Calcutta, India

The primary setting for the novel Song of Kali, Calcutta is described from the preface onward as a place too evil to exist. Narrator Robert C. "Bobby" Luczak, a man who has shunned violence since childhood, wishes that nuclear bombs would rain down on Calcutta and expunge it. Indian poets variously call Calcutta a "half-crushed cockroach of a city" (pg. 130) and dying courtesan. Bobby's friend, Abraham "Abe" Bronstein, who spends several months in 1947 covering Mohandas Gandhi, describes Calcutta as a miasma, worse than Burma, Singapore, and even Washington, DC, in August. It is not only a "sewer city" (pg. 10), but also scary. Seen from the air, coming in at midnight over the Bay of Bengal, Calcutta is 250 square miles of light. Bobby imagines that London or Berlin had looked that way to bomber crews during World War II. He notices from the air a "fungal phosphorescence...