The City of Joy Read online

  Hasari stooped down and touched his father's feet. The small man laid his palm on his son's head, then on his

  shoulder, and gripped him tightly until Hasan stood up again. The women wept in silence.

  Next morning, as the first rays of Surya, the Sun god, dawned pale on the horizon, Hasari and his family set off, without venturing to look back at those who watched them go. Hasari walked in front with Amrita, his daughter. His wife, Aloka, dressed in a green cotton sari, followed behind with their two sons, Manooj and Shambu. Over his shoulder Hasari carried a cloth knapsack in which his wife had packed a little linen and the sandals he had received from her parents as part of her dowry. It was the first time these peasants had left their village for so distant a destination. The two boys pranced for joy at the prospect of adventure. "As for me, I was frightened," Hasari was to admit, "frightened of what laid in store for us."

  After a morning of walking, several hours in a swaying bus, and a night in a packed third-class train compartment, Hasari Pal and his family arrived at Howrah Station, one of Calcutta's two railway terminals. They were so stunned at the spectacle that confronted them that for several seconds they were unable to move. They were suddenly engulfed into a tide of people coming and going in all directions, of coolies bearing mountains of cases and packages, of vendors offering every conceivable sort of merchandise. Never before had they seen such riches: pyramids of oranges, sandals, combs, scissors, padlocks, glasses, bags; piles of shawls, saris, dhotis, newspapers, and of all kinds of food and drink. Wandering monks called Saddhus mingled among the travelers and for a twenty-pa/ms coin (two U.S. cents) would lay hands on them or pour a few drops of holy water from the Ganges into their mouths. Shoe shiners, ear cleaners, cobblers, public writers, and astrologers were all there, oflFering their services. Hasari and his family were dazed, dumbfounded, lost. Many of the other travelers around them seemed equally confused. 22

  "What are we going to do?" the peasant asked himself. "Where are we going to sleep tonight?"

  For a while the Pals wandered about in the midst of the throng. They gazed curiously at a family who appeared to have made their home in a corner of the main hall. They were peasants from the State of Bihar, driven there like the Pals by the drought, and they understood a little Bengali. They had been living here now for several weeks. Besides their carefully tied bundles they had set out their cooking utensils and a chula, a small portable stove. They were quick to put the newcomers on their guard against the police who often raided the station to turn out anyone camping there. Hasari questioned them about the possibility of finding work, but they had found nothing themselves yet. To avoid dying of starvation they admitted to having been reduced to putting their children out on the streets to beg. The shame of it was written on their faces. Hasari explained that a young man from his village was working as a coolie in the market of the Bara Bazar and that he was going to try and make contact with him. The Biharis suggested that Hasari leave his wife and children with them while he went off to make inquiries. Comforted by the goodwill of these strangers, Hasari went to buy some samosas, triangular-shaped fritters filled with vegetables or minced meat, which he shared with his new friends, his wife, and his children; they had eaten nothing since the previous day. Then he plunged resolutely into the flood of travelers emerging from the railway station.

  The sight of this newly arrived peasant provoked an immediate tidal wave. A horde of pedlars surrounded Hasari with offers of ballpoint pens, sweetmeats, lottery tickets, and a thousand other wares. Beggars assaulted him. Lepers clung to his shirt. Outside the station a cyclone of trucks, buses, taxis, handcarts, scooters, cycle rickshaws, horse carriages, motorbikes, and bicycles swirled in a kind of collective madness. They crawled forward at a walking pace, amid a terrifying, chaotic racket. The honking of carrier tricycles, the tooting of horns, the throbbing of engines, buses' horns, cart bells, carriage bells, the clammering of loudspeakers, it was like a competition to see who could make the most noise. "It was worse than

  the thunder that heralds the first drops of the monsoon," Hasari would say. "I thought my head was going to burst."

  In the middle of all this commotion, he spotted an impassive policeman who was trying to direct the traffic. He fought his way over to him to inquire where the bazaar was where his acquaintance was working. The policeman waved his club in the direction of an entanglement of metal girders which soared heavenward at the far end of the square. "On the other side of the bridge!" he growled.

  This bridge was the only link between the twin cities of Calcutta and Howrah. It stretched across the Hooghly River, a tributary of the Ganges, and was undoubtedly the most congested bridge in the world.

  Over a million people and hundreds of thousands of vehicles crossed it every day in a hallucinating maelstrom. Hasari Pal was swept up at once in a stream of people who were pushing their way in different directions between two unbroken lines of vendors squatting on the ground behind displayed wares. In the six lanes of traffic, hundreds of vehicles were completely stuck in one gigantic bottleneck that stretched as far as the eye could see. Trucks roared in an attempt to overtake the line of streetcars. Red double-decker buses were overloaded with people, who clung in clusters to their sides. Some of the buses leaned over at such extreme angles that they looked as if at any moment they would tip over altogether. There were handcarts too, crawling along beneath piles of crates, pipes, and machinery and propelled by poor fellows whose muscles looked as if they were about to burst. Coolies, their faces distorted with the strain, trotted along with baskets and packages piled up on their heads. Others transported drums affixed to either end of a long pole lying on their shoulders. Herds of buffalo, cows, and goats, driven along with sticks, attempted to wend their way through the labyrinth of vehicles. Often the panic-stricken animals escaped in all directions. "How those poor beasts must be suffering," Hasari commented to himself, recalling with nostalgia the tranquil beauty of his countryside.

  On the other side of the bridge the traffic seemed even more congested. Suddenly Hasari noticed a small cart on

  two wheels, transporting two passengers. Between the shafts there was a man. "Good God," he thought, "there are even human horses in Calcutta!" Hasari had just discovered his first rickshaw.

  The nearer he drew to the bazaar, the more there were of these curious little vehicles lugging people about, or merchandise, or both. As his gaze followed their progress he began dreaming. "Would I have the strength to earn a living for my family by pulling such a machine?"

  The Bara Bazar was an area swarming with crowds, and where the houses rose several floors high, so high in fact that Hasari was amazed that they managed to keep standing. The network of small streets, covered alleys, and narrow passageways lined with hundreds of stalls, workshops, and shops was like a beehive humming with activity. Entire streets were taken up with vendors selling ornaments and garlands of flowers. Squatting behind mountains of Bengal roses, jasmine, Indian pinks, and marigolds, children threaded buds and petals like strings of pearls to make up garlands as thick as pythons. Their pendants too were made out of flowers and interlaced with gold thread. Savoring the fragrance of these flowers, Hasari bought for ten paisas a handful of rose petals to put on the lingam of Shiva, the benevolent and terrible god of the Hindu religion, that he encountered in a niche on a street corner. He paused for a moment before the black, cylindrical stone that symbolized the forces of life and asked the god who knew the whereabouts of truth to help him to find the person he sought.

  Farther on Hasari passed through an arcade where dozens of stalls sold nothing but perfume contained in a multitude of vials and colored bottles. Then he entered a covered alleyway where, amid the glitter of gold and small glassware, all he could see were jewelers. He could hardly believe his eyes. There were hundreds of them, lined up like prisoners behind the bars of the cages containing their treasures. Women decked out in costly saris pressed themselves against the bars; the merchants seemed never to stop
unlocking and locking the safes behind them. They handled their minute scales with surprising agility. Hasari also saw several poorer women, wearing darned veils, jostling

  to get near the grills. Here, as in the villages, the jewelers were also userers.

  Beyond this street of the mahajans lay the saris market. Women lingered over sumptuous displays, particularly in the stores that specialized in wedding attire, saris that dripped with gold and spangles.

  The sun that day was overpowering and the water vendors, ringing their small bells, were doing good business. Hasari gave five paisas (one half of a U.S. cent) to one of them to quench his thirst. Ever watchful, he scrutinized every coolie and tradesman and questioned all the bearers, but only a miracle could help him to find his friend in such a seething mass. Nonetheless he pursued his search until nightfall. "Working a ten-acre rice field was less tiring than that endless trek through the bazaar," he would later recall. Exhausted, he bought five bananas and asked the way back to the great bridge.

  His children swooped on the bananas, like starving sparrows and the whole family went to sleep on the railway station floor. Fortunately, the police did not raid the place that night.

  Next morning Hasari took his eldest son, Manooj, with him and together they explored another section of the Bara Bazar: first the metalworkers' and tinsmiths' corner, then the workshops where dozens of men and children with bare torsos spent their day rolling bidis, the thin Indian cigarettes. So dim was the light inside the rooms that the faces were hardly distinguishable. Hasari gave the name and description of his friend to anyone who was prepared to listen but it was like looking for a grain of rice in a bundle of straw. There were probably hundreds of coolies also called Prem Kumar and answering to his description. That second evening Hasari again took some bananas back with him. The Pals shared them with the neighboring family who had nothing to eat.

  After the third day of searching, with no more money to buy bananas, Hasari was reduced to an act of supreme humiliation for a proud peasant. Before making his way back to the railway station, he picked up all the peelings and scraps he could find. "That evening my wife suggested that our daughter, Amrita, go to beg at the entrance to the

  station. Overwhelmed with shame and despair, she wept as she spoke. We were peasants, not beggars." The Pals could not reconcile themselves to so abhorrent an idea. For one more day and night they waited but, as dawn broke on the following day, they sent their little girl and her two brothers to take up their positions where the rich travelers got out of their taxis and private cars.

  Then, dejected, Hasari returned to the Bara Bazar. As he was passing a workshop where some coolies were loading iron bars onto a telagarhi, a long handcart, one of the coolies suddenly began to vomit blood. His companions laid him out on the ground. He was so pale that Hasari thought the man was dead. When the workshop owner came out, shouting because the telagarhi had not yet gone, Hasari rushed forward and offered to replace the ailing coolie. The man hesitated but his delivery could not wait any longer and he offered three rupees for the run, payable on arrival.

  Without really realizing what was happening to him, Hasari braced himself with the others to shift the heavy load. Their employer had carefully avoided to mention that their destination was a factory situated on the other side of the great bridge, well beyond the railway station. The coolies fought like beasts to pull the heavy load across, but to no avail. Halfway up the slope their vehicle came to a standstill. Hasari thought the blood vessels in his neck were going to burst. A policeman came and threatened the men with his stick because they were holding up traffic. "Get out of the way!" he yelled, covering the tooting horns. In response the eldest of the coolies bent down to put all his weight against one wheel and shouted to the others to drive them forward.

  Exhausted but proud at the prospect of surprising his family with his first earnings, Hasari returned to the railway station late that evening. It was he, however, for whom the real surprise lay in store. His wife and children had disappeared. So too had the other family. After a long search he eventually found them on an embankment behind the bus terminal. "The police chased us out," explained Aloka, through her tears. "They said if they ever saw us in the station again, they'd throw us into prison."

  The Pals had no idea where to go next. They crossed the great bridge and simply kept on walking. It was dark but, despite the late hour, the streets were full of people. Bewildered by the throngs that milled about like ants, jostling each other and shouting, they reached a place in the very heart of the city. Pitiful in her poor peasant sari, Aloka had taken her youngest son in her arms and held her daughter by the hand. Manooj, the eldest boy, walked in front with his father. They were so afraid of losing each other that they called out constantly to one another in the darkness. The pavement was littered with sleeping people, wrapped from head to toe in bits of khadi cloth. They looked like corpses. As soon as they found an empty space, the Pals stopped to rest a while. A family was camping nearby. The mother was roasting chapatis on a portable stove. She and her family came from Madras. Fortunately, they spoke a few words of Hindi, a language Hasari could vaguely understand. They too had left the countryside for the mirage of Calcutta. They offered the Pals a hot griddle cake and swept a corner of the pavement so that the newcomers could settle themselves next to them. The strangers' hospitality brought new warmth to the peasant's heart. At least his family would be safe in their company until he found work. That afternoon he had learned a harsh lesson: "Since men in this inhuman city die on the job, I'll be damned if I can't manage one day to replace one of these dead."

  The city that Hasari had not hesitated to describe as "inhuman" was in fact a mirage city, to which in the course of one generation six million starving people had come in the hope of feeding their families. In the nineteen sixties, Calcutta was still, despite its decline over the previous half century, one of the most active and prosperous cities in Asia. Thanks to its harbor and its numerous industries, its metal foundries and chemical and pharmaceutical works, its flour mills and its lines, jute, and cotton factories, Calcutta boasted the third highest average wages per inhabitant of any Indian city, immediately after Delhi and Bombay. One third of the imports and nearly half of India's exports passed along the waters of the Hooghly, the branch of the Ganges on the banks of which the city had been founded three centuries earlier. Here, 30 percent of the entire country's bank transactions were undertaken and a third of its income tax was levied. Nicknamed the "Ruhr of India," its hinterland produced twice as much coal as France and as much steel as the combines of North Korea. Calcutta drained into its factories and warehouses all the material resources of this vast

  territory: copper, manganese, chromium, asbestos, bauxite, graphite, and mica as well as precious timber from the Himalayas, tea from Assam and Darjeeling, and almost 50 percent of the world's jute.

  From this hinterland also converged each day on the city's bazaars and markets an uninterrupted flow of foodstuffs: cereals and sugar from Bengal, vegetables from Bihar, fruit from Kashmir, eggs and poultry from Bangladesh, meat from Andra, fish from Orissa, shellfish and honey from the Sundarbans, tobacco and betal from Patna, cheeses from Nepal. Vast quantities of other items and materials also fed one of the most diversified and lively trading centers in Asia. No fewer than two hundred and fifty different varieties of cloth were to be counted in the bazaars of Calcutta and more than five thousand colors and shades of saris. Before reaching this mecca of industry and commerce, these goods had often to cross vast areas that were extremely poor, areas where millions of small peasants like the Pals scratched a desperate living out of infertile patches of land. How could those poor not dream, each time disaster struck, to take the same road as those goods?

  The metropolis was situated at the heart of one of the world's richest yet at the same time most ill-fated regions, an area of failing or devastating monsoons causing either drought or biblical floods. This was an area of cyclones and apocalyptic earthquakes, an are
a of political exoduses and religious wars such as no other country's climate or history has perhaps ever engendered. The earthquake that shook Bihar on January 15, 1937, caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and catapulted entire villages in the direction of Calcutta. Six years later a famine killed three and a half million people in Bengal alone and ousted millions of refugees. India's independence and the Partition in 1947 cast upon Calcutta some four million Muslims and Hindus fleeing from Bihar and East Pakistan. The conflict with China in 1962, and subsequently the war against Pakistan, washed up a further several hundred thousand refugees; and in the same year, 1965, a cyclone as forceful as ten three-megaton H-bombs capable of razing to the ground a city like New York, together with a

  dreadful drought in Bihar, once more sent to Calcutta entire communities.

  Now, it was yet another drought that was driving thousands of starving peasants like the Pals to the city.

  The arrival of these successive waves of destitute people had transformed Calcutta into an enormous concentration of humanity. In a few years the city was to condemn its ten million inhabitants to living on less than twelve square feet of space per person, while the four or five million of them who squeezed into its slums had sometimes to make do with barely three square feet each. Consequently Calcutta had become one of the biggest urban disasters in the world—a city consumed with decay in which thousands of houses and many new buildings, sometimes ten floors high or even higher, threatened at any moment to crack and collapse. With their crumbling facades, tottering roofs, and walls eaten up with tropical vegetation, some neighborhoods looked as if they had just been bombed. A rash of posters, publicity and political slogans, and advertisement billboards painted on the walls, defied all efforts at renovation. In the absence of an adequate garbage collection service, eighteen hundred tons of refuse accumulated daily in the streets, attracting a host of flies, mosquitoes, rats, cockroaches, and other creatures.