Review By Harsimran Kaur
Rating: 5/5
Calcutta plays a symphony of inhabitants mostly clustered in poverty, draped in yarns of Spartan soiled clothes and anticipatory dreams. A fellow rickshaw pullar drifts the two wheeled abridged carriage by the clasp of his hand fixed tightly around the protuberant rods. He fancies a phantasmagoria, lips curled to hurl a song, a cappella resonating his resistance to the volatile heat fondering the pricks of hair on the parched lesions of the skin.
Not far are the homes to the people of Calcutta; some fortunate to have a roof and some plunder aimlessly for a space on the dilapidated streets to call it their fortuitous abode. Calcutta is also a home to immigrants from other states that come to make a living, pledge to earn money for a bright future but life turns out to be a rattle-trap of remorseful guilt and diseases bereft of palliative taps. Nevertheless in the midst of despair and abominable scourges, people find succour and comfort in their self-restrained diminutive living. The spirit to live never dies and it’s the joy of the benign breath that makes the city of Calcutta a home to many.
Dominique Lapierre, a doyen in the literary field, imposes Calcutta through the hearts of the people, living in the ‘City of Joy’ through decades. It’s the story of the ‘known’ through their own reflective prisms. It’s a story of ‘Pals’ and many like them who arrive in Calcutta with many dreams. The ‘Pals’ too come with a hope, leaving their ancestral village summoned to drought and famine. They live in a morbid dread of ‘hunger’ and ‘disease’, finally settling in the circumambulation of a defined space on streets—a debilitating drooping bolstered by the never ending struggle. Then, starts a search and acceptance of an unknown retaliation to life—hunger destroys but the spirit regains the spirit to earn more, disease cripples but the hands still orchestrate a staccato to beat the instruments of life and death pontificates on the morality of life but the departure brings together the piteous calls of the mourners to tear apart abnormalities.
The prevalence of the disconcerted mahogany of violent cries and copious tears is an incumbent on humanity to clear the dark clouds in the unblemished horizon. Stephen Kovalski, anonymous Polish Catholic priest, makes home among the destitute. Free from any discipline of rituals, caste and creed, he charts a path of self-realization and restrain. Humanity forms the cornucopia of selfless ministrations for the ineffectiveness of the moribund life.
Saints don’t wear cassocks—liberated are those who wear the garb of quixotic determination and reduce the synapse between the rich and poor. Mother Teresa indefatigably worked for the poor and the diseased in Calcutta. A revered saint, she thinned her boots to take care of the needy, not as an avocation but a deliberate attempt to sanctify the anthropocentrism we all are a part of.
An American physician, Max Loeb, arrives in Calcutta and is flummoxed by the simulacrum of a tree denude of its leaves— a grotesque silhouette of its nudity. The people of the ‘City of Joy’ too are bereft of compassion; a protracted saga coiled by silent stoicism.
Dominique Lapierre, through extensive research over the years, has featured Calcutta contemporaneous with its people—their tumultuous lives, indigence as a reflective dimension for the privileged to not call it an irony and the saints who may be an aberration to many but walk on the burning coals to soothe the incandescent rage of the enfeeble due to hunger and disease.
The firmaments heave a sigh for God has its own way to clear the mist that settles like diaphanous flecks and require an emollient hand to stir it off to see clearly what lies ahead.
TAKE AWAY
The book is an assiduous description of lives torn by their own destiny. In the end, it’s the humanity that prevails—victorious and is a verdant full of love.