such poor quality that stitches burst. In many places reserve blood supplies were virtually nonexistent. In order to procure the precious liquid before an operation, patients or their families sometimes had to resort to those specialist racketeers with whom Hasari Pal had already been dealing. Such parasites found in the hospitals idyllic opportunities for self-enrichment. Some of them sandbagged the sick (especially poor people who had come up from the country) and, when they arrived, promised them immediate hospitalization or a medical examination in exchange for some money. Others passed themselves off as bona fide doctors, luring their victims into consultation rooms manned by nurses who were partners in complicity. They then asked the women to hand over their jewels in preparation for an X ray and vanished.
In some hospitals the pilfering of food intended for patients had assumed such proportions that meals had to be transported in padlocked carts. In spite of these precautions, large quantities of food and milk were regularly diverted to the innumerable tea shops that had set themselves up in the vicinity of the hospital. Sugar and eggs were systematically spirited away to be resold on the spot at prices twice as low as in the market. The newspapers revealed that such pilfering was not confined to food. Some establishments had no more doors or windows. At night, treatment had to be given by candlelight: all the electric light bulbs had disappeared.
As is often the case in India, however, the best fortunately mixed with the worst. In all these establishments there was also a network of people who bonded together to dispel isolation, anonymity, horror. A few mattresses away from Kovalski lay a poor fellow who, following an accident, had undergone one of the most delicate and daring operations of modern surgery, a spinal fusion of the rachis involving the grafting of the vertebral column. Day by day, Kovalski followed his progress. In a communal ward that was sordid in so many other aspects, that man was the object of admirable care and attention. Each morning the nurses got him up and helped him gradually regain the use of his legs. Every time he did his rounds, the heavily overburdened surgeon would find the time to examine and
to talk with him, demonstrating as much solicitous concern as competence. A few beds farther on, a mother squatted on the floor beside heN baby's cradle. The child was suffering from meningitis. No one would have thought of preventing the poor woman from remaining with her infant, and the people in charge of the food never went past without offering her also a bowl of rice.
Highly surprised to discover that they had a sahib as a companion in their hardship, several patients dragged themselves over to ask Stephan to decipher the bits of scrap paper used for prescriptions. This was an occasion for Kovalski to marvel at the conscientiousness and precision with which some of the overburdened doctors prescribed their treatment for even the most anonymous of their patients.
Nothing was ever totally rotten in this inhuman city.
The priest would no doubt have been most indignant at what Margareta had done. She had just slipped twenty rupees into the nurse's hand to get him a bed underneath a fan. There was nothing unusual about this: patients were constantly being turned out of their pallets to be replaced by the purveyors of baksheesh.
Without the bottles of serum, medicines, and food that the indomitable Indian woman brought him each day, the Pole might well have died. She had organized a collection in the slum and all the poor people had contributed to the saving of their "Big Brother." Mehboub's children had gone along the railway lines picking up cinders. Surya, the old Hindu from the tea shop, had donated several bags of sweetmeats. The mother of Sabia, the child who had died of tuberculosis in the room next door, had cut out and stitched a shirt for Daddah Stephan. Even the lepers had given up the proceeds of several days' begging. Stephan Kovalski had failed: in his affliction he had not been able to be a poor man like his brothers of the slum.
Calcutta had never seen such a spectacle: thousands of rickshaws abandoned all over the city. The strike—the first great strike of the last human horses in the world—paralyzed the town's most popular means of transport. "But striking is a rich man's weapon," Hasari acknowledged regretfully. "Fine resolutions don't last long when your belly's gripped with the cramps of hunger and your head's as empty as a skin discarded by a cobra. Those brutes, the owners, knew that only too well. They knew we would crack. After only two days some of our comrades picked up their shafts again. Others followed. Soon we were all back on the road chasing after clients, even doing bargain-rate runs just to get something to eat right away. And we were forced to pay the new rent. It was very hard. But fortunately something always crops up in this city to stop you from crying too much over your lot. "When I first made the acquaintance of my colleague Atul Gupta, I rubbed my eyes several times. I couldn't help wondering whether, instead of waiting for a client on the corner of Russell Street, I wasn't actually watching a film, for Atul Gupta looked like a hero straight out of a
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Hindu film. He was a handsome fellow, with well-groomed black mustache, carefully combed hair, full cheeks, and the look of a conqueror. He was dressed in a colorful shirt and proper sahib's trousers, and—what was even more incredible—he was wearing socks and shoes, real shoes that enclosed the foot, not junk plastic sandals. Yet there was something even more surprising about him: he was sporting a gold watch on his wrist. Can you imagine, a rickshaw puller wearing a gold watch?
"I had seen films where heroes disguised themselves as rickshaw wallahs, but that was in the movies. Gupta was real. No one knew where he came from. It's true that in Calcutta you lived alongside people about whom you knew nothing, whereas in our village, everyone had known each other for generations. Only one thing was certain about Gupta: he must have been to school a lot because he was more knowledgeable than all the Brahmins in Calcutta put together. No one could recite the Ramayana quite as he could. He was a real actor. He would sit down anywhere and start to recite poetry. Instantly a little group would form around him and in a few seconds he would make us forget the cuts on our feet, the cramps in our stomachs, the heat—everything. He used to cast a spell over us. He had an amazing way of personifying Rama, then Sita, then the terrible Ravana, all in turn. We could have listened to him for hours, days, nights, while he transported us over the mountains, across the seas and the sky. Afterward the rickshaw weighed less heavily. In a matter of months Gupta became a hero among the pullers of Calcutta. How had he come to finish up in the skin of a poor fellow like me? The answer remained a mystery.
"Some people claimed he was a spy, others that he was a political agitator. He lived in a boardinghouse in Free School Street frequented by peculiar people, foreigners who went barefoot and wore necklaces and bangles around their ankles. Word had it that those people injected themselves with drugs and smoked, not bidis but the bhang that transports you to nirvana. In any case, Gupta himself didn't go barefoot and I never saw him with a cigarette between his lips. He worked as hard as any of us. At dawn he was always the first to arrive at the stand on Park Circus
and he was still trotting around long after nightfall. It must be said that he didn't have years of working with an empty stomach behind him like the other pullers. His engine was still running nicely. But like the rest of us, he had no license for his rattletrap. In Calcutta a good baksheesh would buy you the keys to paradise.
"In any case, license or no license, Gupta must have had some good days because women used to fight with one another to get into his rickshaw. No doubt they thought they were being pulled along by Manooj Kumar.* But then in our line of business it's better to be taken for the poorest of poor devils than to look like a film star. The more you stood out from the crowd, the more people kept tabs on you."
One day when he was taking two young girls back to their house in Harrington Street, the handsome Atul Gupta was to experience the truth of these words for himself. A trash cart had broken down in the middle of the carriageway and the whole street was blocked. Gupta tried to bypass the obstruction by going onto the sidewalk, but a policeman interve
ned. There followed a violent altercation between Gupta and the cop, who made no bones about hitting Gupta several times with his lathi. Furious, Gupta put down his shafts and hurled himself at the policeman. The two men rolled on the ground in a savage scrum. Eventually the policeman ran to get reinforcements and a crew of cops rushed to capture the puller and seize his rickshaw.
When the police finally released him at noon the next day, Atul Gupta was a mass of flesh and blood. They had beaten him all night and burned his chest with cigarettes. They had hung him from a hook, first by his arms, then by his feet, and whipped his body with a bamboo cane. It wasn't only because he had fought with one of their men that they punished him, but also because of his clean trousers, his shirt, his sahib's shoes, and his gold watch. A slave had no right to be different from all the other beasts of burden.
* A famous Indian film star.
Not content with having beaten him, the police registered a complaint against Atul Gupta before the judges at the Bonsai Court, Calcutta's municipal court. On the day of the trial, the rickshaw pullers gave their comrade a proper guard of honor. Since he could hardly walk, they put him in one of their carriages decorated with flowers. "He was just like a maharajah or a statue of Durga, our friend," Hasari Pal was to recall, "except that he had bandages on his arms and legs, and his eyes and face looked as if they had been painted with kohl, his features were so marked with ecchymosis."
The Bonsai Court was an old brick building on the other side of Dalhousie Square, in the center of town. In the courtyard, at the foot of a great banyan tree, stood a small temple. The pullers helped Gupta get down in front of the altar decorated with portraits of Shiva, Kali, and the Monkey god Hanuman because he was very religious and wanted to have a darshan with the deities before facing his judges. Hasari took hold of his hand to help him strike the clapper of the bell suspended above the altar. Gupta recited a few mantras, then placed a garland of flowers around the trident of Shiva.
On the pavement all along the railings, a crowd was squeezed in between a double row of vendors. The warm air intensified the smell of hot oil and frying. Farther away, in the entrance to the courtyard, people were lining up for public writers, who squatted behind typewriters. Inside the courtyard, others were having coconuts cut open or drinking tea or bottled drinks. There were even beggars on the steps up to the audience chambers. What was most striking of all, however, was the constant coming and going. People went in, came out, stopped to talk. Accused men went past chained to policemen. Legal men in black tailored jackets and striped trousers talked among themselves and to the prisoners' families.
Gupta and his friends went into a vestibule that smelled of mildew. Women were breast-feeding their babies on benches. Some people were in the middle of eating, others were asleep on the bare floor, wrapped up in a piece of kadhi.
Someone informed Gupta that he must go and find
himself a lawyer. At the end of a long dark corridor, there was a room full of them. They were seated behind small tables under fans that scattered their papers about. Gupta chose a middle-aged man who inspired confidence. He was wearing a shirt and tie under a black jacket as shiny as the surface of a pool in moonlight. The defending counsel led his client and escort to a staircase that stank of urine. At the turn of every floor, judges were dictating their opinions to clerks who typed them out with one finger.
The small troop at last arrived in a great chamber. A faded photograph of Gandhi decorated one wall. The back of the room was furnished with a pyramid of old metal trunks, which contained thousands of pieces of evidence used in the course of countless trials: knives, pistols, all kinds of weapons, and stolen goods. In the middle of the chamber, benches were arranged in rows in front of a platform. On the platform were two tables and a cage linked to a tunnel of iron railings which ran right across the room. "I had seen a tunnel like that once before in a circus," Hasari Pal was to recount. "It was used to convey tigers and panthers into the ring." Here it was used to bring prisoners before their judges. Atul Gupta did not have to use it because he was appearing before the court as a free man.
The room was soon completely full of rickshaw pullers drinking tea and smoking bidis as they awaited the arrival of the court. Gupta sat before the platform on a bench beside his counsel. Eventually two men in rather grimy dhotis made their entrance. They were carrying under their arms files bulging with papers, and they moved with an air of boredom. They were the clerks. One of them clapped his hands, ordering that the two great fans suspended from the ceiling be set in motion. The machines were so worn that their blades took a while to start up, like two vultures who, having just devoured a carcass, couldn't quite manage to take off.
A door opened at the back of the room and the judge entered. A very thin man with a sad expression behind his glasses, he was wearing a black robe trimmed with fur. Everyone stood up, even Gupta, who had great difficulty in remaining upright. The judge sat down in the ceremonial
chair in the middle of the platform. The accused and his friends could hardly make out his face behind the volumes of the Indian penal code and the files that covered the table. He had hardly settled himself when a pigeon perched itself on one of his books and attended to its own particular needs. A clerk mounted the platform to wipe away the droppings with a corner of his dhoti. Several families of pigeons had built their nests in the heaps of files and the trunks at the back of the chamber.
A small figure, likewise dressed in a black robe, had entered behind the judge. He was so cross-eyed that it was impossible to tell whether he was looking to his right or left. He was the P.P.—the public prosecutor. Below, to the left of the platform, stood a police officer. As Hasari Pal was to say, "It was just as if they were getting ready to play a scene from the Ramayana with lots of characters."
One of the clerks began to read out the charge accusing Atul Gupta of having assaulted the policeman in Harrington Street. The judge had taken off his glasses, closed his eyes, and sunk back in his chair. All that could now be seen of him was his bald head, which gleamed above the heaps of files. When the clerk had finished, the judge's voice was heard asking Gupta's defense counsel what he had to say. Then Hasari saw the rickshaw puller place his hand on his lawyer's shoulder, to prevent him from standing up. Gupta wanted to conduct his own defense.
In the space of a few minutes he gave such a detailed account of the brutality to which he had been subjected that the entire room began to sniff and weep. The P.P. and counsel for the prosecution then intervened, but there was no real point. The judge too was sniffing behind his mounds of books and papers. Gupta was found not guilty and acquitted. Furthermore, the judge ordered that his rickshaw be restored to him.
The hearing had lasted less than ten minutes. "The longest part of it was our applause," Hasari was to say. "We were proud and happy for our friend."
News of Gupta's acquittal spread like wildfire among the city's rickshaw pullers. Scarface and Golam Rassoul, the pillars of the rickshaw pullers' union, suggested that an enormous demonstration be organized immediately outside
the Writers' Building, the seat of the Bengal government, to protest against police violence. Rassoul alerted the leaders of the telagarhi wallahs, the handcart pullers' union. They jumped at the chance: rickshaws and telagarhis were the scapegoats of the Calcutta police.
The procession set off from Park Circus in the early afternoon. Left-wing party leaders had provided streamers, banners, and red flags, so that it looked like a field of red marigolds on the move. In front, seated in a rickshaw decorated with flowers and red streamers, rode the hero of the day, pulled by men who took turns doing a hundred yards between the shafts. It was carriage number 1999 that had the honor of transporting him, the jalopy between the shafts of which Hasari Pal had sweated, suffered, and hoped for four years.
Along the route hundreds of handcart pullers came to join the procession. Traffic was brought to a standstill and soon the paralysis stretched as far as the suburbs. This time the inhabit
ants watched the demonstrators pass without astonishment. Never before had a cortege marched past with so many flags and streamers. The Communists had sent their team, armed with loudspeakers. The leaders shouted and chanted slogans which the pullers repeated at the tops of their voices. It took more than three hours to reach Dalhousie Square. The police had barricaded the approaches to the government building with vans, trucks, and hundreds of men in khaki, armed with guns. The long red brick fagade studded with statues was protected by more policemen.
The column had to stop at the barricade. A police officer in a flat cap stepped forward and asked the men at the head of the procession if they wished to convey a message to the Prime Minister's secretariat. Atul Gupta replied that the organizers of the demonstration demanded to be received by the Prime Minister in person. The officer said that he would pass on the request. The party leaders took advantage of the ensuing wait to give voice to fiery speeches against the police; they shouted revolutionary slogans.
The City of Joy Page 23
