The City of Joy

by Dominique Lapierre

  "You are decidedly well informed," Kovalski confirmed.

  The godfather chuckled and settled himself comfortably in his chair.

  "You must admit that it might seem somewhat surprising that someone should be tempted to exchange his affluent and privileged status of foreigner for that of a poor man in an Indian slum."

  "We probably don't have the same understanding of wealth, you and I."

  "In all events, I shall be proud to count someone like you among the ranks of my compatriots. And, if by any chance the response to your request is delayed, do let me know. I have connections. I shall try and intervene."

  "Thank you, but I put my trust in the Lord."

  The godfather made an effort to believe what he had just heard: was it possible that someone was refusing his support?

  "Father," he said after a growl, "I have heard some strange rumors. It would seem that you intend to create a leper hospital in the slum. Is that right?"

  " 'Leper hospital' is a very grandiose expression. It's to be more a dispensary to treat the worst cases. I've asked Mother Teresa for the help of two or three of her Sisters."

  The godfather surveyed the priest sternly.

  "You must know that no one can concern himself with the lepers in that slum without my authorization."

  "In that case, what's keeping you from helping them yourself? Your assistance would be most welcome."

  The godfather's eyebrows puckered above his thick glasses.

  "The lepers in the City of Joy have been under my protection for twelve years, and that's probably the best thing that has ever happened to them. Without me the other inhabitants of this place would have thrown them out ages ago." He leaned forward with a sudden air of complicity. "My dear Father, have you asked yourself how the people next door to your 'dispensary' will react when your lepers start to show up?"

  "I have faith in the compassion of my brothers," Kovalski said.

  "Compassion? You holy men are always talking about compassion! All you'll get by way of compassion is a riot. They'll set fire to your dispensary and lynch your lepers!"

  The priest gritted his teeth, preferring not to reply. "This scoundrel is probably right," he thought.

  The godfather relit his cigar and took a long draw on it, throwing his head back. "I can see only one way for you to avoid all these trials and tribulations," he said, throwing his head back again.

  "Which is?"

  "That you subscribe to a protection contract."

  "A protection contract?"

  "It will cost you a mere three thousand rupees a month. Our rates are ordinarily much higher. But you are a man of God and, as I'm sure you realize, in India we are used to respecting what is sacred."

  Then, without waiting for any reply, he clapped his hands. His eldest son came hurrying in.

  "The Father and I have come to an amicable agreement," the godfather announced with evident satisfaction. "The two of you can agree on the terms and conditions of the arrangement."

  The godfather was a nobleman. He did not concern himself with details.

  That evening the founders of the Committee for Mutual Aid in the City of Joy assembled in Stephan Kovalski's room to discuss the godfather's ultimatum.

  "The godfather's family is all-powerful," declared

  Saladdin. "Remember the last elections—the Molotov cocktails, the blows with iron bars ... the people killed and all those injured! Is it really worth the risk of setting it all off again, for the sake of a few crippled carcasses? We'll just have to agree to pay."

  "All the same, three thousand rupees for the right to take in and nurse a few lepers is exorbitant." Margareta was indignant.

  "Is it the sum that bothers you," asked Kovalski, "or the principle?"

  She seemed surprised at the question.

  "Why, the sum of course!"

  "A typical answer," thought Kovalski. "Even here in the depths of the slum, extortion and corruption sticks to their skin like flies." All the others shared Saladdin's view, all, that was, except Bandona, the young woman from Assam.

  "May God damn this demon!" Bandona exclaimed. "To give him one single rupee would be to betray the cause of all the poor."

  Her words had the effect of an electric shock on Kovalski.

  "Bandona is right! We must take up the challenge, resist it, fight it. It's now or never that we can show the people here that they are no longer alone."

  Early the next morning, the bulbous, backfiring motorcycle belonging to the son of Kartik Baba came to a halt outside Kovalski's room. As his father had ordered, Ashoka had come to discuss the payment terms for the "contract." The meeting, however, lasted only a few seconds, just long enough for the priest to intimate his refusal to the young ruffian. This was the first defiance ever laid before the authority of the all-powerful head of the Mafia in the City of Joy.

  One week later the little dispensary was ready to receive the first lepers. Bandona and a number of volunteers set out to bring back the six extreme cases Kovalski wanted to hospitalize first. He himself went at dawn to Mother Teresa's house to collect the three Sisters who were to nurse the lepers. Hardly had they reached the square on which the mosque stood, however, than Bandona's group

  was intercepted by a commando of young thugs, armed with sticks and iron bars.

  "No one's going any farther!" shouted the leader, a pimply adolescent whose front teeth were missing.

  The young Assamese girl tried to move forward but an avalanche of blows stopped her. At that same moment the priest arrived from the other end of the slum, accompanied by his three nuns. Seeing the commotion at the far end of the alley, he clenched his teeth. Then he heard a loud explosion and an outcry. A second gang had begun to use iron bars and pickaxes to ransack the old school that was to serve as the leper clinic. Terrified, the neighborhood shopkeepers hastily barricaded their shop windows. On the Grand Trunk Road, the shrill grinding of dozens of metal shutters could be heard as traders rushed to lower them. When the destruction of the dispensary had been completed, a third gang appeared. They were carrying bottles and explosive devices in knapsacks strung over their shoulders. The street emptied in a flash. Even the dogs and the children, who were always swarming everywhere, took off. A series of deflagrations shook the entire neighborhood, their echo resounding far beyond the boundaries of the City of Joy, as far as the railway station and beyond.

  At Kovalski's side, Mother Teresa's Sisters began to recite the rosary aloud.

  The priest led them into Margareta's compound, entrusted them to the protection of Gunga, the deaf mute, and ran in the direction of the explosions. A voice begged him to come back. He stopped and turned around only to find that Margareta was hurrying after him.

  "Stephan, Big Brother," she pleaded again. "For the love of God, don't go any nearer! They'll kill you!"

  At that moment they saw emerging from the road that skirted the slum a procession, with flags and banners stripped with slogans proclaiming in Hindi, Urdu, and English: "We don't want a leper hospital in Anand Nagar!"

  A man with a megaphone marched at the head and chanted out other slogans that the horde behind him repeated. One of them said, "No lepers here! Father Sahib go home!"

  These people didn't actually belong to the neighbor-

  hood. There was nothing very surprising about that. Calcutta held the largest reserve of professional demonstrators in the world. Any political party or organization could rent a thousand of them, for five or six rupees per head per day. The same people who one morning shouted revolutionary slogans under the red flags of the Communists might well parade that evening or the next morning behind the banners of the Congress supporters. In a city that was a permanent boiling pot of tensions, any opportunity to let off steam was a good one. As soon as he spotted the emblem of Indira Gandhi's party on the banners demanding the expulsion of the lepers, the thirty-two-year-old local Communist party representative, a former foreman for Hindustan Motors, named Joga Banderkar, was also seized with t
he sudden impulse to demonstrate. Running as fast as his crippled leg would allow, he went to alert a few comrades. In less than an hour, the Communists in the slum had succeeded in assembling several hundred militants for a counterdemonstration. Thus the godfather's response to Stephan Kovalski's defiance was to result in a political confrontation.

  There was nothing new about this sequence of events. Simple altercations between neighbors degenerated into scuffles between compounds, and those scuffles into battles waged between the residents of an entire neighborhood, in which people were wounded and sometimes killed. On the day when he had saved the unfortunate mad woman from being lynched, old Surya had explained the mechanics of such violence to Kovalski. "You bow your head, you shut up, you put up with everything indefinitely. You bottle up your grievances against the owner of your hovel who is exploiting you, the usurer who's bleeding you dry, the speculators who push up the price of rice, the factory bosses who won't give you a job, the neighbor's children who won't let you sleep for coughing their lungs out all night, the political parties who suck the life out of you and couldn't give a damn, the Brahmins who take ten rupees from you for a mere mantra. You take all the mud, the shit, the stink, the heat, the insects, the rats, until one day, wham! you're presented with an opportunity to shout,

  ransack, kill. You don't know why but it's stronger than you are, and you just pile on in there!"

  Kovalski never ceased to be amazed and impressed by the fact that in so harsh an environment, outbreaks of violence were not more frequent. How many times had he seen scuffles in the compounds dissolve unexpectedly into a torrent of insults and invective, as if everyone concerned wanted somehow to avoid the worst; for the poor of Anand Nagar knew what the price of fights really was. Recollections of the horror of Partition and of Naxalite terrorism still haunted their memories.

  Yet, that morning, nothing seemed to restrain the fury of the men and women stampeding through the slum. The two processions ran into each other on the corner of the Grand Trunk Road. There was a savage clash under a deluge of tiles, bricks, and Molotov cocktails thrown from the roof tops. Stephan Kovalski saw before him again the bleeding face of his father on that evening in the summer of 1947, when police and striking miners had fought around the pits. The confrontation today was even more vicious. 'Tor the first time I read on their faces something which I had believed was extinguished," he was to explain. "What I discovered there was hatred. It twisted their mouths, inflamed their eyes, drove them to perform monstrous acts, like throwing a bottle of explosives at a group of children trapped in the confusion, or setting fire to a coach full of passengers, or throwing themselves on some wretched old men incapable of escaping. There were plenty of women among the most heated fighters. I recognized some of them, although their contorted features rendered them almost unidentifiable. The slum had lost all reason. I realized then what would happen on the day the poor of Calcutta resolved to march upon the districts of the rich."

  All of a sudden there was a whistle, then a detonation followed by a blast of air so fierce that Kovalski and Margareta were thrown against each other. A bottle of gasoline had exploded just behind them. Immediately they were enveloped in dense smoke. By the time the cloud had dispersed, they were in the thick of the throng. It was impossible to escape without risking being struck down on

  the spot. Fortunately the combatants seemed to be observing a pause in order to conduct a ritual as old as war itself—pillaging. Then it began to rain down bricks and bottles once more.

  The ferocity reached a state of paroxysm. Dozens of wounded had fallen on all sides. Kovalski saw a child of four or five pick up one of the projectiles lying beside a drain. The device exploded, tearing off his hand. A few seconds later, he saw an iron bar flash above Margareta's head. He had just time enough to throw himself in front of her and deflect the blow. Already another assailant was bearing down on them with a cutlass. At the very instant he was about to strike, Kovalski saw a hand seize his attacker by the collar and hurl him backward. Beyond the hand he recognized Mehboub, his Muslim neighbor who was himself armed with an iron bar. After his wife's death, the Muslim had entrusted his elderly mother and his children to the care of his eldest son, Nasir, and then he had disappeared. Now here he was back again as a henchman for the godfather. His forehead and nose were scarred with gashes and his mustache matted with blood; he looked more than ever like the picture of the Sacred Shroud before which he had so often collected himself. Meanwhile, all around him, blows rained down with redoubled savagery.

  The most unrestrained fighters were the very young men. They seemed to be fighting one another for the sheer pleasure of it. It was terrifying. Kovalski saw one teenage boy plunge his knife into a woman's stomach. Then, he noticed the thickset silhouette and dark glasses of Ashoka, the godfather's eldest son. Until that moment neither Ashoka nor his father had appeared on the battlefield. Now Ashoka was issuing orders. The priest realized that something was going to happen.

  He did not have to wait long to find out what. "The carnage stopped as if at the wave of a magic wand," he was to recount. "The assailants put up their arms, turned on their heels, and walked away. In a matter of minutes everything was almost back to normal. The groans of the wounded, the bricks and other bits of debris cluttering up the thoroughfare, and the acrid smell of smoke were the

  only signs that a battle had just taken place here. A reflex of reason had prevented the irreparable."

  The godfather was satisfied. He had inflicted the desired lesson and still kept control of his troops. Stephan Kovalski had been given due notice: no one in the City of Joy could defy the godfather with impunity.

  ''With all their speeches, their promises, and their red flags, we were snared like pigeons in glue. No sooner had we elected them than all those left-wing babus turned their backs on us," Hasari Pal was to recount, referring to the elections that had brought the left to power in Bengal. "They started off by voting a law that obliged the judges to order, not just the seizure of any rickshaws operating without official permission, but their actual destruction. These were the so-called defenders of the working class, the ones whose mouths were always full of 'rights' and 'justice/ the ones who spent their time setting the poor against the rich, turning the exploited against their bosses, attacking the very means by which a hundred thousand of us were able to stop our wives and children from dying of starvation! To destroy the rickshaws of Calcutta was like burning the crops in the fields! And who would be the victims of such madness? The owners of the carts? Hell no! They didn't need the five or six rupees each old crate brought them per day to fill their bellies. Whereas for us, God knows, it meant death!" As always, Hasari was after an explanation. The man

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  they called Scarface had one. According to him, if the government babus wanted to burn all unlicensed carriages it was because those ''gentlemen" did not appreciate competition. He had discovered that several babus had their own rickshaws to exploit, for which they of course had arranged to obtain licenses. As for Golam Rassoul, the union secretary who looked like a sparrow fallen from its nest, he had another explanation. Ever since he had been militating with the Communist babus, his head was packed with all sorts of theories that simple souls like Hasari often had difficulty in understanding. "Because we had more opportunities to cultivate our calves than our brains," Hasari was to admit.

  Rassoul claimed that the people responsible for the persecutions were really the technocrats among the municipality officials. According to him, the babus in question begrudged the rickshaw pullers the fact that they worked on the fringes of the government system, in other words, they were not dependent on either the babus or the state. "As if the state were in the habit of doing the rounds of the pavements and slums offering work to the starving unemployed," Hasari was to retort. "In any case," Rassoul went on to explain, "rickshaw pullers had no place in those technocrats' tomorrow's vision of Calcutta. The Calcutta of these visionaries would be one of machines, not human hor
ses. Five thousand more taxis and buses would be better for everybody than the sweat of a hundred thousand poor bums." In Rassoul's view, it was not all that difficult to understand why. "Let us suppose," he explained, "that the government orders five thousand more taxis and buses to transport the one and a half million people who travel about in our old rattletraps each day. Well, you can imagine what an order like that would mean to the automobile manufacturers, the tire makers, the garages, and gasoline companies, not to mention the pharmaceutical laboratories, because of all the lung disease the new pollution would provoke."

  For whatever reason, the newly elected babus decided to go after unlicensed rickshaws. The law was implemented and unauthorized carriages were confiscated. No puller

  dared to use the main avenues where there were policemen directing traffic. Other cops began to check on them at the stands.

  "Let me see your license," an officer would order the first puller in line.

  "I haven't got a license/' the puller would apologize, the poor fellow, taking a few rupees out of the folds of his longhi.

  This time, however, the policeman would pretend not to see the notes. He was under strict orders: the time for baksheesh was simply over. Sometimes the puller did not even reply. He'd just shrug his shoulders with resignation. He was used to a rotten karma. The cop would have the carriages slotted into one another and dragged to the nearest thana, the local police station. Soon, on the pavements outside all the thanas there were long snaking lines of rickshaws stacked up against each other, their wheels shackled with chains. Thus immobilized, the old carts presented a sad picture of desolation. They were ljke the trees in an orchard uprooted by a cyclone, like fishes caught in a net.