"Those are the books?" asked Das and gestured clumsily with his heavily wrapped hands.

"Yes." I knelt on the wooden floor and set the package on the low table. An offering. The lantern hissed. The greenish-yellow light illuminate circles of flaking corruption on the poet's right cheek. Deep fissures in his scalp showed whitely against the darker skin. Mucus clogged Das's torn nostrils, and his breath whistled audibly over the hiss of the lantern.

"Ahh," sighed Das. He laid his hand almost reverently on the wrinkled paper. "Manny's Booksellers. Yes, I used to know him well, Mr. Luczak. Once, during the war, I sold Manny my collection of romantic poets when rent money was scarce. He set them aside until I could buy them back some years later." Das's large, liquid eyes turned up to look at me. Again I was all but overwhelmed by the knowledge of pain visible there. "You brought the Edwin Arlington Robinson?"

"Yes," I said. My voice trembled and I roughly cleared my throat. "I'm not sure that I think as much of him as you do. You might reconsider. His 'Richard Cory' really is not worthy of a poet. It holds out no hope."

"Sometimes there is no hope," whispered Das.

"There's always some hope, Mr. Das."

"No, Mr. Luczak, there is not. Sometimes there is only pain. And acquiescence to pain. And, perhaps, defiance at the world which demands such pain."

"Defiance is a form of hope, is it not, sir?"

Das looked at me for a long minute. Then he glanced quickly toward the darkened back room and lifted the volume he had been reading. "This is for you, Mr. Luczak." He laid it on the table so that I would not have to take it from his hands.

It was an old book, thin, beautifully bound, with thick, heavy parchment pages. I ran my hand over the embossed fabric cover and opened it. The heavy pages had not yellowed or grown brittle with age. The spine had not stiffened. Everything about the thin volume spoke of craftsmanship and care.

Some of the poems were in Bengali, some in English. Those in English I recognized immediately. The flyleaf held a long inscription in Bengali, but the same hand had penned a final note in English: For young Das, the most promising of my 'Chosen Eight.' Affectionately — The signature would have been indecipherable had I not seen it very recently, behind glass, hastily scrawled beneath a Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Rabindranath Tagore, March, 1939.

"I can't accept this, sir."

Das only stared at me. The eyes were ancient beyond age, sad, yet lit with a purpose I had not seen before. He stared at me and I did not argue again.

A tremor went through the poet's body, and I realized what exertion it must take for him to speak, to concentrate. I rose to leave.

"No," whispered Das. "Closer."

I dropped to one knee. There was a smell that rose from the poor man's disintegrating flesh. My own skin crawled as I leaned over to hear better.

"Today," he rasped, "I spoke of power. All violence is power. She is such power. She knows no limits. Time means nothing to Her. Pain carries the sweet smell of sacrifice to Her. This is Her time. Her song knows no ending. Her time has come round once again, you see." He slipped into Bengali, then a smattering of French, then a torrent of Hindi. He was raving. His eyes were focused elsewhere, and the pained, sibilant rush of words went nowhere.

"Yes," I said sadly.

"Violence is power. Pain is power. It is Her time. Do you see? Do you see?" His voice rose to a shout. I wanted to hush him before the Kapalikas rushed in, but I could only stay there on one knee and listen. The lantern sputtered in rhythm to his agitated hissing. "The centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world! Her song has just begun . . ."

The old man leaned forward, dry breath wheezing up out of his damaged lungs. He seemed to come back to himself then. The wild, distracted look left his eyes to be replaced by a terrible weariness. The leprous hand stroked the stack of books on the table as if it were a cat. When he spoke, his voice was calm, almost conversational. "Know this, Mr. Luczak. This is the age of the unspeakable. But there are acts beyond the unspeakable."

I stared, but Das was not looking at me. He was not looking at anything in the room.

"We have always been capable of committing the unspeakable," he whispered. "She can commit the unthinkable. Now we are free to follow."

Das stopped. Saliva moistened his chin. I knew now that his mind had been damaged. The silence stretched out to several minutes. Finally he brought himself back by a great effort and focused his gaze on me. A rotting stump of a hand, wrapped in filthy, reeking rags, raised itself in a gentle benediction.

"Go. Go now. Go."

I was shaking violently when I stumbled out into the corridor. Flashlights bobbed through the darkness toward me. A rough hand took the Tagore volume, turned it over, handed it back. I clutched it in both hands and followed the circle of light down the maze of halls and stairways.

We were at the open door; I could see the car and smell the rain, when suddenly the shots rang out. Two sharp sounds, almost simultaneous, sounding flat and final in the dark.

The four men stopped, shouted back and forth in Bengali, and ran back up the stairs. For several seconds I was left alone at the open door. I stared blankly out into the dark and rain. I was numb, disbelieving, afraid to act, barely able to think. Then the heavy man in khaki ran back down the stairs, seized me by the shirtfront, and dragged me upstairs with the other running men.

The lantern still spilled its cold white light. Flashlight beams bobbed and converged. I was pushed forward, scraping through shoulders, past the circle of noise into a center of silence.

Das seemed to be resting his head on the table. The small chromed pistol — gripped firmly in his left hand — was thrust obscenely into the bulging mouth. One eye was almost closed, while the other showed only the white and seemed to balloon out as if some great pressure were still building within the shattered skull. Already a pool of dark blood had accumulated in the steady flow from mouth, ears, and nostrils. The air was redolent with incense and cordite.

There were shouts. At least eight or nine men were in the room, more in the dark hall. One man was screaming. Another accidentally jabbed me in the chest as he swung his arms around. The man in khaki reached down and jerked the pistol from Das's clenched jaws, breaking a front tooth off as he did so. He waved the bloodied pistol and let out a high, thin wailing that might have been a prayer or a curse. More men shoved into the room.

This is not real. I felt almost nothing. There was a loud humming in my ears. The buffeting all around me was a distant, unrelated thing.

Another man entered. He was older, bald, and wearing a simple peasant's dhoti. The plainness of his appearance, however, was belied by the deference with which the crowd parted for him. He looked down on Das's body for a moment and then touched the leprous head gently, almost reverently, the way the poet had touched my gift of books. Then the man turned black eyes my direction and said something softly to the crowd.

Hands closed on my shirt and arms, and they took me away into the dark.

I sat in an empty room for an unknown time. There were sounds beyond the door. A small oil lamp gave me light. I sat on the floor and tried to think about Amrita and the baby but could not. I could concentrate on nothing. My head ached. After a while I picked up the book they had left me with and read some of Tagore's English poems.

Sometime later three men entered. One held out a small cup and saucer to me. I saw the steam rising form the dark tea.

"No, thank you," I said and returned to my reading.