A small sign outside proclaimed ABSOLUTELY NO YOGIC EXERCISES PERMITTED IN GARDENS! The inside was very hot, the display cases were dusty, and the building was surprisingly empty except for a loud and obnoxious tour group of Germans. I was mildly interested in the anthropology displays on the first floor, but it was the exhibit of archaeological art that finally caught my eye.

"What is it?" asked Amrita as she saw me bending over a glass case.

The tiny black figurine was labeled Representation of Durga Goddess in Kali Aspect: circa 80 B.C. It fell short of being frightening. I saw no sign of a noose, skull, or severed head. One hand held what looked to be a wooden bough, another an inverted egg cup, a third what might have been a trident but looked more like an opened Swiss Army knife, and her last hand was extended palm up, offering a tiny yellow doughnut. As with all the statues of goddesses I'd seen in the museum, she was high-waisted, firm-breasted, and long of ear. Her face was scowling, her many teeth were sharp, but I could make out no vampirish canines or lolling tongue. She was wearing a headdress of flames. Much more fierce, to my eye, was a statue marked Durga that stood in a nearby case. This supposedly more benign incarnation of Parvati had ten arms, and each hand was filled with a weapon more fierce than the last.

"Your friend Kali doesn't seem too terrible," said Amrita. Even Victoria was leaning forward from the backpack carrier to look at the display case.

"This thing's two thousand years old," I said. "Maybe she's grown more hideous and bloodthirsty since then."

"Some women just don't age gracefully," agreed Amrita and moved on to the next display. Victoria seemed to enjoy a large bronze idol of Ganesha, the playful, elephant-headed god of prosperity; and for the rest of our time in the museum we made a game out of finding as many representations of Ganesha as we could.

Amrita would have liked to visit the Victoria Memorial Hall to see artifacts of the Raj, but it was getting late and we contented ourselves with driving by in the taxi and pointing out to the baby the imposing white structure that we told her was named after her.

We entered the hotel in a torrential downpour, changed clothes quickly, and came back out to find Chatterjee's car waiting and the rain stopped.

I was wearing a tie for the first time in several days, and as the car pulled out into traffic I sat uncomfortably, tugging at the knot and wishing my collar were looser or my neck smaller. My short-sleeved white shirt had already soaked through the back and I was suddenly aware how scuffed and stained my faithful Wallabees looked. All in all, I felt wrinkled, tousled, and soaked in sweat. I glanced sideways at Amrita. She looked — as she always did — cool and contained. She was wearing the white cotton dress she had purchased in London and the lapis lazuli necklace I had given her before we were married. By all rights her hair should have been hanging down in limp strands, but it fell full and lustrous to her shoulders.

We drove for the better of an hour, a trip which reminded me that Calcutta was larger in area than New York City. Traffic was as insane and haphazard as ever, but Chatterjee's silent driver found the fastest route through the confusion. My concern about the traffic wasn't overly allayed by the large white signs in Bengali, Hindi, and English that sat in the center of several chaotic traffic circles we negotiated: DRIVE MORE CAREFULLY! THERE HAVE BEEN ___ DEATHS ON THIS THOROUGHFARE THIS YEAR! The boxes were filled with the kind of nail-up number panels one used to see in old-time baseball parks. The highest number we saw on this trip was 28. I wondered idly whether that included that entire section of road or just those few square feet of pavement.

At times we sped down a highway bordered on each side by great chawls — those incredible slums of tin roofs, gunnysack walls, and mud-path streets — which extended for miles and were terminated only by gray monoliths of factories belching flame and unfiltered soot toward the monsoon clouds. I realized that sweeping philosophical convictions such as ecology and pollution control were luxuries for our advanced industrial nations. The air in Calcutta, already sweetened by raw sewage, burning cow dung, millions of tons of garbage, and the innumerable open fires eternally burning, was made almost unbreathable by the further effusion of raw auto emissions and industrial filth.

The factories themselves were huge artifacts of worn brick, rusted steel, rampant weeds, and broken windows — pictures from some grim future when the industrial age had gone the way of the dinosaur but left its rotting carcasses sprawled across the landscape. Yet, smoke rose from the most tumbledown ruin, and ragged human forms came and went from the black maws of the darkest buildings. I found it almost impossible to imagine myself living in one of those floorless hovels, working in one of those grim factories.

Amrita must have been sharing similar thoughts, for we rode in silence, each watching the panorama of human hopelessness pass by the car windows.

Then, in a space of a few minutes, we crossed a bridge over a wide expanse of railroad tracks, passed through a transitional neighborhood of tiny storefronts, and were suddenly in an old, established area of tree-lined streets and large homes guarded by walls and barred gates. The thin sunlight glinted off countless shards of broken glass set atop the flat walls. At one place there was a yard-wide swath cleared on top of a high wall, but the mud-colored masonry was smeared with dark streaks. Well-polished automobiles sat at the end of long driveways. The iron-spiked gates bore small signs warning Beware of Dog in at least three languages.

It took no great insight to realize that this once had been a British residential section, as separate from the pandemonium of the city and its natives as the English governing class could make it. Decay was evident even here — the frequently filthy walls, unshingled roofs, and crudely boarded windows — but it was a controlled decay, a rearguard action against the rampant entropy which seemed to govern Calcutta elsewhere; and the sense of dissolution was ameliorated somewhat by the bright flowers and other obvious attempts at gardening that one glimpsed through high entry gates.

We pulled up to one of these gates. The driver bustled out and unlocked a padlock with a key from a chain on his belt. The circular driveway was lined with tall, flowering bushes and drooping tree limbs.

We were greeted by Michael Leonard Chatterjee. "Ah, Mr. and Mrs. Luczak! Welcome!" His wife was also standing by the door next to a toddler whom I first took to be their son but then realized must be a grandson. Mrs. Chatterjee was in her early sixties, and I revised her husband's age upward. Chatterjee was one of those smooth-faced, perpetually balding gentlemen who reach fifty and seem to stay at that age until their late sixties.

We chatted on the front step for a moment. Victoria was duly complimented, and we praised their grandson. Then we were shown through the house quickly before being led through another door to a wide patio overlooking a side street.

I was interested in their home. It was the first chance I'd had to see how an upper-class Indian family lived. The first impression was one of juxtaposition: large, formal, high-ceilinged rooms with paint flaking from begrimed walls; a beautiful walnut sideboard covered with scratches on which was displayed a stuffed mongoose with dusty glass eyes and molting fur; an expensive, handmade carpet from Kashmir set atop chipped linoleum; a large, once modern kitchen now liberally cluttered with dusty bottles, old crates, crusted metal pans, and with a small, charcoal fireplace set squarely in the center of the floor. Smoke streaked a once white ceiling.