Song of Kali

by Dan Simmons

Perfectly intelligent people with whom we'd enjoyed countless debates over politics, prose, the death of the theater, or the decline of poetry now burbled at us about their little boy's first tooth or spent hours sharing the engrossing details of little Heather's first day at preschool.

"And what, I asked myself, had I done?

had woven a web of illusion that I was carrying on the tradition of our great Tagore. Then I had enmeshed myself in my own web of deceit.

I had lived and worked in our beloved city—the heart and bloodstone of Bengal—and never once had the essence of that city been recreated, nay, nor hinted at, in my feeble art. I had tried to define the soul of Bengal by describing its shallowest exterior, its foreign intruders, and its least honest face.

True for everything written about Calcutta

"Gandhiji once said, 'A man cannot fully live unless he has died at least once.'

Since that day many years ago, my new life has led me to places I had never heard of in my beloved city—a city which I had foolishly thought to have known intimately.

In so doing I have had to acknowledge the presence of those dark gods who held this place in their palms before even the gods themselves were born. In finding them I have found myself.

The afterimage of the young woman stayed in my retinas like a flashbulb's optical echo.

"Perhaps," said Amrita and rose with Victoria secure in her arms. "But I can't see them."

"Kaliksetra. It means 'the place of Kali.' Certainly you knew that this is where the name of our city has originated?"

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.

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.

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.

but the endless political orations and aimless internal bickerings served only to put me to sleep, and after a while he no longer insisted that I accompany him.

Durga was maternal and Kali was reputed to be wanton. Durga was modest in her representations while Kali was naked—not nude, but brazenly naked—wearing only the darkness as her cloak. The

To be a Hindu, especially in Bengal, is to accept all things as aspects of divinity and never to artificially separate the sacred from the profane.

Once again I realized that the greatest argument against marriage, the absolutely irrefutable argument against living with one person for years, was the destruction of the illusion of free will by the spouse's constant recognition of one's total predictability.

realized that sweeping philosophical convictions such as ecology and pollution control were luxuries for our advanced industrial nations.

Indian currency evidently became non-negotiable when damaged.

But she was not the product of consciousness. She was the focus and residue of all the atavistic urges and actions which ten thousand years of conscious strivings had hoped to put behind.

Such is the dreaded act of dying … as banal as all of the other necessary acts which make up our pitiful existence.