In summer the proliferation of filth brought with it the risk of epidemics. Not so very long ago it was still a common occurrence for people to die of cholera, hepatitis, encephalitis, typhoid, and rabies. Articles and reports in the local press never ceased denouncing the city as a refuse dump poisoned with fiimes, nauseating gases, and discharges—a devastated landscape of broken roads, leaking sewers, burst water pipes, and torn down telephone wires. In short, Calcutta was 44 a dying city."
And yet, thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of people swarmed night and day over its squares, its avenues and the narrowest of its alleyways. The smallest fragment of pavement was occupied, squatted upon, covered with salesmen and pedlars, with homeless families camping out, with piles of building materials or refuse, with stalls and a multitude of altars and small temples. The result of all this was an indescribable chaos on the roads, a
record accident rate, nightmarish traffic jams. Furthermore, in the absence of public toilets, hundreds of thousands of the city's inhabitants were forced to attend to their bodily needs in the street.
In those years seven out of ten families had to survive on no more than one or two rupees a day, a sum that was not even sufficient to buy a pound of rice. Calcutta was indeed that "inhuman city" where the Pals had just discovered people could die on the pavements surrounded by apparent indifference. It was also a powder flask of violence and anarchy, where the masses were to turn one day to the saving myth of communism. To hunger and communal conflicts must also be added one of the world's most unbearable climates. Torrid for eight months of the year, the heat melted the asphalt on the roads and expanded the metal structure of the great Howrah Bridge to such an extent that it measured four feet more by day than by night. In many respects the city resembled the goddess Kali whom many of its inhabitants worship—Kali the Terrible, the image of fear and death, depicted with a terrifying expression in her eyes and a necklace of snakes and skulls around her neck. Even slogans on the walls proclaimed the disastrous state of this city. "Here there is no more hope," said one of them. "All that is left is anger."
Yet on what a prestigious past this metropolis, now judged inhuman by many of its inhabitants, could pride itself! From the date of its foundation in 1690 by a handful of British merchants until the departure of its last British governor on August 15, 1947, Calcutta, more than any other city in the world, had epitomized the imperial dream of the white man's domination of the globe. For nearly two and a half centuries it had been the capital of the British Indian Empire. It was from here that until 1912 its governor generals and its viceroys had imposed their authority on a country with a population greater than that of the United States of America today. Calcutta's avenues had witnessed the passing of just as many parading troops and as many high society ladies in palanquins or barouches as
the Champs-Ely sees of Paris or the London Mall. Even now, dilapidated by decades of monsoons, its public buildings, its monuments, its business center, its beautiful residences with their balusters and colonnades still bore witness to that heritage. At the far end of the avenue along which, in 1911, George V and Queen Mary had processed in a gold-studded carriage between two rows of Highlanders in Scottish kilts and white spats, there rose from the heart of a thirty-acre park, the imposing 137-room building in which the Empire had lodged its viceroys. Raj Bhavan, the royal palace, was a replica of Kedleston Hall, one of the most beautiful castles in England. The viceroy, Lord Wellesley, had decorated its great marble drawing room with busts of the twelve Caesars. Before becoming, after Independence, the residence of the Indian governor of Bengal, Raj Bhavan had hosted festivities and celebrations of a sumptuousness beyond the wildest imagination. On gala evenings, the representative of Her Most Gracious Majesty took place on a throne of purple velvet highlighted with gold, surrounded by a whole retinue of aides-de-camp and officers in dress uniform. Two beturbaned Indian servants gently wafted fans of scarlet silk to refresh him while soldiers armed with silver-encrusted lances provided him with a guard of honor.
Many other no less glorious vestiges, often engulfed by the chaos of construction and contemporary slums, bore witness to the past majesty of this former jewel in the crown: buildings, such as die stadium where on January 2, 1804, the Calcutta team, led by the grandson of British Prime Minister Walpole, had opened the batting against a team of old Etonians in the first cricket match ever played in the Orient. Then there was that proud, eight-hundred-acre enclave beside the sacred waters of the Hooghly River, which harbored one of the most impressive citadels ever constructed by man. Built to protect the first three warehouses—one of which, Kalikata, so-called because it was situated near a village dedicated to Kali, was to give its name to the city—Fort William had served as a cradle for Calcutta and for the British conquest of its enormous empire in Asia.
Of all these symbols of former glory, however, none was
more striking than the huge set piece in white marble which rose from the far extremity of the Maidan parte. Erected with funds given by the Indian people themselves to commemorate the sixty-three-year reign of the Empress who believed she incarnated best the vocation of the white man to look after the well-being of people of the earth, the Victoria Memorial conserved, at the very heart of the modern urban jungle, the most fabulous collection of treasures ever assembled within the confines of a colonial epic. All the mementos were there, piously preserved for the incredulous scrutiny of present generations: statues of the Empress at all the various stages of her splendor, together with all the royal envoys who succeeded each other here; a portrait of Kipling; sabers with pommels inlaid with gold and precious stones, worn by British generals during the battles which gave India to Britain; parchments confirming these conquests; manuscript messages from Victoria conveying her affection to her "peoples beyond the seas."
Despite the heat, the tropical diseases, the snakes, the jackals, and even the tigers that sometimes, at night, prowled around the residences, on Chowringhee Road, Calcutta had offered its creators a supremely easy and pleasurable life-style. For two and a half centuries, generations of Britishers had begun their day with a drive in a horse-drawn carriage or a limousine under the shade of the banyan trees, magnolia bushes, and palm clusters of the Maidan park. Every year, before Christmas, a glittering season of polo, horse racing, and social receptions drew the entire elite of Asia to Calcutta. In the city's heyday, the primary occupation of its ladies had been to try on in their boudoirs the very latest outfits from Paris and London, made up by local dressmakers out of sumptuous fabrics and brocades woven in Madras or Benares. For nearly half a century the most sought-after rendezvous among these same privileged ladies was with Messieurs Malvaist and Siret, two famous French hairstylists whom an astute financier had brought over from Paris.
It was because of its wealth of entertainment that the Calcutta of these times had earned the nickname of "Paris of the East." Not one of its parties began without a
delightful serpentine excursion on the Hooghly, on one of those long gondolas propelled by forty or so boatmen in red-and-green turbans and white tunics girded with golden sashes. Alternatively there was always a promenade along the riverside pathways of the Garden of Eden, to which one viceroy, in love with Oriental architecture, had had a pagoda transported plank by plank, from the lofty plateaus of Burma. At the end of every afternoon the garrison's brass band provided, on this spot overlooking the river, a concert of romantic music for the delectation of expatriates in crinolines, frock coats, and top hats. Later in the evening, there were always a few rounds of whist or ombre in one of the innumerable clubs "prohibited to dogs and Indians," which constituted die pride of British Calcutta. Then there was perhaps a dinner and dance under the ornamental ceilings of the luxurious ballrooms of the Chowringhee houses or on the teak dance floor of the London Tavern. Those with a predilection for dramatic art were spoiled with choices. Calcutta prided itself on being the artistic and intellectual capital of Asia. Every evening there was a Shakespeare
performance at the New Play House and all the latest London West End productions were staged in a host of other theaters. Geoffrey Moorhouse, a noted historian of Calcutta, tells us that at the beginning of the century one of the city's great society ladies, a Mrs. Bristow, had even converted one of the reception rooms in her residence into an opera stage and hosted there the best tenors and divas from Europe.* The boards of the Old Empire Theatre had borne the ballet shoes of the great Anna Pavlova in an unforgettable recital that shortly preceded her retirement. The Calcutta Symphony Orchestra gave a concert every Sunday conducted by the baton of its founder, a Bengali merchant named Shosbree. Shortly after the First World War, flourished on Chowringhee Road the most famous three-star restaurant in Asia. Firpo was to remain, until the 1960s, the Maxim's of the Orient, Calcutta's temple of gastronomic and social delectation. Like having a reserved pew in St. Paul's Cathedral, every self-respecting family had a table reserved in Firpo's large L-shaped
^Calcutta, by Geoffrey Moorhouse (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London).
dming room. The Italian restaurateur received people like an Oriental potentate, or perhaps even turned them away if their faces or attire did not appeal to him. Enlivened by the musicians of Francisco Casanovas, a Spanish nobleman who had switched to the art of playing the clarinet, Firpo's dance floor had formed the cradle of romance for the last generation of white men in Asia.
Those who preferred the treasures of the rich Bengali culture to the Occidental delights were no less spoiled. Since the eighteenth century, Calcutta had been the homeland of philosophers, poets, storytellers, and musicians. In the person of Tagore, Calcutta had even given to India a Nobel Prize for literature and in J. C. Bose a world famous scientist. It was also the home of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, two of the most venerated modern saints; of Satyajit Ray, one of the most celebrated prizewinners of world cinema; of Sri Aurobindo, one of the giants of universal spirituality; of Satyen Bose, one of the great scholars of the theory of relativity.
The vicissitudes of destiny had not completely obliterated so prestigious a heritage. Calcutta was still India's artistic and intellectual beacon and its culture continued to be as alive and creative as ever. The hundreds of book stalls in College Street were still laden with books—original editions, pamphlets, great literary works, publications of every kind, in English as well as in the numerous Indian languages. Though the Bengalis now constituted barely half of the city's working population, there was no doubt that Calcutta produced more writers than Paris and Rome combined, more literary reviews than London and New York, more cinemas than New Delhi, and more publishers than all the rest of the country. Every evening its theaters put on several theatrical productions, classical concerts, and countless recitals at which everyone, from a universally renowned sitarist like Ravi Shankar to the humblest of flute or tabla players, was united with the popular audiences before whom they performed in the same love of music. Half of India's theater groups stemmed from here. The Bengalis even claimed that one of their scholars had translated the great French playwright Moli&re into their language, long before the British had even heard of him.
For Hasari Pal and the millions of exiles who crowded into its slums, however, Calcutta represented neither culture nor history. For them it meant only the faint hope of finding some crumbs to survive until the next day. In a metropolis of such magnitude there were always a few crumbs to be gathered, whereas in a village flooded with water or parched by drought, even that possibility didn't exist anymore.
After another day spent running about the Bara Bazar, Hasari Pal returned one evening with a triumphant smile that was altogether unexpected.
"May Bhagavan be blessed!" exclaimed Aloka when she caught sight of her husband. "Look, children, your father seems pleased. He must have found the coolie from our village. Or even better, perhaps he has found work. We're saved!"
Hasari had found neither his friend nor work. He was simply bringing his family two newspaper cones full of muri, this rice roasted in hot sand that the poor eat in last resort to stem their hunger. The dried grains were hard and had to be masticated for a long time, a process that prolonged the illusion of actually getting one's teeth into something.
Parents and children chewed for a while in silence. "There you are. That's for you," said Hasari, happily giving the remainder of his own share to his youngest son who was looking at him with an expression of entreaty.
Aloka watched her husband's gesture with an aching heart. Among India's poor, food was always reserved in 38
priority to those who could work and provide for the family's needs. Hasari had lost a lot of weight since their arrival in Calcutta. His bones were protruding. Two deep cracks had carved themselves beneath his mustache, his dark, shining hair had turned gray above his ears, a phenomenon that was rare in so young an Indian. "Good God, how he has aged," thought his young wife as she looked at him stretching out for the night on the bare asphalt of their piece of pavement. She thought of the first time she had seen him, so handsome, so sturdy under the ornamental canopy erected for their marriage in front of her family hut. He had come from his village, borne on a palanquin and escorted by his relatives and friends. The Brahmin priest had anointed his forehead with rice paste and small basil leaves. He had been wearing a brand-new white tunic and a very bright saffron-colored turban. Aloka remembered her terror when her mother and aunts had left her alone with him after the ceremony. She was only fifteen and he was barely three years older. Their union had been arranged by their parents and they had never met before. He had gazed at her insistently and asked her name. She recalled too that he had added, "You are a very beautiful girl and I am wondering whether you will find me as appealing." She merely smiled in response because it was not decent for a new bride to speak freely to her husband on their wedding day. She had blushed then and, encouraged by his gentleness, she in turn had ventured a question: did he know how to read and write? "No," he had replied simply before adding with pride, "But I know how to do many other things."
"That day the father of my children looked as strong and solid as the trunk of the great banyan tree at the entrance to our village," reflected Aloka. And now he seemed so fragile, curled up on his patch of pavement. It was hard for her to appreciate that this was the same man whose powerful arms had clasped her as a pair of pliers on their wedding night. Although her eldest aunt had given her some words of advice, she had been so timid and ignorant then that she had struggled to escape from his grasp. "Don't be frightened," he had said, "I am your husband and you will be the mother of my children."
Aloka was pondering on these memories in the darkness when an uproar broke out nearby. The neighbors, those good people who had so generously welcomed the distressed Pals, had just noticed that their daughter was missing. She was a pretty girl of thirteen, sweet and gentle, with a large braid down her back and green eyes. Her name was Maya, which meant "illusion." Every morning she used to go off to beg outside the entrance to the big hotels on Chowringhee Road and Park Street, where business men and rich tourists from all over the world stayed. No one, however, had the right to hold out his hand in such a gold mine of a district unless he was directly controlled by the syndicate of racketeers. Each evening Maya handed over her entire day's earnings to the gang leader who, in return, paid her a daily wage of five rupees (fifty U.S. cents). Maya was lucky to have been accepted at all because, in order to incite their "clients" to greater generosity, the racketeers preferred to exploit deformed or disabled youngsters, legless men on planks with wheels, or mothers in rags with emaciated babies in their arms. It was even said that children were mutilated at birth to be sold to these torturers.
Young Maya was deeply pained by the obligation to beg. On several occasions as she was about to leave for "work," she had thrown herself, sobbing, into her mother's arms. Such scenes were frequent on the streets of Calcutta where so many people were condemned to suffer the very worst degradations in order simply to survive. Yet, Maya had never shirked her
task. She knew that for her family the five rupees she brought back each night meant the difference between life and death.
That evening she had not come home. As the hours went by, her mother and father grew sick with worry. They got up, sat down again, walked around in circles uttering incomprehensible imprecations. In the three months since they had found themselves stranded on that pavement they had learned enough to know that their anguish was justified. Just as elsewhere in the world, abduction of children was a frequent crime in Calcutta. The villains responsible generally went for young girls between ten and fifteen, but small boys were not entirely exempt. The children were
usually sold to a ring of pleasure house suppliers who dispatched them to Madras, Bombay, or New Delhi, or even exported them to certain Arab capitals in the Persian Gulf countries. They were never seen or heard of again. The lucky ones were locked in prostitution houses in Calcutta itself.
Shaken by their neighbors' distress, Aloka woke her husband. Hasari immediately suggested to Maya's father that they should go out and look for the girl. Accordingly, the two men plunged into the dark alleyways packed with people sleeping in doorways and on the pavements. Avoiding getting lost in such a labyrinth, where all the buildings looked alike, was no mean achievement for peasants used to finding their way in the familiar simplicity of their countryside.
After the two men had gone, Aloka sat down beside the neighbor's wife. The poor woman's cheeks, pockmarked from smallpox, were bathed in tears. She was holding a sleeping baby in the folds of her sari and two other small boys muffled in rags were asleep beside her. Nothing, it seemed, could disturb children's slumbers, not even, as here, the noisy exhausts of trucks or the harrowing grind of the streetcars passing along their heads on the avenue, not even the cramps of a hungry stomach. During the time that these peasants had been living on their piece of pavement, they had marked out their territory as if they meant to remain there forever. Their plot was a proper little campsite with one corner for sleeping, and another corner for cooking, with a chula and few utensils. It was winter and these shelterless people had no need to fear the torrential downpour of the monsoon. But when the December wind blew down from the Himalayas and swept through the avenues, it was as cold as death on the pavements. From every direction there rose the same haunting noises. The sound of coughing fits, of throats being cleared, the whistle of spitting. The worst for Aloka was to have to "sleep on the bare ground. You woke up in the morning with limbs as painful as if they'd been beaten." By some cruel stroke of irony, an advertisement on a billboard seemed to flout them from the opposite pavement. It
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