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. Vas-co'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 Ben-galese, 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 beautifuclass="underline" 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 hol-lowed-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.