The City of Joy Page 5
showed a maharajah sleeping snugly on a thick mattress. From his dreamland he inquired solicitously, "Have you ever thought of a Simmons mattress as a present?"
Maya's father and Hasari Pal did not return for several hours and when they did it was without the little girl. Instantly something about her husband's behavior surprised Aloka. The same man who had seemed so exhausted before he left was now full of life. Maya's father was in the same state. Without uttering a word, they sat down on the pavement and began to laugh. Aloka realized her husband had been drinking. "I was indignant," she would remember. "And my husband must have sensed my anger because he slunk back to the spot where he had been sleeping a few hours earlier like a penitent dog. Our neighbor did the same and I could tell by his wife's silence that the poor woman was used to this kind of situation." It was not really all that surprising. Like all the overpopulated cities, Calcutta was packed with seedy drinking and gambling dens where for a few paisas the poor could procure some foul concoction in which to drown their sorrows for a while.
Aloka spent the night trying to console the neighbor's wife. The woman's grief tore at her heart all the more acutely because she had just discovered that her eldest son, a boy of fifteen, was in prison. He had been going off every evening but coming back regularly each morning with about ten rupees. He belonged to an organized gang that looted railway cars. Two months earlier the police had come and arrested him. Since then the three youngest children had never stopped moaning that they were hungry. "Poor woman! A daughter lost God knows where, a drunken husband, a thief of a son behind bars. What a dreadful fate!" Aloka lamented, terrified at the thought that the same plight awaited her own family if her husband did not soon find work.
The dawn had just broken after a night of anxiety, when young Maya reappeared. Her mother reared up like a cobra. "Maya," she cried, clasping her child in her arms, "Maya, where have you been?"
The adolescent girl's face was shuttered, hostile. There were traces of red on her lips and she smelled of perfume.
Freeing herself from her mother's grasp and gesturing to her two small brothers, she handed her a ten-rupee note.
'Today they will not cry."
Three hundred thousand people stranded in this mirage city lived like those two families in the streets. Others crowded into the jumble of planks and daub that were its three thousand slums.
A slum was not exactly a shanty town. It was more like a sort of poverty-stricken industrial suburb inhabited exclusively by refugees from rural areas. Everything in these slums combined to drive their inhabitants to abjection and despair: shortage of work and chronic unemployment, appallingly low wages, the inevitable child labor, the impossibility of saving, debts that could never be redeemed, the mortgaging of personal possessions and their ultimate loss sooner or later. There was also the total nonexistence of any reserve food stocks and the necessity to buy in minute quantities—one cent's worth of salt, two or three cents' worth of wood, one match, a spoonful of sugar— and the total absence of privacy with ten or twelve people sharing a single room. Yet the miracle of these concentration camps, was that the accumulation of disastrous elements was counterbalanced by other factors that allowed their inhabitants not merely to remain fully human but 44
even to transcend their condition and become models of humanity.
In these slums people actually put love and mutual support into practice. They knew how to be tolerant of all creeds and castes, how to give respect to a stranger, how to show charity toward beggars, cripples, lepers, and even the insane. Here the weak were helped, not trampled upon. Orphans were instantly adopted by their neighbors and old people were cared for and revered by their children.
Unlike the occupants of shantytowns in other parts of the world, in these slums the former peasants who took refuge there were not marginals. They had reconstructed the life of their villages in their urban exile. An adapted and disfigured life perhaps—but nonetheless so real that their poverty itself had become a form of culture. The poor of Calcutta were not uprooted. They shared in a communal world and respected its social and religious values, maintaining their ancestral traditions and beliefs. Ultimately— and this was of primary importance—they knew that if they were poor it was not their fault, but the fault of the cyclical or permanent maledictions that beset the places where they came from.
One of the principal and oldest of Calcutta's slums was situated in the suburbs, a fifteen minutes' walk from the railway station where the Pal family first alighted. It was wedged between a railway embankment, the Calcutta-Delhi highway, and two factories. Either out of ignorance or defiance, the jute factory owner who, at the beginning of the century, had lodged his workers on this land which he had reclaimed from a fever-infested marsh, had christened the place Anand Nagar, "City of Joy." Since then the jute factory had closed its doors, but the original workers' estate had expanded to become a veritable city within a city. By now more than seventy thousand inhabitants had congregated on an expanse of ground hardly three times the size of a football field. That included some ten thousand families divided up geographically according to their various religious creeds. Sixty-three percent of them were Muslims, 37 percent Hindus, with here and there little islands of Sikhs, Jains, Christians, and Buddhists.
With its compounds of low houses constructed around
minute courtyards, its red-tiled roofs, and its rectilinear alleyways, the City of Joy did indeed look more like an industrial suburb than a shantytown. Nevertheless it boasted a sad record—it had the densest concentration of humanity on this planet, two hundred thousand people per square mile. It was a place where there was not even one tree for three thousand inhabitants, without a single flower, a butterfly, or a bird, apart from vultures and crows—it was a place where children did not even know what a bush, a forest, or a pond was, where the air was so ladened with carbon dioxide and sulphur that pollution killed at least one member in every family; a place where men and beasts baked in a furnace for the eight months of summer until the monsoon transformed their alleyways and shacks into lakes of mud and excrement; a place where leprosy, tuberculosis, dysentery and all the malnutrition diseases, until recently, reduced the average life expectancy to one of the lowest in the world; a place where eighty-five hundred cows and buffalo tied up to dung heaps provided milk infected with germs. Above all, however, the City of Joy was a place where the most extreme economic poverty ran rife. Nine out of ten of its inhabitants did not have a single rupee per day with which to buy half a pound of rice. Furthermore, like all other slums, the City of Joy was generally ignored by other citizens of Calcutta, except in case of crime or strike. Considered a dangerous neighborhood with a terrible reputation, the haunt of Untouchables, pariahs, social rejects, it was a world apart, living apart from the world.
Stranded there in the course of successive migrations, those who occupied this slum belonged to all the races of the Indian subcontinent. Afghans of the Turkish-Iranian type> pure Indo-Aryans from Kashmir and the Punjab, Christian Bettiahs, negroid Oryans, Mongoloids from Nepal, Tibeto-Burmese from Assam, aborigines, Bengalis, Afghan moneylenders, marwaris from Rajasthan, Sikhs proudly sporting their turbans, refugees from distant overpopulated Kerala —they were all there. So were several thousand Tamils from the South, who lived apart in wretched huts with dwarf pigs, their own customs, and their own language. Hindu sages were also to be seen there, installed in
small ashrams built out of planks; groups of Bauls, these wandering Bengali mystic monks in ocher robes, for whom the City of Joy was a port of call; Muslim Sufis with goatees, dressed all in white; all kinds of fakirs decked out in the most unlikely clothes, or indeed sometimes without any clothes at all; a few Parsee fire worshippers; and Jains with masks over their mouths to prevent their taking any life by accidentally swallowing an insect. There were even a number of Chinese dentists. And the mosaic would not be quite complete without the mention of a small colony of eunuchs. Then there were the families of the local Mafia lord
s, who held a controlling hand over the slum's activities, be it real estate speculation on the cattle sheds, illicit distillation of alcohol, eviction for nonpayment of rent, summary trials, punishments meted out for the slightest verbal offense, the black market, smoking dens, prostitution, drugs, or the control of union and political activity. A few Anglo-Indians, the descendants of children born of the union of casteless Indians and nonranking British soldiers, and a scattering of other ethnic groups completed the population of this Tower of Babel. Until recently only the white race of the Vikings and the Celts remained unrepresented in this ants' nest. One day, however, this gap was to be filled.
A few weeks after the arrival of the Pal family in Calcutta, it was the turn of a European to alight at the great glory hole of Howrah Station. With his thin mustache beneath a turned-up nose, his bare forehead, and relaxed walk and manner, he looked very much like the American actor Jack Nicholson. He was dressed in jeans and an Indian shirt, with basketball shoes on his feet, and his luggage was confined to a cloth knapsack slung over his shoulder. Only a black metal cross dangling on his chest at the end of a piece of cord denoted his status. The thirty-two-year-old Pole, Stephan Kovalski, was a Catholic priest. For him Calcutta was the culmination of a long journey that was begun in Krasnik, a little coal mining city of Poland's Silesia, where he was born in 1933. The son and grandson of mining men, Stephan Kovalski had spent his early childhood in the gloomy environment of the pit into which his father used to descend each morning. He had just reached the age of five when his father took the whole family by train to join a group of cousins who had immigrated to the North of France; there, salaries offered to coal miners were six or seven times higher than they 48
were in Poland. One evening in the summer of 1946, an ambulance had drawn up outside the entrance of the Kovalskis' mining home. Stephan had seen his father brought out of it. His head was wrapped up in bandages. It was the summer of the great strike which paralyzed all the pits of the Northern France coal basin. In the course of violent confrontations between the miners and the forces of law and order, Stephan Kovalski's father had suffered burns on his face and lost an eye. This traumatic experience had completely transformed this quiet and profoundly religious man. He rose up in rebellion against the suffering and the pain and took refuge in active, radical, and desperate revolt. A former militant of Catholic Workingmen's Action, he went over to join the ranks of the revolutionary Marxist League, an extreme left-wing organization. Recognizable at a distance because of the patch over his eye, he came to be nicknamed "the Pirate." He got himself mixed up in a number of serious incidents. There was talk of industrial terrorism and he was arrested. A few days later, the mayor of the locality came to inform Stephan's mother, a generous, sweet-natured Polish woman, that her husband had hanged himself in his cell.
The young Stephan had been a helpless witness to his father's metamorphosis. This suicide was a terrible shock for the adolescent boy. Stephan stopped eating, to the extent that people feared for his life. He shut himself away in his room to meditate before a picture of the Sacred Shroud of Tirin which his father had given him for his First Communion. The imprint of Christ's face after his removal from the Cross, together with a photograph of France's most famous female popular singer, Edith Piaf, and a few books including a life of Charles de Foucauld, an aristocrat and officer who had become a monk in the Sahara Desert, and a Polish translation of The Keys of the Kingdom by Cronin, were his only companions. One morning as he kissed his mother goodbye on leaving for school, he made an announcement, "Mother, I'm going to be a missionary."
Stephan Kovalski had been mulling over his decision for a long time. "There were two factors that drove me to it," he would recount years later. "The need to get away after
the death of my father but, above all, the desire to achieve by other means what he had attempted to accomplish by violence. At that time large numbers of new immigrants were working in the mines in the North of France: North Africans, Senegalese, Turks, Yugoslavs. My father, who never forgot he had been an immigrant himself, had enrolled them all in his revolutionary organization. It had become their family and he was something of a father to them. Some of them used to spend the evening at our house when they came out of the pit. There wasn't any television yet, so people talked—about everything, but especially about justice, solidarity, fraternity, about what they needed most. One day a Senegalese immigrant challenged my father: 'You're always saying you're close to us but do you really know anything about us? Why don't you go and live for a while in an African shantytown or in our poor countryside? Then you'd have a better idea of why we were forced to leave and come here to break up stones all day at the bottom of a mine.' I had never forgotten what this man had said."
The African's suggestion influenced the boy profoundly. Several years previously, during the cruel summer of 1940, Stephan had been devastated by the sight of the exodus of Belgian refugees, fleeing before the German armies on the road that ran along the back of the miners' estate. After school he had rushed off to take those wretched people something to drink. Later he witnessed the Nazi roundups of Jewish children. Together with his parents, he threw them bread and cheese from the family's own rations, underneath the barbed wire. All through the war these working-class people had shared their meager resources with others. Stephan Kovalski's vocation to serve was born out of this very revolt against injustice, and out of the life of love and sharing in which he had grown up.
On leaving the mining community, he spent three years at a small seminary in Belgium. The religious instruction he received there seemed to him far removed from everyday exigencies, but deeper study of the gospel reinforced his desire to identify himself with the plight of the poor. Each vacation period he went home to embrace his mother before hitchhiking on to the Paris area where he sought out
a kind of bearded saint. At that time the Abb6 Pierre, a French priest who was also a member of Parliament, with his old beret on his head and his rag and bone disciples at his side, provided help for the most needy with the proceeds from the sale of anything they could salvage, by clearing out the cellars and attics of the more privileged.
Later, at the Louvain seminary in Belgium, Kovalski met the man who was to give a definitive direction to his journey. Padre Ignacio Fraile belonged to a Spanish order founded in the last century by a priest from the province of Asturias, now being considered for beatification by the Vatican. The Fraternity of San Vincente gathered together priests and consecrated laymen who took the vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and charity in order to "seek out the poorest of the poor and the disinherited in the places where they are, to share their life, and to die with them." Small communities of priests and brothers sprung up in the industrial suburbs of numerous cities in Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, everywhere in fact where people were suffering. There were several in France itself.
Stephan Kovalski was ordained a priest on August 15, 1960, on the Feast of the Virgin Mary. He was just twenty-seven years old. That very evening he caught a train to spend a few hours with his mother, who had been in the hospital for three months, suffering from cardiac problems. Before embracing her son for a last time, she gave him a carefully wrapped box. Inside it, on a bed of cotton wool, he found a black metal cross engraved with two dates: that of his birth and that of his ordination. "Never be parted from it, my boy," she said to him, clasping her son's hand in her own. "This cross will protect you wherever you go."
Knowing that the most forsaken people were to be found not in Europe but in the third world, Stephan Kovalski had studied Spanish during his last year at the seminary, in the hope of being sent to the shanty towns, or favelas, of South America. Instead, however, it was to India that his fraternity required him to go.
India! A subcontinent with exceptional potential wealth— yet where areas and social groups of overwhelming poverty survived. A land of intense spirituality and of savage
racial, political, and religious conflicts. A land of
saints like Gandhi, Aurobindo, Ramakrishna, and Vivekananda, and of political leaders who were sometimes odiously corrupt. A land that manufactured rockets and satellites but where eight out of ten of its inhabitants had never traveled faster than their oxen could pull their carts. A land of incomparable beauty and variety, and of hideous prospects like the slums of Bombay or Calcutta. A land where the sublime often stood side by side with the very worst this world can offer, but where both elements were always more vibrant, more human, and ultimately more attracting than anywhere else.
Impatient to leave, Stephan Kovalski applied for a resident's visa. His request marked the beginning of a prolonged purgatory. Month after month for five years the Indian authorities promised the delivery of the essential document. Unlike a temporary tourist visa, a resident's permit in fact required die approval of the ministry of Foreign Affairs in New Delhi. The inclusion of his status as a priest on Stephan Kovalski's application had given rise to difficulties. For some time India had not been permitting foreign missionaries to enter its territory. The motives for this prohibition had never been officially defined but the massive number of conversions from Hinduism to Christianity had been unequivocally denounced.