A Dead Hand by Paul Theroux Read Free Book Online Page A

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.

4

    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