to the extravagant recitations always so rich in resilience, which had nourished the beliefs of India since time immemorial and given a religious dimension to its everyday life. There was not one infant on the vast peninsula who did not fall asleep to the sound of his elder sister intoning a few episodes from that great poem, not one children's game that did not derive its inspiration from the confrontations between good and evil, not a single schoolbook that did not extol the exploits of the heroes, not a marriage ceremony that did not cite Sita as an example of the virtues of fidelity. Each year, several grand festivals commemorated the victory of Rama and the benevolence of the monkey god. Each evening in Calcutta, thousands of dockers, coolies, rickshaw pullers, laborers, and starving people would assemble around the storytellers on the embankments of the Hooghly. Squatting for hours, their eyes half-closed, these people whom happiness seemed to have somehow overlooked, exchanged the harshness of their reality for a few grains of fantasy.
Above the multitudes squeezed around the trestled boards, there often rose the slightly balding skull of Stephan Kovalski. Despite his difficulties in grasping the subtleties of the language and the little free time he had, he greatly loved to watch the performances. "It was the perfect way to get to know the memory of a people," he was to say. "The Ramayana is a living encyclopedia. There, in my slum, I suddenly went back in time. The perfumes, gifts, weapons, court life, music, the habits of wild elephants, the forests of India soon held no secrets from me. But above all, that great popular epic was an ideal means to marry the mentality of my brothers and enter more completely into my new skin. Marrying their mentality meant no longer thinking of the Red Sea when you talk of a dry passage across the waters, but rather of the straits of Ceylon. It meant no longer citing one of our miracles as evidence of a supernatural event, but rather the exploit of the monkey general Hanuman who transported the Himalayas in his hand just so that the captive Sita could smell a flower. It meant wishing a woman about to give birth that she will be the mother of one of the five Pandavas. Entry into the mentality of a people involves using its imagery,
its myths, and its beliefs. That applied to the Muslims too. What smiles I brought to their faces when I mentioned the name of the emperor Akbar, when I referred to Mohammed, or compared a little girl to the princess Nur Jahan or to some other Mogul queen, or when I deciphered an Urdu text on a calendar hanging at the back of one of their hovels."
His name was Nissar. He was twelve years old and he was a Muslim. The whole compound agreed: that boy was an archangel. His luminous face, the keenness of his gaze, his natural authority made him a being apart. The harelip that revealed his dazzling teeth and the small monkey with the sad eyes that never left his shoulders further accentuated how different he was. "Nissar was a diamond with a thousand facets, a firework, a glittering light in the world," Kovalski was to comment. Yet the skinny little boy with short hair was not the son of any of the families in the compound. He had been found one evening half-dead on a pavement in Dalhousie Square and picked up by Bouddhou Koujour, the aborigine who killed the eunuch with the cobra. Driven away from his village in Bihar by parents who could no longer feed him, Nissar had traveled on the roofs of trains to get to the mirage city. After wandering around for a few days, feeding himself on scraps, he found in an alleyway of the Bara Bazar, the object that was to become both a means of earning a living and his talisman: a patched old jute sack. Like thousands of other starving youngsters, Nissar became a ragpicker. 442
Every evening he went to deposit his pitiful finding in the den of a ragpicker wholesaler and received in exchange a few small coins, sometimes one or two rupees. One day a secondhand dealer gave him a monkey. Christened Hanu-man, the animal slept with him on the pavements and they became inseparable companions. On monsoon nights, Nissar would shelter them both as best he could under the awning of a shop or in the arcades on Chowringhee Avenue. His great love was the movies. As soon as he had earned a few paisas, he would rush oflF with his monkey to one of the caravansaries, purveyors of dreams to the poor of the slums. His favorite actor was Dilip Kumar, who always took the parts of princes and maharajahs draped in brocade tunics, jewels, and beautiful courtesans.
The integration of this young abandoned Muslim into the little Hindu world of the compound posed very few problems. His two years of drifting on the asphalt of the great city had endowed him with a special kind of aura. This fact was in itself remarkable for the living conditions of the other youngsters in the compound were hardly less harsh. As soon as they could walk, they were expected to do their bit, just like adults, toward their collective survival. They were spared no task, not even the drudgery of fetching water which, because of the weight of the buckets, often caused irreparable damage to their fragile, undernourished bone structure. Two or three out of fifty were lucky enough to go to school. (The evening classes subsidized by Kovalski did not yet involve anyone in this compound.) By the time they were seven or eight they were nearly all working. Some of them were salesmen or assistants in a grocer's store, a cobbler's workshop, or a pan or bidi shop. Others toiled from dawn to dusk in one of the eating houses in the main street. Others knew the slavery of the small factories found in such profusion in the slums. The two sons of the former sailor from Kerala earned their food and the twenty rupees a month, which enabled their parents to buy just sixteen pounds of rice, by making chains for ships for ten hours at a stretch in one of the innumerable sweatshops.
Before Nissar arrived, three boys from the compound had already been working as ragpickers. It had not, how-
ever, proved to be a very profitable occupation. In a slum nothing is ever thrown away. Anything that can be salvaged— the smallest bit of coal, the remains of a cow dung cake, a shred of shirt, a broken bottle end, a coconut shell—can become the object of covetousness.
4 'You won't find anything here but small fry. To bring back a good catch you have to go where the real fish are," the young Nissar announced one evening to the three little Hindu ragpickers.
Hasari had overheard the remark. "That kid must know where there's gold to be struck," he told himself. Obsessed as he was with the idea of finding the money for his daughter's dowry, the idea of a secret source of wealth excited him. "Whatever happens he's got to take Shambu with him," he confided to Kovalski, pointing to his second son who was flying a kite up on the roof. Hasari never stopped computing figures: "Suppose I add the five hundred rupees of my bones to the eight hundred I can expect to earn wading about with my rickshaw in the monsoon slush. If, on top of that Shambu brings back two or three hundred rupees from rag picking with the young Muslim, that makes... that makes (since he had had the red fever Hasari's reckoning had slowed down)... that makes it close to two thousand rupees! Just think, Big Brother Stephan! All I'd have to do then would be to pay a little visit to the mahajan with the earrings belonging to the mother of my children and that'd be it!" Hasari could already see the Brahmin binding his daughter's hand to that of her husband.
A gold mine! The rickshaw puller had not been dreaming. It was indeed for an El Dorado, a land of milk and honey, that the Muslim boy with the harelip set off each morning with his monkey. Yet in that same place, on a bed of trash the police had one day set fire to all unlicensed rickshaws. The name under which it appeared in the municipality records and plans did not instantly evoke the idea of wealth, but in a city where even a poster taken off a wall or a bent nail was of some value, the Calcutta dumping ground might well seem like a promised land to the thousands of human ants that scrabbled about on it. Young Nissar was among their number and henceforth the three
other little ragpickers from the compound would accompany him together with Shambu Pal who he had agreed to take with him.
"Get your son up tomorrow at the first crow of the eunuchs' cockerel," Nissar ordered the rickshaw puller. "We leave at dawn."
Nissar led his comrades to the mouth of the great Howrah Bridge. Pointing to one of the overloaded buses, he directed Shambu to cling o
nto the spare wheel. The others climbed onto the rear bumper. Every day tens of thousands of people made use of Calcutta's public transport in this way without paying. They were not the only defrauders. The real champions of this system were some of the conductors themselves who, it was said, pocketed part of the takings by selling passengers false tickets. In the hellish traffic, a journey undertaken balancing on the bumpers or the spare tire, or clinging onto the clusters of humanity that hung from the windows, was a dangerous acrobatic feat. Nearly every week there was some mention in the papers of the death of an illicit passenger squashed between the metal work, crushed by the wheels of a truck, or electrocuted by a streetcar.
"Off, fellows!"
Nissar's order rang out through the already scorching early morning air. The five children let themselves drop onto the asphalt. The bus had just emerged from the last suburb to the east of the city and the road now ran across a vast, flat expanse of marshy land. Shambu rubbed his eyes still heavy with sleep. A mile and a half away to the east, the sky was black with clouds of vultures.
"Is it over there?" he asked.
Nissar wagged his head. With his old jute sack slung over one shoulder and his monkey on the other looking for nits in his hair, he took the head of the group. He was happy in his role as a ragpicker. Ragpickers were free and each day brought with it new hope of some outstanding discovery. They walked for half a mile until suddenly, just as his father had done on the evening the rickshaws were
burned, Shambu experienced the shock of the stench rising from the dump; but the nostrils of a child reared on the pavements of Calcutta are less sensitive than those of a peasant used to the aromas of the countryside. Shambu followed Nissar and the others without faltering. Apart from the vultures and the cows that grazed on the refuse, large numbers of men, women, and children were already at work on the huge mound. Nissar stopped his party three hundred yards short of the approach ramp used by the dump trucks.
4 'We're going to have to be quick," he announced in a voice that his harelip turned into a whistle. "It's the hotels and hospitals day. Mustn't miss out on their goods."
Sure enough, once a week the municipal dump trucks brought the refuse from the establishments mentioned. Their arrival was always greeted with a frantic onslaught. It was only to be expected. Real treasure often lay concealed in their loads, the kind that represented top value on the dumping ground exchange: flasks, bandages, syringes, remnants of coal, scraps of food.
"You, Shambu," ordered the young Muslim, pointing to a kind of low burrow, "park yourself in that hole. As soon as you see a bit of red rag in the window of a truck, give a whistle to let me know. That means it's coming from a hospital or a hotel." Nissar took a five-rupee note out of his belt. Showing it to his companions, he went on, "I'll run over to the truck waving this note. The driver will slow down to grab it. That's when we all have to jump onto the back. The driver will make for a distant corner of the dump and ditch all his load as quickly as possible. We'll really have to look quickly before the others get there."
The young Muslim with the harelip had spoken with all the calmness and authority of a commando leader. They all rushed to their respective positions to await the first truck. Most of the other ragpickers already foraging about in the mound lived in the small number of hovels that stood nearby. The ragpickers were mostly women and children, for the local men were otherwise occupied, macerating the guts of animals and vegetable scraps in watertight jars, which they submerged at the bottom of four reservoirs of
green, stagnant water. They subsequently distilled these concoctions and the juice extracted was put into bottles and delivered to the clandestine gambling dens of Calcutta and the drinking places in the slums. "That puts the life back into a man!" Hasari used to say, remembering his libations with Ram Chander and Son of Miracle. Yet the forbidden alcohol, the famous bang la, had killed more Indians than had any number of natural disasters.
The first yellow truck arrived, then another, then a third. None of them, however, was carrying the red signal. Nobody moved. Hasari's son felt as if his pupils were about to burst. He had never seen such a spectacle. Just above him in the searing early morning light, an extraordinary ballet was unfolding. A host of barefoot women and children were scouring the hill of refuse with baskets in one hand and spikes in the other. The arrival of each vehicle unleashed a frenzied seething of activity as everyone scrambled after it. A suffocating cloud of sulphur dust enveloped each unloading. Even more mind-boggling was the flurried searching that went on around the bulldozers there to level out the mountains of refuse. Children slipped without hesitation under the mastodons to be the first to explore the manna turned over by their steel scoops. How many had perished, suffocated by their solid bulk or crushed by their caterpillar bands? Shambu felt a cold sweat break out on his back. "Would I be capable of such courage?" he wondered. Just then a fourth truck appeared, but still there was no red rag at the window. Above him, the ballet continued. To protect themselves against the sun and the dust, the women and girls had covered their heads and faces with old but colorful pieces of cloth which made them look like harem princesses. As for the boys, with their felt hats, their caps full of holes, and their worn-out shoes that were far too big for them, they all looked like Charlie Chaplin in his early films. Each had his speciality. The women tended to look for bits of coal and wood. The children preferred things made out of leather, plastic, or glass as well as bones, shellfish, and papers. They all picked up. anything edible with equal enthusiasm: rotten fruit, peelings, crusts of bread. This kind of picking was the most difficult and often the most dangerous. Shambu
• ——————————
saw a vulture bear down like a torpedo on a small boy to snatch the piece of meat he had just found. Vultures were not the only creatures to compete with men for grazing ground. Pigs, cows, goats, pariah dogs and, at night, even hyenas and jackals had chosen to make their homes on the dump, as had millions of other small creatures and insects. The flies were the most aggressive. Greenish in color, they buzzed about in their myriads, clinging to men and beasts, even to their eyes, mouths, or the inside of their noses and ears. Those flies were completely at home among all that decaying matter and they made quite certain that everyone knew it.
The most surprising factor about this nightmare was that all the ingredients of normal life had been established here. Among the heaps of stinking rubbish, Shambu could see ice-cream salesmen on their decorated carrier tricyles, water vendors laden with large goatskin bottles, fritter makers squatting under sunshades behind their smoking braziers, bangla retailers surrounded by bottles set out like bowling pins. So that mothers could forage more effectively among the refuse, there were even baby-sitters to look after their children, usually very young girls seated under old black umbrellas with holes in them, with several fly-covered babies in their laps.
The dumpsite was also a busy trading center, a bazaar, a money market. A whole tribe of secondhand salesmen and scrap iron merchants had grafted themselves onto that of the ragpickers. Each one had his speciality. Using archaic scales, traders in vests and longhis would buy by the weight anything the foragers had unearthed. Every evening wholesalers would come with trucks to harvest the various treasures which, once cleaned and sorted, would be resold to factories for recycling.
Shambu felt his heart begin to pound. He had just seen the tip-off color in the window of a truck. Stuffing his fingers into his mouth, he whistled in the manner agreed. Instantly he saw Nissar, straddled by his monkey, loom up in the cloud of dust and jump onto the running board to hand over his five-rupee note. The driver put on his brakes. This was the signal. With the agility of lizards, the five
little ragpickers from the City of Joy climbed aboard the dump truck full of refuse.
"All of you, flat on your bellies!" Nissar ordered.
The truck accelerated to climb the access slope to the dump. Half-submerged in the filthy cargo the five ragpickers were well out of sight of a
ny onlookers. "That garbage was sticky and burned you at the same time," Shambu was to recount, "but worst of all, I felt as if thousands of creepy-crawlies were coming out of it and jumping onto me. The enormous cockroaches were the most frightening. They ran over my legs, my arms, my neck."
Instead of heading for the bulldozers, the driver veered off in the opposite direction. This was part of the "deal." Nissar and his band would have ten minutes in which to forage alone. It all went off like a holdup in the films. The truck pulled up sharply. The five boys leaped down and the dump truck unloaded its avalanche of garbage. They scrabbled, located, sorted, and stowed their booty away as fast as they could. With bottles, stray bits of cooking utensils and crockery, broken tools, pieces of tile, old tubes of toothpaste, run-down batteries, empty tins, plastic soles, scraps of clothing, and papers, their bags were filled in a trice.
"Let's hurry, fellows! Here come the others."
Nissar knew only too well that they had to scram from there before the furious crowd of other ragpickers fell upon them. Caught up in the fever of the search, Shambu sank his spike into a stinking mass for one last time and let out a cry. "I had just seen something glinting among all that shit. I thought it was a coin and struck out frenziedly to free it. What I brought out on the end of my hook was a bracelet, and on the end of the bracelet was a watch."
"At first an expression of total stupefaction came over Hasari Pal's face," Kovalski was to say. "Then he took the object in his hands and lifted it up with so much emotion and respect that we thought he wanted to offer it to some deity. All he actually wanted to do was put it to his ear." The voices in the compound fell silent. For
several seconds Hasan remained like that, immobile, incapable of uttering a word, as if transfigured by the jewel that ticked in unison with the beating of his heart.
The City of Joy Page 43
