Heart Gift 2: When our hearts beat in unison — Spending five days in the slums of Calcutta
Sharing with you a deeply personal story from my father’s five days living in the slums of Calcutta in 1953. My dad was fascinated by how the poorest in our world live. He wanted to experience the world through their eyes. The lessons he learned by directly experiencing poverty shaped the way he lived his whole life, in turn, they shaped mine.
“The five days I lived amongst the ‘street people’ of the Calcutta bustees brought an encounter very different if no less enriching. My ‘neighbour’ Ramu would sleep on the hard earth of the unpaved alley, curled up by a much peed-on and spat-on wall, and within a few feet of the open sewer which ran along the other side. He had come here in search of livelihood, “several years ago” — he didn’t quite remember when — from a village of southern Bengal, one of eight surviving children born to a family of landless labourers. His frame hardly reached 5 feet. All chiselled bone, loosely clan in wafer thin parchment of dark skin which wrapped his skeleton with the scant-disguised transparency of a see-through dress over the flesh of a fashionable woman. A small, pinched face with thickish lips that never quite met over sparse yellowed teeth which pointed in all directions as if in perpetual look-out for food. Apart from a rag for a loin-cloth, materially Ramu possessed nothing — unless the festering ulcers on his legs and potted belly were to be counted as such. In the first day or two of our acquaintance Ramu remained glum, hardly said a word. The reason being that he had not eaten for three days — or was it four? — he didn’t quite know how many. Then he dragged himself off, to reappear some hours later. Broad-smiled, he sidled up to me, brandishing four chapattis. Two of which he flung into my lap with a gesture of a king dispensing largesse. “I have food! Come, eat!” “Oh, Ramu, I cannot take”, I protested, not so much because I hesitated to accept, but because ever much of the East it is a basic rule of good manners not to accept the first time something is proffered; it is like saying ‘I see how much you give, and appreciate it.’ “No talk, eat!”, he commanded, slapping me on the knee. “One enough”, I countered, holding out the other to him. “No, two”, he shoved my arm away, laughing hoarsely. And there we squatted side by side by that foul-smelling cloaca. In utter contentment munching away those stale, grubby chapattis, slapping how much all the other people down this alleyway laughed as they chatted whirling down the alley, spinning up plumes of dust and rubbish. Making the pot-bellied children brink and rub eyes. Blowing the pee of cocking mongrels over the prostrated figures. But to all that Ramu was indifferent. “Eat, food good!”, he guffawed. Ramu was peace and fulfilment incarnate. Our hearts found harmony as we broke bread and rejoiced. “God good, life good, eat!”, he shouted and laughed and laughed.
I hardly ever recount this story. Not merely because it is intensely personal, but because much of its inner content is incommunicable. Why did I accept so readily those chapattis from a starving man? Can the answer be formulated? No, not entirely, but let me try. Those who materially possess nothing find inner riches in the act of sharing whatever the little comes their way. It binds them to one another. Through the act of giving/sharing they delve into life’s mainsprings, and therein secure and inner peace, ability to endure — to abide. It takes them into the deeper reaches of life’s essence, and thereby closer to the ultimates of creation, and — dare I say it — closer to God Himself. Take a handful of grain. Eat it in self-gratification. And dead grain shall issue, to join the sewer at the pull of a lavatory chain. But in harvest give back a hundredfold. There’s in this something which partakes of the ultimate, the elemental. Indeed, elemental is the word:- in Greek myth the giant Antaeus, son of those two Elements, Ea, Mother Earth, and Poseidon, Water Sea, remained invincible so long as his bare feet were in contact with the bare earth, his mother. But how many layers separate our feet from Mother Earth? Socks, shoes, carpet, underlay, floor-boars, concrete, insulation screed, foundations… Therein arises something symbolic of the alienation, the rootlessness which as blight pervades much in the affluent societies.
Did I reciprocate Ramu’s gift? Well yes. On parting I gave him enough for a hundred chapattis and more. Which he accepted as naturally as he did the hunger, the laugher, his sores, the dust-devils and the other realities of life. And without the ‘thank you’ so dear to Western ears, merely because this phrase hardly exists in most Indian Languages. Yes, I performed the rites of helping a poor man. But there was none of the magic of the shared chapattis in this act, and our hearts did not beat in unison. For he had given of himself, I of my pocket. And ultimately thereby he was the rich man, I the poor.
I may well be asked:- “So what are we to make of all this? Are you romanticising? Or is life in the bustees not as dismal as we are led to believe?” “Oh yes”, I’d answer, “and more abysmal than you’d ever imagine. Brimful of wretchedness, degradation, pain, hunger, brutality, low cunning.” But in case my questioner felt he had extracted at last some concrete answer, I’d add:- “But if by some miracle we could convey to the bustee-shelterless the dire connotations with which in our landing the above nouns are invested, they’d stare back at us in bewildered incomprehension.” So back to square one. Much of the inner sense in Ramu’s story remains incommunicable, and much in the forgoing lines of attempted interpretation is but philosophical verbiage. All I can assert in unquibbled assurance about my story with the bustee people of Calcutta is this:- In this Gehenna, as nowhere else, I met a man who gave me half his worldly goods and delighted over it; there I had heard more laughter, spontaneous, unaffected laughter, than in the salons of Paris, London or New York; and I left the place in spirit enriched, humbled in flesh. And there, amidst the midden-heaps, the suffering, that sore-blown desolation, a man had told me with utter conviction:- “God good, life good, eat!”. What triumphant affirmation of Man, the glory of Man Alive…”
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