Imagine that you are the mind of the universe but that you are not implanted in the white beard of a wise old man holding a staff, not in the shining third eye of the Buddha. Instead you are implanted in the clitoris of a 37 year-old woman who craves to have a child. And imagine it is a Sunday night, and you are out at the bar, and it is getting near closing time and there are only a few stragglers left, and the booze has flooded your female system with excess testosterone, and you are hungry like a man. And when you approach the last remaining candidate standing at the bar, about to put his coat on, and you have already swallowed your dignity to approach, and at the last second a blond, blue-eyed little cunt butts in, just the kind you know from high school, from middle school, who always got to go on spring break to Mexico while you had to work in the movie theater, and came back tan and fit and you were pasty with popcorn pox and still had only a couple of dollars in your pocket. When it’s that girl—even though you’re older and wiser and more mature and more successful and even by now more beautiful—you can’t stop. You go mad. You grab the man in question—some undeserving idiot—and rip out his throat with your teeth and spit the molten flesh in the blond chick’s face, and the poisoned blood of the man burns her like acid, disfiguring her, and watching her little button features melt you can’t help but laugh gluttonously, and pick up the beer bottle the man was about to drink from, and empty it, and then lifting up your skirt, shove the bottle into your wettened pussy, rocking it back and forth, with bits of flesh and tendon still slopping from your mouth, as the blond dissolves on the ground into a puddle of filth. And even though you know it’s wrong and unnecessary part of you is like Yes! Yes! Yes!
Imagine you are that mind of the universe—Then what would you do?
A five-story building moving as fast as a jet airplane and heading straight toward your house. A crack so deep it changes the earth’s rotation, just slightly, rendering time different. The whole planet ringing like a bell. Ring my bell. Deep in the center of the earth there were tremors. And we felt it. I fought with everybody I knew. I don’t know why. Everybody fought. We let ghosts loose and felt different afterward. We too were ringing like bells. Weren’t you? When I was a kid in Kansas they used to make jokes about the other side of the world. If you fell down a deep enough hole you would come out in China. But then we looked at the globe and realized that if we fell through the world we would miss China and end up in the middle of the Indian Ocean. And then years later the people of Kansas made it illegal to teach evolution in schools. My grandmother sat in front of her French toast at Waid’s and shook with arthritis: “We’re the laughing stock of the whole world.” And people laughed. They sucked way down into their bellies and let out a deep, roaring, otherworldly laugh that centered in on Kansas and burrowed down into the soil and penetrated the earth’s crust and mantle until it got to the core and then started to rise and grow and by the time it got to the floor of the Indian ocean it was so ferocious that you could hear it in Africa, in the Maldives. There was no Moses to lead the people to safety. Animals were smarter and fled. But hundreds of thousands of people died. And the earth rang like a bell. It started a year-long series of disasters that would strike the poor and hungry from the 9th Ward of New Orleans to the Hindu Kush in Pakistan. A year of ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that would end with the immigrant suburbs of Paris burning. Extraterrestrials snorting through their third snorkel wondered if it wasn’t the beginning of something more permanent: “What is that sound?” The rhythm of the spheres. The music of chance. Ring, ring my bell. The people of Kansas, in the interconnectedness of everything—bombed abortionists, serial killers, votes for mad, murderous political leaders—had perhaps played their part.
My old neighbor Peca had left his bar in Belgrade to go diving off the west coast of Thailand. Graham Kelly, an English stunt coordinator who I would meet the following week at a wedding in Bombay, was lying on a chaise lounge in Phuket. Val, an Indian-English doctor who would provide me with antibiotics to fend off third world digestion after said wedding, was lying in bed with his wife in a hotel in Pondicherry. A Bombay Parsee businessman was with his family in his adopted home of Vienna. Nikola Ilic was watching the world snooker championship on cable in Berlin. We met that afternoon and he described the damage to me: “It’s like someone chucked the moon into the sea.”
In mid-November an English expert in the paranormal predicted that the onset of the earth’s most degenerate periods, Kali Yuga—the era of catastrophe that is to precede an age of enlightenment—would be announced by an apparition in the sky sometime around Christmas. On December 20 he dreamt of a hotel room full of water.
At 7:58 am on December 26, 10 km below the ocean surface, 60 km north of Sumatra, the Indian tectononic plate was subducted under the Burmese plate along a 1200 km interface, the first movement of the plates in 162 years. Parts of the sea floor abruptly jerked upwards 5 to 10 meters, releasing energy equivalent to 10,000 atomic bombs. Displaced water rushed away from the sudden bump at 800 km per hour, as fast as a transatlantic flight. On North Sentinel Island, part of the Andaman chain, members of an elusive and hostile tribe started to make for higher ground. At 8:20am 15 meter waves slammed into the city of Banda Aceh on the shores of Sumatra.
At ten to ten, Graham was awakened from a nap on a chaise lounge in front of his hotel in Phuket, off the west coast of Thailand, thinking “How stupid, putting the hotel so close to the sea that high tide comes right up to the deck!” Within seconds he was floating up above the swimming pool, holding a young boy by the ankle, and trying to swim to the second floor balcony, which was now at the level of the surface of the sea.
At ten, the waves hit Sri Lanka and then the coast of Tamil Nadu in south India, devastating the fishing villages around Pondicherry.

In the Hindu pantheon, there is only one force which can account for destruction on this scale—Kali. Kali is the mother goddess, but also the destroyer. She is depicted with a black face and extended red tongue. A string of decapitated men’s heads hangs around her neck and a girdle of hands rings her waist. She is the consort of Shiva, and is at times depicted straddling his supine form in throes of sexual abandon, with scenes of death and devastation in the background.
Asked his thoughts on what had caused the tsunami, Shantipada Chattopadhayay Tirtharitwick, head priest of the temple of Kali in Calcutta, balked at first, saying: “If today I talk about God’s fury, I would be ridiculed.”
But Nadadur Vardhan, president of the Hindu Temple Society of Southern California, was not afraid to say that the disaster had occurred because “too many people were doing too many bad things.” Some believed that the era of Kali—characterized by extensive violence and immorality—had already begun. Vardhan stated that “the response to evil human actions is immediate.”
The earthquake moved a significant amount of mass slightly closer to the earth’s center, like a figure skater pulling his arms in, speeding up the planet’s rotation by 2.67 microseconds. Time was subtly altered. For over thirteen days, the entire earth was ringing like a church bell.
After the first wave hit Phuket, Graham sat watching the water recede perhaps two kilometers out, leaving nurse sharks and other fish flipping about in the sand. People went out to pick up the fish, and watching this, Graham had a feeling of foreboding and led his girlfriend away from shore. They sat on a fifth floor balcony and watched. Soon enough a second wave came, 70 ft high, and swallowed the people gathering fish. The wall of water submerged the palm trees as it moved in toward the town. The force broke down walls and smashed plate glass windows, sending shards through the water at hundreds of miles an hour, slicing people to bits.
36 hours after the earthquake the force of the tsunami was registered in the Gulf of Mexico. The wave had covered the world. In the forgotten past, so had Kali, whose name appears everywhere—from Califia, California, Caledonia, to the Kalderash language of the Roma, to Gallipoli, Karnack, Carmona, Kelly. The world was inscribed with a history of forgotten disasters.
Who remembers the earthquake in 1556 that killed 830,000 in Hunan? Or in 1887 when the Yellow River broke it’s bank in Huayan Kou and killed 900,000? Who remembers the cyclone that killed 500,000 in Bangladesh in 1970? Nearly that many had been killed now, in an event so outrageous the waves of trauma it released would be embedded in the rim of the Indian Ocean for generations. But still it would be forgotten. It would have to be.

In the distant past when rain and floods threatened, Lord Krishna lifted the Govardhan Mountain onto his little finger to shelter his people. On January 16, 2005, three weeks after the tsunami hit, I arrived in the city of Chennai and found great multitudes along the beach to celebrate this. It was the last day of Pongal—the day of tribute to the sea. The entire shore was invisible behind a mass of bodies—lungis and shirts and saris. Men were selling kites, plastic and rubber toys, some that flew into the air, mutated, and fell back to earth, along with candies, nuts, cooked milk, multicolored bits of sugar in paper cones, ice cream, corn, samosas, sweet milky coffee, sweet milky tea.
Everywhere brown to purple-black Tamil faces. Noserings, earrings, heaps of bangles. People smiled. Children ran up to me, proudly holding up toys before they ran off. To the left was a makeshift amusement park. Ferris wheels and merry-go-rounds, all run by Tamil men pedaling bicycle-style crank-run pulley systems. The beach was broad and flat; if it weren’t for the crowd it might seem almost bleak. The mess of bodies and smells grew denser as I moved toward the water. When I got within thirty feet of the gentle surf, I realized the crowds were being kept back from the water’s edge by a police line. The yellow ribbon extended all the way down the miles of humid sand. Many of the people there must have lost relatives and were coming down to the water for the first time since the disaster. Some were perhaps waiting for a sign—an explanation or an answer to the mystery. Some perhaps believed a miracle would occur—maybe a boat would appear bearing missing parents, missing children back to safety. Certainly there had been enough miracles and disasters at this point to make anything possible. But mostly the people of Chennai had come to stand side by side, crunched against the police line, so they could stand still and stare out southwest at the undulating dark blue water and contemplate the reason for the disaster, the meaning of it, and to try to understand how to go on living in its wake. One woman signalled to an officer, begging to be allowed to step down to the water’s edge and drop in a string of beads. The officer assented, leading her down and watching over her as she knelt to perform her solitary ritual quickly before disappearing back into the mass of bodies.
And what did the sea answer?
I struck up a conversation with an older man standing next to me. He rasped and said “people cannot forget what happened.” He said the tsunami was a karmic occurrence, but that did not mean that everyone that died deserved it. Some died because of the bad deeds of their parents or friends. Those that felt the pain knew the answer, they knew the secret of the karmic equation. He said that for some it was fortunate to die—to be swept away by the sea meant they had completed the cycle that was before them and were ready to go on to the next incarnation.
We stood and watched the sea. It pushed and pulled gently against the sand. We got the leaders we deserve we got the face we deserve we got the death we deserve. The undulating mass of Tamil humanity stood facing east, the direction of origins. But in this case what had originated was the wave, this massive, annihilating force. And finding myself also turned toward this memory my Western mind clung to thoughts of tectonic plates and words like ‘subduction.’ What was it like to stare at the ocean and believe it had a mind connected to the mind of God? It came to take life because “the response to evil human actions is immediate.”

When I got further down the coast to the villages struck hardest by the wave I asked people about the effects. Mostly they were hungry because they refused to eat the fish. Those fish swam with the dead, perhaps fed on the dead. And to feed on what feeds on one’s own dead is not kosher in any religion. The people were impassive by then, but I shuddered considering the depths of the sea populated by swollen corpses. And the saline decay and the bits of scavenging sea creatures. What would happen to the sharks? And in that moment the depth of the tragedy stung me. The poor of Tamil Nadu. The poor of Sri Lanka, Aceh, across to Somalia.
Did karmic punishment entail death or could it also entail staying alive? How subtle is the cosmic machinery? Surely it is not simplistic enough merely to answer sin with a watery death. But certain authorities were calling karma a “non-divine mechanism”—as simple as cause and effect, without the intelligent design of God’s will.
The mind of the universe is not a great holy blissful ease into easeful death. The universe is a passionate and vigorous lunatic. And so karmic justice is not just at all, no more just than worldly justice. It’s perversity is boundless—a doctor who rapes his paralytic patient, a sex slave dreaming of the man that sold her. The workings of karmic justice—though it may truly be pure mindless mechanics—are defined by the unruly workings of emotions. The same strains we recognize in ourselves. And the power of destruction is Bakhunian, Bacchanalian. Death and disease are driven by lust. The response to human activity is immediate. Envy, tedium and cowardice breed death by drowning.

I left my old friend’s Bombay wedding and came to Chennai to volunteer. I got to the Aid India office at nine as requested and was met by a smiling administrator in blue slacks. He told me three other volunteers were arriving and together we could split a cab out to the field (as humanitarians refer to the areas where they work, anywhere outside the office). I just had to wait for them to organize everything, find out if other supplies were needed. Meanwhile I sat around the office. Everyone was polite. “Good morning! Have a seat! Tea?” The office was the site of much scurrying, much conversation. The walls hung with maps and charts. Photographs of smiling villagers. Coffee cups with their owners’ names stenciled on the side.
Two of the three others I was waiting for appeared and they turned out to be a pair of Bombay Parsees, both about fifty. One had moved long ago to Vienna, it turned out, and there were Germanic open vowels mixed into the articulations of his Indian English. He had left India when he was just 12, and although he had been back several times, there was only one time he had made an attempt to live here, around age 19, just out of high school. “My parents returned and I wanted to come with them, but I was too Austrian already. It made no sense to me here.” And he said it again, shaking his head in some kind of regret: “I was just too Austrian.” Later he would explain to me that he had come down with hepatitis and been dangerously close to starving to death because his body was rejecting everything and he spent six weeks on the edge of consciousness, just hallucinating in his illness. As soon as he got better he split in a hot second back for the clean and orderly West.
When the Viennese heard about the tsunami, though, he knew it had his name on it. It had come at a turning point in his life. After his teenage attempt to live in India he’d returned to Austria, finished his studies and struggled to open a business, something to do with telecommunications, as far as I can remember. In any case—office, staff, taxes. Our man was doing fine. He married an Austrian woman and reared two children who had in recent years left home for universities around Europe. Empty nest, success, a time to relax. But instead his calm was immediately ruptured by a surge of memory from his third world past. The fat reality of Viennese life all of the sudden looked sheltered, even idiotic. He said it was no crisis. It was simply that as soon as the tsunami struck he knew if he did nothing this emptiness would eat him. It was time for action. He left his business in the hands of a partner. He made some kind of peace with his wife. Perhaps she would even come. She had never been to India. He had spent two weeks on the phone, on the Internet, trying to locate an organization that would take him. He was frustrated at every turn. “I was going mad.” It wasn’t enough to send money. He wanted to get his hands dirty. He thought of opening orphanages, funding schools, bringing the talented to the West. Finally he found out about Aid India and in two days he had a ticket and was headed to the airport on his way to Bombay, where he met up with his old friend (who sat smiling and bemused listening to this story as we waited on mismatched furniture for a ride out to the field that first morning). Together they had flown in to Chennai the night before. The Viennese could not get to the field fast enough. He bounced on his toes slightly and rubbed his palms as he spoke.
As we were listening to this story, I was thinking about the transparent selfishness of the man’s motives. I did not trust him at all. And I wondered what was the difference between his motives and mine. The existential attempt to find meaning in extreme situations appeared to me utterly pathetic and I was feeling depressed by the entire scenario when an older American woman appeared, in track pants with a plastic buckle hip-sack strung around her waist. Her thick, flabby arms emerged from white cotton sleevelets and several gobbly chins hung down from a smiling, fleshless, lightly lipsticked mouth. The shrill voice ricocheting around the office. “Did my husband call?…Um, have we decided how we’re going to get out to the site?…Oh yes I would love a glass of water…Yes, the heat. Whew!…Oh! thank you!” Is it only because I grew up in America, or could I sense everyone in the room duck slightly at the sound of this voice? My interior monologue was silenced. How insane to hear that voice in the tsunami zone. What was happening? Where were we heading? She introduced herself to us and said she would be coming out and sorry she was late but the office was a little difficult to find oh no dear the directions it’s only for a foreigner my husband, etc.
We were ready to go. We called a cab. You could see steam rise off the back of the Viennese’s neck. The administrator brought us downstairs and put us in a big white car with tinted windows, driven by an old man hunched over the steering wheel. When we got out on the open road after an hour weaving through the endless rickshaws of urban Chennai the Viennese again on nerves started to press the driver to open up the gas a bit. “Don’t be afraid! My friend! Let’s get moving!” Until his larger, smiling companion started to get a shy, embarrassed look in his eyes. All this time the American woman talked and gabbed and explained how she was a psycho-social programmer and someone from Aid had heard her speak at a conference at the university where her husband is a visiting professor of civil engineering and had asked if she wouldn’t want to get involved in the relief efforts and yes of course because she herself had worked as a volunteer and what was often overlooked was the effect that the relief work had on the volunteers themselves and how mostly no one looks after them and keeps their sound minds sound.
The American’s program was to provide relief to the relief-givers, to counsel the counselors.
The non-Viennese Bombay Parsee explained a few things about the Zoroastrian religion. Seems the main temple is in Gujarat, and twice a year there’s a fire ceremony. If you’re well connected you can find a way to get into the inner hall. And if you do that you feel, as he put it, “some holy feeling.”
Meanwhile the American woman gabbed on about helping the helpers and the Viennese Parsee urged the driver to drive faster and faster, as if the seashore, now three weeks after the tsunami struck, were on fire.

The ultimate punishment could be the fate of staring straight ahead, comfortable and well-fed, in a Western home, with the legendary middle-class emptiness swelling in your soul until you’re driven to murderous schizoid rage. To be washed out to sea, to have your children taken from you, the immediate anguish of such an experience can be seen as a kind of reward—immediacy comes only to the sincere and courageous. The smiling idiocy of the American counselor could be its own form of hell. Who knows? Ignorance, obesity, spiritual malaise, the world-weary exhaustion of those who have traveled to the ends of the earth without learning anything. The physical infirmity that comes from the overcautious, spoiled lifestyle of the developed world.
Swollen corpses. Families who lost their livelihood. Fear of fish who feed on corpses, of cultures and races who feed on corpses, their thundering hoofs heading this way, trailing spreadsheets and chicken fat and notes to talks on positivity, health, self-determination, their eyes lit with a stunning unreal fluorescence.

We got to a small town called Kuvathur. Aid had a house in town and had rented the wedding hall upstairs on the main drag, which is where we were all supposed to sleep—on straw mats on the linoleum floor. We dropped off our bags and the American woman went to buy a bottle of water and the Parsees went to look for damage. We didn’t even know which way the sea was. I wandered through the center of town and watched the young girls walk home from school. They wore blue uniforms and their hair was all plaited, a thick braid behind each ear—the symbol of virginity. Mostly they had flowers woven into these plaits and they were all smiles and laughter and easy strides. The houses in town were all decorated for Pongal, their walkways covered in abstract designs drawn with red mud and a white paste made from newly harvested rice.
Eventually a guy called Salim met us. He was from Pune near Bombay, where the Rajneeshis are. He gave us some rice and sambar to eat and told us we’d be picked up in a half hour. And eventually a van showed up and we had to go out into town to find the Parsees, who had had to accept that we were actually far from the seashore and that the tsunami had not reached this far and that the Viennese was going to have to wait a little longer before he could sink his teeth into scenes of destruction and depravation.
We got in the van and drove.
We were dropped off in a little village called Chinakuppam. Straw huts on the beach, with a few brick houses set back from the water. 52 of the straw huts had been washed away by the waves and Aid was helping the community to build new houses. There were piles of wood and dried palms and people were already building. The crew was a mixture of local people, some Aid administrators like Salim, a group of volunteers from Bangalore, a girl from Bombay called Shannon, a bearded Italian guy named Marco and a skinny Scot named Stuart with a low gravelly voice and a face that showed either a bit of hard life or hard living. And there was a young Tamil American named Daesha that had an air of bright and determined humor in whom I recognized the makings of a rare humanitarian believer.
A local politician was there to launch the first of the fishing boats that had been supplied to the bereft villagers. When we got there the site was already a mob of television crews. We found out later that the boats had been sitting in the village for a week already. Salim said: “first the left wing came, then the right wing came, and finally the centrists feel they can make a statement.”
People from the crowd launched a boat, were photographed, dropped their nets and came up with a heap of tiger prawns. They brought the boat back in, the politician and his entourage got out, and everybody left. Then the beach was quiet for a second. Then a few local men came down and whistled and I watched as Salim and another guy from Aid hopped in a boat and went out. The dark blue waves rocked. Up the beach the palms started and then the houses. Among the first line of houses were some that were just the foundation, some where a bit of wall was still standing, and some nearly intact except for a windblown palm stuck through horizontally, like a toothpick through an olive.
Aid was building new shelters just behind this first row of houses. 2×4 A-frames which would be covered with dried palms. Two were already built, and after the disturbance with the politician, it was time for more construction. The first thing that had to be done was to move the 2x4s from where they had been dropped off at one end of the village to the construction site. Everyone rushed to do this. Me, Daesha and Stuart worked together carrying bundles of wood and so started to get to know each other. Stuart had been an actor in London, and had made some money in the last couple of years doing TV commercials and had taken his money and disappeared and moved to Central America—Guatemala was his favorite. He had spent a year exploring the jungle and relaxing. He was about to go back to London when the tsunami hit, and he decided it was the perfect opportunity to go to India and do some good clean manual labor. It amazed me the way all the volunteers, including myself, had seen the tsunami as a thing that fit perfectly into their lives—their timing and their needs. As if it had been anticipated.
We finished moving the pieces of wood and the villagers got straight into the construction. We tried to help but not knowing the language, and not having experience with this kind of building we just got in the way, so we stopped. Daesha and I walked through the village, where small children would run up to us, extend a hand straight out to us as if to shake and shout: “My name is!”
And then the end of the village came and it was just palms and sea and we walked to the sea and sat and stared at the sea. Not helping anyone. Not needed and not missed.
Eventually the sun started to go down and Salim—who had come back from his short fishing trip high on adrenalin—gathered everyone back up and piled us into the van to head back to Kuvathur. The first day of volunteering was over. When we were loaded in, I noticed the American woman and the Parsees were missing. Where had they gone? I asked Salim and he said that they hadn’t even stayed an hour. They had come, seen the site, asked to be shown the damage, complained about the fact that most of the houses had been repaired. Salim explained that there were no more beaches lined with corpses—it had been three weeks. Even so, the three of them had bargained with their cab driver to keep on further south, where other agencies were working, who, Salim assured them, weren’t accepting volunteers, because in general this is work for local people and professionals, but where there might be more extensive damage. Salim said he had argued with them: “What are you doing? Looking for death itself?”
After our first day at Chinakuppam we arrived back in Kuvathur thirsty for booze, and found a place at the edge of town where we could buy bottles of beer, some drink called Day-Night, and little half-liters of Old Monk rum. We settled for the beers and sat down on the pavement to drink them. The other days were very much the same.
The days passed and the nights passed and I settled into the peaceful and beautiful rhythm of small town Tamil life. I watched and sometimes worked to build shelters and distributed rations of rice and lentils. I grew accustomed to eating nothing but rice with sambar and learned to wipe my banana leaf clean. Sometimes as the sun started to go down I sat behind a house with the rest of the volunteers and workers and drank an evil tasting coconut homebrew called toddy taken with spicy pickle. But always when we got back to Kuvathur I sat by the side of the road drinking bottles of beer and talking with the other volunteers and feeling lucky—lucky that the tsunami had brought me there where I was. Life was aesthetic and repetitive and free and easy. Walking back to the van as the sun sank over the sandy fields strewn with plastic bags the men gathered on the road in the center of the village, squatted down and dealt out cards on the pavement. It happened every night. And I looked out over the idyll and tried to imagine the sea rising up irrationally and blanking out the security, the everyday reality, the imaginary what keeps us afloat, and renders it a horrible overpowering mess. The same ocean that now rocked and frothed and lapped at the sandy beach as the sky turned orange. Despite the absent fishing boats and ruined houses and the silence of those who had lost people, the rituals that make life happen continued.

It seeps in during moments of realization. The understanding that life and death are amoral, that nothing is learned, that it is a sentence to be spoken and punctuated, but not understood. Washed out to sea. To stand aside while others are washed out to sea. To go on living when others die. To sit in seriousness, to be humble and content, when others laugh and live carelessly. The realizations come one after another. The knowledge of failure in advance, even as you set out on the trail. The necessity of happiness. The pursuit of happiness. Set out to pursue happiness. To capture and tame it, establish contractual relations there and embezzle money. Import goods and open markets there. Impose democracy and enforce human rights. Suck out tax benefits and raw materials and leave happiness helpless, spent like a ripped balloon in the sand on a beach during a festival, stepped on by children, eventually scooped up by underpaid laborers and hidden from view. And in that momentum comes a hysterical sense of well-being, teetering on the edge of life and death. As long as you keep that in mind you’re fine.

One day I woke up as usual to the whole room in action. Everyone showering, rushing, teeth brushing. I lazed in the corner, eventually went to the coffee guy downstairs and drank cup after cup of sweet milky coffee from the little stainless steel cylinders. The local lunatic walked by and chatted up Stuart, got excited by the drawstrings on his shorts and wouldn’t leave him alone. We had seen him before—handsome, around 30, always in baggy blue trousers, an oversized black thermal undershirt under a pale blue baseball jersey, with one foot in a trainer and the other in an old Teva, carrying a piece of red plastic bent and stapled to form a cup. He spoke a rapid mixture of English and Tamil and jaunted around like Chaplin. First we kind of liked him and tried to be nice, but later we saw him beating a sick dog with a stick.
We skipped breakfast of rice and sambar in favor of store-bought cookies and more coffee while we waited for a ride. We decided to skip hut building that day in favor of health mapping and were driven to a couple of villages just up the coast from the place we usually worked. First we passed out packets containing oil, sugar, mustard and tamarind. Due to limited supply, we had decided that we would give milk powder to those families with children under three years old. Mothers came up to us with children 4 or 5 years old and asked how we could say those children didn’t need milk. Many women did not know the exact age of their children. These people we were not able to help.
We passed out large bags of rice and lentils to a few more fishing communities along the way so they wouldn’t go hungry while their new boats and nets were sorted out, then we went to a larger village called Pazheyanadukuppam to map and register everyone so we could start to deliver packages to them too. This was a laborious process that required arguing in Tamil, so Stuart, Daesha and I turned out to be utterly unnecessary, just more mouths to feed (on lemon rice and brinjal curry, eaten off banana leaves). We wandered around the village and down to the sea—an organization called Terre des Hommes had apparently come through and put up a row of what looked like prefab straw huts, all with signs above the door reading Terre des Hommes. In front of the row was a big black banner reading Terre des Hommes. In the center of the village a large white Terre des Hommes tarp tent had been set up, and in the shade it provided many village men sat playing cards. In an empty field across from the new huts another structure—also made of straw but much larger—had been built by an organization called Good Samaritan. So even the international organizations had been through here. And you could feel it in the people. When they saw us many approached and begged, motioning to my bag. Apparently they connected foreigners with gifts and handouts and were prepared to follow us around hassling us until we coughed something up. After a while Daesha gave away the orange and banana she had bought that morning back in Kuvathur. Totally uninteresting but duly accepted. We waited, we walked, we waited. We sat in front of a small church that had been transformed into a tailor’s shop. The family in the hut next door eyed us, giggled, had Stuart play with their young son. There were three women of varying ages—one young and beautiful in a white and gold silk sari. In the rear of their area of sand, behind the straw hut and shielded by a couple of palms, an old man sat on the ground, wrapped in a torn blanket, moving idiotically from side to side. When he turned around you could see his nose—large and deformed, with several nickel- and quarter-sized carbuncles growing out of each other. His expression was wild and blank and he occasionally licked his lips with a distended and diseased-looking tongue. Daesha recognized the symptoms from a class on infectious diseases—leprosy. I wondered how the village dealt with him. I stared and recoiled internally. Was I so soft that I could not stare a leper in the face? Bite the sores off lepers. Comfort the ill and protect the infirm. I tried to make eye contact with the man but his mind seemed a molten stew that could not connect, and I was soon distracted by the young woman, who had changed into a pure black sari. She came and sat next to me and began to comb and plait her hair elaborately. I sat considering the beauty of this woman, of her clothes and her plaits, and the idealized setting she lived in—the straw huts and the sea. This was the elegant simplicity we’ve all heard about. And behind her the leper. And it seemed to me that to believe in this process of registering and handing out that one had to believe in cause and effect. And my mind went from the girl to the leper, from the girl to the leper, and at that moment I felt that my place was somehow with the leper. That I would have been happier crawling under his diseased blanket and rocking and howling and gnashing my teeth until blood flowed out of my distended tongue.

Kali Yuga is a period of degradation, when all messages are mixed and confused—drug use, exploitation, experimentation, travel, superficiality, rage. The desire to dive into the pit of the dangerous and unknown. I was sitting on the step of a church in an idyllic village watching with longing the contortions of a sick human being. Wondering if he suffers. The vision of Raghunath—one of the eight perfections—consists in feeling the suffering of others as our own. And I was instead feeling the heat of the sun on gold silk and the sweat beading on a man’s leprous carbuncles as if they were visions, as if the intensity of illness and deformity were liberating, as if it were an initiation into something, the shocking thing that jars your awareness and takes you into an altered and deepened reality—the pressure of sentences piling up behind your eyes, in your veins, the feeling of fullness that comes from being a freak, from being a pig among princes, a wandering sore, a maniac in the china shop. A sick and deranged mind behind the house, a molten thing that flows and hardens, underneath the palms, next to the bowl of rice, boiled in a copper pot. Lack of clarity, then extreme focus, and all of the sudden from the leper’s mouth a holler, an uncoiling, and in a moment the sound dopplers into the past and we are disseminated into the far reaches of the world, among rapists and hallucinatory soldiers in high heels, men that believe the rubber of an inner tube is enough to stop bullets, men that believe raping a baby is a cure for AIDS, on beaches strewn with swollen corpses, among the discarded pharmaceuticals and deconstructed arguments, among motivations and childhood scars, until we come back down to the front of the church and then relive it at night lying on the floor of the wedding hall on the straw mats, wheezing through the humidity as volunteers snore, as the polemics unfurl and the night cools the humanitarian bloodlust. Relax and let out the dead air, drop back to the sandpit with the leper, to the bar by the side of the road, to the well-deserved sleep of people who work, and ask for one more chance to do things right, even if it is not here not now not among this particular breed of unspoken thirst, somewhere else, in some other sandtrap with the sick and insane, I imagine it will make sense.
The next day I decided to leave. I said goodbye to Stuart and Daesha and got a ride back to Chennai and resolved to head north.
It was sunset again as I waited, surrounded by schoolboys and holy men, for the train to Calcutta. Jackdaws flocked from tree to tree. And in the temples—parrots, or lovebirds. A couple with a small child drew patterns on the concrete platform with pieces of red earth. A man wearing a lungi and a business shirt stood with an old blender in his hands. A half moon appeared with the cool evening breeze that blew through pink saris, through moustaches and hair-knots. An old woman sat in front of the ticket stand combing her eyebrows. You could buy fresh rose milk, fresh mausambi juice, kokam juice. On the column opposite the platform, a sign advertising Monkey Kung Fu.
And in Calcutta there were bodies everywhere. In alleyways, on staircases, in the middle of the pavement, day and night, hidden behind the chickens in the market hall, in every recess of the city. In the morning everyone washed in the public spigots, children played in the runoff. I spent the day reeling in pain—my right eye had become infected from the bad air—and walking the streets, I eventually came to the Kali Ghat—the greatest temple of Kali in the world. The alleyway leading up to it was a swarm of shops and beggars. Strangely the temple is right next to the Missionaries of Charity hospital—the order of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. The sisters certainly did it intentionally, but who knows what their logic was. Was the Ghat the site of the most abjection? Did Teresa want to evangelize right in the face of the other cult? The two mothers side by side—one old and frail, blue and white, desexualized and selfless, a personification of the true humanitarian, the Christian martyr in life. Then Kali—black and bloody-tongued, fucking Shiva wildly from above—sexual abandon, meaningless violence, rage and vitality, dark forces—the evil in nature. The temple was thronged with worshippers. A line winding all the way out the doors onto the street. Everyone buying figurines and offering packets stamped with Kali’s face. Inside it was a rage of worshipers with their hands in the air, desperate, some in tears, ringing the countless bells that hung from the ceiling like clusters of gaping mouths. Beyond the threshold a monk hung off a column caked with an orange dust that he smeared on worshipers’ foreheads after they pressed him with rupee notes, shouting, demanding, begging for blessings. The shouts became overwhelming. My burning eyes. The dust in the air. The sound so fierce it’s rhythmic—a chant everyone knows, but so chaotic it becomes the sound of a mob, the pure sound of the throng in need. Hands straining outstretched, banging bells, asking to be heard, asking for blessings from our mother the destroyer. Kali says: recite the mantra not in the manner written in the book, but as written across my vulva.
And if next door the Missionaries of Charity swept the sidewalk and opened their doors to the poorest and sickest, it was clear that the city would continue to generate so many starved and infirm that there would never be an end. A constant tsunami. Mother Teresa the symbol of Christian charity and for many the symbol of Calcutta. But the other symbol—the red tongue riding the supine god and forever animating us with vital energy—was clearly more powerful. Mother Teresa was just a parasite who could not live without suffering and destitution. Like the bloodthirsty volunteers and the crowds around the world watching in fascination the devastation left by the tsunami, the devastation that is everyday life in many parts of the world, and among all of that, with the bells ringing and the offering fires burning and the nuns next door sweeping in their pressed whites, I made peace with the situation, sat still for a second, then set out to save myself.

Kali in her perfection—the clear mind and awareness of suffering. Ultimate compassion that is also raging, merciless inflicting pain and at the same time feeling it. Inflicting and processing. Killing and mourning. Destroying and nourishing. They say a monk watched the beating of a bull. And with each crack of the whip the monk screamed out in pain. And when he fell the crowd came to his aid. And stripping off his shirt they found welts on his back. And it was him who had been doing the whipping. That’s where I was. And I was happy.