In fact the one and only master of the entire fleet was the Bihari.
Few of his rickshaw pullers knew his face. Some of them did not even know his identity. During the last ten years, he had ceased to be seen around the area. "Now I am nothing but an old man, doddering with the aid of a stick to meet the God of death, whom I await in peace and serenity," he was to say. "I have a clear conscience. I have always been kind and generous to those who pulled my rickshaws. Whenever one of them had difficulty paying his hiring fee, I would let him have one or two days credit. Naturally I asked him for interest but I was reasonable. I asked for only twenty-five percent per day. Similarly, if one of them was sick or the victim of an accident, it was I who advanced him the hospital fees for medicine or a doctor. Afterward I increased the man's hiring fee to cover what I had paid out and the puller had several weeks in
which to reimburse me. Now, my factotum looks after all such matters. Alas, nowadays the pullers don't have the same good mentality they used to have. They are forever asking for something. They'd like some magic wand to give them the ownership of their carriages. They have even formed a union for that goal. And they've taken strike action. The world is upside down! So now we owners too have had to organize ourselves. We, too, have created a syndicate, the All Bengal Rickshaw Owners Union. And we've taken on henchmen to assure our protection. There was simply no alternative, with a government that spent its time turning workers against their bosses in the name of the so-called class struggle. Several big shots in high circles even wanted to ban rickshaws altogether, under the pretext that they were an insult to human dignity and that the pullers were exploited like workhorses. Rubbish! They can shoot their mouths off all they like about their so-called respect for the human being. Nothing is going to change the fact that there are over a million poor bastards without work in Calcutta, and that if you eliminate the livelihoods of a hundred thousand rickshaw pullers, you'll condemn eight or nine hundred thousand more people to starvation. It's a matter of common sense, but then politics and common sense aren't dungs of the same cow! So you just have to get by as best you can."
As long as his steward brought him the rent money each day after sunset, the Bihari would know that nothing had fundamentally changed. For this old man in the twilight of his life, there was still the joy of seeing his factotum's shirt bulging with bundles of bills. "The wise men of our nation say that nirvana is the attainment of a state of supreme detachment. For me nirvana is to be able, at the age of ninety plus a few years, to count out each evening, one by one, the rupees earned by my three hundred and forty-six rickshaws on the asphalt of Calcutta."
"When I was a child," Stephan Kovalski recalled, "I used to like to go for walks in the country and it amused me to chop the heads off flowers with a stick. Later, when I went to school, I used to like to pick a flower and put it on my table. Then I told myself that flowers were beautiful right there where they grew, and so I stopped cutting them and admired them in their natural setting. It was the same with women. One day I told the Lord that I didn't want to pick any one single woman because I wanted to let them all bloom right there where they were.
4 'Saint John of the Cross once wrote, 'Heaven is mine. Jesus is mine. Mary is mine. Everything is mine.' As soon as you want to hold on to any one particular thing, everything else escapes you, whereas by detachment you can enjoy everything without actually possessing anything in particular. That's the key to voluntary celibacy, without which chastity would make no sense. It's a choice of love. Marriage, on the other hand, means giving yourself, body and soul, to one single human being. As far as the body and carnal love were concerned, that would not have been
117
difficult, but it was impossible for me to give my soul to any one single person. I had already decided to give it to God and there was no one in this world with whom I could share that gift—not even my mother whom I adored. 4 Whoever has renounced a wife, children, a field, in my name will have them returned a hundredfold/ said Christ; and he was right. I had never had a sister, yet there, in the City of Joy, I found plenty of them who brought me great joy. With them I shared a sense of communion and solidarity which was so essential in a slum where people have so much need of one another.
"Nevertheless, having said all that, how could I fail to dream sometimes of a certain human tenderness? How, amid so much misery, could I fail to succumb to desirable women, who were such beacons of grace and seduction in their multicolored saris? In the ugliness of the slum, they were beauty itself. They were flowers. My problem was to adjust to their presence and remain lucid. Since I had decided not to seek a lasting love, with all its associated implications, I had no right to accept passing loves either. After all, I had responded once and for all to the appeal of the Lord of the Gospels and made mine his injunction to have no other household except the one that he would show me. ;
"I was not in a very comfortable position, particularly as my reputation for being a sort of Santa Claus often brought the women of the slum to me. An innuendo, a hand laid on mine, a flirtatious way of adjusting a sari, or a disturbing look sometimes led me to think their intentions might be suspect. But then perhaps I was mistaken, because in India links between men and women are frequently stamped with a certain ambiguity. Like the majority of other Indian women, still untouched by feminist liberation movements, the women in the City of Joy had no way other than seduction to attract masculine attention and assert their identity.
"I had hoped that my well-known status as a religious man would protect me from such manifestations of feeling, but I was wrong, and it wasn't really all that surprising. Wasn't there always, in every work of sacred Hindu literature, a scene in which the guru was tempted? And
what about the erotic sculptures in the temples, where veritable orgies sprawled right across the bas-reliefs? I noticed that it was always during periods of relaxation that temptation hit me hardest, and not during intervals of intense trial. It was always during a phase when my relationship with God was in some way impoverished that I was at my most vulnerable. If you don't find your joy in God, you seek it elsewhere.
"I was particularly aware of this kind of danger in my relationship with Margareta, the young Christian widow who had brought me the bread and wine for my first Mass in the slum. It was not that she had ever made the slightest gesture or hint that was in any way compromising, but her body, molded in a simple piece of muslin, exuded a sensuality, a fragrance, a magnetism, which I found more difficult to resist than the attractions of other women. What was more, such a capacity for love, such an abandonment of herself emanated from her look, her smile, her voice, and her bearing that this flower seemed ever open to me. Probably I was wrong. I suspected the surroundings of distorting my perception."
One evening, at the end of one of those days that the fall of the barometer had made particularly trying, one of those days when your shirt sticks to your back and your mind is devoid of energy, Kovalski was trying to pray in front of the picture of the Sacred Shroud. In the moisture of the air, the little flame of his oil lamp made the face of Christ and his shadow dance in a ghostly ballet. He felt as if he were roaming about in a drifting vessel. In vain he struggled to concentrate his heart and soul on the Lord. He felt agonizingly deserted. It was then that he sensed her presence. He had not heard her enter but that was not very surprising. She moved about with the litheness of a cat. It was her scent that gave her away, the delicate fragrance of patchouli. He pretended not to notice her. He was praying aloud but soon the words became nothing but sounds. Her presence, her soft breathing in the darkness, the thought of the woman he could not see but whom he could smell, cast a spell over him in a way that was both marvelous and terrible. It was then as if the Lord abandoned him altogether. Suddenly from the other side of the wall came a moan, then a
rattle, then uninterrupted groaning. The agony of Sabia, his little Muslim brother, had just begun again.
Those cries of anguish drove the Pole and the Indian woman i
nstantly toward each other. Like two victims of a shipwreck clinging to the same buoy, they were two people in distress wanting to proclaim on the threshold of death their irresistible desire to live.
A kind of euphoria was flooding over Stephan when a knocking at the door wrested him from the grip of temptation. The Lord had rushed to his rescue.
"Big Brother Stephan!" called the mother of Sabia. "Come quickly! Sabia is asking for you."
Hasari Pal turned up at the Park Circus esplanade but Ram Chander, his friend the rickshaw puller, was not there. The peasant decided to wait. "This guy was my only hope," he was to explain, "my only assurance that somewhere in this infernal city a small lamp was burning for me also. I was prepared to wait until evening, all through the night if necessary—and all the next day too."
Ram Chander arrived in the early afternoon. He was without his rickshaw and looked dejected.
"The bastards have pinched my rickshaw," he growled. "Last night, after I dropped off the old lady I took on when we parted, I was going home when a cop stopped me. It had just gotten dark. 'Where's your lamp?' the son of a bitch asked me. I apologized, I told him I'd forgotten to take it with me that morning. But he didn't want to know. He suggested the usual arrangement."
"The usual arrangement?" asked Hasari.
"Yes, of course! 'Give me fifteen rupees,' he says to me, 'or I'll arrest you and take you to the police station.' It didn't matter how much I protested that I didn't have that
121
kind of money. He was totally unmoveable. He drove me off to the police station, beating me with his lathi * There they confiscated my carriage and, to top it all off, they reported me officially and ordered me to appear at police court tomorrow. They're going to saddle me with a fine of at least thirty rupees."
Ram took a long puff on the cigarette he held wedged in the hollow of his hands. "Let's go and get something to eat," he said. "Even the worst troubles look better on a full stomach."
He led Hasari to a cheap restaurant in Durga Road which was a regular haunt of his. It consisted of a small low room with five marble-topped tables. The owner, a fat Muslim, presided bare-chested over the cooking pots. On the wall behind him hung a grimy engraving of the Kaaba, the great black sacred stone of Mecca. On each table stood a bowl of coarse salt and dried pepper, and on the ceiling an antiquated fan showed ever-increasing signs of fatigue, with every turn of its blades. There was a strong smell of frying. A young boy brought them two plates of rice and a bowl of dal —boiled lentils. The two friends poured the soup over the rice and stirred the mixture with their fingers, then ate in silence. This was a real feast for Hasari, his first proper meal since he arrived in Calcutta. By the time they had finished, Ram Chander's optimism had been restored.
"There's enough wealth in this city to fill everyone's stomach." Hasari smoothed his mustache and looked skeptical. "It's true, I assure you," continued the rickshaw puller. "You still think like a peasant. But soon you'll be a real Calcutta wallaht and know all the tricks!"
Ram Chander left three rupees on the table and they set off for the hospital. They walked along a wide avenue, which was a street-car route, until they came to the Sealdah Railway station. Next to it was a market where the rickshaw puller bought some mandarin oranges and bananas for the injured coolie they were going to visit.
"Outside the hospital there were even more people than
*Club.
tAn inhabitant of Calcutta.
on the previous day," Hasari was to recount. "Everyone was trying to get in. There was shouting and arguing going on all around us. An ambulance with a red cross narrowly missed running over some people who were crowding the emergency entrance where we had left our friend the day before. I thought for a moment that the angry crowd was going to tear the driver to pieces, but he managed to extricate himself and open the door at the back of the vehicle. Inside I could see several bodies covered in blood. They looked as if they had been burned, shreds of flesh were hanging off their legs. It wasn't a pretty sight but we were in a hospital, after all, not in a paddy field. In a corner of the courtyard was a collection of rusty ambulances with broken windows and flat tires. Their red crosses were hardly visible. A number of lepers had made their home in this junk yard.
44 We wandered about the hospital corridors, trying to find our friend. A nurse directed us to a room. I think she must have been in charge because she was the only one with a wide belt around her waist, an enormous bunch of keys, and stripes on her shoulders. Also she seemed to frighten everyone. To our left and right were larger rooms where employees were writing, drinking, and chatting, surrounded by mountains of paper tied together with little bits of string. Some of the papers must have been there for a long time because they were crumbling to dust—at least what the rats had left. Talking of rats, we saw a number of them coming and going. They must have a marvelous time in a place like that. Ram informed me that they sometimes attacked the sick and the injured. He cited the case of an old woman who was paralyzed, whose feet and hands were' gnawed away during the night.
"Ram slipped a five-rupee note to the male nurse in charge of the ward for people who'd had operations. It was a vast room with several windows and large green fans on the ceiling. There were about fifty or so beds squeezed up against each other. At most of the bed heads hung a bottle from which a tube went into the patient. Generally the liquid was clear like water but in some instances it was red. That must have been blood from some poor bum like me who had sold it to feed his children. We went around
between the beds, looking for our friend. It wasn't very pleasant because there were fellows there who weren't very nice to look at. There was one poor old man imprisoned from head to toe in a plaster cast. Nurses went from bed to bed pushing a cart laden with bottles of every imaginable color, and with cotton, dressings, and instruments. Those women must have their hearts in the right place to do that kind of work. Some patients clung to their white saris; others pushed them away with insults and threats.
"Our friend was lying on a charpoy, a frame strung with light ropes, because there were no more iron beds available. He looked pleased to see us. He told us that his foot was very painful but, even as he said so, he must have realized that it had been cut off because his eyes filled with tears. Ram gave him the fruits. He smiled, took a mandarin orange, and pointed to the next bed on which lay a small body whose head, arms, and legs were swathed in bandages. The child had been burned in a paraffin stove explosion and was groaning weakly. I peeled the fruit the injured coolie had given me and pressed a segment between the boy's lips. He opened his mouth and, with great difficulty, swallowed. The poor child, he was the same age as my Shambu.
4 'Our friend seemed to be in bad shape. His beard had grown, which served to accentuate how ill he looked, and his eyes appeared to have sunk into their sockets. His expression was full of despair. Ram and I did our best to comfort and reassure him that we wouldn't just leave him in the lurch. He had no one to call his own in Calcutta. We had become his only family. I'm not speaking for Ram, but having a bum like me for family was certainly no big deal.
44 We stayed with him for quite a while. He must have had a very high fever because his forehead was constantly wet. Eventually a male nurse told us to leave. Our friend took our hands in his and held on to them, but we had to go. We said a few more things to him to try and raise his spirits, and we promised to come back. Before leaving the room, I turned around for one last time. I saw his hand waving weakly, like a reed in the evening breeze."
A Muslim family of seven—four children and three adults—occupied the hovel adjoining Stephan Kovalski's room. The head of the family was called Mehboub. He was a wiry, muscular little man in his thirties with a lively, determined expression beneath his shaggy eyebrows and a forehead half-concealed by a thick shock of curly hair. His wife, Selima, wore a little inlaid stone in her nostril. Despite the fact that she was several months pregnant, she was constantly on the go, sweeping, cleaning pots and pans
, preparing meals, or doing the wash. Mehboub's mother, an old woman with short-cropped white hair who could hardly see, lived with them. For hours on end she would remain squatting in the alleyway murmuring snippets from the Koran. Nasir, the eldest son aged ten, was employed in a small workshop. Two of his sisters went to the Koranic school. The youngest, who was three years old, scampered about the alleyway. The family was quite well-off. For thirteen years Mehboub had worked as a day laborer in a naval yard in East Calcutta, forging propellers for boats. He earned about three hundred rupees a month, thirty U.S. dollars, a small .fortune in a slum where
125
thousands of families were unable to lay a hand on one rupee per person per day.
For several weeks Stephan KovalskTs relations with his neighbors had been confined to the mere exchange of a polite 4 'Salaam" each morning and evening. Evidently these Muslims (and they were not the only ones) persisted in disapproving of the intrusion of a foreign Catholic priest into their neighborhood. As always, it was thanks to the children that relations gradually thawed. A few attentions, indications of interest in their games, was all it took to win them over.
A dramatic incident was to break the ice once and for all. One evening Mehboub came home from work looking totally dejected. The naval yard had just laid oflf all its work force. It was a practice that had been current since the introduction of a law obliging employers to pay their workers on a monthly basis after several months of regular work. With the exception of those whose interests it served, no one wanted to see this law implemented. It was even said that government, management, and the unions had actually joined forces against it. The government, because the increase in number of workers paid on a monthly basis would fatally reinforce the strength of the unions; management, because a laborer working on precarious terms was much more readily exploited; the unions, because their membership was composed of monthly workers eager to restrict their advantages to their own minority. Furthermore, as always in India, in addition to objective reasons there were considerations of tradition, inherited from the past. If all the day laborers became monthly workers, what would become of the custom by which the eldest son of a monthly worker was accorded the privilege of being employed by the factory where his father worked? Thus everyone conspired together to get around the law. To avoid having to give employment contracts, people were laid off periodically, then rehired. So it was that thousands of men lived under the shadow of not knowing whether or not their jobs would be waiting for them on the following day. After thirteen or fourteen years of employment, when it was no longer possible to put off giving them a contract,
The City of Joy Page 12