A Dead Hand Read Online Free PDF

that blocked-off street?"
    "You must have been there many times, you're so popular."
    "Yes, but someone else was doing the driving," I said.
    "That's the mixed blessing of being in Calcutta. Someone else is always doing the driving."
    The ambiguity of this made me pause. I didn't have a reply to it, though I knew I'd remember it. I said, "So that's how you knew where to find me with your letter."
    I felt obvious and fooled with the conceit that I'd attributed it to my high visibility as a big pink
ferringhi.
But she dodged that—this had become a fencing match—and said, "I don't have much to do with those people. But I know how greatly they value you."
    "Really?" I said, mildly surprised because I'd never been convinced that Howard took me seriously as a writer. He liked my availability, and that I was willing to give pep talks at colleges at short notice, a volunteer speaker, glad for the per diem, who was not terrified by Calcutta, helping him do his job.
    "Oh, yes," Mrs. Unger said. "They're big fans. You know that Indians are very suspicious of the Americans that come out here, especially the ones sponsored by the U.S. government. They have a long history of being patronized. The consulate regards you as a friend who won't let them down."
    "And what do they think of you?"
    "I don't exist for them. But I'm glad you do. I'm glad your writing means something to them."
    Once again I wanted to say: I have no writing, I have a dead hand, I am out of stories, I have stopped believing. And maybe it will never happen. I didn't have much to write about at the best of times, and now it's done. But I had also thought, when I'd reflected on my dead hand: A writer without an idea, without the will or the energy to write, is someone in need of a friend.
    Nelson Algren had had friends, cronies, gambling pals, drinking buddies, and though he wrote nothing in his last years, he'd had companions. William Styron did not write anything in the last fifteen years of his life. His dead hand hadn't hastened his death; it had made him immensely gloomy, paranoid, and impatient, longing to write yet incapable of it. But he had been surrounded by a doting family and a loving wife. I had no writing, I had no one, I was alone with my dead hand.
    So I said, "I'll be there." Then I said, "Shall I call you Merrill?"
    "Call me Ma." And she looked closely at me. "Everyone does."
    It was a word that had always made me uncomfortable, so I resisted saying it, yet I allowed myself to be swept up. And it was all unexpected, which was why it was so pleasant: the drink, the meal, and now this appointment for a massage.
    I wondered if I looked so idle as to agree to so much at short notice. I hoped she understood that I was interested in her, even if I was bewildered by the story of the corpse in the hotel room. I was glad to have found her, and it seemed—I was sure of this—I was making her happy too. She had praised my work; she knew I had friends at the consulate. She seemed glad I had come. You go away to be anonymous, but sometimes the opposite happens: you excite interest, even in big, villagey India, in the stew of Calcutta.

3

    O VER BREAKFAST the next morning on the verandah of my hotel, the Hastings, conscious that I was eating what she'd instructed me to order—a little yogurt, green tea, a slice of mango, a handful of unsalted almonds—I mentally reviewed the meeting with Mrs. Unger—Ma, as I now thought of her. I was grateful to her for giving me something to do in Calcutta, to take my mind off my writing failure and my idleness. I had dreaded being stumped, having to sit in the heat over a blank page. I could not force out a story, and the few words I had written rang false.
    Trivial as it was, the appointment she'd made for me had given me a purpose, a destination for the day. I could have called Howard at the consulate, but he had a real job and obligations. I could have met Parvati for tea, providing she was in the