Song of Kali

by Dan Simmons

  "Really?" asked Amrita.

  "Yes, really, Mrs. Luczak. And Yeats then cried out, 'Tagore be damned! He sings of peace and love when blood is the answer!'"

  The tape recordings of Tagore's music stopped abruptly. We all turned, as a poorly dressed boy of about eight stepped into the room. The boy carried a small canvas bag, but it was too small and too irregular to hold a manuscript. He looked from face to face until he came to me.

  "You are Mr. Luczak?" The words sounded memorized, as if the boy did not speak English.

  "Yes."

  "Follow me. I take you to M. Das."

  * * *

  A rickshaw waited in the courtyard. There was room beside the boy for Amrita, Victoria, and me. Gupta and Chatterjee hurried to their car to follow. Krishna seemed to lose interest, and stood by the door.

  "You're not coming?" I shouted.

  "Not now," said Krishna. "I will see you later."

  "We're leaving in the morning," called Amrita.

  Krishna shrugged. The boy said something to the rickshaw wallah, and we moved out onto the street. Chatterjee's Premiere pulled out behind us. Half a block back, a small gray sedan also pulled away from the curb. Behind it, a bullock cart lumbered along with half a dozen ragged people in it. I amused myself by imagining that the bullock cart driver was the Metropolitan Policeman assigned to following us. The boy yelled a sentence in Bengali and the rickshaw-coolie shouted back and broke into a faster trot.

  "What'd he say?" I asked Amrita. "Where are we going?"

  "The boy said, 'Hurry up,'" said Amrita with a smile. "The rickshaw man said that the Americans are heavy pigs."

  "Hmmm."

  We crossed Howrah Bridge in a mass of brawling traffic that made all previous traffic jams I'd seen pale in comparison. There was as much pedestrian movement as wheeled traffic and it jammed the two levels of the bridge to capacity. The intricate puzzle of gray girders and steel mesh stretched more than a quarter of a mile across the muddy expanse of the Hooghly River. It was a child's Erector Set version of a bridge, and I took Amrita's Minolta to snap a picture of it.

  "Why did you do that?"

  "I promised your father."

  The boy waved both hands at me and repeated something that sounded urgent and angry.

  "What's he saying?"

  Amrita frowned. "I'm not sure through the dialect, but it's something about photos of the bridge being against the law."

  "Tell him it's okay."

  She spoke in Hindi, and the boy scowled and responded in Bengali.

  "He says it's not okay," said Amrita. "He says that we Americans should let our satellites do our spying."

  "Jesus."

  The rickshaw pulled up in front of an interminable brick building that was the Howrah Railway Station. There was no sign of Chatterjee's Premiere or of the gray sedan in the snarl of traffic coming off the bridge. "Now what?" I said.

  The boy turned to me and handed over the canvas bag. I was surprised by its weight. I tugged the drawstring loose and looked inside.

  "Good heavens," said Amrita. "They're coins."

  "Not just coins," I said, holding one up. "Kennedy half-dollars. There must be fifty or sixty of them here."

  The boy pointed to the entrance of the building and spoke quickly. "He says you are to go inside and give these away," said Amrita.

  "Give them away? To whom?"

  "He says someone will ask you for them."

  The boy nodded as if satisfied, reached into the bag, grabbed four of the coins, and was out of the rickshaw, into the crowd.

  Victoria reached for the coins. I tugged the drawstring tight and stared at Amrita. "Well," I said, "I guess it's up to us."

  "After you, sir."

  When I was a child, the Merchandise Mart in Chicago was the biggest building I could possibly imagine. Then in the late '60s I had the opportunity to see the interior of the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center. The friend who was showing me around told me that clouds formed indoors on some days.

  Howrah Railway Station was more impressive.

  It was a structure built to a giant's scale. There were a dozen tracks immediately visible; five locomotives at rest, several pouring steam; several score of vendors selling unnamed things from carts that sent up eye-scalding plumes of smoke, thousands of sweating, jostling people; more thousands squatting, sleeping, cooking — living there; and a cacophony of sound so deafening that one couldn't hear himself shout, much less think. That was Howrah Railway Station.

  "Mother of Mercy," I said. A few feet from my head, an aircraft propeller protruded from a girder and slowly stirred the heavy air. Dozens of similar fans added their racket to the ocean of noise.

  "What?" shouted Amrita. Victoria cringed against her mother's breast.

  "Nothing!" We began walking aimlessly, shoving through a crowd moving nowhere. Amrita tugged at my sleeve, and I leaned over so she could speak in my ear. "Shouldn't we wait for Mr. Chatterjee and Mr. Gupta?"

  I shook my head. "Let them get their own Kennedy half-dollars."

  "What?"

  "Never mind."

  A short woman came up to us. On her back was a thing that might have been her husband. The man's spine was twisted cruelly, one shoulder grew out of the middle of his humped back, and his legs were boneless tentacles that disappeared inside the folds of the woman's sari. A black arm, more bone than flesh, unfolded our way and his palm opened. "Baba, Baba."

  I hesitated a second and then reached into the bag and handed him a coin. His wife's eyes opened wide, and both her hands thrust at us. "Baba!"

  "Should I give him the whole thing?" I shouted at Amrita, but before she could reply there were a dozen hands being thrust into my face.

  "Baba! Baba!"

  I tried to back away, but more imploring palms struck at my back. Quickly I began dispensing coins. The hands would grasp the silver, disappear into the fray, and then thrust back for more. I caught a glimpse of Amrita and Victoria ten feet away and was glad there was some distance between us.

  The crowd grew magically. One second there were ten or fifteen people shouting and holding their hands out, and a few seconds later the mob had grown to thirty, then fifty. I felt as if it were Halloween and I was dispensing candy to a crowd of trick-or-treaters, but this harmless illusion disappeared when a dark hand rotted from leprosy came out of the crowd and scabrous fingers batted at my face.

  "Hey!" I shouted, but it was a weak sound against the noise of the mob. There must have been a hundred people pushing toward the packed center of a circle which held me as its locus. The pressure was frightening. A groping hand accidentally ripped my shirt open and left parallel tracks across my chest. An elbow struck me in the side of the head and I would have gone down then if the press of bodies had not kept me upright.

  "Baba! Baba! Baba!" The entire mob was moving toward the edge of the platform. It was a six-or seven-foot drop to the metal rails. The woman with the cripple on her back screamed as the man was torn loose and fell into the surging pack. A man near me began screaming and repeatedly striking another in the face with the side of his hand.

  "The shit with this," I said and threw the bag of coins into the air. The canvas pouch turned over once in a lazy arc and spewed coins across the mob and a shouting rice vendor. The screaming rose in pitch and the frenzied mass lunged away from the edge of the platform, but not before I heard something or someone heavy fall to the rails. A woman screamed inches from my face and saliva spattered over me. Then a heavy blow caught me in the back and I pitched forward, grabbed at a sari, then went down on my knees.

  The mob pressed around me, and for a second I panicked, covering my heads with my hands. Stained trouser legs and sharp knees in rags struck at my face. Someone tripped over me, and for a second the full weight of the mob was on my back, forcing my face to the floor, crushing me. I distantly heard Amrita's shouts above the animal roar of the crowd. I opened my mouth to scream, but at that instant a filthy bare fo
ot struck me in the face. Someone stepped on the back of my leg and a searing pain shot up my calf muscle.

  One second I was lost in the darkness of tumbling forms and in the next I could see the glow from broken skylights high above and Amrita was bending over me, holding Victoria in her left arm while she used her right arm to shove aside the last of the jostling beggars. Then the mob was past and Amrita was helping me to a sitting position on the filthy platform. It was as if a tidal wave had appeared from nowhere, spent its violence, and was now flowing back into the random sea of people and pools of huddled families. Nearby an old man crouched over a large pot of boiling water that had remained miraculously unspilled in the confusion.

  "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," I kept repeating to Amrita when I could get my breath. Now that the danger was past, Amrita began sobbing and laughing as she hugged me and helped me to my feet. We checked Victoria for bruises or scratches, and the baby chose that instant to begin wailing so loudly that both of us had to reassure her with hugs and kisses. "I'm sorry," I said again. "That was so stupid."

  "Look," said Amrita. There, next to my feet, lay a plain brown briefcase. I picked it up, and we pushed our way outside past packs of rickshaw coolies clamoring for our business. We found a relatively open space near the street and leaned against a brick pillar while the flow of people broke around us. I checked Victoria again. She was fine, blinking in the stronger light and obviously debating whether to resume her wailing.

  Amrita grasped my forearm. "Let's see what's in the briefcase and get out of here," she said.

  "I'll open it later."

  "Open it now, Bobby," she said. "We'll feel pretty foolish if you went through all that to come away with some businessman's lunch."

  I nodded and snapped open the latches. It was not someone's lunch. The manuscript lay in a heap of several hundred pages. Some were typewritten, some were scrawled in longhand, and at least half a dozen different sizes and colors of paper had been used. I glanced at enough pages to confirm that it was poetry and that the manuscript was in English. "Okay," I said, "Let's get out of here."

  I closed the briefcase and we had turned to choose a taxi when the Premiere screeched to a halt and Mr. Chatterjee and Mr. Gupta jumped out, shouting excitedly.

  "Greetings," I said wearily. "What kept you?"

  11

  "I think with my body and soul

  about the women of Calcutta . . . "

  — Ananda Bagchi

  The apparition in the mirror was a mess. His hair was in disarray, his

  shirt was torn, his white cotton slacks were filthy, and there were

  fingernail tracks across his chest. I grimaced at myself and tossed the

  ruined shirt on the floor. I grimaced again as Amrita applied a cotton swab soaked with peroxide to my cuts.

  "You didn't make Mr. Chatterjee or Mr. Gupta very happy," she said.

  "It's not my fault that there wasn't a Bengali version of the manuscript."

  "They would have liked to have had more time to study the English version, Bobby."

  "Yeah. Well, they can catch excerpts in Harper's or wait for the spring edition of Other Voices. That is, if Morrow's experts decide it is a Das manuscript. I have my doubts."

  "And you're not going to read it today?"

  "Nope. I'll look at it tomorrow during the flight and study it when we get home."

  Amrita nodded and finished swabbing the cuts on my chest. "Let's have Dr. Heinz look at these when we get home."

  "All right." We went into the other room and sat on the bed. The electricity was out, the air conditioning had failed, and the room was a steam bath. Opening the windows only served to let in the noise and stench from the street below. Victoria sat on her quilt on the floor. She wore nothing but diapers and rubber pants and was wrestling with a big ball with bells in it. The ball was on top and appeared to be winning the match.

  I had surprised even myself by not reading the manuscript immediately. I had never been known for either stifling my curiosity or deferring gratification of any sort. But I was tired and depressed and had a strong and completely illogical aversion to even looking at the manuscript until the three of us were safely out of the country.

  Where had the police been? I had not seen the gray sedan again and now had my doubts as to whether it had ever actually followed us. Well, nothing else had appeared to work efficiently in Calcutta. Why should the police force be an exception?

  "So, what do we do today?" asked Amrita.

  I flopped back on the bed and picked up a tourist guide. "Well, we can see impressive Fort William, or view the imposing Nakhoda Mosque — which, by the way, was modeled on Akbar's tomb, whoever Akbar was — or go back across the river to see the botanical gardens."

  "It's so hot," said Amrita. She had changed into shorts and a T-shirt that read A WOMAN'S PLACE IS IN THE HOUSE — AND THE SENATE. I wondered what Chatterjee would think if he saw her dressed that way.

  "We could go to the Victoria Memorial."

  "I bet they don't even have fans there," she said. "Where would it be cool?"

  "A bar?"

  "It's Sunday."

  "Yeah. I've been meaning to ask. Why is it that every place closes down in a Hindu country on — "

  "The park!" said Amrita. "We could go for a walk on the Maidan near the racecourse we saw from the taxi. There should be a breeze."

  I sighed. "Let's try it. It's bound to be cooler than this place."

  It was no cooler there. Small groups of beggars, a painful reminder of the morning's folly, flocked to us everywhere. Even the frequent and violent bouts of rainfall did not discourage them. I had long since emptied my pockets of change, but their insistent clamoring only grew louder. We paid two rupees to duck into a zoological garden in the park. There were only a few animals caged there, miserably swatting their tails back and forth to keep away clouds of insects, tongues hanging out from the heat. The zoo smell mixed with the heavy sewer sweetness of the river tributary that flowed past the park. We pointed out a tired tiger and some sullen monkeys to Victoria, but the baby wanted only to nestle against my damp shirt and sleep. When the rains struck again we found shelter in a small pavilion which we shared with a six- or seven-year-old boy who was watching over an infant lying on the cracked stone. Occasionally the boy would wave a hand to shoo the flies which hovered above the baby's face. Amrita tried talking to the youngster, but he continued to squat silently and stare at her with his large brown eyes. She pressed several rupees and a ballpoint pen into his hand and we left.

  The electricity was on at the hotel, but the laboring air conditioner had not cooled the room appreciably. Amrita showered first and I had just pulled off my soaked shirt when there was a heavy knock at the door.

  "Ah. Mr. Luczak! Namastey."

  "Namastey, Mr. Krishna." I remained standing in the doorway, blocking it.

  "You had a successful conclusion to your transaction?"

  "Yes, thank you."

  The heavy eyebrows went up. "But you have not read Mr. Das's poem?"

  "No, not yet." I braced myself for a request to borrow the manuscript.

  "Yes, yes. I do not want to bother you. I wish to give you this in anticipation of your meeting with Mr. M. Das." Krishna handed over a wrinkled paper sack.

  "I have no plans to meet with — "

  "Yes, yes." Krishna shrugged from the waist up. "But who is to know? Good-bye, Mr. Luczak." I shook Krishna's extended hand. Before I could look in the sack, he was gone, whistling down the corridor toward the elevators.

  "Who was that?" called Amrita from the bathroom. I sat on the bed.

  "Krishna," I said and opened the sack. There was something wrapped in a loose bundle of rags.

  "What did he want?"

  I stared at the thing in my hands. It was an automatic pistol: metal, chromed, tiny. It was as small and light as cap pistols I'd played with as a boy. But the muzzle opening looked real enough, and when I figured out how to slide the small clip out, the
jacketed cartridges were all too real. Tiny lettering above the handgrip read GUISSEPPE .25 CALIBRE. "Goddamn it to shit," I said softly.

  "I said, What did he want?" called Amrita.

  "Nothing!" I yelled and looked around. Four steps took me to the closet. "Just to say good-bye."

  "What did you say just now?"

  "Nothing," I stuffed the pistol and clip in the bag separately, wrapped them tightly in rags, and tossed the bag as far back as I could on the wide shelf above the hangars.