Chapter 21
Chapter 21
"You make a very attractive woman," Rumi said from the comfort of his pit. "Did I tell you that my wife has passed on to her next incarnation and that I am alone?"
"Yeah, you mentioned that." He seemed to have given up on us getting his daughter back. "What happened to the rest of your family, anyway?"
"They drowned."
"I'm sorry. In the Ganges?"
"No, at home. It was the monsoon season. Little Vitra and I had gone to the market to buy some swill, and there was a sudden downpour. When we returned..." He shrugged.
"I don't mean to sound insensitive, Rumi, but there is a chance that your loss could have been caused by - oh, I don't know - perhaps the fact that you LIVE IN A FUCKING PIT!"
"That's not helping, Biff," Joshua said. "You said you had a plan?"
"Right. Rumi, am I correct in assuming that these pits, when someone is not living in them, are used for tanning hides?"
"Yes, it is work that only Untouchables may do."
"That would account for the lovely smell. I assume you use urine in the tanning process, right?"
"Yes, urine, mashed brains, and tea are the main ingredients."
"Show me the pit where the urine is condensed."
"The Rajneesh family is living there."
"That's okay, we'll bring them a present. Josh, do you have any lint in the bottom of your satchel?"
"What are you up to?"
"Alchemy," I said. "The subtle manipulation of the elements. Watch and learn."
When it was not being used, the urine pit was the home of the Rajneesh family, and they were more than happy to give us loads of the white crystals that covered the floor of their home. There were six in the family, father, mother, an almost grown daughter, and three little ones. Another little son had been taken for sacrifice at the festival of Kali. Like Rumi, and all the other Untouchables, the Rajneesh family looked more like skeletons mummified in brown leather than people. The Untouchable men went about the pits naked or wearing only a loincloth, and even the women were dressed in tatters that barely covered them - nothing as nice as the stylish sari that I had purchased in the marketplace. Mr. Rajneesh commented that I was a very attractive woman and encouraged me to drop by after the next monsoon.
Joshua pounded chunks of the crystallized mineral into a fine white powder while Rumi and I collected charcoal from under the heated dying pit (a firebox had been gouged out of the stone under the pit) which the Untouchables used to render the flowers from the indigo shrub into fabric dye.
"I need brimstone, Rumi. Do you know what that is? A yellow stone that burns with a blue flame and gives off a smoke that smells like rotten eggs?"
"Oh yes, they sell it in the market as some sort of medicine."
I handed the Untouchable a silver coin. Go buy as much of it as you can carry."
"Oh my, this will be more than enough money. May I buy some salt with what is left?"
"Buy what you need with what's left over, just go."
Rumi skulked away and I went to help Joshua process the saltpeter.
The concept of abundance was an abstract one to the Untouchables, except as it pertained to two categories, suffering and animal parts. If you wanted decent food, shelter, or clean water, you would be sorely disappointed among the Untouchables, but if you were in the market for beaks, bones, teeth, hides, sinew, hooves, hair, gallstones, fins, feathers, ears, antlers, eyeballs, bladders, lips, nostrils, poop chutes, or any other inedible part of virtually any creature that walked on, swam under, or flew over the subcontinent of India, then the Untouchables were likely to have what you wanted lying around, conveniently stored beneath a thick blanket of black flies. In order to fashion the equipment I needed for my plan, I had to think in terms of animal parts. Fine unless you need, say, a dozen short swords, bows and arrows, and chain mail for thirty soldiers and all you have to work with is a stack of nostrils and three mismatched poop chutes. It was a challenge, but I made do. As Joshua moved among the Untouchables, surreptitiously healing their maladies, I barked out my orders.
"I need eight sheep bladders - fairly dry - two handfuls of crocodile teeth, two pieces of rawhide as long as my arms and half again as wide. No, I don't care what kind of animal, just not too ripe, if you can manage it. I need hair from an elephant's tail. I need firewood, or dried dung if you must, eight oxtails, a basket of wool, and a bucket of rendered fat."
And a hundred scrawny Untouchables stood there, eyes as big as saucers, just staring at me while Joshua moved among them, healing their wounds, sicknesses, and insanities, without any of them suspecting what was happening. (We'd agreed that this was the wisest tack to take, as we didn't want a bunch of healthy Untouchables athletically bounding through Kalighat proclaiming that they had been cured of all ills by a strange foreigner, thus attracting attention to us and spoiling my plan. On the other hand, neither could we stand there and watch these people suffer, knowing that we - well, Joshua - had the power to help them.) He'd also taken to poking one of them in the arm with his finger anytime anyone said the word "Untouchable." Later he told me that he just hated passing up the opportunity for palpable irony. I cringed when I saw Joshua touching the lepers among them, as if after all these years away from Israel a tiny Pharisee stood on my shoulder and screamed, "Unclean!"
"Well?" I said after I'd finished my orders. "Do you want your children back or not?"
"We don't have a bucket," said one woman.
"Or a basket," said another.
"Okay, fill some of the sheep bladders with rendered fat, and bundle the wool in some kind of hide. Now go, we don't have a lot of time."
And they all stood and looked at me. Big eyes. Sores healed. Parasites purged. They just looked at me. "Look, I know my Sanskrit isn't great, but you do know what I am asking?"
A young man stepped forward. "We do not want to anger Kali by depriving her of her sacrifices."
"You're kidding, right?"
"Kali is the bringer of destruction, without which there can be no rebirth. She is the remover of the bondage that ties us to the material world. If we anger her, she will deprive us of her divine destruction."
I looked at Joshua across the crowd. "Do you understand this?"
"Fear?" he said.
"Can you help?" I asked in Aramaic.
"I'm not good at fear," Joshua said in Hebrew.
I thought for a second as two hundred eyes pinned me to the sandstone on which I stood. I remembered the red-stained gashes on the wooden elephant statues at the altar of Kali. Death was their deliverance, was it?
"What is your name?" I asked the man who had stepped out of the crowd.
"Nagesh," he said.
"Stick out your tongue, Nagesh." He did, and I threw back the cloth that covered my head and loosened it around my neck. Then I touched his tongue.
"Destruction is a gift you value?"
"Yes," said Nagesh.
"Then I shall be the instrument of the goddess's gift." With that I pulled the black glass dagger from the sheath in my sash, held it up before the crowd. While Nagesh stood, passive, wide-eyed, I drove my thumb under his jaw, pushed his head back, and brought the dagger down across his throat. I lowered him to the ground as the red liquid spurted over the sandstone.
I stood and faced the crowd again, holding the dripping blade over my head. "You owe me, you ungrateful fucks! I have brought to your people the gift of Kali, now bring me what I ask for."
They moved really quickly for people who were on the edge of starvation.
After the Untouchables scattered to do my bidding, Joshua and I stood over the bloodstained body of Nagesh.
"That was fantastic," Joshua said. "Absolutely perfect."
"Thanks."
"Had you been practicing all that time we were in the monastery?"
"You didn't see me push the pressure point in his neck then?"
"No, not at all."
"Gaspar's kung fu training. The rest, of course, was from Joy and Balthasar."
I bent over and opened Nagesh's mouth, then took the ying-yang vial from around my neck and put a drop of the antidote on the Untouchable's tongue.
"So he can hear us now, like when Joy poisoned you?" Joshua asked.
I pulled back one of Nagesh's eyelids and watched the pupil contract slowly in the sunlight. "No, I think he's still unconscious from me holding the pressure point. I didn't think the poison would work quickly enough. I could only get a drop of poison on my finger when I loosened my sari. I knew it would keep him down, I just wasn't sure it would put him down."
"Well, you are truly a magus, now, Biff. I'm impressed."
"Joshua, you healed a hundred people today. Half of them were probably dying. I did some sleight of hand."
My friend's enthusiasm was undeterred. "What's the red stuff, pomegranate juice? I can't figure out where you concealed it."
"No, actually I was going to ask you about that."
"What?"
I held my arm up and showed Joshua where I had slashed my own wrist (the source of blood for the show). I had been holding it against my leg and as soon as I removed the pressure the blood started spurting again. I sat down hard on the sandstone and my vision began to tunnel down to a pinpoint. "I was hoping you could help me out with this," I said before I fainted.
"You need to work on that part of the trick," Joshua said when I came to. "I might not always be around to fix your wrist." He was speaking Hebrew - that meant for my ears only.
I saw Joshua kneeling above me, then beyond him the sky was blotted out by curious brown faces. The recently murdered Nagesh was in the front of the crowd. "Hey, Nagesh, how'd the rebirth go?" I asked in Sanskrit.
"I must have strayed from my dharma in my last life," Nagesh said. "I have been reincarnated, once again, as an Untouchable. And I have the same ugly wife."
"You challenged master Levi who is called Biff," I said, "of course you didn't move up. You're lucky you're not a stink bug or something. See, destruction isn't the big favor you all thought it was."
"We brought the things you asked for."
I hopped to my feet feeling incredibly rested and energized. "Nice," I said to Joshua. "I feel like I just had one of those strong coffees you used to make at Balthasar's."
"I miss coffee," said Josh.
I looked at Nagesh, "I don't suppose you..."
"We have swill."
"Never mind," I said. Then I said one of those things that as a boy growing up in Galilee, you never think you'll hear yourself say: "Okay, Untouchables, bring me the sheep bladders!"
Rumi said that the goddess Kali was served by a host of black-skinned female demons, who sometimes during the feast would bring men to corners of the altar and copulate with them as blood rained down from the goddess's saw-tooth maw above.
"Okay, Josh, you're one of them," I said.
"What are you gonna be?"
"The goddess Kali, of course. You got to be God last time."
"What last time?"
"All of the last times." I turned to my intrepid minions. "Untouchables, paint him up!"
"They're not going to buy that a burr-headed Jewish kid is their goddess of destruction."
"O ye of little faith," I said.
Three hours later we were again crouched beneath a tree near the temple of Kali. We were both dressed as women, covered from head to toe by our saris, but I was looking much lumpier under mine due to Kali's extra arms and garland of severed heads, played tonight by painted sheep bladders filled with explosives and suspended around my neck by long strands of elephant tail hair. Any observers who might get close enough to notice my protrusions were quickly deterred by the smell coming off of Joshua and me. We had used the goo from the bottom of Rumi's pit to paint our bodies black. I didn't have the courage to ask what the substance had been in life, but if there was a place where they allowed vultures to ripen in the sun before pounding them into a smooth paste and mixing it with just the right amount of buffalo squat, then Rumi called it home. The Untouchables had also painted huge red rings around Joshua's eyes, fitted him with a ropey wig of oxtails, and affixed to his torso six pert little breasts fashioned from pitch.
"Stay away from any open flame. Your tits will go up like volcanos."
"Why did I have to have six and you only had to have two."
"Because I am the goddess and have to wear the garland of skulls and the extra arms."
We'd made my arms from rawhide, using my primary arms as models, then drying the molded arms in place over the fire. The women made a harness that held the extra arms in place under my own, then we painted the arms black with the same black goo. They were a little wobbly, but they were light and would look realistic enough in the dark.
It was still hours from the height of the ceremony at midnight, when the children would be hacked to death, but we wanted to be there in time to stop the revelers from cutting off the children's fingers if we could. Now, the wooden elephants were empty on their turntables, but the altar of Kali was already filling with gruesome tribute. The heads of a thousand goats had been laid on the altar before the goddess, and the blood ran slick over the stones and in the grooves that channeled it into large brass pots at the corners of the altar. Female acolytes carried the pots up a narrow ladder at the back of the great statue of Kali, then dumped them through some sort of reservoir that fed it through the goddess's jaws. Below, by torchlight, worshipers danced in the sticky shower as the blood flowed down upon them.
"Look, those women are dressed like me," Joshua said. "Except they only have two breasts each."
"Technically, they're not dressed, they're painted. You make a very attractive female demon, Josh. Did I tell you that?"
"This isn't going to work."
"Of course it's going to work."
I guessed that there were already ten thousand worshipers in the temple square, dancing, chanting, and beating drums. A procession of thirty men came down the main boulevard, each carrying a basket under his arm. As they reached the altar, each man dumped the contents of the basket over the rows of bloody goat heads.
"What are those?" Joshua asked.
"Those are exactly what you think they are."
"They're not the heads of the children?"
"No, I think those are the heads of strangers who happened down the road we were on before Rumi came along to pull us into the grass."
After the severed heads were dispersed across the altar, the female acolytes came out of the crowd dragging the headless corpse of a man, which they laid on the steps leading to the altar. Each one mimed having intercourse with the corpse, then rubbed their genitalia against the bloody stump of its neck before dancing away, blood and ochre dripping down the insides of their thighs.
"There's sort of a theme developing here," I said.
"I think I'm going to be sick," Joshua said.
"Mindful breath," I said, using one of the phrases that Gaspar was always barking at us when we were learning meditation. I knew that if Joshua could stay with the yeti for days at a time without freezing to death, he could certainly conjure up the bodily control to keep from throwing up. The sheer magnitude of the carnage was all that was keeping me from vomiting. It was as if the atrocity of the whole scene couldn't fit in my mind all at once, so I could only see just enough for my sanity and my stomach to remain intact.
A shout went up in the crowd now and I could see a torch-lit sedan chair being carried above the heads of the worshipers. On it reclined a half-naked man with a tiger skin wrapped around his hips, his skin painted light gray with ashes. His hair was plaited with grease and he wore the bones of a human hand as a skullcap. Around his neck hung a necklace of human skulls.
"High priest," I said.
"They aren't even going to notice you, Biff. How can you even get their attention after they've seen all this?"
"They haven't seen what I'm going to show them."
As the sedan chair emerged from the crowd in front of the altar, we could see a procession following it: tied to the back of the sedan chair was a line of naked children, most of them not more than five or six, their hands tied together, a less ornately dressed priest on either side of them to steady them. The priests began to untie the children and take them to the great wooden elephants lining the boulevard. Here and there in the crowd I could see people beginning to brandish edged weapons: short swords, axes, and the long-bladed spears Joshua and I had seen over the elephant grass. The high priest was sitting on the headless corpse, shouting a poem about the divine release of Kali's destruction or something.
"Here we go," I said, pulling the black glass dagger from under my sari. "Take this."
Joshua looked at the blade shimmering in the torchlight. "I won't kill anyone," he said. Tears were streaming down his cheeks, drawing long red lines through the black and if anything making him look more fierce.
"That's fine, but you'll need to cut them loose."
"Right." He took the knife from me.
"Josh, you know what's coming. You've seen it before. Nobody else here has, especially those kids. You can't carry all of them, so they have to have enough of their wits about them to follow you. I know you can keep them from being afraid. Put your teeth in."
Joshua nodded and slipped the row of crocodile teeth attached to a piece of rawhide under his upper lip, leaving the teeth to protrude like fangs. I put in my own false fangs, then ran into the dark to circle the crowd.
As I approached the rear of the altar I pulled the special torch I'd made from under my girdle of human hands. (Actually my girdle of human hands was made of dried goat's udders stuffed with straw, but the Untouchable women had done a pretty good job as long as no one bothered to count fingers.) Through Kali's stone legs I could see the priests tying each of the children on the trunk of a wooden elephant. As soon as the bonds were tight, each priest drew a bronze blade and held it aloft, ready to strike off a finger as soon as the high priest gave the signal.
I struck the tip of my torch on the edge of the altar, screamed for all I was worth, then threw my sari off and ran up the steps as the torch burst into dazzling blue flame that trailed sparks behind me as I ran. I hopped across the array of goat heads and stood between the legs of the statue of Kali, my torch held aloft in one hand, one of my severed heads swinging by the hair in the other.
"I am Kali," I screamed. "Fear me!" It came out sort of mumbled through my fake teeth.
Some of the drums stopped and the high priest turned around and looked at me, more because of the bright light of the torch than my fierce proclamation.
"I am Kali," I shouted again. "Goddess of destruction and all this disgusting crap you have here!" They weren't getting it. The priest signaled for the other priests to come around me from the sides. Some of the female acolytes were already trying to make their way across the dance floor of decapitations toward me.
"I mean it. Bow down to me!" The priests charged on. I did have the crowd's attention, though unfortunately they weren't cowering in fear at my angry goddessness. I could see Joshua moving around the wooden elephants, the guarding priests having left their posts to come after me. "Really! I mean it!" Maybe it was the teeth. I spit them out toward the nearest of my attackers.
Running across a sea of slick, bloody heads is evidently a pretty difficult task. Not if you've spent the last six years of your life hopping from the top of one post to another, even in ice and snow, but for the run-of-the-mill homicidal priest, it's a tough row to hoe. The priests and acolytes were slipping and sliding among the goat and human heads, falling over each other, smacking into the feet of the statue, one even impaling himself on a goat's horn when he fell.
One of the priests was only a few feet away from me now, trying not to fall on his own blade as he crawled over the mess. "I will bring destruction...oh, fuck it," I said. I lit the fuse on the severed head I held in my hand, then swung it between my legs and tossed it in a steep arch over my head. It trailed sparks on its way into the black goddess's open maw, then disappeared.
I kicked the approaching priest in the jaw, then danced across the goat heads, leapt over the head of the high priest, and was halfway to Joshua at the first wooden elephant when Kali, with a deafening report, breathed fire out over the crowd and the top of her head blew off.
Finally, I had the crowd's attention. They were trampling each other to get away, but I had their attention. I stood in the middle of the boulevard, swinging my second severed head in a circle, waiting for the fuse to burn down before I let it sail over the heads of the receding crowd. It exploded in the air, sending a circle of flame across the sky and no doubt deafening some of the worshipers who were close.
Joshua had seven of the children around him, clinging to his legs as he moved to the next elephant. Several of the priests had recovered and were storming down the steps of the altar toward me, knives in hand. I pulled another head from my garland, lit the fuse, and held it out to them.
"Ah, ah, ah," I cautioned. "Kali. Goddess of destruction. Wrath et cetera."
At the sight of the sparking fuse they stopped and began to backpedal. "Now that's the sort of respect you should have shown before."
I started whirling the head by the hair and the priests lost all semblance of courage and turned and ran. I hurled the head back up the boulevard onto the altar, where it exploded, sending a spray of real severed goat heads in all directions.
"Josh! Duck! Goat heads!"
Joshua pushed the children to the ground and fell over them until the pieces settled. He glared at me a second, then went on to free the other children. I hurled three more heads into different directions and now the entire temple square was nearly deserted but for Joshua, the children, a few injured worshipers, and the dead. I had built the bombs without any shrapnel in them, so those who had been injured had been trampled in the panic and the dead were those who had already been sacrificed to Kali. I think we pulled it off without killing anyone.
As Joshua led the children down the wide boulevard and out of the temple square, I covered our exit, backing down the boulevard, my last explosive head swinging in one hand, my torch in the other. Once I saw that Joshua and the children were safely away, I lit the fuse, whirled the head around and let it fly toward the black goddess.
"Bitch," I said.
I was out of sight when it exploded.
Joshua and I got as far as a limestone cliff overlooking the Ganges before we had to stop to let the children rest. They were tired and hungry, but mostly they were hungry, and we had brought nothing for them to eat. At least, after Joshua's touch, they weren't afraid, and that gave them some peace. Josh and I were too jangled to sleep, so we sat up as the children lay down on the rocks around us and snored like kittens. Joshua held Rumi's little daughter, Vitra, and before long her face was smeared with black paint from nuzzling his shoulder. All through the night, as he rocked the child, all I heard Joshua say was, "No more blood. No more blood."
At first light we could see thousands, no, tens of thousands of people gathering at the banks of the river, all dressed in white, except for a few old men who were naked. They moved into the water and stood facing east, heads raised in anticipation, dotting the river as far as the eye could see. As the sun became a molten fingernail of light on the horizon, the muddy surface of the river turned golden. The gold light reflected off its surface onto the buildings, the shanties, the trees, the palaces, making everything in sight, including the worshipers, appear to have been gilded. And worshipers they were, for we could hear their songs from where we sat, and although we could not discern the words, we could hear that these were the songs of God.
"Are those the same people from last night?" I said.
"They would have to be, wouldn't they?"
"I don't understand these people. I don't understand their religion. I don't understand how they think."
Joshua stood and watched the Indians bowing and singing to the dawn, looking occasionally to the face of the child that slept on his shoulder. "This is testament to the glory of God's creation, whether these people know it or not."
"How can you say that? The sacrifices to Kali, the way the Untouchables are treated. Whatever they might believe, in practice their religion is hideous."
"You're right. It's not right to condemn this child because she was not born a Brahman?"
"Of course not."
"Then is it right to condemn her because she is not born a Jew?"
"What do you mean?"
"A man who is born a gentile may not see the kingdom of God. Are we, as Hebrews, any different from them? The lambs at the temple on Passover? The wealth and power of the Sadducees while others go hungry? At least the Untouchables can reach their reward eventually, through karma and rebirth. We don't allow any gentile to do so."
"You can't compare what they do to God's law. We don't sacrifice human beings. We feed our poor, we take care of the sick."
"Unless the sick are unclean," Joshua said.
"But, Josh, we're the chosen. It's God's will."
"But is it right? He won't tell me what to do. So I'll say. And I say, no more."
"You're not just talking about eating bacon, are you?"
"Gautama the Buddha gave the way to people of all births to find the hand of God. With no blood sacrifice. Our doors have been marked with blood for too long, Biff."
"So that's what you think you're going to do? Bring God to everyone?"
"Yes. After a nap."
"Of course, I meant after a nap."
Joshua held the little girl so I could see her face as she slept on his shoulder.
When the children awoke we led them back to their families at the pits, handing them into the arms of their mothers, who snatched each child away from us as if we were devils incarnate; they glared over their shoulders as they carried the babies back to their pits.
"Grateful bunch," I said.
"They are afraid that we've angered Kali. And we've brought them another hungry mouth."
"Still. Why did they help us if they didn't want their children back?"
"Because we told them what to do. That's what they do. What they are told. That's how the Brahmans keep them in line. If they do what they are told, then perhaps they will not be Untouchables next life."
"That's depressing."
Joshua nodded. We only had little Vitra to return to her father now, and I was sure that Rumi would be happy to see his daughter. His distress over losing her had basically been the reason he had saved our lives. As we came over the sandstone rise we could see that Rumi was not alone in his pit.
Rumi stood on his sitting rock, stark naked, sprinkling salt on his erect member as a large humpbacked cow, which nearly filled the rest of the pit, licked at the salt. Joshua held Vitra so she faced away from the pit, then backed away, as if he didn't want to disturb the moment of beefy intimacy.
"A cow, Rumi?" I exclaimed. "I thought you people had beliefs."
"That's not a cow, that's a bull," Joshua said.
"Oh, that's got to be your super-bonus abomination there. Where we come from whole cities get destroyed for that kind of thing, Rumi." I reached over and put my hand over Vitra's eyes. "Stay away from Daddy, honey, or you'll turn into a pillar of salt."
"But this is my wife, reincarnated."
"Oh, don't try that one on me, Rumi. For six years I lived in a Buddhist monastery where the only female company was a wild yak. I know from desperate."
Joshua grabbed my arm. "You didn't?"
"Relax, I'm just making a point. You're the Messiah here, Josh. What do you think?"
"I think we need to go to Tamil and find the third magus." He set Vitra down and Rumi quickly pulled up his loincloth as the child ran to him. "Go with God, Rumi," Joshua said.
"May Shiva watch over you, you heretics. Thank you for returning my daughter."
Joshua and I gathered up our clothes and satchels, then bought some rice in the market and set out for Tamil. We followed the Ganges south until we came to the sea, where Joshua and I washed the gore of Kali from our bodies.
We sat on the beach, letting the sun dry our skin as we picked pitch out of our chest hairs.
"You know, Josh," I said, as I fought a particularly stubborn gob of tar that had stuck in my armpit, "when you were leading those kids out of the temple square, and they were so little and weak, but none of them seemed afraid...well, it was sort of heartwarming."
"Yep, I love all the little children of the world, you know?" "Really?"
He nodded. "Green and yellow, black and white."
"Good to know - Wait, green?"
"No, not green. I was just fuckin' with you."
***