Song of Kali

Chapter Two

On the night before we were to leave, I sat on the front porch with Amrita as she nursed Victoria. Fireflies winked their cryptic messages against the dark line of trees. Crickets, tree frogs, and a few night birds wove a tapestry of nocturnal background noise. Our house was only a few miles from Exeter, New Hampshire, but at times it was so quiet there that we could have been on another world. I had appreciated that solitude during my winter of writing, but I realized now that I was restless; that it was partly those very months of isolation that were making me itch to travel, to see strange places, faces. "You're sure you want to go?" I asked. My voice sounded too loud in the night.

Amrita looked up as the baby finished nursing. The dim light from the window illuminated Amrita's strong cheekbones and soft brown skin. Her dark eyes seemed luminous. Sometimes she was so beautiful that I physically ached at the thought we might not have met, married, had our child together. She lifted Victoria slightly, and I caught a glimpse of a soft curve of breast and raised nipple before her blouse was back in place. "I don't mind going," said Amrita. "It will be nice to see Mother and Father again."

"But India," I said. "Calcutta. Do you want to go there?"

"I don't mind, if I can be of help," she said. She put a folded, clean diaper on my shoulder and handed Victoria to me. I rubbed the baby's back, feeling her warmth, smelling the milk and baby smell of her.

"You're sure it won't be a problem with your work?" I asked. Victoria wiggled in my grasp, reaching a chubby hand toward my nose. I blew on her palm and she giggled and then burped.

"It won't be a problem," said Amrita, although I knew it would be. She was to start teaching a new graduate-level math course at Boston University after Labor Day, and I knew how much preparation lay ahead of her.

"Are you looking forward to seeing India again?" I asked. Victoria had moved her head closer to my cheek and was happily drooling on my collar.

"I'm curious to see how it compares with what I remember," said Amrita. Her voice was soft, modulated by her three years at Cambridge, but never clipped in the flat British manner. Listening to Amrita was like being stroked by a firm but well-oiled palm.

Amrita had been seven years old when her father moved his engineering firm from New Delhi to London. The memories of India that she had shared with me supported the stereotype of a culture rampant with noise, confusion, and caste discrimination. Nothing could have been more alien to Amrita's own character; she was the physical essence of quiet dignity, she despised noise and clutter of any sort, she was appalled by injustice, and her mind had been disciplined by the well-ordered rhythms of linguistics and mathematics.

Amrita had once described her home in Delhi and the apartment in Bombay where she and her sisters had spent summers with her uncle: bare walls encrusted with grime and ancient handprints, open windows, rough sheets, lizards scrabbling across the walls at night, the cluttered cheapness of everything. Our home near Exeter was as clean and open as a Scandinavian designer's dreams, all gleaming bare wood, comfortable modular seating, immaculately white walls, and works of art illuminated by recessed lighting.

It had been Amrita's money that made both the house and our little art collection possible: her "dowry," she jokingly used to call it. I had protested at first. In 1969, the first year of our marriage, I declared an annual income of $5,732. I had quit my teaching job at Wellesley College and was writing and editing full-time. We lived in Boston, in an apartment where even the rats had to walk stoop-shouldered. I didn't care. I was willing to suffer indefinitely for my art. Amrita was not. She never argued; she agreed with the principle behind my protests over the use of her trust fund; but in 1972 she made the down payment on the house and four acres and bought the first of our nine paintings, a small oil sketch by Jamie Wyeth.

"She's asleep," said Amrita. "You can quit rocking."

I looked down and saw that she was right. Victoria was fast asleep, mouth open, fists half-clenched. Her breath came soft and quick against my neck. I continued rocking.

"Shall we take her in?" asked Amrita. "It's getting cool."

"In a minute," I said. My handspan was broader than the baby's back.

I was thirty-five when Victoria was born; Amrita was thirty-one. For years I had told anyone who wanted to listen — and a few who didn't — all about my feelings concerning the foolishness of bringing children into the world. I spoke of overpopulation, of the unfairness of subjecting youngsters to the horrors of the Twentieth Century, and the folly of people having unwanted children. Again, Amrita never argued with me — although with her training in formal logic I suspect that she could have laid waste to all of my arguments in two minutes — but sometime in early 1976, about the time of our state's primary, Amrita unilaterally went off the pill. It was on January 22, 1977, two days after Jimmy Carter walked back to the White House from his Inauguration, that our daughter Victoria was born.

I never would have chosen the name "Victoria" but was secretly delighted by it. Amrita first suggested it one hot day in July, and we treated it as a joke. It seemed that one of her earliest memories was of arriving by train at Victoria Station in Bombay. That huge edifice — one of the remnants of the British Raj, which evidently still defines India — had always filled Amrita with a sense of awe. Since that time, the name Victoria had evoked an echo of beauty, elegance, and mystery in her. So at first we joked about naming the baby Victoria, but by Christmas of 1976 we knew that no other name would fit our child if it was a girl.

Before Victoria was born, I used to grumble about couples we knew who had been lobotomized by the birth of their children. Perfectly intelligent people with whom we'd enjoyed countless debates over politics, prose, the death of the theater, or the decline of poetry now burbled at us about their little boy's first tooth or spent hours sharing the engrossing details of little Heather's first day at preschool. I swore that I would never fall prey to that.

But it was different with our child. Victoria's development was worthy of serious study by anyone. I found myself totally fascinated by earliest noises and most awkward movements. Even the repellant act of changing diapers could be delightful when my child — my child — would wave her pudgy arms and look up at me in what I took to be loving appreciation at the thought of her father, a published poet, carrying out such mundane tasks for her. When, at seven weeks, she blessed us with her first real smile one morning, I immediately called Abe Bronstein to share the good news. Abe, who was as well known for never rising before ten-thirty in the morning as he was for his sense of good prose, congratulated me and gently pointed out that I had called at 5:45 A.M.

Now that Victoria was seven months old, it was even more obvious that she was a gifted child. She had learned to play "So big!" almost a month earlier and had mastered "Peekaboo!" weeks before that. She was creeping at six and a half months — a sure sign of high intelligence, despite Amrita's comments to the contrary — and it didn't bother me at all that Victoria's attempts at locomotion invariably moved her backwards. Each day now her language abilities became stronger, and although I hadn't been able to pick dada or mama out of the babble of syllables (even when I played back my tapes at half-speed), Amrita assured me, with only a slight smile, that she had heard several complete Russian or German words and once an entire sentence in Hindi. Meanwhile, I read to Victoria every evening, alternating Mother Goose with Wordsworth, Keats, and carefully chosen excerpts from Pound's "Cantos." She showed a preference for Pound.

"Shall we go to bed?" asked Amrita. "We need to get an early start tomorrow."

Something in Amrita's voice caught my attention. There were times when she asked, "Shall we go to bed?" and there were times when she said Shall we go to bed? This had been one of the latter.

I carried Victoria up to her crib and tucked her in. I stood and watched a minute as she lay there on her stomach under the light quilt, surrounded by her stuffed animals, her head against the bumper pad. The moonlight lay across her like a benediction.

In a while I went downstairs, locked the house, turned off the lights, and came back upstairs to where Amrita was waiting in bed.

Later, in the last seconds of our lovemaking, I turned to look at her face as if seeking the answer to unasked questions there, but a cloud had crossed the moon and everything was lost in the sudden darkness.