When a famous, globetrotting writer writes a book describing in commanding detail the decaying mansion whose limestone peels were scattered across your own childhood, about urban legends that fluttered in your youth, the imposing porches above crawling footpaths that you manned at night or the sweating streets from your summers past, you are bound to be momentarily carried away. But the reverie does not last long because in A Dead Hand: A Crime in Kolkata, Paul Theroux is only occasionally brilliant and effortlessly banal at the same time, writing just another novel, which happens to be based in Calcutta. Theroux is prolific and intelligent enough to not stop for long on a book that cannot, notwithstanding his formidable descriptive powers, ruffle the feathers of Ghost Train to the Eastern Star.

Holed up in a nondescript hotel in Calcutta’s Sudder Street, down-in-the-dumps travel writer Jerry Delfont receives a letter from one Merill Unger to investigate a grisly happenstance in the life of her churlish, adopted son’s effeminate Bengali friend in a flea hotel in Calcutta’s downtown New Market. The Bengali gent had chanced upon a dead body of a naked young boy in his hotel room in the dead of night and fled from the scene. Unger urges Delfont to find out the truth. An impervious Delfont half agrees till he meets Unger, who turns out to be a woman with drop-dead looks and formidable charms that matched her self-assured poise of earnest philanthropism. The rest is about how Delfront unravels the mystery and with it, some of Calcutta.

One engaging exercise for the reader of A Dead Hand is to find out in which parts Theroux, the itinerant travel writer that he is, slips in and out of the narrative and makes way for the storyteller Delfont. There is a creeping sense that whenever the latter finds his powers waning he summons the former to make up for the lull, forcing the grimy thriller to make occasional, poetic journeys to the Calcutta subterranean. And Theroux observes Kolkata sharply; at least in places where he lets go of his protagonist Jerry and writes about the much-maligned city with his eyes wide open. And he is unrelenting in the feverish bullishness that perfectly describes Calcutta.

As a thriller, hence, A Dead Hand is merely a fiddle to Theroux’s Calcutta sojourns. In the portraiture of the mercurial philanthropist Merill Unger there is a hint of a Christopher Hitchens kind of an expose of how the rich in say Manhattan, sully their hands on the other side of the spectrum: among the dirt poor in India. Theroux should have worked with a blotting paper when he writes about Unger because he unfailingly overwrites about her and her steamy Tantric massages to Jerry. And the dead hand as a motif for Jerry’s writers’ block as well as the gruesome signature of a foul murder is interesting, if wholly predictable. Then there are those annoying mistakes about details including Jerry’s inability to pin down on a suitable season for his three-month odd stay in Calcutta which can be anywhere between post-Puja (Autumn), high Summer and the arrival of the rains. And Jerry’s meeting with ‘famous and successful travel writer’ Paul Theroux on the lawns of the iconic Fairlawn Hotel is nothing more than a smart digression.

A Dead Hand says nothing about Calcutta that is already not dreaded the world over. The same cannot be said about Unger. In fact, Theroux’s (and by extension Jerry’s) Calcutta ends up, sadly, as less memorable than the beautiful, inviolable, portentous and diabolical Merill Unger.

A Dead Hand: A Crime in Kolkata | Paul Theroux | Hamish Hamilton | 2010 | P 265