Gunter Grass - The Flounder

He arrives in a jumbo jet. Actually all he wants to do is visit the black Kali and see her stick out her red tongue.

Vasco has read all the statistics. Vasco knows what the president of the World Bank thinks about Calcutta. Vasco is supposed to deliver a lecture. As a precaution he has already written it down, in long and short sentences. "By a rough estimate…" says his speech. Well fed, Vasco suffers under the problem of world hunger. After many rebirths, Vasco is now a writer. He is writing a book in which he exists down through the ages: the Stone Age, the Early Christian, High Gothic, Reformation, and Baroque eras, the age of the Enlightenment, et cetera.

Immediately after the takeoff he quotes himself: Somebody ought to write a report on hunger down through the ages, comparing past, present, and future hunger. The famine of 1317, when there was nothing to eat but manna grits. The meat shortage of 1520, when dumplings of many kinds were invented. Hunger in Prussia before the introduction of the potato, and hunger in Bangladesh. The gestures and language of hunger are in need of study. Behavior patterns induced by the anticipation of hunger. Evocation of past famines: the rutabaga winter of 1917; the soggy corn bread of '45. What it really means to be starving. We need a catalogue of hunger quotations, says Vasco to himself, toying listlessly with refrigerated and therefore tasteless Air India pate.

The goddess Kali is looked upon as the female aspect of the god Shiva. Her power destroys. When in the mood she demolishes man's precarious structures. We are living in her era. (Vasco thinks in passing of his wife, Ilsebill, who likes to smash glasses and is a great hand at wishing.)

Even before the fueling stop at Kuwait his eyeglasses get broken. But he is not unprovided for. Because of the humidity in Calcutta, Vasco has bought cotton trousers, shirts, and socks in a tropical-outfitting store in Hamburg. Vasco is supplied with Enterovioform. Vasco has had cholera and yellow-fever shots. Vasco has thrice swallowed colored antityphoid capsules on an empty stomach. Vasco is carrying five pounds of statistics in his luggage. Vasco is the guest of the Indian government. This is known on board the

jumbo jet. Vasco is really someone else and is known under a different name.

He ought to have spoken to his wool-gathering audience in Delhi about Kali and how she sticks out her red tongue, instead of citing roughly estimated figures replete with zeros, standing for protein deficiency, excess population, and mortality rates: abstract quantities worshiped only in footnotes, whereas the unfathomable Kali can be understood everywhere, but especially in Calcutta, on the Hooghly River. She who is hung with garlands of skulls and chopped-off hands. She, the playful, commanding, terrible, Dravidian Kali. (She can also be called Durga, Parvati, Uma, Sati, or Tadma.)

Still aboard the jumbo jet (without sleep), Vasco tries to construct a kinship between the neolithic goddess Awa, remarkable for her three breasts, and Kali, the four-armed strangler. He thinks up an uprising: oppresed by matriarchy, the men in the swamplands of the Vistula estuary band together. In a frenzy of procreative activity (advised by the Flounder), they try to introduce the patriarchate. But Awa wins out and has a hundred and eleven men emasculated with stone axes. From then on she wears their dried penises strung on a chain around her vast pelvis, just as the Indian Kali decks herself out with chopped-off hands and skulls.

The moment he gets there, Vasco starts writing postcards. "Dear Ilsebill, everything here is strange. . " Then, wishing to gain a visual impression of the strange country, he has his glasses made whole.

Fourteen ninety-eight: Vasco knows that he lied to himself then, just as he deceives himself now. Men are always rubbing up their aims to a high polish: For the glory of God. . To save endangered humanity. . When what actually impelled him to find a sea route to India, the land of spices, was nautical ambition. It was other people, the "peppersacks," or shopkeepers, who made the big money.

At an evening reception (in his honor), some ladies who have studied in England question Vasco about the aims and motives of the women's liberation movement. Vasco tells

them about a women's tribunal that is being held in Berlin but making headlines far beyond its confines. A captured Flounder, he tells them, is symbolically on trial; the Flounder embodies the principle of male domination; he is being tried in a bulletproof tank. Then Vasco suggests to the ladies that the liberation of Indian women be placed under the high patronage of the goddess Kali. (Mightn't Nehru's daughter, Indira, be an embodiment of her terrible aspect?) While pine nuts are being nibbled, his suggestion arouses interest, although the ladies, daughters of prominent Brahman families, prefer Durga, the mild aspect of the goddess; Kali, it seems, is more popular with the lower castes.

The next day Vasco doesn't feel like going to the museum; he wants to visit a slum. The slum dwellers look at him in amazement. He is intimidated by the cheerfulness of these poverty-stricken people and their unconquerable charm. The giggling of the ragged young girls who, because they have hips, show their hips. True, they beg with their hands and eyes, but they don't complain. (They're not starving, after all, just chronically undernourished.) It all looks so natural. As though that were how it had to be forever and ever. As though the growth of bigger and bigger slums were an organic process that shouldn't be disturbed, but at the most cured of its worst abuses.

Vasco (the discoverer) asks questions about work, wages, number of children, school attendance, family planning, intestinal flora, latrines. The answers confirm the statistics in his possession, no more. Then he is obliged to visit a large fortress (dating from his Mogul days) in which some units of the Indian army are now quartered. Looking down from the battlements at midday, Vasco tries to engrave a picture on his mind: five hundred ragged bodies lying in a flat field (whose grass covering has been eaten away by cows), looking as dead as if English machine guns, firing from the fort's embrasures, had mowed them down. Each bundle lies by itself. Dusty units. Corpses eager to rot. Their death-sleep warmed by the sun. Extras out of a colonial film, waiting for the next pan. A pity Vasco has left his 35-mm camera at the hotel. He makes a note of the word: death-sleepers. And I, he says, am supposed to have discovered this? In vain Vasco

forbids himself to find these sleeping corpses, arranged by chance or some other law, beautiful. If he were tired and lay down among them, he would look awkwardly out of place.

The chairman of the planning commission fills out a Nehru suit and speaks past Vasco deep into the distance: We have, as you know, three thousand years of history behind us. We did not come into existence when that Portuguese discovered us by the sea route.

Vasco appears to be listening attentively while he tries in vain to recall the details of the 1498 landing at Calicut. (We sent a convict ashore to see what would happen.) The chairman of the planning commission explains that despite its infinitely various faces India is nevertheless one. No outsider can fully know us. Calcutta, he says, is indeed a problem, but there are many artists living in this fascinating city. And Bengali poetry. .

The next slum has grown up (organically) beside the Delhi power plant, which uninterruptedly belches vast clouds of smoke. Across the slum stands the modern high-rise building of the World Health Organization, South Asia Section. The clouds of smoke and not the slums are reflected in the windows of the WHO building. Next door, lest there be anything missing, stands the pavilion of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, which has invited Vasco to come, see, and understand that "we are a modern democracy."