Dan Simmons - Song of Kali

I jumped down and followed him into the light. Another door on the second-floor landing led to a wide hallway. "You saw the University down the street?" asked Krishna over his shoulder. I nodded, although I'd seen no building more imposing than a warehouse. "This, of course, is the University coffee shop. No, that is not right. Coffee house . Just like Greenwich Village. Yes."

Krishna turned left and led me into a truly cavernous room. The high ceiling, heavy columns, and windowless walls reminded me of a parking garage I used to know near the Chicago Loop. At least fifty or sixty tables were visible in the dim light, but only a few were occupied. Here and there a cluster of earnest-looking young men in loose white shirts sat at rough tables painted a dark green. Slow-moving fans hung from a twenty-foot-high ceiling; and although the moist air did not stir perceptibly, the light from the widely spaced bulbs was made to flicker slightly, imparting a dully stroboscopic, silent-film quality to the scene.

"A coffee house," I repeated stupidly.

"Come this way." Krishna led the way through tightly packed tables to the farthest corner. A young man of about twenty sat alone on a bench built into the wall. He rose as we approached.

"Mr. Luczak, this is Jayaprakesh Muktanandaji," Krishna said, and added something in Bengali to the youth. The deep shadows made it difficult for me to make out the young man's features clearly; but along with a moist, hesitant handshake, I registered a thin face, thick glasses, and a case of acne so severe that the pustules almost glowed.

We remained standing for a silent moment. The young man wiped his palms together and glanced furtively at the students at other tables. Some of them had turned to watch as we entered, but none continued to look our way.

We sat down just as an old man with stubble outlining a white beard brought coffee to the table. The cups were badly chipped and traced with fracture lines that radiated pale branches against the enamel. The coffee was strong and surprisingly good, except that someone had already added dollops of sugar and sour milk. Both Krishna and Muktanandaji looked at me as the old man stood quietly by the table, so I pawed through my billfold and set down a five-rupee note. The man turned and left without giving any change.

"Mr. Muktanandaji," I began, proud of remembering the name, "you have some information about the Calcutta poet M. Das?"

The boy bowed his head and said something to Krishna. Krishna replied abruptly and turned to me with his sharp-toothed smile. "Mr, Muktanandaji does not, I am sorry to say, speak such fluent English. Indeed, Mr. Luczak, he speaks no English. He has asked for me to interpret for him. If you are ready, Mr. Luczak, he will now tell you his story."

"I thought this was to be an interview," I said.

Krishna held up the palm of his right hand. "Yes, yes. You must understand, Mr. Luczak, Mr. Jayaprakesh Muktanandaji is speaking to you only as a personal favor to me, his onetime teacher. He is very reluctant. If you please to let him tell his story, I shall translate to the best of my abilities; and then, if you have questions, I shall put them to Mr. Muktanandaji."

Damn , I thought. That was twice in one day that I had made the mistake of not having Amrita with me. I considered canceling or rearranging the meeting, but discarded the idea. Better to get it over with. Tomorrow I would be receiving the Das manuscript, and with any luck we would be flying home in the evening.

"Very well," I said.

The young man cleared his throat and adjusted his thick glasses. His voice was even higher pitched than Krishna's. Every few sentences he would pause and rub idly at his face or neck while Krishna translated. At first I found the delay irritating, but the musical flow of Bengali followed by the singsong rush of Krishna's dialect had a mantra-like , mesmerizing effect on me. It was similar to the heightened state of concentration and involvement one brings to a foreign movie simply because of the effort of reading the subtitles.

A few times I stopped them to ask a question; but this seemed to upset Muktanandaji, so after a few minutes I contented myself with sipping my cooling coffee and listening. Several times Krishna turned to say something in Bengali, and the boy would reply and I would curse myself for being a monolingual moron. I wondered if even Amrita could have followed the gist of the high-speed Bengali.

As the story began I found myself mentally rearranging Krishna's often tortured syntax or substituting the proper word for his sometimes comical replacement. Occasionally I jotted details in my notebook, but after a while even this became a distraction and I put my pen away. The overhead fans turned slowly, the light flickered like distant heat lightning on a summer's night, and I gave Jayaprakesh Muktanandaji my total attention as his story unfolded in Krishna's voice.

"I am a poor person of Sudra caste. I am one of eleven sons of Jagdisvaran Bibhuti Muktanandaji who was with Gandhiji on his Walk to the Sea.

"My home is in the village of Anguda which is near Durgalapur which is along the rail line connecting Calcutta and Jamshedpur. It is a poor village, and no one from the outside has taken any interest in it except for the time when a tiger ate two of the sons of Subhoranjan Venkateswarani and a man came from a newspaper in Bhubaneshwar to ask Subhoranjan Venkateswarani how he felt about this. I do not remember this well, as it occured during the war — which was some fifteen years before I was born.

"Our family has not always been poor. My grandfather, S. Mokeshi Muktanandaji, once loaned money to the village moneylender. By the time I was born, the eighth of eleven sons, we had long since borrowed back my grandfather's money and much more. To pay off some of the interest on his debts, my father was forced to sell the richest six acres of his land — those closest to the village. That left fifteen acres, spread over many miles, to be divided among the eleven us. One cannot raise cane for two bullocks on that small a share of land.

"The problem was made a small bit better when my older brother Marmadeshwar went off to do his patriotic duty in 1971 and was promptly killed by the Pakistanis. Still, the prospects for the rest of us were not good.

"Then my father had an idea. For eight years I had gone halftime to the Christian Agricultural Academy in Durgalpur. The school was sponsored by the very rich Mr. Debee of the Bengal Cattle Insemination Centre. It was a small school. We had few books and only two teachers, one of whom was slowly going mad from syphilis.

"Nonetheless, I was the only member of my father's family ever to have gone to school, and he decided that I would go off to university. He planned for me to become a doctor or — even better — a merchant, and bring much money to the family. This also solved the problem of my share of land. It was obvious to my father that a doctor or wealthy merchant would have no need for a small plot of poor farmland.

"I, myself, had mixed feelings about this idea. I had never been more than eight miles from Anguda. I had never ridden in a train or automobile. I could read very simple books and write basic sentences in Bengali, but I knew no English or Hindi and only enough Sanskrit to recite a few lines of the Ramayana and Mahabharata .