Song of Kali

Chapter Seventeen

The sun rose as we were approaching the English coast, but even with the sunlight falling across my legs I felt trapped in a night that would not end. I was shivering violently, acutely aware that I was strapped into a fragile, pressurized tube suspended thousands of feet above the sea. Worse that that was a growing inward pressure that I first attributed to a claustrophobic reaction but then realized was something else altogether. There was a vertiginous tilting within me, like the first solid stirrings of some powerful homunculus.

I sat gripping the armrests and watching the silent mouthings of characters on a movie screen while Europe passed beneath us. I thought of Tagore's last moments. Meals arrived and were dutifully eaten. Late in the day I tried to sleep. And all the while the hollowness and dizziness grew stronger and there was the constant sound of insect wings in my ears. Repeatedly I would be on the verge of sleep, only to snap awake to the sound of distant, mocking laughter. Eventually I gave up the attempt to sleep.

I forced myself to join the other passengers during the refueling stop in Tehran. The pilot had announced the temperature outside as being 33 degrees, and only when the terrible heat and humidity struck me did I realize that it had been given in degrees Celsius.

It was late, sometime before midnight, but the hot air stank of waiting violence. Pictures of the Shah were everywhere in the echoing, brightly lit barn of a terminal, and security men and soldiers roamed around with their sidearms drawn for no apparent reason. Muslim women cloaked in black chadors glided like wraiths through the green fluorescent emptiness. Old men slept on the floor or knelt on their dark prayer rugs amid cigarette butts and cellophane wrappers while nearby an American boy of about six — blond hair and red-striped shirt incongruous among dark hues, crouched behind a chair and raked the customs counter with automatic fire from his toy M-16.

The PA system announced that our flight would be re-boarding in fifteen minutes. I stumbled past an old man in a red scarf and found myself in the public restrooms. It was very dark in there, the only light reflected from a single bulb outside the entrance. Dark shapes moved through the gloom. For a second I wondered if I had inadvertently entered the women's side and was seeing chadors in the darkness, but then I heard deep voices speaking in guttural syllables. There was also the sound of water dripping. At that second the dizziness struck me worse than before, and I crouched over one of the Asian toilets and vomited, continuing to spasm long after I had rid myself of the last of the airline meals.

I collapsed sideways and lay full-length on the cool tile floor. The emptiness inside me was almost complete now. I trembled as sweat poured from me and mixed with the salt of my tears. The incessant insect noise had risen to a crescendo so that I could hear distinct voices. The Song of Kali was very loud. I realized that already I had crossed the borders into her new domain.

In a few minutes I rose in the darkness, cleaned myself as well as I could at the only sink, and walked quickly into the green light to joint the others lining up for the flight to Calcutta.

We came out of the clouds, circled once, and landed at Calcutta's Dum-Dum Airport at 3:10 A.M. I joined the line descending the staircase to the wet tarmac. The city seemed to be on fire. The orange light turned back by the low monsoon clouds, the red beacons reflected in countless puddles, and the blaze of spotlights from beyond the terminal added to the illusionr I could hear no sound but the chanting chorus of shrill voices as I stumbled along with the others toward the customs shed.

A year before, Amrita, Victoria, and I had spent more than an hour going through customs in Bombay. This time I was through in less than five minutes. I had not the slightest anxiety that they would open my luggage. The little man in soiled khaki chalked an X on my suitcase directly over the outside compartment where I had hidden the Luger and ammunition, and then I was in the main terminal, walking toward the outside doors.

Someone will be here to meet me. Probably Krishna-Sanjay. He will tell me where to find the Kamakhya bitch before he dies.

It was almost three-thirty in the morning but the crowd was no less intense than the other times I had been in the airport. People shouted and shoved in the sick light from sputtering fluorescent strips, but I could barely hear the noise as I stepped over Kipling's "sheeted dead" while making little effort to avoid treading on the sleeping forms. I let the crowd move me. My arms and legs felt anesthetized, jerking along as if I had become a poorly handled marionette. I closed my eyes to listen to the Song and to feel the energy from the weapon only inches from my right hand.

Chatterjee and Gupta also will have to die. However small their complicity, they will have to die.

I stumbled along with the crowd like a man caught in a terrible windstorm. The noise and smell and pressure from the jostling mob joined perfectly with the growing emptiness within me to form a dark flower unfolding in my mind. The laughter was very loud now. Behind my closed eyelids I could see Her visage rising above the gray towers of the dying city, hear Her voice leading the rising chant, see Her arms moving to the beat of the terrible dance.

When you open you eyes you will see someone you know. You do not have to wait. Let it begin here.

I forced my eyes to stay shut, but gripping the suitcase with both hands I raised it to my chest. I could feel the crowd moving me forward with them toward the open doors. Screams of porters and the sewer-sweet smells of Calcutta came in clearly now. I felt my right hand begin unzipping the outside compartment of the suitcase where I had packed the loaded gun.

Let it begin here.

With my eyes still closed I saw the next few minutes opening before me like the waiting doors, like the maw of the great beast that was the city, and I could sense the dark flower opening wide inside me and then the lifting of the oiled perfection of the Luger and then the sacrament will commence, and then the power will flow up my arm and into me and through me and out of me in coughs of flame in the night, and the running forms will fall and I will reload with the satisfying snick of the new magazine sliding into place and the pain and the power will flow from me and the running forms will fall and flesh will fly from flesh from the impact and the flames of chimneys will light the sky and by their red hue I will find my way through the streets and lanes and alleys and I will find Victoria, in time this time, find Victoria in time, and I will kill those who took her from me and kill those who get in my way and kill everyone who —

Let it begin now.

"No!" I screamed and opened my eyes. My scream quelled the Song for only a second or two but in that time I pulled my hand out of the open suitcase compartment and shoved violently to my left. The doors were only ten paces in front of me and the crowd surged relentlessly toward them, the current of their progress faster now, more concentrated. Through the doors I caught a glimpse of a man in a white shirt standing by a small blue-and-white bus. The man's hair rose like spikes of dark electricity.

"No!" I used the suitcase as a battering ram to fight my way to the wall. A tall man in the crowd shoved me and I struck him in the chest until he let me pass. I was only three steps from the open doors now, and the movement of the crowd pulled me along as surely as an explosion of air into a vacuum.

Let it begin now.

"No!" I do not know if I shouted aloud. I threw myself forward, shoved against the crowd like a man wading chest-deep in a river, and with my left hand grasped the bar of an unmarked side door leading into the off-limits section of the terminal. Somehow I managed to hold onto the suitcase while human forms battered against me, fingers and arms accidentally striking my face in the melee.

I pushed through the door and ran, my suitcase banging against my right leg, surprised airport workers stepping aside as I passed. The Song roared louder than ever before, bringing enough pain to make me squeeze my eyes shut.

Let it begin here. Lei it begin now.

I stopped in mid-stride, struck the wall, and stumbled backward with the force of the compulsion. My arms and legs twitched and thrashed as if I was in the midst of an epileptic seizure. I took two steps back toward the terminal.

"Fuck you!" I screamed — I think I screamed — and managed to stumble sideways against a wall that was a door, and then I was on my hands and knees in a long, dark room.

The door closed and there was silence. True silence. I was alone. The room was long and dimly lit, empty except for a few unclaimed stacks of luggage, some boxes, and trunks. I sat down on the cement floor and looked around with a rising shock of recognition. I looked to my right and saw the battered counter where the airline casket had waited.

The Song had stopped.

For several minutes I sat on the floor and panted. The emptiness in me was almost a pleasant thing now — an absence of something black and poisonous.

I closed my eyes. I remembered holding Victoria the night she was born, the other times, the milk and baby smell of her, and the thirty-step walk from the delivery room to the nursery.

Without opening my eyes I gripped the handle of my suitcase and — rising now — flung it as far as I could across the long room. It bounced off a dusty shelf and crashed out of sight into a heap of boxes.

I left the room, walked twenty steps down an empty corridor, emerged into the terminal ten paces from the only occupied ticket counter, and bought a ticket for the next flight out.

There were no delays. The Lufthansa flight to Munich held only ten other passengers when it lifted off the runway twenty minutes later. I did not even think about looking out to catch a last glimpse of Calcutta. I was asleep before the landing gear retracted.

I landed in New York the next afternoon and caught a Delta 727 to Logan International in Boston. There the last of my nervous energy left me and I could not keep my voice from cracking as I called Amrita and asked her for a ride.

By the time she got there in the red Pinto, I was shaking all over and not completely aware of my surroundings. She wanted to take me to a hospital, but I slumped deep into the black vinyl seat and said, "Drive. Please drive."

We headed north on I-95 with the evening sun throwing long shadows across the median. The fields were wet from a recent rainstorm. My teeth were chattering almost uncontrollably, but I insisted on talking. Amrita drove in silence, occasionally glancing at me with those deep, sad eyes. She did not interrupt me even when I began to babble.

"I realized that it was exactly what they wanted me to do. What She wanted me to do," I said as we approached the state line. "I don't know why. Maybe She wanted me to take his place the way he took Das's. Or maybe Krishna saved me because he knew they would bring me back someday for some other insanity. I don't know. I don't care. Do you see what's really important?"

Amrita looked at me and said nothing. Evening light turned her tan skin gold.

"I've been blaming myself every day, knowing that I'll go on blaming myself until I die. I thought it was my fault. It was my fault. Now I know you've been blaming yourself."

"If I hadn't let her in —" began Amrita.

"Yes!" I said. It was almost a shout. "I know. But we have to stop that. If we don't go beyond that, we'll not only destroy each other and ourselves, we'll destroy what the three of us meant. We'll be part of the darkness."

Amrita pulled into a rest stop near the Salisbury Plains exit. She took her hands off the wheel. We sat in silence for several minutes.

"I miss Victoria," I said. It was the first time I had said our child's name to her since Calcutta. "I miss our baby. I miss Victoria."

Her head came over against my chest. I could barely understand her through the muffling of my shirt and the beginning of her own tears. Then it was clear.

"So do I, Bobby," she said. "I miss Victoria too."

We held each other as the trucks moved by in a rush of wind and noise and the last of the rush-hour traffic filled the lanes with sunbaked colors and the sound of tires on pavement.