"Well now, my friend," volunteered the stranger. "You don't look too well!"
This friendly remark comforted Hasari. Thefe were not many people who treated you like a "friend" in this
inhuman city. He wiped his bloodied mouth with a corner of his vest.
"It must really be a tough job to have to pull one of those carriages when you're coughing your head off!" continued the stranger.
Hasari nodded. "You bet your ass!"
"What would you say if I were to offer you as much money as you earn in two months sweating between your shafts, without your having to do anything," the stranger then inquired.
"As much money as. . ." stammered Hasari at a loss for words. "Oh, I would say that you were the god Hanuman in person." Then suddenly he remembered the middleman who had accosted him one day in the Bara Bazar: "If it's my blood you're after, you're on the wrong track," he announced sadly. "Even the vultures wouldn't want anything to do with my blood. It's rotten."
"It's not your blood I'm after. It's your bones."
"My bones?"
The puller's expression of horror brought a smile to the procurer's face.
"That's it," he explained calmly. "You come with me to my boss. He'll buy your bones for five hundred rupees. When you kick off he'll collect your body and take your skeleton."
This man was one of the links in a singular trade that made India the prime exporter of human bones in the world. Each year, some twenty thousand whole skeletons and tens of thousands of different carefully packed bones departed from India's airports and seaports, destined for medical schools in the United States, Europe, Japan, and Australia. This extremely lucrative business brought in approximately one and a half million dollars a year. Its center was Calcutta. The principal exporters—eight in number—all had a house of their own and their names featured in the register of the local customs headquarters. They went under the names of Fashiono & Co., Hilton & Co., Krishnaraj Stores, R. B. & Co., M. B. & Co., Vista & Co., Sourab and Reknas Ltd., and finally Mitra & Co. Precise administrative regulations governed the exercise of this trade. A special manual entitled the Export Policy
Book specified in particular that "the export of skeletons and human bones is authorized upon the furnishing of a certificate of origin from the corpse signed by a police officer of at least substantive superintendent rank." The same document stipulated that the bones could not be exported except for the purposes of study or medical research. It did, however, provide for the fact that exportation could be effected "for other reasons, upon examination of individual cases."
The fact that Calcutta was the center of this strange activity had nothing to do with the mortality rate in its slums. This commerce owed its prosperity to the presence in the city of a community of several hundred immigrants from Bihar who belonged to an extremely low caste, that of the Doms. Doms are destined from birth to take care of the dead. Often they are also looked upon as footpads, pillagers of corpses. They usually live near the funeral pyres of the Hooghly and near cemeteries or hospital morgues and they do not mix with other residents. It was they who provided the exporters with most of the remains necessary for their activities. They came by their macabre merchandise in a variety of ways: primarily by picking up the bones and corpses cast up on the bank of the Hooghly, for tradition determined that many bodies—those of certain Saddhus, lepers, or children less than a year old, for example—should be committed to the river rather than cremated. At the entrance to the cremation area they would also intercept families who were too poor to buy wood for a pyre or pay for the services of a priest. The Doms would offer to undertake the funeral rite themselves for a more advantageous price. Such poor people were completely ignorant of the fact that their relative's remains would be cut up in a nearby hut, that his bones would be sold to an exporter, and that one day his skull, his spinal column, perhaps even his complete skeleton would be exhibited for the edification of American, Japanese, or Australian medical students. Hospital mortuaries provided another reliable source of bones. In the Momimpur morgue alone, more than twenty-five hundred unclaimed bodies fell into the hands of the Doms each year. When demand was exceptionally great, they would even go and compete with the
jackals for the bones of the dead buried in the Christian and Muslim cemeteries. In short, there was never any real danger of running out of merchandise. Yet the ingenuity of the traffickers had just conceived of a fresh means of supply. The idea of buying a man while he was still walking about, in much the same way that you might purchase an animal for slaughter, in order to secure the right to dispose of his bones when he died, was as diabolical as it was ingenious. It made it possible to accumulate unlimited stock for there was certainly no shortage of poor or moribund people in Calcutta.
"Five hundred rupees!" The sum tumbled about in Hasari's head like the balls in a lottery barrel. The procurer had not been mistaken. He knew how to spot his prey at a glance. The streets were full of poor devils coughing their lungs up, but not all of them were in a position to provide the necessary guarantees. For the purchase of a man to represent a profit-making venture, he must have a family, an employer, friends, in other words an identity and an address. How else could his body be retrieved after his death?
"Well, friend, do you agree?"
Hasari looked up into the pockmarked face awaiting his response. He remained silent but the man showed no sign of impatience. He was used to this. "Even a fellow with his back against the wall doesn't just sell his body like a piece of khadi."
"Five hundred rupees, no less! What do you say to that?" In the company of Ramatullah, the puller who shared his rickshaw, Hasari was still marveling at the astonishing offer he had just been made. He had asked the procurer for time to think it over until the next day. Ramatullah was a Muslim. Persuaded that when he died, Allah would come to drag him straight into paradise by the hair, any idea of bodily mutilation after death was repugnant to him. The mullahs of his religion even forbade the donation of organs to science, and the few Indian eye banks had not one single Muslim on their files. Nevertheless the sum was so considerable that he could not fail to be dazzled by it.
"Hasari, you've got to go do it," he eventually advised. "Your great God will forgive you. He knows you've got to get your daughter married."
The former peasant was equally anxious not to offend the gods. The Hindu faith required that, for the soul to "transmigrate" into another form after death, the body should first be destroyed and reduced to ashes by the fire that purifies all. "What will become of my soul if my bones and my flesh are cut up by those butchers instead of being burned in the flames of a funeral pyre?" lamented the rickshaw puller. He resolved to confide in Kovalski. In principle the priest's attitude fell into line with that of the Muslim Ramatullah. The Christian idea of resurrrection implied that existence of an intact body coming to life again in all its vigor and beauty to take its place alongside its Creator in its original state of wholeness. Years of living in the poverty of a slum, however, had led Kovalski to accept occasionally compromises between the ideals of faith and the imperatives of survival.
"I think you should take this opportunity to further the completion of your mission here below," he declared reluctantly, drawing the rickshaw puller's attention to his daughter who was busy delousing her little brother at the other end of the compound.
As a two-story building eaten away by the humidity, next door to a kind of warehouse, there was nothing to distinguish the appointments of "Mitra & Co." from those hundreds of other small-scale enterprises scattered throughout the city, except that this company bore no notice to indicate the nature of its undertakings. The procurer with the pockmarked skin knocked several times at the door of the warehouse and soon a face appeared in the' half-open door. The procurer indicated Hasari.
"I'm bringing a client," he announced.
The door opened wide and the porter motioned to the two men to enter. The smell that hit them was a suffocating stench of the kind that tears at the t
hroat, overpowers, and flattens. Hasari had never smelled anything like it before. For a moment he wavered in his resolve, but his
companion pushed him forward. It was then that he saw the source of the stench. He had just entered a place such as only the imaginations of Dante or Diirer could have conceived, an unbelievable catacomb for the next world in which dozens of skeletons of all different sizes were ranged upright along the walls like a parade of phantoms, where rows of tables and shelves were covered with human remnants. There were thousands of bones from every part of the body: hundreds of skulls, spinal columns, thoraxes, hands and feet, sacrums, coccyxes, whole pel vises, and even hyoids—those little U-shaped bones in the neck. Perhaps most astonishing of all, however, was the supermarketlike display of this macabre bazaar. Every skeleton, indeed every bone, bore a label on which the price was marked in U.S. dollars. An adult skeleton for demonstration purposes, with movable bones and metal articulation, was worth between two hundred and thirty and three hundred and fifty dollars, according to its size and the quality of workmanship. For a mere hundred or a hundred and twenty dollars, you could acquire a child's skeleton without articulation, a complete thorax for forty dollars, a skull for six. The very same "items" could cost ten times more, however, if they had been subject to special preparation.
Mitra & Co. maintained a whole team of specialist bone extractors, painters, and sculptors. These craftsmen worked in a poorly lit room at the end of the gallery. Crouched among their mountains of human remains, they looked like the survivors of some prehistoric cataclysm, scraping, decorticating, assembling, and decorating their funereal objects with precise gestures. Sometimes real works of art emerged from their hands, like the collection of articulated skulls with jaws that could be dismantled and movable teeth, ordered by the dental faculty of a large American university in the Midwest. Of all the precious merchandise exported from India, doubtless none was packaged with more care. Each item was first protected by a small cotton pad, then wrapped in a carefully stitched piece of linen before being placed in a special cardboard box and then in a packing case covered with labels marked "Very Fragile.
Handle wih Care." "Dear God," thought Hasari, flabbergasted by what he saw. 'Those poor chaps' bones were never given such celebrity treatment when they were alive."
Not all the merchandise delivered up by the Doms was necessarily destined for such dignified use. Thousands of skulls, tibias, collarbones, femurs, and other pieces that had been gnawed by jackals or had spent too long in the water, ended up more prosaically between the teeth of a crushing mill and then in a boiling pot where they were turned into glue. It was from precisely that subsidiary process that the stench arose.
In a cabin at the far end of the gallery, they found the man who negotiated the purchase of "living" skeletons. In his white overalls he presided over a dusty table heaped with files, paperwork, registers, and folders, threatened every fifteen seconds by the motion of a rotating fan. Actually, not a single paper ever flew away, thanks to an entire collection of paperweights made out of the skulls of newborn babies and decorated with red and black tantric symbols. Mitra & Co. also exported thousands of skulls to Nepal, Tibet, and even China, to be used for devQtional purposes. Other countries imported them to make them into votive cups or ashtrays.
The toothless employee examined the rickshaw puller attentively. The latter's prominent collarbone, his lean thorax, and vertebrae protruding like a catfish's spine reassured him. There was no doubt about it: the merchandise was bona fide. It would not be unduly long before what was left of this poor fellow enriched the stocks of Mitra & Co. He gave the procurer a satisfied wink. All he had to do now was draw up a formal purchase agreement and inform the Doms who lived closest to the slum where Hasari resided so that they knew where to recover the corpse when the time came.
These various formalities took three days, at the end of which Hasari was entitled to a first payment of one hundred and fifty rupees. Like all the other companies engaged in the same trade, Mitra & Co. were reluctant to
DOMINIQUE LAPIERRE
invest their money on too long-term a basis. Hasari was, therefore, informed that the sum outstanding would be paid as soon as his state of health would show further deteriorating signs.
Some rudimentary scenery on trestles was enough. It was as if all the grayness, all the mud, the stench, the flies, the mosquitoes, the cockroaches, the rats, the hunger, the anguish, the sickness, and the death had faded away. The time for dreams had come once more. With their eyes starting out of their heads and their emaciated bodies raked with laughter or with tears, the imprisoned people of the City of Joy were rediscovering the thousand enchantments and dramatic episodes of the ancient folk story that had molded them. The epic Ramayana was to India what the Golden Legend, the Chanson de Roland, and the Bible had been to the crowds assembled on Europe's cathedrals' steps. For three months the troupe of actors and strolling musicians had installed itself and its carts bulging with drapes and costumes in between the two large buffalo sheds at the very heart of the slum. News of their arrival had spread from one compound to the next like the announcement of a kindly monsoon. Thousands of people flocked to the site. Children who had never seen such a thing as a tree, a bird, or a hind came to delight in the cardboard forest where the handsome prince Rama and
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his divine Sita would experience the joy of love before being torn from each other's arms. Hours before the presentation of the first tableau, the little esplanade in front of the stage was already covered with a sea of brown heads and motley veils. All the nearby roofs accommodated clusters of spectators. The audience trembled in anticipation of the curtain rising, impatient to let themselves be borne away from their existence in garbage for a few hours by their heroes, eager to find in the song's twenty-five thousand verses fresh reason for continuing to live and to hope.
Written, so tradition has it, by a sage at the dictation of the gods two and a half thousand years ago, the Ramayana opens with a marvelous love story. The handsome young Rama, the only one of all the princes to be able to bend the bow of the god Shiva, receives as his reward the princess Sita. Her father wishes to give his throne to the young couple but, succumbing in his weakness to one of his favorite ladies, he exiles them instead to the wild forests of central India. There they are attacked by demon brigands whose leader, the terrible Ravana, harbors a lustful passion for Sita. Tricking her husband into leaving her alone, the demon succeeds in seizing the princess and lifting her onto his winged chariot drawn by flying, carnivorous donkeys. He transports her to his fabulous island of Lanka—none other than Ceylon—where he shuts her up in his quarters, seeking in vain to seduce her.
In order to win back his wife, Rama forms an alliance with the king of the monkeys who places at the prince's disposal his principal general, Hanuman, and the whole army of monkeys aided by bands of squirrels. With one single prodigious leap across the sea, the monkey general reaches Ceylon, finds the captive princess, reassures her, and after a thousand heroic and comic reversals reports back to Rama. With the help of the monkey army, the latter manages to sling a bridge across the sea and invade the island. A furious battle is then waged against the demons. Eventually Rama personally defeats the odious Ravana and good thus triumphs over evil. The freed Sita appears, overwhelmed with joy.
Complications, however, set in, for Rama sadly pushes
her away. "What man could take back and cherish a woman who has lived in another's house?" he exclaims. The faultless Sita, wounded to the quick, then has a funeral pyre erected and casts herself into the flames. Virtue, however, cannot perish in the fire: the flames spare her, testifying to her innocence, and all ends with a grand finale. The bewildered Rama takes back his wife and returns with her in triumph to his capital, where he is at last crowned amid unforgettable rejoicing.
The ragamuffins of the City of Joy knew every tableau, every scene, every twist and turn of this flowing epic. They followed each move made by the actors, the m
imes, the clowns, and the acrobats. They laughed, cried, suffered, and rejoiced with them. Over their rags they felt the weight of the performers' costumes, on their cheeks they felt the thickness of their makeup. Many of them even knew whole passages from the text word for word. In India it is quite possible for a person to be "illiterate" and still know thousands of verses of epic poetry by heart. Old Surya from the tea shop, the children of Mehboub and Selima, Kovalski's former neighbors, the coal man from Nizamudhin Lane, Margareta and her offspring, the lovely Kalima and the other eunuchs, the former sailor from Kerala and his aborigine neighbors, Bandona and her Assamese brothers and sisters, the godfather and his thugs, hundreds of Hindus, Christians, and even Muslims packed themselves in side by side, night after night, before the magic stage. Among the most assiduous spectators was Hasari Pal. "That broken man went every night," Kovalski was to say, "to draw new strength from his encounter with the exemplary obstinacy of Rama, the courage of the monkey general, and the virtue of Sita."
To the rickshaw puller "those heroes were like tree trunks in the middle of raging floodwaters, life buoys that you could cling to!" He could remember how when he was a small child, carried on his mother's hip as she walked the narrow dikes across the rice fields, she used to sing softly to him the verses of the mythical adventures of the monkey general. Later, whenever bards and storytellers passed through the village, his family would gather along with all the others in the square, to listen for nights on end
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