The City of Joy

by Dominique Lapierre

  After a few minutes the officer returned to announce that the Prime Minister agreed to receive a delegation of four

  rickshaw pullers. Rassoul and Gupta together with two other union members were authorized to cross the barrier. When they came back half an hour later, they harbored an air of satisfaction, especially Gupta. He announced through a loudspeaker that the Prime Minister and the chief of police had given their assurance that there would be no recurrence of police brutality. Applause and cheers greeted the news. Gupta added that he had personally received a solemn promise that the policemen who had ill-treated him would be punished.

  There was a fresh round of acclamations. Gupta, Rassoul, and the two other delegates were then decorated with garlands of flowers. "We felt as if something that was of great significance for us had just occurred," Hasari Pal was to say. "We could take leave of each other happily and in peace. Tomorrow would mark the beginning of better days."

  The procession broke up without incident. Rickshaw wallahs and telagarhi wallahs returned to their homes. Gupta climbed back into Hasari's rickshaw. They and a few friends went to a drinking place in Ganguli Street to celebrate their victory with some bottles of bangla. It was just as they were leaving the bar that Hasari heard a dull sound like that of a bursting bicycle tire. Gupta uttered a cry, his head flopped onto his chest, then his whole body crumpled against the shafts. Hasari saw that he had a hole in his head, just above his ear from which the blood had begun to flow. Gupta tried to say something, then his eyes turned completely white.

  "Our enemies had avenged themselves. They had robbed us of our hero."

  A little colony had installed itself in the far reaches of the slum, in an area bounded by the railway tracks. From the outside nothing distinguished it from other quarters in the slum. The same compounds in the form of a square around a courtyard were to be found there, with the same sort of laundry drying on the roofs and the same open drains. Yet this was a ghetto of a very particular kind. No other occupants of the slum ever ventured there, for it was in this place that the City of Joy's six hundred lepers lived, squeezed ten or twelve together to each room.

  India numbers about five million lepers among its population. The horror and fear inspired by disfigured faces, hands and feet reduced to stumps, and wounds at times infested with vermin, condemned the lepers of Anand Nagar to total segregation. Although they were free to go about the slum, an unspoken code forbade them to enter the houses or compounds of the healthy. By having gone to Stephan Kovalski's room, the cripple Anouar had transgressed the rule, and the infraction could have cost him his life. There had already been several lynchings, although more

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  out of fear of the evil eye than out of fear of contagion. Though they would give alms to lepers to improve their own karma, most Indians looked upon leprosy as a malediction of the gods.

  In the heart of the leper colony, a hut made out of bamboo and dried mud provided shelter for a few mattresses. In this hovel laid a number of refugees from the pavements of Calcutta, who had come to the end of their Calvary. One of these was Anouar.

  "That man too had a smile that was difficult to understand in the light of his suifering," Stephan Kovalski was to say. "He never uttered the slightest complaint. If ever I ran into him by chance in an alleyway, he would always greet me in a voice resonant with joy.

  44 'Well, Stephan Daddah, are you well today?'

  "Coming from a human wreck groveling in the mud, the question seemed so incongruous that I hesitated before replying. I had formed the habit of stooping down to him and grasping the stump of his right hand with my hands. The first time I did it the gesture took him so much by surprise that he surveyed the people around him with an expression of triumph, as if to say, 4 You see, I'm a man just like you. The Daddah is shaking my hand.' "

  Stephan Kovalski knew that Anouar had reached the advanced stages of his illness and was going through utter torment. There was nothing more that could be done for him since the disease had reached his nerves. When the pain became too intolerable, he used to have himself carried to 49 Nizamudhin Lane where the priest gave him a shot of morphine. Kovalski had managed to procure some vials of it from the hospital in Howrah. He kept them for desperate cases.

  The day after one of these injections Kovalski encountered Anouar in one of the alleyways. He looked unusually preoccupied.

  4 'What's wrong with you, Anouar?" asked the Pole, concerned.

  44 Oh nothing, Stephan Daddah, I'm fine. But my neighbor, Said, is not too good. You ought to come and see him. He's so ill he can't eat or sleep."

  The cripple creeping along in the filth asked nothing for

  himself. Worried only about his neighbor, he was the living message of the Indian proverb, 'The hell with misery as long as we are miserable together."

  Stephan Kovalski promised to come that afternoon.

  It was a journey into sheer horror. What the priest discovered was not so much a leper colony as a kind of ossuary. Were those skeletons consumed with gangrene, whose closed eyes were covered with white mushrooms, really human beings? Those breathing corpses whose crackled skin oozed out a yellowish liquid? Even so the sight was nothing by comparison with the stench. "I had never smelled anything like it. A mixture of decay, alcohol, and incense. You needed to have Hope with a big H well anchored in the bottom of your heart to withstand it." Squatting among the rubbish and excreta, children played marbles, with great shrieks of laughter. Kovalski had no difficulty in identifying Anouar's friend. Said was a man of barely forty, left with no hands and no feet. Leprosy had also eroded his nose and eaten away his eyebrows. Anouar performed the introductions. Said turned his blind face toward the priest and Kovalski thought he detected a smile on it.

  "Stephan Big Brother, Fm fine," he assured him. "You shouldn't have taken the trouble to visit me."

  "It's not true," corrected Anouar, shaking his mop of hair, "you're in a lot of pain."

  Kovalski took hold of his arm and examined the stump. The wound was greenish in color and maggots were crawling over the bone. Said too was beyond all treatment. Kovalski filled a syringe with morphine and looked for a vein beneath the hard, crackled skin. He could do nothing more.

  Nearby, a woman was stretched out on a rough bed with a baby lying next to her. The child was a bouncing boy. An allergic reaction to her medicines had covered the mother's face with swellings and pustules. It was a common phenomenon and one that was so traumatic that many lepers refused any kind of treatment. The poor woman's body was concealed by a piece of cloth pulled up to her

  chin. Kovalski bent over and picked the child up in his arms. He was amazed at the force with which the boy's little hand gripped his finger.

  "He's going to be a big fellow," he promised the mother. The leper woman turned away. Kovalski thought he had hurt her.

  "Here, you take him. He's yours and shouldn't be away from you."

  An interminable moment passed. The mother made no move to take her son. She was crying. Eventually she pushed back the sheet and held out her arms. She had no fingers.

  Kovalski placed the child carefully at her side. Then, joining his hands in the Indian gesture of salutation, he left without a word. Outside, a host of cripples, blind men, and limbless people awaited him. They had all come running to receive a darshan from the "Big Brother," who had dared to enter their lair. "They too were smiling," the priest was to say. "And their smiles were neither forced nor suppliant. They had the smiles of men, the bearing of men, the dignity of men. Some of them clapped their maimed hands to applaud me. Others jostled with each other to get near to me, to escort me, to touch me."

  Anouar led the visitor to a compound where four lepers were playing cards, squatting on a mat. His arrival interrupted them but he begged them to continue their game. This proved to be an opportunity for him to witness a juggling act worthy of the most celebrated circus. The cards flew about between the palms of their hands before tumbling to the ground in a ballet punctuated wi
th laughter and exclamations.

  In a neighboring compound, beggar musicians performed a concert for him on flutes and drums. Everywhere he went in the leper colony, people came out of their hovels. His visit was turning into a fete. "Outside the door to one shack, a grandfather who was almost blind thrust in my direction a three-year-old boy he had just adopted. The old man used to beg in front of Howrah Station. One morning this child sought refuge with him, like a dog lost without a collar. That same old man who didn't have enough to feed himself every day, and who would never be cured, had

  taken the boy under his wing." A little farther on, Stephan was awestruck by the sight of a small girl massaging, with fingers that were still intact, the chubby body of her little brother as he lay in her lap. Anouar led the way, propelling himself along on his plank on wheels, with a fervor that was redoubled by his pride at acting as guide for his "Big Brother Stephan."

  "Stephan Daddah, come and sit over here," he ordered, gesturing to a mat made out of jute sacks sewn together that a woman had just unrolled for him in one of the courtyards. Several lepers scrambled to settle themselves next to him. That was when he realized that he was being invited for a meal.

  "I thought I had come to terms with everything about poverty, yet I felt revolted by the idea of sharing food with the most bruised of all my brothers," Stephan was to admit. "What a failure! What lack of love! What a long way I still had to go!" He hid his uneasiness as best he could and very soon the warmth of the lepers' hospitality dispelled it. Women brought metal bowls full of steaming rice and vegetable curry, and the meal began. Kovalski did his utmost to forget the fingerless hands battling with balls of rice and pieces of marrow. His hosts seemed overwhelmed with joy, wild with gratitude. Never before had a foreigner shared their food. "Despite my heaving stomach, I wanted to show my friendship for them," he would explain, "show them that I wasn't afraid of them. If I wasn't frightened of them it was because I loved them. And if I loved them it was because the God with whom I lived and for whom I lived, loved them also. These people needed more love than anyone else. They were pariahs among the pariahs."

  His generosity of heart did not, however, prevent Kovalski from feeling a certain indignation that men could allow themselves to be reduced to such a state of physical decline. He was well aware that leprosy was not a fatal disease. Provided it was treated in time, it was even quite easily cured and left no aftereffects. It was that day, confronted by the horrible sight of so much mutilation, that he made his decision. He would set up a leprosy dispensary in the City of Joy, a proper place with specialists who knew how to cure the disease.

  Next day Stephan Kovalski climbed aboard the bus that went across the Hooghly. He was going to the south of Calcutta to lay his plans before the only person in the city who could help him to implement them.

  Like a flower straining toward the sun, the sug-arloaf-shaped dome of the temple of Kali surfaced from the imbroglio of alleyways, residences, hovels, stores, and pilgrims' rest houses. This high place of militant Hinduism, built near a branch of the Ganges, on the banks of which the dead were burned, was the most frequented shrine in Calcutta. Day and night crowds of the faithful swarmed inside and around its gray walls. Rich families, their arms laden with offerings of fruit and food wrapped in gold paper; penitents dressed in white cotton, leading goats to the sacrifice; yogis in saflFron robes, their hair tied up and knotted on the crowns of their heads, the sign of their sect painted in vermilion on their foreheads; troubadours singing canticles as plaintive as sighs; musicians, tradesmen, tourists; the motley throng milled about in an atmosphere of festivity.

  This is also one of the most congested places in the overpopulated city. Hundreds of shops surround the temple with a string of multicolored stalls. There is something of everything sold here: fruit, flowers, powders, imitation jewels, perfumes, devotional objects, gilded copper uten-

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  sils, toys, and even fresh fish and caged birds. Above the antlike activity hovers the bluish mist of the funeral pyres and the smell of incense mingled with burning flesh. Numerous funeral corteges wend their way between the cows, the dogs, the children playing in the street, and the flock of faithful worshippers. At the temple of Kali, the most vibrant life goes hand in hand with death.

  Around the corner from this sanctuary stands a long, low structure with windows obstructed by plaster latticework. There is no door in the imposing sculpted porch way. Anyone can enter at any time. A wooden board announces in English and Bengali: "Municipality of Calcutta, Nirmal Hriday—The Place of the Pure Heart—Home for Dying Destitutes."

  Stephan Kovalski had reached his destination. He mounted the few steps and went into the building. An indefinable smell which even disinfectants could not obscure floated around. Once his eyes had grown accustomed to the dimness, he made out three rows of litters with thin green mattresses, squeezed in tightly side by side. Each one had a number painted in front of it. Shadowy shapes moved silently between the rows. On the beds lay fleshless bodies stretched out in various postures of agony. In a second room, rows of similar beds were provided for women.

  What struck Kovalski immediately was the serenity of the place. There was no horror here. No longer were the wretched people who had come together in this place tormented with anguish, solitude, destitution, or neglect. They had found love and peace.

  The one hundred and ten occupants of the Place of the Pure Heart owed that peace to the staunch little woman in a white cotton sari with a blue border, whom Stephan Kovalski spotted leaning over a dying man at the far end of the room. India and the world were beginning to recognize the name of this saint who for some years now had been revolutionizing the practice of charity. Newspapers and magazines had popularized the nun who picked up abandoned children and dying destitutes from the streets of Calcutta. Her work had already spread beyond the frontiers of India, and nations had awarded her their highest distinctions. Her name was Mother Teresa and she had just turned fifty-four

  years of age when Stephan Kovalski walked in to meet her.

  Despite her sturdiness, she looked older. Her face was already furrowed with deep wrinkles, her bent form bore witness to years of self-sacrifice and sleepless nights.

  Agnes Bojaxhiu was born in Skopje, Yugoslavia, of Albanian parents. Her father was a prosperous merchant. She was attracted to the life of a missionary in India at a very early age. At eighteen, taking the name of Teresa in memory of the little Flower of Lisieux, she entered the Missionary Order of the Loreto Sisters and, on January 20, 1931, she stepped off a steamship onto the quay at Calcutta, then the largest city in the Empire after London. For sixteen years she taught geography to the daughters of well-to-do British and Bengali society in one of the most prestigious convents in Calcutta. One day in 1946, however, during a train journey to Darjeeling, a town on the slopes of the Himalayas, she heard a voice. God was asking her to leave the comfort of her convent, to go and live among the poorest of the poor in the vast city beyond. Having first obtained permission from the Pope, she changed into a plain white cotton sari and founded a new religious order whose vocation was to relieve the misery of the most neglected of men. In 1950, the order of the Missionaries of Charity was born, a congregation which thirty-five years later would have two hundred and eighty-five houses and several thousand charitable foundations throughout India and all the other continents, including countries behind the Iron Curtain. The home for the dying which Kovalski had just entered was born out of a particularly moving encounter experienced one evening by Mother Teresa.

  It was in June 1952. The monsoon cataracts were beating down upon Calcutta with a noise that seemed to herald the destruction of the world. A white figure, stooping under the deluge, was skirting the walls of the Medical College Hospital. Suddenly she stumbled upon something stretched out on the ground. She stopped and discovered an old woman lying in the middle of a pool of water. The woman was hardly breathing. Her toes had been gnawed to

  the bone by rats. Mother Te
resa scooped her into her arms and ran to the door of the hospital. She found the emergency entrance, went into a reception room, and deposited the dying woman on a stretcher. Instantly an attendant intervened.

  "Take that woman away immediately!" he ordered. "There's nothing we can do for her."

  Mother Teresa took the dying woman in her arms and set off again at a run. She knew another hospital, not far away. Suddenly, however, she heard a rattle. The body stiffened in her arms and she realized that it was too late.

  Putting down her burden, she closed the poor creature's eyes and made the sign of the cross as she prayed beside her in the rain. "In this city, even the dogs are treated better than human beings," she sighed as she turned away.

  The next day, she rushed to the municipal building and besieged its offices. The persistence of this European nun in a white cotton sari was a source of considerable astonishment. One of the mayor's deputies finally received her. "It's a disgrace that people in this city are forced to die in the streets," she declared. "Give me a house where we can help the dying to appear before God in dignity and love."

  One week later the municipality placed at her disposal a former rest house for Hindu pilgrims, next to the great Kali temple. Mother Teresa was overjoyed. "This is God's doing. The place is ideally situated. It is to the precincts of this sacred spot that the destitute come to die, in the hope of being cremated on the temple pyres." At first the intrusion of a nun dressed in a white sari and adorned with a crucifix, in a neighborhood wholly consecrated to the worship of Kali, provoked curiosity. Gradually, however, orthodox Hindus became indignant. The word spread that Mother Teresa and her Sisters were there to convert the dying to Christianity. Incidents broke out. One day a shower of stones and bricks rained down upon an ambulance, bringing the dying to the home. The Sisters were insulted and threatened. Eventually Mother Teresa dropped to her knees before the demonstrators.