of all was the boy's smile, a tranquil, luminous smile which dug two deep ditches around his mouth and revealed four shining teeth. He didn't appear to be starving but he was surely very poor because he was completely naked. In his arms he was clutching a baby, only a few days old and wrapped in pieces of rag.
"He was holding it with so much pride," Max recalled for his fiancee, "with so much gravity behind his smile and with such an obvious sense of his responsibilities, that for several ttiinutes I was unable to take my eyes off him.
'The child was an inhabitant of the City of Joy and the baby in his arms was his little brother. The journalist who took the photograph wrote in his article about his visit to the slum and his encounter with a 'white apostle who had come from the West to live among the world's most disinherited people.' The white apostle in question was Stephan Kovalski. In answer to one of the journalist's questions, Stephan had expressed the wish that someone with advanced medical training, preferably a young doctor, should come to Anand Nagar for a year to work with him and help him to organize proper medical help in a place deprived of aid.
"I wrote to him," concluded Max. "And he replied that he would expect me as soon as possible. Apparently the winter is coming to an end there and soon it'll be the scorching heat of the summer and the monsoon."
Mention of the monsoon brought a quickening to the blue eyes of the American girl.
"The monsoon!" she echoed pensively. She was thinking of a poem by Paul Verlaine for which she had a special afiFection. "II pleut dans mon coeur," she recited in French tenderly caressing Max's hand, "comme il pleut sur la ville. Quelle est cette langueur qui penetre mon coeur?"*
* "There is weeping in my heart, like the rain falling on the city. What is this languor that pierces my heart?"
The picture in its gold frame decorated with a garland of flowers was an expression of strength and beauty. On his elephant, caparisoned with carpets and encrusted with precious stones, the figure portrayed looked like a conquering maharajah. He was wearing a tunic embroidered with gold thread and studded with jewels. The only features that distinguished him from a man were his wings and his four arms brandishing an ax, a hammer, a bow, and the arm of a set of scales.
His name was Viswakarma and he was not a man, nor indeed was he a prince, but rather a god belonging to the Hindu pantheon. One of the mightiest gods in Indian mythology, Viswakarma was the personification of creative power. The hymns of the Vedas, the sacred books of Hinduism, glorified him as "the architect of the universe, the all-seeing god who fashioned the heavens and the earth, the creator, father, distributor of all the worlds, the one who gives the deities their names and who resides outside the realms of mortal comprehension." According to the Mahabharata, the epic legend of Hinduism, Viswakarma was not only the supreme architect. He was
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also the artificer of the gods and the maker of their tools, lord of the arts and carpenter of the cosmos, constructor of the celestial chariots and creator of all adornments. It followed, therefore, that he was the protector of all the manual trades that enabled man to subsist, a fact that gave him a particular following among the laborers and artisans of India.
In the same way that Christians glorify "the god of the universe, who gives bread, the fruit of man's labor," during the Offertory of the Mass, the Indians venerated Viswakarma, the source of labor and life. Each year after the September moon, in all the myriad workshops of the Calcutta slums, as in all the large modern factories of the suburbs, his triumphant effigy presided over man's places of work, richly decorated for a fervent two-day puja. It was a marvelous moment of communion between owners and workers, a wild rejoicing of rich and poor, united in the same adoration and the same prayer.
Like all the other slums, the City of Jov celebrated the festival of Viswakarma with special fervor for the god who provided their rice. After all, was it not true that the entanglement of huts that made up the slum harbored the most amazing ants' nest of workmen imaginable? Every day a hovel sighted behind an open door, the grinding of a machine, a pile of new objects outside a hut, would reveal to Stephan Kovalski the presence of some tiny new workshop or small factory. Here, he might discover half a dozen half-naked children engaged in cutting off sheets of tin to make pannikins; there, other urchins like Nasir, Mehboub's son, would be dipping objects into tanks exuding noxious vapors. Elsewhere, children made matches and Bengal firecrackers, gradually poisoning themselves as they handled phosphorus, zinc oxide, asbestos powder, and gum arabic.
Almost opposite the Pole's hut, in the darkness of a workshop, blackened figures laminated, soldered, and adjusted pieces of scrap iron, amid the smell of burning oil and hot metal. Next door, in a kind of windowless shed, a dozen shadows made up bidis. They were nearly all victims of tuberculosis who no longer had the strength to maneuver a press or pull a rickshaw. Provided they didn't
stop for a single minute, they could roll up to thirteen hundred cigarettes a day. For a thousand bidis, they received eleven rupees, a little more than one dollar. A little farther on, in a tiny room, Stephan Kovalski noticed one day an enormous ship's propeller next to a forge. The door was so narrow that the entrance of beaten earth had to be enlarged with a pickax to get the mastodon out. Eventually five men succeeded in shifting the propeller and levering it on to a telagarhi. The owner then harnessed three coolies to the cart and ordered them to proceed. Backs and hamstrings braced themselves in a desperate eflFort. The wheels turned, and the employer sighed with satisfaction. He would not need to take on a fourth coolie. But what would happen, Kovalski wondered, when the three unfortunates reached the bottom of the slope leading up to the Howrah Bridge?
How many years would it take him to discover all the places where men and children spent their lives making springs, truck parts, spindles for weaving looms, bolts, aircraft tanks, and even turbine meshing to a sixth of a micromillimeter. With surprising dexterity, inventiveness, and resourcefulness a whole work force was to copy, repair, renovate any part and any machine. Here the slightest scrap of metal, the tiniest piece of debris was used again, transformed, adapted. "Nothing was ever destroyed," Kovalski was to say, "because by some miracle everything was always born again."
Amid the shadows, the dust, and the clutter of their sweatshops, the workmen of Anand Nagar were the pride of the God who gives rice to man. Alas, they often gave him cause for remorse too.
Article 24 of the Indian constitution stipulated that "no child must work in a factory or mine, nor be employed in any other dangerous place." For reasons of profit and docility, however, a large proportion of the work force was extremely young. In fact, a child was almost always hired in preference to an adult. His little fingers were more adept and he was content with a pittance as a salary. Yet these pittances earned by children with so much pride meant so often the difference between their family's starvation and survival!
The workers in the slum were among the worst protected in the world. They were not eligible for any social security; they were often shamelessly exploited, working up to twelve or fourteen hours at a stretch in premises in which no zoo in the world would dare to keep its animals. Many of them ate and slept on the spot, without light or ventilation. For them there were no weekends or vacations. One day's absence and they could find themselves laid off. A misplaced remark, a claim, a dispute, being one hour late, could mean instant dismissal and without compensation. Only those who managed to acquire some form of qualification (as a turner, a laminator, expert press operator) had any real hope of keeping their jobs.
In the City of Joy alone there were thousands of them— perhaps fifteen or twenty thousand—and naturally several hundred thousand in Calcutta and millions throughout India. "How was it that they had never used the weight of such numbers to change their lot?" Kovalski was one day to remark. "That was a question that had always intrigued me and one to which I had never really found a satisfactory answer. Certainly, their rural origins had not prepared them for making collective demands
. Their poverty was such that any kind of work, even in a sweatshop, was a blessing of a kind. When so many were unemployed, how could they protest against work that at least enabled them to take home to their families the bowl of rice they needed each day? And when a family is reduced to the most extreme poverty because of a father's sickness or death, wasn't it understandable that one of the children should be prepared to work anywhere? No doubt morality would dictate otherwise, but who can talk about morality and what is right, when it all comes down to a question of survival?
"And what did the unions do to protect them? Along with three powerful central federations incorporating several million members, there are in India nearly sixteen thousand unions, of which seventy-four hundred and fifty belong exclusively to Bengal. And there is no lack of strikes on their list of achievements. In Bengal alone more than ten million working days are lost each year. But in a slum like the City of Joy who would dare to instigate a
strike? There are too many people waiting to step into your shoes.
"With all due deference to Viswakarma, the giver of rice, these people were the real damned of the world, the slaves of hunger. And yet with what ardor and faith they feted their god each year and called down his blessing upon the machines and tools to which they were chained."
Work had stopped in all the slum workshops since the previous evening. While all the workers hastened to clean, repaint, and decorate their machines and their tools with foliage and garlands of flowers, their employers had gone to Howrah to purchase the traditional icons of the god with four arms, perched on his elephant, and the statues of him in painted clay, sculpted by potters from the kumar's district.* The size and splendor of the images depended on the magnitude of the business concern. In large factories, statues of Viswakarma were two or three times as large as life and were worth thousands of rupees.
In the space of one night all the dungeons of suffering had been transformed into places of worship, adorned with ornamented temporary altars bedecked with flowers. Next morning the entire slum resounded anew with the joyous din of the festival.
The slaves of the previous day now wore multicolored shirts and new longhis; their wives draped themselves in ceremonial saris, so carefully conserved throughout the year in the family coffers. Children were resplendent in the garb of little princes. The joyous saraband of the wind instruments and drums of a brass band replaced the thud of machines, around which the Brahmin priest now circled, ringing a bell with one hand and bearing the purificatory fire in the other, so that every instrument of labor might be blessed.
That day a number of workmen sought out Kovalski to ask him to bless also the means of their survival in the name of his god. "Praise be to you, O God of the universe who gives bread to man, for your children in Anand Nagar
* Potters.
love and believe in you/' the priest repeated in each workshop. "And rejoice with them for this day of light in their lives of sorrow."
After the blessings, the festivities began. The employers and foremen served the workmen and their families a banquet of curry, meat, vegetables, yoghurt, puris* and laddousA The bang la and todiX flowed freely. People drank, laughed, danced and, above all, they forgot. Viswakarma could smile from his thousand beds of flowers. He had united men through their labor.
The revelry went on into the middle of the night, in the beams of the floodlights. A populace deprived of television, movies, and virtually all other entertainments surrendered itself once more to the magic of festival. Workers and their families ran from workshop to workshop, pausing to marvel at the most beautiful statues and congratulate the creators, while loudspeakers poured popular tunes over the roofs, and fireworks illuminated the libations.
The next day, the workmen from each workshop loaded the statues onto a telagarhi or a rickshaw and accompanied them, to the sound of drums and cymbals, as far as the Banda ghat on the banks of the Hooghly. There they hoisted them onto boats and rowed out to the middle of the river. Then they threw the images overboard so that their clay bodies could dissolve in the sacred water, mother of the world. "Viswakarma-ki jail Long live Viswakarma!" cried millions of voices at that special moment. Then each one returned to his machine and the curtain fell for another year upon the slaves of the Lord, the giver of rice.
* Puffed corn griddle cake fried in ghee.
t Small ball of curdled milk, sweetened, condensed, and fried.
X Palm wine.
"We called the festival of Viswakarma 'the rickshaw puja, 9 " Hasan Pal was to explain. "Our factory, our workroom, our machines were all made up of two wheels, a chassis, and two shafts. One wheel had only to break in a hole, or a truck tear off a shaft, or a bus flatten the bodywork like a chapati, and it would be goodbye to Hasari! There would be no use going crying in the owner's gamsha* All you could hope to get from him was a good beating. More than anyone else, we had a great need for the god's protection, not only for our carriages but also for ourselves. A nail in your foot, an accident, or the red fever that got Ram or Scarf ace, and you were done for."
Like their pullers, the rickshaw owners were fervent worshippers of the god Viswakarma. Not for anything in the world would they have failed to take out insurance with him by organizing a puja in his honor that was as vibrant and generous as those held in all the other workplaces in Calcutta.
* A kind of large handkerchief.
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The celebrations were generally held in their homes. Only the old man, Narendra Singh, known as the Bihari, persisted in concealing his address. "Perhaps in case one day we got angry and decided to pay him a visit," joked Hasari. So Narendra Singh's eldest son rented a large house surrounded by gardens behind Park Circus and set up there a magnificent pandal decorated with garlands of flowers and hundreds of light bulbs fed by a generator rented for the occasion.
On the day before the festival, every puller set about giving his rickshaw a meticulous cleaning. Hasari had even bought the remains of a tin of black paint to camouflage the scratches on the woodwork. He carefully greased the hubs of the wheels with a few drops of mustard oil so that there would be no disagreeable noise to irritate the god's ears. Then he went to fetch his wife and children.
Aloka had prepared his festival clothes for him: a longhi with little maroon checks on it and a blue-and-white striped shirt. She herself was dressed in a ceremonial sari of red and gold, which they had brought with them from their village. It was her wedding sari and, despite the rats, the cockroaches, the humidity, and the overflowing drains she had managed somehow to preserve its original freshness. The children too were splendidly dressed; they looked so clean and smart in fact that people came to admire them. The god could rest contented. The whole family might well live in a shanty made out of crates and bits of cloth but for today at least the people who issued from that hovel were princes.
Aloka, her daughter, and youngest son climbed into the rickshaw. The old jalopy had never before transported such proud, elegant passengers. Together the three of them were like a bouquet of orchids. Manooj, the eldest son, harnessed himself to the shafts because his father did not want to perspire in his beautiful shirt.
The house rented by the Bihari's son was not far away. One of the city's distinguishing features was that the rich people's quarters and the slums for the poor were close to one another.
Few rickshaw pullers had the good fortune to be able to celebrate the puja as a family. Most of them lived alone in
Calcutta, having left their families in the villages. "It was a shame for them," Hasari said. "There is nothing more enjoyable than celebrating a festival with the whole family together. It's as if the god becomes your uncle or cousin."
The owner had done things well. His pandal was decorated just like a proper shrine. Interwoven red-and-white flowers and palm leaf trimmings formed a triumphal arch over the entrance. In the middle, on a carpet of marigolds and jasmine, was enthroned an enormous statue of Viswakarma, magnificently made up with rouge on his lips and kohl on his e
yes.
"How imposing our god is! What power he exudes!" Hasari enthused. "The statue's arms reached the tip of the tent, brandishing an ax and a hammer as if to force gifts from the heavens. His chest looked as if rt could blow the winds of a storm, his biceps as if they could raise mountains, his feet stamp out all the wild beasts of creation. With such a god for protector how could the sorry-looking old carts fail to become celestial chariots? And the poor devils that pulled them winged horses?"
Hasari and his family prostrated themselves before the divinity. Aloka, who was very devout, had brought offerings—a banana, a handful of rice, jasmine, and marigold petals—which she placed at his feet. Her husband went to park his rickshaw next to the others in the garden. One of the owner's sons busied himself decorating it with garlands of flowers and foliage. "What a pity he can't speak to thank you," Hasari remarked. All those carts with their flower-covered shafts pointing like spears toward the heavens, made a splendid spectacle. The former peasant barely recognized the shabby, creaking carriages that he and his colleagues pulled so breathlessly each day. "It was just as if the stroke of a magic wand had given them a new incarnation."
When all the rickshaws were in their places, there was a roll of drums, then a clash of cymbals. An elderly priest made his entry at this point, preceding a band of some fifty musicians in red jackets and trousers trimmed with gold. A young Brahmin whose bare torso was girded with a small cord began frenetically to bang the clapper of a bell to inform the god of their presence, then the priest passed
The City of Joy Page 27
