The Cauliflower Read Free Page B

is Kali (the feminine form of kalam , which means “black,” or kala , which means “time”). When fierce Kali died, Shiva became uncontrollable with grief and rage. He carried her corpse on his shoulders and performed a violent dervish dance of anger, smashing his feet down upon the earth. The other gods became concerned that unless Shiva could be persuaded to relinquish Kali’s body he would destroy the world altogether, and so Vishnu took a blade and threw it at Kali’s corpse, which was then scattered in fifty-two chunks across the earth. The little toe of the right foot landed next to the great river Hooghly, in Bengal, and a temple was built there to mark the spot. This temple was—and is—Kalighat. This place was—and is—Kali-kata.
    In the beginning was Job Charnock. And Job Charnock was named after the biblical character famed for being sent endless trials by Satan, with God’s permission, to test whether his love for God was truly sincere. Job is celebrated for his righteous suffering. Our Job—Mister Charnock (who suffered righteously)—was born in London although his family originally hailed from the north, from Lancashire. He was a loyal, highly valued employee of the English East India Company in Bengal. He was a moral man and a devout Christian. In 1663, he took a common-law wife—a Hindu widow, a sati —who he was reputed to have snatched from her husband’s funeral pyre. She was fifteen years old, and he renamed her Maria. They had four children together. They all lived in Cal-Kali-kata-cutta. One of the daughters, Mary, went on to marry Bengal’s first president, Sir Charles Eyre. Job was devoted to Maria, and they lived happily together for twenty-five years until her tragically premature death in 1688. A devastated Job built a garden house in the northern suburb of Barrackpore, Cal-Kali-kata-cutta, in order to remain close to her grave, where, rumor had it, every year he slaughtered a cock in a Sufi ritual on the date of her death. Maria was buried as a Christian, although Job Charnock was accused of converting to Hinduism and his life story was later—with considerable bile and aplomb—employed as a cautionary tale of moral laxity and improbity. When Charnock died, Eyre, his powerful son-in-law, erected a monument in his honor—which made no mention of his beloved wife—constructed from a form of shimmering granite which in the year 1900, after briefly apprehending it, the famous geologist Thomas Henry Holland would christen “Charnockite.”
    In the beginning was the word, and the word was Cal-Kali-kata-cutta, but there is no word, and the person who created the word is no person, only rock, and if there was a person he was a most loathed, mistrusted, morose, and morally degenerate company administrator. So it’s probably better that we waste no more of our precious time and energy thinking about him here.
    1857, the Kali Temple, Dakshineswar (six miles north of Calcutta)
    What better place in the world for one such as Uncle to be born than deep in the bosom of the Chatterjee family? Both Kshudiram and Chandradevi had been blessed with many divine visions. Uncle’s brother Ramkumar had special spiritual gifts and foretold his own wife’s early death. Uncle’s sister, Katyayani, was prone to erratic behaviors and was once possessed by a bad spirit which Kshudiram exorcized with a pilgrimage to Gaya to worship at the feet of Vishnu. Kshudiram’s sister, Ramsila, would sometimes believe herself to be possessed by the spirit of the Goddess Sitala (the Disease Goddess, the Goddess of Smallpox, who brings coolness to victims of fever). I was very afraid of Ramsila as a boy, but Uncle—only four years older—showed no fear of his aunt during her transformations. No, the young Uncle was not remotely afraid. Uncle was fascinated. Uncle calmly observed the reverence and awe with which Ramsila was