Brian Dana Akers studied Sanskrit and Indian history at the University of Michigan, spending his seminar year in India. Now he lives in New York with his wife Loretta and divides his time between translating Sanskrit texts and writing science fiction. We are very proud to present his first sale.

Death Looked Down

Reverend Sir turned his head and looked at the crocodile. The crocodile looked back at him. Reverend Sir shook his head very slightly back and forth. The crocodile swam away.
Reverend Sir turned his head back again and looked at the man sitting before him. The man had earlier been pacing back and forth; gesturing wildly, yelling and swearing in English. Now he was slumped back in his chair. His left hand was resting in midair a foot above his emaciated brown belly. His right hand grasped an imaginary clicker. He kept pressing it with his thumb, flicking through channel after channel with a dull look on his face. One channel grabbed his attention and he leapt to his feet.
"Goddamn that asshole Dan Rather! That bleeding heart liberal prick! Those food stamp fuckers are hungry and homeless because they don't have the balls to pull themselves up by their bootstraps the way I did. GodDAMN him!" The man started pacing again, his fists balled up and resting six inches on either side of his protruding hip bones. Every time he walked in front of the chair, he would reach down into an imaginary bag of potato chips and stuff them into his mouth.
Reverend Sir looked at the other two men on the platform. They were quite baffled and looked at Reverend Sir imploringly. Mr. Bose spoke English, but was having a hard time with the man's American accent. Mr. Sen, the man's older brother, spoke only Bengali. Since the man himself also spoke only Bengali, they had put him in a boat and rowed all night back to Calcutta to bring him to Reverend Sir. He would surely know what to do.
"As one sows, so shall one reap," said Reverend Sir, in Bengali. "It is the law of karma."
"Ah, karma," said Mr. Bose and Mr. Sen together and knowingly. What else could it be? A previous life was coming back to the surface.
Reverend Sir recited a long mantra, then stepped up to the man and smacked him hard on the face, knocking him down. "Come back! Come back!" he shouted.
The man looked up glassy eyed at Reverend Sir, then at the other two. He moaned and muttered something to himself. His head drooped down.
"Thank you, Reverend Sir," said Mr. Sen. "Please take these as a small token." He handed Reverend Sir a large bundle of food wrapped in a banana leaf and tied with string. Mr. Bose handed him some drinking coconuts and bottles of soda.
"You would rather not be coming with us?" asked Mr. Sen. "Surely you have stayed here as long as anyone could expect. All the other holy men have left. The goddess will not be angry."
Reverend Sir stood up straight and tall and paused a moment. His sacred thread looped over one shoulder. A simple cotton dhoti was wrapped around his waist. His quiet brown eyes surveyed the landscape of dingy, decaying buildings, half submerged by the monsoon floods. He had been asked this question many times before. Yet he still could not say why he felt he shouldn't leave.
"No, you two go and take this poor fellow with you. Remember: as one acts, so one becomes. That is karma. That is what will determine the nature of our new lives."
They all said their namashkars. The man was lifted down into the boat. The two men pushed off from the platform and rowed away.
Reverend Sir carried the food and drink into the small thatched hut he had built for himself, stepping directly on the face of the greatest Bengali cinema star of all time. When his temple had first flooded, Reverend Sir had asked the neighborhood boys to scavenge some wood for him to build a platform on the temple's roof. They came gleefully back with an abandoned cinema billboard. In the middle was this fool cinema star; two rows of white teeth and oversized sunglasses. His fist was raised to the sky and one foot was crushing a globe beneath it. Bengal triumphant! But now the paint was wearing away from the rain, the heat and Reverend Sir's footsteps.
It is a sign of the times, these past lives coming to the surface, thought Reverend Sir as he stowed his food. Certainly a great tragedy has befallen mankind. Perhaps, even, we are coming to the end of this cycle of existence. Perhaps, too, the panic from this plane of existence has spread to other ones and the orderly transmigration of souls has become disrupted. It was hard to say. Reverend Sir often pondered these types of questions, but he always found it difficult to come to firm conclusions. Every school of thought said something different. He liked to keep an open mind.
He had finally decided some months ago that speculation alone would be inadequate to answer these types of questions. His older brother, whom everyone referred to by his initials, N. K., was a brilliant civil engineer. They used to debate with each other about everything under the sun. N. K.'s trump card was always empirical proof. Where was Reverend Sir's empirical proof? What kind of proof was quoting dusty old Sanskrit tomes? Were the Vedas based on a standard model of the Big Bang, or a nonstandard model? Reverend Sir did the best he could in these debates, but the two brothers were so different. Reverend Sir liked to slowly ponder things, while N. K. was like a computer-his tongue flicking out the answers, flick, flick, flick. Now that the last of those requiring his help had departed, Reverend Sir was ready to try to find some clues to his situation.
A wandering yogi had once passed through his temple and had offered instruction in reliving past lives in return for food and a place to sleep. Reverend Sir was not too interested in this knowledge at the time and would've given the yogi food and shelter anyway. But the yogi-his eyes so clear and deep beneath his matted locks-had a persuasive way about him. So Reverend Sir learned the technique, but did not practice it at the time.
Now he felt it was time. He had done the preparatory exercises and meditations. According to the yogi, what life one returned to was controlled by concentrating on when that life happened. Reverend Sir-not wanting to get stuck in some life millions of lifetimes ago-decided to go back one century on his first attempt.
He walked out of his hut and sat in the center of the platform, square on the cinema star's chest. He commenced the final phase.
Very gradually he began to feel light and buoyant. Then he started to rise in the air. He commanded that it become bright and sunny, and it became so. As he rose, Calcutta shimmered up out of the flood waters and laid itself out for him.
First, directly beneath him, he saw his temple along the Adiganga, the original bed of the river Ganga. To his left were the Kidderpore Docks, with some merchantmen tucked safely away from the Hooghly river's treacherous currents. As he rose higher, he gazed upon the Maidan, Calcutta's Central Park. It was a giant green lung, fully two square miles in size, and studded with treasures: the Victoria Memorial, Birla Planetarium, Fort William, the Ochterlony Monument. His eyes followed Chowringhee-Calcutta's main road, running along the east edge of the Maidan-northward toward the original Howrah Bridge. He could even spot Howrah Station way across the Hooghly!
Now he started to descend. He tried to avoid panicking as he came down faster and faster. He landed with a thump on the sidewalk of Chowringhee.

Read the rest of DEATH LOOKED DOWN in New Altars