"If you're not a member of the CIA, nor of the Naxalite commandos, nor of the Maoist action groups," recapitulated the chief inspector, "then you must be a Jesuit?"
For a few seconds Kovalski was silent, torn between anger and the desire to burst out laughing.
"If you're now trying to get me to admit that I'm a missionary," he said eventually, "you're wasting your time again. I'm no more a missionary than a CIA agent."
"But you know what the missionaries did in Nagaland," insisted the chief inspector.
"No."
"Come, come, Shri Kovalski, you really don't know that the missionaries joined forces with the separatist movements to spur the local people into rising up and reclaiming their autonomy?"
"I can assure you that the work of the vast majority of missionaries in this country—Jesuit or otherwise—has been an action to better the lot of the people," replied Kovalski sharply, indignant at the turn taken by the interrogation. "What's more, you know for a fact that when people here talk about the 'missionary spirit,' it is often to draw attention to the work of someone who has in truth devoted himself to others, who has given only love to his Indian brothers."
There was silence and then, suddenly, the chief inspector stood up and offered his hands to his interlocutor, in a gesture marked with respect. His assistant with the shiny skin did likewise and so did the others, one after another. At last they had come to an understanding.
Before accompanying the visitor back, the chief inspector pointed to the picture of the Sacred Shroud spread out on his table.
"I am a Hindu," he said. "But I would like to ask your permission to keep this picture as a souvenir of our meeting."
Stephan Kovalski could hardly believe his ears. That's fantastic, he thought. The chief of the police asking me for a picture of Christ! "It was a present and I'm very
attached to it," replied the priest, "but I could have a photographer make up a copy for you."
The man seemed delighted at the idea. The chief inspector then put down in front of Kovalski a sheet of paper bearing several administrative seals.
"In exchange, here is a document that will no doubt please you. This is your resident's permit. My country is proud to welcome authentic holy men like you."
She is the triumphant goddess, the destructor of the demons of evil and ignorance, wife of the god Shiva, daughter of the Himalayas, a queen of manifold incarnations, the feminine force of the gods, alternately the symbol of gentleness and of cruelty. The Puranas, the golden legends of Hinduism, devote thousands of verses to the legendary exploits she accomplishes under a score of names, guises, and attributes.
In her tender guise, she is called Ouma, light and grace; Gauri, the goddess with the light skin; Parvati, queen of the mountains; or Jagan Mata, mother of the universe. In her destructive form she takes the names of Kali the Black one, Bhairavi the Terrible, Chandi the Furious, or Durga the unattainable. It is under this latter name and in the guise of the divine conqueror of evil that she is specially worshipped in Bengal. Every child knows her fabulous story.
Hundreds of thousands of years ago a terrible demon ravaged the earth, throwing the seasons into confusion. He was the demon of evil, in other words, of ignorance, and the gods themselves could not get rid of him. Brahma, the 212
Creator, had declared that only a son born to the god Shiva could conquer him, but Shiva's wife was dead and he, in his grief, could give no thought to bringing a son into the world. He lived the life of an ascetic, begging in the villages for his food, like so many others seen in the India of today, with their long hair and their bodies covered with ashes.
Meanwhile the situation on earth grew worse and in the heavens the gods lamented the fact that Shiva could not consider marrying again. The gods themselves appealed to Kama, god of love and desire, to cause love to be born in the heart of Shiva. Kama set out, accompanied by his wife, Voluptuousness, and their friend, Spring. They came to the foot of the mountain where Shiva was meditating and, at a moment when the ascetic seemed to relax his concentration, Kama released from his floral bow the jasmine arrow that no one can resist. From that moment onward, Shiva began to think of Ouma, daughter of the Himalayas, in whose body his first wife had been reincarnated. After various trials, they were married and she took the name of Parvati, "daughter of the mountain."
Yet the demon of evil continued to lay waste to the earth and by the time a son of Shiva was available to tackle him, it might be too late. So it was that the gods united then-diverse energies in a single breath of fire and concentrated it upon Parvati who was thereby transfigured. She became the great goddess, Durga, "she whom nothing can attain." In order to combat the demon in the ten directions of space, she had ten arms which the gods equipped with their own weapons. Her father, Himalaya, King of the Mountains, provided her with a lion as a mount, then the moon gave her a rounded face and death her long black hair. She was the color of the dawn.
The demon then appeared in the form of a huge buffalo accompanied by the multitudes of his army. Battle commenced. Axes, arrows, and javelins hurtled through space and the roaring lion on which the goddess was mounted pounced upon the army of demons like flames upon a forest. She herself, with her armored hands, smote her enemy, their horses, elephants, and chariots so that they crashed into a heap of chaos. The furious bellowing of the
giant buffalo made the worlds tremble; with his horns he uprooted the mountains and hurled them at the goddess, who pulverized them with her arrows. Thus the battle raged for three days. Several times Durga was on the point of defeat. At one point, on the evening of the third day, she interrupted her onslaught to raise to her lips a cup filled with the liquid of the gods. Then, with a terrible blow, she sank her trident into the monster's chest. Mortally wounded, the monster immediately tried to abandon his body. From his mouth there issued the figure of a hero, brandishing a scimitar. At once, however, the triumphant goddess decapitated him.
It was then that she turned completely black and became known as Kali, "the Black one," as black as time which consumes everything. Then earth and heaven resounded with cheers of joy and songs of victory.
Once a year, at the end of the monsoon, the eight million Hindus in Calcutta commemorate this victory by celebrating a four-day festival, the splendor and fervor of which are probably without equal in the rest of the world. For four festive days the city becomes a city of light, joy, and hope. Preparation for the festival begins several months beforehand, in the old quarter occupied by the potters' caste, where hundreds of artisans create a collection of the most magnificent statues ever consecrated to a city or his saints. For one whole year the craftsmen compete between themselves to produce the most colossal and most sumptuous representation of the goddess Durga. Having constructed a framework out of braided straw, the potters coat their models with clay before sculpturing them to produce the desired shape and expression. Finally they complete their handiwork by painting and clothing them. Ordered in advance by families, communities, neighborhoods, factories, or workshops, these thousands of Durgas are all destined to take their places, on the first day of the festival, under one of the thousand canopies, known as pandals, erected in the streets, avenues, and crossroads of the city. The construction of these canopies, and especially their decoration, is the subject of great rivalry.
Some weeks before the festival, Stephan Kovalski received a visit from two gentlemen who introduced them-
selves as representatives of the Neighborhood Committee for the Construction of Canopied Shrines in Anand Nagar. Courteous in the extreme and far too well-dressed to be actual occupants of the slum, the visitors showed him a notebook full of subscriptions and invited the priest to pay them the sum allocated to him, namely, fifty rupees. In one morning alone, they had already collected more than a thousand rupees by racketting one after another the hovels in the alleyway, including those occupied by Muslims and Christians.
Kovalski was outraged that so much money should be squandered on a festival, w
hile so much poverty prevailed. He was wrong. His rational Western reaction failed to take into account the most essential point of all: that these people lived in a state of osmosis with their deities. And he forgot too the role these gods played in everyday life. Any intervention of fortune, good or bad: work, rain, hunger, a birth, a death—in fact everything was ascribed to the gods. And that is why the country's most important festivals never commemorate historic anniversaries, not even the glorious day of Indian Independence, but always some religious event. No other people honors its gods and its prophets as fervently as does the population of Calcutta— despite the fact that the heavens often seem to have completely abandoned the city to its tragic destiny. Every day, or almost every day, the slum and other areas of the city resounded with the noise of some procession bearing witness to the mystical marriage of a people and its creator.
The previous week, Kovalski had run into a brass band on the corner of Chitpore Road. Blocking traffic, dancers performed their contortions, calling out the name of the prophet Hussain and swirling in the sunlight curved swords above their heads. It was Moharram, the great Muslim festival that marked the beginning of the Islamic holy year. In the slum, as elsewhere in the city, all the Shi'ite Muslims changed into their festival clothes. It was a municipal holiday, one of fourteen or fifteen such holidays in the calendar of this city that was a veritable mosaic of peoples and beliefs.
Two days previously, a thunderous burst of fireworks
had woken the tenant of 49 Nizamudhin Lane with a start. The several Sikh families in the slum were celebrating the birth of the guru Nanak, the revered founder of their community, born in the Punjab at the other end of India. A procession of beturbaned men, armed with their traditional kirpans* went through the slums to the triumphant sound of a brass band and made for the small local gurdwaraA Meanwhile, from every corner of the city, other processions, accompanied by carts richly decorated with garlands of flowers, made their way to other gurdwaras. Inside these sanctuaries priests took turns participating in an uninterrupted reading of the Granth, their sacred book. A huge blue-and-white tent had been erected on the grass of the Maidan for a colossal feast. One of the leaders of the Sikh community in Anand Nagar, Govind Singh, a likable giant in a scarlet turban and a taxi driver by profession, had invited the Pole to be present at the celebrations. Hundreds of the faithful came to sit on the ground in long rows, with the women in tight trousers and Punjabi tunics on one side, and the men in their pointed turbans on the other. Generous people carrying caldrons of rice and curried vegetables passed along the rows and ladled curry onto banana leaves placed before each guest. Little girls with dark eyes made up with kohl poured tea into small baked clay bowls which would be broken after use. All day long hundreds of loudspeakers proclaimed the joy of the Sikhs from one bank of the Hooghly to the other.
On the previous day the Bara Bazar, the huge market on the other side of the bridge, had been the scene of effervescent rejoicing. Followers of the Digambara Jains sect, a reformed branch of Hinduism born about the time of the Buddha, had been celebrating the return of their pilgrimage season, marked by the official end of the monsoon. Preceded by two life-sized horses made out of white cardboard and affixed to the chassis of a Jeep, the procession carved its way through trucks, handcarts, rick-
* Small dagger/sword, one of the five attributes of the Sikhs. t Sikh temple.
shaws, indeed vehicles of every kind, inextricably entangled with a seething multitude of pedestrians. In the middle of the cortege, on a flower-bedecked float pulled by men curiously dressed in the costumes of Elizabethan lackeys, the sect's pope sat enthroned, half-naked in a golden shrine, waving to the multitudes who acclaimed him with the clash of cymbals and drums.
Of all these celebrations, however, surely none bore witness to the presence of God in Calcutta with more intensity than the Hindu pujas in honor of the goddess Durga. Even though with the passing of the years the festival had changed somewhat to become more of a commercial fair, it still contributed to making this city a place of faith. Nowhere was this characteristic so clearly in evidence as in the slums, at the heart of those disinherited people to whom the experts of the Ford Foundation predicted no improvement of their condition before the year 2020. In the depths of their poverty, they had managed to preserve the heritage of their traditions, and none of these traditions was more visibly expressed than the taste for celebration.
Deep in their veins flowed dedication to festivities that for the space of a day or a week removed them from reality. Festivities for which people went into debt or without food in order to buy their families new clothes in honor of the gods. Festivities that were a more effective vehicle for religion than any catechism. Festivities that embraced the heart and the senses with the magic of song and the ritual of long and sumptuous liturgical ceremonies.
What did it matter, therefore, that swindlers made their cut out of the sweat and hunger of the poor? In the final reckoning it was the poor who were the richer. In Anand Nagar racketeers had no qualms about obliging rickshaw cyclists and telagarhi pullers to pay their bit toward the shrines, or stopping trucks and buses on the Great Trunk Road to racket drivers and passengers. Even the leper quarter at the far end of the slum did not escape the fund-raising. No one knew exactly what percentage of the manna went straight into the pockets of the collectors, but what was left for the festival was enough to create magic.
As the day approached, a kind of vibration washed through the slums. Large bamboo frames shaped like
Roman triumphal arches began to pop up everywhere. Artists dressed these structures in multicolored materials. They decorated the supports and capitals with splendid patterns, in the form of mosaics or checkered squares, giving the drapes a geometry of exemplary refinement. The shrine destined to receive the statue of the goddess was itself a sumptuous floral creation, a veritable scaffold of roses, marigolds, and jasmine that embalmed the surrounding stench. Most surprising of all was the improbable panoply of accessories that came with the decorations. No pandal was complete without an abundance of floodlights, garlands of bulbs, lamps, and even Victorian chandeliers. Small islands of light suddenly brought to the roofs and facades a supernatural halo. Discharged by loudspeakers, songs and music poured out over the slum, day and night, endorsing the fact that everywhere in India celebrations are accompanied by excessive noise. This concert was the signal for a ritual of purification which, in the space of a few days, would completely transform a universe of squalor.
All Hindu families and a substantial number of Muslim and Christian households set about whitewashing their hovels inside and out—their verandas, the curbstones of the wells, and their shop fronts. The pious old Hindu who kept the tea shop opposite Kovalski's hovel took advantage of the priest's absence to repaint the fa§ade of his room in a beautiful white that filled the entrance with light. Then followed the people's special toilet. On this unique occasion in the year, thousands of poor people exchanged their worn clothes for the carefully preserved festival attire, or perhaps even bought for the occasion by going into debt with the neighborhood usurer. All the Calcutta traders encouraged such purchases by offering special reductions in honor of the goddess. Like film stars, the Durgas passed through the hands of an army of dressers and makeup artists, who adorned them with sumptuous clcfthes and jewels, before they were turned out as food for the hungry gazes of their public. The installation of statues in their shrines was the occasion for a meticulous ritual undertaken under the watchful eye of the police.
On the appointed day, at six o'clock in the evening, the plaintive sound of conches and the haunting roll of thou-
sands of daks* which down through the centuries had beaten out the pujas to Durga, announced the official beginning of the festival. For four intoxicating days of kermis, the slum people, like millions of others in the city, would proceed with their families in a blaze of floodlights past the four pandals erected in the City of Joy. Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Buddhists, Christians we
re all brothers, united in a dream. The men wore woolen sherwanis over their trousers and their wives were dressed in green silk kurtas, with gold earrings which gave them the air of Oriental princesses. Mehboub's eldest son, Nasir, who made ballpoint pens in a workshop, and his sisters, even the last little one with her stomach swollen with worms, were also made up and attired like little princes, despite the fact that, tragically scarred by their mother's disappearance, the family had sunk into wretchedness. Next to Mehboub and his children, Kovalski recognized the old Hindu from the tea shop. His forehead was decorated with the three streaks of ashes of the worshippers of Shiva. Visibly moved by his darshari with the deity, oblivious to the lights and the din of the loudspeakers, he was immersed, eyes closed, in a state of bliss. The sight of this holy man at prayer reminded Stephan Kovalski of the words of the prophet Isaiah, "The prayer of the poor and the orphaned never rises to the Lord without response."
On the fourth day at dusk, all the statues in the City of Joy were hoisted onto illuminated carts, draped in material and flowers, to be conducted solemnly in procession, accompanied by brass bands, bagpipes, drums, and conches as far as the banks of the Hooghly. At the same time, all over the city, similar corteges were heading for the same destination. Borne on trucks, handcarts, taxis, private cars, and even cycles and hand-pulled rickshaws, thousands of Durgas descended to the river, escorted by their devout owners. One of the rickshaws caught up in this tide bore the number 1999. At every stop along the way Hasari Pal
* Large double drum, hung horizontally round the neck. t Visual encounter with a deity or great soul.
turned around to gaze at the marvelous spectacle of the goddess he was transporting on the seat of his old carriage, a Durga almost as large as life, with ten arms and magnificent black hair crowned with a golden diadem, and with the eyes of a conqueror. "Oh dear God," he said to himself, "even my rickshaw has become a shrine."
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