"Is it much farther?" It was beginning to rain again, and I'd left our umbrella back at the hotel. My white slacks were muddy halfway to my knees. My tan Wallabees would never be the same again. I stopped. "I said, Is it much farther?"
The heavy man in khaki turned and shook his head. He stabbed a finger at a wall of gray industrial buildings visible just beyond the sea of shacks. We had to climb a muddy hillside for the last hundred yards and I went down on my knees twice. The top of the hill was guarded by a high mesh fence with overhanging barbed wire. I looked through and saw rusted oil barrels and empty railroad sidings between the buildings.
"Now what?" I turned to admire the view of the chawl. The tin roofs were held down by countless rocks, black on gray. Here and there open flames were visible in dark doorways. Far off in the direction from which we had come, tenements stretched out of sight into the heavy drizzle. Smoke rose from a hundred sources and blended into the gray-brown sky.
"Come." The thin, hatched-faced man had peeled back a section of fence.
I hesitated. My heart was pounding from more than the climb up the hill. I was filled with that exhilarating, stomach-clenching lightness that one feels approaching the end of a high diving board.
I nodded and stepped through the fence.
The factory area was silent. I realized how I had grown used to the constant sounds of conversation, of movement . . . of people in this crowded city. Now, as we moved from one dim alley to the next, the silence grew as thick as the moist air. I could not believe that this factory complex was still active. Small brick buildings were almost overgrown with weeds and vines. Far up a wall, a window that had once held a hundred glass squares could now show only ten or twelve intact. The rest were jagged black holes through which small birds occasionally flitted. Everywhere were the empty oil drums — once a bright red, yellow, blue, but now scabrous with rust.
We turned into an even narrower alley, a cul-de-sac. I stopped abruptly. My hand went to the lower right pocket of my safari shirt and to the heavy, palmsized rock I had picked up on the hillside. Incredibly, I felt no fear now that I was here, only a strong curiosity as to what the two men would do next. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure my back was clear, mentally traced a retreat through the maze of alleys, and turned back to the two Kapalikas. Watch the heavy one, a part of me warned.
"There." The one in khaki pointed up a narrow outside wooden stairway. The door at the top was a little higher than a normal second floor would be. Ivy matted the brick wall. There were no windows.
I did not move. My hand closed around the stone. The two men waited a long moment, glanced at each other, and turned on their heels to walk back the way we had come. I stepped to the side with my back against a wall and let them go. I could tell that they did not expect me to follow. Their footsteps on gravel were audible for a short while, and then there was only the sound of my own heavy breathing.
I glanced up at the steep stairway. The high walls and narrow strip of sky made me a little dizzy. Suddenly a flock of pigeons exploded from some dark cavity under the rooftop and wheeled away, wings flapping like rifle shots, circling into the heavy sky. It seemed very dark for 3:30 in the afternoon.
I walked back to the junction of alleys and looked both directions. Nothing was visible for at least a hundred paces. The rock in my hand felt cool and properly heavy, a caveman's utensil. Red clay still clung to its smooth surface. I raised the stone to my cheek and looked again at the door thirty feet up the overgrown wall. There was a pane of glass in the door but it had been painted over long ago.
I closed my eyes a second and let my breathing slow. Then I dropped the stone into my shirt pocket and climbed the rotting staircase to meet whatever waited there.
12
>
" . . . You bitch Calcutta
You piss yellow leprosy, like jaundiced urine,
Like a great artistic fresco . . . "
— Tushar Roy
The room was very small and very dark. A tiny oil lamp, open flame sputtering above a pool of rancid ghee, sat in the center of a square wooden table but the little light it produced was swallowed by the tattered black curtains which hung on every side. The chamber was less a room than a black-shrouded crypt. Two chairs waited at the table. On the splintered table's surface lay a book, its title not quite legible in the sick light. I did not have to read the cover to know what book it was. It was Winter Spirits, the collection of my poetry.
The door had opened on a corridor so narrow and so black that I almost had smiled, remembering the fun house at old Riverview Park. My shoulders brushed the flaking plaster on either side. The air was thick with the smell of wood rot and mold, bringing memories of times as a child when I'd crawled under our latticed front porch to play in the moist soil and darkness there. I would not have entered the narrow hall had not the faint glow of the oil lamp been visible.
The black gauze curtain hanging just inside the room struck my face as I entered. It swept aside easily enough, crumbling at my touch like a spider's abandoned web.
If the copy of my book was meant to intrigue me, it did. If it was meant to put me at my ease, it failed.
I remained standing four feet from the table. The rock was in my hand again, but it seemed a pitiful thing, a child's response. I again remembered the fun house at Riverview Park, and this time grinned despite myself. If anything leaped out of the curtained darkness at me, it would damn well get a face full of granite.
"Hey!" The black curtains absorbed my shout as effectively as they did the light. The open flame danced at the movement of air. "Hey! Ollie Oxen in Free! Game's over! Come on in!" Part of me was close to giggling at the absurdity of the situation. Part of me wanted to scream.
"All right, let's get this show on the road," I said and stepped forward, pulled the chair out, and sat at the table. I laid the rock on my book like a clumsy paperweight. Then I folded my hands and sat as still and upright as a schoolchild on the first day of school. Several moments passed. No sound intruded. It was so hot that sweat dripped from my chin and made small circles in the dust on the table. I waited.
Then the flame bent to an unfelt movement of air.
Someone was coming through the black curtains.
A tall form brushed back the netting, paused while still in shadow, and then shuffled hesitantly into the light.
I saw the eyes first — the moist, intelligent eyes tempered by time and too great a knowledge of human suffering. There was no doubt. They were the eyes of a poet. I was looking at M. Das. He stepped closer, and I gripped the edge of the table in a convulsive movement.
I was looking at a thing from the grave.
The figure wore gray rags that might have been the remnants of a shroud. Teeth gleamed in an involuntary rictus grin — the lips were rotted away except for tattered polyps of pulpy flesh. The nose was almost gone, seemingly nibbled away to a moist, pulsating membrane of raw tissue that did not conceal the twin openings to the skull. The once impressive forehead had been spared the ravages of the lower face's, but irregular scaly patches cut through the scalp and left tufts of white hair standing out at odd angles. The left ear was a shapeless mass.
M. Das pulled out the other chair to sit, and I noticed that two fingers of his right hand were missing at the middle joint. A rag was wrapped around what was left of the hand, but it did not conceal patches of corruption at the wrist, which left muscle and tendons clearly visible.
He sat down heavily. The massive head bobbed as if the narrow neck could not support it, and the rags over the bowl of a chest rose and fell rapidly. The room was filled with the sound of our ragged breathing.
"Leprosy." I whispered the word but it seemed as if I'd shouted it. The small flame flickered wildly and threatened to extinguish itself. Liquid brown eyes stared across the oil lamp at me and I could see now that parts of the eyelids themselves had been eaten way. "My God," I whispered. "Oh, dear God. Das, what have they done to you? Leprosy."
"Yes
ss . . . "
I cannot adequately explain the quality of that voice. The ruined lips made some sounds impossible, and others were accomplished only with a sibilant lisp as the tongue batted against exposed teeth. I do not know how he managed to speak at all. Adding to the insanity of the moment was the still-audible Oxford accent and elegant syntax in the labored, hissing phrases. Spittle moistened the bare teeth and flew in the lamplight, but the words were intelligible. I could not move and I could not look away.
"Yesss," said the poet M. Das, "leprosy. But it is called Hansen's Disease these days, Mr. Luczak." Desss dayss, Missser Lussak.
"Of course. I'm sorry." I nodded, blinked, but still could not look away. I realized that I was still clinging tightly to the edge of the table. The splintery wood connected me to reality somehow. "My God," I repeated dully, "how did this happen? How can I help?"
"I have read your book, Mr. Luczak," hissed M. Das. "You are a sentimental poet."
"How did you get a copy?" Idiot. Get a grip on yourself. "I mean, why do you think the verse is sentimental?"
Das blinked slowly. The ruined eyelids came down like frayed window shades and never completely covered the whites of his eyes. With the intelligent gaze hidden, the apparition before me was a thousand times more horrible. I resisted the impulse to run, and held my breath until he was looking at me again.
Das's voice managed to sound wistful. "Does it really snow that much in Vermont, Mr. Luczak?"
"What? Oh, you mean . . . yes. Yes. Not always, but some winters. Especially in the mountains. They mark the roadsides and mailboxes with batons and little orange pennants." I was babbling, but it was either that or stuff my knuckles in my mouth to stifle other sounds.
"Ahhh," sighed Das, and the sound was air escaping from a dying sea creature. "I would have liked to have seen that. Yesss."
"I read your poem, Mr. Das."
"Yesss?"
"The Kali poem, I mean. Of course, you know that. You sent it to me."
"Yess."
"Why?"
"Why what, Mr. Luczak?"
"Why are you sending it out of the country for publication? Why did you give it to me?"
"It must be published." For the first time Das's odd voice conveyed emotion. "You did not like it?"
"No, I did not like it," I said. "I did not like it at all. But there were parts that are very . . . memorable. Terrible and memorable."
"Yesss."
"Why did you write it?"
M. Das closed his eyes again. The awful head bowed forward, and for a second I thought that he had gone to sleep. The lesions on his scalp glowed a gray-green in the lamplight. "It must be published," he whispered hoarsely. "You will help me?"
I hesitated. I was not sure if the last thing he had said was a question. "All right," I said at last. "Tell me why you wrote it. What you're doing here."
Das returned his gaze to me, and in the electric contact of it, he somehow communicated that we were not alone. I glanced to the side but there was only blackness. Sweat dripped from my cheeks in the terrible heat. "How did you . . . " I hesitated. "How did you come to be like this?"
"A leper."
"Yes."
"I had been one for many years, Mr. Luczak. I ignored the signs. The scaly patches on my hands. The pain followed by numbness. Even as I signed autographs on tours and led seminars at the University, the feeling fled my hands and cheeks. I knew the truth long before the open sores appeared, long before the week I went east to my father's funeral."
"But they have drugs now!" I cried. "Surely you must have known . . . medicines! It can be cured now."
"No, Mr. Luczak, it cannot be cured. Even those who believe in such medicines claim only that the symptoms can be controlled, sometimes arrested. But I was a follower of Gandhi's health philosophy. When the rash and pain came, I fasted, I followed diets, I administered enemas and purified my body as well as my mind. For years I did this. It did not help. I knew it would not."
I took a deep breath and wiped my palms on my trousers. "Well, if you knew that — "
"Listen, please," whispered the poet. "We do not have much time. I will tell you a story. It was the summer of 1969 — a different century to me now, a different world. My father had been cremated in the small village of my birth. The bleeding sores had been visible for many weeks. I told my brothers it was an allergy. I sought solitude. I did not know what to do.
"The long ride back to Calcutta gave me time to think. Have you ever seen a leprosarium in our country, Mr. Luczak?"
"No."
"You do not wish to. Yesss, I could have gone abroad. I had the money. Doctors in such enlightened nations as yours rarely see advanced cases of Hansen's Disease, Mr. Luczak. Leprosy does not truly exist in most modern nations, you see. It is a disease of filth and muck and unhygienic conditions forgotten by the West since the Middle Ages. But it is not forgotten in India. No, not in my beloved India. Did you know, Mr. Luczak, that there are half a million lepers in Bengal alone?"
"No," I said.
"No. Nor did I. But so I have been told. Most die of other causes before the disease progresses, you see. But where was I in our story? Ah, yes. I had arrived in Howrah Station in the evening. By then I had decided upon my course of action. I had considered going abroad for medical help. I had considered enduring the years of pain as the disease followed its slow encroachment. I had considered submitting myself to the humiliation and isolation such treatment would demand. I considered it, Mr. Luczak, but I rejected it. And once I had made my decision, I felt very calm. I was very much at peace with myself and the universe that evening as I watched the lights of Howrah Station through the window of my first-class coach.
"Do you believe in God, Mr. Luczak? I did not. Nor do I now . . . believe in any god of light, that is. There are other . . . but where was I? Yes. I left the coach in a peaceful state of mind. My decision allowed me to avoid not only the pain of being an invalid, but also the pain of parting. Or so I thought.
"I gave away my luggage to a surprised beggar there in the railway station. Ah, yes, you must forgive me my method of transferring the manuscript to you yesterday, Mr. Luczak. Irony is one of the few pleasures left to me. I only wish that I could have seen it. Where were we? Yes, I left the station and walked to the marvelous structure we call the Howrah Bridge. Have you seen it? Yes, of course you have. How silly of me. I have always considered it a delightful piece of abstract sculpture, Mr. Luczak, quite unappreciated as the work of art it truly is. The bridge that night was relatively empty — only a few hundred people were crossing it.
"I stopped in the center. I did not hesitate for long, because I did not wish to have time to think. I must confess that I composed a short sonnet, a farewell verse you might say. I too was once a sentimental poet.
"I jumped. From the center span. It was well over a hundred feet to the dark water of the Hooghly. The fall seemed to go on forever. If I had known the interminable wait between execution and culmination of such a suicide, I would have planned differently, I assure you.
"Water struck from such a height has precisely the consistency of concrete, Mr. Luczak. When I hit, the impact was like a flower blossoming in my skull. Something in my back and neck snapped. Loudly. Like a thick branch breaking.
"My body sank then. I say 'my body' because I died then, Mr. Luczak. There is no doubt of that. But a strange phenomenon occurred. One's spirit does not depart immediately after death, but, rather, watches the disposition of events much as a disinterested spectator might. How else can I describe the sensation of seeing one's twisted body sink to the mud at the bottom of the Hooghly? Of seeing fish preying on the eyes and soft parts of one's self? Of seeing all this and of feeling no concern, no horror, only the mildest of interest? Such is the experience, Mr. Luczak. Such is the dreaded act of dying . . . as banal as all of the other necessary acts which make up our pitiful existence.
"I do not know how long my body lay there, becoming one with the river mud, before the
tides or perhaps the wake of a ship brought my discarded form to shore. Children found me. They poked at me and they laughed when their sticks penetrated my flesh. Then the Kapalikas came. They carried me — tenderly, although such distinctions meant nothing to me then — to one of their many temples.
"I awoke within the embrace of Kali. She is the only deity who defies both death and time. She resurrected me then, Mr. Luczak, but only for her own purposes. Only for her own purposes. As you can see, the Dark Mother did not see fit to remove the scourge of my affliction when she restored the breath to my body."
"What were those purposes, Mr. Das?" I asked.