er, a neighbor had found him lying lifeless in an alleyway. Margareta had diagnosed cholera, loaded him onto a rickshaw, and taken him to the nearest hospital. With the help of a ten-rupee note, she had persuaded the duty nurse to find him a place on an emergency pallet. On the way home, she had visited the church of Our Lady of the Loving Heart and lit a candle. Three days later Gunga was back. When he saw Kovalski, he rushed up to him and stooped down to brush the dust from his basketball shoes, then put his hands on his head as a mark of respect.
What the priest encountered on entering the Christian compound would remain forever engraved upon his memory. "They had covered a plank supported on two crates with a square of spotless cotton material and placed a candle at each corner. A bowl and cup served as paten and ciborium. A wooden crucifix and a garland of yellow marigolds completed the decoration of this improvised altar erected next to the well in the center of the courtyard."
For a while Stephan Kovalski stood and gathered his thoughts, meditating upon the miracle that he was about to accomplish against a backdrop of smoking chulas, pieces of rag drying on rooftops, and children in tatters chasing each other about in the gutters, amid all the uproar of horns, singing, shouting, and life in general. With a piece of chapati —so like the unleavened bread Christ himself had broken at his last supper—he was about to "create" the very Creator of this matter. In his hands a piece of bread was about to become God, the God who was at the origin of all things. To Kovalski this process was the most prodigious revolution that man might ever be called upon to bring about.
He had often celebrated Mass in a hut in a shanty town, in the communal living room of a house for immigrant workers, or in some corner of a factory workroom. But today, in the midst of these suffering, despised, and broken people, he sensed all that would be unique about this offering, this sharing of bread.
"The will of God to share the plight of the most humble had always seemed an extraordinary phenomenon to me,"
he was to say. "As if taking upon himself the form of a man were not in itself enough to satiate his thirst for abasement, as if he wanted to draw closer still to the very poorest, the humblest, the most handicapped and rejected of this world. What an extraordinary source of happiness it is to have the power to enable God to express through the Eucharist the infinite quality of his love."
Kovalski was celebrating his Mass in a monasterylike silence when three pariah dogs, with tails cocked, scampered across the courtyard in hot pursuit of a rat that was almost as big as they were. The scene was so commonplace that no one paid any attention to it. A balloon seller passing during the reading of the Gospel did, on the other hand, attract a few glances. Flying at the tip of their bamboo canes, the colorful gold-beaters' skins stood out like stars against the expanse of gray sky. As the multicolored clusters disappeared into the distance, Kovalski's voice rose resonantly above the assembled heads. The priest had carefully chosen the message of good news it conveyed. Looking with love upon the emaciated faces that confronted him, he repeated the words of Jesus Christ.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.
Blessed are the sorrowful, for they shall find consolation.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for what is right, for they shall be satisfied.
As he uttered these words, Stephan Kovalski felt a certain uneasiness. "Do these people really need words?" he wondered. "Aren't they already Christ, the vehicle, the Sacrament? Aren't they the poor of the Scriptures, Yahweh's poor, the ones in whom Jesus became incarnate when he said that where the poor were, there he was also?"
After a silence, he held out his arms as if to embrace the handful of suffering men and women. Wanting to imbue them with the Gospel message of that very first morning,
he gazed intently at each of his new brothers and sisters. Then, letting Christ speak through his voice, he proclaimed, "Peace be with you for you are the light of the world."
Stephan Kovalski's first wash in the slum began with yet another sacrilege. He had undressed down to his underpants, as he had seen the men on the way to the water pipe do. He had then gone out into the alleyway outside his room, duly armed with his bucket of water. He had squatted on his heels in that distinctive Indian position so difficult for a Westerner to maintain, tipped some water over his feet, and was in the process of vigorously scrubbing his toes when the elderly Hindu from the tea shop opposite called out to him in horror.
"Father, that's not how you're supposed to wash yourself. It's your head you should wash first, and your feet last, after you've cleaned everything else."
The Pole was about to stammer some excuse when the little girl appeared who had brought him the plate of food the evening before. The vision of a half-naked sahib sprinkling himself with water amused her so much that she burst out laughing.
"Why are you washing yourself anyway, DaddahV she asked. "Your skin's already so white!"
A few moments later, Kovalski committed a fourth
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blunder by rolling up his bedding mat the wrong way. Instead of starting with the head end, he did the opposite. As his Muslim neighbor explained to him with a mimic, it meant that on the following night he risked placing his head where his feet had been the night before. "I knew that it would take time for me to grasp all the subtleties of slum life and not shock people anymore," the Polish priest acknowledged later. On the way back from the fountain he had felt his neighbors' reserve even more distinctly. Women had rapidly pulled the veil of their saris over their faces. Children playing marbles had scurried away like rabbits. The vermin were the only ones who did not ostracize him. Like the rats, the centipedes, and the mosquitoes of the night, the flies now danced sympathetic attendance on him. "There were hundreds of them. Green ones, gray ones, big ones, tiny ones—they moved about in whole squadrons, ever ready to latch on to the slightest patch of skin. They had no reservations about getting into my ears, my nostrils, my eyes, right down my throat with each small ball of food. Nothing curbed their audacity. They didn't even deign to fly away when I pursued them. All they did was move on a few inches to inflict their torture on some more distant piece of me. I was completely at their mercy. In an attempt to escape their tortures, I tried to concentrate on happier memories, on my mother beating up the egg whites for a floating island, my favorite dessert, or on my father's face, as black as coal, when he came home at night from the mine."
On that first morning, Stephan Kovalski sought help too from the picture of Christ. With his eyes fixed on the tortured face pinned to the wall, he chanted a litany of Oms. After a moment the invocation became completely unconscious, as he brought its rhythm into unison with the beating of his heart. This method of using his body rhythm to communicate with God freed him gradually from all exterior contingencies. The flies could attack him as they wished; he was no longer aware of them.
It was then that the smiling face of the parish priest's envoy appeared in the recess of the door. The man had come because he was concerned about how the Pole had survived his first hours in the slum. The account of his
adventures at the latrines and his entanglements with rats and flies were a source of great consternation.
"Father Cordeiro has charged me to tell you that there is a comfortable room for you at the presbytery," he insisted. "That wouldn't prevent you from coming and spending as much time here as you liked. I beg you to accept it. This is no place for a priest."
The Anglo-Indian shook his head sadly, then took out of an imitation leather bag two large volumes that Father Cordeiro had asked him to pass on to Kovalski. One was a Bengali grammar; the other was an edition of the Gospel in Hindi. The Pole received the gifts with enthusiasm. He knew that they would be indispensable in helping him to break down the wall of silence that isolated him in his new existence.
Far from disheartening him, his inability to express himself and understand had at first delighted Kovalski. "For a foreigner like me arriving among such poor people, it pr
ovided a unique opportunity to place myself in the position of an inferior," he was to explain. "It was I who needed others and not others who needed me"—a consideration of fundamental importance for a man who felt himself so privileged by comparison with those around him that he wondered whether he would ever really be integrated with them. "Indeed, how could I seriously believe it possible mentally and physically to share the plight of those who lived in the slums, when I enjoyed the health of a football player, didn't have a family to feed, house, and care for, and didn't have to look for work or be obsessed with keeping my job; when I knew that at any given moment I could leave." As he had hoped, the language handicap helped his first contacts with people around him by giving them a sense of importance, of superiority. How did one say "water" in Urdu? "Tea" or "bucket" in Hindi? By repeating the words in their language the wrong way, by pronouncing them incorrectly, he provoked their laughter and gradually won their sympathy until that day came when, realizing that he wasn't just a passing visitor but one of them, they gave him the most affectionate nickname in their vocabulary, that of "Daddah Stephan," Big Brother Stephan.
Hindi, the great lingua franca of modern India, now spoken by nearly a quarter of a billion people, was understood by the majority of the occupants of the City of Joy. It was one of twenty or thirty languages used in the slum; others were Bengali, Urdu, Tamil, Malayalam, Punjabi, and numerous dialects. In the absence of a teacher, Kovalski began his learning process in a somewhat original fashion. Every morning after his hour of meditation, he gave himself a lesson in Hindi based on the Gospel texts that he knew better than the lines on his hand. He would sit down on his mat, his back straight up against the wall, his legs folded in the lotus position, his French version of the Jerusalem Bible on one thigh and on the other, the fat volume of the Gospels in Hindi sent him by Father Cordeiro. The stylish, mysterious calligraphy of the work reminded him of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Like the illustrious French scholar Champollion who had deciphered these hieroglyphics, Kovalski realized that he had first to find a key. Patiently he searched for it, scrutinizing the verses of the Hindi text one by one, in the hope of discovering the name of a person or a place that had not been translated. After several days of looking, his eye fell at last on a nine-letter word printed in Roman capitals. Instantly he identified the chapter from which it came and, with no difficulty at all, inscribed against each Hindi word the French equivalent. All he then had to do was decorticate each letter one at a time to discover its transcription and reconstruct an alphabet. The key word seemed to him doubly symbolic. It was the name of a town in the image of the one where he was, a town where crowds of poor people had gathered to turn to God. It was also a symbol of an inextricable entanglement of people and things comparable to the slum of the City of Joy. The magic word was Capernium.
ALLTHECiTiEsof the former colonial world have banished them from their roads, as one of the most degrading aspects of man's exploitation of his fellow man. All, except Calcutta, where even today some hundred thousand slave horses harnessed to their rickshaws run up more miles per day than the thirty Boeings and Airbuses of the Indian Airlines, India's domestic airline. Each day they transport more than one million passengers and no one, apart from a few visionary town planners, has thought of relegating these anachronistic carriages to a historical museum, for here human sweat provides the world's cheapest energy.
With their two large wheels with wooden spokes, their slender bodies and uncurved shafts, rickshaws look like the carriages of our grandmother's day. Invented in Japan at the end of the eighteenth century by a European missionary, their name derives from the Japanese expression ji riki shaw which means literally "vehicle propelled by man." The first rickshaws appeared in India around 1880, on the imperial avenues of Simla, the summer capital of the British Indian Empire. Some twenty years later a few
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of these vehicles arrived in Calcutta, imported by Chinese traders who used them to transport goods. In 1914 these same Chinese applied for permission to use them also to carry people. Faster than the palanquins of olden times and more manageable than hackney carriages, it was not long before rickshaws imposed their presence on the foremost port in Asia. The fashion was to reach numerous metropolises in Southeast Asia. For many farmer peasants among the millions of men who had sought refuge in Calcutta since Independence, their shafts provided a providential means of earning a living. It is not known how many rickshaws now plow their way through the streets and alleys of the last city in the world to retain them. In 1939 the British limited their number to six thousand, and since no other license to operate them has been issued since 1949, there are still officially fewer than ten thousand of them. Unofficial statistics suggest a figure five times larger, however, since four out of five operate illegally, with baked plates. Each one of those fifty thousand rickshaws provides a living for two pullers, who take turns between the shafts from one sunrise to the next. The sweat of those hundred thousand drudges feeds as many families. It is, therefore, estimated that a total of over one million individuals look to their rickshaw for their daily bowl of rice. Economists have even calculated the financial implications of this unique activity in the catalogue of professions: four million dollars, one fourth the budget of the whole urban transport system of a city like Paris. A sizable part of this amount— about a hundred thousand dollars a year—represents the bribes paid by the pullers to the police and other authorities, to be able to exercise their trade in a city which has become so congested that more and more streets have been banned to them.
''There's nothing like a large glass of bangla for putting a tiger in your tank!" exclaimed Ram Chander, paraphrasing an old advertisement that had covered the walls of Calcutta. He steered his newfound friend outside.
"Hell, yes!" said Hasari Pal, "it's like absorbing six chapatis in a row and a bowl full of fish curry." He
grimaced and rubbed his stomach. ''Except that this particular gasoline rumbles a bit inside you."
The fact that it' 'rumbled" inside him was not surprising— the concoction the two companions had just imbibed was one of the most lethal mixtures ever brewed in stills by man. It was called "country liquor" and came from a village situated on the fringes of Calcutta's garbage dump. There, throughout the year, all kinds of refuse, animal innards, and cane juice were fermented for a month in large jars at the bottom of a putrid pool. The news item pages in the newspapers never ceased recording the havoc worked by this poisonous alcohol which in India claimed as many victims every year as malaria. It had only one advantage and that was its price. Evading tax levies, it cost only seven rupees a bottle, four or five times less than a bottle of the most mediocre governmental rum.
The two friends began walking together. Soon, however, Ram Chander was hailed by an elderly but very hefty woman, dressed in the white sari of a widow. Hasari helped her to climb into the rickshaw and Ram set off at a trot. As he watched the carriage pulling away, the peasant couldn't help remarking to himself how lucky his friend was. "At least he can look other people in the eye. He has a job. He has his dignity. Whereas I'm just like the mangy dogs that roam about the streets. I don't exist."
Before parting, the two men had arranged to meet the next day at the Park Circus esplanade, at the point where the streetcar lines crossed. Ram Chander had promised to try and introduce his friend to the rickshaw owner's representative. "With a little bit of luck and a generous baksheesh, he might just find you an old heap to pull." "I should have refused to believe in anything quite so wonderful," Hasari would say, "but the bangla had given me wings. I felt like a paper kite." The two men had also decided to go to the hospital to visit the injured coolie.
The peasant wandered about for a long time before finding his family. "Everywhere there were uninterrupted rows of shops, stores, stalls, and thousands of people on the pavements and in the roadways. It was as if one half of the population spent its entire time selling things to the other half. There was an abundance of objects that I had
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br /> never seen before, like instruments to peel vegetables with, or squeeze the juice out of fruits. There were piles of cooking utensils too, and tools and mechanical parts, sandals, shirts, belts, bags, combs, pens, and dark glasses for the sun. In some places it was very difficult to move at all because of all the people and goods crammed into the roadway. On one street corner I bought several alu-bhurta from a pedlar. My children loved those potato fritters dusted with sugar, but with five rupees I couldn't buy many of them and perhaps I'd have done better to buy several portions of puffed rice for the whole family instead. But when your stomach and head are full of bangla, you're not responsible for your madness."
Night had long fallen by the time Hasari at last recognized the avenue where he had set up camp. Before he actually reached his family's piece of pavement, he heard shouting and saw a mob. Fearing that something dreadful had happened to his wife or one of his children, he rushed to the scene, but it was the neighbor's wife who was howling. Her face was bleeding and there were the marks of blows on her shoulders and arms. Once again her husband had come home drunk. They had quarreled and he had hit her with an iron bar. If the neighbors had not intervened he would have killed her. He had also beaten the two smallest children. Then he had picked up his ragged clothing and simply gone off, committing his family to the mercy of the devil. The poor woman found herself alone on the pavement with three young children and another on the way, not forgetting a son in prison and a prostitute daughter. "Sometimes there are good reasons for cursing your karma," thought Hasari.
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