Song of Kali Read online

  I jumped down and followed him into the light. Another door on the second-floor landing led to a wide hallway. "You saw the University down the street?" asked Krishna over his shoulder. I nodded, although I'd seen no building more imposing than a warehouse. "This, of course, is the University coffee shop. No, that is not right. Coffee house. Just like Greenwich Village. Yes."

  Krishna turned left and led me into a truly cavernous room. The high ceiling, heavy columns, and windowless walls reminded me of a parking garage I used to know near the Chicago Loop. At least fifty or sixty tables were visible in the dim light, but only a few were occupied. Here and there a cluster of earnest-looking young men in loose white shirts sat at rough tables painted a dark green. Slowmoving fans hung from a twenty-foot-high ceiling; and although the moist air did not stir perceptibly, the light from the widely spaced bulbs was made to flicker slightly, imparting a dully stroboscopic, silent-film quality to the scene.

  "A coffee house," I repeated stupidly.

  "Come this way." Krishna led the way through tightly packed tables to the farthest corner. A young man of about twenty sat alone on a bench built into the wall. He rose as we approached.

  "Mr. Luczak, this is Jayaprakesh Muktanandaji," Krishna said, and added something in Bengali to the youth. The deep shadows made it difficult for me to make out the young man's features clearly; but along with a moist, hesitant handshake, I registered a thin face, thick glasses, and a case of acne so severe that the pustules almost glowed.

  We remained standing for a silent moment. The young man wiped his palms together and glanced furtively at the students at other tables. Some of them had turned to watch as we entered, but none continued to look our way.

  We sat down just as an old man with stubble outlining a white beard brought coffee to the table. The cups were badly chipped and traced with fracture lines that radiated pale branches against the enamel. The coffee was strong and surprisingly good, except that someone had already added dollops of sugar and sour milk. Both Krishna and Muktanandaji looked at me as the old man stood quietly by the table, so I pawed through my billfold and set down a five-rupee note. The man turned and left without giving any change.

  "Mr. Muktanandaji," I began, proud of remembering the name, "you have some information about the Calcutta poet M. Das?"

  The boy bowed his head and said something to Krishna. Krishna replied abruptly and turned to me with his sharp-toothed smile. "Mr. Muktanandaji does not, I am sorry to say, speak such fluent English. Indeed, Mr. Luczak, he speaks no English. He has asked for me to interpret for him. If you are ready, Mr. Luczak, he will now tell you his story."

  "I thought this was to be an interview," I said.

  Krishna held up the palm of his right hand. "Yes, yes. You must understand, Mr. Luczak, Mr. Jayaprakesh Muktanandaji is speaking to you only as a personal favor to me, his onetime teacher. He is very reluctant. If you please to let him tell his story, I shall translate to the best of my abilities; and then, if you have questions, I shall put them to Mr. Muktanandaji."

  Damn, I thought. That was twice in one day that I had made the mistake of not having Amrita with me. I considered canceling or rearranging the meeting, but discarded the idea. Better to get it over with. Tomorrow I would be receiving the Das manuscript, and with any luck we would be flying home in the evening.

  "Very well," I said.

  The young man cleared his throat and adjusted his thick glasses. His voice was even higher pitched than Krishna's. Every few sentences he would pause and rub idly at his face or neck while Krishna translated. At first I found the delay irritating, but the musical flow of Bengali followed by the singsong rush of Krishna's dialect had a mantra-like, mesmerizing effect on me. It was similar to the heightened state of concentration and involvement one brings to a foreign movie simply because of the effort of reading the subtitles.

  A few times I stopped them to ask a question; but this seemed to upset Muktanandaji, so after a few minutes I contented myself with sipping my cooling coffee and listening. Several times Krishna turned to say something in Bengali, and the boy would reply and I would curse myself for being a monolingual moron. I wondered if even Amrita could have followed the gist of the high-speed Bengali.

  As the story began I found myself mentally rearranging Krishna's often tortured syntax or substituting the proper word for his sometimes comical replacement. Occasionally I jotted details in my notebook, but after a while even this became a distraction and I put my pen away. The overhead fans turned slowly, the light flickered like distant heat lightning on a summer's night, and I gave Jayaprakesh Muktanandaji my total attention as his story unfolded in Krishna's voice.

  6

  A REQUEST

  When I die

  Do not throw the meat and bones away

  But pile them up

  And

  Let them tell

  By their smell

  What life was worth

  On this earth

  What love was worth

  In the end

  — Kamela Das

  "Iam a poor person of Sudra caste. I am one of eleven sons of Jagdisvaran Bibhuti Muktanandaji who was with Gandhiji on his Walk to the Sea.

  "My home is in the village of Anguda which is near Durgalapur which is along the rail line connecting Calcutta and Jamshedpur. It is a poor village, and no one from the outside has taken any interest in it except for the time when a tiger ate two of the sons of Subhoranjan Venkateswarani and a man came from a newspaper in Bhubaneshwar to ask Subhoranjan Venkateswarani how he felt about this. I do not remember this well, as it occurred during the war — which was some fifteen years before I was born.

  "Our family has not always been poor. My grandfather, S. Mokeshi Muktanandaji, once loaned money to the village moneylender. By the time I was born, the eighth of eleven sons, we had long since borrowed back my grandfather's money and much more. To pay off some of the interest on his debts, my father was forced to sell the richest six acres of his land — those closest to the village. That left fifteen acres, spread over many miles, to be divided among the eleven us. One cannot raise cane for two bullocks on that small a share of land.

  "The problem was made a small bit better when my older brother Marmadeshwar went off to do his patriotic duty in 1971 and was promptly killed by the Pakistanis. Still, the prospects for the rest of us were not good.

  "Then my father had an idea. For eight years I had gone halftime to the Christian Agricultural Academy in Durgalpur. The school was sponsored by the very rich Mr. Debee of the Bengal Cattle Insemination Centre. It was a small school. We had few books and only two teachers, one of whom was slowly going mad from syphilis.

  "Nonetheless, I was the only member of my father's family ever to have gone to school, and he decided that I would go off to university. He planned for me to become a doctor or — even better — a merchant, and bring much money to the family. This also solved the problem of my share of land. It was obvious to my father that a doctor or wealthy merchant would have no need for a small plot of poor farmland.

  "I, myself, had mixed feelings about this idea. I had never been more than eight miles from Anguda. I had never ridden in a train or automobile. I could read very simple books and write basic sentences in Bengali, but I knew no English or Hindi and only enough Sanskrit to recite a few lines of the Ramayana and Mahabharata.

  "In short, I was not sure that I was ready to become a doctor.

  "My father borrowed more money — in my name, this time — from the village moneylender. My teacher, in his madness, wrote a recommendation for admission to Calcutta University and directed it to his old instructor there. Even Mr. Debee, who in his pre-Christian days had sworn to Gandhiji that he would humbly work for our villages and have his ashes spread on the main path of Anguda, wrote a note to the University requesting their kindness in admitting a poor, ignorant, low-caste peasant child to their honored halls of learning.

  "Last year there was an opening. I paid most of my borrowed m
oney as baksheesh to my teacher and to Mr. Debee's secretary, and then I left my home for the great city. How terrified I was!

  "I will not describe my reactions to all of the wonders of Calcutta. Suffice it to say that every hour brought marvelous revelations. I was soon downcast, however. My meager funds barely paid the first semester's tuition and left not enough money for the expensive dormitories or student hostels near the University. I spent my first week in the city sleeping under the bushes in the Maidan, but the monsoon rains and two beatings by the police convinced me to seek a room.

  "My four classes were somewhat of a disappointment. There were more than four hundred students in my Introduction to National History class. I could not afford the textbook and was rarely close enough to hear the lecturer, who mumbled and, in any case, spoke only in English, which I could not understand. I therefore spent my days hunting for lodging and wishing I were home in Anguda. Even by eating only one meal of rice and chapatis a day, I knew that I would be out of money within a few weeks. If I was lucky enough to find a room to rent, I would starve that much sooner.

  "Then I answered an ad for a roommate in the Student Forum and everything changed. The room was six miles from the university on the seventh floor of a building which housed mostly refugees from Bangladesh and Burma. The student who wished to rent half of the room was a junior — a brilliant man several years older than I who was then studying pharmacy science but who wished to someday be a great author, or, failing that, a nuclear physicist. His name was Sanjay, and from the first time I saw him standing there amidst piles of his papers and unwashed clothing, I knew somehow that my life would never again be the same.

  "He wanted two hundred rupees a month for my half of the room. My face must have shown my despair. At that time I had less than one hundred rupees to my name. I realized that I had made the two-hour walk for nothing. I asked if I could sit down. The soles of my feet were in great pain from the beating with lathi sticks I had received a few nights earlier. I later discovered that the policemen had broken the arches of my feet.

  "Upon hearing this, Sanjay immediately took pity on me. He became furious when I told him of the beatings and the size of the bribes demanded by the University dormitory wardens. Sanjay's moods, as I was soon to learn, were like monsoon storms. One minute he could be calm, contemplative, as still as a statue, and the next he would fly off in a rage against some social injustice and put his fist through the rotting wallboards or kick some Burmese child down the back staircase.

  "Sanjay was a member of both the Maoist Student Coalition and the Communist Party India. The fact that these two factions despised each other and frequently came to blows did not seem to bother him. He described his parents as "decadent capitalist parasites" who owned a small pharmaceutical company in Bombay and who sent him money each month. His parents at first had sent him out of the country to study, but when he returned to "renew contacts with the revolutionary struggle in my own country," he further offended them by choosing the brawling, plebeian Calcutta University in which to pursue his degree rather than a more prestigious college in Bombay or Delhi.

  "After telling me these things about himself and listening to my own story, Sanjay promptly changed the rent request to five rupees a month and offered to loan me the money for the first two months. I confess that I wept with joy.

  "During the following weeks, Sanjay showed me how to survive in Calcutta. In the morning, before sunrise, we rode to the center of the city with the Scheduled Class truck drivers who transported dead animals to the renderers. It was Sanjay who taught me that in a great city such as Calcutta, caste distinctions meant nothing and would soon disappear when the imminent revolution arrived. I agreed with Sanjay's points, but my upbringing still made it impossible for me to share a bus seat with a stranger or accept a piece of fried dough from a vendor without instinctively wondering what the caste of the man was. Nonetheless, Sanjay showed me how to ride the trains for free, where to be shaved by a street-corner barber who owed my friend favors, and how to squeeze into the cinema for free during the intermission of the nightly three-hour film.

  "During this time I quit attending classes at the university, and my grades rose from four Fs to three Bs and an A. Sanjay had educated me as to how to buy old papers and tests from upper-class students. To do this, I was forced to borrow another three hundred rupees from my roommate, but he did not mind.

  "At first Sanjay took me to both the MSC and CPI party meetings, but the endless political orations and aimless internal bickerings served only to put me to sleep, and after a while he no longer insisted that I accompany him. Much more to my liking were the rare times when we went to the Lakshmi Hotel Nightclub to see the women dance in their underwear. Such a thing was almost unthinkable to a devout Hindu such as myself, but I confess I found it terribly exciting. Sanjay called it "bourgeois decadence" and explained that it was our duty to witness the sickening corruption, which the revolution was destined to replace. In all, we went five times to witness the decadence, and each time Sanjay loaned me the princely sum of fifty rupees.

  "We had been roommates for three months before Sanjay told me of his association with the goondas and Kapalikas. I had suspected that Sanjay was in some way involved with the goondas, but I knew nothing of the Kapalikas.

  "Even I knew that for several years gangs of Asian thugees and Calcutta's own goondas had run entire sections of the city. They charged fees to the var ious refugees for entry and squatting rights; they controlled the flow of drugs to and through the city; and they murdered anyone who interfered with their traditional management of protection, smuggling, and crime in the city. Sanjay told me that even the pathetic slum-dwellers who paddled out from the chawls each evening to steal the blue-and-red navigation lights from the river for some purpose of their own paid a commission to the goondas. This commission was tripled after a goondas-chartered freighter — bound for Singapore with a cargo of opium and smugglers' gold — ran aground in the Hooghly because of missing channel lights. Sanjay said that it had taken most of the ship's profits to bribe the police and port authorities to pull it off the mud and let it proceed.

  "At this time last year, of course, the country was going through the last stages of the Emergency. Newspapers were censored, the prisons bulged with political prisoners who had irritated Mrs. Gandhi, and it was rumored that young men in the South were being sterilized for riding trains without proper tickets. Calcutta, however, was in the middle of its own emergency. Refugees over the past decade had raised the population of the city beyond counting. Some guessed ten million. Some said fifteen. By the time I moved in with Sanjay, the city had gone through six governments in four months. Eventually, of course, the CPI assumed control out of sheer default, but even they have brought few solutions. The real masters of the city were not to be seen.

  "Even today the Calcutta police will not enter major sections of the city. Last year they had tried daytime patrols in twos and threes, but after the goondas returned a few of these patrols in portions of seven and eight, the Commissioner refused to let his men go into those areas without the protection of soldiers. Our Indian Army announced that it had better things to do.

  "Sanjay admitted that he had become associated with the Calcutta goondas through his pharmaceutical connections. But, he said, by the end of his first year at University, he had widened his role to include collection of protection money from many of his classmates and a runner's job as liaison between the goondas and the Beggarmasters' Union on the north side of the city. Neither of these tasks paid Sanjay very much, but they gave him considerable status. It was Sanjay who carried the order to the Union to temporarily reduce the number of child kidnappings when the Times of India began one of its seasonal and short-lived editorial outrages at the practice. Later, when the Times turned its moralizing eye to dowry murders, it was Sanjay who relayed permission to the Beggarmasters to replenish their depleted stock by increasing the kidnappings and mutilations.

  "It was throug
h the Beggarmasters that Sanjay received his chance to join the Kapalikas. The Kapalika Society was older than the Goonda Brotherhood, older even than the city.

  "They worship Kali, of course. For many years they worshiped openly at the Kalighat Temple, but their custom of sacrificing a boy child each Friday of the month caused the British to ban the Society in 1831. They went underground and thrived. The nationalist struggle through the last century brought many to seek to join them. But their initiation price was high — as Sanjay and I were soon to learn.

  "For months, Sanjay had tried to make contact with them. For months he had been put off. Then, in the autumn of last year, they offered him his chance. Sanjay and I were fast friends by then. We had taken the Brotherhood Oath together and I had done my small share by running a few messages to various people and once I made a collection run when Sanjay was ill.

  "It surprised me when Sanjay offered to let me join the Kapalikas with him. It surprised and frightened me. My village had a temple to Durga, the Goddess Mother, so even so fierce an aspect and incarnation of her as Kali was familiar to me. Yet I hesitated. Durga was maternal and Kali was reputed to be wanton. Durga was modest in her representations while Kali was naked — not nude, but brazenly naked — wearing only the darkness as her cloak. The darkness and a necklace of human skulls. To worship Kali beyond her holiday was to follow the Vamachara — the perverse left-handed Tantra. I remember once as a child an older cousin was showing around a printed card showing a woman, a goddess, in obscene coitus with two men. My uncle found us looking at it, took the card, and struck my cousin in the face. The next day an old Brahmin was brought in to lecture us on the danger of such Tantric nonsense. He called it 'the error of the five Ms' — madya, mamsa, matsya, mudra, maithun. These, of course, were the Poncha Makaras which the Kapalikas might well demand — alcohol, meat, fish, hand gestures, and coitus. To be truthful, coitus was much on my mind those days, but to first experience it as part of a worship service was a truly frightening thought.