The City of Joy

by Dominique Lapierre

  "He hadn't actually told me where he wanted to go. When he got in, he had simply said, 'Straight on and fast!' That marwari must have been used to speaking to horses, or slaves. "Iirn right! Tbrn left! Faster!' He barked out his orders and I performed the appropriate acrobatics in between the buses and the trucks. Several times he ordered me to stop and then had me set off again immediately.

  *A merchant, originally from the state of Marwar in Rajasthan, with a reputation for toughness in business.

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  Sharp stops like that, involving a jerk of the lower back and a pull in reverse to halt the full weight of movement, are horribly painful. It's as if all of a sudden your hamstrings are supporting the total weight of the rickshaw and the client. Setting off again was no less painful, but this time the pain came from the shoulders and forearms because it took a supreme effort to get the old machine rolling again. Poor old jalopy! With every stop and start its shafts shuddered as violently as my bones. I don't know whether it was because of the heat wave that had been scorching Calcutta for two or three days, but that day the bus and taxi drivers seemed to be afflicted with an extreme attack of nervous irritation. On the corner of one avenue a sardarji put his arm out of his window to grab the shaft of my rickshaw; he pushed it away with such violence that I lost my balance—a predicament that earned me a fresh outburst from my passenger and a whack from the cop directing the traffic. A little farther on, a group of kids hanging out the doorway of a packed streetcar, rained down a shower of kicks on my head. It was impossible to retaliate. These were humiliations that had to be swallowed in silence."

  Hasari's run finished that day outside the door to a restaurant in Park Street. Before putting down his shafts to allow his passenger to get out, he asked for five rupees. Staring at the puller as if the latter had just thrust a gun into his stomach to steal his wallet, the fat marwari, scarlet with fury, exclaimed, "Five rupees! Five rupees for a journey with a lame horse!"

  At this point, however, the incident took an unexpected turn. Alerted by the marwari's protestations, a dozen rickshaw pullers who had been waiting outside a nearby restaurant came rushing over to form a circle around him. Frightened by their threatening air, the fat fellow calmed down and lost no time in foraging in his pocket. Without a word, he handed to Hasari a crisp, green five-rupee note. As the Bengali peasants say, "When the dogs howl, the tiger sheaths its claws."

  This city was indeed a jungle, with laws and hierarchies like those in the forest. There were elephants, tigers, panthers, snakes, and all kinds of other urban animals, and it was undoubtedly best to know which were which, if you

  didn't want to run into trouble. One day when Hasari was parked outside the Kit Kat, a nightclub on the corner of Park Street, a Sikh taxi driver signaled to him to clear out so that he could take his place. The puller pretended not to understand. The Sikh's turban stirred angrily behind the steering wheel. He trumpeted loudly with his horn, like an elephant preparing to stampede. Hasari really believed that he was going to charge his rickshaw, and so he seized his shafts to move off. He had made a mistake: he had failed to respect one of the laws of the Calcutta jungle, one that stipulates that a rickshaw must always give way to a taxi.

  The most trying part of his existence as a human horse was not, however, the physical hardship; in his village there were jobs that were just as exhausting as pulling two obese poussahs from Park Street to the Bara Bazar. But those tasks were seasonal, interspaced with long periods of inactivity when a man could take a rest. The life of the rickshaw wallah was a form of slavery that spanned every day of the week and every week of the year.

  "Sometimes I would have to take people to Howrah Station on the other side of the river. Over there there weren't any rickshaws drawn by men on foot, only cycle rickshaws. I had never pedaled one of those machines but it seemed to me that there must be less effort involved. I mentioned this fact one day to Ram Chander but he merely placed the flats of his hands on his buttocks with an air of great long suffering."

  "You poor fellow," he groaned, "you've no idea what it's like to spend ten or twelve hours on the saddle of a bike! To start with you get an ass full of sores. Then your balls get stuck up and after two or three years you can't screw anymore. Your bike has made your prick as soft as cotton."

  "Good old Ram, there was no one quite like him for making you realize that there was always someone worse off than you."

  ''You'll see, my dear fellow, they'll gnaw you right down to the bone. They'll expect everything of you because of your white skin. Just think of it, a European in a necropolis like the City of Joy. Such a thing is completely unheard of!"

  Stephan Kovalski couldn't help thinking of the words of the Indian rector from the parish of Our Lady of the Loving Heart as he handed out aspirin tablets to a woman who had brought him her child stricken with meningitis. The recovery of the young blind girl and his compassion for all the afflicted had been enough to guarantee the realization of Father Cordeiro's prediction. The "Father" of 49 Nizamudhin Lane had become Santa Claus, a Santa Claus especially tailored for the needs of a slum, a man who was prepared to listen and could understand, onto whom the most neglected could project their dreams, in whom they found friendship and compassion. Suddenly, he found himself credited with the smallest good thing that might occur, like the municipality's decision to dig ten new wells, or the exceptional mildness of the temperature at the beginning of that winter. The constant need to relate 162

  to a person is a characteristic trait of the Indian soul. No doubt it is due to the caste system and to the fact that within each social group there was always somebody in charge. Unless you knew this "somebody," or had access to him, you had very little chance to obtain anything, whether it was from the civil administration, the police, the hospitals. For the hundreds of despised and rejected occupants of his neighborhood, Stephan Kovalski thus became the ultimate "somebody," an almighty intercessor who could do absolutely anything because of his white skin, the cross of a man of God that he wore on his chest, and his wallet which, for poor people with nothing, must have seemed as fat as that of G. D. Birla, Calcutta's celebrated multimillionaire.

  This kind of notoriety exasperated the Pole. He did not want to be Santa Claus, nor Social Security, nor Divine Providence. All he wanted to be was a poor man among the poor. "My ambition was primarily to give them confidence in themselves, so that they would feel less abandoned and want to undertake actions to improve their own lot."

  A few weeks before the festival of Durga, his wish was to be fulfilled. One evening some of his neighbors, led by Margareta, walked into his room.

  "Stephan, Big Brother," declared the young Christian widow, "we want to discuss with you how we can do something useful for the people here."

  Margareta performed the introductions. With her were a young Hindu couple, an Anglo-Indian Christian, a Muslim laborer, and an Assamese girl in her twenties—six, poors who wanted to restore their own dignity and "build something together." The Hindu couple, named the Ghoshs, were attractive, healthy, and bright. Beneath her red cotton veil, decorated with a floral pattern, the young woman with her very smooth clear skin looked like a Renaissance madonna. The intensity of her gaze struck Kovalski immediately. "That young woman was burning with an inner fire." Her name was Shanta and she was the eldest daughter of a poverty-stricken peasant from Basanti, a large isolated borough in the Ganges delta. To provide for his eight children, her father used to go oflF with the local

  fishermen on regular expeditions to the flooded jungle of the Sundarbans. There they would collect wild honey. One day, however, her father did not return. He had been carried off by a man-eating tiger, of the kind that kill more than three hundred honey collectors a year in that part of the country. It was on the puddled clay floor of the little local primary school that Shanta had gotten to know the bearded fellow with the curly hair who was her husband. He was twenty-six-year-old Ashish (which means "hope"), one of eleven children of a landless day laborer. />
  This couple's case was unique: they had married for love. Their defiance of all tradition had provoked such a scandal that they had been forced to flee from the village and seek refuge in Calcutta. After starving for nearly a year, Ashish had found a job as an instructor in one of Mother Teresa's training centers for handicapped children. As for Shanta, she was a teacher in a Howrah school. After the birth of their first child they had found their El Dorado: a room in a Hindu compound in Anand Nagar. Two regular incomes of two hundred rupees (twenty U.S. dollars) a month might seem a pittance, but in Anand Nagar it was a small fortune. The Ghoshs were privileged people, which made their readiness to serve others all the more remarkable.

  The Anglo-Indian bore the extravagant name of Aristotle John. He was a small man with a sad face and the worried air typical of many members of a community that has become particularly marginal, in contemporary India. He worked at the railways. The fifty-two-year-old Muslim, Saladdin, had a short mustache and wore a little embroidered skullcap on his head. It was he who had been longest in the slum. Having escaped the massacres of Partition, for the last twenty years he had shared a hovel with three mullahs for whom he acted as cook and guide.

  To build something together! In this "gulag" where seventy thousand men fought each day for their survival, in this ants' nest which at times looked more like a death camp where hundreds of people died each year of tuberculosis, leprosy, dysentery, and all the diseases caused by malnutrition, in this environment so polluted that thousands never reached the age of forty, there was everything

  to build. You needed a dispensary and a leprosy clinic, a home for rickety children, emergency milk rations for kids and pregnant women, drinking water fountains, more latrines and sewers. The urgent tasks were countless.

  "I suggest we all make an individual survey," said Kovalski, "to find out what are the most immediate problems our brothers want to see given priority." The results came in three days later. They were all identical. The most pressing desires of the inhabitants of the City of Joy were not the ones that the priest had anticipated. It was not their living conditions that people wanted to change. The sustenance they sought was not directed at their children's frail bodies, but at their minds. The six surveys revealed that the primary demand was for the creation of a night school so that children employed in the workshops, stores, and tea shops in the alley, could learn to read and write.

  Kovalski gave Margareta the task of inviting the families concerned to find a hut which would serve as a classroom, and he offered to share in the remuneration of two teachers. "I had achieved my main objective," he was to say, "that of encouraging my brothers in Anand Nagar to take charge of themselves."

  That first step was the beginning of an enterprise based on solidarity and sharing that would one day completely revolutionize living conditions in the slum. At the very next meeting Kovalski suggested the creation of a team of volunteers to help accompany the sick to the Calcutta hospitals. To go by themselves for treatment in such caravansaries was often so nightmarish a prospect that most people didn't dare undertake the voyage.

  Anyone could attend the meetings in the room at 49 Nizamudhin Lane. A new rumor soon spread: "there are actually people willing to listen to the poor." The idea was so revolutionary that the Pole christened his little team the Listening Committee for Mutual Aid. It was also a revelation: people discovered that there were others worse off than themselves. Kovalski made it a rule that each meeting should begin with the reading of a chapter from the Gospel. "No reading could have been more appropriate to life in the slum," he was to say, "no example could have

  been more apt than that of Christ relieving the burdens of his contemporaries. Hindus, Muslims, Christians, all men of goodwill could understand the link between the message of the Gospel and their lives of suffering, between the person of Christ and those who had taken it upon themselves to continue his work."

  No one seemed to feel this link with greater intensity than the young Assamese girl who had come that first evening to offer her services to Kovalski. With her braid hanging down her back, her slits for eyes, and her pink cheeks, she looked like a little Chinese doll. Her name had all the resonance of a mantra. She was called Bandona which means "praise God." Although she belonged to the Buddhist faith she had been instantly captivated by the Gospel message. By revealing that it was in the service of others that God is best found, the message spoke to her impatience. "Every time some unfortunate person explained his difficulties, her face was transformed into a mark of pain," Kovalski was to comment. "All suffering was her suffering."

  Yet this girl who was so hypersensitive to others was almost unhealthily modest when it came to anything that concerned her. In response to any personal question she would veil her face with the tip of her sari and lower her head. Kovalski's curiosity was aroused by this. One day when he was teasing her she replied curtly, "Didn't your Jesus himself say that we are only here to carry out his Father's will and that our own identity does not matter? In which case, why are you so interested in me?"

  Still the priest managed to glean a few bits of information that would enable him to understand how a girl from the lofty mountains of Assam had come to be washed up in the filth of a Calcutta slum. Her father was a small peasant of Assamese stock, who had settled in the region of Kalimpong, to the extreme north of Bengal, in the shadow of the first foothills of the Himalayan mountain range. Like all the other mountain people in that area, he worked a small terraced plot of agricultural land, painfully wrested from the hillside. It was enough to provide his wife and four children with a meager living. One day, however, entrepreneurs from Calcutta set about exploiting the wood

  from the forests. They fixed a daily quota of trees to be chopped down. Years before, the region had already been radically changed by the development of the tea gardens. With the arrival of the lumbermen, the wooded jungles shrank. Peasants were compelled to venture ever farther afield to find the necessary wood to cook their food, and new land to cultivate. The number of bushfires increased and, since the vegetation no longer had time to recover before the monsoon cataracts came, erosion ravaged the soil. Deprived of their traditional grazing land, the cattle, too, became part of the destructive process. The growing scarcity of natural products obliged families to increase the growth of crops needed for their own food. As firewood became progressively rarer, they had to use animal dung to cook their meals, thus depriving the land of its richest fertilizer. The yield dropped. Deterioration of the land became more rapid. Because of the deforestation, water was no longer retained, springs ran dry, reservoirs stood empty, the underground water dried up. Since this area was subject to one of the heaviest rainfalls in the world— up to thirty-three feet of water a year in Assam—with each monsoon the arable earth and humus was washed away to the plains, leaving only the bare rock. In a matter of years the whole region had become a desert. For those who lived there, there was no alternative but to leave, to leave for the city which had ruined them.

  Bandona was four years old when her family set out for Calcutta. Thanks to a cousin who worked in a clothing shop, her family was lucky enough to find a room in Anand Nagar. Five years later her father died of tuberculosis. Her mother, a little woman who could not be daunted, had burned incense sticks before the blackened picture of the founder of the Buddhist sect of the Yellow Caps, and then, after a year, married again. Shortly afterward, however, her husband had gone off to work in the South. Alone, she had brought up her four children by retrieving metal objects from the garbage heaps and selling them to a scrap metal dealer.

  At the age of twelve Bandona had started work, first in a cardboard factory and then in a workshop that turned out parts for trucks. From then on she became her family's

  only support, for her mother was struck down with tuberculosis. Bandona would go out at five in the morning and rarely get back before ten o'clock at night, after a two-hour bus ride and walking three miles. Often she would not come home at all: power cuts neces
sitated her sleeping at the foot of her machine tool so she could make up the time lost when the electricity was restored. In Calcutta, tens of thousands of workers lived like that, chained to their machines because of load shedding and electricity failures. Bandona earned four rupees a day (forty U.S. cents), which only just enabled her to pay the rent for the family hovel and guarantee her mother and brothers a bowl of rice or two chapatis once a day. On Sundays and feast days, instead of resting or indulging in the usual distractions of her age group, she would prowl the slum looking for distressed people to help. That was how she came one evening to enter the home of Stephan Kovalski.

  A number of donations from Europe made it possible for the priest to help her leave her workshop and work full-time in the service of the Listening Committee for Mutual Aid. No one had a better understanding of sharing and dialogue, of respect for other people's faiths and beliefs, than Bandona. She knew how to listen to the confessions of the dying, how to pray with the families of the dead, wash the corpses, accompany the deceased on the last journey to the cemetery or the funeral pyre. No one had ever taught her, yet she knew it all through intuition, friendship, love. Her extraordinary capacity to communicate enabled her to go into any compound, any hut, and sit down among people without encountering any prejudice of caste or religion, and this ability was all the more remarkable because she was not married. Normally it would be inconceivable that a young single woman would go anywhere at random, especially into a milieu outside her own caste. Married women never took a young girl into their confidence, even one belonging to their own caste, because tradition required that young girls know nothing about life so that they could come to their marriage innocent, on pain of being accused of immorality and thereupon rejected.