The City of Joy

by Dominique Lapierre

  An authentic Hindu wedding would have included a whole host of other rites, variable according to province and caste. One of them, however, was universal. Without it no ceremony was complete. Puli invited the couple to walk seven times around the sacrificial fire, their palms still joined by the piece of cord. In his excitement he had forgotten Anouar's infirmity. Again he had to call for the bearers. The leper saw his big brother rise from his cushion and approach him with open arms.

  "Old friend, let me help you to accompany Meeta round the flame," said the priest with affection.

  Kovalski picked up the fragile little body, and the three of them walked slowly, seven times round the cosmic fire. The residents of the courtyard and dozens of neighbors who had scaled the roofs watched the scene with emotion. When Kovalski had restored him to his place, Anouar asked:

  "What about you? When are you going to get married?"

  Puli, who had overheard, burst out laughing. Waving his

  hat about in something resembling a waltz, he interjected, "And I'll be the Brahmin again!"

  They all laughed. Only poor Meeta seemed ill at ease in her new role.

  Now it was time for the feast. At a signal from Puli, children brought piles of banana leaves which they distributed to everyone present. Immediately women came out of various houses, laden with steaming bowls of rice, vegetables, and fish. Little girls began to serve the food. People talked, laughed, sang, and cracked jokes. To keep a child amused, an old leper without a nose pretended to be wearing a mask. The fragrance of spices filled the courtyard, as the banana leaves were gradually filled. Even the neighbors on the roof tops were served. The sound system made the tiles vibrate. Resplendent on their cushions, the newlyweds and Kovalski received the homage of the community, under the delighted eye of Puli whose buffoonery increased by the minute. Every now and then he would disappear only to reappear an instant later in a state of even greater excitement. It did not take Kovalski long to guess what he was up to.

  Alcohol! The celebration was on the point of degenerating into a monumental drinking bout. Concealed up to now at the back of the hovels, bottles of bang la began now to circulate among the guests. The eflect of the drink was instantaneous and totally unexpected. Instead of flattening such sick and undernourished constitutions, the abrupt ingestion of alcohol electrified them. Those lepers who still had limbs leaped to their feet and began to dance. Stumps joined stumps in a frenzied farandole that snaked its way about the courtyard to the laughter and cheers of all the others present. Children ran about after each other. Women, too, freed from their inhibitions by large glasses of bangla, hurled themselves into dizzy circles that spun like tops about the courtyard. They had so much energy! So much vitality! So much zest for living! Once again Kovalski marveled. Let no one ever again say to him that lepers were just apathetic people, a bundle of rags and tatters, a collection of derelicts resigned to their lot. These men and women were life itself. LIFE in capital letters, the life that throbbed, the life that vibrated in them as it

  vibrated everywhere else in this most blessed of cities, Calcutta.

  It was then that something amazing happened. At a signal from Puli's top hat, the dancing abruptly ceased, the singing and shouting faded, then stopped completely. The garlands of lights went out all at once. After one last hiccup, the generator came to a halt. Darkness fell and a cloak of silence enveloped the assembly. There was not a sound, not a word. Even the children were quiet.

  On his cushion of honor Stephan Kovalski held his breath. Why this sudden obscurity? Why the stillness? Bemused, he could just make out shadows slipping away in the darkness and entering the different lodgings that opened onto the courtyard. Others felt their way across the roofs. Yet others melted into the blackness of the ground. The newly weds next to him had vanished. Straining his ears, he detected the faint sound of voices that sounded like groans. He even heard a number of quickly stifled cries. Then he understood.

  The celebration was not over. It was still going on. It was reaching its climax in the ultimate ritual, a last act of homage to all-powerful Life. The lepers of the City of Joy were making love.

  ''It began with a feeling of utter fatigue and a strange aching in my bones, as if dozens of cops had been beating me with their lathis/' Hasari Pal was to recount. "I told myself that it was probably old age creeping up a bit early, as it did with many rickshaw pullers. In Calcutta even the leaves on the trees in the squares fell earlier than those in the countryside. Then I felt a strange warmth in my chest. Even when I was standing still, waiting for a fare, I felt the heat of it, bathing me in perspiration from head to toe. It seemed all the stranger for the fact that it was winter and, God knows, in Calcutta it can be as cold in winter as it's hot in summer. The fact that I never took off the old sweater given to me by a customer from Wood Street made no difference; I was still cold. Perhaps I'd caught the mosquito disease.* According to Chomotkar, a friend of mine who was a taxi driver, that illness gives you the same sort of shivers. He'd had it himself and had been cured with small white tablets. He brought me a whole load wrapped up in a piece of newspaper and told me to

  * Malaria. 294

  swallow two or three a day. We began the treatment with a bottle of bangla. Chomotkar claimed that bangla was a universal medicine, but I think he was wrong because I went on sweating like a pig. The heat in my chest began to burn so much that every breath was painful. Every time I took on a customer, even a lightweight like a schoolboy, I had to stop every two or three minutes to get my breath back. One day I was really frightened. It happened in Park Street. I had parked my rickshaw to go and buy some bidis under the arcades when suddenly, as I was going past Flury's pastry store, I saw myself in the shop window. For a second I asked myself who the old man in front of the display of cakes might be, with his hollow, stubbled cheeks, and his head of white hair. Suddenly I saw the image of my old man on the morning he blessed me before I left for Calcutta. I shall never forget that sight.

  "By the way she'd been looking at me for some time, I knew that my wife too was alarmed about my health. She had become particularly attentive to my every word and gesture. It was as if she was desperate for the slightest indication to reassure her, to prove to her that I was well. No doubt that was why she responded with such unusual enthusiasm whenever I expressed the desire to make love. The strange thing about it was that the more worn out with fatigue I felt, the more I desired my wife. It was as if all the vitality in my shattered body had taken refuge in my reproductive organ. What was more, it was not long before my wife announced that she was expecting a child. This news filled me with such joy that for several days I was oblivious to the fatigue, the cold, and my sweating.

  "Then afterward things got very much worse. One day when I had just picked up a marwari with a pile of packages, I was forced to stop and put down my shafts. Something had wedged itself in my chest. I couldn't breathe anymore. I collapsed onto my knees. The marwari was a kind man. Instead of abusing me and calling another rickshaw, he tried to help me get my breath back by striking me sharply on the back. When he did so, I felt something hot gurgle into my mouth. I spat it out. The

  marwari surveyed the spittle and grimaced. Handing me a five-rupee note, he transferred his packages to another rickshaw. As he drew away he gave me a slight wave of his hand.

  "I remained there for quite a while before getting up. But the act of spitting had brought me some relief. Little by little I got my breath back and found enough strength to move on. That wasn't the day the god was coming for me. My wife burst into sobs when I told her about the incident. Women are like animals. They sense the oncoming storm long before men do. She ordered me to go and see a quack immediately and buy some drugs. A quack was a street doctor. He would ask only one or two rupees whereas a real doctor who had completed his studies would expect five or ten times more. But before I went to find the quack, my wife suggested that we take offerings to the temple to ward off the ogress Suparnaka, who was responsible for so man
y sick people. On a plate she placed a banana, jasmine petals, and the equivalent of a handful of rice and off we went to the temple, where I slipped the Brahmin the five-rupee note that the marwari had given me. He recited some mantras. We laid our offerings at the foot of the statue of Ganesh and lit several sticks of incense. When the elephant-headed god had disappeared behind a veil of smoke, we withdrew to leave him to crush the ogress with his trunk. Next day I had recovered enough strength to pick up the shafts of my rickshaw again.

  "At that time a spell of icy cold had hit the North of the country. The tar on the Calcutta streets burned the bare soles of our feet just as acutely with the cold as it did with the heat during the worst dog days before the monsoon. The nights were terrible. It was no use our huddling together like dried fish in a packing case. The cold bit into our skin and bones with teeth more pointed than a crocodile's.

  "The potions from the quack in Wellesley Street must have contained some miraculous substance, because two bottles were enough to appease the pain in my bones and the heat in my chest within a matter of days. I was quite convinced that soon I would be able to go back to Flury's pastry shop and look at myself in the window without fear. That was when I began to feel strange scratchings at the

  base of my throat that provoked a series of uncontrollable coughing fits. It was a dry, painful cough which became progressively more violent until it shook me like a coconut tree in a tornado, then left me completely exhausted. It's true that such coughing fits are a music as familiar to rickshaw pullers as the ringing of their bells. All the same it was a terrifying experience. It proved that the god had not heard my prayer."

  With its handlebars bristling with headlights and horns, its thick wheels painted green and red, its tank gleaming like a streak of silver, and a seat covered with panther skin, the motorcycle looked just like one of those flashy machines you see in films. Strapped into leather trousers with wide elephant thongs, topped with a silk shirt, its rider drove through the muddy alleyways of the City of Joy, spitting an exhaust inferno with obvious delight. Everyone knew the strapping fellow in the dark glasses who dispensed waves and smiles like a campaigning politician. He was as familiar a character as the blind mullah from the great mosque and the old Brahmin from the little temple next to the railway lines. His name was Ashoka, like the famous emperor in Indian history. He was the eldest son and first lieutenant of the local Mafia boss. Despite a population of more than seventy thousand, the City of Joy had no mayor, no police force, no legal authority of any kind. As in the Pals' slum, this gap had however been promptly filled by the Mafia who reigned supreme over the City of Joy. It was they who directed affairs, extorted, arbitrated; no one disputed their power. 298

  There were several rival families among them but the most powerful godfather was a Hindu with thick-lensed glasses, who lived with his sons, his wives, and his clan in a modern four-story house built on the edge of the slum on the other side of the Grand Trunk Road, the main Calcutta-Delhi highway. He was about sixty and known as Kartik Baba, a name given to him by his father as a tribute to the son of Shiva, god of war.

  Practically all the clandestine drinking dens in the slum were his property. Similarly, it was he who controlled the drug traffic and local prostitution. He could also pride himself on being one of the largest real estate owners in Anand Nagar. He had exercised great dexterity in choosing his tenants. Instead of refugee families, he preferred cows and buffalo. Most of the cattle sheds that harbored the approximately eighty-five hundred head of cattle living in the slum belonged to him. This animal invasion, with its stench, its entourage of millions of flies, and the river of liquid manure it discharged into the drains each day, went back to the days when for reasons of hygiene the municipality had banished the cattle sheds from the center of Calcutta. There had been a great uproar about the creation of municipal dairies on the outskirts of the town but, as always, nothing had actually been done, and the animals had simply been rehoused in the City of Joy and other similar slums. The godfather had been one of the principal beneficiaries of this operation. It was more advantageous to house a cow than a family of nine people. As he himself said, "For the same rent and the same amount of space, there is no risk of the least complaint or demands of any kind."

  Everyone knew that the godfather had plenty of other sources of revenue at his disposal. In particular, he managed a network of fences who bought and resold goods stolen from the railways. The profits from this racket came to millions of rupees. Above all, however, he derived considerable benefit from a particularly odious form of exploitation. He exploited the lepers of Anand Nagar.

  Not content merely to collect rent for their miserable shacks, he forced them to pay him a daily tax of one or two rupees in exchange for his "protection" and a place to

  beg on the pavement at Howrah Station. Substantial political backing was necessary for the godfather actually to be able to implement such exactions with impunity. Rumor had it that he was a generous contributor to the coffers of the party in power, for whom he also acted as a diligent electoral agent. Ballots in the City of Joy, even those held between wasted stumps, formed part of his trafficking. Strangely, the residents were rather happy with this state of affairs and, since there existed no other uncontested body of authority in the slum, they even sought out frequent recourse to the godfather. In the course of years he had thus become a redresser of wrongs, a kind of Robin Hood.

  Of course, he rarely intervened personally. Instead he delegated that role to his eldest son Ashoka or to some other member of his family. Nevertheless, it was he who pulled the strings and he was never short of tricks to establish his authority. He would send his henchmen, for example, to provoke an incident in one of his drinking dens. Then he would dispatch Ashoka or, in cases of extreme delicacy, would himself appear to restore peace and order and thereby show the community exactly how good and how influential he was. Furthermore, when Ashoka or any of his other sons had gotten a slum girl into trouble, he showed himself to be so generous toward the parents that people hastened to hush up the affair. In short he acted the role of a proper nobleman.

  The presence of the godfather's son's motorcycle outside Stephan Kovalski's door one morning caused a sensation in Nizamudhin Lane. Rumors quickly ran: "The godfather's picking a quarrel with Big Brother Stephan. The godfather wants to turn the 'Father' out..." At first sight this anxiety appeared unjustified. After prostrating himself before the priest with all the respect he would award the goddess Kali, the messenger of the Mafia boss addressed Kovalski, "Father, my father has asked me to deliver an invitation to you."

  "An invitation?" marvelled the priest.

  "Yes. He would like to discuss a small matter with you. Something altogether insignificant..."

  Kovalski knew that nothing was "insignificant" to the godfather. He judged it useless to stall.

  "Fair enough," he said. 'Til follow you."

  Ashoka beat the air with his large, hairy hands.

  "Not so fast! My father doesn't see people at just any time of day! He'll be expecting you tomorrow at ten o'clock. I'll come and get you."

  Crossing the City of Joy on the bulky and noisy motorcycle of the heir to the throne, with all his sirens going, Stephan Kovalski found the experience somewhat comical. He could just imagine the parish priest's expression if he could only see him now. "I don't know how the Hindu and Mogul emperors received their subjects," he was to recount, "but it would be very hard for me to forget the princely fashion in which the godfather of the City of Joy received me."

  His house was truly palatial. Outside the door were three Ambassador cars complete with radio antennas and protective screens at the windows, plus several motorcycles like those the police use to escort ministers and heads of state. The hall on the ground floor opened onto a large room furnished with Oriental carpeting and comfortable cushions. A small altar with a lingam of Shiva, the images of numerous gods, and a little bell to ring the puja adorned one corner of the room. The sticks of burn
ing incense spread about exuded a heady fragrance.

  The godfather was seated on a kind of throne sculpted out of wood and encrusted with designs in mother-of-pearl and ivory. He was wearing a white cap and a black velvet waistcoat over a long white cotton shirt. Tinted glasses with very thick lenses completely concealed his eyes but his reactions could be discerned by the puckering of his bushy eyebrows. Ashoka motioned to the visitor to sit on the cushion placed in front of his father. Servants in turbans brought tea, bottles of iced lemonade, and a plate of Bengali pastries. The godfather emptied one of the bottles, then began to tap the arm of his chair with the fat topaz that adorned his index finger.

  "Welcome to this house, Father," he said in a ceremonial and slightly hollow voice, "and consider it your own." Without waiting for a reply, he cleared his throat and dispatched a globule of spit into the copper urn which glistened next to his right toe.

  At this point Kovalski noticed that he was wearing sandals with straps encrusted with precious stones.

  "It is a very great honor to make your acquaintance," added his host. One of the servants returned with a tray of cigars tied together in a bundle. The Mafia boss untied the cord and offered a cigar to the priest, who declined it. The godfather took his time lighting his own.

  "You must be an altogether special person," the godfather declared, exuding a puff of smoke, "because it has been reported to me that you have made an application ... I can't actually believe it. . . for Indian citizenship."