The City of Joy

by Dominique Lapierre

  The man laid a friendly arm around his shoulder. "You shouldn't fool around with things like that, friend. For the moment, what you've got in your veins is water. And if you don't watch out, your family'll soon be seeing your ashes floating on the Hooghly."

  Hasari felt so hounded by poverty that this prospect seemed inevitable anyway.

  "This time we're done for," he sighed. "We shall all die." Hardened as he was by his extraordinary profession, the procurer was nevertheless moved by Hasari's distress. "Don't cry, my friend. Come on, I'll give you a present." He dragged the peasant over to the nearest drugstore where he bought a bottle of tablets. The chemists of the Swiss laboratory that manufactured them had most likely never foreseen the use the desperate people of the third world would make of these tablets.

  "There you are, friend," said the procurer, handing Hasari a packet of ferrous sulphate tablets. "Take three a day and come back here in a week's time. Remember, in seven days exactly. But just you mind!" he added, suddenly menacing, "Don't you fail to turn up or that junk in your veins could well flow free of charge." Then softening again, he concluded, "I'll take you to a place where they'll think your blood's just fine, so fine that they'll want to drain it out to the very last drop."

  The events that marked the life of Stephan Kovalski the day after his first night in the "City of Joy" might well seem insignificant. Yet in a place where seventy thousand people live together in a state of promiscuity and deplorable conditions of hygiene, even the ordinary necessities of everyday living present particular problems. The performance of natural bodily functions was just one example. The envoy of the rector from the neighboring parish had urged Kovalski to go to the latrines in a Hindu quarter which was also occupied by a number of Christians. For a Hindu, the response to "the call of nature" is an act that must be undertaken according to a very precise ritual. The place chosen must not be situated within the proximity of a temple, a banyan tree, a riverbank, a pond, a well, or a crossroad frequented by people. The ground must not be light in color or plowed, but flat and open and, above all, set apart from all habitation. Before executing the act* a Hindu must remove his sandals—that is, if he has any—squat down as low as possible, and never get up in midperformance. He must take care, on pain of committing a grave offense, not to look at the sun, the moon, the 74

  stars, a fire, a Brahmin, or a religious image. He must observe silence and refrain from the sacrilege of turning around to examine his handiwork. Finally there are rules that prescribe the means by which he must go on to complete his ablutions with a mixture of earth and water.

  The authors of these sacred instructions had obviously never envisaged that millions of people would one day be crammed into urban jungles, devoid of any open space set apart from places of habitation. For Hindus in the City of Joy, therefore, "the call of nature" could only be attended to in public, over an open sewer in the alleyways, or in one of the rare cabins recently distributed by local town planners and christened "latrines."

  What an adventure his first visit to one such public convenience was for Stephan Kovalski! At four o'clock in the morning, access to it was already obstructed by a line of several dozen people. The first had already been there for nearly two hours. The arrival of the sahib in jeans and basketball shoes provoked a lively upsurge of curiosity and amusement, and all the more so because, in his ignorance of the customs of the country, the Pole had already committed an unforgivable blunder: he had brought with him a few sheets of toilet paper. Was it conceivable that anyone should want to preserve in paper a defilement expelled from the body and then leave it for other people? Showing him a tinful of water he was holding in his hand, a young lad tried to make Stephan understand that he should wash himself, then clean the bowl. Looking around him, Kovalski established that indeed everyone had brought a similar receptacle full of water. Some people even had several that they shuttled forward with their feet as the line gradually advanced. "I understood that they were keeping places for others who were absent," the priest later said.

  A toothless old man came over to offer the Pole his pitcher. "I took the object with a smile of gratitude, not realizing that I had just committed a second act of sacrilege that would unleash a further explosion of hilarity. I had grasped the receptacle with my left hand, which was reserved for impure contacts. Before reaching the public conveniences, I had to cross a veritable lake of excrement. This additional trial was a courtesy of the cesspool empti-

  ers, who had been on strike for five months. The stench was so foul that I no longer knew which was the more unbearable: the smell or the sight. That people could actually remain good humored in the middle of so much abjection, seemed quite sublime to me. They laughed and joked—especially the children who somehow brought the freshness and gaiety of their games into that cesspool. I came back from that escapade as groggy as a boxer knocked out in the first round. Nowhere else had I ever been subjected to such an onslaught."

  On the way back, the Pole noticed a number of hostile gazes upon him. It was hardly surprising. The rumor had spread that the sahib was a Catholic priest. Right in the heart of the Muslim quarter this intrusion might well be interpreted as an act of provocation. "God only knows how alone I felt that first morning!" he was to say. "Not being able to breathe a single word of the languages spoken in the slum, it was like being deaf and dumb. And not being able to lay my hands on a little wine, I was deprived even of the comfort of being able to celebrate the Eucharist in the darkness of my den. Fortunately, there was still prayer!"

  Prayer! For years Stephan Kovalski had begun each day with an hour's contemplation. Whether he was in a plane, a train, or a roomful of immigrant workmen, he emptied himself, turned to God, gave himself up to him to receive his word, or simply to say to his Creator, "Here I am, at your disposal." He also liked to open the Gospels at random and pick out a sentence such as, "Save me; or I perish," or "Salvation is of the Lord," or "In Thy presence is fullness of joy." He would study every word and every syllable turning them over in every possible direction. "It's a spiritual exercise that helps me to achieve silence," he would explain, "to find emptiness in God. If God has time to listen to me, then inevitably he has time to love me."

  That day, however, Kovalski felt himself incapable of real silence, real emptiness. He had been bombarded with too many impressions since the previous evening. Somehow he could not manage to pray as he did on other mornings. "Sitting in front of the picture of the Sacred

  Shroud, I began to recite Oms —aloud. Then I intercalated the name of Jesus. 'Om ... Jesus, om, .. . Jesus.' For me it was a way of joining in the prayer of the slum people who were so close to God and lived with him constantly, while at the same time discovering a way of communicating with my revealed God whom they did not know. After a moment I was once more in his presence. I could speak to him.

  "Lord, here I am. It's me, Stephan. Jesus, you know that I am but a poor man, so have mercy on me. You know that I haven't come here to earn favor. Nor have I come here for other people. I am here for you, to love You unconditionally. Jesus, my brother, Jesus, my savior, I have arrived here in the depths of this slum with hands so empty that I cannot even celebrate the Eucharist in remembrance of your sacrifice. But then don't all these men with lowered eyes and swollen faces, don't all these innocent people martyred in this place of suffering commemorate your sacrifice every day? Have mercy on them, Jesus of Anand Nagar.

  "Jesus of the City of Joy, you who are eternally crucified, you who are the voice of the voiceless ones, you who suffer within each one of these people, you who endure their anguish, their distress and their sadness, but you who know how to express yourself through their hearts, their tears, their laughter, and their love. Jesus of Anand Nagar, you know that I am here simply to share—so that together they and I can show you that we love you—you and your Father, the Father of mercy, the Father who sent you, the Father who forgives. And to tell you, too, you who are the light and the salvation of the world that here, in the Cit
y of Joy, we are living in darkness. So Jesus, our light, we need you, for without you we are lost.

  "Jesus of Anand Nagar, let this slum deserve its name, let it be truly a City of Joy."

  "Holy mackerel! That bum can't even count up to seven!" stormed the procurer for the blood bank when he saw Hasari Pal walking resolutely in his direction. A full twenty-four hours had not yet passed since their fiasco of the previous day.

  4 'Hullo, old friend!" Hasari called out to him cheerily. The peasant's cheerfulness took the man with the gold teeth by surprise.

  "What's got into you, my friend? Have you won first prize in a lottery?"

  "I think I've found a job, so I've come to give you back your tablets for turning blood red. Here, you can let someone else benefit from them."

  Fortune did indeed seem to be smiling at last on the Bengali peasant. Once more, he had gone to take up his stand near one of the numerous workshops on the outskirts of the Bara Bazar, one which made mechanical parts for railway carriages. It was the same place where he had once earned five rupees by standing in for the coolie who had passed out. This time two men were in the process of loading flat springs onto a handcart, when one of them 78

  tripped over a stone and dropped what he was carrying. The wretched man cried out with pain—the heavy metal part had crushed his foot as it fell. Hasari rushed to his rescue. Tearing a strip off his own cotton loincloth, he knotted it around the leg to stop the bleeding. In Calcutta, police assistance or an ambulance were rarely available in case of accident. All the owner of the workshop, a fat man in a buttoned vest, could do was to call a rickshaw. Obviously furious at the incident, he took several five-rupee notes out of his belt. He put one in the hand of the injured man and gave a second to the rickshaw puller. Seeing Hasari lifting the coolie into the carriage, he entrusted two more to him. "Keep one for yourself. The other's to grease the palm of the attendant at the hospital entrance so he lets, you in." Then turning to the puller waiting between the shafts of the carriage, he ordered harshly, "All right, you bunch of lazy good-for-nothings, scram!"

  Hasari Pal's hesitation in climbing into the carriage intrigued the man pulling it.

  "Haven't you ever sat in a rickshaw before?"

  "No," acknowledged the peasant, perching himself timidly next to the coolie with the injured foot.

  The human horse braced himself against the shafts and they set off with a jolt. The man's graying hair and wizened shoulders indicated that he was no longer young. But with rickshaw pullers, physical appearance bore little relationship to age. People grew old very rapidly pulling such machines.

  "You don't look as if you're from around here?" the puller questioned Hasari after having picked up a little speed.

  "No, I'm from Bankuli."

  "Bankuli!" repeated the rickshaw puller, slowing up sharply. "But that's only twenty miles from my home! I'm from..."

  Although he didn't actually catch the name of the village, lost as it was in the clamor of horns, Hasari would have liked to leap out and hug the man. At last he had found in this "inhuman city" someone from his homeland. Still he made an effort to conceal his joy, for the sake

  of the coolie who was groaning more and more with every bump. The puller was now charging toward the hospital as fast as his bandy legs would carry him. At unpredictable intervals, however, his body would throw itself backward in a desperate movement, trying to stop sharply in front of some bus or truck cutting across his path.

  Calcutta's general hospital was a city in itself, made up of a collection of somewhat dilapidated buildings, linked by endless corridors, with courtyards in which entire families were squatting. A plaque at the main entrance revealed that "In 1878, in a laboratory seventy yards southeast of this door, Surgeon Major Ronald Ross of the Indian army discovered the manner in which malaria is transmitted by mosquitoes." The rickshaw puller made directly for emergency admissions. He had often brought the sick and wounded to this hospital. Indeed, it was one of the special functions of rickshaws, to serve as ambulances in Calcutta.

  "A whole string of people was waiting at the door in front of us and there was a lot of shouting and arguing going on," Hasari would recount. "There were women carrying babies so weak they didn't even cry anymore. From time to time, we saw a stretcher go past with a corpse covered in flowers that bearers chanting prayers were taking to a funeral pyre. When it came to our turn, I slipped the five-rupee note given to me by the workshop owner into the attendant's hand. The bribe paid oflF. Instead of sending us away with most of the other people, he told us to carry our friend into a room inside."

  The two men laid the coolie down on a stretcher still besmirched with the blood of the previous patient. A penetrating smell of disinfectant prevailed in the room, but what was undoubtedly most striking was the jumble of political inscriptions that adorned the walls. Every shade of opinion was mingled there in a kind of pictorial delirium: red flags, hammers and sickles, portraits of Indira Gandhi, and slogans. The astonishment of the Bengali peasant brought a smile to the lips of the rickshaw puller. "Here, my friend, they remind you to vote for them, even when they're just about to carve you up."

  "I don't remember how long they kept our coolie in

  their operating room," Hasari was to say. "I kept asking myself what they could possibly be doing to him for all that time. Then an idea came to me. What if he were dead? Perhaps they'd killed him without meaning to and didn't dare let his corpse be brought out in case we demanded an explanation. But that was absurd because there were bodies coming out of the room next door all the time and it was impossible to tell whether they were dead or alive. They all looked as if they were asleep. In any case I had already realized that in this inhuman city poor fellows like us were not in the habit of asking for explanations. Otherwise, the rickshaw pullers, just to mention them, would have smashed in the faces of all those SOB bus and truck drivers.

  "At last some employees came out carrying a shape curled up on a stretcher. A nurse was holding a bottle with a tube that went into the patient's arm. He was asleep. I took a closer look. It was our friend. He had a fat dressing on the end of his leg. It was only then that I understood what they had done, Those bastards had cut his foot off!"

  "There's no point in your waiting. He'll be asleep for several hours yet," the nurse said. "Come to pick him up in two days."

  The two men retrieved the rickshaw from the courtyard and left the hospital. For a moment they walked in silence. Hasari was visibly shocked.

  "You're still green," said the rickshaw puller. "There's no point in getting worked up. You'll see plenty more like that."

  Hasari nodded. "And yet I already feel as if I've had all I can take." -

  "All you can take!" laughed his companion, jangling the bell on the shaft of his rickshaw. "When you've had ten years of cruising about this slag heap like I have, then you can say you think you've had all you can take!"

  They had arrived at a crossroad where a policeman was directing traffic. The puller took a coin out of his shirt and put it in the policeman's hand as he passed.

  "It's a custom here," he explained with a grin. "It saves you from all sorts of troubles. Especially when you don't have a license to operate your rickshaw." Then,

  sliding his palms along the shafts, he asked, "How would you like to pull one of these machines?"

  The question took Hasan by surprise. How could a bum like him ever have the chance to become a rickshaw puller? The idea seemed as ridiculous as if he had been asked if he would like to fly a plane.

  "Any kind of job would suit me," he replied, touched by the fact that the rickshaw puller was showing so much interest in him.

  "Try it," said his companion, pulling up sharply. He pointed to the shafts. "Get between them and oflF you go! Jerk your back to get the wheels rolling."

  Hasari did as he was told. "But if you think it's easy to get one of these jalopies moving, you've got another think coming," he was later to say. "It takes the strength of a buffalo! And
once it's moving, it's even worse. Once started, there's no stopping the thing. It runs all by itself, as if it has a life of its own. It's really a very strange sensation. To pull up suddenly in an emergency takes a special knack. With passengers on board, you might be pulling a good three hundred pounds."

  The rickshaw puller showed him some marks pn the shafts, where the paint had worn off.

  "Look here, son, the main thing is to find the point of equilibrium for the weight you're lugging about. You have to put your hands on exactly the place where the balance is established."

  Hasari simply could not get over the fact that someone could show so much patience and kindness toward him. "This city isn't all that inhuman," he thought as he handed the shafts of the rickshaw back to its owner. He mopped his forehead with a tail of his longhi. The effort had exhausted him.

  "We should celebrate your initiation!" exclaimed the rickshaw puller. "This is a big day for you. Let's go and have a glass of banglal* I know a place behind Sealdah Railway Station that isn't too expensive."

  The rickshaw puller was somewhat astonished at his

  ♦Clandestinely distilled alcohol.

  companion's lack of enthusiasm. Hasari pulled out the five-rupee note given to him by the workshop owner.

  "My children and their mother haven't had anything to eat," he said. "I must take something back."

  "No problem! It's on me."

  They turned right and plunged into an area of low houses and narrow alleyways packed with people at the windows and in the streets. Music blared out from loudspeakers. Washing was drying on the edge of the roofs and green streamers dangled from the ends of bamboo poles. They went past a mosque, then a school where under a porch roof a mullah was teaching a class of little girls in trousers and tunics and veils over their heads. This was a Muslim sector. Next they entered into one of Calcutta's red-light districts. Women with provocatively colored skirts, low-cut bodices, and outrageously made-up faces were talking and laughing. Hasari was struck dumb with astonishment. He had never seen such creatures in his life before, for where he came from the women wore only saris. "Several of them called out to me. There was one I found very attractive. She must have been very rich because her arms were covered in bracelets right up to her elbows. But my companion went straight past her without stopping. He was a serious-minded man."