An insight into Dominique Lapierre's "City of Joy "

 The novel,  'City of Joy' is a 1985 novel by Dominique Lapierre. Calcutta is nicknamed "the City of Joy" after this novel, although the slum was based on an area in its twin city of Howrah. The author has stated that the stories of the characters in the book are true and he uses many real names in his book. However, the book is considered fictional since many conversations and actions are assumed or created. 

The book told about the story of epic in a place called Anand Nagar or City of Joy. The novel concerns men, women and children who have been uprooted from their homes by implacable nature and hostile circumstances, and thrown into a city whose capacity for hospitality has been pushed beyond imagining. 

This is a story about how people learn, despite incredibly difficult odds, to survive, to share and to love. Besides Hasari Pal and Brother Stephan Kovalski, and Max a doctor from America, are the main characters of the novel. 

Father Stephan Kovalski a Polish priest travels to Calcutta, India to live among the poorest people, and help raise them up. Father Stephan joins a religious order whose vows put them in the most hellish places on earth. He chooses not only to serve the poorest of the poor in Calcutta but also to live with them, starve with them, and if God wills it, die with them.

 In the journey of Kovalski's acceptance as the Big Brother for the slum dwellers, he encounters moments of everyday miracles in the midst of appalling poverty and ignorance. The slum dwellers are ignored and exploited by wider society and the authorities of power but are not without their own prejudices. This becomes evident by their attitude towards the lepers and the continuation of the caste system.

In parallel, a man brings his family to Calcutta from West Bengal, having lost his family lands to loan sharks. Hasari Pal, and his family take up residence on a footpath, and they struggle for survival until eventually he is helped into a job as a rickshaw puller, and eventually takes a place in the City Of Joy - the name given to the slum in this book. 

Midway through the book an American doctor, Max Loeb, arrives to join Kovalski, setting up a small dispensary. Lepers, the mafia, corruption, festival, a wedding, eunuchs, mother Teresa, the bureaucracy Indian government departments, the hardships of obtaining drinking water, the lack of sanitation, all feature heavily. These are, or course, the realities of slum life in India, and many other countries.

For Hasari Pal, leaving his home in Bihar, Bengal was not what he wanted. The fall short of harvest, made him to sell his cow: Rani and left his home to Calcutta for better living. Then, he found that Calcutta was harder than in Bihar. He made his children became beggar, and Hasari himself had to sell his blood. They all lived in the street. 

By the help of a friend, Ram, Hasari became an pedicab driver. From the money he collected, Hasari could afford him and his family to move to Anand Nagar. Until one day, Hasari found himself was affected by tuberculosis .

 Many poor people like Hasari suffered from this illness, including his best friend, Ram - But Hasari still have one obligue, to find his eldest daughter a husband. But, finding a good husband meant expensive dowry. To complete the dowry, Hasari had to sell his (dead) body for medical purposes. Hasari died at the day his daughter wedding.

The book does not celebrate poverty but the author paints an incredible picture of the denizens of this city of Joy : 

"The poorer they were, the more eager they were to give". Further the author tries to describe the miracle of these concentration camps where "the accumulation of disastrous elements were counter balanced by other factors that allowed their inhabitants not merely to remain fully human but even to transcend their condition and become models of humanity "

At the same time Dominique Lapierre speaks about the Indian administrative system and he takes a dig at the bureaucracy while narrating his brush with the custom authorities calling the customs office as "classic shrine to bureaucracy". What the city of Calcutta offers to the famished immigrant is " faint hope of finding some crumbs to allow them to survive until the next day .

Lapierre states in the introduction that the contents are all real, but the names are all changed. The place names, the peoples names, professions etc all appear to be different, and as such it is recognised as a novel. 

 The dashing images of people unfortunate enough to never breath some fresh air, or think of a clutter free, clean life. With their water polluted,bodies diseased,rights denied and brutally kept on the run by the urban machinery, death was sometimes more welcoming than the suffering. But the amount of life and hope displayed by the characters in this story is unbelievable