by Bagoas

When Savitri first met Suryaraman, she thought that her parents had made an excellent choice in selecting a husband for her. Suryaraman [Surya for short] was very handsome, very manly, courteous and attentive.

Their parents had neglected one point which was to cause difficulty. Surya was an "elephant" man and Savitri was a "hare" woman. The disparity in genital size would make sex painful for Savitri.

The courtesy and attentiveness lasted until the wedding ceremony was over. Savitri quickly learned that they were but a facade behind which lurked a cruel, abusive, brutal drunkard. The wedding night was a nightmare. Surya had got drunk at the wedding and lost no time in revealing his true character .

Suryaraman quickly stripped off his clothes displayed his erect lingam and orderd Savitri to disrobe and get onto the bed. He neither knew nor cared anything about foreplay, but was concerned only with relieving his own sexual tension. His sexual experience had been confined to whores and he treated his wife as he did them.

Suryaraman hurled himself onto her and rammed his rigid lingam into her much too tight virgin yoni , rupturing her hymen and stretching her tight passage almost to the point of tearing. "Stop ! You're hurting me !" screamed Savitri. Suryaraman's response to that was merely to clap his hand over her mouth and have his way with her.

After Suryaraman had relieved the pressure in his glands and seminal vesicles, he rose, washed the blood off his lingam and ordered Savitri to get out of the bed and sleep on the floor. He tossed her one of the pillows from the bed. This set the pattern for their marital relations. Every time they had sex, it was a rape.

However, on their wedding night, Surya was nowhere near as drunk as he would be most nights thereafter. So, on that occasion, he did not beat Savitri. Thereafter, several times a week, he would come home fighting drunk as well as horny. Surya would give Savitri an unprovoked backhanded slap in the face which would throw her across the room or against the wall. Then he would rape her.

Before her marriage, Savitri had seldom used cosmetics , but, afterward, she needed them almost daily to conceal the bruises, black eyes, and other marks of Suryaraman's brutality. Though Suryaraman had never needed any reason to beat Savitri, he held it against her that she did not immediately become pregnant and present him with a son and heir, and often used this as a pretext.

And so it went for theree years. Suryaraman was in a constant fury because he had no son. In truth, he would doubtless have made as abusive a father as he did a husband. Savitri could not bring herself to pray for a child to place in that monster's power.

One day, while Savitri was washing clothes in the river, an older woman working next to her noticed the bruises which Savitri's make-up did little to conceal. "Your husband beats you." said the woman, not asking a question, but stating a fact. Savitri said nothing but nodded. "So did mine until Yama [the god of death] made off with him. Listen carefully. I am going to tell you a secret known only to widows here in Khasiya. What use you make of this knowledge is your decision, but you would do well to keep it in mind."

With these words, the older woman leaned closer to Savitri and whispered in her ear. What she said shocked Savitri deeply. She was sure that she could never bring herself to do that. "It appears to be a natural death with an unknown cause." said the widow.

Though revolted by the idea, Savitri could not forget the widow's words. Despite the beatings, Savitri did not believe that Suryaraman had given her sufficient provocation for that.

The necessary provocation came a few nights later. Suryaraman came home later and drunker and in an even fouler mood than usual. Worse, he smelled unmistakeably of cheap perfume. He had been unfaithful to her, probably with a whore. "You've been with another woman" cried Savitri. Never before had she dared to question, criticise, or accuse Surya. This was the incense stick which broke the elephant's back.

Suryaraman flew into a rage. "YOU DARE" he bellowed. "You DARE to accuse ME ?" He slapped Savitri in the face with the backs of both hands and then hauled her to her feet by her hair. Drawing back his left arm, he drove his fist into Savitri's right breast, flattening it. She felt it burst inward into her chest cavity. Savitri staggered backward, faint, sick, and in agony, shielding her breasts with her right arm and her face with the left arm.

Pleased that he had taught her her place, Suryaraman quickly pulled off his clothes and said. "Take that sari off and lie on the bed with your legs apart, slut. " Sobbing, Savitri complied. As he usually did, Suryaraman hurled himself atop her and raped her. When he was satisfied, he pushed Savitri off onto the floor and stretched out on his back to sleep.

Then it was that Savitri remembered the widow's advice. Then it was that she decided that Suryraman deserved it. Savitri waited for a while until Suryaraman began to snore. She approached the bed and reached out to take Suryaraman's testicles in her right hand, letting the bag and cords pass between her third and fourth fingers.

Suddenly, as quickly and as hard as possible Savitri SQUEEZED Suryaraman's testicles, closing her left hand over the right. Surya started to sit up, his mouth opened, and his eyes bulged out. Instead of a scream, though, he emitted only a startled gasp, his body convulsed, his face turned deathly pale, his eyes rolled back, and he slumped, his eyelids partially closing over his eyes. Savitri continued to squeeze for several minutes until she was sure that there was no sign of life.

She listened to his chest for a heartbeat and found none. She held his wrist and sought a pulse; there was none. Releasing his testicles, she examined his bag. Hard as she had squeezed it, there was no bruising. There was no mark on her husband's body to indicate the cause of his death. Savitri lay on the floor beside the bed seeking to sleep, though her crushed right breast hurt so that sleep was almost impossible. Still, she did finally fall asleep.

The first light of dawn awakened Savitri. She rose, put on her sari and then went over to the bed as if to awaken Surya. She took ahold of his shoulder to shake him and found it cold and stiff with rigor mortis. Before she fell asleep, she had carefully rehearsed this scene. She screamed and then cried out "Surya, my husband , HE IS DEAD !"

Neighbors rushed in to find her pointing with a trembling hand at the cold, pale, stiff corpse of her husband. One of the neighbors rushed to the home of Sri Joshi who had a telephone, to call the police. The ladies stayed with Savitri to comfort her. After about a quarter hour, a policeman and an ambulance arrived. Though it was quite obvious that Surya was dead, his body was taken to Khasiyapur Hospital to be pronounced "Dead on Arrival", thus making it official.

The policeman took Savitri's statement (which was the truth, and nothing but the truth, but far from the whole truth). The physician who examined Surya's body found no sign of foul play and concluded that he had died of a "seizure". Under the circumstances, this was comical. There had, indeed, been a seizure, but the physician never dreamed just what had been seized.

As Suryaraman had no son to conduct his funeral obsequies, the ceremony was conducted by his father. The custom of suttee had fallen into obsolescence, which was just as well, as Savitri was decidedly unwilling to immolate herself upon her husband's pyre. Her family invited her to return to their home and she lived there as she had before her marriage.

About a month after the funeral, Savitri found herself pregnant. Evidently, her late husband's last spending and done the trick. In due course, she was delivered of a son, whom she refused to name Suryaraman as her in-laws desired, Savitri named the boy Kalidas [servant of Kali] and taught him to respect and venerate all women and especially the Mother goddess, Kali.

She may have overdone the indoctrination. It caused young Kalidas no trouble before puberty but, afterward, he faced greater and greater conflict between his reverential awe toward all women and his increasing feelings of lust toward them.

At sixteen, he took the resolution of this conflict into his own hands. To be sure that he remained pure in body and mind and , thus, fit to serve the Mother, Kalidas

hacked off his testicles with a bread knife. His grandfather called an ambulance and he was brought to the Emergency Room at Khasiyapur Hospital.

The staff of the Emergency Room were all devout Saivites who had no difficulty at all in understanding Kalidas' motivation in castrating himself. When he had recovered from the surgery, Kalidas took a begging bowl and went forth from his home as a sannyasin [one who has renounced the world and all possessions].

For the next seven years, he wandered widely preaching abstinence to those devotees of Kali who could practise it and self-purification such he as he had undergone, to those who could not. Kalidas had a singularly compelling way of speaking and a resonant, deeply moving voice. He convinced dozens of youths and young men to give up the temptations of lust in the way that he had.

Finally, he returned to the Kali temple at Khasiyapur where he remained for the balance of his life, preaching extreme purification to Kali's male devotees.