The old Hindu went over to the mad woman who was looking at him like an animal run to earth. Slowly, delicately, with the tail of his shirt, he wiped the excreta and blood from her face. Then he helped her up and, supporting her around the waist, led her away down the alleyway toward his tea shop.
It was quite some time before Kovalski came to know the history of that lover of justice and bearer of the luminous name of Surya, or Sun. Three years previously the hands that now handled bowls of tea and kettles had fashioned balls of clay thrown on a stone wheel. In the course of their circuits those balls would be transformed, between the fingers of the old Hindu, into goblets, pots, cups, dishes, religious lamps, vases, and even the gigantic six-foot-high vases used at weddings. Surya had been the potter for Biliguri, a large borough with about a thousand inhabitants, one hundred and twenty miles north of Calcutta. His ancestors had been village potters since time immemorial. The role of the potter formed as intimate a part of community life as that of the Brahmin priest or the moneylender. Every year, in every Hindu family, the pots
were ceremonially broken; also they were broken every time there was a birth, as a mark of welcome to the new life, and every time there was a death, to allow the deceased to leave for the afterlife complete with his plates and dishes. They were also broken on the occasion of a marriage; in the bride's family because by leaving, the young woman died to the eyes of her family, and in the groom's family because the arrival of the young wife meant the birth of a new household. Again, they were broken to mark numerous festivals because the gods wanted everything on earth to be new. In short, a potter was never in danger of being out of work.
Apart from Surya and his two sons who worked with him, there were only seven other artisans in the village. Their workshops all opened out on to the main square. There was a blacksmith, a carpenter, a basket maker who also made traps and snares, and a jeweler who had his own design for what were called "savings necklaces." Whenever a family had saved up a little money, the women would rush to have one or two silver links added to their necklaces. There was also a weaver, a cobbler, and a barber whose particular talents lay less in his skill in looking after his fellow villagers' hair than in ensuring the happiness of their offspring, for it was he who was the official matchmaker. Finally, on either side of Surya's workshop were two stores: that of the grocer and that of the confectioner. Without the latter's mishtis, sweetmeats that were sweeter than sugar, no religious or social ceremony could ever be properly observed.
Toward the end of the monsoon that year, there occurred in Biliguri one of those incidents that appear quite insignificant. Nobody, therefore, took much notice of it at the time. Ashok, the weaver's eldest son who worked in Calcutta, came back to the village with a present for his wife—a pail made out of plastic as red as hibiscus. Cut off as they were in the countryside, people had never seen a utensil like that before. The light supple material out of which it was made provoked general admiration. It was passed from hand to hand with wonder and envy. The first person to really understand the usefulness of this new object was the grocer. Less than three months later, his
store was decorated with similar buckets in several different colors. Goblets, dishes, and gourds subsequently arrived to further enrich his collection. Plastic had conquered a new market. At the same time it had mortally afflicted another craftsman in the village.
Surya watched his clientele rapidly diminish, and in less than a year he and his sons had foundered into destitution. The two boys and their families set out on the path to exile and the city. Surya, himself, tried to resist. Thanks to the solidarity of his caste, he found work about thirty miles away in a village not yet caught up in the plastic fever. The virus was on the rampage, however, and soon all the villages in the area were contaminated.
Then the provincial government gave a manufacturer from Calcutta a grant so that he could construct a factory. One year later every potter in the region was ruined. ^
Surya had no recourse but to embark also upon the road to Calcutta. With him he took his wife, but the poor woman suffered from asthma and could not cope with the shock of urban pollution. She died after only a few months, on the corner of pavement where they had made their" home.
After his wife's cremation on one of the pyres on the banks of the Hooghly, the potter wandered for some time beside the river, completely at a loss. About one mile from Howrah Bridge he noticed a man on the riverbank, filling a basket with clay. Surya started up a conversation with him. The man worked in a potters' workshop on the edge of the City of Joy, where they made the handleless cups used as teacups that were broken after use. Thanks to this miraculous encounter, the very next day Surya found himself squatting behind a wheel making hundreds of the small receptacles. The workshop supplied numerous tea shops scattered throughout the alleyways of the City of Joy.
One day the old Muslim who kept the tea shop in Nizamudhin Lane was found hanging from a piece of bamboo in the framework. He had committed suicide. Surya, who no longer felt physically able to do prolonged manual work, went to see the proprietor of the shop and obtained the concession for it. Ever since then he had been
intoning his "Oms" and heating his kettles of milky tea on a chula that filled the alleyway with smoke from one end of the day to the other. The old Hindu was such a good and holy man, however, that the residents of Nizamudhin Lane forgave him for the smoke.
Shortly after his arrival, Stephan Kovalski had received a visit from his neighbor. The old man had entered the priest's room with his hands pressed together at the level of his heart. Despite the fact that the Hindu's mouth was almost devoid of teeth, his smile warmed the Pole's heart and he invited him to sit down. For a while they remained there, surveying each other in silence. "In the West," Kovalski was to note, "people's gazes barely brush over you. That man's eyes revealed his entire soul." After about ten minutes, the Hindu stood up, joined his hands together, bowed his head, arid left. He came back the next day and observed the same respectful silence. On the third day, at the risk of shattering a delicate mystery, the priest inquired as to the motive for his silence.
"Stephan Daddah" he replied, "you are a Great Soul and in the presence of a Great Soul, words are not necessary."
Thus it was that they became friends. In the midst of the Muslim families that surrounded the Pole, the Hindu became a kind of life raft to which Stephan could cling whenever he lost his footing. Establishing a bond with Hindus was indeed easier. For them God was everywhere: in a door, a fly, a piece of bamboo, and in the millions of incarnations of a pantheon of deities, in which Surya considered Jesus Christ naturally had his place in the same way that Buddha, Mahavira, and even Muhammad. For them, these prophets were all avatars of the Great God who transcended everything.
41
The city of Miami, Florida, lies approximately eight thousand miles west of Calcutta. In reality, however, the immensity of the gulf separating these two cities would be better measured in light-years. Certainly, Miami possesses slums almost as poverty-stricken as those of Calcutta: its black ghetto and its miserable shantytowns built by refugees from Cuba and Haiti on its southwestern fringes. During the 1970s, burglaries, armed robberies, muggings, rapes, a whole array of violent crimes engendered by drug addiction, a dismal poverty and a bleakness born of despair became such commonplace events in Miami that only the most outrageous among them inspired the city's headlines writers. So great was the psychosis of fear gripping parts of the city that many residents preferred to move to safer suburbs or even immigrate to less troubled parts of the United States.
For all the poverty of its slums, no such psychosis of physical insecurity has ever overwhelmed the citizens of Calcutta. With the exception of the brief period of Naxalite terrorism, the people of Calcutta have never had to go out in fear for their physical safety or their property. Fewer 266
violent crimes are committed each year in the vastly overpopulated capital of Bengal than are committed in downtown Miami alone. Fear is by a
nd large a stranger to Calcutta's streets. A young girl can walk along Chowringhee Road or any of the city's other main thoroughfares in the middle of the night without the slightest fear of being attacked. An elderly woman can carry home a day's shopping down any of the main Calcutta streets without listening in fear for a mugger's tread.
Side by side with its slums and its shantytowns, Miami the city that proudly describes itself as the gateway to the American South, also harbors islands of wealth and luxury far beyond the wildest imagining of any inhabitants of Calcutta, even its most privileged residents whose feet have never ventured inside a slum. One of them was called King Estates. It was a vast marina nestling among elegant palm trees and clusters of jacaranda, a heaven for multimillionaires and their sumptuous villas. Most houses had swimming pools, tennis courts, and private docks from which cabin cruisers and yachts, some almost the size of ocean liners, rode the bright blue sea. Several properties had heliports, others a polo field with stables to accommodate several dozen horses. A high iron grille sealed off this little island of privilege. Armed private guards, their patrol car equipped with searchlights and sirens, prowled the enclave night and day. No one entered King Estates, even on foot, unless he or she possessed a magnetic pass whose code was changed weekly, or was personally inspected and cleared by one of the estate's guards.
It was a prison for the wealthy and one of its most distinguished inmates was a highly reputable Jewish surgeon called Arthur Loeb. His Mexican hacienda with its luminescent white walls, its patios, its fountains, and its colonnade cloisters, was among the estate's showpieces. Loeb was a giant of a man, his red hair barely flecked by gray, who was given over to four passions: police novels, deep-sea fishing, ornithology, and his luxurious one-hundred-and-forty-bed Bel Air Clinic where he treated diseases of the respiratory system with techniques that were at the cutting edge of medical science.
Married for twenty-nine years to Gloria Lazar, the blond
and gentle daughter of one of the pioneers of talking movies, Loeb had two children: Gaby, twenty, a sparkling brunette studying architecture at the Miami College of Fine Arts, and Max, twenty-five, like his father a red-headed giant wrapped in freckles. Max was about to receive his diploma from the Tulane University Medical School in New Orleans. In two years, after he had completed his internship, he intended to specialize in thoracic surgery. He was a source of enormous pride and happiness to his father. Not only was he following in the elder Loeb's professional footsteps, his decision to specialize in chest surgery seemed to promise that the direction of Loeb's Bel Air Clinic would one day pass into his hands.
"Professor, I'm leaving the country."
There was no mockery in the title "professor." His children had given. Arthur Loeb that affectionate nickname the day he had stepped onto the podium at Columbia University to receive an honorary degree of Professor of Medicine.
Arthur Loeb reined in his horse and turned to face his son.
"What do you mean, you're leaving the country?"
"I'm going to India for a year."
"To India? And what about your internship?"
"I've asked for a deferment."
"A deferment?"
"Yes, Professor, a deferment," repeated Max, trying with difficulty to remain calm.
His father freed off the reins. The horses set off at a slow trot.
"And to what do we owe this surprise?" his father asked after their horses had advanced several paces.
Max pretended not to notice the irritation lurking behind the question.
"I need a change of air... and I want to be of service to someone."
"What do you .mean 'you want to be of service'?"
"Just that. To help people who need help." Max knew he couldn't go on beating around the bush much longer. "I've been invited to fill in for someone in a dispensary," he said.
"Where in India? After all, India is a large place!'*
"Calcutta, Professor."
The word stunned Arthur Loeb so much that he lost his stirrups. "Calcutta! Of all places, Calcutta!" he repeated, shaking his head.
Like many other Americans, Loeb felt very little sympathy for India. His dislike turned into downright revulsion when it came to Calcutta, a city synonymous for him with misery, beggars, and people dying on the city's pavements. How many television programs had he seen, how many magazine articles had he read, in which all the tragedies of Calcutta had been set before him in lurid details! Even more, however, than the specter of famine, overpopulation, and poverty, it was the image of a man in particular that provoked the surgeon's special aversion to the world's largest democracy. It was the face of a man with arrogance and hatred giving the world lessons in morality from the rostrum of the United Nations. Like so many Americans, Loeb recalled the diatribes of Krishna Menon, India's envoy to the United Nations in the 1950s, with an uncontrolled rage. A dangerous visionary he had seemed, a kind of high priest spitting out his venom all over the West in the name of the values of the third world, values which he claimed were being strangled by the white man.
"Is that the best place you can find to exercise your talents?" asked a bewildered Arthur Loeb. "And do you really think, you poor naive creature, that your friends are going to keep a place warm for you? By the time you get back, they'll all have their diplomas and you'll find yourself in with a new group who won't do you any favors, believe me."
Max made no reply.
"Does your mother know?"
"Yes."
"And she approves?"
"Not exactly... but in the end, she seemed to understand."
"And Sylvia?"
Sylvia Paine was Max's fiancee, a beautiful, tall, blond girl of twenty-three, a healthy, athletic American girl. Her parents owned the property next to the Loebs in King Estates. Her father was the owner of the Tribune, one of
Miami's daily newspapers. She and Max had known each other since they were children. They were due to marry in June after his exams.
4 'Yes, Professor. She knows," replied Max.
"And what does she think of the idea?"
"She suggested she come with me!"
Six weeks after their conversation, Max Loeb flew off to Calcutta. Like the good sports they were, his parents had given a farewell party in his honor. The invitation cards stipulated that Max Loeb was going to spend a sabbatical year of study and reflection in Asia. Asia was a vast place and Max had agreed not to reveal his exact destination to anyone, so as not to invite any disagreeable comments from the small colony of multimillionaires of King Estates. Naturally he spent his last evening in America with his fiancee. He took her to dinner at The Versailles, a fashionable French restaurant in Boca Raton. There, he ordered a bottle of Bollinger, his favorite champagne, and she proposed a toast to the success of his mission and his earliest possible return. Sylvia was wearing a very low-cut pink linen dress with a simple string of pearls around her neck. Her hair, caught up in a chignon and pinned with a shell comb, revealed the nape of her neck and the superb bearing of her head. Max could not take his eyes off her.
"You're so beautiful," he said, "how am I going to manage without you?"
"Oh, you'll find plenty of beautiful Indian girls. People say they are the best lovers in the world. They say they even know how to prepare special drinks that make you fall madly in love with them."
Max thought of the slum Stephan Kovalski had described in his letter, but the idea of arousing Sylvia's jealousy was not altogether unpleasant.
"I'll do my best to master their techniques so that I can make you even happier," he said with a wink.
He was joking. Max knew too well that beneath Sylvia's beautiful exterior there lay a private and modest nature. Poetry was her great passion. She knew thousands of verses by heart and could recite works of Longfellow, long
extracts from Shelley, Keats, Byron, and even Baudelaire and Goethe. Although they had been lovers ever since their high school days (it had first happened on Max's father's cabin cruiser during an e
xpedition to catch sword-fish between Cuba and Key Largo), the course of their love had been more intellectual than physical. Apart from horseback riding and tennis, they had not really taken part in the usual pursuits of young people their age. "We hardly ever went to parties," Max would recount, "and we detested dancing. Instead we preferred to spend hours lying on the sand beside the sea, discussing life, love, and death. And Sylvia would recite to me the latest poems she had memorized since our last meeting."
Sylvia had come to visit him in New Orleans on several occasions. Together they had explored the historical treasures of Louisiana. One night when a tropical storm confined them to a plantation on the banks of the Mississippi, they had made love in a bed in which Mademoiselle de Granville and the Marquis de Lafayette had slept. "There was no doubting the fact that our marriage was written in the stars," Max was to say. "Despite the fact that Sylvia's family were Presbyterians and mine were practicing Jews, we knew that no event could please our parents more."
Then, suddenly, exactly seven months before the date fixed for the wedding, Max had decided to go off for a year. He had said nothing to his fiancee of the deeper reasons for his decisions. There were some actions in a man's life, he thought, that did not call for explanation. Yet on that last evening, carried away by the euphoria of the champagne and the mild smell of a contraband Havana Montecristo cigar, he decided to admit the truth. "Just in case anything should happen to me, I wanted everyone to know that I hadn't just gone off on a whim." He told the story of how one day, in the university library, his gaze had fallen on the photograph of a child on the illustrated cover of a magazine published in Canada by a humanitarian organization. The child was a little Indian boy of five or six sitting in front of the crumbling wall of a house in Calcutta. A black shock of hair concealed his forehead and part of his eyes, but in between the locks of hair there shone two little flames—his eyes. What struck Max most
The City of Joy Page 26
