Calcutta (20 page)

Cholera now came in the wake of famine and in one week, in the district of Naogaon alone, one thousand people died of it; yet in the same few days, on 21 October, Mr Amery was telling Parliament that there was no shortage of medical supplies and no widespread outbreak of disease. Within three weeks it was announced in Delhi that 2,233,000 people queued each day at feeding centres throughout Bengal; in Calcutta, hundreds fought each other beside a row of dustbins which contained nothing but particles of refuse and putrid food. On 4 December,
Major-General
D. Stuart made a radio broadcast in which he admitted that ‘The reports you have seen in the newspapers of the
numbers
requiring medical treatment and clothing are not
exaggerated
… In the first place malnutrition coupled with the advent of the cold weather and shortage of personal clothing and blankets, has made a large percentage of the poorer people easy victims to malaria, cholera and pneumonia, which are
rampant
throughout a large number of civil districts.’ It was
impossible
, by now, for anyone in India to ignore or dilute the truth, and nobody was trying to any more, though the figures which demonstrated the full extent of the disaster did not begin to appear for some months yet. It was the end of March 1944
before
the news agencies reported that in Dacca, 22, 866 people had died in January, compared with 7,194 in January 1943.

Even at that date, horror stories were still being printed
almost
every day. On 26 March, the
Hindustan
Standard
reported
from Mymensingh: ‘The dead body of a destitute woman was found yesterday morning in a vacant house by the District Board road off Sarish station. The body was seen lying all day long without any arrangements for removal. At night, jackals dragged the body out and mostly devoured it up. The remaining part of the body is being devoured by dogs and crows in front of the eyes of hundreds of passers-by this morning.’ By this time Bengal was merely suffering from the awful after-effects of famine. Nearly a century before, Sir Bartle Frere had described in the context of another catastrophe what was happening now: ‘Men are death-stricken by famine long before they die. The effects of insufficient food long continued may shorten life after a period of some years, or it may be of some months. But
invariably
there is a point, which is often reached long before death actually ensues, when not even the tenderest care and most
scientific
nursing can restore a sufficiency of vital energy to enable the sufferer to regain even apparent temporary health and strength.’

Early in 1944 there was plenty in the land again. By the middle of the preceding November a man from
The
Times
of
India
had been able to write that ‘a grim but not uncommon spectacle in East Bengal today is to find a whitened skeleton in the corner of a field bearing the richest rice crop in half a
century
’. By the spring a new Governor of Bengal, the Australian Mr R. G. Casey, was guilty of nothing more than an
insensitive
analogy when he said ‘I am convinced that there is plenty of rice in Bengal for all the people of Bengal. The difficulty is that it is unevenly spread … Our task is to spread the butter evenly on the bread.’ He might have chosen his words more carefully, but there were Englishmen open to charges much graver than that and a member of the Bengal provincial assembly had already made one of them. ‘I would like the fact to be more widely known in India,’ said Dr M. R. Jayakar one day in the chamber, ‘for few newspapers have reported it, that at the last debate in the House of Commons on the Indian food question, the attendance of Members varied from 35 to 53 out of a total of 600 and odd … This knocks the bottom out of the old
superstition
that these 600 and odd men can govern India from 7,000
miles away. Is it not time that this Punch and Judy show was ended?’ He was speaking in November 1943, when the effects of the Bengal famine were to be seen at their worst. And Punch, without letting on to Judy, was already losing interest in the show.

*

Calcutta has known nothing of famine since 1943, yet starvation has become a permanent factor in its life, such a commonplace that it is scarcely remarked on any more. It is very difficult for Westerners, certainly for the British, to understand quite what starvation means in terms of the person to whom it is happening. This is partly because the English language in the West has
become
debased at this point; the vocabulary of extreme hunger unto death has been used so flippantly so often that it has almost ceased to convey its true meaning. An Englishman will
frequently
say that he is starving when he means that he is ready for his second large meal of the day, and he has never in his life known the day which has not contained two large meals and several snacks. He will use the word famished as an alternative to starving in exactly the same way. There are places in the North of England where a man will say that he is starving when he is merely chilly enough to move closer to the fireplace. Famine, on the other hand, has almost sunk without trace in our understanding because it has for too long carried entirely biblical overtones or because it has become tediously associated for a generation with a number of charitable organizations which are forever making demands upon our purses and our consciences. Starvation has nothing at all to do with its contemporary
English
usage, and famine is quite obscured by the Christian
mythology
and by the publicity apparatus of charity. Starvation and famine really mean a man who dies with a stomach containing undigested grass; a child whose body has started to split open with lack of food, so that its liquids begin to trickle out; a fisherman who is so weak that a dog begins to eat him before he is dead; a crowd which goes scavenging among poultices full of blood and pus and scabs in the hope of finding something putrid but edible there, too.

It is also very hard to understand what the starvation and the
other parts of Calcutta’s poverty are like, at a distance, because of the effect they have on the man who is reporting them at first hand. You find, when you have returned from the leper colony at Dhapa, or from the death shed of Nirmal Hriday, that you have the very sketchiest recollection of whàt these people
actually
look like in their extremity. There is something quite
intolerable
about peering too closely at those sores and those
mutilations
and most of all at the eyes (which I cannot describe) that go with them. No derelict human being should be examined as a specimen by another human being, unless it is by someone who can give him something to mend his condition; whatever that may be. For the same reason you return from Calcutta, unless you are very tough or a professional, with a camera which may be full of exposed film but which contains hardly any record of people. Quite apart from the risk of violence when the camera is raised, which is considerable, you are also deterred by the
indecency
of the act.

Maybe these are among the reasons why comparatively few Western hippies are to be seen in the city. They are to be found in hundreds at places like Benares, where they live in boats moored in the Ganga for months on next to nothing, where they idle along the interminable ghats in their blue jeans and with their embroidered satchels, and where occasionally a Western face may be observed gliding by in a rickshaw, a vision of
flowing
muslin and long hair who has lately been dignified there as the Italian swami. But in Calcutta hippies are few and far
between
and they do not stay long even when they come, though Allen Ginsberg spent months here a few years ago, becoming curiously obsessed with the spectacle of incinerated corpses at the Nimtallah burning ghat. The reputation of the city has stopped most hippies in their tracks elsewhere in India; and on first acquaintance it is enough to destroy any romantic illusions about gentleness and brotherly love and a dominating
concentration
upon the beatific vision. It is a place where disagreeable statistics are translated into men and women and children
without
number. The Reserve Bank of India published a report in 1970, pointing out that if the baseline of poverty be taken as a calorific rather than a financial measurement (this being agreed
upon in India’s case by experts), then seventy per cent of the nation’s people live in absolute poverty, an increase of eighteen per cent in seven years. In Calcutta you can see this for what it is in almost any hundred yards you care to choose from; you can see it, you can feel it as it brushes past you, you can smell it, you can almost taste it. Most of the time you struggle with yourself and with the poverty-stricken to avoid bumping into it or treading on it.

Calcutta is a place where people devise the most ingenious methods of adding to a pittance if they have one, or of
acquiring
one if they have not; at the Zoo in Alipore, across the road from Warren Hastings’ old house, a keeper has trained his
elephants
to take coins, not biscuits or sweets, in the tip of their trunks from the visitors. And a Zoo keeper is not nearly at the bottom of the human pile in Calcutta. At the bottom of the pile are those who squat upon its pavements, scarcely noticed in life by the people walking by, claiming attention in death only because the kites have started to circle overhead or because the crows have begun to prod at their bodies. In the end they have not even had the energy or the willpower to destroy
themselves
, as some do. If it were not lost in the far bigger problems of Calcutta, there would be the problem of those who jump off the Howrah Bridge in despair. A man leaps in front of a train pulling into Sealdah Station and, misjudging the angle, merely loses both legs at the thigh; whereupon he is taken to Nirmal Hriday and there, eventually, he dies. In 1967, 4,682 people were known to have committed suicide in West Bengal; in 1968 there were 5,800; in the first six months of 1969 there were 2,873.

All these things are terrible in themselves. They are made much more terrible in Calcutta because they are to be seen
alongside
all the signs of opulence. One day you pass an emaciated man standing outside the window of a fashionable shoe shop on Chowringhee. He is without shoes himself, but that is as
unremarkable
as the grimy rags that hang upon his body. It is his stance that catches your attention. His knees are faintly bent, his shoulders are curved forward, his head hangs almost upon his chest while his eyes gaze unblinking at the lowest row of shoes. His hands dangle by his sides but he is utterly
motionless
.
He suggests not envy, not anger, not desire, but absolute incomprehension and total defeat. He is still there, not having shifted an inch, when you return half an hour later. It is at about this time that you are struck anew by the memory of something seen on your journey into the city from the airport. It dawns on you that the messy collection of packing cases and tin sheets standing in the shade of the BOAC hoarding was not a couple of chicken coops at all, but the best that a handful of people could manage in the way of a house. The ironies of such wealthy advertisement next to the deepest deprivation in Calcutta are so huge and so frequent that you might almost suspect
someone
of gigantic and tasteless caricature very deliberately carried out. Down in Ballygunge there is a long and gleaming metal hoarding, from the same stud as ‘Try a Little VC-Ioderness’, and it invites all-comers to ‘Dial Panam and Ask for the World’. Smoke drifts across its surface in the evening, for within fifty yards there are half a dozen families cooking by the gutter. Somewhere else the bedtime people are catching the eye with ‘Ever Thought of Dunlopillo as a Gift?’; and five yards below the lights which keep the thought uppermost through the night, a man is sleeping on the pavement without even a blanket to his name.

And then there is the advertisement with a specially-constructed concrete foundation, half-way up Park Street, where it begins to curve from middle-classiness to the downright
proletarian
tramtracks of Lower Circular Road. The foundation consists of a concrete roof supported by four concrete posts on the very edge of the pavement and at first sight it looks as if it might be a bus shelter. It has been erected solely to bear the weight of the sign perched on top – ‘Fedders Lloyd, the world’s largest-selling air-conditioner!’; and a picture to go with it.
Almost
every day there is someone lying prone and exhausted under that concrete roof, which provides a splendid shade from the searing sun. Once, a family moved into it. There is a broken standpipe a few yards away in the gutter and there the woman would dhobi clothes and draw water, khaki though it is, for cooking. Her two small children would splash and play in the water. Her husband could occasionally be seen taking a bath
in that gutter, which also accommodated two or three discarded green coconut shells. Sometimes the children would rush up to a rich pedestrian and beg something from him, and because they were generally full of smiles and giggles and did not pursue their quarry more than ten yards down Park Street, they more often than not collected a few paise. But mostly the family kept to themselves.

They had been there only a day when it was noticeable that they had made an alteration to the Fedders Lloyd shelter. On the three sides that did not border the gutter they had raised a minute wall of mud, no more than three or four inches high, which linked one post to another. It was the boundary of their home, and inside it their three tin bowls, their iron pot and their two old blankets were laid out, the only things they possessed apart from the winding sheets the parents wore and the beads that dangled at each child’s crutch. They lived there for more than a week, and when the parents were not cooking or washing they were usually, one at a time, just lying very still. Then one morning they were gone, and only their little mud wall was left behind. Possibly they had infringed the Bengal Destitute
Persons
(Repatriation and Relief) Ordinance of 1943, or some
subsequent
equivalent, by having sheltered without permission or
payment
beneath an advertisement they would not even be able to read. Nor would they be able to read another notice facing them on a wall just across Park Street, not so well turned-out as the one promoting Fedders Lloyd but demanding attention
nonetheless
. There are now many more of these in Calcutta than there are those of commercial origin and they usually come in a kind of durable whitewash or a shade of dolly-blue. This one said: ‘No hope left. Only anger.’