INDIA: The Sacrifice

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Kali, the Dark Mother, wife of Siva in the Hindu pantheon, is black and terrible. Death and destruction are her province; her eyes and the palms of her four hands are red, her tongue protrudes, corpses are her earrings and around her neck is a string of skulls. In times gone by, Kali was occasionally offered human sacrifices; in modern India she must make do with the blood of goats. But not always.

Last week in Ghaziabad (pop. 50,000), near Delhi, dark Kali reasserted herself through a dirt-poor street sweeper. Hari Singh came home one day to find that his two pigs had wandered off and were locked up in the pound. He had no money to redeem them. That night as he slept, Black Kali came to him in a dream and told him what he must do to get his pigs back. The next day he did it.

His wife and older children were out working; his four-year-old son Bikram was playing outside the hut. Hari Singh took him inside, laid him on a cot and, with a scream of "Kali mai ki jai" (Hail Mother Kali), cut his throat. Then, carrying Bikram's bloody body and chanting the name of Kali, he strode out along the street. An awe-struck crowd followed him to the temple of the goddess, watched while he sprinkled the blood on her black image and smeared it on her forehead.

Summoned by the shocked temple priest, the police found Hari Singh sitting quietly under a sapling in the temple courtyard, waiting for Kali to bring Bi-Kram's little body back to life.

In Nehru's India, religious excesses are embarrassing relics of the past. "Hari Singh will be tried for murder—he is not insane," said a police officer curtly.