Song of Kali Read online

  "He'd been climbing on the new bridge?" I said.

  "Yeah, that's what I thought," said Abe. "And that's what the local authorities said at the inquest. But for the life of me I couldn't figure out how he'd managed to hit those rods . . . He would've had to have jumped way out from the high girders. Then, a couple of weeks later, right before Gandhi broke his fast and the rioting stopped back in Calcutta, I went over to the British consulate there to dig out a copy of Kipling's story 'The Bridge Builders.' You've read it, haven't you?"

  "No," I said. I couldn't stand Kipling's prose or poetry.

  "You should," said Abe. "Kipling's short fiction is quite good."

  "So what's the story?" I asked.

  "Well, the story hinges around the fact that at the end of every bridgebuilding, Bengalis used to have an elaborate religious ceremony."

  "That's not unusual, is it?" I said, half guessing the punch line of all of this.

  "Not at all," said Abe. "Every event in India calls for some sort of religious ceremony. It's just the way the Bengalis went about it that caused Kipling to write the story." Abe put the cigar back in his mouth and spoke through gritted teeth. "At the end of each bridge construction, they offered up a human sacrifice."

  "Right," I said. "Great." I gathered up my photocopies, stuffed them in my briefcase, and rose to leave. "If you remember any more Kipling tales, Abe, be sure to give us a call. Amrita'll get a big kick out of them."

  Abe stood up and leaned on his desk. His blunt fingers pressed down on stacks of manuscripts. "Hell, Bobby, I'd just prefer that you weren't going into that — "

  "Miasma," I said.

  Abe nodded.

  "I'll stay away from new bridges," I said while walking toward the door.

  "At least think again about taking Amrita and the baby."

  "We're going," I said. "The reservations have been made. We've had our shots. The only question now is whether you want to see Das's stuff if it is Das and if I can secure publication rights. What do you say, Abe?"

  Abe nodded again. He threw his cigar into a cluttered ashtray.

  "I'll send you a postcard from poolside at the Calcutta Oberoi Grand Hotel," I said, opening the door.

  My last sight of Abe was of him standing there with his arm and hand extended, either in a half-wave or some mute gesture of tired resignation.

  2

  "Would you like to know Calcutta?

  Then be prepared to forget her."

  — Sushil Roy

  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 repellent 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.

  3

  "At midnight, this city is Disneyland."

  — Subrata Chakravarty

  We flew into Calcutta at midnight, coming in from the south,over the Bay of Bengal.

  "My God," I whispered. Amrita leaned across me to peer out the window.

  On the advice of her parents, we had flown BOAC into Bombay to go through customs there. That had worked fine, but the connecting Air India flight to Calcutta had been delayed for three hours due to mechanical problems. We finally were allowed to board, only to sit at the terminal for another hour with no lights or air conditioning because the external generators had been detached. A businessman in the row ahead of us said that the BombayCalcutta flight had been late every day for three weeks because of a feud between the pilot and flight engineer.

  Once airborne, we were routed far south of our path because of severe thunderstorms. Victoria had fussed much of the evening, but now she was sleeping in her mother's arms.

  "My God," I said again. Calcutta was stretched out below, over 250 square miles of city, a galaxy of lights after the absolute blackness of cloud tops and the Bay of Bengal. I had flown into many cities at night, but none like this. Instead of the usual geometries of electric lights, Calcutta at midnight was ablaze with countless lanterns, open fires, and a strange, soft glow — an almost fungal phosphorescence — that oozed from a thousand unseen sources. Instead of the predictable urban progression of straight lines — streets, highways, parking lots — Calcutta's myriad of fires seemed scattered and chaotic, a jumbled constellation broken only by the dark curve of the river. I imagined that this was what London or Berlin must have looked like — burning — to awed bomber crews during the war.

  Then the wheels touched down, the terrible humidity invaded the cool cabin, and we were out in and part of the shuffling crowd making its way toward Baggage Claims. The terminal was small and filthy. Despite the late hour, sweating mobs were jostling and shouting all around us.

  "Wasn't someone supposed to meet us?" asked Amrita.

  "Yeah." I had rescued the four bags from the broken conveyor belt, and we stood by them as the crowd ebbed and flowed against us. There was a sense of hysteria in the pulses of white-shirted, saried humanity in the little building. "Morrow had a contact with the Bengali Writers' Union. Some fellow named Michael Leonard Chatterjee was supposed to give us a ride to the hotel, but we're hours late. He probably went home. I'll try to get a cab."

  One glance at the doorway jammed with shoving, shouting men made me stay standing by the bags.

  "Mr. and Mrs. Luczak. Robert Luczak?"

  "Loo-zack," I said, automatically correcting the pronunciation. "Yes, I'm Robert Luczak." I looked at the man who had shoved his way up to us. He was tall and skinny, wearing dirty brown trousers and a white shirt that looked gray and grimy in the green fluorescent lighting. His face was relatively young — late twenties, perhaps — and clean-shaven, but his black hair stood out in great electric tufts and his dark, piercing eyes gave an impression of such intensity that it bordered on a sense of restrained violence. His eyebrows were dark brush strokes that almost met above a falcon's predatory beak. I took half a step back and dropped a suitcase to free my right hand. "Mr. Chatterjee?"

  "No, I have not seen Mr. Chatterjee," he replied shrilly. "I am M. T. Krishna." At first, through the noise and heavy singsong dialect, I heard it as "empty Krishna."

  I extended my hand, but Krishna had turned and was leading the way outside. He used his right arm to shove people aside. "This way, please. Quickly, quickly."

  I nodded at Amrita and lifted three of the bags. Incredibly, Victoria had continued to sleep through the heat and bedlam. "Are you with the Writers' Union?" I asked.

  "No, no, no." Krishna did not turn his head as he spoke. "I am a part-time teacher, you see. I have contacts with the U.S. Education Foundation in India. My supervisor, Mr. Shah, was contacted by his very good and longtime friend, Mr. Abraham Bronstein of New York City, who asked me to extend this kindness. Quickly."

  Outside, the air seemed even heavier and more moist than in the steaming terminal. Searchlights illuminated a silver sign above the terminal doors. "Dum-Dum Airport," I read aloud.

  "Yes, yes. It is here they made the bullets until they were outlawed after World War Number One," said Krishna. "This way, please."

  Suddenly we were surrounded by a dozen porters clamoring to carry our few bags. The men were reed-thin, bare-legged, draped in brown rags. One was missing an arm. Another looked as if he had been in a terrible fire: his chin was welded to his chest by great wattles of scar tissue. Evidently he could not speak, but urgent sounds gurgled up from his ruined throat.

  "Give them the luggage," snapped Krishna. He gestured imperiously as the porters scrambled over one another to get at the bags.

  We had to walk only sixty feet or so along the curved drive. The air was weighted with moisture, as dark and heavy as a soaked army blanket. For a dizzy second I thought it was snowing, as the air appeared to be swirling with white flecks; then I realized that there were a million insects dancing in the beams of the terminal spotlights. Krishna gestured to the porters, pointed to a vehicle, and I stopped in surprise. "A bus?"
I said, although the blue-andwhite van was more of a jitney than a full-fledged bus. The legend USEFI was printed along its side.

  "Yes, yes, yes. It was the only transport available. Quickly now."

  One of the porters, agile as a monkey, clambered up the back of the bus to the roof. Our four bags were handed up and secured to the luggage rack. As they tied down a strip of black plastic over the luggage, I wondered idly why we couldn't have taken them in the bus. Shrugging, I fumbled out two five-rupee notes to tip the porters. Krishna took them out of my hand, gave one back.

  "No. It is too much," he said. I shrugged again and helped Amrita to get aboard. Victoria had finally awakened at the shouting of the agitated porters and was adding her shrill cry to the general confusion. We nodded at the sleepy driver and took the second seat on the right. At the door, Krishna was arguing with three of the porters who had carried our bags. Amrita did not understand all of the cascade of Bengali, but she picked up enough to tell me that the porters were upset because they could not divide five rupees three ways. They demanded another rupee. Krishna shouted something and went to close the door of the bus. The oldest porter, his face a maze of deep gullies forested with white stubble, stepped forward and blocked the folding door with his body. Other porters drifted over from their place near the terminal doors. Shouts turned to screams.