It was at this point that something very strange occurred. Propelled by some mysterious force, an eddy of scorching air suddenly surged off the rooftops to shower the compound with the sound of broken tiles. Immediately thereafter a series of thunderbolts rolled across the sky. Hasari and all the other residents looked up at the heavens. Above the smoke of the chulas appeared great waves of black clouds. The rickshaw puller felt tears obscure his vision. "That's it," he thought. "The monsoon has come. I am saved. I shall be able to die in peace. Thanks to this watch and to the downpour that is about to fall, thanks to the five hundred rupees for my bones, my daughter will have a good husband."
"The ci t y had changed our eyes," Hasari was to recount. "In the village we would scrutinize the sky for days on end, waiting for the first clouds to come bearing water. We would dance and sing and implore the goddess Lakshmi to make our fields fertile with a beneficent downpour. But in Calcutta there was nothing to make fertile. Neither the streets, nor the pavements, the houses, buses, nor trucks could be rendered fruitful by the water that makes the rice grow in our countryside. That doesn't mean that here we did not yearn for the monsoon; we yearned for it because of the appalling heat that reduced you to a state where you could have stopped in the street and just laid down and died. Sometimes there wasn't any need to stop to wait for death. Instead it would take you by surprise in midaction, when you were taking a schoolboy to school or a marwari to the movies. You just collapsed suddenly. Sometimes your own carriage would run over you before tipping over onto a bus or the pavement. That was known as the 'stroke of Surya', the stroke of the Sun-god.
"All that night and throughout the next day big, black
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clouds rolled across the sky, plunging the city into almost total darkness. The clouds mingled with the fames and the dust. Soon, above the rooftops, there appeared a kind of blackish mantle. It was as if Sani, the planet that augurs ill, wanted to punish us with asphyxiation. People were suffocating. They fought in the streets over nothing. The cops' sticks began to twitch without your even knowing why. I was having more and more difficulty breathing. Even the crows and the rats scavenging among the piles of garbage in Wood Street had a peculiar look about them. The children never stopped crying. Dogs barked ceaselessly. I found myself wondering whether, rather than the monsoon, this might not be the end of the world that was approaching.
"Lots of people begged me to take them to the hospital. They wanted someone to help them breathe. But I knew that in the hospitals they wouldn't even help people die. At the entrance to Lower Circular Road, I picked up an old woman groaning on the pavement. She was all dried out. Her skin was like cardboard. I bought a coconut and made her drink the tepid, slightly sweet milk from it. Then I took her to the hospital, where such a long time ago, our coolie friend had died.
"After three days had gone by, a violent wind blew up, a tornado of sand and dust such as we had already had during the premonsoon storms. In a matter of minutes the whole city was covered in a sheet of yellow sand. Apparently that sand comes from the Himalayan Mountains and from the plateaus on the Chinese side. It was terrifying. Sand and dust permeated everything. People's eyes and mouths were full of it. I don't know whether it was because of those gusts of wind or because of the red fever, but all of a sudden I felt quite unable to lift the shafts of my old cart. I was reduced to nothing by some force from the beyond. I lay down on the canvas seat with my legs in the air, trying to get my breath back. My head was buzzing, my eyes hurt, and my stomach was knotted with cramps. How long did I lie there like that? In the absence of the sun, hidden as it was by black clouds, I completely lost all track of time."
The nightmare lasted for several days. In the City of Joy
the drought began to dry up the wells and fountains. The number of victims of dehydration multiplied and Max exhausted his small supply of serum in the space of hours. On the sixth day, toward noon, the thermometer rose to one hundred and seventeen degrees Fahrenheit. The wind had dropped and the slum stifled beneath a blanket of fire. Yet still no drop of water fell. Persuaded that this year the monsoon would not come, many of the residents lay down in their hovels to wait for the wheel of their karma to put an end to their torment.
The next day, a few short squalls restored a little hope. Towards midday, however, despite all the offerings placed on the altars to the gods, the thermometer went wild again. Its excesses were a harsh test of strength for Max, Bandona, and all the other members of the Committee for Mutual Aid. An SOS could summon them at any moment to the bedside of the latest heat victim.
Returning from one of these visits, Max had just gotten back to his room, exhausted, when he felt a damp, perfumed cloth on his sweating face. Bandona was gently mopping his brow. He grasped her hand and raised it to his lips. The unexpected contact with her skin, so fresh and so alive, in those sordid surroundings that smelled of ether and alcohol, threw him completely. The patients crowding at the door were dumbfounded. This kind of public demonstration of affection was quite uncommon in India.
He let go of the young woman's hand but kept the piece of linen, delighting in its perfume. The scent reminded him of something. He sought in his mind and suddenly the vision of Manubai Chatterjee came to him. Hers was an unwonted, unreal image in this stricken slum. Despite the furnacelike heat, he shivered. The beautiful, rich Indian woman had brought so much embellishment to his life since that memorable night not so long ago, when for awhile he had forgotten his slum on the pillows of her muslin-draped four-poster bed. The very incarnation of the India of tales, myths, and spells, Manubai had reminded him that luxury too was part of creation, that even in Calcutta it was possible to live surrounded by floral gardens, to eat and drink to repletion, and to rejoice in the pleasures of existence. Careless of what people might say
about her, she had thrown several dinners in his honor in her sumptuous dining room decorated with paintings of tropical birds. She had taken him to diplomatic evenings, to receptions on the verdant lawns of the Tollygunge Golf Club, to bridge parties at Government House. Caressing her body vibrant with sensual fragrances, listening to the exhilarating sound of her laughter had given him a taste of the pleasures and refinements of an India of thousand-year-old enchantments.
Yet it was from another woman that he had drawn the will and the strength to pursue his task among the poor of the City of Joy. Bandona had no house, no servants, no four-poster bed. She had never known anything but sweatshops, hovels, mud, and hunger, but her illuminating smile, her availability to others, her magical ability to bring relief and comfort were worth any amount of riches. In a world where tortured people every day besieged the door of his dispensary, bringing him their wounds, their illness, and their misery, in the face of all that suffering, naked despair, and death, it was this angel of mercy who had given Max the courage to stand firm. How could the shared experience of so much horror and the giving of so much love have failed to create an exceptional bond between them?
In this concentration camp where never a wink could pass unnoticed, it was quite inconceivable that such a bond should be outwardly manifested. Kovalski had warned Max: a slum was a pot boiling in a constant state of ferment. Any event that was the slightest bit out of the ordinary risked blowing the lid off and causing an explosion. Unlike Manubai Chatterjee who, by virtue of her social position, could cast off her chains and defy the existing order, Bandona had not the least hope of ever being incarnated as Radha, the divine love of Krishna, the herdsman god and flutist. She was a prisoner of the rites and taboos that governed relationships between men and women in India. Like all the other young girls in her position, her destiny was to be given as a virgin to a husband, whom others—her father, an uncle, or a grandmother—would choose for her. Emotional and physical attraction would play no part in her union. She would see
her husband for the first time at the ceremony. As for her wedding night, like all the future couplings of her married life, it would be primarily a ritual intended to
conceive a male heir.
The circumstances of this ritual never failed to take Kovalski by surprise. ''Suddenly I would hear a strange stirring among the people sleeping around me. Then in the darkness, I would make out people getting up discreetly. There would be the sound of doors, then stifled cries. The couples in the compound were making love. I knew then that it was purnima, the full moon."
At midday, three days after the episode with the perfumed handkerchief, when a further rise of the thermometer was subjecting the hovels of the City of Joy to a white heat, Bandona came into Max's room. She was holding an offering so rare in a slum that it was reserved for the gods.
4 'Doctor, Big Brother," she said kindly as she laid a bouquet of jasmine on the table, "don't be afraid. You're not alone. I am here to share it all with you."
Max took the flowers and sniflFed at them. So intoxicating was the perfume they exuded that it was to him as if the decay, the stench, the blazing heat, the rat-infested framework, the mud of the walls, and the cockroaches were all borne away in a dream. All that remained of that damnable cesspool was the bouquet of happiness and the young girl in a bright pink sari, as motionless and meditative as a madonna in a cathedral.
"Thank you, sweet Bandona," he murmured at last, before borrowing Kovalski's favorite compliment. "You are a light of the world."
Max could not remember clearly the events that followed. The heat and fatigue had distorted his faculties. "I think," he was later to tell Kovalski, "that I went over to her and pressed her to me in an irrepressible need to possess that light. Bandona did not repulse me. On the contrary, with an embrace full of infinite tenderness, she offered me her love."
It was then that they heard a strange pattering noise on the roof. Max thought people were bombarding the tiles of his room with pebbles. Then he heard shouting in the neighboring buildings, immediately followed by a great
commotion on all sides. A mighty thunderclap shook the walls and roofing of the little room. Max saw a troop of crazed rats emerge from the framework. Almost immediately all the tiles began to vibrate with a dull, powerful, regular sound. Bandona gently pulled away from Max's chest anid looked up at the roof. Her small, almond eyes were brimming with tears of joy.
4 'Max, Big Brother, do you hear? The monsoon has arrived."
It must have been late afternoon when I saw the first drop of water fall," Hasari was to recount. "It was enormous, but as soon as it hit the asphalt, the heat caused it to evaporate instantaneously." To the former peasant, banished forever from his land by drought, every year that first drop of water was like "manna from the heavens and proof that the gods could still weep for the plight of mankind on this earth." He thought of the singing and shrieks of joy that would be erupting in his village at that very moment. He imagined his father and his brother squatting on the small dike at the edge of the rice field and gazing with wonder upon the young shoots, endowed with new vigor by dew from the heavens. "Will I ever see them again?" he sighed.
That first downpour of the monsoon was exceptionally violent. The water was battering the ground with the sound of drums beaten by a million fingers. Swiftly, Hasari put up the hood of his rickshaw, then gave himself up to the sheer joy of being soaked by the flood. "After a moment a breath of air blew through the warm shower, bringing with it a touch of coolness," he would say. "It was as if the
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portals of some giant icehouse had opened onto the city to release a little coolness into the overheated air stirred up by the tornado. By this time the beating of the water obscured all other sounds. All you could hear was the noise of the sky emptying itself. Instead of seeking shelter, people had rushed out into the rain. Children, completely naked, danced and laughed and performed somersaults. Women let themselves be drenched and their saris clung to their bodies like the thin bark of bamboo canes.
"At the rickshaw stand on Park Circus and elsewhere, the pullers had begun to sing. Other workers joined them from the neighboring streets and took part in the thanksgiving. It was as if the whole city had gone down to the river to bathe and purify itself, the only difference being that the river was falling from the heavens instead of flowing over the ground. Even the old palm trees in the Harrington Street gardens trembled with joy. Trees that had looked like dusty old men were now all shiny with vitality, freshness, and youth.
"The euphoria lasted for several hours. While this communal bathing went on, we all felt like brothers. Coolies and sadarjis, rickshaw wallahs, babus, marwaris — from the Bara Bazar, Biharis, Bengalis, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Jains—ail the different people of this great city were taking part in the same grateful puja by letting ourselves be soaked in the same saving deluge.
"The rain stopped suddenly to reveal the most extraordinary sight: in the sunlight the entire city began to steam like a gigantic boiling washtub. Then the downpour began again.'*
In the slum Max could hardly believe his eyes. "A whole race of people who only a second earlier had seemed half-dead had just been resurrected in a fantastic explosion of happiness, exuberance, and life," he would remember. "The men had torn off their shirts, women rushed out fully clothed, singing. Swarms of naked children were running about in all directions under the magical shower and shrieking for joy. It was a real festival, the carrying out of some ancestral ritual." At the end of his alleyway, he noticed a tall figure with white skin. Amid all the general levity, Kovalski was dancing unrestrainedly in
a circle with the other residents of the City of Joy. On his streaming chest his metal cross jumped about as if to beat out the time. "He looked like the god Neptune under the waters of some celestial spring!"
For three days the deluge continued, a deluge such as Bengal had not known for several years. From one compound to the next and throughout the alleyways of the City of Joy there soon rang out the word that had haunted the memory of India, for as long as the monsoon had existed. "Barha!" "Flood!" The jubilation of the initial moments was succeeded by a frantic hunt for umbrellas, bits of canvas, cardboard, or plastic, for anything that might serve to patch up the roofs and hold back the water invading the slum houses. There followed a search for containers and any utensils that could be used for bailing. The water, however, always came back. It welled from out of the ground, for the slum was built on marshland. Finally, people went after bricks and any other materials they could use to raise the charpoys in the hovels, the only refuge on which the castaways could shelter their children and their few possessions. The situation grew rapidly worse and soon the dreaded noise was heard. The lapping of the water rose above the general commotion. Voices assumed a distinctive resonance because the sheet of water made them echo. One evening Max made out a feeble cry 460
coming from the room next door. Intrigued, he went to investigate. The little girl who had brought him the umbrella during the premonsoon cataracts had slipped into the blackish floodwater and was in the process of drowning. He grabbed her by the hair and carried her back to his room.
His room by now was more a pestilential bog. Awash with the downpour, the latrines, the sewers, and the drainage channels from the cattle sheds were overflowing, and their vile tide had just spilled over the small protective wall outside his door. To save the cartons of milk and the medicine chest, Bandona had suspended a sheet from the four corners of the framework to form an improvised hammock which looked like a sail of painter Delacroix's Medusa's raft. Elsewhere umbrellas had come to the rescue. The trick was to hang them upside down under the gutters in the roof and empty them as soon as they were full.
Hunger soon added itself to the discomfort caused by the overflowing excrement, the stench, and the humidity. Their cow dung cakes reduced to sponges, the women could no longer cook food. Striking a match had become a real survival feat. "Look here, Big Brother," Kalima explained to Kovalski, "you rub the match vigorously under your armpit to warm the sulphur and then you strike it!" Sure enough, the miracle occurred: in the middle of the deluge a small flame emerged from between the eunuch's
fingers. Kovalski tried to repeat the performance, but the armpit of a Polish Catholic priest, it would appear, does not secrete the same fluids as that of a Hijra from the India of the fakirs: the attempt ended in failure.
Kovalski set out in search of Margareta, Saladdin, Bandona, and other members of the Committee for Mutual Aid, groping his way through the darkness and wading up to his waist in the foul flood. Help had to be organized urgently. The rain was still falling, The water level was rising. The situation was becoming desperate.
The rest of Calcutta was experiencing a similar nightmare. In the lower districts to the East, on the Topsia,
Kasba, and Tiljala side, thousands of residents had been compelled to flee or take refuge on the rooftops. The entire city was plunged into darkness: the cataracts had drowned the transformers and the electric power cables. No trains could reach the stations anymore. The traffic on the roads had come to a standstill and supplies had begun to run out. One pound of potatoes was already worth the astronomical sum of five rupees (fifty U.S. cents), an egg was nearly thirteen U.S. cents.
Much to the delight of the rickshaw pullers, there was no longer any other form of urban transport. Hasari, who had been counting on these catastrophic days to make up his daughter's dowry, was ecstatic. "What a joy it was to survey the spectacle of disaster presented by the proud red double-decker buses of Calcutta, the blue-and-white streetcars, the Sadarji Sikhs' arrogant yellow taxis, and the privately owned Ambassador cars with their uniformed drivers. With their engines flooded, their chassis up to the doors in mud, abandoned by their passengers, deserted by their crews, they looked like wreckage from the boats on the banks of the Hooghly. What a glorious opportunity we had been given at last to avenge the brutality we had taken from drivers and all the humiliating haggling the clients had inflicted on us. For once we could ask for the fares our efforts warranted. Our carts with high wheels and our legs were the only vehicles that could get about the flooded streets. To my dying day I shall hear the desperate appeals of people wanting me to carry them in my rickshaw. All of a sudden I had ceased to be a despised, insulted animal, whose sides people pummeled with their feet to make me go faster, and from whom people lopped ten or twenty paisas off the agreed price once they reached their destination. Now people fought with each other, offered two, three, or even four times the usual price just to be able to sit on the drenched seat of the only boats still afloat on the sea of Calcutta."
The City of Joy Page 44
