The Indian poet M. Das, long thought to be dead, has mysteriously reappeared, and Robert Luczak is commissioned to write an article on him and to negotiate for the new poem that Das has written. So Luczak, his Indian wife and their baby daughter are soon engulfed in the foul, teeming, crime-ridden city of Calcutta, confronting the appalling possibility that M. Das really has come back from the dead to proclaim a new and horrific age and to sing the song of Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction...