“Man, I’m telling you, Sam, I have never before or since seen such pure madness in someone’s eyes. For a moment, as she stared at me, I could feel her despair and insanity seeping into my pores. She was emaciated from starvation and had been severely burned at some time—the left half of her face was fused to her shoulder by greasy wattles of pinkish-gray scar tissue. She was trying to form words but all that emerged were these…guttural animal sounds.

“The baby she was holding, it was dead. Not only that, but it had been dead for quite some time because it was partially decomposed. It looked like a small mummy.”

I could clearly see the baby take shape from a few stray strands of smoke.

“The old beggar woman lowered her arms, laid the baby’s corpse on the ground, and began keening—that’s the only word for it. She sang her grief. I looked at the others and saw these placid expressions on their faces…they seemed almost distracted.” He looked at me for a moment, then directed his gaze to the shadowy smoke-play unfolding in the air between us.

The figure of the beggar woman thrust one of its hands under its shawl and pulled out something that could only have been a knife; a very, very long knife.

“She began hacking away at her own chest, ripping out sections of muscle and bone until this bloody cavity was there,” said Knight, his eyes glazing over. “I backed away but I couldn’t stop looking. I mean, I’d read all the stories of Yukio Mishima’s committing public hara-kiri as a way of merging life with art but I never tried to picture something like that in my mind—and now, right here in front of me, this poor, crazy woman was disemboweling herself in an apparent act of worship, and the ‘congregation’ looked like a bunch of disinterested Broadway producers forced to watch a cattle-call audition.”

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.