Dan Simmons - Song of Kali

Krishna . That insane son of a bitch. What is the gun for ? I tried to convince myself that the present of the gun was another one of Krishna's senseless, melodramatic gestures, but what if it was part of some elaborate scam? What if he contracted the police and told them that the American was carrying an illegal firearm? I sat up in bed, my skin clammy. No. How the hell could that benefit Krishna? Are handguns illegal in Calcutta ? For all I knew, Calcutta was the home office of the N.R.A.

Sometime before midnight I arose and turned on the tiny table lamp. Amrita stirred but did not wake. Victoria was asleep with her rump raised under the light blanket. The catches on the briefcase made a soft click in the silence.

The pages were yellowed, tattered, and strewn about the inside of the briefcase, but they were also numbered with bold strokes of a fountain pen and it took me only minutes to set them in order. There were over five hundred pages, and it made for a heavy stack of poetry. I smiled ruefully as I thought of any American magazine editor being confronted with five hundred pages of verse.

There was no cover page, no title, no cover letter, and no author's name on the pages. If I hadn't know that the massive work was purported to have been written by M. Das, there would have been no way to guess from the manuscript.

The first page looked like a poor carbon copy. I leaned closer to the light and began reading.

Several more stanzas of this rough verse painted a grisly picture of the demon Mahishasura, a powerful, malevolent thing which threatened even the gods. Then, on page 3, the meter and "voice" changed drastically. I translated a scrawled marginal notation as Kalidasa: Kumarambhava 400 A.D. new trans .

I yawned. "A fearful flock of evil birds." God help me when I give this to Chet Morrow. Nothing could help me if I brought this as my "new Das epic" to Abe Bronstein. I skimmed through several pages of similar turgid verse. The only reason I didn't put it down then was a vague curiosity as to how Parvati was going to beat the apparently invincible Demon Mahishasura. Stanza after stanza described the opening of the battle between the gods and demons. It was vintage Homer via Rod McKuen.

I could identify with that. Still, I continued reading. Things looked bad for the goddess Parvati. Even with the assistance of the great god Siva, she could not best the mighty Mahishasura. Parvati was reborn as the warrioress Durga, ten hands brandishing weapons of battle. Millennia passed as the struggle progressed, but Mahishasura could not be conquered.

The gods retreated from the field to review their options. Mere mortals petitioned them not to abandon the earth to the less than tender mercies of Mahishasura. A grim decision was made. The will of all the gods was bent to dark purpose. From Durga's forehead leaped a goddess more demon than divine. She was power incarnate, violence personified, unfettered even by the bonds of time which held other gods and mere men in check. She strode the heavens wrapped in darkness deeper than night, casting fear into the hearts of even the deities who had brought her forth.

She was called to battle. She accepted the call. But before opposing Mahishasura and the rampaging legions of demons, she demanded her sacrifice. And it was a terrible one. From every town and village on the young earth, men and women, children and elders, virgins and depraved were brought before the hungry goddess. Das's marginal note, only just decipherable, read: Bhavabhuti Malatimadhava .

That would have been enough for one night, but the next line kept me in my chair. I blinked and read on.

And then, without transition, the style reverted to the fifth-century sambhava .

All this was mere prelude as the poem unfolded like some dark flower. Das's strong poetic voice would appear occasionally, only to fade and be replaced by a classic Veda or a piece of news raised from archives or the banal tones of journalism. But the song was the same.

For ages beyond time, the gods conspired to contain this black power they had created. It was circumscribed, propitiated, and hidden in the pantheon, but its essential nature could not be denied. It alone — she alone — grew in strength as other divinities faded from mortal memory, for she alone embodied the dark underside of an essentially benign universe — a universe whose reality had been forged through the millennia by the consciousness of gods and men alike.