Dan Simmons - Song of Kali

"Their father? Oh, Das's —"

"Yes. At any rate, his name hasn't been mentioned in the household for years. I got the impression that she was too shy to approach Chatterjee or the Writers' Union."

"She approached us."

"That's different," said Amrita. "We're foreigners. We don't count. Are we still going to dinner?"

I lowered Victoria to my stomach. Her face was red with pleasure and she was pondering whether to cry. She dug her knees into my lap and began creeping up my chest. One pudgy hand tightened on the collar of my shirt in a death grip.

"Where shall we eat?" I asked. I explained about the nine-thirty meeting with Krishna's Mysterious Stranger. "It's a little late to go out on the town. Shall we call Room Service or go down to the Prince's Room? I hear they have Fatima the Exotic Dancer for a floor show."

"Victoria would undoubtedly create a fuss," said Amrita. "But I would imagine she would prefer Fatima to Room Service."

"Righto," I said.

"I'll be ready in a moment."

Fatima the Exotic Dancer was an overweight, middle-aged Indian woman whose dance could have been performed before a den of Exeter Cub Scouts without fear of scandal. Nonetheless, the crowd of overweight, middle-aged, predominantly male couples in the Prince's Room seemed appropriately titillated by her performance. Victoria was not. She began to cry, and the three of us left half way through Fatima's second round of gyrations.

Rather than return to the room, Amrita and I walked around the darkened hotel courtyard. It had been raining much of the evening, but now we could make out a few stars between the low, sulfurous clouds. Heavy curtains were drawn across most of the windows facing the courtyard, and only a few bands of light were visible. We took turns carrying the still-crying baby until the sobbing slowed and then stopped altogether. We paused by the pool and sat on a low bench near the dark caf6. Ripples of light from underwater spotlights danced across the heavy foliage and lowered bamboo curtains. I noticed a dark shape floating in the shallow end of the pool and realized that it was a drowned rat.

"Victoria's asleep," said Amrita. I glanced over to see the baby's hands clenched and her eyes closed in that intense, somehow satisfied-looking form of sleep that often followed intense crying spells.

I stretched my legs out and put my head back. I realized that I was very tired, probably still suffering from jet lag. I sat up and looked at Amrita. She was gently rocking the baby, her own gaze absent and meditative as it often was when she was working on a prolonged mathematical problem.

"How does it feel to be back?" I asked.

Amrita looked at me and blinked. "What, Bobby?"

"In India," I said. "How does it feel to be back?"

She patted the baby's ruff of hair and handed her to me. I settled Victoria in the hollow of my shoulder and watched as Amrita walked to the edge of the pool and smoothed down her tan skirt. The light from the pool illuminated her sharp cheekbones from below. My wife is beautiful , I thought for the thousandth time since our wedding.

"It feels a bit like déjà vu ," she said very softly. "No, that's not quite the right word. It's actually more like reentering a recurring dream. The heat, the noise, the languages, the smell — everything is familiar and alien at the same time."

"I'm sorry if it upsets you," I said.

Amrita shook her head. "It doesn't upset me, Bobby. It frightens me, but it doesn't upset me. I find it very seductive."

"Seductive?" I stared at her. "What on earth have we seen that has been seductive?" It was not like Amrita to use a word loosely. Her precision with language often exceded mine.

She smiled. "Do you mean besides Kamakhya Bharati?" She slipped off her sandal and stirred the blue water with her foot. I could not see the drowned rat at the far end of the pool. "Seriously, Bobby, I find it all seductive in a strange way. It's as if I have been using only one part of my mind for all these years and now another part of me is being called to."

"Would you like to stay longer?" I asked. "After the assignment's over, I mean." I was confused.

"No," said Amrita, and there was no mistaking the finality in her voice."

I shook my head: "I'm sorry I left you alone all afternoon and agreed to this thing tonight," I said. "I guess it was a mistake for the three of us to come. I underestimated how difficult it would be for you with Victoria along." Somewhere from above came a sharp series of commands in what sounded like Arabic followed by a rush of nasal Bengali. A door slammed.

Amrita walked over to sit next to me again. She took Victoria and laid her across her legs. "It's all right, Bobby," she said. "I knew what it would be like. I guessed that you probably wouldn't need me as a translator until after you got the manuscript."

"I'm sorry," I said again.

Amrita looked back at the pool. "When I was seven years old," she said, "the summer before we moved to London, I saw a ghost."

I stared at her. I could not have been more surprised or incredulous if Amrita had told me that she had fallen in love with the old bellhop and was leaving me. Amrita was — or had been to that instant — the most unrelentingly rational person I had even known. Her interest and belief in the supernatural had until now seemed nonexistent. I had never even been able to interest her in the trashy Stephen King novels I would bring to the beach each summer.

"A ghost?" I said at last.

"We were on our way by train from our home in New Delhi to our uncle's in Bombay," she said. "It was always exciting when my sisters and I traveled with our mother to Bombay each June. But this year my sister Santha became ill. We got off the train west of Bhopal and stayed in a railway guest house for two days while a local doctor treated her."

"Was she all right?" I asked.

"Yes, it was just the measles," said Amrita. "But now I was the only one of the children who had not had them, so I slept outside our hotel room on a small balcony overlooking the forest. The only way to the balcony was through the room where my mother and sisters slept. The rains had not yet come that summer, and it was very hot."

"And you saw a ghost?"

Amrita smiled slightly. "I awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of crying. At first I thought it was my sister or mother, and then I realized that an old woman in a sari was sitting on the edge of my bed and sobbing. I remember feeling no fear, only wonder that my mother had allowed this person to go through their room to join me on the balcony.

"Her crying was very soft but somehow very terrible. I reached out my hand to console her, but before I touched her she stopped weeping and looked at me. I realized then that she was not really old, but that she had been aged by some terrible grief."

"And then what?" I prompted. "How did you know she was a ghost? Did she fade away or walk off on air or melt down to a pile of rags and grease, or what?"

Amrita shook her head. "The moon passed behind the clouds for a few seconds, and when there was light again the old woman was gone. I called out, and when my mother and sisters came out onto the balcony they assured me that no one had come through their room."

"Hmmm," I said. "Sounds sort of dull to me. You were seven years old and probably dreaming. Even if you were awake, how do you know it wasn't some chambermaid who'd come up a fire escape or something?"

Amrita lifted Victoria to her shoulder. "I agree it's not a very frightening ghost story," she said. "But it frightened me for years. You see, in that second before the moon was obscured, I looked right into the woman's face and I knew very well who she was." Amrita patted the baby's back and looked at me. "It was me."