The woman collapsed, took the dead infant, and shoved it into the cavity, then lay there sputtering smoke-blood from her mouth.

“I was transfixed...but unmoved, y’know? The image of that dead child floating in the gore of the beggar woman’s chest fascinated me on an artistic level, so I stood there and watched her dying, searing the image into my brain. And then I heard the music.”

Instruments appeared in the hands of the smoke-crowd; drums, a flute, something that could only have beer a sitar.

“I have no idea where the instruments came from. To this day I swear that the others were empty-handed when I got there but now, suddenly, all of them had instruments and were playing them with astonishing skill—ghatams, tablas, mridangams, a recorder and sitar—and the sound was so rich, so spiraling and glad! I could feel it wrap itself around me and bid ‘Sing!’ I couldn’t find my voice—believe me, if I could have, I would’ve sung my heart out—so one of the women in the group began to sing for me: ‘I am struck by a greater and greater wonder, and I rejoice again and again!’ She was singing in Hindu—Hindu, a language I don’t know, yet I understood every word in her song. ‘Oh, see him in the burdened, In hearts o’erturned with grief, The lips that mutter mercy, The tears that never cease,’ and the others responded in voices a hundred times fuller than any human’s voice should be: ‘I AM, I AM, I AM the light; I live, I live, I live in light,’ and now I’m shaking not only from the damned weirdness of it all but because the music, this pulsing, swirling, pure crystal rain sound is inside me—I know how that must seem to you, but I swear I felt it assume physical dimensions deep in my gut. It shook me.

“I went down on one knee because I thought I was going to be sick but the sound kept growing without and within me, and I was aware not only of the music and the people playing it and the dying woman in front of me, but of every living thing surrounding us; every weed, every insect, every animal in distant fields, the birds flying overhead...it was...I’m not quite sure how to—oh, hang on.

“I once met a schizophrenic who described what it felt like when he wasn’t on his medication. He said it was as if all of his nerves had been plugged into every electrical appliance in the house and someone had set those appliances to run full-blast. That’s what it was like for me that day in the graveyard. For one moment all life everywhere was functioning at its peak and I was ‘plugged into’ everything—but only as long as this music deemed me worthy of possession.”

I began shaking my head; slowly, at first, then with more determination, in order to rid my ears—both my ears—of a buzzing pressure that was growing inside my skull.

Knight continued: “I managed to pull my head up and look at the beggar woman. She had reached over and taken the violin with the broken neck and was holding it against the baby—both the dead infant and the instrument were slick with her blood—and she made the smallest movement with her head, a quick, sharp, sideways jerk that I knew meant ‘Come closer.’ I leaned over until my ear was nearly touching her lips and I heard her whisper three words: ‘Shakti. Kichar admi.’ It wasn’t until later, when I’d gotten back to the set and asked one of the Indian crew members about it, that I found out what ‘Shakti’ meant: Creative intelligence, beauty & power. The cosmic energies as perceived in Hindu mysticism, given to mankind by Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva so it might know some small part of what it feels like to be a god.

“Then she pushed me away with surprising strength. I fell backwards onto my ass and felt the music wrenched from my chest. I was suddenly separate from all of them, from the earth, my own flesh, the glow of the setting sun; the surrounding life had withdrawn from me, unplugged itself. I was being asked to leave, so I did. With their glorious music still spinning in the air behind me, I moved toward the road and did not look back until I was well past the gates.”

The smoke-players began to reverently shift their positions. I rubbed my temples and turned my head to the side; not only was I hearing the song Knight had described, but underneath it was the cumulative babble of a million whispering voices speaking in as many different languages.

“As soon as I stepped from the cemetery I heard a new sound join the music, a lone, sustained note that floated above everything, a mournful cry that sang of ill-founded dreams and sorrowful partings and dusty myths from ages long gone by, then progressively rose in pitch to soften this extraordinary melancholy with promises of joy and wonder—‘I AM light’s fullest dimension, I AM light’s richest intention, I AM, I AM, I AM the light!’—and I turned for one more look, one last drinking in of this gloriously odd, golden moment, and I saw the child standing in the midst of the musicians, such a beautiful child, the violin tucked firmly under his chin. He looked at me and smiled a smile unlike any that had been smiled before, full of riddles and mischief and answers and glee, and in that smile I knew his name: Shakti. He was giving me a final chord, a last bit of the music to remember for the rest of my life, and in that last moment he opened me up to the majestic cacophony to such a degree that I heard…Jesus Christ, I heard everything.

“I ran. It was the only thing I could think to do to break this hold on me. I turned and ran back toward the film set. And even though it seemed that every person I passed on the road wore the beggar woman’s face or was clutching a dead infant to their chest or was in some way sick or damaged, I felt…elated. I know that must sound crazier than a soup sandwich, but I knew all of these people, with their lips that muttered mercy and their tears that never ceased, were walking toward the cemetery where the pain and sadness would be lifted from their eyes, and that I was being watched over by a child of wonder who would always be waiting at the entrance to my secret world. “And all of them said the same thing to me as they passed by. ‘Kichar admi.’” “Did you ever find out what that meant?” He nodded, then strummed the guitar once again. “’Mudman.’” “Holy shit.”

“Yeah.” He began playing the opening to “Kiss of the Mudman”, that almost-traditional 12-bar blues riff where you can tell something is just a bit off but can’t put your finger on it.

“What is the Mudman supposed to be?” I asked him.

“I always figured it was just another name for Kshetrapala, but later, when I woke up in the middle of the night after me and Veronique had practically went through the floor with our fucking, I thought…man, I thought, what better way to describe what it feels like after you wake up from a night of excess. The taste of booze in your mouth, maybe a little puke-burp rolling around in the back of your throat, your body aching, your head splitting, your face feeling like a glazed donut from going down on wet pussy…excess. You wake feeling like you got kissed by the Mudman.”

He stopped playing. “I was still hearing that song they had been singing, so I picked up my guitar and started fooling around with it, and I realized that what they’d been singing was…I don’t know if this’ll make sense…but they’d been singing something like an inverted traditional blues riff.”

He played it again, and this time I heard it, the off-thing, a single note in the middle of the riff that didn’t seem to fit.

“The progression seemed so logical,” said Knight. “Leave the G string alone—tuned to G, of course—so the high and low E strings go down a half step to E flat. The B string goes down a half step to B flat, the A and D go up a half step, to B flat and E flat. The result was an open E flat major chord, which made easy work of the central riff. For the intro, I started on the 12th fret, pressing the 1st and 3rd strings down, dropped down to the 7th and 8th fret on those same strings for the next chord, and continued down the neck...as the progression moved to the 4th string, more and more notes were left out and it became a disguised version of a typical blues riff. The idea was to have a rush of notes to sort of clear the palette, not open the back door to Hell...but that’s a road paved with good intentions, isn’t it?”