Gunter Grass - The Flounder

There are no separate slums, or bustees, in Calcutta. The whole city is one bustee, or slum, and neither the middle nor the upper classes can segregate themselves from it. High-school girls with their books can be seen plodding down the street among bundles of rags the same age as themselves, forming islands in the traffic, then merging again with the great, flowing mass. Wherever the traffic leaves a free space, there are people living in the roadway. Side by side with parks and run-down mansions one sees villagelike groups of cardboard and sheet-metal shacks. People flushed into the city by the last famine (just a year ago), those whom the bustees have expelled or found no room for stay on in such places. They come from Bihar; they are strangers among the Bengalis. At night they squat around fires outside the shacks and cook what they've been able to find in the garbage. The collecting instinct is all they have left. The fires are fed with cow dung or cakes of straw and coal dust. Here the Stone Age is staging a comeback and has already made deep inroads. The buses look like an archaeologist's dream. Vasco takes refuge in the governor's palace. The palace guard knows him by now.

On the program: tea with a film maker who is flying to Chicago tomorrow to show American students his Calcutta film. Smilingly we converse — two sophisticated producers. Vasco asks about the possibility of a film in which a reborn Vasco da Gama visits modern India, fears the goddess Kali, comes to Calcutta, gets diarrhea, and lives in the governor's palace. Then he talks about the cooks of his various time-phases: the neolithic Awa, the High Gothic Dorothea, the revolutionary Sophie, and the cooking abbess Margarete Rusch, for whose cookery a drop in the price of pepper was important. He mentions the Flounder and his activities since the Neolithic era. The film maker nods. Yes, he says, a similar fish in a similar function has been known in India since the Dravidian period, and this fish was hostile on principle, though ineffectually, to Kali.

Then the film maker talks about the next film festival and, in passing, about the dead bodies in the streets of Calcutta, which are collected toward morning. It has always been this way. In 1943, when he was a child, two million Bengalis had starved because the British army had used up all the rice stocks in the war against Japan. Had a film been made about it? No, unfortunately not. You can't film starvation.

Wherever he goes in Calcutta, at the film maker's, with Mother Theresa's nuns, at the governor's luncheon in his honor, everyone wants to know what his next book is about — as if that could make any difference to India.

Even on his visit to a bustee, the planner from the Department of Economic Planning asks him literary questions. Vasco explains himself in detail. The book deals with the history of human nutrition. It all happens in the region of the Vistula estuary, though actually it might just as well take place at the mouth of the Ganges or here on the banks of the Hooghly River. The goddess in his book is called Awa. Unfortunately he knows much too little about the Dravidian Kali.

Then Vasco takes refuge in statistical questions and gets answers he could have found in statistical tables. There are three thousand bustees in Calcutta. "We prefer not to call them slums." The population of the bustees ranges from five

hundred to seventy-five thousand. That adds up to three million bustee dwellers. An average of eight to ten people to a room. Ten to twelve huts form an open square around a court. Excrement and kitchen waste flow down the main streets in open gutters. In this particular bustee the schoolroom holds some forty-five children. A social worker is in charge of it. The same cheerfulness: so proud to have a school. Vasco tries to imprint the stench on his memory. Hallmarks of misery; the usual injustice. Extortionate rents are paid to hut owners who also live in the bustee. Everybody shits where he can and must. True enough, Vasco writes, but compared to Frankfurt am Main, the people here are alive. Later on he wants to cross out this sentence.

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. .