MOTHER KALI'S DAUGHTERS is a psychedelic trip into the heart of India. The occult, astrologers, mystics and magicians all wield their power in a love story that takes the readers up the Ganges River from West Bengal to its source; a giant glacier in the shape of a cow's head, located high in the Himalayas. The purpose of the journey is to return a powerful crystal to its crown on a mountain peak above the glacier.
Two witches have been employed by Lord God Shiva to accomplish this task. And they materialize on this plane of existence as a couple of young hippy goddesses. Using a magic, psychedelic oil, they recruit an unsuspecting subject, and after ingesting the oil he enters another dimension, to find himself in a story of love and separation. Fate pushes him along, so that he comes into contact with the goddess who possesses the crystal. After many adventures with Aghoris, Hijras, snake charmers, yogis and tantric madmen they complete their mission.
Yet the mystical tale doesn't end there, because disobeying the witch's instruction forces the story to return to the present dimension. The book is woven together with Hindu metaphysical philosophy and brings up many questions concerning one's own perceptions of reality. Still, everything is tempered with an acute sense of humor and may cause the reader to have happy hallucinations. Do not read while driving, or operating heavy machinery. The following is an excerpt from the novel.
The train from Haridwar to Delhi was tightly packed with passengers. There was no room to sit anywhere, not even on the floor, or in the overhead luggage racks, as these were all crammed with people. It was hard to imagine anyone else squeezing in, but Lotus and Tamas had no reservations, so they had to wedge themselves into cracks between the bodies.
They’d come down from the mountain elated by the experience. Lotus felt relieved that she no longer had the responsibility of the crystal, and was glad she’d accomplished her fated task to return Shiva’s sacred tool to its place in the mountain’s crown. And Tamas was pleased that he’d rediscovered his love for Sita. He had thought that she was lost forever.
They were still good friends too. Both had assumed that they would part ways after Tapovan, but that didn’t happen, as they’d grown inexplicably fond of each other. It had nothing to do with sex either. And Lotus had decided to leave all the romance for Sita too. She couldn’t explain her feelings for Tamas, and didn’t try. She only acknowledged that Tamas was a soul mate, and her destiny was to travel with him to Goa.
Tamas was content with her companionship. He no longer feared she would replace Sita in his heart. He knew that was impossible. His indiscretions with his mystical lover had already been forgotten. His conscience had been wiped clean. His love for Sita was no longer tainted.
“There is no air in here,” Tamas complained, as a few more passengers pushed into the car.
“Then stop your breath.”
Tamas felt that an unwise decision, as he was no great yogi and still needed oxygen to survive. But Lotus seemed very capable of doing it. Nothing indicated she was breathing. There was no movement anywhere. So Tamas placed his hand under her nose. He felt no air moving there either. Lotus stood motionless, until the train jerked forward and jostled her out of her trance.
“Oh,” she complained with a grimace, “I was just leaving my body!”
“Well, welcome back!” Tamas greeted her with laughter. “Did you expect me to suffer alone?”
“No. That’s what friends are for; we suffer together!”
The sound of a beggar suddenly came from within the packed mass of humanity. His voice was full of emotion as he sang a Muslim song. Tamas tried to see what he looked like, but couldn’t find him anywhere. His voice appeared to be coming from all directions simultaneously.
“Where is the singer?” he asked Lotus.
“He sounds like he is inside my head.”
“It’s the same with me,” Tamas returned, not understanding the phenomenon.
A few seconds later the beggar crawled out from under some feet and placed himself on the floor between Tamas and Lotus. He only had half a body, with no legs, but still sang with the voice of a very proud man.
“If you want to dance with me, then you’ll have to dance with God. Everything must have His blessing. My legs are gone and I have to beg, but still I sing ‘God is great’ with all my heart!”
The beggar lifted his hand to ask for alms. As he did so, the train rocked and he inadvertently rubbed it against Lotus’s yoni. She didn’t seem to mind at all. It was only harmless titillation, esoteric love she could freely share with a legless beggar.
The train swayed in the opposite direction and the beggar’s hand moved to Tamas’s pocket. He gave him a coin. The beggar examined it and asked for more. But Tamas refused, so Lotus searched her own bag and found another coin for him. The beggar rubbed his nose between her legs in gratitude, and then crawled away.
“Do you always let men touch you that way?” Tamas asked her, having noticed their interaction.
“Yes, if it gives them pleasure,” she replied nonchalantly. “He begs for alms, and I offer him something no one else is willing to give, so that’s why he sings, ‘God is great’!”
“But don’t you even pick and choose, or make any distinctions?”
“No, I let the Divine Mother do that. She’s the one who sends them to me. I’m only her obedient devotee!”
The train spat them out on the Delhi platform several hours later. It was a big city, full of people, traffic and noise. The air was thick with yellow and black automobile pollution.
“We have to get out of here as quickly as possible,” Tamas decided. “I can’t survive in this stuff.”
“But there is no train to Goa until tomorrow. Where will we spend the night? The streets don’t look very inviting.”
“Maybe we can find a temple nearby. Let’s go look around.”
Their enquiries pointed them to a gateway, directly across the busy thoroughfare, opposite the railway station. A set of stone stairs descended from an archway at street level, to a park full of trees and flowers. Set amongst this greenery, were a number of small shrines and temples. Lotus and Tamas rang the overhead bells, as they entered this oasis of serenity, located in the middle of all the chaos that comprised old Delhi.
A number of sadhus had set up camps in the park, and Lotus was very pleased with this discovery.
“Perfect! We can stay with the babas tonight.”
Tamas liked the idea too, because he was sure to find a chillum burning someplace on the premises. He decided to search around right away, and luckily caught the attention of a group of orange-clad mahatmas. They signaled for him to join them.
Lotus wasn’t interested, and preferred to explore the rest of the ashram. She told Tamas she would wander around by herself.
“You know where to find me,” he agreed.
Lotus hadn’t gone far, when she came across two half-naked women behind one of the shrines. They sat within a hexagon they’d drawn with colored dust on the ground. There was something familiar about them, but Lotus couldn’t place it, and thought they might have appeared in one of her dreams. She would have thought they were women sadhus, except for their naked breasts, which made Lotus decide that they were not ordinary sanyasins.
One of them beckoned for Lotus to enter the hexagon. And she curiously did so.
“We have something for your sister,” a witch cackled through her broken teeth.
“Which sister?” Lotus asked with surprise. “All women are my sisters, even you!”
“The one you haven’t met yet, but whose destiny you share. Here is a small, green bottle for you to deliver. If you fail in your efforts, this dream will be over!”
Lotus didn’t understand what the witch meant, and asked what the bottle contained.
“Three drops of magic!”
Lotus was intrigued and asked how it worked.
“Place a drop on your tongue and make a wish. All will come true. But heed our warning and save one drop for your sister, or nothing will appear as it should.”
Lotus pulled out the stopper and looked inside. It seemed to go on forever. She could see no bottom to the bottle, and felt that if she wasn’t careful, she might fall through its tiny opening and end up on a long journey to nowhere. So she quickly averted her eyes, by looking up. The two witches were no longer there. They had vanished.
Lotus took the bottle back to Tamas, who had been enjoying himself immensely with the mahatmas.
“Look,” she said, holding out the bottle for his inspection.
“What’s that?”
“A bottle full of magic that two strange women gave me.”
One of the mahatmas quickly snatched the bottle from her hands and demanded to examine it. He sniffed the contents until he was satisfied he recognized its composition.
“What’s inside the bottle?”
But the mahatma didn’t answer immediately and instead asked Lotus where she had acquired the bottle.
“From two women sadhus behind that shrine,” Lotus pointed out the direction.
“Describe them.”
Lotus painted a very clear picture of the witches, even indicating differences between their naked breasts.
“There are no such women here! All women must cover themselves in this ashram!”
“But I saw them and they gave me the bottle!”
“Where are they now?”
“I don’t know; they disappeared.”
“They were never here,” the mahatma concluded.
“What about the bottle?” Lotus countered, sure that it wasn’t just her imagination, because she held physical proof of their existence.
“Oh, the bottle is real. We can all see that. And from the smell, I ascertain it contains magic oil with properties that are able to transport beings to other dimensions.”
Tamas raised his eyebrows in hope. He liked to be transported to other dimensions, and asked to see the bottle, so he could also sniff the contents. Something about it and the description of the two women, struck a familiar note with him too! But Tamas couldn’t figure out the connection either, and like Lotus, also decided they must have appeared in his dreams.
“Shall I try a drop?” Tamas offered himself as a willing subject for experimentation.
“You will have to wait until I find my sister,” Lotus refused his request. “The two women said it was very important!”
“Which sister?”
“We’ll know her when we find her,” Lotus stated, as she put the bottle safely away in her pouch.
Bells rang and gongs clanged to announce evening aarti. A conch shell punctuated the air with sharp blasts that sounded like an elephant’s trumpet. Frankincense wafted out the temple door, and called devotees to worship. Lotus was irresistibly drawn to the puja, while Tamas remained behind at the chillum circle.
The Hindu ritual permeated all her senses. It started with the sounds of the instruments, then moved to the intoxicating smell of burning incense, was followed by the ecstatic sight of the deity and the touch of the cold, stone lingam, to be concluded with the sweet taste of prasad.
Lotus found this form of worship to be very simple and beautiful. It was designed as a path of devotion for the common man and his family. Their dharma was not in a position for them to cast off maya and take on the lives of yogis. So they followed this thread through the fabric of existence. It gave them something to hang onto, in all the swirling, biological confusion of survival.
Procreation was their only other reason for existence. God had injected them with a strong genetic urge, where their families were the most important things in their delusions. The family man could not escape his duties with instant enlightenment, and had to be content with this form of worship for countless incarnations, until he accumulated enough good karma to advance to the next stage. Every time he offered a flower, or lit a candle and recited a mantra, he added another grain of sand to an infinite hourglass that would take all eternity to fill. Yet he persisted with his task, generation after generation, because it was his only hope. Lotus appreciated this devotion and immersed herself in all its glory.
She sat on the floor, in one corner of the temple, and watched as devotees made their offerings and received blessings. She drank it all in, turning their worship into her own. She became light-headed and giddy with every drop she ingested. Through a process of osmosis she was pulled through the curtain of illusion, into the world of Gods. It was a very gentle and loving place, where Lotus became a truly free spirit, because her body no longer existed, and she was attached to nothing. Only the molecules of karma made up her being now. And in the world of Gods, all molecules were mixed into a great and vast oneness. Lotus became the deities she worshipped. She was the Mother Goddess. Divine!
Tamas brought Lotus back to earthbound reality when he told her food was being served, and asked her if she was hungry, because they hadn’t eaten all day. Lotus wanted to stay on the other side, but the issue of food dragged her back to the mundane plane. She was famished.
“Yes,” she said, as she jumped to her feet. “Let’s go eat!”
Lotus took a banana leaf and sat down beside a fat baba who wore no clothing at all. She wanted to ask him why he was allowed to go naked in the ashram, while women had to cover their breasts, but decided it might not be an appropriate topic of conversation.
So instead, she asked, “What’s for dinner?”
The fat baba slowly turned his eyes to see who had dared to speak with him. Lotus met them and gave a warm smile in return. The baba furled his brow in disapproval.
“Do you know what is being served?” she innocently continued.
“Food!” the baba replied in disbelief.
“What type of food?”
“Vegetarian! We are not concerned with anything else here. We don’t care how it tastes, or where it comes from; only that it is vegetarian!”
“What about onions? Do you like them?”
“I don’t like to eat anything!”
“Then how did you get so fat?”
The baba turned away from her without answering the question, because a man came around with a pot of rice. Lotus expected the fat baba to ask for a big pile of it, but was quite shocked when he was only given a few grains. Everyone else got much more on their plates. The same thing happened with the vegetables. And then the baba only ate a tiny piece of sweet too.
“Is that all the food you take in?”
“It’s enough for me,” he replied. “Why, do you think I need more?”
Lotus saw his point, because he was already extremely fat. But she couldn’t believe he’d gotten that way from eating so little.
“Are you on a diet?” she hesitantly asked, hoping to discover his secret.
“No, I’ve always eaten this way,” he replied, getting tired of her questions.
Lotus still didn’t believe him, and tried to prod the truth out, “How can this be? It doesn’t make sense! How can you get fat from nothing?”
The baba just smiled at her and said, “Om Nama Shiva!”
