Feel free to pass this over:
I nodded. The heat had caused a headache to start throbbing behind my eyes. "Abe, you've just spent time in the wrong cities," I said lightly. "Try spending a summer in North Philadelphia or on the Southside of Chicago where I grew up. That'll make Calcutta look like Fun City"
"Yeah," said Abe. He wasn't looking at me anymore. "Well, it wasn't just the city. I wanted out of Calcutta so my bureau chief--a poor schmuck who died of cirrhosis of the liver a couple of years later ... this jerk gives me an assignment to cover a bridge dedication way out in the boonies of Bengal somewhere. I mean, there wasn't even a railroad line there yet, just this damn bridge connecting one patch of jungle to another across a river about two hundred yards wide and three inches deep. But the bridge had been built with some of the first postwar aid money sent from the States, so I had to go cover the dedication." Abe paused and looked out the window. From somewhere down the street came angry shouts in Spanish. Abe did not seem to hear them. "So anyway, it was pretty dull. The engineers and construction crew had already left, and the dedication was the usual mixture of politics and religion that you always get in India. It was too late to start back by jeep that evening--I was in no hurry to get back to Calcutta, anyway--so I stayed in a little guest house on the edge of the village. It was probably left over from British inspection tours during the Raj. But it was so damn hot that night--one of those times when the sweat won't even drip, it just beads on your skin and hangs in the air--and the mosquitoes were driving me crazy; so sometime after midnight I got up and walked down to the bridge. I smoked a cigarette and headed back. If it hadn't been for the moon I wouldn't have seen it."
Abe took the cigar out of his mouth. He grimaced as if it tasted as foul as it looked. "The kid couldn't have been much more than ten, maybe younger," he said. "He'd been impaled on some iron reinforcement rods sticking up out of the cement abutment on the west side of the bridge. You could tell that he hadn't died right away; that he'd struggled for some time after the rods went through him--"
"He'd been climbing on the new bridge?" I said.
"Yeah, that's what I thought," said Abe. "And that's what the local authorities said at the inquest. But for the life of me I couldn't figure out how he'd managed to hit those rods ... He would've had to have jumped way out from the high girders. Then, a couple of weeks later, right before Gandhi broke his fast and the rioting stopped back in Calcutta, I went over to the British consulate there to dig out a copy of Kipling's story 'The Bridge Builders.' You've read it, haven't you?"
"No," I said. I couldn't stand Kipling's prose or poetry.
"You should," said Abe. "Kipling's short fiction is quite good."
"So what's the story?" I asked.
"Well, the story hinges around the fact that at the end of every bridge-building, Bengalis used to have an elaborate religious ceremony."
"That's not unusual, is it?" I said, half guessing the punch line of all of this.
"Not at all," said Abe. "Every event in India calls for some sort of religious ceremony. It's just the way the Bengalis went about it that caused Kipling to write the story." Abe put the cigar back in his mouth and spoke through gritted teeth. "At the end of each bridge construction, they offered up a human sacrifice."
Song of Kali, by Dan Simmons.
Good book, if any of you care to pick it up sometime. Sorry for the long copypasta. It seemed to fit.
