The chairman of the planning commission fills out a Nehru suit and speaks past Vasco deep into the distance: We have, as you know, three thousand years of history behind us. We did not come into existence when that Portuguese discovered us by the sea route.
Vasco appears to be listening attentively while he tries in vain to recall the details of the 1498 landing at Calicut. (We sent a convict ashore to see what would happen.) The chairman of the planning commission explains that despite its infinitely various faces India is nevertheless one. No outsider can fully know us. Calcutta, he says, is indeed a problem, but there are many artists living in this fascinating city. And Bengali poetry …
The next slum has grown up (organically) beside the Delhi power plant, which uninterruptedly belches vast clouds of smoke. Across the slum stands the modern high-rise building of the World Health Organization, South Asia Section. The clouds of smoke and not the slums are reflected in the windows of the WHO building. Next door, lest there be anything missing, stands the pavilion of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, which has invited Vasco to come, see, and understand that “we are a modern democracy.”
In the slum Vasco speaks with women from Uttar Pradesh, who have six or eight children but do not know how many rupees their husbands earn as sweepers at the power plant next door. This slum is reputedly clean. Vasco finds a doctor who, however, has never crossed the street to visit the WHO, just as the WHO has never called on the doctor. Of course we have cases of smallpox, he says. I report them. But they always vaccinate too late. I’m only a volunteer. I have no counterpart in other slum sections. The people here think I’m a fool to be doing this. This doctor doesn’t speak English. In translation everything sounds plausible. Maybe he’s only a medical orderly. Vasco puts a rupee on the table of the mud-hut dispensary for medicines. As he was leaving home, Vasco’s children said: Don’t go bringing us any presents. None of that crazy stuff. Give somebody the money. And on this occasion Ilsebill had no particular wishes, either.
Vasco goes to Fatehpur Sikri to see the sights from his Mogul days. Today he smiles to think how he tried to be tolerant in his spacious fortress apartments by including not only a Mohammedan but also a Hindu woman and a Christian lady from Portuguese Goa in his marriage contract. Only the Hindu woman bore him a son (who turned out badly). Nothing remains but fragments of carved red sandstone. Each column cut differently. But the desert said no. When the water ran out, the city had to be abandoned. All that tolerance for nothing. (When Vasco died in Cochin in 1524, Margarete Rusch, cook and nun, became abbess of Saint Bridget’s, after which, as her fancy bade her, she took Protestant, Catholic, and seafaring men into her bed, and runaway monks as well. So tolerant she was, so spacious.)
Still in the state of Uttar Pradesh, Vasco visits a village school, built of clay like the huts and walls round about. Everything is mud-brown—the hard-stamped village street, the cows, the bicycles, the children, the sky. Only the women’s saris are colorful, though faded. Once again poverty indulges in beauty. The teacher has light-brown eyes. He shows Vasco schoolbooks. In one little book, which tells the history of India in Hindi script, Vasco sees himself portrayed in simple lines, bearded under a velvet cap. In some wrinkle of his traveler’s existence he is proud or touched, but he is also somewhat put out because he has made school history and become textbook material. (What do they actually know about me? About my restlessness. Always looking for goals beyond the horizons. Using my nautical skill as a means of reaching God. And my lifelong fear of Dominican poison. Everything has died away. But I’m still inwardly rich in figures… .)
Because it’s expected of him, Vasco asks questions. The teacher complains about social workers who come to the village and use pictures without written commentaries as propaganda for family planning, as though addressing themselves to illiterates. And yet forty-five percent of the children attend school off and on. To prove it, the schoolchildren read aloud from the book in which Vasco has become textbook material.
In the left-hand niche of the temple the goddess dances, this time in her gentle Durga aspect. The right-hand niche discloses a monkey god. The cawing of the crows, the laughter of the children. The peasants’ complaints about the price of wheat, which has suddenly doubled, are translated for Vasco’s benefit. Most have sold too cheap. A third of the peasants are landless. Many move to the city. A rich peasant rents out his tractor. For fear of abduction (a common occurrence in the days of the Moguls) the women cover their faces as Vasco passes. In the midst of the dust an old man, who is chewing betel, gives him a carrot. Next day Vasco has diarrhea and has to take Enterovioform—three tablets daily. After a while it helps. But his shit is still mustard-blond and liquid. Bubbles in the soup. He looks for worms and feels disappointed because his stools refuse to turn black like those of the poet Opitz, who was carried off by the plague. That was in the days when the earth was a vale of tears. Opitz’s cook was named Agnes. In his book Vasco gives her credit for feelings that she served up to the poet as diet fare. The plague, it was thought, had been brought in from India by the sea route.
While viewing the remains of his Mogul period in Sikri and visiting his tomb, he, like other tourists, ties a cotton wishing string (for which he has paid a rupee) to the battered filigree of his mortuary chapel. But he doesn’t know what to wish for. Good God! This absurd joie de vivre. This splendid splendor. This screwed-up planning, O Lord! Why has thou piloted me to this place? (It was an Arab helmsman, who knew the way and knew the monsoon winds. Ahmed ibn Majid was in the habit of celebrating his nautical feats in verse.)
At the airport a wreath of flowers is thrown over Vasco’s head. Flags everywhere (not on his account). The world-championship table-tennis matches, now being held in Calcutta, are viewed as a political event. The International Table Tennis Association has excluded South Africa and Israel, but the Palestinians have been invited. Only Holland protests. The Brazilian contestants lack a few inoculations and are quarantined. It has taken only four weeks to build the modern table-tennis stadium. The city government of Calcutta, with its three thousand slum districts, here called bustees, is proud of the achievement. Because of the table-tennis tournament all the hotels are full, so Vasco is housed in the guest apartments of the former viceroy’s palace, since independence the residence of the provincial governor. Vasco’s room is twenty feet high; the bed, under its canopy of mosquito netting, is in the middle. Two ventilators and three electric fans keep the air in motion. On the writing desk, two inkwells from Queen Victoria’s day. Vasco jots down notes about the farm cook Amanda Woyke. Her correspondence with Count Rumford. Both wanted to combat world hunger with giant kitchens, she with her West Prussian potato soup, he with his Rumford soup for the poor. Vasco writes: But the Kashubians couldn’t get used to potatoes, just as semolina is repellent to the rice-eating Bengalese, even when they are starving. So the Kashubians continued for a long time to eat too little millet, until at last they consented to fill up on potatoes.
The governor’s palace is known as Raj Bhavan. On every side, quietly moving servants in slitted red coats under white turbans. They fold their hands when they greet Vasco. The soldiers in the corridors salute. The cook has been in the house for thirty-six years. He has cooked for Englishmen and their guests. At table four servants wait on Vasco. The aged cook calls his cooking European. At breakfast (ham and eggs), Vasco is served the newspaper with the latest word of the table-tennis matches. Through an aide the governor requests the honor of Vasco’s company at luncheon. Vasco dreads the meal with the governor. (Good God! What am I doing here!) He wants to go home to his Ilsebill.
But Calcutta, this crumbling, scabby, swarming city, this city that eats its own excrement, has decided to be cheerful. It wants its misery—and misery can be photographed wherever you go—to be terrifyingly beautiful: the decay plastered with advertising posters, the cracked pavement, the beads of sweat adding up to nine million souls. People pour out of railroad stations which, like Vasco only yesterday,
have daily diarrhea: white-shirted maggots in a shitpile with Victorian excrescences, a shitpile that dreams up new curlicues every minute. And on top of everything betel-reddened spittle.
On foot across the Hooghly Bridge and back. On the left side junk for sale: worn-out shoes, coconut fiber, school slates, faded shirts, primitive tools, kitsch from Hong Kong, native kitsch. The right-hand sidewalk is bordered by groups of peasants from the surrounding villages selling purple onions, yellow, sand-gray, or bright-red lentils, ginger root, sugar cane, molasses pressed into cakes, unhusked rice, coarse-ground wheat, chapatty. The bridge, which has no central support, vibrates under the two-way traffic of bare feet, trucks, rickshas, and oxcarts. Suddenly, in the midst of the crowd, Vasco is overcome with joy. He, too, wants to chew betel. But when he looks down from either bridgehead, there is nothing but misery; he is aghast at the sight of hollowed-out women and old men with shrunken heads, upon whom death has set its mark.
There are no separate slums, or bustees, in Calcutta. The whole city is one bustee, or slum, and neither the middle nor the upper classes can segregate themselves from it. High-school girls with their books can be seen plodding down the street among bundles of rags the same age as themselves, forming islands in the traffic, then merging again with the great, flowing mass. Wherever the traffic leaves a free space, there are people living in the roadway. Side by side with parks and run-down mansions one sees villagelike groups of cardboard and sheet-metal shacks. People flushed into the city by the last famine (just a year ago), those whom the bustees have expelled or found no room for stay on in such places. They come from Bihar; they are strangers among the Bengalis. At night they squat around fires outside the shacks and cook what they’ve been able to find in the garbage. The collecting instinct is all they have left. The fires are fed with cow dung or cakes of straw and coal dust. Here the Stone Age is staging a comeback and has already made deep inroads. The buses look like an archaeologist’s dream. Vasco takes refuge in the governor’s palace. The palace guard knows him by now.
On the program: tea with a film maker who is flying to Chicago tomorrow to show American students his Calcutta film. Smilingly we converse—two sophisticated producers. Vasco asks about the possibility of a film in which a reborn Vasco da Gama visits modern India, fears the goddess Kali, comes to Calcutta, gets diarrhea, and lives in the governor’s palace. Then he talks about the cooks of his various time-phases: the neolithic Awa, the High Gothic Dorothea, the revolutionary Sophie, and the cooking abbess Margarete Rusch, for whose cookery a drop in the price of pepper was important. He mentions the Flounder and his. activities since the Neolithic era. The film maker nods. Yes, he says, a similar fish in a similar function has been known in India since the Dravidian period, and this fish was hostile on principle, though ineffectually, to Kali.
Then the film maker talks about the next film festival and, in passing, about the dead bodies in the streets of Calcutta, which are collected toward morning. It has always been this way. In 1943, when he was a child, two million Bengalis had starved because the British army had used up all the rice stocks in the war against Japan. Had a film been made about it? No, unfortunately not. You can’t film starvation.
Wherever he goes in Calcutta, at the film maker’s, with Mother Theresa’s nuns, at the governor’s luncheon in his honor, everyone wants to know what his next book is about—as if that could make any difference to India.
Even on his visit to a bustee, the planner from the Department of Economic Planning asks him literary questions. Vasco explains himself in detail. The book deals with the history of human nutrition. It all happens in the region of the Vistula estuary, though actually it might just as well take place at the mouth of the Ganges or here on the banks of the Hooghly River. The goddess in his book is called Awa. Unfortunately he knows much too little about the Dravidian Kali.
Then Vasco takes refuge in statistical questions and gets answers he could have found in statistical tables. There are three thousand bustees in Calcutta. “We prefer not to call them slums.” The population of the bustees ranges from five hundred to seventy-five thousand. That adds up to three million bustee dwellers. An average of eight to ten people to a room. Ten to twelve huts form an open square around a court. Excrement and kitchen waste flow down the main streets in open gutters. In this particular bustee the schoolroom holds some forty-five children. A social worker is in charge of it. The same cheerfulness: so proud to have a school. Vasco tries to imprint the stench on his memory. Hallmarks of misery; the usual injustice. Extortionate rents are paid to hut owners who also live in the bustee. Everybody shits where he can and must. True enough, Vasco writes, but compared to Frankfurt am Main, the people here are alive. Later on he wants to cross out this sentence.
The bustee dwellers come from the countryside. To clean up Calcutta, says the planner, you’d first have to clean up the villages. So Vasco goes to the villages: mud huts under coconut palms. He sees the round storehouses, mounted on trestles to keep out the rats, but empty. A smiling peasant woman with a cluster of seven children sends her eldest boy up a palm tree. Vasco drinks the coconut milk and remembers. There’s not enough water in the fields for the young rice plants. The roadside canal has been drained; it’s supposed to be dredged, no one knows when. The peasants are deeply in debt, mostly for their daughters’ weddings. They pay forty percent interest. Untouchables are not allowed to help with the harvest. Men and women bathe in a number of pools where last month’s rain water is fast evaporating. All bathe in their clothes. (Mohammedan puritanism followed by Victorian puritanism.) All the children have worms. Vasco agrees: a beautiful village. He likes the coconut palms, the banana trees, the mud huts, the wormy children, and the smiling women. But the village is sick and on its way to becoming a Calcutta.
China and Czechoslovakia are leading in the table-tennis matches. The newly built table-tennis stadium is almost empty, since the tickets are priced too high even for the middle class.
After his four servants have brought him the morning paper and served his breakfast (poached eggs), Vasco visits the former premier of the West Bengal People’s Front government. He finds himself facing an elderly gentleman, bolt upright in a white cotton garment stirred by the draft. No, he doesn’t belong to the Moscow-inspired party, he’s a Marxist Communist. Without bitterness he names defeats. Vasco learns how the Naxalites have split off and regrouped as a revolutionary movement. So many intelligent young people, says the Marxist with regret, and adds ironically: Of good family. When they found they weren’t getting anywhere—because all the stories about “liberated territories” were Chinese propaganda—the Naxalites started murdering their former comrades, some four hundred Marxists. No, says the old man, Maoism cannot be transplanted to India. Basically Naxalite radicalism is just another gesture of bourgeois impotence.
In this country, Vasco hears himself say, I’d be a radical myself. He decides (so many characters swarming inside him) to invent for his book a conversation between Lena Stubbe, cook at the Danzig-Ohra soup kitchen, and Comrade August Bebel, who happens to be on his way through (1895), in which they take up the question of whether working-class women should emulate “bourgeois” cookery, or whether they require a proletarian cook book.
The melancholy (Brahman) Marxist sits in a bare room and flexes his knees. From time to time a laconic telephone conversation. On the walls, side by side with three wooden wild ducks that pass as ornaments, a small picture of Lenin. Only last week there were two attacks on comrades. In front of the house is parked a black automobile, surrounded by the Marxist’s bodyguards.
Next Vasco visits poets. They read one another (in English) poems about flowers, monsoon clouds, and the elephant-headed god, Ganesha. An English lady (in a sari) lisps impressions of her travels in India. Some forty people in elegant, spacious garments sit spiritually on fiber mats under a draft-propelled fan; outside the windows, the bustees are not far away.
Vasco admires the fine editions of books, the literary
chitchat, the imported pop posters. Like everyone else me nibbles pine nuts and doesn’t know which of the lady poets he would like to fuck if the opportunity presented itself.
Why not a poem about a pile of shit that God dropped and named Calcutta. How it swarms, stinks, lives, and gets bigger and bigger. If God had shat a pile of concrete, the result would have been Frankfurt. Calcutta airport is called Dum-Dum. The formerly British munitions factory there is still producing. Christian hypocrites used to say that the enormous holes made by the truncated, expanding dumdum bullets spared the victims the usual tortures (of belly wounds, for instance). The surviving Naxalites are imprisoned in Dum-Dum Prison. Hope has no place in a poem about Calcutta. Write with pus. Rip off scabs… .
A nun from Wattenscheid, belonging to the Order of Mother Theresa, takes Vasco to a lepers’ bustee. A child is lying there, half dead. With her white hand, the nun shoos the flies away from the half-dead child. Vultures are perched on the tile roofs of the stinking slaughterhouse across the way. All you can do is walk through, step across, look away.
Vasco no longer knows where he is or has been. Now in a day nursery—so affectionate, these two-year-olds. Now in a school, where the children sing something Catholic with closed eyes. Now in a foundling home—a childless Brahman couple adopt the newborn son of an untouchable mother. Vasco wishes them well. Now milk is being distributed outside a dispensary—all so inadequate. A resolute nun keeps the crowd in order. Sister Ananda tells me what Mother Theresa says about the problems of Calcutta. “Maybe we’re only a drop of water in the ocean,” she says, “but the ocean wouldn’t be full without us.”