The neighborhood of Kalighat, in the south, derived its name from the Kali temple at its heart. The temple wasn’t much to look at, a kind of local branch building, with headquarters elsewhere, but the streets around it were hectic and colorful. Vendors hawked worship paraphernalia—flower garlands, pots of ghee, lurid posters of the goddess Kali sticking her tongue out—to pilgrims swarming in and out of the temple entrance. Directly behind the temple, sharing a wall with it, in fact—and the reason why the volunteers referred to the place as “Kalighat”—was the home.
Making his way through the throng outside, Mitchell went through the inconspicuous door and down the steps into the semisubterranean space. The tunnel-like room was dim, the only light issuing from street-level windows high in the exterior wall, through which the legs of passing pedestrians could be seen. Mitchell waited for his eyes to adjust. Slowly, as if being rolled in on their beds from a netherworld, the stricken bodies appeared in three shadowy tiers. Able to see now, Mitchell walked down the length of the ward to the supply room in back. There he found the Irish doctor, consulting a sheet of handwritten notes. Her glasses had slid down her nose and she had to tilt her head back to see who had entered.
“Ah, there you are,” she said. “I’ll have this ready in a moment.”
She meant the medicine cart. She was standing in front of it, placing pills into numbered slots in the tray top. Behind her, boxed medical supplies rose to the ceiling. Even Mitchell, who knew nothing about pharmaceuticals, could tell that there was a redundancy problem: there was way too much of a few things (like gauze bandages and, for some reason, mouthwash) and scant wide-spectrum antibiotics like tetracycline. Some organizations shipped medicines days before their expiration dates, claiming deductions on their tax returns. Many of the drugs treated conditions prevalent in affluent countries, such as hypertension or diabetes, while offering no help against common Indian maladies like tuberculosis, malaria, or trachoma. There was little in the way of painkillers—no morphine, no opiate derivatives. Just paracetamol from Germany, aspirin from the Netherlands, and cough suppressant from Liechtenstein.
“Here’s something,” the doctor said, squinting at a green bottle. “Vitamin E. Good for the skin and libido. Just what these gents need.”
She tossed the bottle in the trash, gesturing toward the cart. “It’s all yours,” she said.
Mitchell maneuvered the cart out of the supply room and started down the line of beds. Dispensing medications was one of the jobs he liked. It was relatively easy work, intimate yet perfunctory. He didn’t know what the pills were for. He just had to make sure they went to the right people. Some men were well enough to sit up and take the pills themselves. With others he had to support their heads and help them drink. Men who chewed paan had mouths like bloody, gaping wounds. The oldest often had no teeth at all. One after another the men opened their mouths, letting Mitchell place pills on their tongues.
There was no pill for the man in bed 24. Mitchell quickly saw why. A discolored bandage covered half his face. The cotton gauze was deeply recessed into the flesh, as if adhering directly to the skull beneath. The man’s eyes were closed, but his lips were parted in a grimace. As Mitchell was taking all this in, a deep voice spoke up behind him.
“Welcome to India.”
It was the beekeeper, holding fresh gauze, tape, and a pair of scissors.
“Staph infection,” he said, gesturing toward the bandaged man. “Guy probably cut himself shaving. Something simple like that. Then he goes to wash in the river, or perform puja, and it’s all over. The bacteria get in the cut and start eating away his face. We just changed his bandage three hours ago and now it needs changing again.”
The beekeeper was full of information like this, all part of his interest in medicine. Taking advantage of the lack of trained medical staff, he operated in the ward almost as an intern, taking orders from the doctors and performing actual procedures, cleaning wounds, or picking maggots from necrotic flesh with a pair of tweezers.
Now he knelt down, squeezing his body into the narrow space between the beds. When he laid the gauze and tape gently on the bed, the man opened his one good eye, looking frightened.
“It’s O.K., fella,” the beekeeper said. “I’m your friend. I’m here to help.”
The beekeeper was a deeply sincere, deeply good person. If Mitchell was a sick soul, according to William James’s categories, then the beekeeper was definitely healthy-minded. (“I mean those who, when unhappiness is offered or proposed to them, positively refuse to feel it, as if it were something mean and wrong.”) It was inspiring to think about the beekeeper, tending his bees in the high desert, raising his children and staying passionately in love with his wife (he often spoke of this), producing honey in every direction you looked. And out of this perfect life had come the need to break out of it, to bring it into real difficulty, even hardship, in order to relieve the suffering of others. It was to be around people like the beekeeper that Mitchell had come to Calcutta, to see what they were like and to have their goodness rub off on him.
The beekeeper turned his sunny face up to Mitchell’s.
“How you holding up today?” he asked.
“Fine. I’m just giving out the medicine.”
“It’s good to see you here. How long you been coming now?”
“This is my third week.”
“Good man! Some people poop out after a couple days. Keep on keeping on. We need all the help we can get.”
“I will,” Mitchell said, and he pushed the cart forward.
He finished the beds in the first and second tiers and turned back to get those on the other side of the aisle, against the inner wall. The man in bed 57 was propped up on one elbow, watching Mitchell in a lofty fashion. He had a fine-boned, patrician face, short hair, and a sallow complexion.
As Mitchell offered him his pills the man said, “What is the point of these medications?”
Momentarily startled by his English, Mitchell said, “I’m not sure what they’re for, exactly. I could ask the doctor.”
The man flared his nostrils. “They are palliatives at best.” He made no move to take them. “Where do you come from?” he asked Mitchell.
“I’m American.”
“An American would never languish in an institution of this nature. Isn’t that correct?”
“Probably not,” Mitchell admitted.
“I should also not be here,” the man stated. “Years ago, before my illness, it was my fortune to serve in the Department of Agriculture. Perhaps you remember the famines we had in India. George Harrison made his famous concert for Bangladesh. That is what everyone remembers. But the situation in India was equally calamitous. Today, as a result of the changes we made in those times, Mother India is again feeding her children. In the last fifteen years agricultural output per capita has risen five percent. We are no longer importing grain. We are growing grain in sufficient quantities to feed a population of seven hundred million souls.”
“That’s good to know,” Mitchell said.
The man went on as though Mitchell hadn’t spoken. “I lost my position due to nepotism. There is great corruption in this country. Great corruption! Then, a few years later, I acquired an infection which devastated my kidneys. I have only twenty percent kidney function left. As I am speaking to you, the impurities are building up in my blood. Building up to intolerable levels.” He stared at Mitchell with fierce, bloodshot eyes. “My condition requires weekly dialysis. I have been trying to tell the sisters this, but they don’t understand. Stupid village girls!”
The agronomist glared for a moment longer. Then, surprisingly, he opened his mouth like a child. Mitchell put the pills in the man’s mouth and waited for him to swallow.
When Mitchell finished, he went to find the doctor, but she was busy in the female ward. It wasn’t until he’d served lunch and was about to leave that he had a chance to talk with her.
“There’s a man here who says he needs dialysis,” h
e told the doctor.
“I’m sure he does,” she said, smiling sadly, and, nodding, walked off.
The weekend arrived, and Mitchell was free to do what he liked. At breakfast he found Mike hunched over the table, staring at a photograph.
“You ever been to Thailand?” he said as Mitchell sat down.
“Not yet.”
“Place is stupendous.” Mike handed the snapshot to Mitchell. “Check out this girl.”
The photograph showed a slender Thai girl, not pretty but very young, standing on the porch of a bamboo hut. “Her name’s Meha,” Mike said. “She wanted to marry me.” He snorted. “I know, I know. She’s a bar girl. But when we met she’d only been working for like a week. We didn’t even do anything at first. Just talked. She said she wanted to learn English, for her job, so we sat at the bar and I taught her some words. She’s like seventeen. O.K., so then a few days later, I went back to the bar and she was there again and I took her back to my hotel. And then we went to Phuket together for a week. She was like my girlfriend. Anyway, we get back to Bangkok, and she tells me she wants to marry me. Can you believe it? She said she wanted to come back to the States with me. I actually thought about it for a minute, I’m not kidding you. You tell me I could get a girl like that back in the States? Who would cook and clean for me? And who’s a piece of ass? No way, man. Those days are over. American women are all looking after themselves now. They’re basically all men. So, yeah, I thought about it. But then I’m taking a piss one day and I get this burning in my johnson. I thought she’d given me something! So I went to the bar and ragged her out. Turned out it was nothing. Just some spermicide or whatever getting up my shaft. I went back to apologize but Meha wouldn’t talk to me. Had some other guy sitting with her. Some fat Dutch guy.”
Mitchell handed the photograph back.
“What do you think?” Mike said. “She’s pretty, right?”
“Probably a good idea that you didn’t marry her.”
“I know. I’m an idiot. But I’m telling you, she was sexy, man. Jesus.” He shook his head, putting the snapshot back into his wallet.
Having nowhere to go on a Saturday, Mitchell lingered at breakfast for another half hour. After the waiters stopped serving and took his plate away, he wandered into the little lending library on the second floor, browsing the shelves of inspirational or religious titles. The only other person there was Rüdiger. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, barefoot as usual. He had a large head, wide-set gray eyes, and a slight Habsburg jaw, and he was dressed in clothes he made himself, tight-fitting maroon pants that ended at his calves and a sleeveless tunic the color of fresh ground turmeric. The snugness of his clothes, along with his lithe frame and bare feet, gave him a resemblance to a circus acrobat. Rüdiger was a mercurial presence. He had been traveling for seventeen straight years, visiting, by his own claim, every country in the world except North Korea and South Yemen. He’d arrived in Calcutta by bicycle, riding the two thousand kilometers from Bombay on an Italian ten-speed and sleeping out in the open beside the road. As soon as he’d got to the city, he’d sold the bike, making enough money to live for the next three months.
Right now he was sitting still, and reading. He didn’t look up when Mitchell entered.
Mitchell took a book from the shelves, Francis Schaeffer’s The God Who Is There. Before he could open it, however, Rüdiger suddenly spoke up.
“I also cut my hair,” he said. He ran his hand over his bristly scalp. “I used to have so beautiful curls. But the vanity, it was so heavy.”
“I’m not sure it was vanity in my case,” Mitchell said.
“Then what was it?”
“Sort of a cleansing process.”
“But that is the same thing! I know the person you are,” Rüdiger said, examining Mitchell closely and nodding. “You think you are not a vain person. You are maybe not so much into your body. But you are probably more vain about how intelligent you are. Or how good you are. So maybe, in your case, cutting off your hair only made your vanity heavier!”
“It’s possible,” Mitchell said, waiting for more.
But Rüdiger quickly changed subjects. “I am reading a book what is fantastic,” he said. “I am reading this book since yesterday and I am thinking every minute, Wow.”
“What is it?”
Rüdiger held up a frayed green hardback. “The Answers of Jesus to Job. In the Old Testament, Job is always asking God questions. ‘Why do you do so terrible things to me? I am your faithful servant.’ He goes on asking and asking. But does God answer? No. God doesn’t say nothing. But Jesus is a different story. The man who is writing this book has a theory that the New Testament is a direct response to the Book of Job. He does a whole textual analysis, line by line, and let me tell you, it is thorough. I come into the library here and I find this book and it is a doozy, as you Americans say.”
“We do not say ‘doozy,’” Mitchell said.
Rüdiger raised his eyebrows skeptically. “When I was in America they always said ‘doozy.’”
“When was that, 1940?”
“1973!” Rüdiger objected. “Benton Harbor, Michigan. I work for a fine printer for three months. Lloyd G. Holloway. Lloyd G. Holloway and his wife, Kitty Holloway. Children: Buddy, Julie, Karen Holloway. I have this idea to become a master printer. And Lloyd G. Holloway, who was my master, always said ‘doozy.’”
“O.K.,” Mitchell allowed. “Maybe in Benton Harbor. I’m from Michigan, too.”
“Please,” Rüdiger said dismissively. “Let’s not try to understand each other by autobiography.”
And with that he went back to his book.
After reading ten pages of The God Who Is There (Francis Schaeffer ran a foundation in Switzerland where Mitchell had heard you could stay for free), he put the book back on the shelf and left the library. He spent the rest of the day walking around the city. Mitchell’s concern that he wasn’t coming up to the mark at Kalighat coexisted, oddly enough, with a surge of real religious feeling on his part. Much of the time in Calcutta he was filled with an ecstatic tranquillity, like a low-grade fever. His meditation practice had deepened. He experienced plunging sensations, as if moving at great speed. For whole minutes he forgot who he was. Outside in the streets, he tried, and often succeeded, in disappearing to himself in order to be, paradoxically, more present.
There was no good way to describe any of this. Even Thomas Merton could only say things like “I have got into the habit of walking up and down under the trees or along the wall of the cemetery in the presence of God.” The thing was, Mitchell now knew what Merton meant, or thought he did. As he took in the marvelous sights, the dusty Polo Grounds, the holy cows with their painted horns, he had got in the habit of walking around Calcutta in the presence of God. Furthermore, it seemed to Mitchell that this didn’t have to be a difficult thing. It was something every child knew how to do, maintain a direct and full connection with the world. Somehow you forgot about it as you grew up, and had to learn it again.
Some cities have fallen into ruin and some are built upon ruins but others contain their own ruins while still growing. Calcutta was a city like that. Mitchell walked along Chowringhee Road, gazing up at the buildings, repeating a phrase he remembered from Gaddis, the accumulation of time in walls, and thinking to himself that the British had left behind a bureaucracy that the Indians had made only more complex, investing the financial and governmental systems with the myriad hierarchies of the Hindu pantheon, with the levels upon levels of the caste system, so that to cash a traveler’s check was like passing before a series of demigods, one man to check your passport, another to stamp your check, another to make a carbon of your transaction while still another wrote out the amount, before you could receive money from the teller. Everything documented, checked over, scrupulously filed away, and then forgotten forever. Calcutta was a shell, the shell of empire, and from inside this shell nine million Indians spilled out. Beneath the city’s colonial surface lay the rea
l India, the ancient country of the Rajputs, nawabs, and Mughals, and this country erupted too from the baghs and alleyways, and, at some moments, especially in the evening when the music vendors played their instruments in the streets, it was as though the British had never been here at all.
There were graveyards filled with the British dead, forests of eroded obelisks in which Mitchell could make out only a few words. Lt. James Barton, husband of. 1857–18–. Rosalind Blake, wife of Col. Michael Peters. Asleep in the Lord, 1887. Tropical vines infiltrated the cemetery, and palm trees grew near family mausoleums. Broken coconut shells lay scattered over the gravel. Rebecca Winthrop, age eight months. Mary Holmes. Died in childbirth. The statuary was Victorian and extravagant. Angels kept vigil over graves, their faces worn away. Apollonian temples housed the remains of East India Company officials, the pillars fallen, the pediments askew. Of malaria. Of typhus. A groundskeeper came out to see what Mitchell was doing. There was no place in Calcutta to be alone. Even a deserted cemetery had its custodian. Asleep in the Lord. Asleep in. Asleep.
On Sunday, he went into the streets even earlier, and stayed out most of the day, getting back to the Guest House in time for afternoon tea. On the veranda, beside a potted plant, he took a fresh blue aerogram out of his backpack and began writing a letter home. Partly because he used his aerograms as an extension of his own journal, and was therefore writing more to himself than to his family, and partly because of the influence of Merton’s Gethsemani journals, Mitchell’s letters from India were documents of utter strangeness. Mitchell wrote down all kinds of things to see if they might be true. Once written down, he forgot about them. He took the letters to the post office and mailed them without any thought of what impression they would make on his mystified parents back in Detroit. He opened this one with a detailed description of the man with the staph infection that was eating away his cheek. This led to an anecdote about a leper Mitchell had seen begging in the street the day before. From there Mitchell moved into a discussion of misunderstandings people had about leprosy, and how it wasn’t really “that contagious.” Next, he scribbled a postcard to Larry, in Athens, giving the return address of the Salvation Army. He took Madeleine’s letter out of his backpack, thought about what to reply, and put it back again.