charity. But she spent very little of the millions she was given. She believed that poverty made people better, but it can make them vicious. The Vatican has the money, all those windbags and pedophiles. Little Agnes was an egotist." Mrs. Unger was still gripping my hand, tapping her emotion into it. "I don't fault her for leaving her order of nuns and starting her own band of sisters. She needed to be in charge. It's understandable that she was self-invented—it's always the way with so-called saints. Saints are always on their own journey. Agnes was."

"How do you know?"

"I knew her. I helped her." Mrs. Unger was smiling, passing between a pair of imploring beggars. I glanced away from their cupped hands. "She had doubts, you know. But I forgive her for being an atheist, poor thing. God had pretty much abandoned her. Instead of faith, she had a feral willpower and a love of failure and death and, excuse me"—she waved away a man on a bicycle—"poverty and illness. Absolutely loved them, all these miseries that concentrate a person's mind on salvation. 'Save me,' people screamed at her, and that hopeless scream turned her head. Well, of course it would. Who would not be attentive to people so desperate, especially if you can build a reputation on it."

"How well did you know her?" I asked.

"I sometimes think I'm the only person on earth who truly understood her. She was tiny. Unphysical. She was well aware of the effect her little pickled face and twisted body had on other people. Famous people loved posing with her."

I tried to imagine Mrs. Unger and Mother Teresa side by side, but it seemed a preposterous pairing. I suspected that Mother Teresa would not have been terrified by the mob, as Mrs. Unger obviously was.

"She was preoccupied with death. I have only cared about the living, about children who have their whole life ahead of them," Mrs. Unger said. "She wanted to give people an easy death. Is that an accomplishment? What about giving them sixty years of useful life? But no, that didn't interest Agnes."

I said, "Where are we going?"

But she was too engrossed in this memory of Mother Teresa to answer.

"I can ignore all that, but what I cannot ignore is her hideous posturing and her need to be noticed. Is that saintly? She lived for people to see her. She asked for money, but she believed that wealth was the source of evil. She needed witnesses. There's the difference. I don't want attention. I need no witnesses. I gave her money."

Then she smiled—the smile of ill humor—and waved her hand in the direction of Mother Teresa's home.

"And what's left? Only that obvious anachronism, the house of death."

Ahead of her, a bearded man in a long white shirt and homespun khadi vest recognized her and looked eager.

"Yes, madam, here," and he gestured in invitation.

"
Apni keman achen?
"

"
Bhalo achhi.
Health is good, madam. I have been waiting you, madam."

The front of his shop was open—no wall. It was not a shop in the usual sense, but rather an open-sided pen with a tile roof. In a fenced enclosure with an earthen floor there were about a dozen black bleating goats. They were small, most of them, with glossy coats, making sad little cries, each one tethered with a rope around its neck. They nibbled at fodder, grass that had been stacked in a cradle.

The bearded man tugged one of the goats away from the others and heaved it off the ground, holding it in his arms. But Mrs. Unger walked past him—in her white diaphanous sari, in the reeking goat pen, she seemed suspended above the trampled floor.

"This one," she said, indicating a small, bewildered-looking goat that stood staring up at her, not bleating. The animal looked cuddly and confident, even a bit defiant.

"He's cute," I said.

"The blackest.
Dam koto?
"

"One thousand rupees, madam."

Handing him a block of notes that had a paper band around it, she kept her eyes on the chosen goat.

"A brave little thing," she said.

What happened next happened fast. We crossed the lane, passed Mother Teresa's hospice again, and walked up another lane, entering the precincts of the temple she'd shown me earlier. A young man carried her goat tightly against his chest. Seeing her, some men at the temple cleared the way, shoving people, then nagging me to take my shoes off.

As I sat on a bench, untied my shoes, and slipped them off ("And sockings, sar"), Mrs. Unger stepped out of her sandals and went to the back of the temple. I found her surrounded by chanting, sweaty-faced men near a walled enclosure—just walls, no roof. She wore a necklace of flowers, and the goat too was garlanded like a beloved pet. The chanting of the men became louder in their excitement.

A man inside the enclosure wearing an apron-like skirt stood over a drum and began to smack it, a snare-drum sound of syncopation that got the crowd of men stamping. The drummer's arms were flecked with red. The sound and the louder chanting seemed to make the day hotter. My shirt was stuck to my back, and my head was burning.

Speaking in what I took to be Bengali, Mrs. Unger directed the man with the goat to enter the walled enclosure. The man walked through clusters of flowers and what looked like fresh paint on the stone floor, where a barefoot priest stood, streaked with ashes and daubs of holy vermilion on his forehead and cheeks.

The goat began to bleat as its head was jammed between two upright stone stakes the height of a wicket, its neck pushed hard against a stump. The drumming grew louder. The priest touched his fingers to his lips and then caressed the goat's head. He raised a long curved knife, and without pause he struck down, like a butcher dividing a side of meat, and with the same thunk as the blade hit solid wood.

The goat's bleating ceased like an interrupted hiccup as its head tumbled to the stone floor, coming to rest at the base of the wicket, blood bubbling and spurting from the raw ragged meat of the neck and spilling onto the blossoms, puddling near the priest's feet.

I had gasped in the act of saying "Please, no," but everyone around me was screeching with delight. Even in the open air I felt suffocated, as if I was in a small room. Though I had seen dead animals, flattened squirrels on the road, and human corpses in coffins, I had never seen any creature slaughtered. A live thing bulged with blood, and now all the blood was puddled on the stone floor. My head hurt; I felt it in my guts; I wanted to vomit.

Mrs. Unger bent low to kiss the carcass of the black goat, and when she straightened up she was smeared with blood, red streaks on her shawl.

A shrill cry went up (
Joi Kali!
), joyous, cruelly triumphant, as she lifted her blood-smeared shawl from her head and draped it over the posts of the execution rack, along with a garland of blood-red lilies. The bystanders rushed forward, their bare feet slapping and skidding on the blood, and stuck their faces into the sticky folds of the shawl.

The carcass of the headless goat was hoisted on a hook. Using the same hacker, the priest skinned and swiftly butchered it, carving it into bloody chunks and joints on a platter, then directed it to be taken away.

The look on Mrs. Unger's face was one of rapture, gleaming with sweat, the ringlets of her hair gummed to her cheeks, and she offered her face to the priest, who in one gesture of his dripping hand marked her forehead with a fingertip of blood.

Murmuring, her face a mask of ruddied passion, she raised her eyes to the temple window, her mouth half open—as I had seen women in the throes of desire—her hands clasped, breathing deeply. She was speaking like a priestess possessed, but her words were drowned out by the chants and shrieks of the people who had watched the sacrifice.

Before we left, she led me into the temple. We shuffled past an inside window where the image of the goddess Kali, gleaming black and brightly marked, stared with orange lozenge eyes from a stack of blossoms and offerings. I was briefly frightened, jostled by the mob in this stifling place of incense and flowers and dishes of money and frantic pilgrims, who were twitching with gestures of devotion, and gasping, seeming to eat the air, all of them smiling wildly at the furious image.

H
ER
SLIGHTLY
BLOODSTAINED
white sari billowed as she swept through the Kalighat bazaar, past the beggars and the flower sellers and the fruit stalls, the beseeching holy men, the clattering rickshaws, the beeping motorbikes. From the sounds alone you knew you were in another century—bicycle bells, the clop of pony hooves on cobblestones, the chatter of a sewing machine, the clang of a hammer on an anvil, the bang and bump of wooden wagon wheels.

Though her hand was hot, clutching mine like that of a panicked child, she seemed utterly serene. Now I knew that beneath Mrs. Unger's impassive strength and certainty, she was wary of the big screeching mob. Well, who wouldn't be? But I was impressed by her bluff, showing nothing but indifference. She was unfazed, and even in this filthy street of the market, she appeared to take no notice of the men trying to get her attention. More than that, she looked fulfilled and a little fatigued, with a wan smile, spent, but with a glow like sexual relief on her face, lips apart, her eyes shining with pleasure though her face was rather pale.

Passing a heap of blossoms, the blood-colored lilies I'd been seeing, I remarked on the redness. I tried to let go to touch the petals, but her fingers gripped me harder.

"Hold me," she said, and as if to cover her fear she added, "The
shonali
lily, Kali's favorite."

Because she didn't hesitate, and kept walking slightly ahead of me, pulling me onward, I saw how the bottom of her sari was soaked with a narrow red profile, a stripe of blood in a crimson hem where it had touched the floor of the sacrifice enclosure. And the light hairs on her arm prickled with tiny droplets of blood, more like dew than gore. If I hadn't seen where she'd been, I would have guessed that she'd brushed against fresh paint. It was vivid red in places, in other spots going brown.

"The puja was for luck," she said, "and to bless us in our next venture."

That "us" cheered me. Seeing her car in the distance, Balraj leaning next to it, she raised her hand. Balraj put on his chauffeur's cap, straightened it, and scrambled inside. But it took him several minutes to reach us through the crowd.

I now knew that Mrs. Unger was uneasy on the street, yet she didn't betray it; she didn't look at anyone in the crowd. Her gaze was lifted to the gold bulge on the top of the Kali temple roof while she held my hand. And that was something else I knew: she needed me.

If you had money in India, I was thinking again, you never had to wait. Some people like Mrs. Unger never waited, while others did nothing but wait to be summoned, to open a door; many obeyed without a command, acting when the person with money or power appeared, as though these underlings operated from a motion sensor.

I must not forget that, I thought; if I take this attention for granted, I'll be like the money people, presumptuous and priggish. In this respect Mrs. Unger was like the rest of them, expecting to be waited on, impatient when there was a delay. But at least she had the grace not to comment on it. She said nothing to me, but I could tell from the way she held herself that she was mentally drumming her fingers—beautiful fingers. It seems to be a feature of impatience that a person cannot speak, or at least hold an animated conversation, while she is waiting in this way—too preoccupied by the suspense and annoyance to hold or express a complete thought, and seemingly deafened by annoyance too.

This, and her fear of the mob, made Mrs. Unger human to me. I welcomed her lapses. I needed to be reassured that she wasn't perfect because usually—and especially when I was away from her—I felt she was faultless. Her apparent perfection intimidated me and reminded me of my weakness.