Song of Kali

Chapter Twelve

The room was very small and very dark. A tiny oil lamp, open flame sputtering above a pool of rancid ghee, sat in the center of a square wooden table but the little light it produced was swallowed by the tattered black curtains which hung on every side. The chamber was less a room than a black-shrouded crypt. Two chairs waited at the table. On the splintered table's surface lay a book, its title not quite legible in the sick light. I did not have to read the cover to know what book it was. It was Winter Spirits, the collection of my poetry.

The door had opened on a corridor so narrow and so black that I almost had smiled, remembering the fun house at old Riverview Park. My shoulders brushed the flaking plaster on either side. The air was thick with the smell of wood rot and mold, bringing memories of times as a child when I'd crawled under our latticed front porch to play in the moist soil and darkness there. I would not have entered the narrow hall had not the faint glow of the oil lamp been visible.

The black gauze curtain hanging just inside the room struck my face as I entered. It swept aside easily enough, crumbling at my touch like a spider's abandoned web.

If the copy of my book was meant to intrigue me, it did. If it was meant to put me at my ease, it failed.

I remained standing four feet from the table. The rock was in my hand again, but it seemed a pitiful thing, a child's response. I again remembered the fun house at Riverview Park, and this time grinned despite myself. If anything leaped out of the curtained darkness at me, it would damn well get a face full of granite.

"Hey!" The black curtains absorbed my shout as effectively as they did the light. The open flame danced at the movement of air. "Hey! Ollie Oxen in Free! Game's over! Come on in!" Part of me was close to giggling at the absurdity of the situation. Part of me wanted to scream.

"All right, let's get this show on the road," I said and stepped forward, pulled the chair out, and sat at the table. I laid the rock on my book like a clumsy paperweight. Then I folded my hands and sat as still and upright as a schoolchild on the first day of school. Several moments passed. No sound intruded. It was so hot that sweat dripped from my chin and made small circles in the dust on the table. I waited.

Then the flame bent to an unfelt movement of air.

Someone was coming through the black curtains.

A tall form brushed back the netting, paused while still in shadow, and then shuffled hesitantly into the light.

I saw the eyes first — the moist, intelligent eyes tempered by time and too great a knowledge of human suffering. There was no doubt. They were the eyes of a poet. I was looking at M. Das. He stepped closer, and I gripped the edge of the table in a convulsive movement.

I was looking at a thing from the grave.

The figure wore gray rags that might have been the remnants of a shroud. Teeth gleamed in an involuntary rictus grin — the lips were rotted away except for tattered polyps of pulpy flesh. The nose was almost gone, seemingly nibbled away to a moist, pulsating membrane of raw tissue that did not conceal the twin openings to the skull. The once impressive forehead had been spared the ravages of the lower faces, but irregular scaly patches cut through the scalp and left tufts of white hair standing out at odd angles. The left ear was a shapeless mass.

M. Das pulled out the other chair to sit, and I noticed that two fingers of his right hand were missing at the middle joint. A rag was wrapped around what was left of the hand, but it did not conceal patches of corruption at the wrist which left muscle and tendons clearly visible.

He sat down heavily. The massive head bobbed as if the narrow neck could not support it, and the rags over the bowl of a chest rose and fell rapidly. The room was filled with the sound of our ragged breathing.

"Leprosy." I whispered the word but it seemed as if I'd shouted it. The small flame flickered wildly and threatened to extinguish itself. Liquid brown eyes stared across the oil lamp at me and I could see now that parts of the eyelids themselves had been eaten away. "My God," I whispered." Oh, dear God. Das, what have they done to you? Leprosy."

"Yesss . . ."

I cannot adequately explain the quality of that voice. The ruined lips made some sounds impossible, and others were accomplished only with a sibilant lisp as the tongue batted against exposed teeth. I do not know how he managed to speak at all. Adding to the insanity of the moment was the still-audible Oxford accent and elegant syntax in the labored, hissing phrases. Spittle moistened the bare teeth and flew in the lamplight, but the words were intelligible. I could not move and I could not look away.

"Yesss," said the poet M. Das, "leprosy. But it is called Hansen's Disease these days, Mr. Luczak." Desss dayss, Missser Lussak.

"Of course. I'm sorry." I nodded, blinked, but still could not look away. I realized that I was still clinging tightly to the edge of the table. The splintery wood connected me to reality somehow. "My God," I repeated dully, "how did this happen? How can I help?"

"I have read your book, Mr. Luczak," hissed M. Das. "You are a sentimental poet."

"How did you get a copy?" Idiot. Get a grip on yourself. "I mean, why do you think the verse is sentimental?"

Das blinked slowly. The ruined eyelids came down like frayed window shades and never completely covered the whites of his eyes. With the intelligent gaze hidden, the apparition before me was a thousand times more horrible. I resisted the impulse to run, and held my breath until he was looking at me again.

Das's voice managed to sound wistful. "Does it really snow that much in Vermont, Mr. Luczak?"

"What? Oh, you mean . . . yes. Yes. Not always, but some winters. Especially in the mountains. They mark the roadsides and mailboxes with batons and little orange pennants." I was babbling, but it was either that or stuff my knuckles in my mouth to stifle other sounds.

"Ahhh," sighed Das, and the sound was air escaping from a dying sea creature. "I would have liked to have seen that. Yesss."

"I read your poem, Mr. Das."

"Yesss?"

"The Kali poem, I mean. Of course, you know that. You sent it to me."

"Yess."

"Why?"

"Why what, Mr. Luczak?"

"Why are you sending it out of the country for publication? Why did you give it to me?"

"It must be published." For the first time Das's odd voice conveyed emotion. "You did not like it?"

"No, I did not like it," I said. "I did not like it at all. But there were parts that are very . . . memorable. Terrible and memorable."

"Yesss."

"Why did you write it?"

M. Das closed his eyes again. The awful head bowed forward, and for a second I thought that he had gone to sleep. The lesions on his scalp glowed a gray-green in the lamplight. "It must be published," he whispered hoarsely. "You will help me?"

I hesitated. I was not sure if the last thing he had said was a question. "All right," I said at last. "Tell me why you wrote it. What you're doing here."

Das returned his gaze to me, and in the electric contact of it he somehow communicated that we were not alone. I glanced to the side but there was only blackness. Sweat dripped from my cheeks in the terrible heat. "How did you . . ." I hesitated. "How did you come to be like this?"

"A leper."

"Yes."

"I had been one for many years, Mr. Luczak. I ignored the signs. The scaly patches on my hands. The pain followed by numbness. Even as I signed autographs on tours and led seminars at the University, the feeling fled my hands and cheeks. I knew the truth long before the open sores appeared, long before the week I went east to my father's funeral."

"But they have drugs now!" I cried. "Surely you must have known . . . medicines! It can be cured now."

"No, Mr. Luczak, it cannot be cured. Even those who believe in such medicines claim only that the symptoms can be controlled, sometimes arrested. But I was a follower of Gandhi's health philosophy. When the rash and pain came I fasted, I followed diets, I administered enemas and purified my body as well as my mind. For years I did this. It did not help. I knew it would not."

I took a deep breath and wiped my palms on my trousers. "Well, if you knew that —"

"Listen, please," whispered the poet. "We do not have much time. I will tell you a story. It was the summer of 1969 — a different century to me now, a different world. My father had been cremated in the small village of my birth. The bleeding sores had been visible for many weeks. I told my brothers it was an allergy. I sought solitude. I did not know what to do.

"The long ride back to Calcutta gave me time to think. Have you ever seen a leprosarium in our country, Mr. Luczak?"

"No."

"You do not wish to. Yesss, I could have gone abroad. I had the money. Doctors in such enlightened nations as yours rarely see advanced cases of Hansen's Disease, Mr. Luczak. Leprosy does not truly exist in most modern nations, you see. It is a disease of filth and muck and unhygienic conditions forgotten by the West since the Middle Ages. But it is not forgotten in India. No, not in my beloved India. Did you know, Mr. Luczak, that there are half a million lepers in Bengal alone?"

"No," I said.

"No. Nor did I. But so I have been told. Most die of other causes before the disease progresses, you see. But where was I in our story? Ah, yes. I had arrived in Howrah Station in the evening. By then I had decided upon my course of action. I had considered going abroad for medical help. I had considered enduring the years of pain as the disease followed its slow encroachment. I had considered submitting myself to the humiliation and isolation such treatment would demand. I considered it, Mr. Luczak, but I rejected it. And once I had made my decision, I felt very calm. I was very much at peace with myself and the universe that evening as I watched the lights of Howrah Station through the window of my first-class coach.

"Do you believe in God, Mr. Luczak? I did not. Nor do I now . . . believe in any god of light, that is. There are other . . . but where was I? Yes. I left the coach in a peaceful state of mind. My decision allowed me to avoid not only the pain of being an invalid, but also the pain of parting. Or so I thought.

"I gave away my luggage to a surprised beggar there in the railway station. Ah, yes, you must forgive me my method of transferring the manuscript to you yesterday, Mr. Luczak. Irony is one of the few pleasures left to me. I only wish that I could have seen it. Where were we? Yes, I left the station and walked to the marvelous structure we call the Howrah Bridge. Have you seen it? Yes, of course you have. How silly of me. I have always considered it a delightful piece of abstract sculpture, Mr. Luczak, quite unappreciated as the work of art it truly is. The bridge that night was relatively empty — only a few hundred people were crossing it.

"I stopped in the center. I did not hesitate for long, because I did not wish to have time to think. I must confess that I composed a short sonnet, a farewell verse you might say. I too was once a sentimental poet.

"I jumped. From the center span. It was well over a hundred feet to the dark water of the Hooghly. The fall seemed to go on forever. If I had known the interminable wait between execution and culmination of such a suicide, I would have planned differently, I assure you.

"Water struck from such a height has precisely the consistency of concrete, Mr. Luczak. When I hit, the impact was like a flower blossoming in my skull. Something in my back and neck snapped. Loudly. Like a thick branch breaking.

"My body sank then. I say 'my body' because I died then, Mr. Luczak. There is no doubt of that. But a strange phenomenon occurred. One's spirit does not depart immediately after death, but, rather, watches the disposition of events much as a disinterested spectator might. How else can I describe the sensation of seeing one's twisted body sink to the mud at the bottom of the Hooghly? Of seeing fish preying on the eyes and soft parts of one's self? Of seeing all this and of feeling no concern, no horror, only the mildest of interest? Such is the experience, Mr. Luczak. Such is the dreaded act of dying . . . as banal as all of the other necessary acts which make up our pitiful existence.

"I do not know how long my body lay there, becoming one with the river mud, before the tides or perhaps the wake of a ship brought my discarded form to shore. Children found me. They poked at me and they laughed when their sticks penetrated my flesh. Then the Kapalikas came. They carried me — tenderly, although such distinctions meant nothing to me then — to one of their many temples.

"I awoke within the embrace of Kali. She is the only deity who defies both death and time. She resurrected me then, Mr. Luczak, but only for her own purposes. Only for her own purposes. As you can see, the Dark Mother did not see fit to remove the scourge of my affliction when she restored the breath to my body."

"What were those purposes, Mr. Das?" I asked.

The poet's lipless grimace was a cruel imitation of a smile. "Why, it must be obvious to what end my poor powers have been spent," said Das. "I am the poet of the goddess Kali. Unworthy as I am, I serve her as poet, priest, and avatar."

During this entire conversation, a portion of me experienced the detached observation that Das had mentioned. It seemed as if a part of my consciousness were hovering near the ceiling, watching the entire exchange with a cool appraisal bordering on indifference. Another part of me wanted to laugh hysterically, to cry out, to turn the table over in raging disbelief and to flee from that vile darkness.

"That is my story," said Das. "What do you say, Mr. Luczak?"

"I say that your disease has driven you insane, Mr. Das."

"Yesss?"

"Or that you are quite sane but must play a role for someone."

Das said nothing, but the baleful eyes glanced quickly to the side.

"Another problem with the story," I said, amazed at the firmness of my own voice.

"What is that?"

"If your . . . if the body was discovered only last year, I doubt if there would be much to find. Not after almost seven years."

Das's head snapped up like a nightmare jack-in-the-box. There was a scraping sound in the curtained darkness.

"Oh? Who said that the discovery occurred last year, Mr. Luczak?"

My throat constricted. Without thinking, I began talking. "According to Mr. Muktanandaji, that was when the mythical resurrection took place."

A hot breeze stirred the flame and shadows danced across Das's ruined face. His terrible grin remained fixed. There was another stirring in the shadows.

"Ahhh," exhaled Das. His wrapped and mangled hand scraped across the table in an absent gesture. "Yesss, yesss. There are . . . from time to time . . . certain reenactments."

I leaned forward and let my hand fall next to the stone. My gaze searched out the human being in the leprous hulk across the table from me. My voice was earnest, urgent. "Why, Das? For Godssake, why? Why the Kapalikas? Why this epic obscenity about Kali returning to rule the world or whatever the shit it's about? You used to be a great poet. You sang songs of truth and innocence." My words sounded insipid to me but I knew no other way to say it.

Das leaned back heavily. His breath rattled through his open mouth and nostrils. How long can someone live in this condition? Where the flesh was not ravaged by the disease, the skin looked almost transparent, fragile as parchment. How long had it been since this man saw sunlight?

"There is a great beauty in the Goddess," he whispered.

"Beauty in death and corruption? Beauty in violence? Das, since when has a disciple of Tagore sung a hymn to violence?"

"Tagore was blind!" There was a new energy in the sibilant whisper. "Tagore could not see. Perhaps in his dying moments. Perhaps. If he had been able to then, he would have turned to her, Mr. Luczak. We all would turn to her when Death enters our night chamber and takes us by the hand."

"Fleeing to some sort of religion doesn't justify violence," I said. "It wouldn't justify the evil you sang of it —"

"Evil. Pahhh!" Das spat a gob of yellow phlegm on the floor. "You know nothing. Evil. There is no evil. There is no violence. There is only power. Power is the single, great organizing principle of the universe, Mr. Luczak. Power is the only a priori reality. All violence is an attempt to exercise power. Violence is power. Everything we fear, we fear because some force exerts its power over us. All of us seek freedom from such fear. All religions are attempts to achieve power over forces which might control us. But She is our only refuge, Mr. Luczak. Only the Devourer of Souls can grant us the abhaya mudras and remove all fear, for only She holds the ultimate power. She is power incarnate, a force beyond time or comprehension."

"That's obscene," I said. "It's a cheap excuse for cruelty."

"Cruelty?" Das laughed. It was the rattling of stones in an empty urn. "Cruelty? Surely, even a sentimental poet who prattles of eternal verities must know that what you call cruelty is the only reality which the universe recognizes. Life subsists on violence."

"I don't accept that."

"Oh?" Das blinked twice. Slowly. "You have never tasted the wine of power? You have never attempted violence?"

I hesitated. I could not tell him that most of my life had been one long exercise of control over my temper. My God, what were we talking about? What was I doing there?

"No," I said.

"Nonsense."

"It's true, Das. Oh, I've been in a few fights, but I've always tried to avoid violence." I was nine, ten years old. Sarah was seven or eight. In the woods near the edge of the forest preserve. 'Take down your shorts. Now!'

"It is not true. Everyone has tasted the blood wine of Kali."

"No. You're wrong." Slapping her in the face. Once. Twice. The rush of tears and the slow compliance. My fingers leaving red marks on her thin arm. "Only unimportant little incidents. Kid stuff."

"There are no unimportant cruelties," said Das.

"That's absurd." The terrible, total excitement of it. Not just at the sight of her pale nakedness and the strange, sexual intensity of it. No, not just that. It was her total helplessness. Her submission. I could do anything I wanted to.

"We will see."

Anything I wanted to.

Das rose laboriously. I pushed back my own chair.

"You will publish the poem?" His voice rasped and hissed like embers in a cooling fire.

"Perhaps not," I said. "Why don't you come with me, Das? You don't have to stay here. Come with me. Publish it yourself."

Once, when I was seventeen, an idiot cousin dared me to play Russian roulette with his father's revolver. The cousin put the single cartridge in. He spun the chamber for me. In a second of pure, mindless bravado I remember lifting the gun, putting the barrel to my temple, and squeezing the trigger. The hammer had fallen on an empty chamber then, but since that day I had refused to go near guns. Now, in the Calcutta darkness, I felt I had again lifted a barrel to my head for no good reason. The silence stretched.

"No. You must publish it. It isss important."

"Why? Can't you leave here? What can they do to you that they haven't already done? Come with me, Das."

Das's eyes partially closed, and the thing before me no longer looked human. A stench of grave soil came to me from its rags. There were undeniable sounds behind me in the blackness.

"I choose to stay here. But it is important that you bring the Song of Kali to your country."

"Why?" I said again.

Das's tongue was like a small, pink animal touching the slick teeth and then withdrawing. "It is more than my final work. Consider it an announcement. A birth announcement. Will you publish the poem?"

I let ten heartbeats of silence bring me to the edge of some dark pit I did not understand. Then I bowed my head slightly. "Yes," I said. "It will be published. Not all of it, perhaps, but it will see print."

"Good," said the poet and turned to leave. Then he hesitated and turned back almost shyly. For the first time I heard a note of human longing in his voice. "There is . . . something else, Mr. Luczak."

"Yes?"

"It would mean you would have to return here."

The thought of reentering this crypt after once escaping it made my knees almost buckle. "What is it?"

He gestured vaguely at Winter Spirits still lying on the table. "I have little to read. They . . . the ones who care for my needs . . . are able to get me books occasionally when I specify titles. But often they bring back the wrong books. And I know so few of the new poets. Would you . . . could you possibly . . . a few books of your choice?"

The old man lurched forward three steps, and for a horrifying moment I thought he was going to grasp my hand in his two rotted ones. He stopped in mid-motion, but the raised and bandaged hands seemed even more touching in their imploring helplessness.

"Yes, I'll get some books for you." But not come back here, I thought. I'll give some books to your Kapalika friends, but to hell with that return crap. But before I could phrase the thoughts out loud, Das spoke again.

"I would especially love to read the work of that new American poet, Edwin Arlington Robinson," he rushed on quickly. "I have read only one new poem of his, 'Richard Cory,' but the ending is so beautiful, so perfectly applicable to my own situation, to my own ambitions, that I dream about it constantly. If you could bring such a work?"

I could only gape. That new American poet! Finally, not knowing what else to say, terrified of saying the wrong thing, I nodded. "Yes," I managed to get out. "I'll try."

The sad and twisted form turned and left the room. A second later so did I. The black curtains clung to me for a second as if restraining me, refusing to let me escape, but then I was free. Free!

Calcutta looked beautiful to me. Weak sunlight filtering through the clouds, crowds of people, the riot of afternoon traffic — I looked at it all with a joyous sense of relief that added a glow to the scene. Then I remembered Das's final comment and doubts assailed me. No, I would think about that later. For now I was free.

The two Kapalikas had been waiting at the bottom of the stairway. Their services as guides were needed for only a few minutes to lead me through the chawl to a main street where I managed to wave down a taxi. Before leaving me, one of them handed me a soiled card with the note In front of Kalighat — 9:00 scrawled on it. "This is where I'm to bring the books?" I asked the thinner man. His nod was both affirmation and farewell.

Then the black and yellow cab was poking through barely moving traffic and I spent ten minutes just reveling in my release from tension. What a goddamn experiencel Morrow would never believe it. Already I found it hard to believe. Sitting there, probably surrounded by crazy Calcutta street thugs, talking to what was left of one of the world's great poets. What a goddamn experience!

This kind of story would never work for Harper's. The National Enquirer, perhaps, but not Harper's. I laughed out loud, and the sweaty little cabdriver turned in his seat to stare at the crazy American. I grinned and spent several minutes writing potential leads and weighting the story so it would have the proper dried and cynical attitude for Morrow. Too late I realized that I should have been noting my location, but by then we were miles from where I'd hailed the cab.

Finally I recognized the large buildings that meant we were near the center of the city. About two blocks from the hotel, I had the driver let me put in front of a dilapidated storefront with a large sign proclaiming MANNY'S BOOKSELLER. The interior was a maze of metal shelves and tall heaps of books, old, new, some thick with dust, most from English publishers.

It took me about thirty minutes to find eight books of good, recent poetry. There was no collection by Robinson, but a Pocket Book of Modern Verse had "Richard Cory" as well as "The Dark Hills" and "Walt Whitman." I turned the yellow paperback over in my hands and frowned at it. Could I have misunderstood Das's message? I thought not.

Deciding nothing then, I nonetheless spent several minutes choosing the last two books just on the basis of their size. As the bookseller was counting out my change in odd-shaped coins, I asked him where I could find a drugstore. He frowned and shook his head, but after several attempts I explained my needs. "Ah, yes, yes," he said. "A chemist's." He gave me directions to a shop between the bookstore and the hotel.

It was almost 6 PM. when I got back to the Oberoi Grand. The Communist pickets were squatting along the curb, brewing tea over small over fires. I waved at them almost cheerily and reentered the air-conditioned security of another world.

I lay half dozing while Calcutta moved into evening. The buoyant excitement and relief had drained away to be replaced by a weight of exhaustion and indecision. I kept replaying the afternoon's encounter, trying in vain to lessen the incredible horror of Das's disfigurement. The longer I denied the images that flickered behind my closed eyelids, the more terrible their reality became.

". . . so beautiful, so perfectly applicable to my own situation, to my own ambitions, that I dream about it constantly."

I did not have to open the newly purchased paperback to know the poem of which Das had spoken.

"And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head."

Simon and Garfunkel had made that particular image accessible to everyone in their song of the previous decade.

I dream about it constantly.

It was almost seven P.M. I changed my trousers, washed up, and went downstairs for a light dinner of curried rice and fried dough that Amrita had always called poori but that the menu referred to as loochi. With the meal I drank two cold quart bottles of Bombay beer and felt less depressed by the time I went back up to the room an hour later. As I came down the hall I thought I heard the room phone ringing, but by the time I'd fumbled out my key the sound had stopped.

The brown sack was where I had tossed it on the closet shelf. The .25-caliber automatic was smaller than I had remembered. Perhaps the very toyness of the little pistol helped me to determine what to do next.

I removed the package of razor blades and the bottle of glue from the chemist's sack. Then I tested three of the larger books for size, but only the hardback of Lawrence Durrell's poetry seemed right. I flinched before beginning; all of my life I've hated the thought of damaging a book.

It took me forty minutes of hacking away, always worried that I was going to slice a finger off, before I could say I was finished. The wastebasket was half filled with shredded paper. The interior of the book looked as if rats had chewed at it for years, but the little automatic fit perfectly in the space I had hollowed out.

Just seeing it there made my pulse pound. I continued to tell myself that I could always change my mind and throw the thing in an alley somewhere. Actually, the book would be a clever way to get it out of the hotel so I could toss it. Or so I told myself.

But I took the pistol out of its nest and gingerly pressed the loaded clip until it clicked and locked. I searched but could find no safety. Then I set the pistol back in the book and carefully glued the pages together at several points.

I dream about it constantly.

I shook my head and packed the books in the brown bag lettered MANNY'S BOOKSELLER. The Durrell went third from the bottom.

It was 8:50. I closed up the room and moved quickly down the hall. That was when the elevator doors opened and Amrita stepped out carrying Victoria in her arms.