“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.