The City of Joy

by Dominique Lapierre

  "Kill me!" she cried in Bengali, her arms outstretched in a gesture of crucifixion. "And I'll be in heaven all the sooner!"

  Impressed, the rabble withdrew, but the harassment continued. Neighborhood delegations presented themselves at the town hall and the general police headquarters to demand that the "foreign nun" be expelled. The chief of police promised to satisfy their demands but insisted upon first making his own inquiries. He made his way to the home for the dying and there found Mother Teresa kneeling at the bedside of a man who had just been picked up off the street, a skeleton figure lying there in a state of indescribable filth, with his legs swollen with purulent sores. "Dear God," he wondered, "how ever can she put up with that?" Mother Teresa cleansed the horrible wounds, applied antibiotic dressings, and promised the unfortunate man that he would get better. Her face was bathed in an extraordinary serenity and the chief of police found himself strangely moved.

  "Would you like me to show you around?" she asked him. "No, Mother," he excused himself. "That won't be necessary."

  As he emerged from the building, the neighborhood's young fanatics were waiting for him on the steps.

  "I promised you that I would expel this foreign woman," he told them. "And I will do so on the day that you persuade your mothers and sisters to come here and do what she is doing."

  The battle was not won yet. During the days that followed, troublemakers continued to throw stones. One morning Mother Teresa noticed a gathering of people outside the Kali temple. As she drew near to them she saw a man stretched out on the ground with turned-up eyes and a face apparently drained of blood. A triple braid denoted that he was a Brahmin, one of the priests from the temple* No one dared to touch him. They knew he was suffering from cholera.

  She bent over, took the body of the Brahmin in her arms, and carried him to the home for the dying. Day and night she nursed him, and eventually he recovered. One day he was to exclaim, "For thirty years I have worshipped a Kali of stone. But here is the real Kali, a Kali of flesh and blood." Never again were stones thrown at the little Sisters in the white saris.

  News of this incident spread throughout the whole city. Every day, ambulances and police vans brought the suffering to Mother Teresa. "Nirmal Hriday is the jewel of Calcutta," the nun was to remark one day. The jewel was granted the protection of the city itself. The mayor, journalists, and many eminent people rushed to visit it. High-caste ladies came to offer their services and tend the dying with the Sisters. One of these was to become a great friend of Mother Teresa.

  Amrita Roy, at thirty-five, was rich, beautiful, and powerful. Her uncle, Dr. B. C. Roy, a man of the heart, was none other than the chief minister of Bengal, an associate who would smooth out many an obstacle in a city where every aspect of life was an ordeal: the climate, pollution, overpopulation and, above all, bureaucracy. Like Stephan Kovalski, Mother Teresa sometimes had to spend days in customs warehouses retrieving from petty officials crates of medicines and boxes of powdered milk sent by friends around the world.

  Taking in dying destitutes, however, was only a first step for Mother Teresa. The living too needed care, and among the most neglected of the living were the newborn babies that might be found one morning on a rubbish heap, in a gutter, or in the doorway of a church.

  One day "the hand of God" directed Mother Teresa to the portal of a large unoccupied house on a road very near the place where her congregation had made its home. On February 15, 1953, "Shishu Bhavan," the Children's Home, welcomed its first guest, a premature baby wrapped in a piece of newspaper, picked up from the pavement. He weighed less than three pounds and had not even the strength to suck at the bottle Mother Teresa gave him. He had to be fed with a nasal tube. The nun persisted and won her first victory in this new haven of love and compassion. Soon several dozen babies were bundled together in cots and playpens. Five or six more arrived every day. Her Sisters and good Father Van Exem, her confessor, were worried. How was she going to provide for so many people? Together with the occupants of the home for the dying, there were now several hundred mouths to feed.

  Her response to this question was an all-illuminating smile. "The Lord will provide!"

  Sure enough, the Lord did provide. Gifts poured in. Rich families sent their chauffeurs with cars full of rice, vegetables, fish. One evening Mother Teresa encountered the man who had given her a room in his house in the very earliest days.

  "It's wonderful," she announced to him jubilantly, "I've just obtained from the government a monthly grant of thirty-three rupees for a hundred of our children."

  "From the government!" repeated the man with compassion. "I really feel sorry for you. Because you've no idea what bureaucratic mess you'll be forced into."

  True to this prediction, six months had not gone by before a meeting was held in the government building. A dozen bureaucrats in dhotis examined the nun's account books. They asked questions, quibbled over details, and criticized. Exasperated, Mother Teresa stood up. "You think you can demand that I spend thirty-three rupees on the children you sponsor," she exclaimed indignantly, "when I can spend only seventeen on our other children who are by far the more numerous. How can I spend thirty-three rupees on some and seventeen on others? Who would do a thing like that? Thank you, gentlemen, but I will do without your money." And she left the room.

  In a city already overwhelmed by too high a birthrate, she declared war on abortion. She had her Sisters draw and put up posters announcing that she would take in every child that was sent to her. Under the cover of night, pregnant girls came to ask her for a place for their prospective babies.

  The angel of mercy was constantly flying to the rescue of some new group of needy people. After the dying and the abandoned children, it was the turn of those most wretched of all creatures, the lepers. At Titagarh, a shanty-town in an Industrial suburb of Calcutta, she constructed, on land lent by the railway company, a building of rough bricks and corrugated iron, in which she harbored the worst cases, bringing them dressings each day, medicines,

  and words of comfort. Soon hundreds of patients stormed the gate to this oasis of love.

  Titagarh was only a beginning. Next she dispatched commandos of Indian Sisters out into the city, their mission being to open seven more dispensaries. One of them set herself up in the slum where Mother Teresa had first tended the poor. Lepers flocked there in hordes. An employee at the town hall who lived in the vicinity protested against such unpleasant neighbors and threatened to alert the authorities. Eventually Mother Teresa was compelled to give in. But as always, she knew how to make the best of her defeats.

  "What we need," she announced to her Sisters, "are mobile clinics."

  Several small white vans bearing the emblem of the Missionaries of Charity would one day patrol the enormous city to bring treatment into the most neglected areas.

  It was one of these vehicles that Stephan Kovalski wanted to bring into Anand Nagar. Even better, he hoped two or three of Mother Teresa's Sisters would come to assist him in the running of the little leper clinic he planned to set up in the former Muslim school next to the buffalo sheds in the City of Joy. That was why he had come to see Mother Teresa.

  He made his way between the rows of bodies and approached the kneeling figure. The nun was bathing the wounds of a man who was still young but who was so thin that he looked like one of the living dead discovered by the Allies in the Nazi concentration camps. All his flesh had melted away. Only his skin remained, stretched taut over his bones. The woman was speaking softly to him in Bengali.

  "I shall never forget that man's expression," Kovalski was to say. "His suffering was transformed into surprise, then peace, the peace that comes from being loved." Sensing a presence behind her, Mother Teresa stood up. She did not fail to notice the metal cross the visitor was wearing on his chest.

  44 Oh Father," she excused herself humbly, "what can I do for you?"

  Stephan Kovalski felt awkward. He had just interrupted a conversation in which he identified something
unique. The eyes of the dying man seemed to be imploring Mother Teresa to bend over him once more. It was deeply touching. The priest introduced himself.

  "I think I've heard people talk about you!" she said warmly.

  /'Mother, I've come to ask for your help."

  4 'My help?" She pointed a large hand toward the ceiling. "It's God's help you want to ask for, Father. I am nothing at all."

  At that point a young American in jeans came along carrying a bowl. Mother Teresa called him over and drew his attention to the dying man.

  "Love him," she ordered. "Love him with all your might." She handed the young man her tweezers and cloth and left him, steering Stephan Kovalski toward an empty area with a table and bench between the room for men and the one for women. On the wall was a board bearing a framed text of a Hindu poem which the priest read aloud.

  If you have two pieces of bread, Give one to the poor, Sell the other, And buy hyacinths To feed your soul.

  The Pole outlined his plan for a leper clinic in the City of Joy.

  "Very good, Father, very good," commented Mother Teresa in her picturesque accent, a mixture of Slavonic and Bengali. "You are doing God's work. All right, Father, I'll send you three Sisters who are used to caring for lepers."

  Her gaze strayed over the room full of prostrate bodies and she added, "They give us so much more than we give them."

  A young Sister came over and spoke to her in a low voice. Her presence was needed elsewhere.

  "Goodbye, Father," she said. "Come and say Mass for us one of these mornings."

  Stephan Kovalski was overwhelmed. "Bless you, Calcutta, for in your wretchedness you have given birth to saints."

  The situation was growing steadily worse. Terrifying bottlenecks immobilized the flow of traffic more and more frequently. At certain times, advancing just one step was quite a feat. The roads in the city center were frequently jammed with streetcars deprived of electricity, broken-down trucks with radiators steaming, double-decker buses with broken axles or even turned over on their sides. Hordes of yellow taxis with their paintwork in shreds forced their way to the clamor of horns. Buffalo carts and hand-pulled carriages creaking beneath enormous loads, and hosts of coolies carrying mountains of merchandise on their heads tried to move across the engulfing tide. Everywhere swarms of pedestrians competed with rickshaws for a share of asphalt in streets disrupted by frequent water pipe or drain bursts. Everything seemed to crack and crumble a little more with each passing day.

  "There were clients too, who pricked you in the stomach with the point of a knife and demanded the day's takings," Hasari Pal was to recount. "Drunkards who paid you with their fists, goondas and prostitutes who vanished

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  without settling up for the ride, elegant memsahibs who cheated you out of a few paisas"

  One day Hasari asked the munshi to add to his money invoice a short message for his father in the space reserved for correspondence: "We are well. I am earning my living as a rickshaw puller." His chest swollen with pride at having been able to make this gesture for those who expected everything of him, he hurried back to the pavement where he was camping with his wife and three children. He had an important piece of news to announce to them.

  "Wife!" he called out as soon as he saw Aloka, crouched down, cleaning out the neighboring woman's tin can. "I've found us a place in a slum!"

  A slum! For peasants used to a daily bath in a pool, the cleanliness of a hut and the healthy food of the countryside, the prospect of living in a slum, with no water, no drains, and sometimes no latrines, offered little to be joyful about. Still, anything was better than the pavement. There at least, a few bits of cloth and sheet iron placed on four crates would furnish them with something resembling a lodging place, a precarious shelter to ward off the next winter and, a few months later, the excesses of the monsoon.

  The shantytown, where Hasari had foraged out their thirty square feet of space, was situated right in the middle of the city on an extension of the great Chowringhee Road which skirted the Maidan park. Its foundation dated back to the time of the war with China, when thousands of refugees from the North descended upon Calcutta. One day a few families had stopped on the ground between two roads, put down their miserable bundles, set up a few stakes, and stretched out some bits of cloth between them as a shield against the sun. Other families had joined this initial nucleus, and so the small encampment had become a shantytown, right in the heart of a residential area. No one raised any objections to it—neither the municipal authorities, nor the police, nor the owners of the land. The city was already pockmarked throughout with similar patches of misery, places where several hundred uprooted people lived, sometimes without so much as a drinking water point. Some of these little islands had existed for a whole

  generation. Not everyone, however, was quite so disinterested in the squatters. No sooner had a newcomer installed himself on his square of mud or concrete than someone set about fleecing him. That was one of the stupefying things about the extortion business conducted by the Mafia, with the cooperation of certain authorities. It was a strictly indigenous "Mafia" which had no reason to envy its famous Italo-American model.

  Even before he had moved in, Hasari received a visit from a small, shady-looking man who claimed to represent the "owner" of the colony—in other words, the local godfather. Every time a handful of refugees stopped somewhere to set up some kind of shanty, the Mafia representative would turn up armed with a bona fide demolition order issued by the city's authorities. The squatters then found themselves confronted with a choice between paying regular rent or purchasing the plot. For his thirty square feet Hasari Pal was forced to pay out fifty rupees in "key money" and a monthly rent of twenty rupees payable in advance. The bloodsuckers did not, however, confine their racket merely to collecting rents and other "residential taxes." Their control extended, in fact, to all aspects of life in the slum. Being the only local authority, the Mafia set itself up as the "protector" of the population. In a way its claim was true. The Mafia intervened whenever a conflict required arbitration, or at election times by distributing a host of favors in exchange for votes: ration cards, a lead oflf the water pipes, the building of a temple, the admission of a child into a government-run school.

  Anyone who dared to question the legitimacy of this underground power was punished without mercy. Every now and then shanties caught fire. Sometimes a whole neighborhood went up in flames. At other times a body was recovered, riddled with stab wounds. This omnipresent dictatorship manifested itself in many and various ways. Sometimes directly, as was the case in Hasari's slum, where several Mafia representatives lived right there. In other tenements planted in the vicinity of a construction site, a distillery, a garbage dump, or a quarry, the Mafia ruled via the manager or the owner of the enterprise. These intermediaries exercised absolute power over the inhabit-

  ants because the latter depended on them for their daily bowl of rice. Elsewhere, it was through committees and associations that it imposed its law. These organizations were little more than cover-ups. Whether they were religious in nature or represented a caste or a place of origin, they all provided the Mafia and its political connections with the ideal means by which to infiltrate the very depths of the slum population. Thus it was no longer a simple matter of rent and taxes. The Mafia meted out justice even within the family unit. It fixed the level of fines, collected donations for religious festivals, negotiated marriages, divorces, adoptions, inheritances, levied out excommunications—in short it managed everyone's rites and practices from birth to death inclusively: no Muslim would ever find a place in a cemetery, no Hindu have himself cremated, without paying a cut to the Mafia.

  The Pals' departure from their pavement occurred discreetly under the cover of night. No sooner had they piled their meager possessions into the rickshaw and turned the corner of the avenue, than a new refugee family moved in to take their place.

  The drama erupted just as Stephan Kovalski was coming out
of the latrines. He heard shouts and saw a mob of children and adults charging toward him. At once a deluge of stones and missiles rained down all around the little public convenience, only narrowly missing the priest. He leaped backward only to discover the target of all the fury: a wretched woman in rags, with disheveled hair and a face stained with blood and grime. Her eyes were full of hatred, her mouth was foaming, and she was emitting animal sounds as she flailed her fleshless hands and arms about her. The more insults she uttered, the more the mob set upon her. It was as if all the latent violence in the slum was exploding at once: the City of Joy wanted to claim a lynching! The Pole tried to rush to the rescue of the unfortunate woman but someone grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him backward. They were about to close in for the kill. Men were getting their knives out. Women urged them on with their clamoring. It was dreadful to see.

  Suddenly, however, the priest saw a little gray-haired man brandishing a stick surface from the crowd. He

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  recognized the old Hindu who kept the tea shop opposite him. Swinging his stick about, he rushed to the woman's side and, shielding her with his frail figure, turned on her aggressors.

  4 'Leave this woman alone!" he shouted to them. "God is visiting us."

  The rabble came to a halt, transfixed. The yelling stopped abruptly. All eyes were turned upon the frail figure of the elderly Hindu.

  After a few seconds that seemed more like an eternity to Kovalski, he saw one of the assailants, armed with a knife, approach the old man. Having reached him, he prostrated himself, placed the weapon at his feet, and went through the motions of wiping the dust from his sandals and touching his forehead with it as a mark of respect. Then he stood up, turned on his heels, and walked away. Others followed his example. In a few minutes the mob had disappeared.