A Dead Hand by Paul Theroux Read Free Book Online

a high portico, slatted blinds, and a date at the base of a plinth, 1892. It could have been a school or a rotting hospital, but probably—this being Calcutta—it had once been the residence of a tycoon, a jute merchant or tea magnate. A fountain in the courtyard, its centerpiece a nymph in the act of emptying a water jar, was dry and the nymph was missing one arm. Two rusted urns held geraniums. A fresher eye than mine, someone new to Calcutta, would have seen the villa as derelict, but I knew that it was a usable antique: it was clean and orderly, the courtyard swept, the flowers watered, all of them deep red lilies. To one side was a gateway with a garden of shade trees visible beyond it. This was one of those Indian time warps that I had stepped into many times but without surrendering to it, because I was the traveling writer who always had to leave early the next morning for a new place. I kicked off my shoes and mounted the steps.
    A man in a white smock and leggings stood barefoot at the doorway, a woman beside him in a white sari. She held the usual tray with a flame, passed it under my chin, and applied a red thumbprint to my forehead.
    "Welcome to the Lodge, sir."
    "Lovely place."
    "Your home, sir," the man said.
    I followed them inside and through a high-ceilinged lobby, across a marble floor. The ruinous outside was not repeated here: the interior was whole and cool, with painted murals of classical European landscapes on the walls of the lobby—Palladian villas set amid tall poplars, deer and birds in a pastoral scene, a great sweep of bay, perhaps Naples, all of these faded paintings blurred with an overlay of dust.
    I had seen a few spas in India; this was not like any of them. The ruin on the outside did not suggest anything hygienic, and the lobby here was more suited to stuffed shirts and evening gowns. In this newer incarnation I would have said it was a school—for the odors alone, with the whiff of chalk dust in the air, the tang of varnished desks and mildewed books, the battered woodwork, the baseboards looking kicked and bumped. I imagined children jostling here. And I could hear voices: the singsong of children's laughter, the sounds of their playing, reciting, the shrieky rat-a-tat of childish taunts. And more, the tapping of feet—the peculiar dry scuff and thump of bare soles; the fleeting shapes—faces at door cracks, faces at the spindles in the upper galleries, the contending screeches of small boys, the imploring voices of little girls. Because I could not see any of them clearly, they seemed to be especially numerous, a whole mansion of murmuring children, Interrupted from time to time by the odd dull nag of an older woman.
    The unseen but vibrant presence of life, an intimation of children, made me uncomfortable. I felt I'd entered by the wrong door, somewhere I didn't belong.
    I looked at the man who was leading me through the cool, odorous—smell of damp mop on old tile—corridors, and I hoped to be reassured. I wanted him to say
Never mind them,
or to explain what the voices were.
    He didn't say anything, not even his name. He didn't smile, or if he did, I could not see it beneath his mustache. He had the face-forward and rather resigned and glazed expression of an Indian menial doing his duty. That is, both submissive and slightly haughty.
    We turned into another corridor—fleeting shapes of children—and then went through a latched door to an annex of the old building. A woman waiting at the door handed me a parcel, like a delivery of hotel laundry, and the man said, "You can change in there. Wear robe only and cloth slippers. Valuables will be deposited in this container"—he indicated a basket on a shelf—"for containing only. No one will disturb."
    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