JUST AS SOPHIE, AT HOME in England, had counted the days till Christmas, now Alex was counting the days to Diwali, the Festival of Lights. With Diwali also came Durgapuja, the Festival of Kali.
“Will you be taking Sophie to Kalighat to see the goddess?” Alex asked.
Jeannie exchanged a quick glance with Tom. “I think Sophie might find the experience too disturbing.”
“Do you think you would be frightened of the goddess, Sophie?” Without waiting for an answer, Alex declared, “I’m not frightened, and I’m a lot younger than you.”
“Perhaps not, “Jeannie said. “But then you’ve grown up in Calcutta. You’ve seen plenty of Kali figures. Sophie might find the goddess quite alarming.”
“I’m not easily frightened,” said Sophie. Not any more. And as though she had heard that bleak thought spoken aloud, Jeannie gave her a quick look of comprehension.
“She’s all glittery black with a necklace of skulls round her neck,” said Alex, with obvious relish. “Her tongue is bright red and so long it hangs out of her mouth, and she stands with one foot on her husband’s body, holding up a chopped-off head.”
“Goodness,” Sophie remarked, inadequately.
Alex, encouraged, went on, “And every night of Diwali she fights a great battle with the demon Asura, and all over the city there are lights burning, to help her win the fight.”
“And why do you suppose she is sticking out her tongue?” inquired Sophie.
Smearing a generous portion of marmalade on her toast, Alex explained, “Most people think it’s because she intends to drink somebody’s blood. But the cook’s boy says she’s just embarrassed, because while she was rampaging about in fury, she accidentally stepped on her husband, the god Shiva. So it is as if she is saying, “Oh sorry, dear, please excuse me.”
Sophie laughed. “I like that explanation better! Though it can’t be very pleasant for Shiva, being trod upon.”
“Kali isn’t only a goddess of death and destruction,” Tom said. “Her worshippers would tell you that she represents time, change, empowerment . . . Seriously, Sophie, would it interest you to see the temple?”
“Since I’m to become a Calcuttan, I suppose I should learn as much about the city as I can.”
“Quite right,” said Tom. “Then I’ll arrange an expedition.”
As they drove south along the Chowringhee towards Kalighat, past the interminably-under-construction Victoria Monument and Gothic spires of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the grand buildings gave way to shops, hotels, and clubs. Here the stately Victorian mansions, now grown shabby, had been cut up into rooming houses.
The temple at Kalighat was surrounded by a crowded marketplace where dozens of stalls sold brass pots and kettles, picture postcards, clay images of the gods, brightly-coloured paintings on cheap paper, small goats clearly meant for sacrifice, and an intriguing array of cheap souvenirs. The air reeked of mustard oil and the swamp-smell from a nearby canal. Milling about among the stalls were travel-worn pilgrims, Brahmin gentlemen in pleated dhotis with their sari-clad ladies, saffron-robed devotees, naked longhaired sadhus.
The main roof of the temple was topped by a smaller roof and a pinnacle on top of that, with a raised platform all around. “We won’t be allowed into the inner sanctum,” said Tom, “even if we were prepared to spend hours in the line-up and risk being crushed to death by pilgrims. However, if we can find a spot on the platform with the rest of the tourists, we should still be able to see into the sanctum sanctorum.”
They managed to find footholds in the press of onlookers gathered on the platform, all vying for a glimpse of the inner temple and the image of Kali Maa. Sophie maneuvered her way to the front, where there was a line of sight through the temple verandah to the inner sanctum. By craning her neck, it was just possible to see the area surrounding Kali’s altar and Kali herself presiding over it.
This was not the painted image of the goddess that Sophie had seen everywhere throughout the city, nor did it resemble the clay figures sold in the marketplace. Neither was it the comic monster Alex had gleefully described. This Kali of black stone, with her long, grotesquely protruding golden tongue and her three huge glaring red eyes, must be, thought Sophie, the goddess at her darkest and most fearsome, the One Who Causes Madness. This was not an image of the deity in terrifying human form, but an image of terror itself, come down from the first days of the world.
Sophie could hear the chanting of the priests within the sanctum, the clash of cymbals in time to the mantra’s hypnotic rhythm. In the space before the altar were heaps of marigolds and scarlet hibiscus, and a row of copper basins standing half in shadow.
Presently the temple musicians began to blow on conch shells and long curved trumpets.
Sophie drew in a horrified breath as the priests dragged before the altar a small, bleating goat smeared with vermilion powder. Another priest took hold of the animal, laid its head on the chopping block, and severed it with a single swift blow of the knife.
She wanted to look away, and found she could not. Standing amid closed-packed bodies in the heat of morning, she felt lightheaded, short of breath; her mouth was parched. The reek of the canal was mingled with the smell of incense, and human sweat, and rotting flowers. She thought she could drown in that thick air, unbreathable as swamp water. She felt herself swaying as her vision blurred; the world slipped sideways and her knees gave way.
Something had shifted, altered. She was standing ankle-deep in trampled flowers and blood-soaked mud. It was no longer morning, but the depths of night. The room flickered with torchlight. Great piles of goats’ heads were heaped before the altar. There was blood everywhere. The air stank of death. The pulsing of the drums had risen to a fever pitch; her heart thudded to their insistent rhythm. Now she saw that the priests were scooping blood from copper basins and throwing it at Kali’s feet.
Naked and cringing, a young boy was dragged forward, out of a long line of other young boys. And she saw that the heads before the altar were not, as she had first imagined, the heads of goats.
“Sophie!” Dimly she heard Jeannie’s voice, crying out in distress. With no notion of how she got there, Sophie found herself sitting on some steps with her head resting on her knees.
“Just keep your head down, Sophie.” That was Tom’s reassuring voice. “You’ll be all right in a moment. You’ve fainted, that’s all.”
And Jeannie, sounding frightened and contrite: “Poor lass, it was too much for her. It’s too soon; it’s the wrong place for her to be.”
But where had she been? Not here on this sunlit platform, in the midst of a noisy, excited crowd. For a few strange moments she had stood alone at midnight in a place where she could not possibly be. Wrenched out of time, she had stood before Kali’s blood-drenched altar, trembling with awe and terror under that pitiless gaze.
At night the whole of Calcutta was alight, with candles burning on rooftops and verandas, clay lamps on every windowsill. Fireworks streaked across the sky, exploding in showers of golden fire.
“Do you think,” said Alex, “if I climbed to a mountain top, like Alexandra, I could look down and see all of India lit up with Diwali lights?”
“Perhaps you could,” said Sophie, “if you climbed high enough.”
She wanted to share Alex’s enjoyment of the incandescent night; and yet a twinkling line of lights along a parapet, the brilliant skyward path of a rocket, the sound of voices calling out in darkness could suddenly make her mouth go dry, her throat constrict.
What had happened to her in the Kali temple? A waking dream? A hallucination brought on by too much heat and excitement?
She had hoped when she stepped from the river steamer onto the Calcutta wharf that she was leaving the nightmares behind. But however it happened, that brief vision of horror in Kali’s temple had shattered the fragile balance she had fought for two years to achieve. She thought with sudden anger, Is this how the rest of my life is to be? When every flare of light in the night, every voice in the dark, reminds me not of celebration, but of death?