"During this time I quit attending classes at the university, and my grades rose from four 'F's' to three 'B's' and and 'A.' Sanjay had educated me as to how to buy old papers and tests from upperclass 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 MMSC and CPI party meetings, but the endless potlitical 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 various 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 through 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 M's' — madya, mamsa, matsya, mudra, maithun. These, of course, were the Pancha 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.
"But I owed Sanjay much. Indeed, I began to realize that I might never be able to pay the debt I owed him. So I accompanied him on his first meeting with the Kapalikas.
"They met us in the evening in the empty marketplace near the Kalighat. I do not know what I expected — my image of Kapalikas grew out of the stories told to frighten unruly children — but the two men who waited there for us fit none of my imaginings and apprehensions. They were dressed like businessmen — one even carried a briefcase — and both were soft-spoken, refined in manner and dress, and courteous to both of us despite class and caste differences.
"The ceremonies in progress were most dignified. It was the day of the new moon in celebration of Durga, and the head of an ox was on the iron spike before Kali's idol. Blood still dripped into the marble basin beneath it.
"As someone who had worshiped Durga faithfully since infancy, I had no trouble joining in the Kali/Durga litany. The few changes were easily learned, although several times I mistakenly invoked Parvati/Durga rather than Kali/Durga. The two gentlemen smiled. Only one passage was so substantially different that I had to learn it anew: