The taxi driver was called Manik Roy. He had started
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out as a bus driver, until one night a gang of dacoits, thieves who worked the highways, stopped him on the road. Having made his passengers get out and having relieved them of their possessions, the robbers then proceeded to slit their throats. By what miracle Manik had been found still alive, the following day, he could not say, but as a reminder of that horrific night, he still bore an impressive scar on his neck. This was how he had come to be nicknamed Chomotkar which means literally, "Son of Miracle."
In Hasari's eyes that man was indeed the "son of miracle," but for quite another reason. Instead of gripping the shafts of a rickshaw, his hands caressed a steering wheel; instead of treading asphalt and holes, his feet traveled deftly between three small rubber pedals; instead of straining and sweating, he earned his children's rice seated calmly on the seat of a chariot more noble than Arjuna's. A taxi! What rickshaw puller had not dreamed that one day the four arms of the god Viswakarma would gently touch his rattling cart and transform it into one of those black-and-yellow vehicles that streaked through the avenues of Calcutta.
One day Son of Miracle invited Hasari for a ride in his taxi. He could not have offered him a finer gift. "It was like going off to Sri Lanka with the army of monkeys," Hasari was to say, "or inviting me to take my seat in the chariot of Arjuna, king of the Pandavas." What a treat it was to settle himself on a seat so well upholstered that the back sank in at the slightest pressure of his body; to discover before his eyes all kinds of dials and pointers that provided information about the state of health of the engine and other parts. Son of Miracle put a key into a slot and instantly there was a joyful backfire beneath the hood. Then he depressed one of the pedals with his foot and maneuvered a lever under the steering wheel. "It was fantastic," Hasari would say. "Those simple actions were enough to set the taxi in motion. It was fantastic to think that all you had to do to get it going and then give it more and more speed was to press the toe of your foot on a tiny little pedal." Dumbfounded, Hasari watched his companion. "Could I, too, manage those actions?" he wondered.
"Had Son of Miracle already been a taxi driver in a previous incarnation? Or had he only learned to drive a car in his present existence?" The driver noticed his companion's perplexity.
"A taxi is much easier to drive than your carriage," he affirmed. "Look, one simple touch of this pedal and you stop dead." The vehicle came to such an abrupt halt that Hasari was flung against the windshield. Son of Miracle burst out laughing.
The rickshaw puller had discovered another world, a world that called on mechanical slaves not muscles, a world in which there was no such thing as fatigue and where you could talk, smoke, and laugh while you worked. Son of Miracle knew all the high spots, the luxury restaurants, nightclubs, and hotels in the Park Street area. He was in business with a whole network of hotel procurers who kept the best fares for him. These middlemen were themselves in partnership with doormen and waiters. The system worked like a dream.
Son of Miracle picked up the day's first two clients in front of the Park Hotel. They were foreigners. They asked to be driven to the airport. "Then something happened that gave me quite a shock," Hasari was to recount. "Before moving off, my friend got out of his taxi, went around and tipped up a sort of small, metal flag on a box affixed to the left of the car windshield. On this box I discovered a sight that seemed so extraordinary that I couldn't take my eyes off it. As we went along, every five or six seconds a new number wrote itself up on the box. I could virtually see the rupees tumbling into my companion's pocket! Only the god Viswakarma could have invented such a machine, a machine that manufactured rupees and made its owner richer by the instant. It was incredible. We rickshaw wallahs never saw money falling into our pockets like that. Each of our journeys had a corresponding fare that was fixed in advance. You could talk it over and ask a little more or accept a little less but the idea that all you had to do was press on a pedal and rupees would rain down on you like wild roses on a windy day was as inconceivable as that of bank notes growing in a paddy field." When Son of Miracle stopped his taxi outside the airport, the meter
was showing a sum that seemed so astronomical to Hasari that he began to wonder whether it really represented rupees at all; but it did. That one journey paid a full thirty-five rupees, almost as much as Hasari earned in half a week. On the way back, Son of Miracle stopped off at a large garage on Dwarka Nath Road.
"When you've saved up enough rupees," he announced, "this is where you'll come for your nirvana."
The passport to this nirvana was a small booklet with a red cover and two pages containing stamps, an identity photograph, and a fingerprint. Son of Miracle was right: this slip of cardboard was the brightest jewel of which a rickshaw puller could dream, the key that would enable him to rise above his karma and open the door to a new incarnation. This document was a West Bengal motor vehicle driver's license, and the garage was the most important driving school in Calcutta, the Grewal motor training school. Inside, a spacious yard harbored trucks, buses, and instruction cars, and a kind of classroom with benches under a covered area. On the walls, pictures depicted the various parts of a car, traffic signs found on the streets and highways, and sketches of every possible accident. There was also a vast colored map of Calcutta including a whole list of routes for the information of prospective taxi drivers. There were so many things to attract his attention that Hasari didn't know where to look first. What humble rickshaw puller could ever hope one day to cross the threshold of this dream school? To follow a course of instruction and pass the test involved an impossible expense, almost six hundred rupees, more than four months' worth of money invoices to his family back home in the village.
Yet, as he climbed back into the taxi, Hasari Pal felt as if that dream was suddenly tattoed upon his flesh. "I shall try to get my full strength back to work even harder. I shall reduce my food to save even more, but one day, I swear on the heads of my sons Manooj and Shambu, I shall pack my rickshaw bell away in the box with our festival clothes and I shall hand back my shafts and my old crate to Musafir and install myself with my
beautiful red booklet behind the steering wheel of a black-and-yellow taxi. Then I shall listen with pride to the rupees raining down in the meter like the fat raindrops of a monsoon storm."
''It's not exactly the Miami Hilton," Kovalski apologized, "but just keep telling yourself that people here live twelve to fifteen into rooms twice as small as this."
Max grimaced as he inspected the lodgings the Pole had found for him in the very heart of the City of Joy. Yet by comparison with many others, it was indeed a princely lodging, complete with a brand new charpoy, a cupboard, a table, two stools, a bucket, a jug, and on the wall a calendar with the face of a fine, chubby baby. The room even boasted a window opening onto the alleyway. Another of its advantages derived from the fact that the floor had been raised about one foot and was thus, in theory at least, protected from the monsoon floods and from the currently overflowing drains.
"And the John?" asked the American, anxiously.
"The latrines are at the end of the alleyway," Kovalski replied apologetically. "But it's better not to use them too often at the moment."
Max's perplexed expression amused Kovalski. With a straight face he added, "And the best way not to have to
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go too often is to eat nothing but rice. That way your intestines are bound up with concrete."
The arrival of Bandona interrupted their joking. Max was charmed by the Oriental beauty of the young Assamese girl. In her bright red sari she looked like a princess in a miniature painting.
"Welcome to Anand Nagar, Doctor," she said shyly, offering the American a bouquet of jasmine.
Max breathed in the very strong scent exuded by the flowers and for a second, he forgot his surroundings, the noise, and the smoke from the chulas that was stinging his eyes. He was transported thousands of miles away. The perfume was
identical to that of the tuberose bushes, which in springtime embalmed the terrace of his house in Florida. "How strange it was," he would recall, "to smell that fragrance in the middle of so much shit."
It took the young woman only a few minutes to make the American's room more welcoming. Moving about as noiselessly as a cat, she unrolled a mat on the strings of the charpoy, lit several oil lamps, set alight some incense sticks, and put the flowers in a copper pot on the table. This done, she looked up at the ceiling.
"And you up there, I'm ordering you to let the doctor sleep. He's come from the other end of the world and he's very tired."
That was how Max discovered that he was, in fact, to share his room. He would have rather done it with this pretty Oriental girl, or with some goddess of the Kama Sutra, rather than with the furry creatures he had already encountered in the leper woman's house. Suddenly a kind of croaking made itself heard. Bandona laid a hand on Max's arm with an expression of joy that brought crinkles to her almond eyes.
"Listen, Doctor," she urged, straining her ears. "It's the tchiktchiki. He's greeting you."
Max looked up at the roof and saw a green lizard looking down at him.
"That's the best omen you could have," announced the young woman. "You will live for a thousand years!"
Since the Mafia boss' Molotov cocktails had reduced to ashes the building in which Kovalski had hoped to nurse the lepers and set up an operating room for other inhabitants of the slum, it fell to the American's room to become during daytime the City of Joy's first dispensary. From seven in the morning till ten at night and sometimes even later, this single room was to become reception room, waiting room, consultation room, nursing ward, and operating theater all combined, a room full of suffering and of hope for several hundred of the seventy thousand slum dwellers. 'The setup was primitive in the extreme," Max was to say. "My table and bed were used for both examining and treating. There was no sterilizer and my instruments were reduced to three or four tweezers and scalpels contained in my student's case. God, this was far away from our Bel Air clinic in Miami!" The stock of bandages, gauze, and cotton was on the other hand rather well supplied. Kovalski had even passed on to Max a gift from one of his Belgian lady admirers: several boxes of sterilized compresses for the treatment of burns. The priest had spent three agonizing days discussing with the customs officials before obtaining their release without paying four hundred rupees in duty and the baksheesh solicited. It was medicines that they lacked most. All the American had at his disposal was contained in a small metallic trunk: a small quantity of sulphone for the lepers, Ryfomicine for tuberculosis patients, quinine for malaria, a small stock of ointments for skin diseases, and a few vitamins for those children who were suffering most acutely from malnutrition. Finally there were about ten antibiotic tablets for cases of virulent infection. 'There was nothing to brag about," Max would recount, "but as Kovalski kept telling anyone prepared to listen, love would make it up for all."
The Indian word-of-mouth telephone was a supremely efficient news system. No sooner had the dispensary opened, than the entire slum knew of its existence. In the alleys, compounds, and workshops people talked of nothing else but of the "rich Big Brother" who had come from America to alleviate the misery of the poor. The City of Joy had received the visit of a "great sorcerer," a "big daktar" a
4 "worker of miracles," who was going to cure the inhabitants of all their ailments. Kovalski allocated Bandona to assist Max in his task. It would take someone as shrewd as the young Assamese girl to identify those who were really sick from those who were pretending, and to sift out the urgent and most extreme cases, the chronically ill and the incurable.
A tidal wave! Dozens of mothers rushed to the dispensary with children covered in boils, abscesses, anthrax, alopecia, scabies, sick from every possible disease caused by the heat wave and the staphylococci which ran rampant about the City of Joy. At least two out of every three children were affected with gastroenteritis and parasites. What a training ground it was for a young doctor, with the additional premium of dealing with many diseases that were virtually unknown in the West! Without the aid of Bandona, Max would never even have been able to identify them.
"You see those chalky traces on the pupils, Big Brother Max," she would say, showing him the eyes of some small child. "That's a sign of xerophthalmia. In one or two years this kid will be blind. They don't know that where you come from."
Max Loeb was out of his depth, drowned, submerged. Nothing he had learned at school had prepared him for this confrontation with the physiological poverty of the third world at its very worse. Manifestations such as eyes that were extremely yellow, chronic weight loss, painfully swollen ganglions in the throat corresponded with nothing he knew or recognized. Yet these were the symptoms of the most widespread disease in India, the one that caused by far the most mortality: tuberculosis. The National Institute for Tuberculosis affirmed that some two hundred and sixty million Indians were exposed to it.*
During the first week, the American examined and treated as best he could 479 sick people. "They arrived in an interminable, pathetic procession," he was to recount.
"India Today. November 30, 1982.
"Sometimes there was a touch of folklore about it. Most of the children were naked with a thin cord about their loins, holding a small bell at the level of their navel. It made examining them by auscultation more practical, but made treatment less easy because their little bodies slipped through your fingers like eels. Many of the women were tattooed, some of them from head to toe. They turned up decked out with all their wealth: a single bangle made out of colored glass or real jewels in some delicate setting, earrings, a semi-precious stone pinned to a nostril, gold or silver ornaments on their wrists, fingers, ankles, and occasionally their toes. Sometimes they wore necklets ornamented with religious symbols: for Muslims a miniature Koran or a crescent; for Hindus a Shiva's trident; for Sikhs a small silver sword; for Christians a cross or a medallion. As for the animists, they wore all kinds of other gris-gris and amulets.
"The ocher and bright red dye with which the women and young girls plastered their hands and feet, together with the stains from the red betel chewed not only by men but also by many women to stifle their hunger, didn't make my diagnoses any easier. How was I supposed to distinguish changes in skin color or inflammation of the mucous membranes in the mouth or throat under all that dye? Some patients tried to make up for it by helping me a bit too much—like this wizened old man who obligingly coughed up a great clot of blood into his hand and showed it to me with supreme satisfaction. Oh, the millions of bacilli that were swimming about in that palm! From my very first day, I strove to apply a few rudimentary principles of asepsis and hygiene. It was by no means easy. I didn't even have a washbasin to disinfect my hands between each patient. And here, germs, sickness, and death were so much a part of everyday life! I saw one woman wipe the running ulcer suppurating on her leg with a corner of her sari. Another spread the ointment I had just applied so delicately to her wound with the flat of her hand.
"Fortunately, there were comic interludes too, like the time when a jet of urine from one infant hit me straight in the face. His mother tried to dry me quickly by rubbing my eyes, mouth, and cheeks energetically with the tip of
her veil. Then there was the hilarious character who turned up with a prescription that was several years old, on which Bandona read that, as he was suffering from a general cancer in its terminal stages, he should take six aspirin tablets a day. Or this other man who arrived, bearing with as much solemnity as if he were transporting a sacred picture of god Shiva, an X ray of his lung cavities that was at least twenty years old.
"But it was the tragic cases that were most prevalent. One day I was brought a little girl whose body was atrociously burned all over. A locomotive had released its steam when she was picking up remnants of coal along the railway line. On another occasion, a young Hindu girl showed me a light patch on her pretty face. The mere prick of a ne
edle in the center of the patch was enough for Bandona to be able to diagnose an illness hardly studied in the American medical faculties: leprosy. Again there was the young father of a family who was suffering from acute syphilis. I had to explain to him, via my young Assamese assistant, the dangers of contagion involved for his wife and children. Or this mother who brought me a lifeless bundle of flesh to which diphtheria had reduced her baby. Not to mention all those who came because a miracle effected by the 'great white daktaf was their only hope: people with cancer, severe heart conditions, madmen, blind men, the mute, the paralyzed, the deformed.
"Most unbearable of all, and something I thought I would never get used to, was the sight of those rickety babies with their inflated stomachs, tiny monstrosities placed on my table by their supplicant mothers. At a year or eighteen months they weighed not so much as nine pounds. They were suffering so acutely from deficiency that their fontanels hadn't closed. Deprived of calcium, the bone structure of their heads had been deformed and their dolichocephalic features gave them all the look of Egyptian mummies. With this degree of malnutrition, the majority of their brains' gray cells had probably been destroyed. Even if I did manage to pull them through, they would most probably be idiots—medically classified idiots."
Max was subsequently to learn that all those little
victims only represented a sad sample of an affliction that was striking the country as a whole. A great Indian scientific authority on the subject, the director of the Nutrition Foundation of India, asserts that India is producing today more and more "subhumans" because of inadequate nourishment.* According to this expert, the health of generations to come will find itself in jeopardy. A hundred and forty million Indians at least, that is, nearly half the population of the United States, are likely to suffer from malnutrition. Of the twenty-three million children born each year, only three million, according to this same authority, have a chance of reaching adulthood in good health. Four million are condemned to die before the age of eight or to become unproductive citizens because of mental and physical defects. Because of nutritional deficiencies, 55 percent of all children under the age of five will manifest psychic and neurological problems occasioning behavioral disorders, while several million adults suffer from goiters, causing similar disorders.
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