Calcutta Read online

  Calcutta is announced with a pothole or two. Then a bus is overtaken, such a vehicle as the traveller has never seen before; its bodywork is battered with a thousand dents, as though an army of commuters had once tried to kick it to bits, and it is not only crammed with people, it has a score or so hanging off the platform and around the back like a cluster of grapes. It is lumbering and steaming into a suburban wasteland, stippled with blocks of dilapidated flats; and maybe Bishop Heber’s imagery was not so far-fetched after all, for these are not at all unlike some of the homes for the workers you can see in Moscow today, though there they are not coloured pink and they certainly haven’t been decorated with the hammer and sickle in crude whitewash on the walls. Swiftly, the outer Calcutta of these revolutionary symbols now coagulates into the inner Calcutta which is unlike anywhere else on earth. The limousine now lurches and rolls, for there are too many potholes to avoid. It rocks down cobblestoned roads lined with high factory walls which have an air of South Lancashire about them. It begins to thread its way through traffic along thoroughfares that have something of Bishopsgate or Holborn in their buildings.

  It is the traffic that makes it all unique. A traffic in trams grinding round corners, a traffic in approximately London buses whose radiators seem ready to burst, in gypsy-green lorries with ‘Ta-ta and By-by’ and other slogans painted on the back, in taxis swerving all over the road with much blowing of horns, in rickshaws springing unexpectedly out of sidestreets, in bullock carts swaying ponderously along to the impediment of everyone, in sacred Brahmani cows and bulls nonchalantly strolling down the middle of the tram-tracks munching breakfast as they go. A traffic, too, in people who are hanging on to all forms of public transport, who are squatting cross-legged upon the counters of their shops, who are darting in and out of the roadways between the vehicles, who are staggering under enormous loads, who are walking briskly with briefcases, who are lying like dead things on the pavements, who are drenching themselves with muddy water in the gutters, who are arguing, laughing, gesticulating, defecating, and who are sometimes just standing still as though wondering what to do. There never were so many people in a city at seven o’clock in the morning. Patiently the driver of the limousine steers his passage between and around them, while they pause in mid-stride to let him through, or leap to get out of his way, or stare at him blankly, or curse him roundly, or occasionally spit in the path of his highly polished Cadillac. Presently, and quite remarkably, he comes to the end of the journey without collision and deposits the traveller and his luggage upon the pavement in front of an hotel. And here, the traveller has his first encounter with a beggar. He had better make the best of it, for beggary is to be with him until the end of his days in Calcutta.

  No one knows how many beggars there are in the city; the only clue is the estimate that there are 400,000 men in town without a job. There is beggary all over India, but nowhere is there beggary on the scale of Calcutta’s. There are not many places where a European can move a hundred yards in the certainty that his charity will not be invoked. An old man with one leg, using a quarter staff in place of the other like a figure from Bruegel, stumps up and mutters subservience with downcast eyes and outstretched tin bowl. A woman rushes to your side and almost thrusts her sleeping child into your face, supplicating mournfully. These are commonplace figures of the landscape. So are the children who come at you with terrible histrionics in which tears begin to stream and sobs become uncontrolled and hands are held upstretched below chins to the cry of ‘No Mamma, no Papa, paise, paise’; and round the corner there is a dwarf woman with the same cry on her lips, though her bandy little legs must have been carrying her around for the best part of fifty years. There are beggars who are horribly mutilated; a small boy without feet or hands, who clumps along an arcade upon wooden blocks which have been strapped to his knees and elbows, while he holds a bowl between his teeth; a man who lies on his back outside the Grand Hotel, his limbs at grotesque angles, squirming violently while he bangs his tin on the ground for attention; and twenty-five yards away, another fellow who uses one arm as a crutch to lever the rest of an apparently lifeless and rigid body along, while tendons stand out on his neck like ropework and his mouth bares its teeth in a werewolf grin. It is said that many of these beggars have been deliberately maimed at birth, to be run in stables for more profitable business. And there is surely a degree of tactical organization to the beggary of Calcutta that is sometimes admirable. Where flashy Park Street turns off Chowringhee there are traffic lights and by these a score or more of beggars customarily stand, waiting for the cars and taxis to pull up at red; whereupon they flush from the pavement like sparrows from a hedge and pester the passengers who have not wound up their windows quickly enough; and for two years, to my certain knowledge, a woman with a baby and a face made hideously piebald by leucoderma was regularly among them.

  The average European was not conditioned to live with beggary of this nature in the middle of the twentieth century and after a while he finds himself being unpleasantly exposed by it. At first his conscience troubles him so much that he dispenses charity to all who approach him. But then, one day, a woman to whom he has given all his loose change counts it carefully and pursues him angrily for more; he finds himself looking carefully over his shoulder, before tossing coin in yet another bowl, to see how many of the beggar’s fellows are within pouncing distance; and before long he is giving very selectively indeed. As long as he remains in Calcutta he is emotionally split in two by the children who come at him and will not let him go, as though he were a second Pied Piper. Sometimes he has observed them being ordered onto him by a pavement tradesman, sometimes they are pestering at his left hand while a parent is beseeching at his right, sometimes they have been playing alone in the gutter until his shadow falls across their game. However they come at him, they eventually corner him, by their dogged persistence, by their interminable numbers, in a frightful dilemma of his own; for he finds that while half of him wants to pick them up and hug them, the other half would willingly kick them hard across the street if he dared. But the most terrible beggars of all are the men, women and children who shuffle into his path with a whisper and only half a gesture of entreaty and who, when the rich man in a moment of excessive guilt or charity thrusts one whole rupee in their direction, do not take the note but stand looking at it blankly; for they cannot comprehend the wealth represented by 6p or 12 cents – current coin of this time.

  The sleepers on the streets present no such problem, being inert, so that they can be avoided at will. A census was made of them one night in 1961 and the tally was then thirty thousand; eight years later a local newspaper referred to seventy thousand; and neither figure can be taken as a precise reckoning of Calcutta’s utmost destitution, which could be either more or less than any systematic calculation. On the one hand, the city is too complex and sprawling for everyone living in the open to be accounted for; on the other, it is an observed fact that many people prefer to sleep on a blanket in the comparatively open air of the streets rather than stifle in the foetid atmosphere of a Calcutta slum. Nevertheless, there are vast numbers who clearly have nowhere else to go. They are to be found late at night and every morning throughout the centre of the city, lying under the arcades of Chowringhee and beside the standpipes of Bentinck Street. There are squadrons of them around the approaches to Howrah Station across the river, in addition to the platoons who sleep inside the station itself. You can find them at intervals along the great curving length of Lower Circular Road and you have to step over their bodies as you move out of the dancing lights of the Ballygunge crossroads. The nights of Calcutta, indeed, flicker with the small fires made by street campers and you are never far from the smell of their acrid fumes; they flare and smoke in the angles of walls, along gutters, even beside tram tracks in the middle of roads. And wherever a fire is, bodies are huddled beside it. Sometimes they still lie there during the day and they are so reduced that they do not even sweat any more; they lie in some
shade from the blistering sun, almost and sometimes totally naked, their hair matted, their sinews clearly visible, their skins bone dry and very dusty, the texture of an abandoned inner tube. They die like that, eventually, and the kites which forever swing lazily in the skies of Calcutta congregate in a swirling circle high above the corpse, waiting for it to – be alone.

  Sometimes these inhabitants of the streets construct lean-tos, if they are in families, of any material they can find. There is a peculiarly awful series of them against a high brick wall at the bottom of Bepin Behary Ganguly Street, where it approaches the hubbub of Sealdah Station, in a junction which marks the spot where Job Charnock’s famous tree once stood. For five hundred yards or so there is a confusion of packing cases, corrugated iron, cardboard, straw matting, odd bricks and wads of newspaper arranged into a double-decker sequence of boxes. Each box is approximately the size of a small pigeon loft, with room in it to squat and only just to kneel. No English miner would dream of keeping his pigeons in anything so ramshackle and primitive; he might, indeed, fear the attentions of the RSPCA if he did. In Calcutta each box, one on top of the other, is the sleeping and loving quarters of a family. The rest of their life is conducted on the pavement where they cook and play and quarrel together; and in the gutter, where they wash themselves and their rags in the gush of fractured standpipes.

  Sometimes these people are taken from the streets on the threshold of death. If this happens then almost certainly it will be because a truck has cruised that way, driven by one of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity; there is scarcely anyone else in Calcutta who will even notice their dying. But the nuns have a refuge specifically for dying destitutes. It is right alongside Kali’s temple and it is called Nirmal Hriday. It is a highly scrubbed and totally antiseptic shed, with little in the way of pious decoration. It is crammed with stretcher beds, row after row of them, and their moribund occupants. There are people in here in their twenties but hardly anyone looks less than sixty years old. They lie very still, blinking and clawing at food, but otherwise not moving at all. They have been brought here because of a curious and alien philosophy that has gradually been evolved in and out of Calcutta by these women in the white muslin saris that are bordered in blue; it is simply a conviction, unfathomable to the deepest dogmas of Hinduism, that there is some point in bringing a human being who has been totally neglected since birth to a place where he can at least die in a scrap of dignity and with somebody aware of his end. So the nuns move perpetually down the rows of stretchers, dishing out food to those who can eat, cropping the heads of those who are lousy, dressing the sores of those who are rancid, mopping up the ones who are squittering incontinently. There are moments in Nirmal Hriday when a visitor can believe he has reached the backside of hell. A young Englishman wrote this in his journal for 1969: ‘A man of forty, he looked seventy – with a gangrenous leg – with a rag wrapped round it; we had to take him outside because of the stench to hose his leg down. The water started the blood flowing over the green flesh; bone and muscle dropped off. The foot was just a skeleton and you could see right through his leg up to the knee. A crow came down and picked up a bone that had fallen from his foot (they’re hungry, too). My stomach didn’t think much of this and added to the mess flowing down the drain.’ When these people die they are not given a Christian burial; the nuns would think that profanity; they are given the cremation and the consignment to the water that they and their ancestors have always craved. Occasionally they do not die, they are restored to a kind of health, and they are gently asked to leave, to make room for more of the really dying. There are always plenty of those.

  Mother Teresa’s nuns are also almost the only people who care for Calcutta’s lepers, and there are reckoned to be something between 35,000 and 40,000 of those. With one exception, the hospitals cannot or will not take them and when the police find a leper wandering at night in the rich suburb of Alipore, it is the missionary convent they ring for a truck to convey the wretch out of the way. Most of the lepers have to fend for themselves, but the nuns look after eight colonies containing ten thousand around the city. One lies beyond the slaughterhouse at Entally, where Calcutta begins to ooze out into the eastern swamplands. It is a smoky, grimy, industrialized area with cobbled streets that are permanently choked with cows of skin and bone and not much else, which are mysteriously no longer sacred and which are being driven in lurching procession to the butcher; or which, having sometimes dropped dead en route, are carried the rest of the way lashed to carts pushed by men, their carcases flopping ghoulishly, their eyeballs glaring at the gritty sky. A few hundred yards further, on the other side of a railway bridge, not far from a vast garbage dump, upon the muddy banks of a creek, is the leper colony of Dhapa.

  There are people here in various stages of disease. Some lie on beds inside mud huts with their limbs bandaged. A boy sits against an outside wall, his arms and legs smeared with a blue ointment; next to him is another child with finger stumps which are raw and quietly bleeding. There are lepers in the early stages of mutilation helping lepers who have already been crippled for life. A woman uses the grey stump of her hand like a wooden spoon to stir a pot of steaming liquid, for it has no feeling left, and the ghastly image that comes to a Western mind is of some particularly hellish production of the witches ‘scene in Macbeth. Next to her a gaudy pop-art representation of Kali has been propped against the wall alongside an iron trident garlanded with marigolds. The nuns come once a week with medicines and call in regularly to treat the worst cases; they also bring cats to keep down the rats from the garbage dump and the slaughterhouse, which would otherwise begin to chew a leprous limb without its owner even noticing. But the lepers are mainly on their own, looking after each other, making shoes to raise some kind of income, having children and now usually managing to rear them free of leprosy, with the nuns to keep an eye on things and administer drugs; for it is possible to halt the disease in its tracks provided you act early enough, when the first scaliness appears on the skin. A patient tries to convey what it is like, when you find you must make your life at Dhapa:’ Mother, I am an educated man. I was a clerk in a very good position. I earned 650 rupees per month. One day the neighbours got up a petition and said his face not properly well, children in the compound, and the police came. The police came and said within two days I must go. I said what must I do. They say you are an educated man, make your own arrangement. Then I know only Mother Teresa will help me. I am an educated man and my motto is leprosy is not a disgrace, it is an illness.’

  The destitutes and the lepers represent the extremities of Calcutta’s poverty. The norm is in a sense even more appalling. For that is what this society appears to have settled for on behalf of huge proportions of its people. In the city of Calcutta proper, the heart of this sprawling metropolis bordering the Hooghly, there are something over three million people. More than a third of them live in slums, of which the most notorious kind is the registered slum, or bustee. The figure generally quoted for the number of bustee dwellers is 700,000, but as that was an estimate made in 1961 the true figure will now be considerably greater. The bustee is legally defined by municipal act as an area of land occupied by a collection of huts not less than ten cottahs (which is one sixth of an acre) in extent. It is, moreover, a definition of ownership and tenant relationships, not a description of building characteristics. It involves three parties: one is the owner of the land, who pays Corporation taxes and leases parts of the holding to others; another is the thika tenant or hut owner, who builds dwellings on the land, pays the landlord for the privilege and rents out the rooms he has constructed; at the bottom of the pile comes the bustee dweller, paying his rent to the thika tenant, ultimately obliged to the landlord. In 1967 it was estimated that there were 20,000 thika tenants in the city proper, owning 30,000 huts between them, each producing an average of Rs 80 a month in rent. But the bustee is an awful fact of life throughout the metropolitan area of Calcutta. People lie in bustees from Budge Budg
e in the South to Kanchrapara in the North, which is even higher up the Hooghly than that old Dutch settlement of Chinsurah. Some of the nastiest are to be found directly across the river, in the twin city of Howrah, which is to Calcutta what Southwark is to London, what Birkenhead is to Liverpool, what The Bronx is to Manhattan.

  There is a typical bustee out near Calcutta’s second university at Jadavpore. It starts on the edge of upstanding middle-class houses and it trails off into the railway lines; so many bustees do. The huts are made of wattle, they have tiled roofs, they have mud floors. They are so congested that there is nowhere more than an arm’s span in the dirt-track lanes that separate one row from another. And open drains run down the middle of each lane, so that you tend to walk them at the straddle. People sit in these lanes chopping wood, cooking at open fires, even buying and selling at tiny stalls. As many as seven or eight sleep in one room of a shanty, for which they pay Rs 10 to 15 a month to their thika tenant. There is no electricity, which means that there are no fans; and the fan in Calcutta is a minimal necessity of life for any European, no luxury for any Indian. There is a standpipe providing water for 125 people. There is also the khatal. The khatal is the rich man’s method of stabling his cattle upon the premises of the poor. Every bustee contains them; it is one way of acquiring a minute income from the rich man, and there is also the consideration of dung which can be collected, shaped into small pats, placed upon the baked earth for drying in the sun, and then used as fuel for the fires. The people have to put up with the filth of these dozen beasts, sitting there tethered under a shady roof in the middle of their homes, and they also have to find vegetation for the wretched animals to eat. In exchange they are allowed to milk them, as long as the cows are not dry. The rich man expects to be paid for the milk, of course; he comes down to the bustee once a month to settle his financial transactions with the people.