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 gov-
ernment. 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 he 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."
No, don't look. Step across. Stop your ears with lead. Practice glassy-eyed indifference. Leave pity in your suitcase with your shirts and socks, or stick a bank note in your guidebook at the place where it says "Calcutta." Or look. Stop. Listen. Feel moved and ashamed. Show your red tongue, because pity is small change and quickly dispensed.
Now in Kalighat, where the ragged bundles that are picked up off the street at night are (for once) given ample helpings of rice at Mother Theresa's home for the dying. Next door (at last) the temple of the goddess Kali. A priest explains, and Vasco pays him five rupees. In the sacrificial area blood covered with flies recalls the goats that were sac-
rificed this morning. Young women scratch little good-luck symbols in the blood-drenched clay. Close by there's a tree for mothers who wish for children, lots of children, another child, more children, more and more children, a child (or two or three) year in, year out. The mothers hang wishing stones on the tree. The tree is full of wishing stones, all signifying children, more children. Wherever Vasco looks, flowery madness and Catholic-type Hindu kitsch. The black Kali is hidden behind the crush of the faithful.
Vasco stands to one side. He wants to know why she sticks out her red tongue. The priest explains that after Kali had killed all the demons (and other counterrevolutionaries) she couldn't stop killing and only came to her senses after setting her foot on the chest of her recumbent male aspect, Shiva. Then Kali was ashamed, and for shame she stuck out her tongue. Sticking out the tongue has been regarded as a sign of being ashamed ever since. Nowhere has Vasco seen a minister, governor, Brahman, or lisping poet stick out his tongue. He has seen the pale tongues of cows grazing gently in garbage. He has seen how undernourishment turns children blond. He has seen mothers dipping their whining babies' pacifiers in brackish sugar water. He has seen flies on everything under the sun. He has seen life before death.
Vasco takes refuge in the newspaper. Side by side with a story about the strike of the food truckers he reads the latest about the table-tennis matches. The members of the Swedish team have the runs. After a short stroll around town they flee back to their hotel in horror. Now they talk of leaving ahead of time. And Vasco writes his Ilsebill, now in her third month of pregnancy, horrified half sentences on a postcard showing a glossy picture of the black Kali: "This place defies understanding. Reason won't get you anywhere. The lepers are worse than I thought. I've met a nun who believes with all her might and is always cheerful. The heat is something. Leaving tomorrow. Flying to the Malabar Coast, where Vasco da Gama landed. ."