“Yeah, leaving that out altogether.”
“But we’ll get your daughter back,” Joshua said.
Joshua wanted to rush into Kalighat and demand the return of Rumi’s daughter and the release of all the other victims in the name of what was good and right. Joshua’s solution to everything was to lead with righteous indignation, and there is a time and a place unto that, but there is also a time for cunning and guile (Ecclesiastes 9 or something). I was able to talk him into an alternate plan by using flawless logic:
“Josh, did the Vegemites smite the Marmites by charging in and demanding justice at the end of a sword? I think not. These Brahmans cut off and eat the fingers of children. I know there’s no finger-cutting commandment, Josh, but still, I’m guessing that these people think differently than we do. They call the Buddha a heretic, and he was one of their princes. How do you think they’ll receive a scrawny brown kid claiming to be the son of a god who doesn’t even live in their area?”
“Good point. But we still have to save the child.”
“Of course.”
“How?”
“Extreme sneakiness.”
“You’ll have to be in charge then.”
“First we need to see this city and this temple where the sacrifices will be held.”
Joshua scratched his head. His hair had mostly grown back, but was still short. “The Vegemites smote the Marmites?”
“Yeah, Excretions three-six.”
“I don’t remember that. I guess I need to brush up on my Torah.”
The statue of Kali over her altar was carved from black stone and stood as tall as ten men. She wore a necklace of human skulls around her neck and a girdle made of severed human hands at her hips. Her open maw was lined with a saw blade of teeth over which a stream of fresh blood had been poured. Even her toenails curved into vicious blades which dug into the pile of twisted, graven corpses on which she stood. She had four arms, one holding a cruel, serpentine sword, another a severed head by the hair; the third hand she held crooked, as if beckoning her victims to the place of dark destruction to which all are destined, and the fourth was posed downward, in a manner presenting the goddess’s hand-girded hips, as if asking the eternal question, “Does this outfit make me look fat?”
The raised altar lay in the middle of an open garden that was surrounded by trees. The altar was wide enough that five hundred people could have stood in the shadow of the black goddess. Deep grooves had been cut in the stone to channel the blood of sacrifices into vessels, so it could be poured through the goddess’s jaws. Leading to the altar was a wide stone-paved boulevard, which was lined on either side by great elephants carved from wood and set on turntables so they could be rotated. The trunks and front feet of the elephants were stained rusty brown, and here and there the trunks exhibited deep gouges from blades that had hewn through a child into the mahogany.
“Vitra isn’t being kept here,” Joshua said.
We were hiding behind a tree near the temple garden, dressed as natives, fake caste marks and all. Having lost when we drew lots, I was the one dressed as a woman.
“I think this is a bodhi tree,” I said, “just like Buddha sat under! It’s so exciting. I’m feeling sort of enlightened just standing here. Really, I can feel ripe bodhies squishing between my toes.”
Joshua looked at my feet. “I don’t think those are bodhies. There was a cow here before us.”
I lifted my foot out of the mess. “Cows are overrated in this country. Under the Buddha’s tree too. Is nothing sacred?”
“There’s no temple to this temple,” Joshua said. “We have to ask Rumi where the sacrifices are kept until the festival.”
“He won’t know. He’s Untouchable. These guys are Brahmans—priests—they wouldn’t tell him anything. That would be like a Sadducee telling a Samaritan what the Holy of Holies looked like.”
“Then we have to find them ourselves,” Joshua said.
“We know where they’re going to be at midnight, we’ll get them then.”
“I say we find these Brahmans and force them to stop the whole festival.”
“We’ll just storm up to their temple and tell them to stop it?”
“Yes.”
“And they will.”
“Yes.”
“That’s cute, Josh. Let’s go find Rumi. I have a plan.”
Chapter Twenty-One
“You make a very attractive woman,” Rumi said from the comfort of his pit. “Did I tell you that my wife has passed on to her next incarnation and that I am alone?”
“Yeah, you mentioned that.” He seemed to have given up on us getting his daughter back. “What happened to the rest of your family, anyway?”
“They drowned.”
“I’m sorry. In the Ganges?”
“No, at home. It was the monsoon season. Little Vitra and I had gone to the market to buy some swill, and there was a sudden downpour. When we returned…” He shrugged.
“I don’t mean to sound insensitive, Rumi, but there is a chance that your loss could have been caused by—oh, I don’t know—perhaps the fact that you LIVE IN A FUCKING PIT!”
“That’s not helping, Biff,” Joshua said. “You said you had a plan?”
“Right. Rumi, am I correct in assuming that these pits, when someone is not living in them, are used for tanning hides?”
“Yes, it is work that only Untouchables may do.”
“That would account for the lovely smell. I assume you use urine in the tanning process, right?”
“Yes, urine, mashed brains, and tea are the main ingredients.”
“Show me the pit where the urine is condensed.”
“The Rajneesh family is living there.”
“That’s okay, we’ll bring them a present. Josh, do you have any lint in the bottom of your satchel?”
“What are you up to?”
“Alchemy,” I said. “The subtle manipulation of the elements. Watch and learn.”
When it was not being used, the urine pit was the home of the Rajneesh family, and they were more than happy to give us loads of the white crystals that covered the floor of their home. There were six in the family, father, mother, an almost grown daughter, and three little ones. Another little son had been taken for sacrifice at the festival of Kali. Like Rumi, and all the other Untouchables, the Rajneesh family looked more like skeletons mummified in brown leather than people. The Untouchable men went about the pits naked or wearing only a loincloth, and even the women were dressed in tatters that barely covered them—nothing as nice as the stylish sari that I had purchased in the marketplace. Mr. Rajneesh commented that I was a very attractive woman and encouraged me to drop by after the next monsoon.
Joshua pounded chunks of the crystallized mineral into a fine white powder while Rumi and I collected charcoal from under the heated dying pit (a firebox had been gouged out of the stone under the pit) which the Untouchables used to render the flowers from the indigo shrub into fabric dye.
“I need brimstone, Rumi. Do you know what that is? A yellow stone that burns with a blue flame and gives off a smoke that smells like rotten eggs?”
“Oh yes, they sell it in the market as some sort of medicine.”
I handed the Untouchable a silver coin. Go buy as much of it as you can carry.”
“Oh my, this will be more than enough money. May I buy some salt with what is left?”
“Buy what you need with what’s left over, just go.”
Rumi skulked away and I went to help Joshua process the saltpeter.
The concept of abundance was an abstract one to the Untouchables, except as it pertained to two categories, suffering and animal parts. If you wanted decent food, shelter, or clean water, you would be sorely disappointed among the Untouchables, but if you were in the market for beaks, bones, teeth, hides, sinew, hooves, hair, gallstones, fins, feathers, ears, antlers, eyeballs, bladders, lips, nostrils, poop chutes, or any other inedible part of virtually any creature that walked on, s
wam under, or flew over the subcontinent of India, then the Untouchables were likely to have what you wanted lying around, conveniently stored beneath a thick blanket of black flies. In order to fashion the equipment I needed for my plan, I had to think in terms of animal parts. Fine unless you need, say, a dozen short swords, bows and arrows, and chain mail for thirty soldiers and all you have to work with is a stack of nostrils and three mismatched poop chutes. It was a challenge, but I made do. As Joshua moved among the Untouchables, surreptitiously healing their maladies, I barked out my orders.
“I need eight sheep bladders—fairly dry—two handfuls of crocodile teeth, two pieces of rawhide as long as my arms and half again as wide. No, I don’t care what kind of animal, just not too ripe, if you can manage it. I need hair from an elephant’s tail. I need firewood, or dried dung if you must, eight oxtails, a basket of wool, and a bucket of rendered fat.”
And a hundred scrawny Untouchables stood there, eyes as big as saucers, just staring at me while Joshua moved among them, healing their wounds, sicknesses, and insanities, without any of them suspecting what was happening. (We’d agreed that this was the wisest tack to take, as we didn’t want a bunch of healthy Untouchables athletically bounding through Kalighat proclaiming that they had been cured of all ills by a strange foreigner, thus attracting attention to us and spoiling my plan. On the other hand, neither could we stand there and watch these people suffer, knowing that we—well, Joshua—had the power to help them.) He’d also taken to poking one of them in the arm with his finger anytime anyone said the word “Untouchable.” Later he told me that he just hated passing up the opportunity for palpable irony. I cringed when I saw Joshua touching the lepers among them, as if after all these years away from Israel a tiny Pharisee stood on my shoulder and screamed, “Unclean!”
“Well?” I said after I’d finished my orders. “Do you want your children back or not?”
“We don’t have a bucket,” said one woman.
“Or a basket,” said another.
“Okay, fill some of the sheep bladders with rendered fat, and bundle the wool in some kind of hide. Now go, we don’t have a lot of time.”
And they all stood and looked at me. Big eyes. Sores healed. Parasites purged. They just looked at me. “Look, I know my Sanskrit isn’t great, but you do know what I am asking?”
A young man stepped forward. “We do not want to anger Kali by depriving her of her sacrifices.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Kali is the bringer of destruction, without which there can be no rebirth. She is the remover of the bondage that ties us to the material world. If we anger her, she will deprive us of her divine destruction.”
I looked at Joshua across the crowd. “Do you understand this?”
“Fear?” he said.
“Can you help?” I asked in Aramaic.
“I’m not good at fear,” Joshua said in Hebrew.
I thought for a second as two hundred eyes pinned me to the sandstone on which I stood. I remembered the red-stained gashes on the wooden elephant statues at the altar of Kali. Death was their deliverance, was it?
“What is your name?” I asked the man who had stepped out of the crowd.
“Nagesh,” he said.
“Stick out your tongue, Nagesh.” He did, and I threw back the cloth that covered my head and loosened it around my neck. Then I touched his tongue.
“Destruction is a gift you value?”
“Yes,” said Nagesh.
“Then I shall be the instrument of the goddess’s gift.” With that I pulled the black glass dagger from the sheath in my sash, held it up before the crowd. While Nagesh stood, passive, wide-eyed, I drove my thumb under his jaw, pushed his head back, and brought the dagger down across his throat. I lowered him to the ground as the red liquid spurted over the sandstone.
I stood and faced the crowd again, holding the dripping blade over my head. “You owe me, you ungrateful fucks! I have brought to your people the gift of Kali, now bring me what I ask for.”
They moved really quickly for people who were on the edge of starvation.
After the Untouchables scattered to do my bidding, Joshua and I stood over the bloodstained body of Nagesh.
“That was fantastic,” Joshua said. “Absolutely perfect.”
“Thanks.”
“Had you been practicing all that time we were in the monastery?”
“You didn’t see me push the pressure point in his neck then?”
“No, not at all.”
“Gaspar’s kung fu training. The rest, of course, was from Joy and Balthasar.”
I bent over and opened Nagesh’s mouth, then took the ying-yang vial from around my neck and put a drop of the antidote on the Untouchable’s tongue.
“So he can hear us now, like when Joy poisoned you?” Joshua asked.
I pulled back one of Nagesh’s eyelids and watched the pupil contract slowly in the sunlight. “No, I think he’s still unconscious from me holding the pressure point. I didn’t think the poison would work quickly enough. I could only get a drop of poison on my finger when I loosened my sari. I knew it would keep him down, I just wasn’t sure it would put him down.”
“Well, you are truly a magus, now, Biff. I’m impressed.”
“Joshua, you healed a hundred people today. Half of them were probably dying. I did some sleight of hand.”
My friend’s enthusiasm was undeterred. “What’s the red stuff, pomegranate juice? I can’t figure out where you concealed it.”
“No, actually I was going to ask you about that.”
“What?”
I held my arm up and showed Joshua where I had slashed my own wrist (the source of blood for the show). I had been holding it against my leg and as soon as I removed the pressure the blood started spurting again. I sat down hard on the sandstone and my vision began to tunnel down to a pinpoint. “I was hoping you could help me out with this,” I said before I fainted.
“You need to work on that part of the trick,” Joshua said when I came to. “I might not always be around to fix your wrist.” He was speaking Hebrew—that meant for my ears only.
I saw Joshua kneeling above me, then beyond him the sky was blotted out by curious brown faces. The recently murdered Nagesh was in the front of the crowd. “Hey, Nagesh, how’d the rebirth go?” I asked in Sanskrit.
“I must have strayed from my dharma in my last life,” Nagesh said. “I have been reincarnated, once again, as an Untouchable. And I have the same ugly wife.”
“You challenged master Levi who is called Biff,” I said, “of course you didn’t move up. You’re lucky you’re not a stink bug or something. See, destruction isn’t the big favor you all thought it was.”
“We brought the things you asked for.”
I hopped to my feet feeling incredibly rested and energized. “Nice,” I said to Joshua. “I feel like I just had one of those strong coffees you used to make at Balthasar’s.”
“I miss coffee,” said Josh.
I looked at Nagesh, “I don’t suppose you…”
“We have swill.”
“Never mind,” I said. Then I said one of those things that as a boy growing up in Galilee, you never think you’ll hear yourself say: “Okay, Untouchables, bring me the sheep bladders!”
Rumi said that the goddess Kali was served by a host of black-skinned female demons, who sometimes during the feast would bring men to corners of the altar and copulate with them as blood rained down from the goddess’s saw-tooth maw above.
“Okay, Josh, you’re one of them,” I said.
“What are you gonna be?”
“The goddess Kali, of course. You got to be God last time.”
“What last time?”
“All of the last times.” I turned to my intrepid minions. “Untouchables, paint him up!”
“They’re not going to buy that a burr-headed Jewish kid is their goddess of destruction.”
“O ye of little faith,” I said.
/> Three hours later we were again crouched beneath a tree near the temple of Kali. We were both dressed as women, covered from head to toe by our saris, but I was looking much lumpier under mine due to Kali’s extra arms and garland of severed heads, played tonight by painted sheep bladders filled with explosives and suspended around my neck by long strands of elephant tail hair. Any observers who might get close enough to notice my protrusions were quickly deterred by the smell coming off of Joshua and me. We had used the goo from the bottom of Rumi’s pit to paint our bodies black. I didn’t have the courage to ask what the substance had been in life, but if there was a place where they allowed vultures to ripen in the sun before pounding them into a smooth paste and mixing it with just the right amount of buffalo squat, then Rumi called it home. The Untouchables had also painted huge red rings around Joshua’s eyes, fitted him with a ropey wig of oxtails, and affixed to his torso six pert little breasts fashioned from pitch.
“Stay away from any open flame. Your tits will go up like volcanos.”
“Why did I have to have six and you only had to have two.”
“Because I am the goddess and have to wear the garland of skulls and the extra arms.”
We’d made my arms from rawhide, using my primary arms as models, then drying the molded arms in place over the fire. The women made a harness that held the extra arms in place under my own, then we painted the arms black with the same black goo. They were a little wobbly, but they were light and would look realistic enough in the dark.
It was still hours from the height of the ceremony at midnight, when the children would be hacked to death, but we wanted to be there in time to stop the revelers from cutting off the children’s fingers if we could. Now, the wooden elephants were empty on their turntables, but the altar of Kali was already filling with gruesome tribute. The heads of a thousand goats had been laid on the altar before the goddess, and the blood ran slick over the stones and in the grooves that channeled it into large brass pots at the corners of the altar. Female acolytes carried the pots up a narrow ladder at the back of the great statue of Kali, then dumped them through some sort of reservoir that fed it through the goddess’s jaws. Below, by torchlight, worshipers danced in the sticky shower as the blood flowed down upon them.
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