The City of Joy Read online

  This book made available by the Internet Archive.

  To T&tou, Gaston,

  Pierre, Franqois, James,

  and to "the lights of the world"

  of the City of Joy.

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  During frequent stays in Calcutta I was fortunate enough to meet some exceptional human beings. They have given me so much, and have had such an impact on my life, that I decided I wanted to tell a story about their lives, in a remarkable area of the world called the City of Joy.

  This story concerns men, women, and children who have been uprooted from their homes by implacable nature and hostile circumstances, and thrown into a city whose capacity for hospitality has been pushed beyond imagining. This is a story about how people learn, despite incredibly difficult odds, to survive, to share, and to love.

  My story about the City of Joy is based on two years of extensive research in Calcutta and various areas of Bengal. I was given access to personal diaries and correspondence, and the bulk of my research consisted of over two hundred lengthy interviews, conducted through interpreters in various languages including Hindi, Bengali, and Urdu. These interviews, which I transcribed into English and French, are the basis for the dialogues and testimonies in this book.

  The protagonists of the City of Joy wished to remain anonymous. Therefore, I have purposely changed the identities of some characters and certain situations. The story I tell here is, however, true to the confidences that the people of the City of Joy have shared with me, and to the spirit of this unusual place.

  This book, though the fruit of extensive research, does not pretend to speak for the whole of India. I have enormous aflFection for India, and great admiration for its intelligence, its achievements, its tenacity in overcoming difficulties. I know well its virtues, grandeurs, and diversity. The reader should not extend to the country as a whole impressions he gathers here of one small corner of it—a small area of Calcutta called the City of Joy.

  Dominique Lapierre

  ^J^VlJ^
  PART ONE

  You Are the Light of the World

  He had the appearance of a Mogul warrior: thick shock of curly hair, sideburns which met the drooping curve of his mustache, a strong, stocky torso, long muscular arms and slightly bowed legs. Yet thirty-two-year-old Hasari Pal was merely a peasant, one of the five hundred or so million inhabitants of India who were looking to the goddess Earth for their livelihood.

  He had built his two-roomed hut with mud walls and a thatched roof; it was a short distance away from the village of Bankuli, West Bengal, a state in northeast India almost as large as the State of Indiana and five times as populated as Illinois. His wife, Aloka, was a young woman with a clear complexion and the look of an angel. The wing of her nose was pierced with a gold ring and her ankles were ornamented with bangles that jangled as she walked. She had given him three children. The eldest, twelve-year-old Amrita, had inherited her father's almond eyes and her mother's peach skin. Ten-year-old Manooj and six-year-old Shambu were two sturdy boys with black tousled hair who would far rather chase lizards around the pond than guide the buffalo into the family rice field. In the peasant's

  home there lived also Hasan's father, Prodip, a gaunt man with a lined face, barred with a thin, gray mustache; his mother Nalini, a bent old woman as wrinkled as a walnut; his two younger brothers with their wives and children—in all, sixteen people.

  Openings set very low in the framework of the hut maintained a certain degree of coolness in the torrid summer, and a little warmth during the chilly winter nights. Shaded by red-and-white bougainvilleas, a narrow veranda ran the length of two of the hut's sides.

  Seated beneath a sloping porch roof, Aloka was pedaling at a kind of wooden seesaw with a pestle fixed to its end, a machine which served to husk the rice. Tick-tack, tick-tack, as the pedal for the rice machine rose and fell, her daughter, Amrita, pushed new handfuls of grain under the pestle. The rice, removed from its husk, was picked up and sorted by the grandmother. As soon as she had a basketful she went to empty it at the gola, a small silo, set on piles in the middle of the courtyard. Its loft was on two levels and served simultaneously as a granary and a dovecote.

  All around the hut the golden rice plantations stretched as far as the eye could see, sprinkled with the dark green of mango orchards, the light green of palm tree clusters and the soft green of bamboo groves, set at far distances from each other. Like sparkling lacework reflecting the blue of the sky, irrigation canals stitched the landscape tightly into squares. Footbridges formed delicate arabesques over pools covered with lotuses, hyacinths, and ducks. Children with sticks drove great shining buffalo across the small dikes, stirring up an ocher-colored dust as they went. At the end of this stiflingly hot day, the reddening disk of Surya, the Sun god, was sinking beyond the horizon, and a welcome breeze was blowing in from the sea. From the vast, flat expanse of land resounded the joyous cry of a myriad birds swooping low over the rice tips in salute to the oncoming night. Bengal was indeed the celebrated jewel of troubadours and poets, a paradise where on moonlit nights the god Krishna came to play his flute with the gopis, his playmates, and to sweep his beloved wife, Radha, into his dance.

  With the disappearance of the sun, came "the hour of

  the cow dust M the time when the cattle came back from their grazing, the men returned from tne rice fields, and the chickens came home to roost. With his cotton loincloth tucked up between his legs to make it easier for him to walk, Hasari Pal whistled as he ambled peaceably along, carrying his wooden plow over his shoulder. As the night drew on, the doves redoubled their circling and cooing. In the tamarinds a tribe of mynahs, India's sparrows, struck up a deafening concert. Two squirrels striped with the 4 'three-finger marks of the god Rama" scampered about in the papaya. Herons and egrets made hastily for their nests. A mangy dog sniffed at the ground in search of a suitable place to spend the night. Then, gradually, the high-pitched squeak of the cicadas faded away. There was the last tick-tack of the rice machine—then silence, a silence that was almost immediately broken as the frogs started up their chorus. And above that there rose the rhythmic croak of a buffalo toad.

  In less than five minutes, the tropical night had descended upon the land. As she did every evening, Hasari's wife, Aloka, blew into a conch shell to greet the goddess of the night. One of her sisters-in-law rang a small bell to chase away the evil spirits, especially those who lived in the hundred-year-old banyan tree at the end of the road. The cow was tied up in the shanty that served as a stable. For a while a recalcitrant goat forced everyone to scatter about, trying to catch it. Eventually, however, order was restored and Hasari pulled a barbed gate across the entrance to the courtyard, to keep out jackals and foxes. Then his mother performed a ritual as ancient as India itself—she filled the oil in the lamp which burned before polychrome pictures of the tutelary gods: Rama and his wife Sita, goddess of the fruits of the earth; Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity seated on a lotus blossom; and Ganesh, the elephant-headed god of good fortune. Two other pictures, discolored by the years, showed the childlike face of Krishna, greedily swallowing a bowl of butter, a popular representation of the Cowherd god most dearly loved by the Hindu people; and the Monkey god, Hanuman, a legendary hero of some of the most prodigious adventures of Indian mythology.

  While the womenfolk cooked the meal outside over a

  clay oven, Hasari and his two brothers came and sat down beside their father under the veranda. The heady fragrance of jasmine bush embalmed the night that was pinpricked with the elusive lights of dancing fireflies. In a sky studded with stars a thin crescent moon was shining. It was "Shiva's moon/' the new moon of the benefactor of the world, the thousand-eyed god of prosperity. The four me
n were sitting, deeply immersed in silent meditation, when Hasari noticed his father observe his sons one after another. Then he heard the old peasant murmur as if to himself, "Coal doesn't change its color when you wash it. What can't be cured must be endured."

  The old man couldn't remember how many generations of lotuses had bloomed and faded in the pond since he was born. "My memory is like camphor. It evaporates with time," he would say. "There are so many things that I've forgotten. I am well advanced in years now and I do not know how many of the baskets of rice, filled by the gods of life at my birth, are left to me." What Prodip Pal did remember, however, was that he had once been a prosperous peasant. He had owned as many as six granaries full of rice and eight acres of fertile land. He had been able to provide for the future of his sons and give his elder daughters generous dowries to procure them good husbands. For himself and his wife in their old age, he had kept the strip of land and the house he had inherited from his father. "The pair of us should be able to live there in peace," he had promised her, "until the day when Yama, god of the dead, comes to claim us."

  The old man had been wrong in his expectations. That plot of ground had been given to his father years ago by a zemindar, a large landowner, in recognition of his devotion. One day this benefactor's heir laid claim to the land. Prodip Pal refused to return it; the matter came before the courts. But the young zamindar had bought the judge and the peasant was obliged to abandon his land and his house. To pay the legal costs, he even had to sacrifice the dowry

  saved for his last daughter and the plots of his two youngest sons. "That dishonest landowner had a heart harder than a jackal's,'' he had remarked.

  Fortunately his eldest son had been able to rescue the whole family under his own roof. Hasari was a good son. He did his utmost to convince his father that he was still the head of the family. The old man was indeed more familiar than anyone else with everyone's rights and duties, the local ways and customs and the boundaries of the rice fields and pastureland. He alone could maintain harmonious relations with the large landowners—a trump card of prime importance for the survival of a family of peasants. "Fishes can't afford to live on bad terms with the crocodiles in the pool," he often liked to say. Nevertheless, the fact remained that this man venerated by his children had lost everything. He was no longer under his own roof.

  "And yet I couldn't complain," he would concede. "It was true that I was a ruined man but I still had my three sons. What a blessing those sons were!" Thanks to them he still enjoyed those things which, for an Indian peasant, constitute wealth; a small rice granary, a stack of straw, two cows and a buffalo, a piece of land, a little grain kept in reserve in earthenware jars in case of hard times, even a few rupees in a money box. And what of his sons' wives? They too had brought happiness into the household. They were all three as beautiful as Parvati* and would all three make worthy mothers for the Pandavas.t The Pals might well be poor, but they were happy. Tomorrow the lotuses would be moist with dew. The time for the harvest would come and with it the season of hope. And on the old mowa trunk, the orchids would proclaim the glory of God.

  ♦Wife of the god Shiva.

  tFive brothers, heroes of the great epic, the Mahabharata.

  Yet further terrible trials lay in store for Prodip Pal and his family. Just as ten or twelve million other Bengali peasants during this second half of the twentieth century, they were to become the victims of that endemic phenomenon known to economists as the cycle of poverty—that unavoidable process of descending along the social ladder by which the farmer became a sharecropper, then a peasant without land, then an agricultural laborer, then, eventually forced into exile. It was no use even dreaming of climbing a step in the opposite direction. Here everyone had to fight merely to defend his existing status, which was under constant threat. Improvement of that status was quite inconceivable, for poverty can only engender greater poverty. If it is true that coal does not change its color when washed, it is equally true that poverty painted in even the most dazzling colors remains forever poverty.

  Their legal wrangles with the zamindar had left the Pals with only half of an acre of good land, on which to produce ten to twelve hundred pounds of rice. That constituted barely a quarter of what was actually necessary

  to feed the family. To make up the deficit, Prodip Pal and his sons managed to sharecrop another plot of land. Although some owners demanded three quarters of the harvest in payment, Prodip was able to retain half of it. This arrangement was of vital importance. When they would run out of rice, they would survive on the fruits from the three coconut trees and on the vegetables from the high ground that required very little irrigation, such as the 4 'serpent gourds," a kind of cucumber that measured up to six feet in length, marrows, and giant radishes. There were also the fruits from the jackfruit tree, some of which weighed nearly four pounds. The Pals were thus able to survive for two years. They even managed to buy two goats. And they regularly gave thanks to the gods, taking offerings to the little temple built at the foot of the most ancient banyan tree in the village.

  During the third year, however, disaster struck once more. A parasite destroyed the entire field of rice in midgrowth. To overcome this catastrophe, the father set out on the path that led to the only brick house of the village. Its tiled roof dominated the other huts.

  Nearly all the inhabitants of Bankuli had been compelled at some time or other to call on the mahajan, the jeweler-usurer, a potbellied man with a skull as smooth and shiny as a billiard ball. No matter how much distaste he provoked, the mahajan of Bankuli was, here as elsewhere in India, the key person in the village. He was its banker, its moneylender, its pawnbroker, and, very often, its vampire. By mortgaging the family field, Hasari's father obtained the loan of four hundred pounds of rice on condition that he would return six hundred after the first harvest. It was a year of great deprivation for the Pals. But "as the tortoise moves forward with difficulty to attain his objective," they succeeded in "turning the page of the god of life." Because of his debts and the inability of buying enough seed, the two following years were nothing short of a nightmare. One of Hasari's brothers had to give up his sharecropping and take a job as an agricultural laborer. By this time the cycle of poverty had really begun to strangle the Pals. Bad weather added to their plight. One night in April, a storm brought down all the mangoes and coco-

  nuts. Consequently they had to sell the buffalo and Rani, one of the two cows, despite the fact that they were so useful during the working season. Rani obviously did not want to leave. She strained at her rope with all her might, uttering the most heart-rending bellows. No one could fail to read in her reaction a bad omen, a sign that Radha, beloved of the Cowherd god Krishna, was angry.

  The departure of the animals deprived the Pal family of part of their precious daily milk and, above all, of the indispensable dung, which when mixed with chopped straw and fashioned into cakes was dried in the sun and used as fuel for cooking food. Every day Hasari's daughter and her cousins had to go out in search of replacement dung. Manna as precious as this, however, did not simply belong to anyone who cared to pick it up, and the villagers chased them away. And so they learned to be secretive and steal it. From dawn to dusk, Amrita's brothers scoured the countryside, with their elder cousins, in search of anything to eat or turn into cash. They picked fruits and wild berries. They collected dead wood and acacia twigs which Indians use to clean their teeth. They caught fish in the pools. They made garlands of wild flowers. And they took these meager treasures to the market which was held three times a week, seven miles from their house.

  Two further incidents were to aggravate the Pals' financial difficulties. Weakened by the lack of food, Hasari's youngest brother fell ill. One day he began to cough blood. For such a poor people illness was more of a curse even than death. A doctor's fee and the cost of medicine could take several months' income. And so, to save his brother, Hasan resorted to the only remaining course of action: he broke open his baked clay money bo
x and ran to the village priest begging him to intervene with destiny, by celebrating a special puja, a ceremony of offering to the gods.

  The boy regained sufficient strength to take part in the second event of that year which was to sink his family a little further into destitution: the marriage of his youngest sister. The girl's aging father had at last found her a husband, and nothing was to prevent the wedding festivities from proceeding according to the traditional ritual.

  How many millions of Indian families, for generations, have been ruined by the marriages of their daughters? First there was the dowry, an ancestral custom officially abolished since Independence, but one that still prevailed in practice. The small farmer with whom Hasari's father had negotiated the marriage of his last daughter had demanded one bicycle, two cotton loincloths, a transistor, and half an ounce of gold, plus a few jewels for the young bride—all under the guise of a dowry. In total his requirements amounted to a good thousand rupees (some one hundred U.S. dollars).

  Custom required, furthermore, that the girl's father, alone, covers the cost of the ceremony, which meant finding another thousand rupees to feed the families and their guests, and buy presents for the officiating Brahmin. For these poor people it was a cruel bloodletting, but the marriage of a daughter is a sacred duty for a father. Once his last daughter had left home, the old man would have completed his task on earth. Then at last he would be able to await in peace the visitation of Yama, god of the dead.

  Prodip Pal went back to the usurer to ask for a new loan of two thousand rupees. As collateral, he took with him his family's only assets, his wife, Nalini's last remaining jewels: a pendant with matching gold earrings and two silver bracelets. The old woman had received these ornaments on the occasion of her own marriage, according to that same custom of the dowry. If it was a cruel system, it was also a form of provision for the future, in fact the only method of family savings in India. The sum loaned by the mahajan represented only half the actual value of the items, at a rate of interest that was astronomical: 5 percent per month, 60 percent for one year! The poor woman had little hope of seeing her jewels again—jewels that she had worn with such pride on feast days during the forty years of her life with Prodip Pal.