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| Published in Washington, D.C. May 21, 1994 |
Hope, despair in 'City of Dreadful Night'
A diary of life in Calcutta
By Richard S. Ehrlich
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
CALCUTTA, India
Thousands of miserable, sweaty, emaciated men are running through the city's grimy streets, pulling passengers in wooden rickshaws past huge mansions with columns and porticos reminiscent of the White House in Washington.
But many of the mansions are crumbling from decay, rented by families who have carved the majestic ballrooms into tiny, dilapidated apartments.
Clusters of servants live in squalor in the yards of these great houses, amid gardens gone barren with neglect. An estimated 300,000 homeless poor also live in the streets under crude shelters like urban cavemen, cooking over campfires on the sidewalk, bathing from hydrants and foraging for scraps of food among piles of rotting garbage.
Welcome to Calcutta, which still lives up to Rudyard Kipling's description as the "City of Dreadful Night" where "above the packed and pestilential town, Death looked down."
* * *
The made-in-India "metro" only goes a short distance, so its clean, spacious facilities are ignored by most commuters, who ride over-crowded trams or buses to get where they're going.
Many people also travel to and from work, shopping, or school via rickshaws that are yanked along by desperate-eyed men through polluted streets for the price of a bowl of rice.
To clear the way, a rickshaw puller rattles a hand-held, walnut-shaped, metal bell that has the deceptively optimistic sound of a sleigh bell.
People who do ride the subway can marvel at its hallway lighting, which looks like a low-budget 1950s science-fiction movie with fluorescent tubes encased in aluminum boxes hammered askew on walls leading to the underground train.
The good news is that a ticket only costs about six cents.
* * *
Kali Ghat -- from where some believe Calcutta got its name -- also has the Kali Temple, famous for the almost daily ritual of chopping off the head of a live goat as a sacrifice to the goddess Kali.
The deity is usually depicted as black, with blood on her hands and dripping from her tongue. She is adorned with a necklace made skulls, which shows her predilection for blood sacrifices.
Kali is often destructive, but she is also believed to protect humanity from disease. She has many shrines throughout Calcutta.
Nearby, for those who she has been unable to protect, is an electric crematorium, where many of the city's dead are disposed of.
The corpses are carried through the streets on lightweight, wood-and-rope litters that are then put side by side in the crematorium's open hallway, so the dead and their mourners can form a line before the twin ovens. Today, as seven bodies lay for several hours awaiting the flames, incense smolders near their heads to ward off the stink of putrefaction.
A tiny, fresh green leaf is placed over each closed eye, white cotton is stuffed into the dead nostrils, and makeup is applied to their faces, which -- along with the hands and bare feet -- are the only part of the bodies visible under cotton sheets.
Friends and relatives shoo flies away from the faces of the deceased, who appear to be resting peacefully in their simple beds.
* * *
As the fires burn, stray dogs wander amid the eight charred rectangles that mark earlier pyres. Several laughing college students huddle to smoke hashish at the relatively isolated site.
"Our friend's father died and they are burning him at the electric crematorium," one of the students says. "We are here just passing the time. Want to smoke?"
The pyres also attract Biswantha Dey, 60, who tells The Washington Times: "I have seen thousands of bodies burn here. During our lives, people are always saying, ÔI am, I am, I am.' But this is the end, this is the result."
He points at a blazing corpse attended by undertakers.
"That person has no identification. No relations. No claimant. No name. The body was brought here by Mother Teresa or one of the other charities. The burning is free for him -- the government pays.
"I am retired," Mr. Dey chats on. "I was an employee of a life insurance corporation. I come here because this is a place of peace. I live in this room," he adds, gesturing to a balcony overlooking the pyres.
* * *
Its title translates as "Still It Is An Exile." The shy student at Presidency College explains: "The essence of my poetry is about exile. Everybody in the world is in exile from their actual home.
"The life we live is not actually the life we want to live -- like, no slums. And equality. And a love of life."
Wearing a black sweater, stone-washed black jeans, and short, black curly hair, Miss Mukhopadhyay read one poem aloud which included the verse "I do not know the words, but the tune is mine. The notes sing in the sitar of my mind, with the rhythm of my heartbeat. It is me alone, the notes and darkness."
She tells this foreign reporter: "People here in Calcutta love reading poetry and are interested in magazines about poetry.
* * *
The dozen or so shops also sell rubber gloves, rubber corsets, rubber hot water bottles, rubber hernia trusses and other rubbery items, but most of the shelves are stacked high with big boxes of domestic and foreign condoms.
"Plan your family planning," say the signs in the windows, which also contain photos of nude women, absent elsewhere in Indian advertising.
At the popular British colonial-era Fairlawn Hotel -- where actor Patrick Swayze's room appeared in the film "City of Joy" -- the owner, a Mrs. Smith, now bellows at the top of her English lungs at her white-uniformed staff: "How dare you talk to a British person that way! You're nothing but bloody servants! Don't you forget that! You come from dirty little villages, all of you!"
Later, in a happier mood, she coos to guests: "I am preserving a little bit of the British Raj here" -- though the heavy, kitschy atmosphere is more like the set of a bizarre Tennessee Williams play.
* * *
"Israeli ecstasy is 800 rupees a tab," whispers one unhealthy British traveler -- a ringer for the author and former heroin junkie William Burroughs.
After reeling off the latest price of ecstasy in London, plus the cost of smuggling the drug from Israel to India, and then converting British pounds into Indian rupees, he insists Sudder Street's price of about 27 dollars is an amazing bargain.
Not far away, in a schoolyard, a group of Indian boys have momentarily forgotten the chaos and despair of Calcutta as they play cricket, ignoring differences of religion, class and ethnic origin that often divides much of India.
While they play, another rickshaw lurches by, carrying two Indian women dressed in gold-embroidered saris as evening begins to darken the teeming streets.