A line of beggars outside Nirmal Hrdaya, Mother Teresa's home for the sick and dying.
Nobel laureate VS Naipual grew up in Trinidad and Tobago but had parents of Indian ancestry. In the early 1960s, Naipaul traveled to India for the first time and wrote the memoir An Area of Darkness about the experience. It is a vivid if relentlessly negative portrait of the Subcontinent. Many Indian intellectuals still have not forgiven Naipaul for the largely pessimistic conclusions he drew of their country. (He wrote two more non-fiction books about India, the titles of which accurately capture his feelings: India: A Wounded Civilization and A Million Mutinies Now.)
I cannot say I share Naipaul’s brutal assessment of his ancestral home. My experiences in India have been mostly positive, memorable, and uplifting, though I visited during a different era in time and brought with me a different set of motivations.
Having read parts of An Area of Darkness in the British Council library of Calcutta nearly a week ago, I am still not able to shrug off one comment Naipaul made. It has stuck with me, and it has continued to influence me as I have walked around the streets of Calcutta these past few days.
Naipaul wrote, “India is the poorest country in the world. Therefore, to see its poverty is to make an observation of no value. A thousand newcomers to the country before you have seen and said as you…It is your gaze that violates (the poor), your outrage that outrages them. It is your surprise, your anger that denies (them) humanity.”
Though India can by no realistic standard still be considered the ‘poorest country in the world’, the level of poverty in this country is astonishing, especially for visitors coming from the West. In Calcutta, it is especially acute. You cannot walk for very long without encountering a destitute family living on a blanket on the sidewalk, or pass an elderly person sitting hunched over on the curb outside a temple with their wizened palm outstretched and their eyes averted towards the pavement.
Indeed, I have written very little about the poverty I have seen because it is so hard to fathom and comprehend, so troubling to face. You learn a lot about yourself and your own soul walking around Calcutta, and sometimes you do not like what you discover.
Naipaul’s words rang in my ears the other day when Mohammed Shabeeb came up to me and begged five rupees. I was on the south side of the Maidan—Calcutta’s central park—and I saw the small boy up ahead of me, blowing tunelessly on a plastic kazoo. He wore no shirt and had grungy black jeans cut off just below the knee. Of course, he had no shoes, which are a luxury for the poor of India. His skin was grimy and ashy, the dirt creating a sickly gray patina over his body. His hair was unkempt and greasy but put up in a way that, I thought, might be considered fashionable if seen on Justin Bieber or Taylor Laughtner. A dry streak of mucus had crusted over his upper lip.
But his eyes caught me. Brilliant sky blue, effervescent and penetrating. They were the kind of eyes that can convey someone’s emotions without the person having to twitch a single face muscle. Mohammad Shabeeb’s eyes brightened and widened when he saw me coming.
He ran up to me, his small hand outstretched.
“Sir, sir, sir. Saab, saab. Five rupees. Five rupees. Five rupees. Hungry. Food. Hungry. Food. Five rupees,” he said, falling into perfect time with my pace and walking by my hip. He put his hand to his mouth reflexively to mimic the act of eating.
I stopped, and he stopped.
“Apnar nam ki?” I said, having picked up a few Bengali phrases from our guesthouse manager. “What’s your name?”
“Nam? Mohammad Shabeeb. Five rupees. Please. Five rupees.”
“Mohammad. Home?”
Mohammad Shabeeb hesitated. He pointed to an overpass, underneath of which could be seen a shadowy pile of formless bundles and piles of trash.
“Native place? Kothay? Where? Calcutta?” I asked.
Mohammad Shabeeb shook his head. “Bihar,” he said, the name of the province directly west of West Bengal, acknowledged by many social statistics as the poorest province in all of India.
“Bihar. Your mother? Father?”
Mohammad Shabeeb again pointed over to the underpass. “Five rupees,” he said, now smiling, his eyes crystalline in the light. I reached into my pocket and counted out five rupees into his palm.
With the change clinking in his fist, he turned and jetted off towards the underpass and disappeared around its concrete corner.
I had not felt good giving Mohammad Shabeeb my pocket change, nor had I felt bad. So often, giving change to the poor is an indifferent action that, in a city like Calcutta, feels the same as brushing your teeth or tying your shoes. You do it so often it no longer feels like a willful decision. I have viewed on numerous occasions, passers-by in Calcutta dig unthinkingly into their pockets and drop a coin or a five-rupee note into a beggar’s plate without even slowing down their walk or looking left or right.
I had given change to the poor often enough, Mohammad Shabeeb was no different in this regard. But this was the first time I had felt compelled to know more about who I was giving to, and that bothered me. Why now? I thought.
Another book about India entitled Notes From Another India by journalist Jeremy Seabrook, tackles the issue of poverty, but in a more strident way than Naipaul. Seabrook writes: “The myths of the beggars are mostly invented by the well-to-do in order to justify their unwillingness to contemplate their own relationship to poverty—the beggars are syndicated, they are controlled by gangs, parents mutilate their own children at birth in order to make them more effective beggars.”
An interesting point, but one I am still ambivalent about. For every Mohammad Shabeeb, there may very well be a scammer. Just this week I saw a man hobbling through an intersection on a pair of knobby wooden crutches begging from the windows of idling cars. When the light turned green and the cars had sped away, he tucked his crutches neatly under his arm and walked off down the street towards another intersection.
Or there was the man who was dragging himself on his rump through the central aisle of a train in Kerala, tapping on passengers’ knees asking for change. Later, when Jenna and I got off I noticed the same man disembark, this time fully upright with perfectly operable legs carrying him along the platform towards another train.
Mohammad Shabeeb, though, struck me as genuine. And, frankly, my mood on that particular day was fortunate for him. As hateful as the words sound to me, at that moment I was in a giving mood. It may be correct to say that your money would be better spent contributed to a reputable charity or your efforts more effective spent volunteering at a home for the poor. But I feel it is equally correct to say it is possible at times to place a few stray coins into the hands of those weak members of society who have resorted to one of the most degrading tasks on the planet.
This is not an opinion that dawned on me overnight upon reaching India. Visitors to India do not suddenly find a well of goodwill in their souls. Nor do they find that generous part of them shrivel into nothingness either. Mine is an evolving belief that is wrung out of me everyday I go through this country. Some days I think I am correct, and other days I think I am absolutely wrong.
The point is, India forces you to wrestle daily and in extremity with your opinions about how to deal with poverty. It is not a theoretical exercise but a practical regimen. Will you give change to the next beggar who approaches you? Will you look them in the eye? Will you cross the street when you see a homeless family camped out on the sidewalk in front of you? Will you ask the next beggar boy his name and where he is from?
These are not easy questions. In fact, I have answered them all ‘yes’ or ‘no’ at some point on our trip. Like Naipaul, I think it wrong to simply ‘gaze’ at the poor or affect a sense of ‘outrage’ at their plight without taking some action to fix the problem. The question remains, though, how to come to grips with your own conflicted feelings. Do you become aloof and bitter like Naipaul? Do you cry for justice like Seabrook? Do you do what Mother Teresa did in these very streets of Calcutta? That is, give and give and give?
I still do not have a definitive answer. Yet, I hope I am creating one each time I meet a Mohammad Shabeeb, each time I am confronted with the problem, each time I decide anew what my response will be.
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