Deep River by Shusaku Endo & van C. Gessel

Author:Shusaku Endo & van C. Gessel [Endo, Shusaku & Gessel, van C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811212892
Amazon: 081121320X
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published: 1995-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

She took two sleeping-pills, stretched out on the hard bed, and, annoyed by the dimness of the lights, read from a book she had brought with her, A Student in India, waiting for sleep to overtake her.

A number of photographs had been reproduced in the book, but the ones that most interested her were those of the goddesses associated with Siva. These goddesses were utterly unlike the European images of the Holy Mother Mary; some rode on water buffaloes and stabbed at the demon gods, while others depicted the savagery of the goddess Kālī, who stuck out her long, snakelike tongue as she trampled on her husband Siva.

Two days earlier, at the New Delhi National Museum, Mitsuko had stared at their collection of photographs depicting the goddess Kālī. Tonight the gardens and the hallway were stone silent; perhaps all the other Japanese tourists had fallen asleep. On a separate page, the goddess Kālī was gazing towards her, her arms outstretched, her eyes brimming with gentleness. Her lips had - or had Mitsuko just imagined it? - curled into a smile. On the next page, that smiling Kālī sucked warm blood from the blood-soaked demon Raktavija. She held up a freshly severed head, and blood flecked her lips as she poked out her long tongue.

Mitsuko flicked back and forth between the photograph and the painting, and felt that both images were herself. Earlier that evening she had told Isobe: T think I may have come here in search of something, too.’ Was it the inept Ōtsu she was searching for? Or was she, like Therese Desqueyroux, looking for what lay in the depths of her heart?

The sleeping-pills gradually numbed her brain. She stood up and turned off the light switch near the door, then again stretched out on the bed and peered at the thickly painted layers of darkness. In the hospital where she had worked as a volunteer there had always been some light, even if just the faint glow from a small light that the nurses used to examine the faces of their patients. But the darkness here in India was truly a spiritual darkness, the darkness of the soul. Mitsuko had come in contact with a portion of the soul's blackness. As a woman in whom the flame of passion had been extinguished. As a kindred spirit with Therese Desqueyroux.

She slept for nearly two hours. In the darkness she could hear a sound like the flapping of a bird's wings. She reached over and groped to turn on the lamp on the bedside table, but she quickly remembered that this dingy room had no such table.

She grew suddenly afraid. She had just finished reading in A Student in India that while the author was studying in his room, he had heard a swishing noise outside his window like the sound of a broom sweeping the garden, but when the sound began to come from a corner of his room, he turned round and saw a stark-black cobra poised to strike.

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