Calcutta (47 page)

The convent stands on Lower Circular Road, not far from that series of shops and pavement trading posts whose commerce is almost completely in bits and pieces of motor bikes and kindred ironmongery. In any light half as intense as Calcutta’s it would be pretty bleak-looking, for it is a drab grey on the outside, pierced by small square windows, and the only decoration is the hammer and sickle someone has whitewashed on the wall next to a slogan left over from the last election – ‘Vote for UF. Stop lockout and automation’. Visitors go down the narrow passage alongside, pull a piece of string dangling by the door, a tin can rattles, and instantly the door is opened by a girl who sits there and does nothing else all day. In a courtyard, twenty or thirty nuns are dhobying linen in a row of buckets. From a row of windows along one side of the yard you can hear the voice of Sister Joseph, soon to fly to Venezuela to take charge of the house
there, but for the moment instructing a classroom of novices in the peculiar philosophy of these surroundings. ‘Let the poor eat you up, is Mother’s motto’, she is telling them. She used to be an accounting clerk and a piano teacher in Southampton, herself, before she gave it up for this. There are maybe a dozen or so women who have come out from Europe to join the missionaries here. The rest are Indians. None of them can have an expectation of life much greater than those of the people who live in
Calcutta’s
bustees. They are exposed to every disease in the city, they work preposterous hours, they are not encouraged to spare
themselves
. The German doctor-sister at the dispensary down the road, who has been drugging, inoculating and plastering for most of a sweltering day without benefit of fans, is soaked in sweat and pasty with fatigue. Not one of the Europeans looks very healthy. The Indians merely look placid, but they succumb, too; they buried one a few days ago, after it had been discovered too late that the playful puppy which nipped her in a bustee was rabid.

Mother Teresa herself looks a bit shrunken, a small person with an olive face much wrinkled like a nutmeg. She has dark brown eyes which can twinkle disarmingly and nothing about her suggests the toughness that is there, or the will-power which no founder of a religious order has yet been known to manage without. She may well be a woman of whim on close
acquaintance
; you can drop in unexpectedly one day and discover upon the anteroom table, alongside the thumping hidebound Bible, a paperback volume entitled ‘Fun Lover’s Guide to Surprising Amsterdam’. She smiles when provoked to it, but she is mostly very serious, very quiet and there is no energy in her handshake. She says ‘Thank God’ a lot, as the Irish do, by way of breaking up her sentences rather than in pious reflection: ‘It’s a lovely day, thank God, and you’ve just arrived, thank God, and very soon I shall have to leave you and be off, thank God …’ There is nothing at all pious about her. She simply recites the details of the convent’s work, talks about the condition of the poor, all of it nearly in a monotone with a sad little nod of the head when she comes to some particularly frightful incident. She becomes a little frosty if anyone inquires what the conversion rate is
among the people she works for. She tries to convey as delicately as possible, beneath a dutiful colour print of the Pope, that the conversion of souls in any orthodox sense
determined
by the Vatican is rather beside the point she is attempting to make.

The point is clear enough in the shed at Nirmal Hriday, where people are dying in a scrap of dignity, surrounded by much care and attention; it is evident out at Dhapa, where the lepers are encouraged to struggle on with their mutilations, to hope for something that might eventually matter more to them than the ostracisms of society. At the dispensary just down the road from the convent, the point seems to be that a lot of sick people are being inoculated, cajoled into taking medicines of which they may be suspicious, occasionally scolded for failing to take pills as prescribed, because that is what you do when you have some medical training and a few resources and when you are
confronted
with sick people. There are always long queues waiting by the dispensary gates; Hindus one day, Muslims the next, Christians after that, rotated in segregated groups so that there is a little order in all the city’s chaos, and to reduce the risk of a sister perpetrating some unthinking religious offence upon a patient. At the orphanage the point of the exercise appears to be that if you hear the mew of a kitten upon a garbage heap one day and, on investigating, discover that it is not a kitten but a very new baby shaped and sized like a wizened rat, you bring it back and try to rear it out of pre-natal malnutrition so that it will be strong enough to face existence in Calcutta, rather than let it perish almost quietly within the hour. Mother Teresa’s sisters wouldn’t understand if anyone asked why. They probably wouldn’t be shocked, either, for Calcutta can immunize a human being against some conditions just as steadily as it can infect him with others.

It is difficult to judge how Calcutta regards Mother Teresa and her missionaries. They are reported warmly and respectfully in
The
Statesman
from time to time but civic leaders ignore them almost completely. Some years ago there was a great fuss and considerable cries of outrage because on one of her trips to Europe Mother Teresa had seemed to imply that there were more
unmarried mothers in the city than Calcutta wished to
acknowledge
. The missionaries acquired Nirmal Hriday with something approaching the blessing of Kalighat next door because, when a couple of the Kalighat priests became destitute and half dead themselves. Mother Teresa was the only person in sight who took any notice of them; but at the beginning of 1970 there was angry talk in the neighbourhood about a house of pestilence on its collective doorstep and the nuns were told that the sooner they found premises elsewhere in Calcutta, the sooner the Kalighat quarter of the city would be pleased. But the nuns have never been molested. Even alongside Kali’s most sacred temple, which might be the most unpleasant place here for any Christian flaunting his own faith, these unmistakable women in the
blue-trimmed
white saris come and go in their truck or on foot, with only the inescapable band of beggars occasionally approaching them. Perhaps the word has gone further round Calcutta than anyone might think, that they really are almost as poor as
anyone
. No sister possesses anything but two saris and one bucket. She is materially very much better off than anyone in a bustee only insofar as her own compound is spotless, and properly drained, and in her assurance that her ration of gruel and rice and fish will come to her every day.

Quite remarkable sums of money are now raised in the West, together with ambulances (which the Indian Government makes a curiously longwinded fuss about before allowing the vehicles into the country). Most of it comes from Mother Teresa
Committees
scattered across the Catholic communities of the wealthy world; the British supporters alone raised
£
33,000 in 1969. It is all deployed with calculating thrift. The convent on Lower Circular Road and its outposts around the city may well be the only places in Calcutta where absolutely nothing is wasted. People who have made contact with the sisters are apt to turn every item of junk over to them before leaving for England, as well as their spare enterovioform and aspirin, for they have been given clearly to understand that these women can find a use for anything at all; empty bottles are invaluable for storing boiled and therefore decontaminated water and old matchboxes are splendid for issuing pills to outpatients. There were 111,000 of
those at the dispensary in 1969; another statistic from Calcutta, to be added to 143 abandoned children in the orphanage, the 13,000 lepers, the 1,250 wrecks who had passed through Nirmal Hriday. And this city needs much more than charity.

It has something more than that in the Calcutta Metropolitan Planning Organization. For the past few years this has been the one excuse for hope that Calcutta might just avoid its ultimate civic disaster without a political upheaval that would almost surely be accompanied by a massacre as frightful as the one of 1946, or even worse. The origins of the CMPO lie in that mission from the World Bank and the earlier exploration of water
supplies
and sanitation by the World Health Organization. The
mission
was highly critical of Delhi’s failure to appreciate Calcutta’s predicament even in the Third Five Year Plan, which had not then been put into operation. Its report said that ‘it is essential, first, that the Central Government should accept a direct and special financial responsibility for the improvement of conditions in the city, and second, that the provincial and municipal authorities should co-operate in establishing an effective body to carry through an enlarged programme of municipal
reconstruction
and improvement.’ Very tactfully, the mission said that ‘the Corporation of Calcutta has neither the power nor the financial resources to cope with the staggering problems of the city. The annual municipal revenue is restricted to the paltry sum of about Rs 85 millions – a good deal less than Bombay, which is a smaller city. The Government of India tends to regard this problem as wholly the concern of the Government of West Bengal which, in turn, is struggling with many other difficulties and must respond to a legislature that inadequately represents the interests of the urban areas. The very magnitude of the challenge that Calcutta presents to the conscience and political commonsense of those in authority no doubt in part explains the inadequacy of the response. Everybody admits mat more ought to be done about it. Nobody is ready to do it.’

That was the CMPO’s charter. Before the World Bank
reported
, a scheme had already been prepared for the reclamation of three and a half square miles of salt marsh on the city’s eastern edge, where between fifty thousand and a hundred thousand
families might eventually be rehoused; a very sketchy start had been made to the construction of a new highway from Howrah to industrial Durgapur. Apart from those two things, every thoughtful step forward that has been taken in Calcutta since 1961 has been taken by the CMPO. It is a cosmopolitan
organization
more than it is a metropolitan one. It is administered entirely by Indians, very largely staffed by Indians, most of them Bengalis, but it has also relied heavily from the start upon a
number
of foreign consultants. It has been supplied with funds from the Central Government in Delhi and the West Bengal
Government
in Calcutta, but it has also been supported by the Ford Foundation, which by 1969 had contributed five million dollars as well as recruiting some of the best available experts from the United States and Europe to come and work in Calcutta. Their numbers have varied from time to time for several reasons. At one stage there were twenty-one of them in the city, at another only five. Either the money was running out of the current budget or the provincial Communist government was campaigning against the Ford Foundation or an individual now and then simply
became
discouraged by the terrible inertia of the official machinery of India, by the almost total lack of progress anywhere except on paper.

The ones who have stayed have developed a very fierce loyalty to the city, marvelling at the patience of its people, scorning outsiders who dismiss it as an appalling mess beyond redemption, doggedly determined to see the thing through to whatever the end might be. They have been working in what would be
regarded
as quite intolerable circumstances anywhere else in the world. Their offices just off Lower Chitpore Road, situated where they cannot possibly forget the magnitude and the nature of Calcutta’s basic problems, are as bare and totally functional as a military command post just behind the trenches. They have been gheraoed, even knocked about once or twice by mobs. Their families have been badly frightened by political violence on the way home from school, on the way to the cinema, even sitting at home in the evening. Not one of them has shown the slightest bitterness in return. They have instead acquired the most
painfully
developed conscience of the rich in all Calcutta. They very
nearly draw lots now if there is a new visitor to be guided through his first bustee, for they do not care to parade
themselves
yet again before people whose circumstances are no better than they were years ago, when the planners first came to their aid; and the guided tour of Calcutta’s slums is just a little bit like turning over a stone in a stagnant pond to see what is
wriggling
underneath. They write memoranda to Ford, suggesting that conventional American automobiles might well be replaced with something more modest, like Volkswagen, because the
Oldsmobile
does invite unpleasant attention and because it has begun to seem offensive to the planners themselves.

There is scarcely anything on the ground to show for almost a decade of the CMPO, no thing to suggest that the necessary miracle is at last being wrought in this city. The highway has proceeded on its unsteady way towards Durgapur and, beyond the penitentiary housing blocks of Maniktala, the grey wasteland of the reclamation which you observe from incoming aircraft, still stretches away in an almost empty plateau of compressed refuse towards the eastern swamps, signposted on its edges as Salt Lake City. The major achievement of the CMPO is its Basic Development Plan, the blueprint for a miracle which was finished in 1966 and which has been awaiting measurable action ever since.

The prospect it held out for Calcutta was exciting. It foresaw the day when there could be a genuine linear city stretching along both banks of the Hooghly here, in place of the sprawling mess which is almost totally devoid of services along most of its length today (for no jute mill owner dreamed of laying
drainpipes
in the nineteenth century when he started the nucleus of a township). There would be two anchorholds for the people of this vast community. One would be the existing twins of
Calcutta
city and Howrah themselves; the other would be to the North, where the townships of Bansberia and Kalyani would be developed and joined into one urban centre supporting as many people as now live in Copenhagen, Chungking or Naples. Even today the makings of this vision can be seen in Kalyani, for uniquely it is a recent township built around textiles, engineering, paper-making and distilling; it has a planned road system and,
marvellously, it has space. To the North of the linear city, express motorways and improved railways would sweep away to the Indian Ruhr around Durgapur, Asansol and the other heavy engineering towns. To the South, modern lines of
communication
would flow down to the new port of Haldia. In between Kalyani and Haldia, those two exemplary visions of the future, Greater Calcutta would very gradually be made endurable for all its people.