"What a calamity," lamented Hasari with his companions. "But as long as they were there, chained up outside the thanas, there was still the hope that one day they would be restored to those for whom they provided a livelihood." Even that hope was soon to be crushed, however.
As the law prescribed, the judges ordered the destruction of the confiscated rickshaws. One evening they were all loaded onto the yellow municipality garbage trucks and taken to an unknown destination. Rassoul managed to have the trucks followed by a union spy and soon the pullers discovered that their carriages had been collected on the city's public dump, behind the tanners' quarter, very probably to be burned.
Because they were so widely dispersed, it generally took a fair amount of time to gather a significant number of pullers together. But on this occasion, it took less than one hour for them to form a formidable procession on Lower Circular Road, with banners, posters, and all the usual trappings of that kind of demonstration. Led by Rassoul, Scarf ace, and all the union general staff, the column set
out on a march to the dump, shouting, "Our rickshaws are our rice!" As they advanced, other workers joined them. In Calcutta demonstrating helped to forget an empty stomach. At every crossroad, policemen stopped traffic to let them pass. In Calcutta that was the norm. Those asserting their rights always took priority over other citizens.
They marched like that for miles, through the outermost suburbs, until finally they reached a deserted area. "And it was then," Hasari was to say, "that the shock came. First there was a stench that burned your lungs out, as if thousands of decaying carcasses were engulfing you, as if heaven and earth were decomposing under your nostrils. It took several minutes for us to get a grip on our nausea and go on." About a few hundred yards ahead laid an enormous mound from which the smell arose—the city's dumping ground. On a mattress of garbage as vast as the Maidan, dozens of trucks and bulldozers moved about in a cloud of pestilential dust. A myriad vultures and crows circled above the putrescence. There were so many of them that the sky was as black as a monsoon day. Most astounding of all, however, was the number of ragpickers wriggling about like insects among the refuse.
As they reached the garbage platform, the pullers noticed their carriages on the far side of the wretched, stinking place. The rickshaws formed a long snake of wheels and arches slotted into one another. "How could the god ever have allowed those purveyors of rice to end up in a place like this?", wondered Hasari and his comrades. It was totally incomprehensible. "The god must have been in the arms of some princess the day the babus voted their law," thought the former peasant. "Either that or he just doesn't give a damn about us."
What happened next was to remain for Hasari the most terrible sight of his life. Behind the rickshaws and below the level of the mound, three police vans were concealed. When the procession spilled onto the dump, the policemen rushed out of their vehicles to block its way. They were not traffic policemen but specialized, antiriot cops with helmets, guns, and shields. They had been given the order to drive back the demonstrators and carry out the total destruction of all the rickshaws.
Rassoul armed himself with his loudspeaker and shouted that the rickshaw wallahs had come to oppose this destruction. In the meantime press photographers had arrived. They looked somewhat out of place in these surroundings, with their shoes and trousers, but the dump was soon black with people. The ragpickers had stopped scrabbling among the garbage and other people had come running from nearby villages. The policemen advanced, brandishing their guns, but not a single puller stirred. "In view of the enormity of the crime about to take place, we were all prepared to fall under the guns of the cops rather than back off," Hasari would say. "All these years had really hardened us and our last great strike had shown us that we could make our bosses tremble if only we remained united. We felt as solidly bound to one another as our shafts were to our carriages/*
It was then that the real drama began. A policeman struck a match and lit a torch which he then plunged into the body of a rickshaw, right in the middle of the line. The flames immediately set the hood and seat ablaze, then spread to the next vehicle. After one stunned second, the people in the foremost ranks of the procession hurled themselves at the barrage of policemen. They wanted to push the burning vehicles out of the way to save the others, but the policemen formed an insurmountable wall.
It was at precisely that moment that Hasari noticed Scarface. He had managed to hoist himself up onto a friend's shoulders. Letting out a shout, he reared up and, with a formidable thrust of his haunches, managed to leap over the policemen. He literally fell into the flames, and from there his comrades saw him launch himself onto the burning carriages to topple them into the ravine. It was a crazy thing to do. Even the policemen turned around in astonishment. A scream went up from the blazing mass. Hasari spotted an arm and a hand grasping one of the shafts, then smoke enveloped the scene and the smell of scorched flesh mingled with the stench of the whole surroundings. Silence fell over the dump. All that could be heard now was the crackling of the flames as they consumed the rickshaws. The babus had won.
When at last the fire had died down, Hasari asked one
of the garbage pickers for a tin. With it, he went and collected up Scarface's cinders from the embers. He and his comrades would scatter them on the waters of the Hooghly, the branch of the sacred river Ganges.
In winter, the same phenomenon occurred each evening. No sooner had the women set fire to the cow dung cakes to cook their dinner than the reddening disk of the sun disappeared behind a grayish filter. Held there by the layer of fresh air above, the wreaths of dense smoke hovered stagnantly over the rooftops, imprisoning the slum beneath a poisonous screen. Its inhabitants coughed, spat, and choked. On some evenings, visibility was reduced to less than six feet. The smell of sulphur overrode all others. People's skin and eyes burned. Yet no one in the City of Joy would have dared to curse the wintertime, that all too short a respite before the summer's onslaught.
Summer, that year, struck like a bolt of lightning. In a matter of seconds, night fell in the very middle of day. Crazed with panic, the slum people rushed out of their compounds and into the alleys. From the terrace where he was sorting medicines, Stephan Kovalski saw an atmospheric disturbance of a kind that was totally unknown to him. At first sight it could have passed for the Aurora Borealis. What it in fact consisted of was a wall of suspended particles of yellow sand bearing down upon the 316
slum with lightning speed. There was no time to take shelter. The tornado had already reached them.
It devastated everything in its path, tearing off the roofs of houses and tossing their occupants to the ground. In their sheds the cow buffalo bellowed with terror. The slum was instantly covered with a shroud of yellow dust. Then a succession of flashes lit the darkness, the signal for a cataclysm which this time bombarded the slum with hailstones succeeded by a torrential downpour of rain. When finally the rain stopped and the sun came out again, a cloud of burning vapor descended over the slum. The thermometer rose from fifteen degrees to a hundred and four degrees Fahrenheit. Stephan Kovalski and the seventy thousand other inhabitants of the City of Joy realized that the short winter truce was over. The blazing inferno was with them once more. That March 17, summer had come to the city.
Summer! That beloved season of all temperate zones inflicted upon the occupants of this part of the world unimaginable suffering and, as always, it was the most destitute people, the miserable slum dwellers, who were most cruelly stricken by it. In the windowless hovels crammed with up to fifteen people, in those tiny compounds scorched for twelve hours a day by the sun, in the narrow alleys where never the slightest breath disturbed the air, while extreme poverty and the absence of electricity prevented the use of fans, the summer months that preceded the arrival of the monsoon were as atrocious a form of torture as hunger itself.
In the avenues of Calcutta people simply did not move without the protection of an umbrella. Even the policemen directing traffic were equipped with linen
shades attached to their crossbelts, so as to leave their hands free. Other people sheltered themselves from the sun beneath attache cases, wads of newspaper, piles of books, the tails of their saris or dhotis raised over their heads. The furnace-like heat was accompanied by humidity that could sometimes reach 100 percent. The least movement, a few steps, going up a staircase, induced a shower of perspiration. Prom ten o'clock in the morning on, any physical effort became impossible. Men and beasts found themselves petrified in
the incandescence of the unmoving air. Not a breath stirred. The reflection off the walls of the buildings was so bright that anyone imprudent enough to go out without dark glasses was liable to a sensation of melted lead in his eyes. Venturing barefoot onto the asphalt of the streets was even more painful. The liquified tar scorched strips of flesh from the soles of the feet. Pulling a rickshaw on this fiery carpet was an act of pure heroism—running, stopping, setting off again with wheels that stuck fast in the burning tar. To try and protect his feet already ulcerated with cracks and burns, Hasari Pal resolved to wear a pair of sandals, an act which millions of barefooted Indians had never accomplished. Thus for the first time in his life, Hasari put on the beautiful pair of sandals received in his wife's dowry on the occasion of his marriage. His initiative was to prove disastrous. The sandals parted company with his feet at the first patch of burning asphalt, sucked off by the melting tar.
For six days the inhabitants of the City of Joy held out; then the hecatomb began. With lungs charred by the torrid air and bodies dried of all substance, those who suffered from tuberculosis and asthma and a whole host of babies began to die. The members of the Committee for Mutual Aid with Stephan Kovalski, Margareta, and Bandona at their head, ran from one end of the slum to another to help the most desperate cases. "Ran" was not really the word, because they too were compelled to move slowly for fear of falling unconscious after only a few steps. Under the torment of such temperatures, a body dehydrated in a matter of hours. "The slightest effort," Kovalski was to recount, "and all your pores exuded a flood of sweat that drenched you from head to toe. Then you experienced something like a shiver and almost instantaneously your head began to swim. So numerous were the victims of sunstroke and dehydration that the alleys were soon strewn with helpless people incapable of standing on their feet."
Strangely enough, it was the Pole who, although used to a more temperate climate, seemed the best able to resist the rigors of such blazing heat. With his burning metal crucifix dancing about on his bare chest, his waist and thighs swathed in a cotton longhi, and his head covered
with an old straw hat, he looked like a Devil's Island convict. On the tenth day, however, the temperature broke the record for the last quarter of a century. On the thermometer at the old Hindu's tea shop, the mercury touched a hundred and fourteen degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. Taking into account the humidity, it was the equivalent of a hundred and thirty degrees in the sun. "The worst part about it was the perpetual dampness in which you were steeped," Kovalski would comment. "It soon caused a series of epidemics that decimated many families. On top of that, malaria, cholera, and typhoid made their appearance again. But it was gastroenteritis that claimed the most victims. It was quite capable of killing a man in less than twenty-four hours."
Yet this was only the beginning. Further trials lay in store for the Pole. Outbreaks of boils, carbuncles, whitlow, and mycosis hit the slum. Thousands of people caught them. The blight reached many other parts of Calcutta, and certain professions like those of the rickshaw wallahs and the telagarhi wallahs who were used to walking barefoot through the muck were particularly vulnerable. Because of the lack of dressings and antibiotics, such skin diseases spread like wildfire. Next door to Kovalski, the bodies of Mehboub's children became open sores. Mehboub himself, having returned home, fell victim to a very painful crop of carbuncles, which the priest had to lance with a penknife. At the end of March the temperature rose again, and as it did so something quite extraordinary happened. The flies began to die. Next it was the mosquitoes' turn; their eggs perished before they hatched. All the centipedes, scorpions, and spiders disappeared. The only vermin ta survive in the City of Joy were the bugs. They came forth and multiplied as they made it a point to fill the vacuum left by the others. Every evening Kovalski gave a furious chase to them, yet still they flourished. Several of them had even taken refuge behind the picture of the Sacred Shroud. The frenzy with which he attacked and killed them gave the priest a measure of the lack of serenity to which he had been reduced. "After all that time in India, the result was bitterly disappointing. Despite the litanies of Oms and the example of detachment that Surya,
the old Hindu opposite, set me, I was still rebelling against the inhuman conditions inflicted upon my brothers here."
One morning as he was shaving, the mirror cast back at him yet another shock. His cheeks were even more sunken and two deep furrows had appeared around his mouth and his mustache, accentuating the comical snub of his nose. His skin had assumed a waxlike hue. It was stretched over his bones like a piece of old shining oilcloth.
The real martyrs of the heat, however, were the workers in the thousands of little workshops and rooms scattered throughout the City of Joy and other slums. Lumped together with their machines in huts without ventilation, they were like the crews of sinking submarines. The women's conditions were pitiful too. Trammeled in their saris and veils at the back of hovels transformed into ovens, the least household chore made them perspire all the sweat their bodies could muster.
Oddly, in a heat so suffocating that it prostrated even the most robust, it was inactivity that was most arduous. "The heat seemed even more unbearable when you stopped moving," Kovalski was to say. "It came down on you like a leaden mantle, stifling you as it did so." To stop themselves from suffocating, people tried to create a minute turbulence of air on their faces by waving a piece of cardboard or newspaper back and forth. "The extraordinary thing was that they went on fanning themselves while they dozed, even while they slept." The Pole tried to do the same but as soon as sleep overtook him, his hand would let go of the improvised fan. He realized then that that kind of ability must be "an adaptation of the species, a reflex acquired in the course of generations of combating the rigors of the climate."
One night in April, Stephan Kovalski felt under his armpits and on his stomach the beginnings of an itch that within a few hours extended to every part of his body. "It felt as if millions of insects were gnawing away at me." The irritation became so intense that he could not resist scratching himself. Soon his entire epidermis was one big sore. Suffocating and drained of all strength, he remained prostrate in his room. A slum is not, however, like one of those Western dormitory cities where a man can disappear
or die without his neighbor noticing. Here, the slightest deviation from the norm aroused curiosity.
The first person to be perturbed by the "Father's" failure to emerge was Nasir, Mehboub's eldest son, who lined up for him each morning at the latrines. He alerted his father who ran to inform Bandona. In a matter of minutes the whole neighborhood knew that Big Brother Stephan was sick. "Only a place where men live in such close contact with death could offer so many examples of love and solidarity," thought the priest on seeing Surya, the old Hindu from across the way, coming into his hut with a pot of tea and milk and a plate of biscuits. A few moments later Sabia's mother brought in a bowl of "lady's fingers," green vegetables that look like large beans. To give them a little more flavor, she had garnished them with a piece of gourd and some turnips, a real extravagance for a woman as poor as she. Bandona arrived next. The young Assamese girl diagnosed the ailment at a glance: it was indeed insects that were biting Stephan Kovalski, but not the bugs and other small creatures that generally infested the hovels in the City of Joy. The Pole was being devoured by tiny parasites called "acarus," whose invasion beneath the epidermis produced a painful skin disease that was ravaging the slum.
"Stephan Daddah" clucked Bandona with a smile
, "You've got scabies!"
At the end of April the thermometer rose several more degrees, and with this new assault a sound that usually formed part of the decor of the City of Joy was silenced. The only birds in the slum, the crows, ceased to caw. Some days later, their corpses were found on the roofs and in the compounds: A thin trace of blood trickled from their beaks. The heat had burst their lungs. The same fate was soon to befall other animals. First in their tens and then in their hundreds the rats began to die. In the hovel next to Kovalski's, Sabia's mother had stretched an old sari over the low ledge on which her youngest daughter who had chicken pox used to sleep. Finding a number of maggots on her child's forehead one day, the poor woman realized they must have dropped through a hole in the material.
When she looked up at the framework, on a bamboo beam above her, she saw a dead rat.
It was at this juncture that the municipal workers responsible for emptying the latrines and cleaning the manure from the cattle sheds chose to strike. In a few days the slum was submerged beneath a lake of excrement. Blocked by mountains of dung from the cattle sheds, the open drains overflowed, spilling out a blackish, stinking stream. Into the torrid, static air, there soon rose an intolerable stench, borne upward on the smoke of the chulas. To top it all, the month of May ended with a terrible premonsoon storm, during which the level of the drains and the latrines rose by almost two feet in one night. The corpses of dogs, rats, scorpions, and thousands of cockroaches began to float around in the foul sludge. People even saw several goats and a buffalo drifting through the alleyways with bellies inflated like a balloon. The storm activated another unforeseen phenomenon: millions of flies hatched out. Naturally the flood water invaded most of the hovels, transforming them into cesspools. Yet, in the very midst of the horror, there was always some kind of miracle to be found. The one which Stephan Kovalski experienced in the depths of his hut that Sunday in Pentecost took the form of "a little girl in a white dress, with a red flower in her hair, who picked her way through all that dung, with the regal air of a queen."
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