The City of Joy Page 7

  The rector of the parish came from Goa—Father Alberto Cordeiro had a very dark skin and carefully combed curly hair. With his rounded cheeks and his plumpish paunch beneath an immaculate cassock, he looked more like a monsignor of the Roman Curia than a priest of the poor. In the courtyard of the church was parked his car, and several Christian servants assured him the soft comfortable existence, which befitted a rector in charge of a parish.

  The sudden advent of a foreign priest in jeans and basketball shoes somewhat disconcerted the ecclesiastic.

  "Don't you wear a cassock?" he asked.

  "It wasn't exactly the most comfortable attire to travel about your country, especially in the heat," explained Stephan Kovalski.

  "Ah," sighed the rector. "You Westerners can allow yourselves such flights of fancy. You will always be respected! Your skin is white! Whereas for us Indian priests a cassock is both a symbol and our protection. In a country that recognizes the sacred, it guarantees us a place apart."

  The Indian acquainted himself with the bishop's message.

  4 'You really want to go and live in a slum?"

  'That's why I'm here."

  Father Cordeiro appeared aghast. With a grave and preoccupied air, he began to pace up and down the room. "But that's not what our mission as priests is about! Here the people only think of wearing you down. You give them the tip of your finger and instantly they take the end of your arm. No, my dear fellow, you won't be doing them any service by going and sharing their existence. All you risk doing is encouraging their latent laziness and turning them into permanent dependents."

  He stopped walking and planted himself in front of Kovalski. "And then, you won't be there indefinitely! When you go off home, it'll be here, in my house, that they'll come clamoring that the clergy aren't doing anything for them. But if we Indian priests were to take the plunge, they'd have no respect for us anymore."

  The idea of going and living in the middle of a slum had evidently never occurred to the good Father Cordeiro. Yet Kovalski would later realize that this reluctance to mix with the slum population did not necessarily spring from a lack of charity, but rather from a desire that was common enough among the local clergy, to keep a certain distance between themselves and the masses, and one that arose out of traditional Indian respect for social hierarchy.

  Despite his very natural reservations, the rector proved to be most understanding. He entrusted Stephan Kovalski to one of his assistants, an Anglo-Indian Christian who undertook to find him a room in the large nearby slum of Anand Nagar, the "City of Joy."

  It was five o'clock in the evening on the following day when the Pole and his guide presented themselves at the entrance to the slum. The red of the sinking sun was veiled in a shroud of grayish vapor. A smell of burning infused the city, as everywhere chulas were lit to cook the evening meal. In the narrow alleyways the air was laden with an acrid density which burned the throat and lungs. One

  sound distinguished itself from all the others—the noise of coughing that racked innumerable chests.

  Before arriving in Calcutta, Stephan Kovalski had spent a few days in a slum in the Madras area, built near a mine, in open countryside. It was a slum full of light and hope, for its occupants left it each morning to go work outside and they knew that one day they would live in a proper industrial estate. At Anand Nagar the opposite was true: everyone gave the impression of having been there forever, and of being likely to remain there forever. It was an impression that was directly reinforced by the intense activity with which the slum vibrated. Could the people he discovered as he picked his way behind his Anglo-Indian guide conceivably be described as "lazy?" "Ants more likely," he thought. Every single one of them, from the most worn-out old man to children hardly yet able to walk, was busy with some task. Everywhere, on the doorstep to each hut, at the foot of every stall, in a succession of little workshops or minifactories, Kovalski discovered people industriously selling, trading, manufacturing, tinkering, repairing, sorting, cleaning, nailing, gluing, piercing, carrying, pulling, pushing. After six hundred feet of exploration, he felt as if he were drunk.

  Forty-nine Nizamudhin Lane—the address was painted across two planks nailed together which served as a door to a windowless hovel, scarcely more than one yard wide and twice as long. The floor was of beaten earth, and through the missing tiles of the roof one could see pieces of sky. There was no furniture, no electricity, no running water. "Exactly the room I need," appreciated Kovalski, "ideally suited to a life of poverty. With, as a bonus, the right environment."

  Along the door ran an open drain overflowing with nauseating black slime. And just opposite rose a pile of refuse. On the left, a small platform planted over the drain sheltered a tiny tea shop under a bamboo roof. All the occupants of this area were Muslims except the old man running the tea shop who was a Hindu.

  The owner of the room, a stout Bengali dressed in Western clothes, passed for one of the richest men in the slum. He owned a block of houses at the end of the alley,

  where the latrines and the well were. He had cups of tea with sweetened milk brought from the nearby tea shop.

  44 You're quite sure, Father, that this is where you want to live?" he asked, examining the visitor with incredulity.

  4 'Quite sure," said Stephan Kovalski. 44 How much does the rent come to?"

  "Twenty-five rupees a month [two dollars and fifty cents]. Payable in advance."

  4 Twenty-five rupees?" the Anglo-Indian exclaimed indignantly. "Twenty-five rupees for a miserable room without a window. That's highway robbery!"

  "It'll do," interrupted Stephan Kovalski, taking his money out of his pocket. ''Here's three months' rent."

  44 I was so happy I would have given the moon for a lifetime lease of that hovel," he recalled later. He was soon to discover how privileged he was: ten or twelve persons were living in huts like his.

  The deal concluded, Father Cordeiro's envoy lost no time in presenting the newcomer to the few Christians of the City of Joy. None of them would believe that the sahib in jeans who appeared suddenly in front of their slum houses was an envoy from God. 44 But as soon as they were convinced," he would later recount, 44 I might have mistaken myself for the Messiah!" In one of the compounds a young woman fell to her knees. 4 'Father, bless my child," she said, holding out to him the baby she was clutching in her arms. "And bless us all for we are not worthy that a priest should enter under our roof." They all knelt down and Kovalski made the sign of the cross over their heads. Discovering that he was going to stay among them, they all wanted to organize his household. Some offered a bucket, others a mat, an oil lamp, a blanket. The poorer they were, the more eager they were to give. That night he returned home followed by an escort laden with gifts, "just like one of the three kings from the Nativity."

  So began the first evening of his new Indian life, an evening that was to form one of the most intense memories of his existence. "It was already dark. Night falls very early in the tropics. I lit an oil lamp lent to me by one family. They had even had the delicacy to think of leaving me several matches. I unrolled the mat I had been given,

  then sat down on the ground with my back propped against the wall, and turned out my old knapsack bought, one day, in the Arab quarter of Marseilles. From it I took out my razor, my shaving brush, toothbrush, the small medicine box given to me by friends at the factory when I left, a change of underpants and shirt and my Jerusalem Bible, in other words, all my worldly possessions. Between the pages of the Gospels was the picture that had never left my side during my years among the destitute and suffering. I unfolded it carefijlly and contemplated it for a long while."

  It was the photograph of the Sacred Shroud of Tlirin given to Stephan by his father years ago. The face of Christ imprinted on his shroud, the face of a man with downcast eyes and swollen cheeks, with punctured brow and a torn beard, that man who died upon the Cross was that evening for Stephan Kovalski the very incarnation of all the martyrs of the slum where he had just ar
rived. "For me, a committed believer, each one of them wore that same face of Jesus Christ proclaiming to humanity from the heights of Golgotha all the pain but also all the hope of man rejected. That was the reason for my coming. I was there because of the cry of the crucified Christ: 4 I thirst,' in order to give a voice to the hunger and thirst for justice of those who here mounted each day on the Cross, and who knew how to face that death Which we in the West no longer know how to affront without despair. Nowhere else was that icon more in its rightful place than in that slum."

  Stephan Kovalski pinned up the picture with the aid of two matches stuck in the pis£ wall. After a while he tried to pray, but his efforts were in vain. He was dazed. He needed some time to adjust to his new incarnation. As he was pondering, a little girl appeared on the threshold, barefoot and dressed in rags but with a flower in the end of her pigtail. She was carrying an aluminum bowl full of rice and vegetables. She set it down in front of Kovalski, joined her hands in the Indian gesture of greeting, bowed her head, smiled, and ran away. "I gave thanks to God for this apparition and for this meal provided by brothers unknown to me. Then I ate, as they do, with my fingers. In the depths of this hovel, I felt everything was assuming a very distinctive dimension. So it was that my fingers'

  contact with the rice made me understand that first night how much the food was not a dead thing, not something neutral, but rather a gift of life."

  Toward nine o'clock, as the noise of the streets died away, Kovalski began to be aware of the echoes of the life that was going on around him: conversations in the nearby rooms, arguments, tears, fits of coughing. Then the searing call of a muezzin surged out of a loudspeaker, followed immediately by the voices of women reciting verses of the Koran. A little later, the Muslims' prayer was succeeded by another litany. Coming from the tea shop opposite, it consisted of one simple syllable indefinitely repeated. "Om ... Om ... Om ..." chanted the elderly Hindu who kept the shop. A mystic invocation which for thousands of years had assisted Hindus to enter into contact with God, this om diffused an ineffable inner peace. Stephan Kovalski had heard it for the first time in the villages in the South and the vibrations of this simple syllable had seemed to him to be charged with such power, such profundity of prayer, that he had adopted it to open his own invocations to the Lord. Pronouncing the Om required no conscious eflFort. "The Om came all by itself and prolonged itself, vibrating like a prayer in the heart," he would say. "That night, as I repeated the Oms that came from the other side of the street, I experienced the sensation not only of speaking to God but also of taking a step forward into the inner mystery of Hinduism, something which was very important in helping me to grasp the real reasons for my presence in that slum."

  Shortly after midnight silence enveloped the City of Joy. The prayer and the palavers were stilled, along with the coughs and the children's tears. Sleep had come to Anand Nagar. Numb with fatigue and emotion, Stephan Kovalski too felt the need to close his eyes. Folding up his shirt and jeans to form a pillow, he stretched out on the narrow mat. He discovered then that his room was exactly as long as he was tall: six feet. After a last look at the Sacred Shroud of Christ, he blew out the lamp and closed his eyes with an inner felicity such as he had not experienced since die day of his ordination five years earlier.

  It was then that a frenzied chorus struck up right above

  his head. Striking a match, he discovered a team of rats chasing one another about on the bamboos framing and rushing down the walls to the accompaniment of a cacophony of shrill cries. He leaped to his feet and, despite his desire not to wake his neighbors, undertook to chase the intruders, hitting them with his shoe. But as fast as one group made off, others arrived through the holes in the roofing. The magnitude of the invasion forced him to give up. However disagreeable cohabitation of this sort might be, he realized that it was an inevitable part of his new life. With determined resignation he lay down again, but almost immediately he felt something stirring in his hair. Lighting the lamp once more, he shook his head and saw an enormous hairy centipede fall out of it. Fervent admirer of Mahatma Gandhi and his principles of nonviolence that he was, he nevertheless crushed it. Later he was to learn the identity of the creature: a scolopendra whose sting could be as venomous as a scorpion's. For the second time he lay down again and recited a chaplet of Oms in the hope of regaining some serenity. The City of Joy had further surprises in store, however, for the Pole's first night within its confines. Indian mosquitoes have as a distinguished characteristic the fact that they are minute, make very little noise, and tease you endlessly before making up their minds to bite. The effect is a torture of anticipation which, if it were not Indian, would almost certainly be Chinese. A few hours later, it was the sound of something resembling a bombardment that woke up Kovalski from a brief interval of sleep. On opening his door, he discovered a delivery van in the alleyway, unloading coal outside the shop of the man who sold fuel. He was just about to lie down again when he discerned in the darkness two small silhouettes creeping under the vehicle. The coal merchant, a man with wader's legs, had spotted the young sneak thieves too. He rained down such a shower of curses upon them that they scampered off. There was the sound of galloping, then a great splash and cries. Certain that one of the fugitives had just fallen in the large sewer that cut across the alleyway a little farther down, Kovalski rushed to the rescue, but he had hardly taken three strides before a firm grasp arrested his progress.

  Without ever being able to recognize the face of the man who had grabbed him, he understood the message. "I was being invited not to get mixed up with the private affairs of the City of Joy.''

  The sale of blood enabled the five members of the Pal family to hold out for four days. During that period they fed themselves mainly on bananas. Found in abundance and sold cheaply, this fruit was a gift of providence for the poor of India. In Calcutta its nutritive and curative qualities had made it the object of a veritable cult. At the time of the great festivities in honor of the goddess Durga, patroness of the city, banana trees appeared on the altars, draped in white saris with a red bonier and venerated as the wife of Ganesh, god of good fortune.

  The Pals also lived on what the two eldest children gleaned from the Bara Bazar, while their father was out looking for work. The last few paisas of the last rupee were devoted to the purchase of four cow dung cakes to use to boil up a last stew of scraps and peelings on the neighbors' chula. When, finally, there was nothing left, Hasari made a heroic decision. He would go back and sell some more of his blood.

  From a physiological point of view, it was a mad idea; but then this "inhuman city" was a city where madness prevailed. A medical report revealed that many men at the

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  depths of despair did not hesitate to turn up at the doors of the blood banks every week. They did not generally live to old age: they would be found dead of anemia in some street, or on a bed in Mother Teresa's home for the dying, snuffed out like the flame of a candle deprived of oxygen. The same report also revealed that in the case of one donor in four, the hemoglobin level of the blood was less than half the minimum acceptable level. How many dispensaries, however, were actually concerned with the hemoglobin content of the blood that they collected? In any case, as Hasari was to learn, there was a way of faking the requisite content.

  That day the rates of the CRC blood bank were so alluring that crowds were waiting at the door. All the procurers for rival establishments had assembled there to attempt to divert some of the clientele toward their own employers. Hasari was immediately accosted by an individual with two gold front teeth. "Forty rupees," whispered the man with the air of a prostitute lowering her price. "Thirty for you, ten for me."

  "Thirty rupees! That's almost double what I got last time," thought Hasari, not yet knowing that in Calcutta the price of blood varied from day to day just like the rates for jute or mustard oil at the stock exchange in Dalhousie Square. The difference in fee stemmed in fact mainly from the capacity of the middlemen to asse
ss the naivety of their preys and hence to fleece them with greater or less rapacity. With his very first glance, the man with the gold teeth had registered with the stigmata on Hasari's arm, which marked him as a professional.

  The Paradise Blood Bank was aptly named. Painted in pink and furnished with comfortable seats, it had been set up in an outbuilding of one of the most modern and expensive clinics in Calcutta, exclusively frequented by rich marwari businessmen and their families. The nurse in immaculate white overalls and cap, who was in charge of admitting the donors, grimaced at the sight of the candidate's pathetic appearance. She made him sit down on a chair with a reclining back. Unlike the attendants at the CRC, however, she did not plunge a needle into his arm. Much to the amazement of the peasant, she confined

  herself to pricking his index finger and making a drop of blood fall onto a glass plate. As for the man with the gold teeth, he realized all too well what was happening. "The bitch is sabotaging me," he grumbled.

  He had guessed correctly. An instant later the young woman informed him politely that his client's blood did not meet with the requirements of the dispensary. The reason given would have precluded the majority of the inhabitants of Calcutta's slums: inadequate hemoglobin level.

  The blow was a harsh one for Hasari.

  "Don't you know anywhere else?" he pleaded with the procurer as soon as they were back in the street. "I don't even have a coin to buy a banana for my children."