Dan Simmons - Song of Kali

"In short, I was not sure that I was ready to become a doctor.

"My father borrowed more money — in my name, this time — from the village money-lender. My teacher, in his madness, wrote a recommendation for admission to Calcutta University and directed it to his old instructor there. Even Mr. Debee, who in his pre-Christian days had sworn to Gandhiji that he would humbly work for our villages and have his ashes spread on the main path of Anguda, wrote a note to the University requesting their kindness in admitting a poor, ignorant, low-caste peasant child to their honored halls of learning.

"Last year there was an opening. I paid most of my borrowed money as baksheesh to my teacher and to Mr. Debee's secretary, and then I left my home for the great city. How terrified I was!

"I will not describe my reactions to all of the wonders of Calcutta. Suffice it to say that every hour brought marvelous revelations. I was soon downcast, however. My meager funds barely paid the first semester's tuition and left not enough money for the expensive dormitories or student hostels near the University. I spent my first week in the city sleeping under the bushes in the Maidan, but the monsoon rains and two beatings by the police convinced me to seek a room.

"My four classes were somewhat of a disappointment. There were more than four hundred students in my Introduction to National History class. I could not afford the textbook and was rarely close enough to hear the lecturer, who mumbled and, in any case, spoke only in English, which I could not understand. I therefore spent my days hunting for lodging and wishing I were home in Anguda. Even by eating only one meal of rice and chapatis a day, I knew that I would be out of money within a few weeks. If I was lucky enough to find a room to rent, I would starve that much sooner.

"Then I answered an ad for a roommate in the Student Forum and everything changed. The room was six miles from the university on the seventh floor of a building which housed mostly refugees from Bangladesh and Burma. The student who wished to rent half of the room was a junior — a brilliant man several years older than I who was then studying pharmacy science but who wished to someday be a great author, or, failing that, a nuclear physicist. His name was Sanjay, and from the first time I saw him standing there amidst piles of his papers and unwashed clothing, I knew somehow that my life would never again be the same.

"He wanted two hundred rupees a month for my half of the room. My face must have shown my despair. At that time I had less than one hundred rupess to my name. I realized that I had made the two-hour walk for nothing. I asked if I could sit down. The soles of my feet were in great pain from the beating with lathi sticks I had received a few nights earlier. I later discovered that the policemen had broken the arches of my feet.

"Upon hearing this, Sanjay immediately took pity on me. He became furious when I told him of the beatings and the size of the bribes demanded by the University dormitory wardens. Sanjay's moods, as I was soon to learn, were like monsoon storms. One minute he could be calm, contemplative, as still as a statue, and the next he would fly off in a rage against some social injustice and put his fist through the rotting wallboards or kick some Burmese child down the back staircase.

"Sanjay was a member of both the Maoist Student Coalition and the Communist Party India. The fact that these two factions despised each other and frequently came to blows did not seem to bother him. He described his parents as "decadent capitalist parasites" who owned a small pharmaceutical company in Bombay and who sent him money each month. His parents at first had sent him out of the country to study, but when he returned to "renew contacts with the revolutionary struggle in my own country," he further offended them by choosing the brawling, plebeian Calcutta University in which to pursue his degree rather than a more prestigious college in Bombay or Delhi.

"After telling me these things about himself and listening to my own story, Sanjay promptly changed the rent request to five rupees a month and offered to loan me the money for the first two months. I confess that I wept with joy.

"During the following weeks, Sanjay showed me how to survive in Calcutta. In the morning, before sunrise, we rode to the center of the city with the Scheduled Class truck drivers who transported dead animals to the renderers. It was Sanjay who taught me that in a great city such as Calcutta, caste distinctions meant nothing and would soon disappear when the imminent revolution arrived. I agreed with Sanjay's points, but my upbringing still made it impossible for me to share a bus seat with a stranger or accept a piece of fried dough from a vendor without instinctively wondering what the caste of the man was. Nonetheless, Sanjay showed me how to ride the trains for free, where to be shaved by a street-corner barber who owed my friend favors, and how to squeeze into the cinema for free during the intermission of the nightly three-hour film.

"During this time I quit attending classes at the university, and my grades rose from four 'F's' to three 'B's' and and 'A.' Sanjay had educated me as to how to buy old papers and tests from upperclass students. To do this, I was forced to borrow another three hundred rupees from my roommate, but he did not mind.

"At first Sanjay took me to both the MMSC and CPI party meetings, but the endless potlitical orations and aimless internal bickerings served only to put me to sleep, and after a while he no longer insisted that I accompany him. Much more to my liking were the rare times when we went to the Lakshmi Hotel Nightclub to see the women dance in their underwear. Such a thing was almost unthinkable to a devout Hindu such as myself, but I confess I found it terribly exciting. Sanjay called it "bourgeois decadence" and explained that it was our duty to witness the sickening corruption which the revolution was destined to replace. In all, we went five times to witness the decadence, and each time Sanjay loaned me the princely sum of fifty rupees.

"We had been roommates for three months before Sanjay told me of his association with the goondas and Kapalikas. I had suspected that Sanjay was in some way involved with the goondas , but I knew nothing of the Kapalikas.

"Even I knew that for several years gangs of Asian thugees and Calcutta's own goondas had run entire sections of the city. They charged fees to the various refugees for entry and squatting rights; they controlled the flow of drugs to and through the city; and they murdered anyone who interfered with their traditional management of protection, smuggling, and crime in the city. Sanjay told me that even the pathetic slum-dwellers who paddled out from the chawls each evening to steal the blue and red navigation lights from the river for some purpose of their own paid a commission to the goondas . This commission was tripled after a goondas -chartered freighter — bound for Singapore with a cargo of opium and smugglers' gold — ran aground in the Hooghly because of missing channel lights. Sanjay said that it had taken most of the ship's profits to bribe the police and port authorities to pull it off the mud and let it proceed.

"At this time last year, of course, the country was going through the last stages of the Emergency. Newspapers were censored, the prisons bulged with political prisoners who had irritated Mrs. Gandhi, and it was rumored that young men in the South were being sterilized for riding trains without proper tickets. Calcutta, however, was in the middle of its own emergency. Refugees over the past decade had raised the population of the city beyond counting. Some guessed ten million. Some said fifteen. By the time I moved in with Sanjay, the city had gone through six governments in four months. Eventually, of course, the CPI assumed control out of sheer default, but even they have brought few solutions. The real masters of the city were not to be seen.