The City of Joy

by Dominique Lapierre

  While awaiting his visa, Stephan Kovalski made his home first in a shantytown of Algerians in the Saint-Michel district of Marseilles, then in a home for Senegalese immigrants in Saint-Denis, near Paris. True to his ideal of fraternity he shared in everything: the exhausting work that was remunerated with wages below the legal rates, the punishing mattresses of immigrants' hotels, the foul stews from barrack-room-style kitchens. He became successively a machine operator, fitter, turner, metal founder, and storekeeper.

  On August 15, 1965, the fifth anniversary of his ordination, Stephan Kovalski finally determined that the waiting had gone on long enough. With the agreement of his superiors, he asked for a simple tourist visa. This time, in the space left for him to fill in his profession, he wrote "skilled factory worker." On the following day, his pass-

  port was returned to him complete with the precious visa duly stamped with the seal of the three lions of the Emperor Ashoka, chosen by the founders of modern India as the emblem of their republic. Despite the fact that the permit authorized him to stay in India for only three months, now at least the great adventure of Stephan Kovalski's life could begin. Once he was actually in Calcutta, his assigned destination, he would try and obtain a permanent resident's permit.

  Bombay, the "Gateway to India!" It was via this port on the West coast, which had for three centuries provided a first glimpse of the continent to hundreds of thousands of British soldiers and administrators, that Stephan Kovalski made his entrance into India. In order to familiarize himself with the country before reaching Calcutta at the other extremity of the huge peninsula, he chose to take the longest possible approach route. At Victoria Station, a prodigious caravansary bristling with neo-Gothic bell towers, he climbed into a third-class compartment of a train leaving for Trivandrum and the South.

  The train stopped at every station. As it did, all passengers got out to fiilfill their bodily needs, to wash, to cook their food, in the middle of a teeming mass of vendors, bearers, cows, dogs, and crows. <4 I looked around me and did as the others did," Stephan Kovalski was to relate in a letter to his mother. On purchasing an orange, however, he was to discover that he wasn't quite as the others were. He paid for the fruit with a one-rupee note but the vendor failed to give him any change. His request for it was met with an expression of fury and disdain: "How could a sahib* be so short of cash?" "I peeled the orange and had broken off a quarter of it when a little girl planted herself in front of me, her big eyes black with kohl. Of course I gave her the fruit and she scampered off. I followed her. She had taken it to share with her brothers and sisters." A moment later Stephan Kovalski had nothing but" a smile to offer a young shoe-shine boy who was circling around him; but a smile does not fill an empty stomach. Kovalski

  *A respectful name formally reserved for the white foreigners.

  foraged in his knapsack and offered the boy die banana he had promised himself he would eat out of anybody's sight. "At that rate I was condemned to die of starvation very rapidly," he would recall.

  In addition to the congestion of the cars there was the sauna heat to contend with, the dust heavy with soot that burned the throat, and all the smells, exclamations, tears, and laughter that made this railway journey a truly royal way to get to know a people. It was in the restaurant of one of the stations in the South that Kovalski experienced his first Indian meal. "I began by watching the people around me," he recounted. "They were eating with the fingers of only their right hands. To make up small balls of rice and dip them into the sauce without the balls disintegrating and without burning your fingers to the bone involved a right set of gymnastics. As for your mouth, esophagus, and stomach, they're set on fire by those murderous spices! I must have presented a somewhat comical spectacle, because all the clients of the restaurant cracked up. It wasn't every day that they could have a good laugh at a poor sahib who had undertaken to master his certificate of Indianization."

  Ten days later, after a short stopover in a shantytown near Madras, Stephan Kovalski arrived in Calcutta.

  No amount of wretchedness, not even utter destitution on a piece of pavement in Calcutta, could alter the ritual of the world's cleanest people. With the very first grind of the streetcar on the rails of the avenue, Hasari Pal would get up to respond to "the call of nature." He went to the sewer which ran along open to the heavens on the opposite side of the avenue. It was a formality that was to become progressively shorter in duration for a man deprived of nourishment. He lifted up his cotton longhi and squatted down over the gutter, and on the edge of the pavement dozens of other men did likewise. No one took any notice of them. It was part of the life and the surrounding scenery. Aloka and the other women had done the same, even earlier, before the men awoke. Afterward Hasari went to take his place in the line of men waiting at the fountain for their daily bath. This fountain was in reality a fire hydrant which issued a brownish liquid pumped directly out of the Hooghly River. When his turn came Hasari would squat on his heels, pour a bowl of water over his head, and scrub himself vigorously from head to toe with the poors' soap, a little ball made out of a

  mixture of clay and ashes. Neither the biting winter cold nor the pangs of an empty stomach would accelerate the completion of this ancestral ritual of purification, which young and old alike piously adhered to each morning.

  Hasari then left with his two eldest children for the Bara Bazar. The market was always overflowing with so many goods that there was invariably some food, in a more or less rotten condition, to be gleaned from its refuse heaps. Hundreds of poor luckless families strayed like this father and his children through the same labyrinth, hoping for the same miracle: the discovery of a compatriot from their village, their district, their province, a relative, an acquaintance, the friend of a friend, a member of their caste, their subcaste, a branch of their subcaste; in short, someone who might be prepared to take them under his protective wing and find them two or three hours, perhaps a whole day, or even—miracle of all miracles—several days of work. This ceaseless quest was not quite as unrealistic as it might appear. Every individual in India is always linked to the rest of the social body by a network of incredibly diversified ties, with the result that no one in this gigantic country of seven hundred and fifty million inhabitants could ever be completely abandoned—except, perhaps, for Hasari Pal whom this "inhuman city" seemed obstinately to reject. That morning, the morning of the sixth day, he left his children to forage among the refuse while he went off once more to scour the bazaar in every possible direction. He offered his services to dozens of traders and transporters. Several times he even followed overloaded carts in the faint hope that one of the coolies would eventually keel over with exhaustion and he might take his place. With his belly screaming with hunger, his head empty, and his heart heavy with despair, the former peasant eventually collapsed against a wall. Through his dizziness, he heard a voice. "Would you like to earn a few rupees?"

  The small man with spectacles looked more like an office employee than a trader from the bazaar. Hasari stared at the stranger in astonishment and motioned that he would. "All you have to do is to follow me. Fll take you somewhere where they'll take a little of your blood and

  give you thirty rupees for it. That's fifteen for me and fifteen for you."

  4 'Thirty rupees for my blood!" repeated Hasari, paralyzed with amazement. "Who's going to want to take blood off a poor bum like me and on top of that give me thirty rupees?"

  "Don't be a fool! Blood is blood!" replied the man with glasses. "Whether it comes from a pandit or a pariah, from a marwari bursting at the seams with money or from a bum like you. It's all still blood."

  Struck by this logic, Hasari made an effort to get back on his feet and follow the stranger.

  The man belonged to a profession practiced in abundance in a city where the slightest suggestion of profit inevitably attracted a swarm of parasitical intermediaries known as "middlemen." For every transaction or service provided there were one or more intermediaries who each t
ook their cut. The individual with the glasses was a procurer. He tracked down donors for one of the numerous private blood banks that flourished in Calcutta. His technique was always the same. He went prowling around the entrances to the work sites, factories, markets, anywhere he knew he would find men without work, ready to agree to anything for the sake of a few rupees. The taboos of Islam forbad Muslims to give their blood. He was, therefore, interested only in Hindus.

  For a man at the end of his resources, the sale of his blood represented a last chance of survival, and for astute and unscrupulous businessmen this meant the opportunity to make a fortune. The need for blood in the hospitals and clinics of an immense metropolis like Calcutta amounted to several tens of thousands of bottles a year. Since the four or five official blood banks of the State of Bengal were incapable of meeting such a demand, it was only to be expected that private entrepreneurs should try and take advantage of the market. All they had to do was wangle the complicity of a doctor, lay a request before the Health Department in his name, rent premises, acquire a refrigerator, a few syringes, pipettes, and bottles, and engage a dispensary assistant. The result was a roaring trade with an annual turnover in excess of ten million rupees, one

  million dollars. Only the fierce competition to which these dispensaries, private or otherwise, were subjected could, it seemed, impede the flow of their profits. Hasari Pal had just put his finger on one of the best organized rackets of a city which, according to connoisseurs of such matters, practiced a multitude of rackets with a degree of art and imagination that would turn Naples, Marseilles, or New York green with envy.

  Hasari followed his bespectacled "benefactor" through the streets of the business quarter, then along Chowringhee Road and at last into Park Street, the street for luxury goods, restaurants, and nightclubs. At the upper end of the block and in the adjoining streets were several blood dispensaries. That of No. 49 Randal Street had been set up in what used to be a garage. Hardly had Hasari and the procurer reached its door than they were accosted by a man with an emaciated face and a mouth reddened by a quid of betel. "Are you coming for blood?" the man asked in a low voice.

  The procurer with the glasses acquiesced with that inimitable wagging of the head that is so distinctively Indian. "In that case, follow me," said the stranger with a wink. "I know another bank where they pay forty rupees. Five for me, the rest for you two. Agreed?"

  This man was another cog in the wheel and was procuring for a rival blood bank two streets farther on.

  A notice bore the initials of its three owners. The CRC was one of the oldest dispensaries in Calcutta. The ten additional rupees it offered had nothing whatever to do with generosity. It simply meant that it took ten liquid ounces from its donors, instead of the usual eight. It is true to say that it added to this remuneration a royal bonus for a man with an empty stomach: a banana and three glucose biscuits. Its boss was a well-known hematologist, a Doctor Rana. He too was but another cog in the wheel of the racket. As a director of one of the state officiaL blood banks, he had no difficulty in diverting donors and purchasers to his own private dispensary. Nothing could be easier. All you had to do was to tell the donors who turned up at the official blood bank that the CRC paid better rates. As for the clients who came to buy blood for an emergen-

  cy or for a future operation, the doctor simply had them informed that bottles of the required blood group were provisionally out of stock at the official bank but available at his CRC.

  Yet such practices could pass for innocent commercial games by comparison with the lack of medical precautions which cursed the majority of dispensaries. The World Health Organization had stipulated a certain number of vital rules with regard to the analyses that must be undertaken before any blood was taken for use in transfusions. They were simple tests which cost little and which made possible the detection of, among other things, the hepatitis B virus or any venereal diseases. Yet at the CRC, as at numerous other private blood banks at that time, viruses seemed to be the very last worry. All that really mattered was profit.

  Hasari was invited to sit down on a stool. While one male nurse knotted a rubber tourniquet around his biceps, another stuck a needle into the vein in the hollow of his elbow. Both of them watched the flow of red liquid with a measure of fascination that grew as the level in the bottle rose. Was it the sight of blood, the idea that he was being "emptied like the goatskin bottle of a water vendor in the Bara Bazar," or the lack of food? Hasari's strength began to fail him. His vision blurred and he started to sweat thick beads of perspiration, despite the fact that he was shivering with cold. The voices of the attendants seemed to reach him from another planet, through a strange clamoring of bells. Through a halo, he could just make out the glasses of his "benefactor." Next he felt the grip of two hands holding him on his stool. Then everything went blank. He had passed out.

  So banal was the incident that the attendants did not interrupt their work. Every day they saw men exhausted by deprivation faint as they sold their blood. If it had been up to them they would have pumped the inert bodies dry. They were paid by the bottle.

  When Hasari opened his eyes again, a dreamlike vision appeared above him: one of the men in white overalls was offering him a banana.

  "There you are, little girl. Get this fruit down you.

  That'll bring you back as Bhim!"* The attendant mocked him gently.

  Then he took a receipt book out of his pocket and inquired, 4 'What's your name?" He scribbled out a few words, tore off the sheet, and directed Hasari in a peremptory tone to "Sign here." Hasari made a cross and pocketed the forty rupees under the covetous gazes of the two vultures who had brought him there. The money would be divided up outside. What the peasant did not know was that he had put his signature to a receipt for forty-five rupees, and not forty. The attendants, too, were taking their commission.

  Light-headed and reeling, lost in neighborhoods that were unknown to him, Hasari would take hours to find the piece of pavement where his wife and children were waiting for him. Out of the seventeen and a half rupees that the procurers had left him, he decided to spend five on celebrating with his family the joy of actually having earned some money in the "inhuman city." He bought a pound of barfiy the delicious Bengali nougat richly wrapped in a thin silver film, and some mansours, yellow sweetmeats made out of chick-pea flour and sweetened milk. Farther on he chose twenty or so paper cones full of muri, the puffed rice that crunched between your teeth, so that the neighbors on the pavement could share in the celebration. Finally he could not resist the desire to give himself a treat. He stopped in front of one of the innumerable niches where vendors as impassive as buddhas prepared their pan, those subtle quids made out of a little finely chopped betel nut, a pinch of tobacco, a suggestion of lime, chutney, and cardamom, all rolled up in a betel leaf skillfully folded and sealed with a clove. Pan gave energy. Above all, it curbed the appetite.

  When Aloka caught sight of her husband, a lump rose to her throat. "Dear God, he's been drinking again," she thought. Then, seeing him laden with parcels, she feared that he had committed some felony. She ran to meet him but the children had already preceded her. Like a litter of

  ♦The strongest of the Pandavas, the five heroic brothers in the great epic tale of the Mahabharata.

  lion cubs throwing themselves on the male returning with a gazelle carcass, they were already sharing out the nougat. In the rush and tumble no one noticed the small red mark that Hasari still bore in the fold of his arm.

  It was here. He was sure it was. The exaltation that suddenly seized Stephan Kovalski, the feeling of plenitude at being at last "with them," could not be designed to deceive him. It was definitely here, in this gray, filthy, poor, sad, stinking, muddy place. In this wild turmoil of men, women, children, and animals. In this entanglement of huts built of beaten earth, this jumble of alleyways full of refuse and open drains, in this murderous pollution of sulphur and fumes, in this uproar of voices, shouting, weeping, tools, machinery and loudspe
akers. Yes, it was definitely to this slum at the far corner of the world that his God had sent him. "How rewarding it was to discover the absolute conviction that I had at last arrived where I was supposed to be," he was later to say. "My enthusiasm and yearning to share had been right to push me into embarking on an experience considered impossible for a Westerner. I was so deliriously happy, I could have walked barefoot over hot coals."

  A few days previously, as soon as he got off the train, Stephan Kovalski had paid a call on the bishop of Calcutta. The bishop dwelled in a beautiful colonial-style house

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  surrounded by a vast garden in a residential area. He was an Anglo-Indian of about fifty, with a white cassock and a majestic manner. On his head he wore a purple skullcap, and on his finger an episcopal ring.

  "I have come to live with the poor," the Polish priest said to him simply.

  "You'll have no difficulty in finding them," sighed the prelate. "Alas, the poor are everywhere here."

  He gave Stephan Kovalski a letter of recommendation to the parish priest of a working-class district on the other side of the river.

  With its two white painted towers, the church could be seen for some distance. It was an imposing building decorated with vividly colored stained-glass windows, and inside were a rich supply of statues of the saints, collection boxes, and fans suspended above the pews reserved for the faithful. Its name was like a challenge cast before the innumerable homeless people camping in the square and surrounding streets. It sprawled in luminous letters across the entire width of the facade: Our Lady of the Loving Heart.