By luck, that night, Hasari's two eldest children had managed to bring back some gourd and turnip scraps from their day's foraging in the rubbish of the Bara Bazar. They were enormously proud of their achievement because so many people explored the refuse heaps that good finds were few and far between. Their mother borrowed the neighboring woman's chula to cook a soup which the Pals shared with her and her abandoned children. They also shared the fritters. Nothing appeases grief and fear more effectively than a good meal, especially when you live on
the pavement, with not even a sheet of corrugated iron or canvas over your head. That night the two families drew a little closer together before they went to sleep. Only the poor may need the help of other poor.
Every night at about eleven o'clock, it started up again. First came the tears. Gradually they increased in intensity. The rhythm became more accelerated and developed into a series of rattles which cascaded through the dividing wall. A ten-year-old Muslim boy was dying of osteotuberculosis in the hovel next door. His name was Sabia.
"Why this agony of an innocent in a place already scarred by so much suffering?" protested an indignant Kovalski.
During the first few evenings the priest had succumbed to cowardice. He had stopped up his ears with cotton so that he would not hear. "I was like Job on the brink of revolt," he was to explain. "In vain I scoured the Scriptures by the light of my oil lamp. I could not find a satisfactory explanation for the idea that God could let such a thing happen. Who could ever venture to say to a child like that, writhing in pain: 'Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven; blessed are the sorrowful, for they shall find consolation; blessed are those who thirst, for they shall be satisfied?' The prophet Isaiah tried 106
hard to justify the suffering of the innocent. It was our suffering that the boy was enduring, Isaiah affirmed, and he would help to save us from our sins. The idea that the suffering of one human being could help to save the world was certainly very alluring, but how could I concede that the suffering of my little neighbor was part of that redemptive process? Everything in me rebelled against the idea."
It took several nights before Stephan Kovalski could accept the experience of listening to Sabia's cries and several more for him to listen to them not only with his ears but also with his heart. He was torn between his religious faith and his very human feelings of revolt. Had he any right to be happy, to sing praises to God while that intolerable torment was going on right next to him? Every night when his young neighbor began to groan again, he emptied himself and prayed. Then he ceased to hear the tears, the cries, the noises; he ceased to notice the rustle of the rats in the darkness; he no longer smelled the stench of the blocked drain outside his door. He entered into what he described as a state of ''weightlessness.''
"In the beginning my prayer was exclusively concerned with young Sabia's agony. I begged the Lord to alleviate his suffering, to lessen his sacrifice. And if, in his judgment, this trial was really useful for the redemption of the sins of mankind, then I asked him, the Father who had not hesitated to sacrifice his own son, to let me assume a part of it, to let me suffer instead of that child." Night after night, his eyes turned in the darkness toward the picture of the Sacred Shroud, Stephan Kovalski prayed until the groans were still. Tirelessly he prayed and pleaded: "You who died on the Cross to save mankind, help me to understand the mystery of suffering. Help me to transcend it. Help me, above all, to fight against its causes, against the lack of love, against hatred and against all the injustices that give rise to it."
The illness of his young neighbor grew worse and the sounds of his agony increased. One morning the priest caught the bus to the nearest hospital.
"I need a syringe and a dose of morphine. It's very urgent," he said to the attendant in charge of the hospital pharmacy, handing him thirty rupees.
"Since his illness was incurable and my prayer had proved abortive," he would later say to justify himself, "Sabia should at least be able to die in peace."
Helped by her three daughters, aged eleven, eight, and five, Sabia's mother spent her days squatting in the alleyway, making paper bags out of old newspapers. She was a widow and this activity represented the only income with which she could support her family. A hundred times a day she had to get up and clear everything out of the way to allow a cycle-car or cart to pass. Yet Stephan Kovalski had noticed that her smile never deserted her.
Hostile gazes beset him as soon as he stopped outside Sabia's hovel. Why did this infidel want to visit the little Muslim who was dying? Was he going to try to convert the boy to his religion? Tell him that Allah was not the true God? There were many in the area who mistrusted the priest. So many stories were told about the zeal of Christian missionaries, about their diabolical capacity to wheedle their way in anywhere. Wasn't it merely to reduce their vigilance that this particular one wore trousers and sneakers instead of a cassock? Nevertheless, Sabia's mother welcomed him with her remarkable smile. She sent her eldest daughter to fetch him a cup of tea from the old Hindu and invited the priest to come in. The smell of putrid flesh caused him to hesitate for a few seconds on the threshold. Then he plunged into the half-light.
The little Muslim boy was lying on a mattress of rags, his arms crossed, his skin pitted with sores, crawling with lice, his knees half bent back over his fleshless torso. Stephan Kovalski drew nearer to him and the boy opened his eyes. His gaze lit up with a spark of joy. Kovalski was totally overwhelmed. "How could I believe my own eyes? How could so much serenity radiate from that little martyred frame?" His fingers tightened on the vial of morphine.
"Salaam, Sabia," he murmured, smiling.
"Salaam, Daddah" responded the child cheerfully. "What have you got in your hand? Sweets?"
Startled, Stephan Kovalski dropped the vial which shattered as it fell. "Sabia had no need of morphine. His features were imbued with a peace that quite disarmed me. Bruised, mutilated, crucified as he was, he remained undefeated.
He had just given me the most precious gift of all: a secret reason never to despair, a light in the darkness."
How many brothers and sisters of light like Sabia did Stephan Kovalski have in this haven of suffering? Hundreds, perhaps even thousands. Every morning after celebrating the Eucharist, he would visit some of them with the few reserves he had at his disposal: a little food, some medicine, or simply the comfort of his presence.
Nothing raised his spirits more than his visits to a blind Christian leper woman who lived next to the railway lines. Incredible as it might seem, this woman too, plunged as she was into unutterable stages of decay, radiated serenity. She would spend entire days in prayer, curled up in a corner of her hovel, without lighting or ventilation. Behind her, hanging from a nail in the mud wall, was a crucifix, and in a niche above the door nestled a statue of a Virgin blackened with soot. The leper woman was so thin that her shriveled skin accentuated the angles of her bones. What age might she be? Certainly younger than she looked. Forty at the very most. As if her blindness were not enough, leprosy had reduced her hands to stumps and eaten away her face. The widow of one of the municipality's lesser employees, she had lived in the slum for twenty years. No one knew how she had come to catch leprosy, but she was so consumed by the disease that it was too late to cure her. In another corner of the room her four grandchildren, aged between two and six, slept side by side on a piece of threadbare matting.
Around this Christian woman and her family had been woven one of those networks of mutual help and friendship that transformed the City of Joy into one of those privileged places to which Jesus of Nazareth referred when he called upon his disciples to "gather in a suitable spot to await the last Judgment and the Resurrection." Such help was all the more remarkable because the neighbors were all Hindus, a fact that would normally have prevented them from touching anyone suffering from leprosy, from entering that person's house or even, so it was sometimes said, from tainting their eyes with the sight of a leper. Yet, every day, those Hindus took t
urns bringing the Christian woman a dish of rice and vegetables, helping her wash,
doing her housework, looking after her grandchildren. The slum, so inhuman in other respects, gave her something which no hospital could have provided. This broken woman suffered from no lack of love.
Some sixth sense always alerted her to Kovalski's arrival. As soon as she sensed him approaching, she would make an attempt to tidy herself. With what was left of her hands she would smooth down her hair; a touching gesture of coquetry amid such utter degradation. Next she would tidy up the area around her, groping to rearrange a tattered cushion for her visitor. Happy then, all she had to do was wait patiently, reciting her rosary. That morning the priest was going to fill her with joy.
"Good morning, Father!" she was quick to call out to him as soon as she heard his footsteps.
"Good morning, Grandma!" replied Kovalski, taking his shoes off in the doorway. "You seem to be in good form today."
He had never heard her complain or utter words of self-pity at her predicament, and on this occasion, again, he was struck by the sight of the joyous expression on her tortured face. She signaled him to sit down beside her and as soon as he was settled, held out her arms in a gesture of maternal love. The blind leper woman caressed the priest's face as if to feel the life in it. "I was utterly bewildered," he was to say. "It was as if she were giving me the very thing that she sought in me. There was more love in the soft touch of that rotten flesh than in all the world's embraces."
"Father, I do so wish the good Lord would come and fetch me at last. Why won't you ask him to?"
"If the good Lord keeps you with us, Grandma, it's because he still needs you here."
"Father, if I have to continue suffering, I'm ready to do so," she said. "Above all I'm ready to pray for other people, to help them endure their own suffering. Father, bring me their suffering."
Stephan Kovalski told her about his visit to young Sabia. She listened with her sightless eyes fixed upon him.
"Tell him that I shall pray for him." The priest searched in his knapsack for the clean handkerchief in which he had
carefully wrapped a piece of chapati consecrated during his morning Mass. The short silence intrigued the leper woman.
"What are you doing, Father?"
"Grandma, I've brought you communion. Receive the body of Christ."
She parted her lips and Kovalski placed the fragment of griddle cake on the tip of her tongue. "Amen," she murmured after a moment, her face radiant with joy. There was a long silence, broken only by the buzzing of flies and the outbreak of an argument outside. The four little sleeping bodies had not stirred.
When Stephan Kovalski rose to go, the leper woman lifted up her rosary in a gesture of salutation and offering.
"Be sure to tell those who are suffering that I am praying for them."
That evening Stephan Kovalski was to jot down in his diary: "That woman knows that her suffering is not useless and I affirm that God wants to use her suffering to help others to endure theirs." A few lines further on he concluded: "That is why my prayer for this poor woman must not be one of sadness. Her suffering is like that of Christ on the Cross; it is constructive and redemptive. It is full of hope. Every time I leave the hovel where my sister, the blind leper woman, lives, I come away revitalized. So how can one despair in this slum of Anand Nagar? In truth this place deserves its name, City of Joy."
He ruled over his fleet of carriages like a pimp over his army of prostitutes. No one ever saw him, but everyone—his pullers, his stewards, and even the police— had for the last fifty years accepted the power of Bipin Narendra, the most influential rickshaw owner in Calcutta. Nobody knew just how many vehicles operated under his ensign. Rumor had it that there were at least four hundred, of which more than half functioned illegally with no official plate. Yet if you had encountered Bipin Narendra on the steps of the Kali Temple, you would almost certainly have offered him alms. With his oversized trousers, his broken down sandals, his baggy shirt spattered with stains, and his crutch that supported a slightly wasted leg, he looked more like a beggar than a captain of industry. Only the sempiternal white forage cap planted on top of his bald skull elevated the poverty-stricken appearance of his personage. No one knew his age; even he knew it only approximately, to within two or three years. It was said that he must be in his nineties; he had never drunk a drop of alcohol, smoked a cigarette, or eaten an ounce of meat in his life. Nor had he, of course, sweated between the 112
shafts of those rickshaws which had killed hundreds of his pullers and made him a rich man.
His longest memory went back to the time when he had first left his native Bihar to come and earn his living in Calcutta. "It was at the beginning of the Great War in Europe," he used to recount. "There were many soldiers in Calcutta and every day more and more of them boarded the waiting ships. There were parades in the Maidan and regimental bands played military music. Life was very entertaining—much more so than in the province where I was born. My parents were landless peasants, agricultural laborers, in fact. My father and brothers hired themselves out to the zamindar but there was only work for a few months in the year. That was no life."
Bipin Narendra found his first job as an assistant to the driver of a bus that belonged to a Bihari from his village. His role consisted of opening the doors at every stop and getting the passengers on and off. Another man was employed as the conductor. It was he who collected the fares according to the distance involved. It was he, too, who rang the bell as a signal to move off. "I envied him greatly because he pocketed a percentage on every ticket and, as it was usual for the conductor to split the proceeds with the driver, all the buses raced between themselves to pick up passengers. Many say that the same system still applies today."
After three years, the owner of the bus was able to buy a second vehicle and Bipin Narendra was given the job of conductor. He was quite unable to say how many thousands of miles he had covered in the huge metropolis. "But the city was very different in those days. There weren't so many inhabitants and the streets were clean and well maintained. The British were very strict. You could earn money without resorting to subterfuge, by working honestly."
Rickshaws had been a roaring success right from the day they had first appeared, because they provided a means of transport cheaper than any horse-drawn carriage or taxi-cab. One day in 1930 Bipin Narendra bought himself two of these machines. They cost two hundred rupees each, new, but he had managed to unearth some secondhand
ones for only fifty rupees. He hired them out immediately to two Bihari expatriates from his village. Later he was to borrow sixteen hundred rupees from his boss and buy eight more brand-new Japanese rickshaws. That was the beginning of his fortune. After a few years, the man who from that time was only referred to as "the Bihari" owned approximately thirty carriages. With the rent that he collected each day, he bought a plot of land in Ballygunge, in South Calcutta, and had a house built on it. Ballygunge was quite a poor area, occupied for the most part by Hindu and Muslim employees, where the price of land was not very expensive. In the meantime the Bihari had gotten married and thereafter, every time his wife became pregnant, he had one more room built onto his house. Now he was the owner of a four-story mansion, the highest in the area, for his wife had given him nine children, three sons and six daughters.
The Bihari had been a hard worker. For nearly half a century he had gotten up every morning at five and set off on his bicycle to do the rounds of the rickshaw pullers, to collect payment for the daily hiring. "I could neither read nor write," he was to say with pride, "but I've always known how to add and I never missed out on a single rupee that was owed to me." As each one of his sons reached working age, he gradually diversified his business affairs. He kept the eldest one with him to assist him in the management of his fleet of vehicles that now came to more than three hundred. The second son he put in charge of a bolt factory that supplied the railways. For the youngest he bought a bus which covered the
route from Dalhousie Square to the suburb of Garia. To obtain the franchise for this particularly lucrative route, he had given a substantial bribe to a babu at the municipality. As for his daughters, he had married them all off, and married them well. A fortunate father indeed was the Bihari! The eldest was the wife of a lieutenant-colonel in the Army, the next youngest that of a naval commander. He had married the two daughters next in line to tradesmen, the fifth to a zamindar in Bihar, and the youngest to an engineer in the highways department, a man who worked for the Bengal govern-
ment. All in all, it was a superb accomplishment for the descendants of an illiterate peasant.
Yet in the evening of his life, the Bihari had lost much of his former enthusiasm. "Business is not what it used to be," he lamented. "Nowadays you have to be furtive about earning money. Effort, success, and good fortune have become crimes. Each successive government controlling our country has tried to liquidate the rich and appropriate the fruits of their labors, as if by making the rich poorer, the poor become richer! Here in Bengal, the Communists have instituted laws to restrict private ownership. They have decreed that no one individual has the right to own more than ten rickshaws. Ten rickshaws, can you imagine! As if I could support a family on ten rickshaws when I have constantly to pay out for maintenance, repairs, accidents, and baksheesh for the police. So I had to look after my own interests. I did what all the large landowners did when they were prohibited from owning more than forty acres of land, I transferred the title of ownership for my carriages to the names of my nine children and twenty-two grandchildren. And just for the record, I even put some rickshaws in the names of a dozen of my nephews. Officially my three hundred and forty-six vehicles belong to thirty-five different owners."
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