The City of Joy

by Dominique Lapierre

  Selima remained alone with the employee of the "clinic." Above the grinding of the fan the sounds of voices could be heard coming from outside. The piece of cotton impregnated with ether still concealed her face. The employee was a stunted little man with bushy eyebrows and a hooked nose, like an eagle's beak. To him the bloodless body on the table was worth more than all the Diwali card parties put together. He knew a useful address where they cut up unidentified corpses to recover the skeletons for export.

  Fifty thousand bombs dropped on each of the fifty thousand rickshaws in Calcutta could not have caused more of an uproar. The rickshaw owners had just announced that they were increasing the daily rent paid by the pullers. It was going up from five rupees to seven, starting the very next day.

  For the pullers it was the worst blow inflicted by the rickshaw owners since the confrontations of 1948, when the owners had demanded that every vehicle should bring in two sets of fees, one for daytime and the other for nighttime use. This claim had been the cause of their first strike, an eighteen-day hartal* which had ended with victory for the human horses and with a major achievement on their part: the formation of a union. The person primarily responsible for this initiative was a former Bihari peasant with bushy gray hair, now aged fifty-four, a record age in a corporation where the average life expectancy was barely more than thirty. In some thirteen thousand days, Golam Rassoul had covered, between the shafts of his

  Total stoppage of all activity; strike.

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  rickshaw, more than four times the distance between the earth and the moon. This survivor of more than a third of a century of monsoons, incidents, and humiliations had realized that a powerful union was the only means by which the population of rickshaw wallahs could make its voice heard. Unlike the factory workers, however, the pullers worked individually and their limited ambitions made it extremely difficult to get them together for collective action.

  Rassoul learned to read and write, compiled tracts, and contracted in the trade union movement an expert in mass meetings, a Communist member of Bengal Parliament named Abdul Rahman. "Lead a crusade," he exhorted him, "so that the Calcutta rickshaw pullers will stop being treated like animals!"

  Thus was born the Rickshaw Workers Union, one of the most unusual unions in the world, an organization of human horses determined to raise their heads and group themselves together to defend their rights. Affiliated with die Communist Federation of Indian TVade Unions, the syndicate chose as its president Abdul Rahman, and as its general secretary its instigator, the gray-haired veteran rickshaw puller, Golam Rassoul. Two rooms on the fourth floor of the Trade Unions' dilapidated building became the new organization's headquarters. Every morning at six, before harnessing himself to his shafts outside Sealdah Station, Rassoul stood there to listen to die grievances of his comrades and to offer them the support of the union in their confrontations with the rickshaw proprietors or the police.

  In the beginning the meetings attracted only very small numbers. Soon, however, pullers began to come from all over the city. In the afternoons, Rassoul would exchange his shafts for an object that was hardly part of a rickshaw puller's general equipment. Armed with a ballpoint pen, he would install himself behind the piles of dusty ledgers in the municipal department for "hackneys and carriages," to oversee formalities for the renewal of rickshaw licenses. The ceremony took place beneath cobwebs waving in the exhalations of an expiring fan, and overlooked by yellowing pictures of Kali, the bloodthirsty, four-armed goddess,

  dressed in a great floral robe. In theory the renewal cost twelve paisas (a little more than one U.S. cent). The price had not changed since 1911. In practice, however, it was said that a puller would have to pay about thirty rupees in baksheesh to the police officials to procure the precious document. When their protector Rassoul was not there, the sum could well be three times greater.

  Protector was the right word. In thirty years of union action, the indefatigable Rassoul had fought relentlessly. With protest meetings, hunger marches, and strikes, he had inspired and organized the resistance of the human horses of Calcutta against the voracity of their employers and the interference of the police. He had fought against what he referred to as the arbitrariness of the municipal authorities who were forever banning rickshaw pullers from new streets under the pretext of relieving the traffic congestion which grew worse every day. The urban disaster of Calcutta constituted a fatal threat to those trying to earn a living among its bottlenecks. Even the most acrobatic pullers found themselves caught like fishes in a net. To escape the net and avoid the forbidden streets, the men were obliged to embark on exhausting detours.

  Now the exorbitant rise in rent was hitting them with a further blow. So it was that from street to street, from square to square, from the banks of the Hooghly to the skyscrapers of Chowringhee, from the slums of Howrah to the gracious portals of the residences on Wood Street, the city began to resound with a strange concert. Tap, tap tap—the haunting sound of bells struck against the wood of rickshaw shafts. The time for anger had come.

  "Some men have knives to defend themselves, or guns, or even worse weapons," Hasari Pal would recount. "All we had was a little ball of copper about the size of a betel nut. But that poor little bell, which made a sharpish sound when struck against the shafts or the base of a streetlamp, was mightier than any weapon. It was the voice of the rickshaws of Calcutta—our voice. And our voice must have made a real din that morning, to get the owners' representatives to rush and explain why their bosses had decided to raise the rent. Normally they gave us bad news without making any bones about it. Who has to provide

  slaves with explanations? But on this occasion, because of the uproar that was reverberating throughout the city, they must have realized we weren't going to swallow their decision like the dutiful little goats in the zoo at Alipore. The increase was far too high. Shouting as loudly as he could to make himself heard above the bells, Musafir, my owner's representative, challenged me publicly. 'Do you know, Hasari, how much it costs nowadays to change the spoke in a wheel?' 'Or a new hood?' cried another factotum. 4 Or how much the baksheesh for the cops comes to?' said a third.

  4 'They were men in positions of confidence who had done their homework well. But we didn't give a damn about the cost of wheel spokes or baksheesh for the cops. We hadn't been breaking our backs between the shafts of our rickshaws in order to weep for the owners' predicament. To a puller the only thing that really mattered was the bundle of rupees he took to the munshi each month to feed the family he had left behind in his village.

  "A discussion started up, but as everyone was shouting at the same time, it was impossible to make yourself heard. The arrival of Golam Rassoul, the secretary of our union, put a stop to the noise. Despite his slight build—he looked like a sparrow that had fallen out of its nest—he had an enormous amount of authority. He confronted the line of representatives. 'Go and tell your employers to give up their rent increase. Otherwise there won't be one single rickshaw left on the streets of Calcutta.'

  "Rassoul opened the cardboard box he had brought with him and handed out leaflets. None of us knew how to read or write, but we all guessed the contents. It was a call to strike. The representatives disappeared to report to their owners. They also had a syndicate.

  "Pullers came running with their carts from every corner of the city. There were even cycle rickshaws from a long way away on the other side of the river, from Barrackpore and the distant suburbs. The cyclists were poor fellows just like us, except that they made more journeys in the course of a day.

  "The Park Circus esplanade was soon so packed with people that the streetcars and buses couldn't get through.

  Police vans appeared to try and get the traffic moving again, but what could thirty cops do against a crowd like that? They dealt out a few random blows, then gave up. One union member unrolled a red banner affixed to two long bamboo poles. It bore the symbol of the hammer and sickle with the name of our union. Raised above our hea
ds, it formed a victory arch.

  4 'The noise of the bells increased with every minute, as new rickshaw wallahs appeared on the scene. It became quite deafening, just as if billions of cicadas were rubbing their wings together all at the same time. The owners must have heard that concert from their hiding places. Provided, of course, they hadn't all put balls of cotton in their ears.

  "The dejected look of the stewards when they came back was more eloquent than any words: their bosses were sticking to the increase they'd announced. Rassoul got up on a telagarhi with a loudspeaker. I couldn't help wondering how so powerful a voice could come out of so puny a chest. 'Comrades!' he shouted, 'the owners of your rickshaws want to increase their profits even more. Their voracity knows no limits. Yesterday they demanded the payment of two lots of rental, one for the day shift and the other for the night. Today they're increasing your fees by fifty percent! Tomorrow, God knows what new demands they'll impose on you.'

  "Rassoul spoke for some time. His face disappeared behind his loudspeaker. He talked about our children and said that this increase would condemn them to starvation. He said that we had no way out of our position as slaves, that most of us had lost our land, and that if the hope of earning a living by pulling our rickshaws was taken away from us, there would be nothing left for us to do but die. He said that we had to get rid of this menace at all costs, that we were numerous and strong enough to impose our wishes and make the owners back off. And he ended up by asking us all to vote for an unlimited strike.

  " 'Inkalabad zindabad! Long live the revolution!' he then proclaimed, 'Rickshaw Workers Union zindabadV

  "We all took up the slogans in a chorus and repeated them several times. It made me think of my friend Ram Chander. How pleased he would have been to see all his

  companions gathered shoulder to shoulder in defense of their family's bowl of rice. He had so often fought alone. We were carried away, as if by the wind that blows before the monsoon. Long live the revolution! The revolution? Like all the others, I let the word roll off my tongue, but I didn't know exactly what it meant. All I wanted was to be able to take a few more rupees to the munshi each month and to be able to knock off a bottle of bangla with my friends now and then.

  "Rassoul asked all those in favor of the strike to put up their hands. We looked at one another in silence. Who among us could face without apprehension a single day without the means of earning his living? Does a bird saw through the branch he's sitting on? The owners would be all right—they had their jars full of rice and dal. We could be reduced to skeletons before they lost a single roll off their paunches. And yet we had no real choice.

  "A fellow next to me put up his hand. He was a Bihari; I knew him by sight. He was called 'Scarface' because a blow from a cop had smashed his cheek in. He coughed like Ram, but he didn't chew pan. When he spat there was no mistaking what the red stuff was. No doubt he'd said to himself that, strike or no strike, it would make very little difference to him.

  4 'Other hands went up. Then more. Finally, one by one, all the hands went up, including mine. It was odd to see all those hands in the air. Not one of them was closed in a fist. There was no hatred, rather, there was a kind of resignation. There was no use in Rassoul repeating that striking was our only weapon, you could sense that the pullers had put their hands up reluctantly. How could you hold it against them? The rickshaw union wasn't the workers union at Dunlop or GKW or any other big factory. There, when the workers went out on strike, the union gave them funds. They could hold out for months.

  "Rassoul took up his loudspeaker again to announce that the motion to strike had been carried unanimously. Then he called out, 'Comrades, our revered president, Abdul Rahman, calls upon us all to meet at the Maidan esplanade this afternoon at three o'clock. United, we will make our anger felt. United, we'll break the owners.' And

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  he started up again with slogans about the revolution that we all repeated as a chorus. It was as if we were drunk. We shouted without thinking. We shouted because we were all poor men who had come together to shout together.

  "The most tremendous thing about it was die feeling of revenge that suddenly came over us. The great city of Calcutta belonged to us, to us the pullers of men, the ones whom taxi, bus, and truck drivers insulted and despised, the ones whom the cops tormented and beat, the ones whom passengers were always trying to cheat out of a few paisas. We, the sweating, suffering slaves of the sardarjis and the owners, we the population of rickshaw wallahs, were suddenly the masters. Not a single vehicle could pass through the city center anymore, blocked as it was by thousands of rickshaws. It was like a flood, except that the monsoon had poured down empty carriages. I don't know how many of us there were—perhaps fifty thousand or more. Like the many arms of the Ganges, our various processions all converged on Chowringhee, along the Mai-dan, the great avenue that those gentlemen of the police force had closed to our old rattletraps three months previously, under the pretext that we took up too much room and caused traffic jams. Today they watched us pass with heads bowed beneath their white helmets, their guns in their highly polished belts, and their lathis ready to batter the poor on the skull or the back.

  "The union leaders had distributed red posters all along the route. They announced that we were the rickshaw pullers of Calcutta and that we were rejecting the new increase in rent. They also said that we'd had enough of police harassment and that we claimed the right to earn our rice like anybody else. Passers-by watched us with astonishment. Never before had they seen so many rickshaws at once. They were used to the city officials demonstrating or the railway employees or the streetcar conductors—in short, those who were fortunate enough to have a proper job and be well paid. That bums whom they regarded as beasts of burden, whom they never saw other than with their backs bent, should dare to demonstrate too seemed to be quite beyond them.

  "As we walked, we chanted slogans rounded off with three jangles of our bells. It made an impressive noise. On the corner of Lindsay Street, a coconut vendor cut the tops off his fruits and handed them out to us to keep us going. It was a shame that the procession forced us to go on walking because I would have very much liked to go and tell that fellow that he could get into my rickshaw and go wherever he wanted free of charge. It wasn't every day that we were offered something to drink in this city. Farther on, in front of the arcades of the Grand Hotel, where Fd been to forage in the garbage cans with my children, there were foreign tourists who couldn't get back to their cars because of our march. They seemed to find us interesting, because they were taking photographs. Some of them even came right into the middle of our procession to have their pictures taken with us. The rickshaw wallahs of Calcutta angry must be as exciting a sight as the white tigers in the zoo at Alipore. I don't know whether rickshaw people go on strike in other countries, but they could probably show those pictures to their friends and relatives when they got home and tell them that there are some very strange experiences to be lived in the streets of Calcutta.

  4 'Our procession reached the rallying point on the edge of Chowringhee. As we joined up with one another, the march swelled to become a river wider than the Ganges. Our final destination was the Sahid Minar, the column on the Maidan that soars up so high, it seems to pierce the clouds. High up on the balcony you could see the cops. Just think, all the thousands of rickshaws in Calcutta gathered together—that must have given the police a few headaches. At the base of the column was a platform decorated with red flags. It looked really splendid. As we arrived, union men invited us to leave our carts along the edge of the Maidan and go and sit in front of the platform. I couldn't help wondering how we were all going to find our own vehicles again among such a pileup of carriages.

  "Golam Rassoul climbed onto the platform. For this occasion he had changed into a clean dhoti and kurta. For all his fine clothes, however, he still looked just as puny. There were several other people on the platform with him, but we didn't know who they were. After a moment


  Rassoul took hold of a microphone and called out something in Hindi. Nearly all the pullers got to their feet and yelled, 'Abdul Rahman zindabadV Rassoul repeated his words, this time in Bengali, which was how I learned of the arrival of the president of our union. He was a plump little man who looked like a babu from a political party. He can't have pulled many rickshaws, unless of course it was during some other life. He was surrounded by a dozen men who cleared his way through the people in front of him. They only just stopped short of sweeping the dust from under his feet. He waved his hand as he passed among them, and what he had on his finger was no mere moonstone, but several gold rings with enormous precious stones that glinted in the sunlight. He climbed onto the platform and sat down with his entourage in the front row.

  4 'Rassoul announced that he was going to present to us the representatives of the other unions who had come to bring us the support of their members. There were representatives from the jute mills, from Hindustan Motors, from the shipyards, and goodness knows where else. Each time the signal was given we sent up a torrent of 'Zindabads' for each one, and each time we did so the crows dispersed in all directions. We had a warm feeling in the pits of our stomachs at the thought that there were people prepared to take an interest in poor fellows like us. Rassoul had us acclaim our president once more. Thrilled by the applause, the man with the rings got up to speak.

  "He must have been very used to this kind of meeting, because his every movement seemed to be specially calculated. To start with there was his silence. For a full moment he stood and looked at us without saying anything, nodding his head slightly like a peasant content to contemplate the shoots in his rice field undulating far away to the horizon. Then he decided to speak, mixing sentences in Bengali and Hindi. I couldn't follow exactly what he was saying because he spoke mainly in Hindi, which most of the Bihari pullers could understand. But he spoke damn well, that babu Abdul. I managed to make out that he was telling us that the bosses were inflicting starvation on us, that they were making their futures out of our sweat and blood, and that all this would go on just as long as the