"We gorged ourselves to bursting point," Max was to tell Kovalski, "like two school kids who wanted to believe in Santa Claus."
Several evenings later Max's taxi passed through a grand portal guarded by two armed sentries, and along a drive lined with jasmine bushes which infused the night with a penetrating tropical scent. "I've got to be dreaming," he told himself when he caught sight of the colonnades of a vast Georgian residence at the end of the driveway. On either side of the steps and along the roof of the terrace burned a garland of oil lamps. "It's Tara," he thought in amazement, the Tara of Gone with the Wind, on a night
given up to festivity. The magnificent structure really did seem to have emerged from a dream.
Built at the beginning of the last century by a British magnate in the jute industry, it was one of the residences that had earned Calcutta its nickname, "the City of Palaces." Besieged on all sides by slums and overpopulated neighborhoods, today it was an anachronism. Yet some of the attractions of this vestige of a vanished era still remained—not least of them the lady of the house, the statuesque and charming ManubaT Chatterjee, a thirty-five-year-old widow and a great lover of modern painting, Indian music, and horseback riding. Gracious and slender like a poor peasant woman—so many of India's women put on weight as soon as they become rich, often losing all grace and beauty—Manubai was active in a number of cultural organizations and charitable works. It was in her capacity as president of the Indo-American Friendship Society that she was giving this evening's party. Tomorrow the United States would celebrate the bicentennial anniversary of its Declaration of Independence.
It took Max a moment to acclimatize himself. Even after an evening feast with a prostitute and a few nights between the expensive sheets of a five-star hotel, he was so impregnated with the reality of the City of Joy that it had become like a second skin to him. Was it true that only a few minutes' taxi ride away from this oasis there were newborn babies with stomachs blown up, mothers with tragic eyes, exhausted men, death ever present in the form of a bier borne on four sets of shoulders, workshops like convict prisons, the noise of weeping, cries, quarrels.
On the lawn of the floodlit grounds several hundred guests thronged. The entire business community from Dalhousie Square was there: everyone who was anyone in industry, people in the import and export business, fat marwaris in embroidered kurtas and their wives no less fat in sumptuous saris encrusted with gold, representatives of the Bengali intelligentsia—the great filmmaker Satyajit Ray who had made Pater Panchali, a film the whole world hailed as a masterpiece; the famous painter Nirode Najundar, whom international critics had called the Picasso of India; the celebrated composer and performer of sitar music Ravi
Shankar, whose concerts in Europe and America had accustomed the ears of Western music lovers to the subtle sonority of the Indian lyre.
Barefoot servants in white tunics with red velvet cummerbunds and turbans were offering the guests trays laden with glasses of whiskey, Golconde wine, and fruit juices; others presented silver platters overflowing with cocktail snacks. At the far end of the lawn, Manubai had had a vast, vividly colored shamiana erected to provide cover for a buffet table overloaded with the finest dishes the rich Bengali cuisine could offer. To the left of the tent, musicians in braided uniforms played themes from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and American swing music. "It was all deliciously nostalgic," Max would later recount. "At any moment I expected to see the viceroy and vicereine of India arrive in a white Rolls-Royce escorted by Bengal Lancers."
Draped in a sari of colors suited to the occasion—blue and red scattered with a dusting of little golden stars— Manubai was moving from one group to another. Like the two or three hundred other guests, Max was dazzled by the grace and beauty of this Indian lady who received people like a sovereign. Yet what a difficult path had been hers before she reached the point where she could create this illusion! Although nowadays widows no longer throw themselves into the flames of their deceased husband's funeral pyre, a widow's position in Indian society is still far from enviable. How many battles Manubai' had had to fight after the death of her husband who had been the owner of Calcutta's leading house of commerce, simply in order to remain in her princely mansion and continue to enjoy there a decent revenue. The flames of the funeral pyre had hardly died away before her in-laws had given her notice of her expulsion. For two years, anonymous telephone calls had called her a money grabber and a whore. Insults and threats—she had borne them all, treating her enemies with silence and contempt, devoting herself to the education of her two children, traveling, furthering the careers of young artists, supporting charity organizations. She has just bequeathed her emerald-colored eyes to the first eye bank in Bengal, an institution which she herself
had founded to help some of the victims of blindness that were so numerous in that part of the world.
Suddenly Max felt an arm slip through his.
"You must be Doctor Loeb?"
"That's right," he said, slightly disturbed by the young woman's odorous perfume.
"I've heard all about you. It seems you're a truly remarkable fellow. You live in the slums and you've set up a dispensary to care for the sick... Am I wrong?"
Max felt himself blush. The faces of Saladdin, Bandona, Margareta, of all his Indian companions from the City of Joy passed before his eyes. If there were really remarkable people anywhere, they were the ones—people who never even had a chance to spend a night in a luxury hotel to forget the horror of their life's surroundings, people for whom there were never receptions or compliments.
"I only wanted to spend some time doing something useful," he replied.
"You're too modest!" Manubai' protested. She took his hand in her long fingers and steered him forward. "Come," she said, "I'm going to introduce you to one of our most learned men, our future Nobel Prize for medicine."
Forty-six-year-old Professor G. P. Talwar was a lively, smiling man. He had done part of his studies at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Head of the biology department of the Institute for Medical Sciences in New Delhi, the shrine of Indian medical research, he had been working for several years on a revolutionary vaccine capable of altering the shape of India's future. He was about to invent the world's first contraceptive vaccine. A single prick of a needle would be enough to make a woman sterile for a year. Max thought of the hundreds of little bundles of flesh deposited on his table by desperate mothers. There was no doubt about it. He had just met one of humanity's benefactors. Already, however, Manubai* was leading him over to another of her proteges.
With his curly fair hair and jovial face, the Englishman James Stevens looked more like an advertisement for Cadum soap than a disciple of Mother Teresa. Yet, this thirty-two-year-old man dressed like an Indian in a full shirt and white cotton trousers was, like Stephan Kovalski
and doubtless other unknown people, a kind of anonymous Mother Teresa. He had dedicated his life to the poor, in this case Calcutta's most underprivileged and neglected people, the children of lepers. Nothing would have predestined this prosperous haberdasher for his mission in India, had it not been for the fact that one day his taste for travel had led him to Calcutta. This visit had moved him so profoundly that it transformed his life. Back in England, he had liquidated all his assets, then returned to India where he married an Indian girl. Using his own funds to rent a large house with a garden in the suburbs, he started to comb the slums in an old van, gathering up sick and starving children. By the end of the year his home harbored about a hundred little inmates. He gave it the symbolic Indian name of Udayan, meaning "Resurrection/' and into it he sank all his savings. Fortunately, generous people like Manubai helped. Stevens would not for all the world have missed one of her parties. For this connoisseur of good whiskey and sherry they were exotic escapades onto some other planet.
Max Loeb's own escapade would that night end in a place of which he would never have ventured to dream: the canopied bed of Calcutta's first hostess. How did this come about?
He had enjoyed too many whiskeys and too much Golconde wine to be able to recall exactly. He remembered only that when, toward midnight, he had joined his hands together in front of his heart to take leave of Manubai, she had rejected his gesture.
"Max, stay a little longer. The night is deliriously cool." Her emerald green eyes seemed to implore him.
Two hours later, after the last guest had gone, she had led him to her bedroom, a huge room that took up almost all of the first floor of her house. The parquet flooring shone like a mirror. Furniture made out of tropical woods exuded a delicious smell of camphor, and at the far end of the room stood a bed with posts of twisted teak supporting a velvet canopy, from where tumbled the delicate stitching of a mosquito net. The walls were hung with brightly colored floral wallpaper. On one of them was displayed a collection of old yellowing prints depicting views of the colonial Calcutta of yesteryear and scenes from life in
Bengal. The opposite wall was entirely bare except for a huge portrait of a man with a stern face. It was not a painting but a photograph, and the face it featured occupied the room just as intensely as if the man had been alive.
Max remembered that Manubai* had turned on a record player, and suddenly the voice, the poignant, grainy voice of Louis Armstrong, accompanied by the stirring sonority of his trumpet, had invaded the room. Neglecting the Indian woman for one instant, Max fell back happily onto the couch in front of the bed. A barefoot servant brought whiskey and bottles of soda. Manubai settled herself beside him and they kissed. Max recalled that at a certain moment the sounds of birds had come in through the window, mingling their trilling with the brilliance of the trumpet. It was fantastic.
The young woman had extinguished all the lights except for a large Chinese lamp. It bathed the room in a voluptuous half-light, and the portrait of her husband was as if erased from the wall.
What followed would become for Max a succession of confused and exciting images. Having danced a few steps, the Indian woman and the American had drifted gently toward the soft cushions and silken sheets of the four-poster bed. They had shut themselves away together behind the invisible wall of the mosquito net- Stretched out side by side they had waited for the voice of the unforgettable black musician to die away. Then they surrendered themselves to pleasure.
It was broad daylight when the sound of knocking at the door made Max leave Manubai's arms and go to open it.
"Sahib, there's someone wanting to see you. He says it's urgent."
Max slipped on his clothes and went downstairs behind the servant.
"Stephan! What the hell are you doing here?"
"I suspected that after your party, you'd want a lie in,"
replied the Pole, laughing, "so I came to dig you out." Then, more seriously, he added, "The leper bus is due. We need you, Max. There'll be some amputations to be done."
"The leper bus" was the nickname Kovalski had given to the ambulance that Mother Teresa sent him every Wednesday, with three of her Sisters. Having been unable to open his small leper clinic in the slum, this was the only means he had been able to find of caring for the worst cases. To avoid any further confrontation with the godfather and his hoodlums, he parked the ambulance on the pavement of the avenue leading to the railway station, well outside the boundaries of the City of Joy.
Those Sisters of Mother Teresa were real driving forces. The eldest of the three, a tall girl with very clear skin, beautiful and distinguished in her white sari with a blue border, was not yet twenty-five. Her name was Gabrielle. An Indian from Mauritius, she spoke the picturesque, lilting French of the islands. Swallowing her /?s, she had nicknamed Kovalski "Dotteu Stef." "Dotteu Stef, here," "Dotteu Stef, there"—Sister Gabrielle's calls made Kovalski laugh. "They were like orchids scattered over putrefaction." Yet the Wednesday sessions were harsh trials indeed.
That morning, as always, there was a massive rush as soon as the red-and-white bodywork of the small van "donated to Mother Teresa by her co-workers in Japan" appeared on the avenue. Lepers came from the City of Joy and from the nearby pavements where they had spent the night. Clinging to their crutches, to their crates on wheels, dragging themselves along on planks, they swarmed around the three folding tables the Sisters set up right there on the sidewalk. One table was used for the distribution of medicine^, another for injections, and a third for dressing wounds and for amputations. Gently but firmly, Sister Gabrielle tried to sort the mass of cripples into some kind of orderly line. By the time Max and Kovalski arrived, the line stretched back more than a hundred feet.
The stench! Max saw some passers-by hurry off, their noses buried in their handkerchiefs. On the whole, however, the spectacle was a big attraction. Dozens of people congregated around the two sahibs and the three Sisters, to
watch. Soon the avenue was completely blocked. "I felt like a magician at a fair," the American would say, still caught up in the euphoria of his night of pleasure; but his euphoria was to be short-lived.
The scene was straight out of Dante's Inferno. Hardly had a leper placed his stump on the table than a swarm of maggots would come crawling out of it. Bits of flesh fell away from limbs that were completely rotten. Bones crumbled like worm-eaten pieces of wood. Armed with a pair of forceps and a metal saw, Max cut, trimmed, pared. It was butcher's work. Amid a sticky swirl of flies and sudden squalls of dust, in the overpowering heat, he shed streams of his own sweat over the wounds. Sister Gabrielle acted as anesthetist. She had nothing to relieve the pain of certain amputations—no morphine—no curare or bhang. She had only her love. Max would never forget the vision of that Indian girl "taking a leper in her arms and pressing him to her as she hummed him a lullaby as I cut off his leg."
Yet, as it was so often the case, in the midst of the worst trials there were scenes that were unbelievably funny. Max would always remember "the compassionate face of a helmeted policeman, furiously inhaling the smoke of two sticks of incense that he had stuck right into his nostrils, as he watched the amputations." Taking advantage of the large audience, several lepers began to give a performance of somersaults and clownish antics which was greeted with laughter and the dropping of small coins. Other lepers preferred to attract attention with outbursts of anger. Brandishing their crutches at the Sisters, they demanded medicine, food, shoes, clothing. Sister Gabrielle and "Dotteu Stef" constantly had to calm their onslaughts. It is sometimes harder to give than to receive, as Kovalski had often found it to be.
Max had been operating for three hours when two lepers deposited on his table a bearded crippled man whose hair was covered with ashes. Kovalski instantly recognized his old friend.
"Max, it's Anouar!" he shouted to the American. "Anouar whose wife gave birth the evening you arrived."
"I thought I knew the face from somewhere. And it couldn't have been from Miami!"
Despite the tragedy of the situation, they broke into laughter. Almost instantaneously, however, Kovalski's gaiety dissolved. Poor Anouar seemed in the worst of states. His eyes were closed. He was perspiring. He was speaking incoherently. His fleshless torso swelled almost imperceptibly with his uneven breathing. Max had great difficulty in finding his pulse.
4 'Gangrene," said Kovalski, examining the dirty, malodorous dressing which enveloped his forearm. "It's got to be gangrene." Helped by Sister Gabrielle, they carefully undid the bandaging. Anouar seemed to be insensible. When they got down to the bare flesh Max felt his legs "sink suddenly into a sea of cotton." Anouar's rotten arm, the crowd of faces before him, the penetrating whistle of passing buses, Kovalski's voice, all suddenly toppled over into a maelstrom of colors and sounds. Then, all at once, everything went blank. There was a dull sound on the pavement. Max Loeb had collapsed in a faint. Letting go of the leper's arm, Sister Gabrielle and Kovalski grabbed hold of him and laid him in the ambulance. The priest saw Gabrielle's hand rend the overheated air and crashed down onto Max's cheek.
"Wake up, Dotteu! Reveille-toi!" she cried as she redoubled the smacks delivered to his face. Finally t
he American opened his eyes. He was amazed to find the faces bending over him. Memories of his night welled into his mind.
"Where am I?" he asked.
"On the pavement in Calcutta in the middle of cutting off leprous arms and legs," Kovalski replied sharply, somewhat annoyed by the incident.
He was immediately angry with himself for this reply.
"It's nothing, old friend. Just a little tiredness because of the heat."
A moment later Max took up his forceps and his butcher's saw once more. This time he had to cut off a whole arm up to the shoulder—Anouar's arm, rotten with gangrene. No doubt there was nothing else to do; the man had been stricken for so long. In the absence of antibiotics,
the infection must already have run through his whole system. Kovalski and Gabrielle laid the poor fellow on his side. A murmur of voices came from the onlookers as Max's pair of forceps, rose above the prostrate man. Max himself had the impression of cutting into a sponge, so putrefied were the skin, muscles, and nerves. The severing of a blood vessel induced a spurt of blackish blood which Sister Gabrielle mopped up with a compress. When he reached the bone just below the shoulder joint, Max changed instruments. Everyone could hear the grinding of the teeth as they bit into the wall of the humerus. After a few strokes of the saw, Max felt his legs "sinking into cotton" again. He clenched his fingers on the handle and pressed with all his might. To avoid thinking, feeling, seeing, he talked to himself. "Sylvia, Sylvia, I love you," he repeated as his hands accelerated mechanically back and forth. Like a tree, felled by a final stroke of an ax, the limb came away from the body. Neither Kovalski nor Sister Gabrielle had time to catch it before it fell onto the ground. Max put down the saw to wipe his forehead and the nape of his neck. It was then that he witnessed a scene that was to haunt him for the rest of his life: "a mangy dog carrying off in its mouth a human arm."
The City of Joy Page 37
