I brought the Luger back to Exeter with me one weekend after Amrita's recovery. She came downstairs late one night and found me turning the freshly oiled and loaded weapon over and over in my hands. She said nothing, but looked at me for a long moment before going back upstairs. Neither of us mentioned it in the morning.

"There's a new book out in India. Quite the rage. An epic poem, I believe. All about Kali, one of their tutelary goddesses," said the book salesman.

I had come down to New York for a party at Doubleday, attracted more by the offer of free drinks than by anything else. I was on the balcony and debating whether to get my fourth Scotch when I heard the salesman talking to two distributors. I went over and took him by the arm, led him to a far corner of the balcony. The man had just returned from a trade fair in New Delhi. He did not know who I was. I explained that I was a poet interested in contemporary Indian writing.

"Yes, well, I'm afraid I can't tell you much about this book," he said. "I mentioned it because it seemed such a damned unlikely thing to be selling so well over there. Just a long poem, really. I guess it's taken the Indian intellectuals by storm. We wouldn't be interested, of course. Poetry never sells here, much less if it's —"

"What's the title?" I asked.

"It's funny, but I did remember that," he said. "Kalisambv-ha or Kalisavba or something like that. I remembered it because I used to work with a girl named Kelly Summers and I noticed the —"

"Who's the author?"

"Author? I'm sorry, I don't recall that. I only remember the book because the publisher had this huge display but no real graphics, you know? Just this big pile of books there. I kept seeing the blue cover in all the bookstores in the Delhi hotels. Have you ever been to India?"

"Das?"

"What?"

"Was the author's name Das?" I said.

"No, it wasn't Das," he said. "At least I don't think so. Something Indian and hard to pronounce, I think."

"Was his first name Sanjay?" I asked.

"Sorry, I have no idea," said the salesman. He was becoming irritated. "Look, does it make that much difference?"

"No," I said, "it doesn't make any difference." I left him and went to lean on the balcony railing. I was still there two hours later when the moon rose over the serrated teeth of the city.

I received the photograph in mid-July.

Even before I saw the postmark I knew the letter was from India. The smell of the country rose from the flimsy envelope. It was postmarked Calcutta. I stood at the end of our drive under the leaves of the big birch tree and opened the envelope.

I saw the note on the back of the photograph first. It said Das is alive, nothing more. The photo was in black and white, grainy; the people in the foreground were almost washed out by a poorly used flash while the people in the near background were mere silhouettes. Das, however, was immediately recognizable. His face was scabbed and the nose was distorted, but the leprosy was not nearly so obvious as when I had met him. He was wearing a white shirt, and his hand was extended as if he were making a point to students.

The eight men in the photo were all seated on cushions around a low table. The flash showed paint peeling from a wall behind Das and a few dirty cups on the table. Two other men's faces were clearly illuminated, but I did not know them. My eyes went to a silhouette of a man seated on Das's right. It was too dark to make out facial features, but there was enough profile for me to see the predatory beak of a nose and the hair standing out like a black nimbus.

There was nothing in the envelope except the photograph.

Das is alive. What was I supposed to make of that? That M. Das had been resurrected yet another time by his bitch goddess? I looked at the photo again and stood tapping it against my fingers. There was no way of telling when the picture had been taken. Was the figure in the shadows Krishna? There was something about the hunched-forward aggressiveness of the head and body that made me want to say it was.

Das is alive.

I turned away from the driveway and walked into the woods. Underbrush grabbed at my ankles. There was a tilting, spinning emptiness inside me that threatened to open into a black chasm. I knew that once the darkness opened, there would be no hope of my escaping it.

A quarter of a mile from the house, near where the stream widened into a marshy area, I knelt and tore the photograph into tiny pieces. Then I rolled a large rock over and sprinkled the pieces onto the matted, faded ground there before rolling the rock back in place.

While walking home I retained the image of moist white things burrowing frantically to avoid the light.

Amrita came into the room that night while I was packing. "We need to talk," she said.

"When I get back," I said.

"Where are you going, Bobby?"

"New York," I said. "Just for a couple of days." I put another shirt over the place where I had packed away the Luger and 64 cartridges.

"It's important that we talk," said Amrita. Her hand touched my arm.

I pulled away and zipped closed my black suitcase. "When I get back," I said.

I left my car at home, took a train to Boston, caught a cab to Logan International, and boarded a ten P.M. TWA flight to Frankfurt with connections to Calcutta.

Chapter Seventeen

The sun rose as we were approaching the English coast, but even with the sunlight falling across my legs I felt trapped in a night that would not end. I was shivering violently, acutely aware that I was strapped into a fragile, pressurized tube suspended thousands of feet above the sea. Worse that that was a growing inward pressure that I first attributed to a claustrophobic reaction but then realized was something else altogether. There was a vertiginous tilting within me, like the first solid stirrings of some powerful homunculus.

I sat gripping the armrests and watching the silent mouthings of characters on a movie screen while Europe passed beneath us. I thought of Tagore's last moments. Meals arrived and were dutifully eaten. Late in the day I tried to sleep. And all the while the hollowness and dizziness grew stronger and there was the constant sound of insect wings in my ears. Repeatedly I would be on the verge of sleep, only to snap awake to the sound of distant, mocking laughter. Eventually I gave up the attempt to sleep.

I forced myself to join the other passengers during the refueling stop in Tehran. The pilot had announced the temperature outside as being 33 degrees, and only when the terrible heat and humidity struck me did I realize that it had been given in degrees Celsius.

It was late, sometime before midnight, but the hot air stank of waiting violence. Pictures of the Shah were everywhere in the echoing, brightly lit barn of a terminal, and security men and soldiers roamed around with their sidearms drawn for no apparent reason. Muslim women cloaked in black chadors glided like wraiths through the green fluorescent emptiness. Old men slept on the floor or knelt on their dark prayer rugs amid cigarette butts and cellophane wrappers while nearby an American boy of about six — blond hair and red-striped shirt incongruous among dark hues, crouched behind a chair and raked the customs counter with automatic fire from his toy M-16.

The PA system announced that our flight would be re-boarding in fifteen minutes. I stumbled past an old man in a red scarf and found myself in the public restrooms. It was very dark in there, the only light reflected from a single bulb outside the entrance. Dark shapes moved through the gloom. For a second I wondered if I had inadvertently entered the women's side and was seeing chadors in the darkness, but then I heard deep voices speaking in guttural syllables. There was also the sound of water dripping. At that second the dizziness struck me worse than before, and I crouched over one of the Asian toilets and vomited, continuing to spasm long after I had rid myself of the last of the airline meals.