The City of Joy

by Dominique Lapierre

  little mosque that had survived the catastrophe. In the very midst of disaster, we had to first give thanks to Allah!"

  That night, the young doctor was to be particularly struck by one detail as he first set foot on the ground: the bellies of all the children who came running toward him, clapping their hands, singing, and dancing. They were huge, protruding, inflated bellies, empty bellies full of worms. As for Kovalski, he was to be seized by the vision of a " woman holding herself erect among all the wreckage, her baby in her arms. She did not beg or moan but stood as dignified and motionless as a statue, with all the poverty of the world inscribed on her expression. Poised beyond time, or rather at the very heart of time, a time that is an eternity to those in distress, that mother with her child was the Bengal Mother, a symbol of that Christmas of misfortune."

  Poor Kovalski! There he was, the man who thought he had seen everything, shared in everything, and understood everything about the suffering of the innocent, condemned to take a further step toward the heart of the mystery. Why had the God of love, the God of justice allowed these people, who were among the world's most disinherited, to be so cruelly afflicted? How, he asked himself, will the incense of our temple ever be able to efface the smell of the death of all these innocents?

  The smell of death! Despite the generous premiums offered in return for the destruction of the corpses, the professional gravediggers sent by the authorities had fled after only two days. How could Hindus be distinguished from Muslims in such a charnel house? How could some be burned and others buried without mistakes arising? Teams of convicts from a penitentiary sent to take their place exhibited no more enthusiasm for the task. Soldiers had to be sent in as a last resort. They were duly equipped with flamethrowers. The entire delta was thus transformed into one gigantic barbecue, the stench of which could be smelled as far away as Calcutta.

  There remained only the living to be dealt with. For four weeks Kovalski, Max, and their Indian companions kept combing several miles of one isolated sector. Going from one group of survivors to the next, they vaccinated them

  with compressed-air Dermo-jets, treated fifteen thousand sick people, vermifuged twenty thousand children, distributed some twenty-five thousand food rations. It was a drop of water in the ocean of need, the Pole would admit, but a drop of water that would be missed if it were not there, he added, citing Mother Teresa's famous remark. On the morning the committee's team packed its bags to return to the City of Joy, the survivors in the area gave their benefactors a small celebration. People who no longer had anything, poverty-stricken people stripped even of hope itself because the sea had rendered their fields unfertile, managed somehow to dance and sing and express their gratitude and joy. Overwhelmed, Kovalski thought of the words of Tagore: "Misfortune is great, but man is even greater than misfortune." As the celebration drew to a close, a little girl dressed in rags, with a water lily in her hair, approached the priest to offer him a gift on behalf of all the villagers. They were Muslims but they had made up a little Crucifix out of shells with the figure of Christ on it. Accompanying the gift, there was a piece of paper on which an uncertain hand had inscribed a message in capital letters. As he read the words aloud, Kovalski thought he could hear the voice of the Gospels.

  "Blessings on you, brothers! Brothers, you came to our aid when we had lost everything, when the light of hope had been extinguished in our hearts. You fed the hungry, clothed the naked, cared for those who were suffering. Thanks to you we have rediscovered our taste for life.

  "Brothers, from now on you will be our closest relatives. Your leaving fills us with sadness. We express our eternal gratitude to you and pray God that he will grant you a long life.

  The survivors of the cyclone"

  One morning, some weeks after this catastrophe, the City of Joy and all the other districts of Calcutta seethed with an unaccustomed excitement. Woken with a start by the explosion of firecrackers and the sound of shouting, a H out of his room. Outside he found his neigh-

  bors singing, shouting, congratulating one another, dancing, and clapping their hands. Children chased one another with shrieks of joy. Exultant in their happiness, people were offering one another sweetmeats and cups of tea. Youngsters were exploding fireworks over the roofs. Since no festival had been forecast for that day, the American could not help wondering what the reason was for this sudden outburst of morning enthusiasm. Then he saw Bandona racing toward him with a garland of flowers in her hands. He had never seen the young Assamese girl so cheerful. Her small almond eyes sparkled with joy. 'These scourged, humiliated, starved, broken people are truly indestructible," he thought with amazement. "Their zest for life, their capacity for hope, their will to survive enables them to triumph over all the maledictions of their karma."

  "Max, Big Brother, have you heard the news?" the Angel of the City of Joy called out breathlessly. "We've won! Now we're as strong as the people in your country, as strong as the Russians, the Chinese, the British.. . We shall be able to irrigate our fields, to harvest our rice several times a year, and to put lighting in our villages and slums. We shall all be able to eat to our heart's content. There will be no more poor people. Our great Durga Indira Gandhi has just made an announcement on the radio: this morning we exploded our first atomic bomb!"

  Epilogue

  The living conditions of the inhabitants of the City of Joy have improved conspicuously since the events recorded in this book. A young French teacher went one day to visit the slum. On her return to her home city, she talked to her students with so much emotion about what she had seen that they helped her to found an organization whose members would undertake each year to send a sum of money to the Committee of Mutual Aid in the slum. The organization was soon to include three hundred people. An article subsequently appeared in the French magazine La Vie, which would multiply the number of members by ten. One year later, a second article again doubled the membership. Donations now provided by some seven thousand members of the organization made it possible to set up in the slum a proper medical-social infrastructure. Dr. Sen, a Bengali doctor with a generous heart, who had been treating the poor free of charge for thirty years, was to become the committee's president. Later two young French people, in love with India, went to live out there to bring new strength and impetus to the team. Dispensaries, homes for rickety 504

  children, maternity clinics, soup kitchens for the old and the needy, training centers for adolescents, and workshops to teach adults skills were gradually set up by the residents themselves with the help of funds sent out from Europe. Campaigns were launched to detect and vaccinate against tuberculosis. This action extended beyond the walls of the City of Joy: rural development programs also introduced irrigation, dug wells, and set up dispensaries in several impoverished and deprived areas of Bengal. It was naturally to the handful of Indians who had assembled one evening in Kovalski's room to "think about the possibility of helping others" that people appealed to create and run all these centers. Today it is Bandona, Saladdin, Ajit, Margareta, Aristotle John, and some two hundred and fifty Indian social workers, nurses, and instructors, helped by local doctors and a few foreign volunteers, who form the mainsprings of this network of mutual help, aid, care, and education.

  For their part, the Bengal government and the Calcutta municipality have not been sparing in their efforts. With the help of funds lent by the World Bank, a vast rehabilitation program was launched in the slums. The alleyways of the City of Joy were paved over, some of them were raised, new latrines were dug, piped wells were sunk, electric cables were extended. These benefits were to have unforeseen consequences. The fact that rickshaws and taxis could now gain access to the interior of the slum, encouraged employees, small business men, and traders to seek premises in the City of Joy. Indeed, situated only a ten minutes' walk away from the great Howrah Railway station and so close to the center of Calcutta, the slum constituted a much more convenient location than the new residential suburbs constructed fifteen to twenty miles
out of the city. Rents suddenly shot up, and the number of jeweler-usurers multiplied tenfold in less than two years, a sign of certain economic change. Unscrupulous entrepreneurs became caught up in unbridled speculation. Three-or four-story apartment buildings began to crop up and many of the poor had to leave.

  The first victims of this new situation were the lepers. The change of government in Bengal deprived the godfa-

  ther of the support he had hitherto enjoyed. A new Mafia installed itself in the City of Joy and it decreed the expulsion of the lepers. They left in small groups, without protest or violence. Kovalski succeeded in rehousing Anouar, his wife and children, and the majority of his friends in one of Mother Teresa's homes. To compensate for the lepers' eviction, the eight thousand buffalo in the cattle sheds were allowed to remain. They still form part of the population of the City of Joy.

  Three weeks after the cyclone, Ashish and Shanta Ghosh returned with their children to their devastated village on the edge of the Sundarban forest. With a courage and application strengthened by their hard apprenticeship in the slum, they rebuilt their hut, cleaned up their fields, and returned to their life as peasants. Their experience of sharing spurred them into taking an even closer interest in their neighbors' lot. Shanta started up several craft workshops for the women of the village while her husband founded an agricultural cooperative which was markedly to improve the resources of the people living in that particularly destitute area.

  Sadly, the example of this family was to remain almost unique. Rare indeed were the occupants of the City of Joy who have to this day managed to escape their hovels and return to the countryside. Recent developments have, however, introduced certain elements of fresh hope. A distinct decline has been recorded in the number of poor peasants fleeing to Calcutta, a fact that may be explained in terms of a marked improvement in the yield provided by Bengali agriculture. Today, in more than half the province, two annual rice harvests are produced, and approximately a quarter of the territory even manages three. This transformation has enabled hundreds of thousands of landless peasants to find work where they live nearly all the year round. Furthermore, whereas twenty years ago Calcutta represented the only hope of finding work in the whole of Northeast India, the implantation of new industrial centers in Orissa, Bihar, and other provinces in that area has

  created new labor sites that have considerably reduced emigration to Calcutta. Thus, provided there are no further major catastrophes, it is possible to hope for a stabilization of the population of Calcutta, and perhaps even for the beginning of a future reflux of the slum dwellers to the countryside of their origin.

  Max Loeb went back to America. Speaking of his experiences, he declared that except perhaps for a trip to the moon, a stay in an Indian slum was the most extraordinary adventure a man of the twentieth century could live through. Other young doctors, male and female, have continued to come from all over the world to give several months of their lives to the residents of the City of Joy. As for Max, his stay has transformed his perception of life and his relationships with others. He continued to keep in close contact with Kovalski. Together with Sylvia, now his wife, he has founded an organization to send medicines and medical equipment to the Committee for Mutual Aid. Above all, however, Max returns regularly to visit his friends in Anand Nagar. Again and again he likes to say, "The smiles of my brothers in the City of Joy are lights that will never be extinguished in me."

  One day, Aloka, Hasari Pal's widow, brought Stephan Kovalski a brown envelope covered with official stamps.

  "Big Brother Stephan, a registered letter arrived for you this morning," she announced.

  Kovalski saw instantly that it came from the Home Ministry. With a pounding heart, he opened it. "Dear God," he shuddered, "I'll bet the government is kicking me out." Anxiously he scanned the type, until suddenly his eyes fell on words that he had to reread several times before he grasped their meaning. "The Government of India hereby grants the said Stephan Kovalski the certificate of..." The letter went on to declare that after he had pledged his loyalty at the time appointed and according to

  the regulations prescribed by the law, he would be entitled to all the privileges, prerogatives, and rights and would be subject to all the obligations, duties, and responsibilities of an Indian citizen.

  "An Indian citizen," stammered the Pole. To him it was as if all at once the heart of the slum were beating in his chest. Seized with vertigo, he leaned against the pillar of the veranda and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he took hold of the cross he wore, around his neck and gazed at the two dates his mother had had inscribed upon it, that of his birth and that of his ordination. His vision dimmed by tears of happiness, he considered then the little blank space in front of the Indian name he had had engraved several years previously. This was the name that, on the day of his citizenship, would replace that of Stephan Kovalski. In Hindi, as in Bengali, ' Premanand" meant "Blessed is he who is loved by God." It summed up perfectly the meaning of his relationship with the humble, the poor, and the broken individuals that were the people of the City of Joy. Next to the patronym which henceforth would be his, he would this very day add the date of his final entry into that great family of his Indian brothers, for this was the third most important day in his life.

  AFTERWORD

  My love story with the City of Joy

  That very first monsoon morning when I walked into it, I knew that this wretched inhuman slum of Calcutta called the City of Joy was one of the most extraordinary places on our planet. When I left it two years later with some 20 pads fall of notes and hundreds of hours of tape, I knew I had the material for the greatest book of my career, an epic on heroism, love, and faith, a glorious tribute to man's capacity to beat adversity and survive every possible tragedy. During this long, difficult, and sometimes painful research, I had to adjust to all sorts of situations. I learned how to live with rats, scorpions, and insects, to survive on a few spoons of rice and two or three bananas a day, to queue up for hours for the latrines, to wash with less than a pint of water, to light a match in the monsoon, to share my living quarters with a group of eunuchs. Before being adopted by the inhabitants of the slum, I had to learn their customs, experience their fears and plights, share their struggles and hopes. This certainly was one of the most extraordinary experiences that a writer could live. It changed my life. Living with the heroic inhabitants of the City of Joy completely transformed my sense of priorities and my

  assessment of the true values of life. After this confrontation with the reaF issues of existence—hunger, disease, total absence of work, etc.—I no longer fight for things like a parking place when I return to Europe or America. Sharing for all these months the lives of a population who has less than ten cents each per day to survive on also taught me the real value of things. Now I instinctively turn the electricity off when I leave a room, use my bar of soap to the very end, avoid throwing into the garbage can what can be saved or used again. These unique experiences also taught me the beauty of sharing with others. For two years nothing was asked of me but always given. The generosity of my friends in the City of Joy showed me that "everything that is not given is lost."

  It took me one full year to write the epic of the City of Joy. I wrote the book in my home in the South of France, in the beautiful and privileged privacy of Provence's pine woods and vineyards. To remind me constantly of the anthill of Calcutta, its noises, its smells, its colors, every day before I began writing I first looked at a few of the two thousand photographs I had taken and ran some of the tapes of the local life I had recorded.

  The final version of The City of Joy was first published in France, then in Spain, Italy, Holland, Germany, England, and the United States of America. Everywhere the success was immediate, enormous, and for me totally unexpected in its dimension.

  Although I was convinced I had written a wonderful epic, I was really surprised that this story of a Calcutta slum would shoot up so fast to the top of all best-seller li
sts. But even more surprising was the mail that began to pour into my Paris apartment. The local post office had to earmark a special employee to sort out the letters that thousands of readers began to send me from all over the world. Every one of these letters (more than forty thousand up to this day) was an homage of gratitude for having written The City of Joy. Many of them really touched me to the bottom of my heart and even drew tears from my wife and I (see excerpts of some of these letters on pages ii-v). In almost each of the envelopes was a check,

  sometimes a small package with a piece of jewelry, a gold ingot, or a stack of stock exchange shares. One letter contained a small anonymous message saying: 'The book The City of Joy is so beautiful that we are happy to send the enclosed items. Please sell them. They will be more useful in the City of Joy than around our fingers." Taped to the sheet of paper were two wedding rings.

  One day, as I was leaving my Paris apartment to rush to Charles de Gaulle airport to fly to New York, the door bell rang. Behind the door was an old lady with a travel bag. "I have just arrived by train from Toulouse," she said. "I have come here to write my will in favor of your heroes of the City of Joy." The story of these heroes has touched so many hearts that school kids have organized collections in their classes, or produced plays and shows on their behalf. Hundreds of readers have offered to adopt a child from the City of Joy, or to devote their next vacations to going there to help.