...Black Kali is beautiful and horrible...Her shoulders are round like the rising autumn moon; her breasts are like buds about to burst; her hips sway like the trunk of the newly born elephant calf; and her dancing feet are like green shoots. Her mouth is as warm as life; her eyes as deep as death...Kali is abject. She has lost her divine caste by having given herself to pariahs, to outcasts, and her cheeks kissed by lepers are now covered with a crust of stars.

She presses herself against the mangy chests of the camel drivers from the north, who never wash because of the intense cold. She sleeps on vermin-ridden beds with blind beggars; she passes from the embrace of Brahmins to that of miserable creatures, the unclean, whose very presence pollutes the day, who are charged with washing the corpses. And stretched out in the pyramid-shaped shadows of the funeral pyres, Kali abandons herself upon the still warm ashes. She also loves the boatmen, who are rough and strong. She even accepts the black men who work in the bazaar, more harshly beaten than beasts of burden; she rubs her head against their shoulders raw from the swaying of their loads. Wretched as a feverish woman unable to find cool water, she goes from village to village, from crossroads to crossroads, in search of the same mournful delights. Her tiny feet dance frantically below the chiming anklets, but her eyes never stop weeping, her bitter mouth never kisses, her eyelashes never caress the cheeks of those who embrace her, and her face remains eternally pale like an immaculate moon.

A long time ago, Kali, lotus flower of perfection, reigned in Indra’s heaven as in the depths of a sapphire; the diamonds of dawn glittered in her eyes, and the universe contracted or expanded in tune with the beatings of her heart. But Kali, perfect as a flower, ignored her own perfection and, pure as the day itself, had no knowledge of her own purity. The jealous gods followed Kali one evening, during an eclipse, into a cone of darkness, in a corner of a conniving planet. A bolt of lightning cut her head off. Instead of blood, a torrent of light sprang from her sliced neck. Her halved body, thrown into the abyss by the Jinns, rolled down into the uttermost pit of hell, where those who have not seen or have refused the heavenly light crawl and whimper. A cold wind blew, condensing the clear flakes that started to drop from the sky; a white layer began to collect on the mountaintops, beneath starry spaces where night was falling.

The monster gods, the cattle gods, the gods of many arms and many legs like turning wheels, escaped through the shadows, blinded by their halos of fire, and the haggard immortals regretted their crime. Contrite, the gods descended along the Roof of the World, into the abyss full of smoke where those who once were alive now crawl. They crossed the nine purgatories; they passed prisons of ice and mud, where ghosts devoured by remorse repent the wrongs they have committed, and prisons of fire, where other dead, tormented by vain greed, bemoan the wrongs they did not commit. The gods were astounded to find that man has such an infinite capacity for evil, so many resources and agonies of pleasure and sin.

At the bottom of the ossuary, in a swamp, Kali’s head bobbed like a water lily, and her long black hair rippled around it like floating roots. Piously, they picked up the lovely pale head and they set off to find the body that had borne it. A headless body was lying on the shore. They took it, placed Kali’s head upon those shoulders, and brought the goddess back to life.

The body was that of a prostitute condemned to death for having sought to trouble the meditations of a young Brahmin. Drained of blood, the ashen corpse seemed pure. The goddess and the harlot had on the left thigh the same beauty spot.

Never again did Kali, lotus flower of perfection, reign in Indra’s heaven. The body to which the divine head was joined felt homesick for the streets of ill repute, the forbidden encounters, the rooms where the prostitutes, meditating on secret debauches, survey the clients’ arrival through the slits of green shutters. She became the seducer of children, the inciter of old men, the ruthless mistress of the young; and the women of the town, neglected by their husbands and feeling like widows, compared Kali’s body to the flames of a pyre. She was as unclean as a gutter rat and as loathed as a weasel of the fields. She stole hearts as if they were strips of offal from the butcher’s block, and the liquefied fortunes of men clung to her hands like strands of honey. Never resting, from Benares to Kapilavastu, from Bangalore to Srinagar, Kali’s body bore the goddess's dishonored head, and her limpid eyes continued to weep.

One morning in Benares, Kali, drunk, grimacing with fatigue, left the harlots’ street. In the fields, an idiot quietly slobbering, seated at the edge of a dung heap, rose to his feet as she passed and ran after her. When he was barely the length of his shadow away, Kali slowed down and allowed him to overtake her. After he had left her, she continued her way toward an unknown city.

A child begged her for alms, and she did not even warn him that a snake, about to strike, was lifting its head between two stones. She had been overcome by a hatred of all living things, and at the same time by a desire to swell her substance, to annihilate all creatures as she fed on them.

She could be seen crouching at the edge of graveyards; her jaws cracked bones like the maw of a lioness. She killed like the female insect devouring the male; she crushed the beings she brought to life like a wild sow turning on her young. Those she killed, she finished off by dancing on their bodies. Her lips stained with blood exuded a dull smell of butcher shops, but her embrace consoled her victims, and the warmth of her breast made them forget all ills.

At the edge of a wood, Kali met a wise man. He was sitting cross-legged, palms placed one against the other, and his wizened body was as dry as firewood. Nobody could have said if he was very young or very old; his all-seeing eyes were barely visible beneath his half-shut lids. Around him the light formed a halo, and Kali felt rising from her own inner depths the presentiment of a vast definitive peace, where worlds would stop and beings would be delivered; and of a day of beatitude on which both life and death will be equally useless, an age in which the All will be absorbed into Nothingness, as if that pure vacuity that she had just conceived were quivering within her like a future child.

The Master of Great Compassion lifted a hand to bless the passing woman. “My immaculate head has been fixed to the body of infamy,” she said. “I desire and do not desire, I suffer and yet I enjoy, I loathe living and am afraid to die.”

“We are all incomplete,” said the wise man. “We are all pieces, fragments, shadows, matterless ghosts. We all have believed that we have wept and that we have felt pleasure for endless centuries.”

“I was a goddess in Indra’s heaven,” said the harlot.

“And yet you were not freer from the chain of things, nor your diamond body safer from misfortune than your body of flesh and filth. Perhaps, unhappy woman, dishonored traveler of every road, you are about to attain that which has no shape.”

“I am tired,” moaned the goddess.

Then, touching with the tip of his fingers the black tresses soiled with ashes, he said: “Desire has taught you the emptiness of desire; regret has shown you the uselessness of regret. Be patient, Error of which we are all a part, Imperfect Creature thanks to whom perfection becomes aware of itself, O Lust which is not necessarily immortal."