A good hand with travel

But Theroux doesn't have such a good hand with crime or sex for that matter

A Dead Hand
by Paul Theroux, published by Penguin India
Price: Rs 399
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I jumped into this book with eager anticipation, having just enjoyed Bishwanath Ghosh's Chai Chai, in which he mentions that he values his copy of The Great Railway Bazar signed by Theroux about as much as he would a copy of the Bible signed by God.

So I was horribly disappointed to find this book though a brilliant travelogue strewn with precise but poetic descriptions a complete disaster as a crime novel. It's only the language, and to some extent the flow of narrative, that holds attention. The actual events are limp and though the characters are vivid, the relationships between them are awkward and the plot hangs clumsy.



This is a book that shows how easy it is to commit crimes and get away with them in India. It has two dead hands, one belonging to the unfortunate writer who tells us his story.

He has not been able to write anything for ages until one day, listless in his hotel in Kolkata (the perfect place to feel like a failure; a place where the air reminded him of the times he'd emptied a vacuum cleaner bag), he receives a letter from a Mrs Unger which draws him into the events which result in this novel.

Mrs Unger is a matronly American do-gooder with a put-on British accent. Our hero claims to have wooed enough women in the past to know that only a woman's trust and hope led to sex, but he's soon madly in love with her.

A tantric massage happens (this is India, after all) and, to cut a rather tedious story short, this book is presently pitted against Philip Roth's The Humbling for the annual Bad Sex Awards. Unless Roth came up with something better than "the sacred spot on her lotus flower" and "my wand of light", it gets my vote.

It's only half-way through the book that we learn that the narrator is not Theroux himself, when Theroux suddenly appears as a character and is cleverly sneered at as "the sort of writer who smiled and encouraged you to chatter and afterwards wrote a pitiless account of the conversation, playing up his knowingness. He was not cruel but he was unsparing."

What I did enjoy about the book were the un-cruel and unsparing descriptions of India.

Unmarried women are like schoolgirls, in their good humour and with their restrictions. Certain of the men, no matter how accomplished and successful, remain like big hairy boys, ungrateful and tantrum-prone and spoiled; a hijra is a fierce she-man.

The mission in our blame-shifting society is to win at any cost and to be blameless, and the simplest way is to rubbish the underlings.

All of India is a work in progress. (Do I mean progress? Never mind).

The ability to provide baksheesh is the principal determiner of a person's worth in India.

What upset me was the slipping idiom. A privileged Indian might certainly say something like, "We are so materialistical."

However, a less-educated one would never ask, "Have you breakfasted?" (It's "Have you taken breakfast?"). Or, for that matter, "I am having a brace of complaints about you giving a nuisance in the night": almost there, but "brace"? No!

Theroux knows India so well surely he has friends who could help with stuff like this.