Calcutta: An Expedition to the Plague City
Calcutta—Well past midnight, the temperature was still in the high 80s. There were five customs officials waiting to greet us and 20 porters sitting listlessly in the airport window sills, though only seven people had come off the plane. The seven were an Indian man with an American wife, a handful of camera-laden tourists headed for Darjeeling, and myself.
An ancient bus was waiting for us in the rain-puddled parking lot. The tourists sat and fidgeted about the bus driver’s delay, ranting about their troubles with India‘s controlled monetary exchange. A window pane quietly slumped out of its frame and shattered on the floor next to the luggage. A young German who was catching a ride reassured the tourists, “It’s India. Everything takes a long time in India.” Finally the driver came out of the airport building with one last passenger.
Along the asphalt road from Dum Dum Airport the headlight beams picked out a string of palm trees and palm-thatched huts, an occasional temple, and some billboards. One billboard brought me up with a start: Sadhana—A Truly Great Name in the Ayurvedic World. What’s that again? Sadhana means “practice, achievement,” or as one book explained, “the ‘inner-unfoldment’ of the Sadhaka (practicer) by means of a ‘formula of worship’ by which the macrocosm and microcosm may be ‘woven’ into a ‘fabric’ of Reality.”
Surely a great name in anybody’s world, but on top of its greatness, it was a coincidence. One of the reasons I was in India was to see a performance called People’s Sadhana, a benefit for Bangladesh. The Sadhana of the billboard turned out to be a brand of medicines. There was an ad for Sadhana toothpaste in the newspaper next morning.
The driver picked his way through the puddles, stopping abruptly for a familiar pothole. Now we could see houses with plastered walls. At least half the houses had political slogans painted on them in Bengali. Lots of hammers and sickles, representing the three different Communist parties in Bengal.
Further on toward town there were more and more white cows to be seen dozing in the streets. More and more people too, homeless people sleeping on the sidewalk wherever there was a roof or overhang. About ten percent of Calcutta is homeless even in normal times, when there aren’t nine million Pakistani refugees for India to take care of.
The bus rolled up to the Oberoi Grand Hotel, a Calcutta posh spot. You wouldn’t know it was posh from the outside—the entrance was invisible behind a muddy portico lined with shops. On the inside, though, it was obviously a sahib hotel. An officious hotel captain led the way to my room up a promenade staircase, through vast domed halls, dusty and dim. Drowsing servants saluted timidly in every hallway. The captain insisted that he and I take the elevator when we reached it, though it only took us up one floor, while the dark skinny porter with my suitcase took the stairs.
The floor of the room was marble and the shower head in the bathroom was a good eight inches across. Twelve bucks a night. Terrific. A sign warned against drinking the tap water.
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For 12 bucks a night you get a free newspaper in the morning. Page one of the Amrita Bazar Patrika, September 1st: Report on the flood conditions in West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh states. A political assassination north of town. Reported cruel beating of a Bengali employee in the Pakistan Embassy in Delhi. Indira Gandhi visits refugee camps. Inside, an Indira Gandhi speech on India’s love of peace but readiness to fight in self-defense.
Olivier Boelen, producer of the People’s Sadhana show, called after breakfast with an invitation to pack out of the sahib hotel and into the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture in Gol Park/Bally-gunge, where the performers of People’s Sadhana were also quartered. Before going to the Mission, though, the first stop was the Bangladesh High Commission. This had been the Pakistan High Commission in Calcutta before the atrocities in East Pakistan. Three weeks after the Pakistani Army “postponed” the seating of the National Assembly, the High Commision had defected en masse and run up the Bangladesh flag.
The road to the Bangladesh place had a cast of thousands. Hundreds of cars of indeterminate make fought for the road space with oxcarts, handcarts, rickshaws, porters, white cows and the helter-skelter overflow of the thickly crowded sidewalk. There are no traffic lights in Calcutta, the theory being that if a car ever stops moving, it will immediately be stuck behind a parade of crossing pedestrians and cows. Instead of traffic lights there is a constant roar of automobile horns.
The streets were drier than last night, much drier since the flooding last week, but everything smelled like a warm mud puddle. “You see,” Olivier gestured at the sidewalks, “Calcutta’s not as bad as they say. You see people living in the street, maybe, but this is not a disaster area. You must remember it is possible to live outdoors here. The climate is warm. It’s not like being homeless on the Bowery, say.” Everyone seemed used to it.
We had come to some quieter, less crowded streets. On our right there was a strange pile of geometry—a century-and-a-half-old English cemetery for all the colonial officers who died of tropical diseases in their 20s. The tombstones were shaped like pyramids, Parthenons and Taj Mahals. Not tombstones, really, since stone is rare in Bengal, but plastered brick. The plaster had fallen away in patches and tropical plants were embracing the brick.
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