"I awoke within the embrace of Kali. She is the only deity who defies both death and time. She resurrected me then, Mr. Luczak, but only for her own purposes. Only for her own purposes. As you can see, the Dark Mother did not see fit to remove the scourge of my affliction when she restored the breath to my body."

"What were those purposes, Mr. Das?" I asked.

The poet's lipless grimace was a cruel imitation of a smile. "Why, it must be obvious to what end my poor powers have been spent," said Das. "I am the poet of the goddess Kali. Unworthy as I am, I serve her as poet, priest, and avatar."

During this entire conversation, a portion of me experienced the detached observation that Das had mentioned. It seemed as if a part of my consciousness were hovering near the ceiling, watching the entire exchange with a cool appraisal bordering on indifference. Another part of me wanted to laugh hysterically, to cry out, to turn the table over in raging disbelief and to flee from that vile darkness.

"That is my story," said Das. "What do you say, Mr. Luczak?"

"I say that your disease has driven you insane, Mr. Das."

"Yesss?"

"Or that you are quite sane but must play a role for someone."

Das said nothing, but the baleful eyes glanced quickly to the side.

"Another problem with the story," I said, amazed at the firmness of my own voice.

"What is that?"

"If your . . . if the body was discovered only last year, I doubt if there would be much to find. Not after almost seven years."

Das's head snapped up like a nightmare jack-in-the-box. There was a scraping sound in the curtained darkness.

"Oh? Who said that the discovery occurred last year, Mr. Luczak?"

My throat constricted. Without thinking, I began talking. "According to Mr. Muktanandaji, that was when the mythical resurrection took place."

A hot breeze stirred the flame and shadows danced across Das's ruined face. His terrible grin remained fixed. There was another stirring in the shadows.

"Ahhh," exhaled Das. His wrapped and mangled hand scraped across the table in an absent gesture. "Yesss, yesss. There are . . . from time to time . . . certain reenactments."

I leaned forward and let my hand fall next to the stone. My gaze searched out the human being in the leprous hulk across the table from me. My voice was earnest, urgent. "Why, Das? For Godssake, why? Why the Kapalikas? Why this epic obscenity about Kali returning to rule the world or whatever the shit it's about? You used to be a great poet. You sang songs of truth and innocence." My words sounded insipid to me but I knew no other way to say it.

Das leaned back heavily. His breath rattled through his open mouth and nostrils. How long can someone live in this condition? Where the flesh was not ravaged by the disease, the skin looked almost transparent, fragile as parchment. How long had it been since this man saw sunlight?

"There is a great beauty in the Goddess," he whispered.

"Beauty in death and corruption? Beauty in violence? Das, since when has a disciple of Tagore sung a hymn to violence?"

"Tagore was blind!" There was a new energy in the sibilant whisper. "Tagore could not see. Perhaps in his dying moments. Perhaps. If he had been able to then, he would have turned to her, Mr. Luczak. We all would turn to her when Death enters our night chamber and takes us by the hand."

"Fleeing to some sort of religion doesn't justify violence," I said. "It wouldn't justify the evil you sang of it —"

"Evil. Pahhh!" Das spat a gob of yellow phlegm on the floor. "You know nothing. Evil. There is no evil. There is no violence. There is only power. Power is the single, great organizing principle of the universe, Mr. Luczak. Power is the only a priori reality. All violence is an attempt to exercise power. Violence is power. Everything we fear, we fear because some force exerts its power over us. All of us seek freedom from such fear. All religions are attempts to achieve power over forces which might control us. But She is our only refuge, Mr. Luczak. Only the Devourer of Souls can grant us the abhaya mudras and remove all fear, for only She holds the ultimate power. She is power incarnate, a force beyond time or comprehension."

"That's obscene," I said. "It's a cheap excuse for cruelty."

"Cruelty?" Das laughed. It was the rattling of stones in an empty urn. "Cruelty? Surely, even a sentimental poet who prattles of eternal verities must know that what you call cruelty is the only reality which the universe recognizes. Life subsists on violence."

"I don't accept that."

"Oh?" Das blinked twice. Slowly. "You have never tasted the wine of power? You have never attempted violence?"

I hesitated. I could not tell him that most of my life had been one long exercise of control over my temper. My God, what were we talking about? What was I doing there?

"No," I said.

"Nonsense."

"It's true, Das. Oh, I've been in a few fights, but I've always tried to avoid violence." I was nine, ten years old. Sarah was seven or eight. In the woods near the edge of the forest preserve. 'Take down your shorts. Now!'

"It is not true. Everyone has tasted the blood wine of Kali."

"No. You're wrong." Slapping her in the face. Once. Twice. The rush of tears and the slow compliance. My fingers leaving red marks on her thin arm. "Only unimportant little incidents. Kid stuff."

"There are no unimportant cruelties," said Das.

"That's absurd." The terrible, total excitement of it. Not just at the sight of her pale nakedness and the strange, sexual intensity of it. No, not just that. It was her total helplessness. Her submission. I could do anything I wanted to.

"We will see."

Anything I wanted to.

Das rose laboriously. I pushed back my own chair.

"You will publish the poem?" His voice rasped and hissed like embers in a cooling fire.

"Perhaps not," I said. "Why don't you come with me, Das? You don't have to stay here. Come with me. Publish it yourself."

Once, when I was seventeen, an idiot cousin dared me to play Russian roulette with his father's revolver. The cousin put the single cartridge in. He spun the chamber for me. In a second of pure, mindless bravado I remember lifting the gun, putting the barrel to my temple, and squeezing the trigger. The hammer had fallen on an empty chamber then, but since that day I had refused to go near guns. Now, in the Calcutta darkness, I felt I had again lifted a barrel to my head for no good reason. The silence stretched.

"No. You must publish it. It isss important."

"Why? Can't you leave here? What can they do to you that they haven't already done? Come with me, Das."

Das's eyes partially closed, and the thing before me no longer looked human. A stench of grave soil came to me from its rags. There were undeniable sounds behind me in the blackness.

"I choose to stay here. But it is important that you bring the Song of Kali to your country."

"Why?" I said again.

Das's tongue was like a small, pink animal touching the slick teeth and then withdrawing. "It is more than my final work. Consider it an announcement. A birth announcement. Will you publish the poem?"

I let ten heartbeats of silence bring me to the edge of some dark pit I did not understand. Then I bowed my head slightly. "Yes," I said. "It will be published. Not all of it, perhaps, but it will see print."

"Good," said the poet and turned to leave. Then he hesitated and turned back almost shyly. For the first time I heard a note of human longing in his voice. "There is . . . something else, Mr. Luczak."

"Yes?"

"It would mean you would have to return here."

The thought of reentering this crypt after once escaping it made my knees almost buckle. "What is it?"