I said nothing. Abe exhaled cigar smoke against the blue sky. "I mention this, Bobby, because afterwards everything seems so inevitable, you know what I mean? You keep thinking you could have changed it but you didn't — like you forgot to do something, then everything happened like clockwork. You know what I mean?"

"Yes."

"Well, it isn't inevitable, Bobby. It's just plain fucking bad luck, is all. It's no one's fault. No one's except the mean bastards that feed off that shit."

I sat without speaking for a long time. Leaves spiralled down around us, adding their sad beauty to the carpet already there. "I don't know, Abe," I said at last. My throat hurt almost too much to go on. "I did everything wrong. Taking them there. Not leaving when I saw how crazy things were. Not making sure their plane got off okay. And I don't understand any of it. Who was responsible? Who were they? Krishna? What did the Kamakhya woman have to gain . . . How does she fit in? Most of all, why did I make the goddamned stupid mistake of taking Das that gun when —"

"Two shots," said Abe.

"What?"

"You told me that night you called that you heard two shots."

"Yeah, well, it was an automatic."

"So what? You think maybe when you blow your brains out you shoot again just to make sure? Eh?"

"What are you driving at, Abe?"

"You didn't kill Das, Bobby. Das didn't kill Das. One of the friendly Kapalika fellows maybe had a reason to set things up that way, eh? Your buddy Krishna . . . Sanjay . . . whatever the fuck his name was — maybe he wanted to be Poet Laureate for a little while."

"Why —" I stopped and watched a seagull pivot on a thermal several hundred feet above us. "But what did Victoria have to do with any of it? Oh, God, Abe . . . how could hurting her help anyone? I don't understand any of it."

Abe rose and spat again. Chips of bark clung to his suit. "Let's go, huh, Bobby? I got to get the bus back to Boston to get the damn train."

I started to lead the way down the hill, but Abe grabbed my arm. He was looking hard at me. "Bobby, you've got to know one thing. You don't have to understand. You won't understand. You won't forget, either. Don't think you will . . . you won't. But you got to keep going. You hear me? Day by day, maybe, but you got to keep going. Otherwise the fuckers win. We can't let them do that, Bobby. You understand me?"

I nodded and turned quickly to follow the faint trail.

On November 2 I received a short letter from Inspector Singh. It informed me that the male suspect, Sugata Chowdury, would not be standing trial. During his detention in Hooghly Prison Chowdury had "met with foul play." Specifically, someone had stuffed a towel down his throat while he slept. The woman identified as Devi Chowdury was expected to come to trial within the month. Singh promised to keep me informed. I never heard from him again.

In mid-November, shortly after the first heavy snowfall of that bitter winter, I reread Das's manuscript, including the final hundred pages that I had not finished in Calcutta. Das has been correct in his succinct summary: it was a birth announcement. To get the gist of it I would recommend Yeats' "The Second Coming." Yeats was a better poet.

It occurred to me then that my problem with deciding what to do with Das's manuscript was oddly similar to the problem the Parsees have in disposing of their dead. The Parsees, a dwindling minority in India, hold earth, air, fire, and water all as sacred and do not wish to pollute them with the bodies of their dead. Their solution is ingenious. Years ago Amrita had described to me the Tower of Silence in a Bombay park, above which circle the vultures in patient spirals.

I refused to burn the manuscript because I did not want the smoke rising like a sacrificial offering to that dark thing I sensed waiting just beyond the fragile walls of my sanity.

In the end, my solution was more prosaic than the Tower of Silence. I shredded the several hundred pages by hand — smelling the stink of Calcutta rising from the paper — and then stuffed the shredded strips in a Glad Bag to which I added some rotting vegetables to discourage scroungers. I drove several miles to a large dump and watched as the black bag bounced down a steep ravine of garbage to settle out of sight in a pool of foul muck.

Driving back, I knew that ridding myself of the manuscript had not stopped the Song of Kali from echoing in my mind.

Amrita and I continued to inhabit the same house. We suffered advice and continued sympathy from our friends, but we saw other people less and less as the harsh winter progressed. We also saw less and less of each other.

Amrita had decided to finish up her Ph.D. work, and she set into her schedule of early rising, teaching, library work, grading papers in the evening, more research, and early to bed. I rose very late and was often gone for dinner and much of the evening. When Amrita gave up the study about ten P.M. , I would take possession of it and read until the early hours of the morning. I read everything during those sunless months — Spengler, Ross McDonald, Malcolm Lowry, Hegel, Stanley Elkin, Bruce Catton, Ian Fleming, and Sinclair Lewis. I read classics I'd had on my shelves unread for decades, and I brought home best-sellers from Safeway. I read everything.

In February a friend offered me a temporary teaching position at a small college north of Boston, and I took it. At first I commuted each day, but soon I took a small furnished apartment near the campus and went back to Exeter only on weekends. Frequently I did not return even then.

Amrita and I never talked about Calcutta. We did not mention Victoria's name. Amrita was retreating into a world of number theory and Boolean Algebra. It seemed to be a comfortable world for her: a world in which rules were abided by and truth tables could be logically determined. I was left outside with nothing but my unwieldy tools of language and the unfixable, nonsensical machine of reality.

I was at the college for four months and might not have returned to Exeter if a friend had not called to tell me that Amrita had been hospitalized. Doctors diagnosed her problem as acute pneumonia complicated by exhaustion. She was hospitalized for eight days and too weak to get out of bed at home for a week after that. I stayed home during that time, and in the small acts of nursing I was beginning to feel echoes of our earlier tenderness; but then she announced that she felt better, she returned to her computer work in mid-June, and I went back to my apartment. I felt irresolute and lost, as if some huge, dark hole was opening wider in me, sucking me down.

I bought the Luger that June.

Roy Bennet, a taciturn little biology professor I'd met at the college, had invited me to his gun club in April. For years I had supported gun-control laws and hated the idea of handguns, but by the end of that school year I was spending most Saturdays on the firing range with Bennet. Even the children there seemed proficient at the two-handed, wide-legged firing stance that I knew only from the movies. When someone had to retrieve a target, everyone politely broke their weapons open and stepped back from the firing line with a smile. Many of the targets were in the shape of human bodies.

When I suggested that I would like to buy my own gun, Roy smiled with the quiet joy of a successful missionary and suggested that a .22-caliber target pistol would be good to start with. I nodded agreement, and the next day spent a small fortune for a vintage 7.65mm Luger. The woman who sold it said that the automatic had been her late husband's pride and joy. She included a handsome carrying case in the price.

I never mastered the preferred two-handed stance, but became reasonably proficient at putting holes in the target at twenty yards. I had no idea what the others were thinking or feeling as they plinked away on those long-shadowed evenings, but each time I raised that oiled and balanced instrument I felt the power of its pent-up energy course through me like a shot of strong whiskey. The slow, careful squeezing, the deafening report, and the blow of the recoil along my stiffened arm created something akin to ecstasy in me.