The City of Joy

by Dominique Lapierre

  Two or three times a week, the young Assamese girl would accompany groups of sick and dying people to the hospitals of Calcutta. Steering these unfortunates through terrifying traffic, then guiding them through corridors and packed waiting rooms, was quite a venture. In such institutions, a poor person without an escort would have only the remotest chance of actually reaching an examination room. Furthermore, even if given the opportunity, he would never have been able to explain what was wrong or understand the treatment he should follow because, nine times out of ten, he wouldn't speak the Bengali the doctor spoke, but only one of the twenty or thirty dialects of the enormous hinterland that exported its millions of poor to Calcutta. Demanding, storming the doors, forcing entry, Bandona fought like a wild beast to have her proteges treated like human beings and to see that the medicines prescribed were properly given to them, a benefit that rarely occurred. In a few weeks she was to become the pillar and heart of the Listening Committee for Mutual Aid. Her memory was the card index of all the miseries of the slum. Above all, however, it was the quality of her expression, her smile, her love that was to earn her a nickname. The poor soon called her ll Anand Nagar ka Swarga Dug" —the "Angel of the City of Joy."

  One evening, returning from one of her expeditions in a hospital, Bandona burst into Stephan Kovalski's room like a missile to inform him that a doctor had diagnosed a fatal skin disease on a pregnant woman from the slum. Only a serum made in England might possibly save her.

  "Stephan, Daddah," she pleaded, taking hold of the priest's hands, "you must have that medicine sent over urgently. Otherwise that woman and her baby will die."

  The next day Kovalski rushed to the post office in Howrah to send a telegram to the head of his fraternity who could contact his connections in London. With a little bit of luck, the cure could arrive within a week. Sure enough, a week later Stephan Kovalski received, via the

  excellent Indian postal service, a slip from customs asking him to come and pick up a parcel.

  That was the beginning of an odyssey that he would not soon forget.

  4 ' H e ' s g o i n g to die right here in the street," Ha-sari thought with horror. His friend Ram Chander's chest had suddenly distended, desperately trying to take in air. His ribs stood out so that his skin looked as if it would burst, his face had suddenly turned yellow, and his mouth was gaping open like that of a drowning man deprived of oxygen. A sudden fit of coughing made him shudder and shake, sounding like a piston in a water pump. He began to bring something up but as he had pan in his mouth, it was impossible to tell whether he was spitting out blood or betel juice. Hasari helped his friend onto the seat of his rickshaw and suggested that he take him home. Ram shook his head, and reassured his companion. "It's only this damned cold," he said. "It'll pass."

  That year the Bengali winter was murderous. Winds from the Himalayas had brought the thermometer down to fourteen degrees, a temperature that was positively frigid for a population used to baking in an oven for eight months of the year. For the human horses it represented a particularly harsh trial. Condemned to switching from the sweatbaths of a run to the cold of prolonged waiting, their

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  undernourished bodies had little resistance. Many of them died.

  "Ram was a brother to me in the jungle of Calcutta, where everyone preyed on somebody else," Hasari Pal would later recount. "It was he who had helped and supported me, he who had found me my rickshaw. Every time I saw his gray hair, I would speed up just to park my carriage next to his. How many hours we spent, sitting side by side on the corner of Park Circus or Wellesley Street, or when it was hot, in front of the big market on Lower Circular Road which everyone called the 'Air Conditioned Market' because there were machines inside that blew out that marvelous substance which I used to think only the peaks of the Himalayas could provide—cool air. Ram's dream was to one day go back to his village and open a grocery shop. 'Just to sit there all day in the same spot, without moving, without having to run around,' he would say, chatting about his future paradise. And he would tell me about how he imagined his life, enthroned in his shop, all around him sacks overflowing with all kinds of dal and rice, and other sacks full of intoxicatingly aromatic spices, piles of vegetables, on the shelves all sorts of other items: bars of soap, incense sticks, biscuits, and sweetmeats. In short, he dreamed of a world of peace and prosperity, of which he would form the fixed center, like these lingam of Shiva,* those symbols of fertility standing on their yonit in the temples."

  Before this dream could be realized, however, Ram Chander had a promise to keep. He had to reimburse the mahajan in his village for the loan he had taken out to pay for his father's funeral rites. Otherwise the family field, which was serving as collateral, would be lost forever. A few days before the payment term expired, he had managed to negotiate another loan with a usurer from a neighboring village. For peasants, paying oflF one debt with the help of another loan, then paying off that loan with a third, and so on, was a common practice. When it came to the final reckoning they invariably lost their land.

  ♦Stone in the form of a phallus, symbolizing god Shiva. tThe feminine sexual organ.

  Ram Chander's five years were due to expire in a few weeks, just before the festival of Durga. Despite the deterioration of his health, Ram went on working. One morning Hasari ran into him outside the post office in Park Street. The robust fellow looked like a shadow of his former self. He had come to have the munshi fill in the form for his monthly money invoice. The sheer bulk of the package of notes he pulled out of his longhi amazed Hasari.

  "I swear you've robbed the Bank of India!" Hasari exclaimed.

  "No," replied Ram with unusual gravity, "but this month I've got to send them everything. Otherwise our field will be lost."

  Sending them everything meant that for the past month he had cut his own food down to starvation rations: two or three griddle cakes, a cup of tea or a glass of sugarcane juice a day.

  "As soon as I saw the neighbor's boy running toward me, I understood," Hasari was later to say. "The news spread instantly around all the main rickshaw stations in the area and there were soon about thirty of us assembled in the little shed behind the Chittarajan Hospital, where Ram Chander lived. He was lying on the plank that had served as his bed for the five years he had spent in Calcutta. His thick shock of gray hair was like a halo around his head. His eyes were half-open and his lips were shaped into one of his mischievous grins that were so familiar. He looked as if he were enjoying the joke he had just played on us. According to the carpenter-joiner who shared his lodgings, Ram had died in his sleep, which probably explained why he looked so peaceful. The night before, he had had several very violent fits of coughing. He had spat a great deal an$[even vomited blood. Then he had gone to sleep, and he never woke up again.

  "Now we had to carry out the funeral rites. We held a discussion among the rickshaw pullers to establish whether we were going to carry him to the cremation ghats on foot or whether we should hire a Tempo. In Calcutta you can

  hire little three-wheeled carts for one hour, two hours, or however long you want, for thirty rupees an hour. In view of the distance to the Nimtallah ghat, we agreed to hire a Tempo, so I suggested we organize a collection. Some gave twenty rupees, others ten, others five. I searched in Ram's waist, in the place where I knew he hid his money, and found twenty-five rupees. His neighbors also wanted to join in the collection, for Ram was much loved in the neighborhood. No one compared with him when it came to storytelling, and the children adored him. Someone brought cups of tea from the nearest tea stall and we all drank, standing around our friend. Whether it was because of his smile I don't know, but there was no sadness there. People chatted and came and went just as if he were alive and joining in the conversation. I went to the market next to Sealdah Station with three colleagues, to buy the items necessary to complete the funeral rites, beginning with the litter needed to transport the body to the ghat. We also bought incense sticks, a pot of ghee,* fifteen feet of
white linen, and a long cord to tie the linen around the body; also garlands of white jasmine and a clay pot with which to pour water from the Ganges into the mouth and over the head of the deceased.

  44 We regarded ourselves as his family, so we performed his last toilet ourselves. It didn't take very long. Ram had died in his pants, longhi, and working vest. We washed him and wrapped him in the shroud we had bought, so that only his face and the tips of his feet were visible. Then we lifted him onto the litter. Poor Ram! He really didn't weigh very much. No rickshaw puller is very heavy but he really broke all records for being a featherweight. He must have lost forty pounds since the winter. Recently he had been obliged to turn down passengers who were too fat. After all, you can't ask a goat to pull an elephant! Next we decorated the litter with the garlands of white jasmine and lit incense sticks at the four corners of it. One after another, we walked around the body in a final namaskar of farewell.

  4 'Before leaving the shed, I gathered up his things. He

  *Melted butter, purified five times.

  didn't have much—a few cooking utensils, a change of longhi, a shirt and trousers for the festival of Durga, and an old umbrella. These were all his worldly possessions.

  64 Six of us climbed into the Tempo with Ram, and the others caught a bus to the cremation ghat by the river. It was just like the festival of Durga except that we were taking the body of our friend instead of a statue of the divinity to the sacred river. It took us over an hour to cross the city from east to west and we sang hymns throughout the journey. They were verses from the Gita, the sacred book of our religion. Every Hindu learns these verses when he is a child. They proclaim the glory of eternity.

  "We met up with the others again at the ghat. There were always pyres burning there and several corpses were already waiting on litters. I made contact with the man in~ charge of cremations. He was an employee belonging to the Dom caste, who specialize in the cremation of the dead. They live with their families next to the funeral pyres. The man in charge asked me for a hundred and twenty rupees for wood. Wood for a cremation is very expensive. That's why indigents and people without families are thrown into the river without being burned. All together it would cost a hundred and fifty rupees to have the body of our friend vanish into smoke. When our turn came, I went down to the river to fill the clay pot with water and each one of us let a few drops fall onto Ram's lips. The Brahmin attendant poured the ghee we had brought onto his forehead and recited the ritual mantras. Then we placed the body on the pyre. The employee covered it with other fagots until the body was completely imprisoned in a cage of sticks. The Brahmin poured more ghee over the fagots until we could see only a patch of white shroud.

  "As the final moment drew nearer, I felt my throat tighten with emotion and tears well up in my eyes. No matter how hardened you were, it was a terrible thing to see your brother encased on a funeral pyre, ready for burning. Images flooded through my memory: our meeting outside the Bara Bazar warehouse when we took the injured coolie to the hospital, that first bottle of bangla we drank together afterward, Sundays spent playing cards in

  the Park Circus restaurant, our visit to the rickshaw owner's representative to beg him to entrust a rickshaw to me. Yes, in this inhuman city, Ram had been a father to me and now, without him, I felt like an orphan. One of the other pullers must have noticed my grief because he came over to me, put a hand on my shoulder, and said, 'Don't cry, Hasari. Everyone has to die some day.' It wasn't perhaps the most comforting of remarks, but it did help me to get a grip on myself. I drew nearer to the pyre.

  "Since Ram had no family in Calcutta, the Brahmin asked me to plunge the lighted torch into the pile of wood. As ritual required, I walked five times around the pyre, then thrust the torch into the place where the head was. Instantly the pyre flared up amid a shower of sparks. We were forced to draw back because of the heat. When the flames reached the body, I wished Ram a good journey. Above all, I wished that he might be reborn with a better karma, in the body of a zamindar, for example, or in that of a rickshaw owner!

  "The cremation lasted several hours. When there was nothing left but a pile of ashes, one of the officials in charge of cremations sprinkled the ashes with water from the Ganges, then put them in a baked clay pot. And then we all went down to the river and scattered the ashes on the current so that they would be borne away to the eternity of the oceans. Then we all immersed ourselves in the waters for a purifying bath and left the ghats.

  "There remained just one last rite for us to carry out. Actually it was more a tradition than a rite. To conclude that sad day we invaded one of the numerous dives that were open day and night in the vicinity of the cremation ghats and ordered up plenty of bottles of bangla. Then, drunk out of our minds, we all went oflF for a meal together, a real feast of curd, rice, dal, and sweetmeats—a rich man's feast in honor of a poor man's death."

  A crumbling old building, with a staircase that stank of urine and filled with a confusion of silhouettes in dhotis wandering about, the Calcutta customs office was a classic shrine to bureaucracy. Brandishing like a talisman the notice for his parcel of medicine, Stephan Kovalski swept into the first office. Once inside, however, he had no sooner taken a step before his commendable enthusiasm deserted him. Seized by the spectacle before him, he stopped in his tracks, transfixed. Before him extended a battlefield of old tables and shelves, sagging beneath mountains of dog-eared files, spewing out yellowing paperwork tied vaguely together with bits of string. There were piles of ledgers all of which appeared to be chewed by rats and termites, and some of which looked as if they dated back to the previous century. The cracked cement of the floor was likewise strewn with paper. From drawers that were coming apart bulged an infinite variety of printed forms. On the wall Kovalski noticed a calendar for some year long past, which sported a dusty effigy of the goddess Durga slaying the demon-buffalo, the incarnation of evil.

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  A dozen babus* in dhotis were seated in the middle of this chaos, beneath a battery of fans which throbbed out a veritable sirocco of moist air and sent the papers into a whirl of confusion. While some scrambled to catch documents as if they were chasing butterflies, others jabbed a single finger at antique typewriters, pausing after each letter to verify that they had actually managed to hit the right key. Others were talking on telephones that didn't appear to be connected to any line. Many of them seemed to be engrossed in activities that were not, strictly speaking, professional. Some were reading newspapers or sipping tea. Others were asleep, with their heads propped up on the papers that covered their desks, looking like Egyptian mummies on a bed of papyrus. Yet others, seated in their chairs in the hieratic position of yogis, looked as if they had attained the ultimate stages of nirvana.

  On a pedestal near the entrance, three divinities from the Hindu pantheon, bound together by a tangle of cobwebs, watched over the enormous office, while a dust-covered portrait of Gandhi contemplated the chaos with supreme resignation. On the opposite wall, a yellowing poster proclaimed the glorious virtues of teamwork.

  The entry of a foreigner had not aroused the slightest bit of interest. Eventually Kovalski's eye fell on a little man with bare feet who happened to be passing with a teapot. The employee stabbed his chin in the direction of one of the officials who was typing with one finger. Stepping gingerly over stacks of files, the priest reached the man in question and handed him the slip he had received in the mail. The babu in glasses examined the document at length, then, taking stock of his visitor, he inquired, "Do you like your tea with or without milk?"

  "With," replied Kovalski, somewhat taken aback.

  The man rang a bell several times, until a shadow emerged from among the pyramids of files.

  He ordered a tea. Then, fiddling with the document, he consulted his watch.

  "It's nearly lunchtime, Mr. Kovalski. Afterward, it'll

  ♦Originally a term of respect, now used to designate lesser officials in the civil service.

  be a bit
late to find your file before the offices close. Please, come back tomorrow morning."

  4 'But it's a question of a very urgent consignment of medicines," protested the priest. "For someone who could die."

  The official assumed a compassionate air. Then, pointing to the mountain of paperwork that surrounded him, he said, "Wait for your tea. We'll do everything we can to find your parcel as quickly as possible."

  With these words, enunciated with the utmost affability, the babu got up and withdrew.

  Next morning at precisely ten o'clock, the time when all the administrative offices in India open, Kovalski was back. A line of some thirty people preceded him. A few minutes before his turn came up he saw the same official with the glasses get up and leave, just as he had done on the previous day. It was lunchtime. Kovalski rushed after him. Still with the same courtesy, the babu merely pointed to his watch with a grave expression. He made his apologies: it was midday. In vain Kovalski pleaded with him; the man remained inflexible. The Pole decided to remain where he was and await the babu's return. But on that particular afternoon the official did not reappear in his office.

  As luck would have it, the next day was one of the two holiday Saturdays in the month. Kovalski had to wait until Monday. After three more hours of lining up on the steps of the betel-stained staircase, he found himself once more before the babu with the glasses.