A Dead Hand Read Online Free PDF Page B

company of some of her friends; it was considered indecent for a man like me to meet a virginal Hindu like her alone. She was gifted, with her whole life ahead of her as a dancer, a poet, a practitioner of Indian martial arts. I wished her well, but I knew that not much would change in my life. Old age was not an accumulation of thought and experience but rather the reverse: by writing of my most vivid experiences I had disposed of them. Old age for me was an emptying of the mind.
    Old age for me was also a narrowing of possibilities and maybe (as I was beginning to think) a slow dying, parts of the body becoming useless—my empty head, my dead hand. What body part next?
    Calcutta was the perfect place to feel like a physical wreck or a failure. Virtually everyone else was much worse off than I was. Maybe that was why I had lingered after my work was done, though I hadn't made anything of my experience in the city. Had I not met Ma the day before, I would have spent the day walking as though in a hot-weather stupor, window-shopping, museum-going, or heading to Howrah station and considering the outbound trains. I had thought of leaving, but having met Ma I was curious and sentimental and dog-like, sniffing at the memory of meeting her and hoping to see her again.
    And sitting on the Hastings verandah, the sun dazzling in the slats of the shutters, I remembered more of what she had said at the Oberoi—more than what I have already written. The talk of the British Empire and her Anglophile late husband had led her to talk about the English in general and the royal family in particular.
    "They love royalty here too. The British spend half their time lying to themselves about their dysfunctional country. The Indians do the same. I'm not surprised they find common ground. 'We love pageantry,' the British say as they hide behind the flags and the funny-looking hats. And Queenie's the head of the church, the Defender of the Faith—it says so on the money. But look at her. Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous? She's a gilded crock, a posturing old dear who regards Britain as her personal property. Imagine finding spirituality in this little old lady. It's like finding spirituality in a skinny cow, which Indians do."
    "If you want to be worshiped, go to India and moo. Isn't that what they say?"
    But she wasn't listening. She was saying, "I think the Indians easily came to admire Queen Victoria, because she was the superqueen, the Rajmata. Indians believe in hierarchies and the British model came ready-made, as a big unifying social contraption."
    She was speaking slowly but intensely, with the kind of fluency that made me think she'd recited this denunciation many times before, because it was a speech rather than a conversation, and whatever I said was an interruption.
    "India's dirty little secret is that they dislike each other and are untrusting. The British are the same—English especially. Can't bear each other. Never talk. Don't even say hello. That's why they're so happy in America, because we believe this fictional version of themselves. They hate their lives. They can only be happy by promoting the myth of the terribly British, and that's only possible overseas, in faraway places like India. Indians have bamboozled Americans too. 'We don't eat animals.' Most of them do! 'We are spiritual, madam.' They worship money!"
    "It's true," Rajat had said. "We are so materialistical."
    "I suppose it's a commonplace to regard the British royal family as social upstarts."
    "I never heard that before," Rajat had said.
    "The royal family is bourgeois—if anything, they're lower middle class but with insane pretensions. Prince Philip used to complain to newspaper reporters that he had no money, that he couldn't afford to keep polo ponies, that Buckingham Palace got horrible aircraft noise. That's typical shabby. 'We just don't have the money!' 'We're stuck here in this rackety house!'"
    And then: "They get all sorts