The City of Joy

by Dominique Lapierre

  The shortest of trips made the former peasant a small fortune—almost an entire day's earnings before the monsoon. Yet how much suffering it cost him! Obscured by the floods, every obstacle became a trap. The bits of old iron on which his bare feet risked impaling themselves at any

  moment were just one example. "Wading up to your thighs through the slime, stumbling over the corpses of rats and dogs was a joke," Hasari was, however, to say, "by comparison with the torture the rain inflicted on our carcasses. Sweating in those cataracts without ever being able to dry yourself off*, doesn't do wonders for your system. It was no use wringing out my dhoti and vest after each fare, and rubbing my hands and feet down, I was constantly bathed in moisture. Steeped in the infected water, many of my colleagues contracted skin diseases. Some of their feet looked like the lumps of old meat you see in butcher's stalls. They were covered with ulcerations and wounds. But the real danger lay in the bouts of intermittent heat and cold—especially in my case. Many of my colleagues left their lungs somewhere in the monsoon. They called it pneumonia or something like that. That's when you caught a raging fever, then shivered with cold and split open without even coughing. Ramatullah, the Muslim friend with whom I shared my rickshaw, claimed that it was much more pleasant than the red fever because it was all over with very quickly and you didn't have to spew your lungs out."

  When Hasari showed his friend Son of Miracle the proceeds from his first two days in the monsoon, the taxi driver, condemned to unemployment by the flood, let out a hoot of admiration. "Hasari, as far as you're concerned, that's not water pouring out of the sky, it's gold nuggets!"

  The rickshaw puller's joy was to be short-lived. The next day when he arrived at the Park Circus stand to pick up his rickshaw, he found his colleagues gathered around an old cart. He recognized his carriage and looked for Ramatullah among the group, but in vain. It was only then that one of the pullers, one of the oldest on the rank, said to him, "Your pal is dead, Hasari. He fell down a man hole. That's the third fellow to drown since yesterday. Apparently some babu's given the order to take off all the drain covers to make it easier for the water to flow away."

  Kovalski was passing in front of his former room in Nizamudhin Lane when he felt a small hand brush against him. He grabbed hold of it only to find that it was inert. He tugged at the little body floating on the surface of the water and hoisted it onto the platform of the tea shop belonging to Surya, the old Hindu. He called out, paddled over to Mehboub's house and tried his onetime neighbor's door, then knocked at Sabia's mother's hovel. There was nobody around. The alleyway looked like a film set deserted by its extras. All he could hear was the beating of the rain, the lapping of the water, and the piercing cries of the rats as they fled from their lairs. From time to time one of them would drop into the water with a splash. Testing the ground with every step to avoid falling into the deep drains that cut across the alley, Kovalski covered several hundred feet. Suddenly a voice rose from the cesspool, his voice, a deep, powerful voice which soared upward through the pouring rain to the opaque vault of a sky streaked with lightning. "Nearer my God to thee, nearer my God to thee ..." sang the priest at the top of his lungs as had the shipwrecked passengers of the Titanic on the night their liner sank beneath the waves.

  The Indians belonging to the Committee for Mutual Aid were waiting in Max's room. Everyone was up to his knees in water. The atmosphere was gloomy.

  "Big Brother Stephan, panic has broken out," announced the old man Saladdin who was used to the slums being flooded. "Everywhere people are running away. At least five hundred occupants have already taken refuge in the great mosque."

  The Jama Masjid was the only building with several stories.

  "And this is only the beginning," said Margareta whose soaked sari was clinging to her skin. "Apparently the Ganges is overflowing its banks."

  "That's enough bad news!" interrupted the Anglo-Indian Aristotle John. "We're not here to whine but to decide how we can help."

  "Aristotle John is right!" said Kovalski, whose sneakers full of water were sending up a steady flow of bubbles.

  A silence ensued. Each one was conscious of the enormity of the task. Max was the first to speak.

  "We ought to vaccinate people quickly—against cholera, typhoid... There's a risk of epidemics..."

  "How many doses have you got?" asked Kovalski, pointing to the medicine chest in the hammock.

  "Pathetically few. We'll have to try and get some from the hospitals."

  The young doctor's candor made the assembly smile. "This American is incorrigible," reflected Kovalski. "After all these months in Calcutta, he still thinks as if he's in Miami."

  "Shouldn't we start by organizing emergency provisions for the refugees?" suggested Saladdin. "Thousands of people are going to find themselves without food and water."

  "Definitely!" said Kovalski.

  It was at this point that Bandona's voice was heard. "Big Brother Stephan, our first priority must go to the old and infirm who have stayed in their homes," she said gently but firmly. "Many of them will drown if someone doesn't go and find them."

  When it came to need, no one knew the order of priorities better than the young Assamese girl. On this occasion, however, she was wrong. Her appeal had suddenly reminded Kovalski of something even more urgent.

  "The lepers!" he exclaimed. "The lepers! You three go for the sick and the elderly," he directed Bandona, Max, and Saladdin. "I'll go with Aristotle John and Margareta to the lepers. We'll all meet at the Jama Masjid!"

  The Jama Masjid, the great Friday mosque! That night the rectangular building with four modest minarets at its corners was like a lighthouse in a storm. Hundreds of escapees clutched at the Arabian latticework of its windows, jostling each other and calling out. Others were still arriving. Fathers, sometimes wih three or even four children perched on their shoulders, mothers carrying pitiful bundles on their heads and frequently babies in their arms, waded through the filthy water to try and get near the only door. Inside, the spectacle was another scene out of Dante's Inferno. Children, frightened by the darkness, screamed

  with terror. Women shouted, bickered, and wept. Everyone was trying to reach the galleries on the first floor because the flood water had already invaded the ground level and was rising rapidly. Suddenly, however, a torrent was released from the roof and submerged the galleries. Some young men managed to break down the doors leading onto the terrace and set up a barricade. The atmosphere became more and more suffocating and some of the refugees fainted. Babies suffering from dysentery emptied their bowels. The first dead were evacuated, passed from arm to arm over the heads of the crowd. It was not long before the rumors spread: eroded by the water, hundreds of hovels were in the process of collapsing all over the slum.

  The little leper colony situated below the level of the railway lines was completely submerged. In order to cover the last few feet, Margareta had to hoist herself onto Kovalski's back, an acrobatic feat that was somewhat delicate in a sari. Not a single inhabitant had left. The parents had put their children up on the roofs and the relatively able-bodied lepers had piled charpoys one on top of another to protect the sick and the infirm. Kovalski discovered Anouar perched on one of these improvised pyramids, half-immersed in water. The crippled man had survived his amputation. He was smiling.

  4 'Anouar, old friend. I've been looking for you," said the priest breathlessly.

  4 'Looking for me? But why? This isn't the first time the monsoon has gotten our feet wet!"

  Again Kovalski was amazed at the leper's stoical, almost cheery attitude. "These lights of the world really deserve their place next to the Father," he thought. "They have been to the very ends of suffering."

  "The rain is still falling. You could all be drowned." Even as he spoke these words, the priest became aware of the vanity of his intentions. How could he hope to evacuate these poor people when he himself and his companions had several times nearly disappeared into the eddies of dark water that engulfed
the whole area. He must get reinforcements. Reinforcements? The idea seemed somewhat comical in a night of general panic. It was then that

  he saw before him the image of a man with small cruel eyes behind thick-lensed glasses, a man with protrudinc ears and the fat jowls of a pleasure seeker. He called out Margareta and Aristotle John.

  "I'm heading for the godfather," he shouted to them. "He's the only one who can help us to get everyone out of here."

  With its four stories of solid masonry, its flights of steps built out of brick, and its stone balconies, the godfather's house emerged like a fortress out of the flood water. Lit up a giorno by a powerful generator, its numerous rooms illuminated the waves that beat against its walls with an unusual clarity. "It's the doges' palace!" Kovalski remarked to himself, not without a certain admiration. Nothing, not even this deluge, could modify the behavior of the doge of the City of Joy. Insensible to what was going on outside, to the cries and the appeals of residents fleeing their collapsing hovels, he remained as impassive as ever, enthroned in his chair encrusted with precious stones. Even the abrupt entrance of a figure dripping in putrid slime, led by his son, unleashed not the faintest shadow of surprise on his toadlike face.

  "Good evening, Father," he said in his hissing voice and fixed his old adversary with a stare. "What kindly breeze brings you here in weather like this?"

  He clapped his hands and a beturbaned servant brought tea and soft drinks on an engraved copper tray.

  "The lepers," said Kovalski.

  "Them again?" marveled the godfather and his forehead puckered. "It would seem that it's always to the lepers that I owe the honor of an encounter with you. What is it this time?"

  "They will probably all drown if they're not evacuated urgently. We need men and a boat immediately."

  Whether out of the fear of losing an appreciable source of income or out of an unexpected upsurge of human solidarity, Kovalski could not say, but the City of Joy's Mafia boss reacted in a manner that was quite spectacular. He stood up and clapped his hands, whereupon Ashoka, the little thug with the big motorcycle, came rushing back. An initial private conference was held, then other members

  of the family appeared. Less than ten minutes later, a boat set out with Kovalski and a team of mafiosi on board. As the first strokes of the oars bore the vessel away into shadows reverberating with the sound of shouting and other noises, Kovalski heard again the hissing voice of the godfather. Turning back, he saw the squat little man framed in a lighted window. He would never forget the words of the Mafia boss, ringing out across the swirling water.

  "Ashoka," he shouted to his son at the top of his lungs. "Bring all the lepers back here. Tonight, our house is for the wretched ones."

  Max Loeb's bulky, wet body collapsed onto the pile of milk cartons. Exhausted by the hardest night of his life, he was back in his room in the first light of dawn. The downpour was now being succeeded by lighter rain that was warm and more restrained, and the rise of the water seemed to have relented a little. All through the night he had accompanied Bandona on her rescue operations, carrying his medicine chest at arm's length above the flood water. The head and heart of the little Assamese girl contained a complete list of all the most flagrant distress cases in the slum. With the help of a team of young men who had placed themselves spontaneously at their disposal, they had waded from one hovel to the next to rescue blind and paralyzed people, bedridden patients with tuberculosis, beggars, and even a deaf and dumb madwoman with her newborn baby. Only once had they arrived too late. When they entered the shack occupied by the old blind leper woman to whom Kovalski took Communion every week, they found her wasted body already afloat in her widow's shroud. Her rosary was twined about her wrist and her mutilated face looked unaccountably serene.

  "Her torment is over now," murmured Bandona as she helped Max to-hoist the body onto the low ledge. "The god she used to call upon has heard her at last. He has taken her to be with him."

  The simplicity of this explanation in the midst of such a

  nightmare moved the American deeply. "It was that night that I realized that I could never be quite the same again," he was to write a few days later to Sylvia, his fiancee in Miami.

  The arrival of the first boatload of lepers at the godfather's house was the occasion for deeds that even a heart as full of love as Kovalski's would not have imagined. He saw Ashoka take Anouar in his arms and carry him carefully to the charpoy in his room. He saw the women of the house strip off their beautiful muslin veils to rub down naked children shivering with cold, for the temperature had suddenly dropped ten degrees. He saw the godfather's wife, a plump matron with arms jingling with bracelets, bring in a cooking pot full of rice and steaming pieces of meat. Above all, he saw a sight that would obliterate forever the horrifying spectacle of Molotov cocktails exploding outside his small leper clinic: the godfather himself reaching out his gold-ringed fingers to receive the castaways, helping them to disembark, drying their mutilated limbs, serving them tea, and offering them dishes of sweetmeats and pastries.

  "In that catastrophic flood," Kovalski was to comment, "all the people of the City of Joy had become brothers. Muslim families took Hindus into their homes, young people nearly drowned carrying the elderly on their shoulders, rickshaw pullers transported the sick free of charge in vehicles that were three-quarters submerged, owners of eating houses did not hesitate to risk their lives to get provisions to the refugees shut up in the mosque."

  In the midst of disaster God was not forgotten. Stopping off at his room, now invaded by more than three feet of water, Kovalski discovered two candles burning in front of his picture of the Sacred Shroud. Before escaping with the other residents of the compound, Kalima, the eunuch, had lit them "to greet the deity of Big Brother Stephan and ask him to make the rain stop."

  All the same, the god of the Christians, the Bhagavan of the Hindus, and Allah the merciful appeared to be deaf to all entreaty. The torment of the flood victims of Calcutta was to go on for days. As Max had feared, cholera and typhoid began to break out. There were no medicines and

  no chance of evacuation. People died. Corpses that could not be incinerated or buried were simply abandoned in the flooded streets. In the space of only a few hours Max stumbled upon three bodies drifting about in the current. Paradoxically, with all that liquid around, there was not a drop of drinking water left. The inhabitants hung up rags and umbrellas to try and collect a little rain, but some had to drink directly from the infected strait of water that engulfed them. The food situation was just as tragic, despite the fact that teams of rescue volunteers were working miracles. Saladdin had managed to dig out a boat and two large pots. Paddling as hard as his strength would permit, the old man did the rounds of the eating houses ta fill up his receptacles with rice and wheat flour and to take this precious cargo to the people marooned in the mosque.

  The strangest thing about this cataclysm was that life still went on as before. On the corner of a submerged alleyway, Max remained rooted on the spot, confronted by a scene that would never leave him: that of a group of children up to their shoulders in water, laughing and splashing in front of a tiny platform on which an old man was selling little plastic cars and dolls, oblivious to the rain.

  For eight days and eight nights the anger of the heavens remained unrelenting. Then gradually it did begin to wane, but it took more than a month for the tide to retreat altogether. Slowly Calcutta began to hope again. A few buses ventured out into the,collapsed avenues. More than four hundred miles of streets had been destroyed or damaged. Half a million citizens had lost everything. Thousands of houses and buildings, either decayed or still under construction, had crumbled away. Whole neighborhoods were without electricity or telephones. Hundreds of water mains had burst.

  It was in the slums, however, that the full horror of the disaster was most readily apparent. When the water subsided, the City of Joy was nothing but a polluted marsh. A glutinous, stinking mud covered everything, interspersed with t
he decaying carcasses of dogs, cats, rats, lizards, and even humans. Millions of flies soon hatched out of the putrefaction and made straight for any survivors. Epidemics broke out in various quarters. To try and contain them,

  Bandona and Aristotle John distributed tons of disinfectant provided by the municipality. Alas, the operation caused heavy losses among the volunteers. Max had to amputate several hands and feet burned to the bone by corrosive substances.

  By the time Kovalski, concealed behind a two-week beard and covered with dirt and vermin, finally regained his compound, all the other occupants had already returned. They were all busy clearing away traces of the inundation. Kalima and his eunuch companions from the room next door were quick to come to greet him.

  ''Welcome back, Big Brother Stephan," said Kalima warmly. "We've been waiting for you."

  What was his emotion when Kovalski discovered that in his absence the eunuchs had washed, scrubbed, and completely repainted his hovel! Before the picture of the Sacred Shroud, a pattern of rangoli, the attractive auspicious motifs traced on the ground in colored powder, paid homage to his God. Before resting, the priest gave thanks for so much love shown in the depths of his wretched slum. He was deep in meditation when a bearded figure burst in. Hasari had lost so much weight that the priest hardly recognized him.