A Dead Hand (6 page)

When I stepped into the changing room, he left and so did the woman. I shut the door and changed quickly, took off my watch and put it with my wallet into the basket. Just then, a knock at the door: he seemed to know that I was done.

"This way, sir."

"Where to?"

"To vault."

What he said was
wait,
and the word thrilled me. He led me deeper into the Lodge, past adjoining rooms and narrowing corridors to a heavy door. Behind this door was a room with a long wooden table in the center, a shower in one corner, a stool in another corner. The tiny smoke trail rising from a taper in a dish must have accounted for the fragrant and dizzying aroma.

Two young men in the room bowed to me, their hands clasped in a gesture of
namaste.
The taller of the two motioned me to the stool where the other had already begun to crouch.

This second man washed my feet with lukewarm water, massaging my toes, rubbing them gently, cupping my heels. It was more than mere pouring water and soaping; it was not an empty ritual but rather an act of purification, a slow and thorough cleansing of the flesh of my feet, making them live—reminding me that I had two feet.

"Table, sir."

These laconic directions were all I got. I could not tell whether they knew a whole English sentence. But it didn't matter. They had removed my robe and my wrap, and I lay face-down on the table, feeling exposed. My first thought, the fearful one, was that I was to be killed: I was in the helpless posture of an animal on a slab. I lay like a human sacrifice, blind to my captors, my ass in the air.

One of them hosed me with a fine spray while the other scrubbed me with a mild abrasive—salt, I realized. Each of them wore cloth mitts, and they worked the salt over my body the way you scour a pot. This went on for a while, their rocking me with scrubbing motions.

I was possessed by a strange sensation, as though I was not human at all but an enormous vegetable or a dumb animal being cleaned. I gave myself up to it and was amazed at their conscientious scrubbing, the chafing of their mitts. Then they sprayed all the salt off me, and I heard the gulp of the excess water in the drains.

When all the salt had been removed from my body and the table, one of them gave me a towel and helped me to a sitting position.

"Take time, sir."

He knew I was dizzy from their pummeling. Was this what Ma had meant when she'd said,
You'll be a new man?
I dried myself and stood up on the wooden slats of the floor. One of the men draped a robe over my shoulders, the other tied the cords in front.

"This way, sir."

Down the hall to a new room, a dry table as sacrificial-seeming as the last but with a more pungent odor, like sesame oil, and a burning smell too. An oil lamp, a sacred statue in a shrine garlanded with marigolds.

I lay on the table, again face-down, but I saw one of them take a brass pot from a squat, stove-like heater, and he poured hot oil on my back and buttocks and calves, and he worked it into my muscles. He dripped it into my hair, massaged my scalp, and proceeded from there to my feet. I felt like a piece of meat being marinated for the pot.

Some minutes of this, then, "Thank you, sir," and they left me alone in the warm room that was thick with the scent of oil.

N
AKED
IN
THIS
STRANGE
interior room in an old ripe-smelling mansion in a district of Calcutta, I began to mock myself, thinking: This is what happens when you surrender. I didn't really know where I was. Somehow curiosity and vanity had led me here, and a sentiment I thought I had outgrown, the greed for experience, agreeing to the suggestions of a beautiful stranger. That willingness had served me before when I needed something to write about.

I did not know what would happen next. Mine was an act of faith, or stupidity—I was a credulous fool. The car had been sent, like a vehicle in a ghost story or an Indian myth, and I had gotten in and allowed myself to be transported here. Now I lay, literally with my dick in my hand, in the posture of submission, alone and bare-assed, like a big buttered man on an altar.

Yet I was not alarmed. The hot oil had calmed me. Coated in it, I was warmed and relaxed, the lamp flickering in the aroma of sesame and ghee. The only light came from the flame wagging on the wick in the oil lamp. The last identifiable sound I'd heard was the door's decisive click as the masseurs had departed. I wasn't sorry: I didn't like being touched by a man. But I wasn't surprised. In puritanical caste-crazed India it was unusual for a woman in a spa to attend to male clients.

I must have dozed. The whole business had been soporific. With my head covered by a folded towel, I was dimly aware—perhaps in shallow dreams, or in adjacent rooms—of the murmur of life nearby, like a children's chorus, vaguely taunting and competing as children's voices seem to do. My body was penetrated by the vibrations of busy lives, the shuffle of small feet, the contentious cries of kids, the whole huge house pulsing around this small room, the vault.

And I thought, or dreamed: This is not like any spa I've ever seen, in India or anywhere else. The muted life, the deliberate pauses, the silences of a spa were unavailable here. This was like being in a household—a large one—or a schoolhouse or (the thought occurred to me as a grotesquerie) a big throbbing body. I had the absurd thought that I'd been swallowed whole by a monstrous creature and that I was in the belly of this monster. But it was an Indian beast, accommodating and warm, its blood pounding in my ears, and still the shrieks and calls of children echoing in the walls.

When I woke, Mrs. Unger was beside me.

She seemed to inhabit a vapor, a fragrant cloud filled with the aroma of flowers and also of Indian spices, mingled oils, and perfumes. She was warmth and softness and a kind of light too. This sounds hyperbolic. I supposed I was overreacting to her because I was so relieved to see her. She brushed my shoulder, the caress of warm skin or silk against my side. I lifted my head a little and saw she was wearing a purple sari. She was moving her hands, palms downward, paddling the air over my body as though warming them like fingers over a fire, and in another motion lifting them in a gesture of levitation, and then making a flourish with them as though she was earnestly searching, my body the object of her dowsing motions.

"Just breathe normally," she said, and that was all she said for a while.

Still I lay naked, slick with oil, imagining that I could feel her fluttering hands. I was glad she was there, not just relieved that she was not an Indian masseur but delighted to see her again. Since the previous day I'd been thinking about her—involuntarily, she shimmered in my memory—and I'd even had a vivid dream of her in which she smiled at me, then turned around and was someone else, a demon version of her bewitching side. The everyday horrors on an Indian street or in an average temple make this sort of nightmare a common occurrence. Without speaking, but (in the manner of dreams) knowing what I wanted, I tried to get her to turn again so I could behold that sensual side of her.

"Trying to see where you need work," she was saying with banal practicality over my feverish memories. Her hands were still active in the air, hovering as if receiving signals with her fingers and palms.

"Where did you come from?"

She didn't answer. With a frown in her voice, she said, "Yes, you do need work. Upper trapezius muscles. Very tight."

Hearing that pleased me. I wanted her to stay. I wanted her attention.

"Now I'm going to ask you to turn over."

I skidded slightly as I rolled onto my back. Then I felt the warmth and weight of a towel over my pelvic area; she tucked the ends under my buttocks, so I was decent. A moment later she placed a damp cloth over my eyes. In the darkness I became more aware of the music in the room—a sitar, a warbling flute, and in bursts the
pok-pok
of tabla drums.

Now I felt her confident fingers on me. She was holding my toes, one by one, explaining softly, "This is your shoulder"—the small toes—"very tense," and working her way from toe to toe, "your neck, your ears," and gripping my big toe, "your head." She dug her nails into the sole of each foot and lifted it, applying pressure. After a minute or so, the same refrain, "You need work."

The very pressure of her fingers relaxed me. She took my right arm and kneaded it from the shoulder downward, my biceps, my forearm, my wrist, my palm, each finger, being thorough, squeezing hard at times, just this side of pain; and then the other arm. She worked my head, my ears, my neck, my face, sometimes caressing me, more often probing, finding a muscle, twisting hard to awaken it and leaving it vibrant with heat.

She said little more, though I could sense her breathing, both as a sighing softness in the air and a pressure against me, the swelling of her midsection of bare skin between the sari and the bodice.

All she said was "Don't help me—relax," as she went lower, lifting my legs, bending each one, stretching and flexing them, my feet, my ankles. She pinched all the muscles from my ankle upward, tracing them and working her knuckles against them, to my thigh; then gripping my inner thigh and making it a bundle of muscle meat, twisting it, and as she did brushing my penis with the backs of her hands, though (this thought burning like a hot circuit in my mind) giving the thing no direct attention.

That was the thickening query, stirring under the towel, the dumb "What now?" that made it so awkward to be a man, the dog-like obviousness of it. But if she noticed, she didn't say so, intent upon warming my thighs, and muscle by muscle taking possession of every part of my body.

An hour or more of this, though I had lost track of time—it could have been two hours. I was keenly aware that she knew what she was doing. Her touch was sure; she knew each muscle and every connector and bit of gristle in me. And she knew—how could she not?—what effect she was having on me. But apart from her incidental brushings and touches, she did not take hold of my penis, which was not erect but swelling.

All her massaging with her querying fingers had been working toward my center, seeming to push energy into my groin. I wanted to say
Touch me there,
but there was something delicious in the delay. Of course I wanted more. I supposed that much was visible, but I was also eager to see what would come next, for as she massaged me, and as I became more relaxed and grateful, I had the impression of her as a person of immense power and authority.

Healing hands,
her son had said.
Magic fingers,
Rajat had said. She hadn't denied it. She had lifted her hands and admired them. I had smiled then, but I wasn't smiling now. She was inflicting pain on me, at the periphery of my groin, pushing hard, and as she did, her hair must have come undone, because I could sense the cool sweep of her loose tresses on my aching muscles.

After a while, in a stupor of ecstasy, I did not feel her hands on me. I seemed to be floating. Her arms were extended above my body, and she was paddling with her hands again, palms-down.

"Better," she said, leaning over me. "But I can still feel tightness here and here."

"Good."

"Not good," she said.

"So I'll have to come back."

"If you want to."

"I want to."

"Are you sure?"

This testing was a little like the massage—a questioning pressure, a tentative flirting, a deeper return, that teased me and gave me pleasure.

"Please."

When had I ever pleaded before? But I meant it. Nothing else seemed to matter. Her silence was also a form of pressure.

"This place is magic," I said, to encourage her to speak to me.

Her muted laugh, more like the contraction of a muscle, made me wary, almost fearful of what she'd say next.

"You don't even know where you are," she said with the energy of that same suppressed laughter. "And you don't know me."

"I want to know. I want to come back." I must have sounded like an overeager child. I lay naked and oily on the table.

"I know exactly what you want," she said. I did not see her move, though she must have because the flame of the oil lamp had begun to shimmy.

She put a robe over my shoulders, and I slipped off the table, stood unsteadily, and tied the cords. She, who had loomed over me and had seemed so powerful, now stepped aside, looking almost fragile.

I wanted to convince her of my sincerity and my worth, but I was out of ideas. I knew I was in subterranean Calcutta, but above ground the chaos in the city echoed the chaos in my mind. Perhaps that was why I wanted to come back to this vault. I yearned to see her again. This need gave me a vague sense of obligation, as though I owed her for her good will, the close attention of her hands. She had touched me. I wanted somehow to repay her so that I could return.

"What's the name of the hotel?"

"The hotel?"

"Where Rajat had the problem."

"Where Rajat claims he had a problem," she said, correcting me and putting her hand on my arm, a mother's caress of consolation. She went on, "Never mind that. It's Rajat's affair. I'm sure you have plenty of more important things to do."