Deprived stasis

In his first visit to the country, the Polish author and renowned journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski describes in a masterly fashion the extreme dire straits of the destitute masses in India in the 1950s.

“It was a gray, overcast day by the time we pulled into Sealdah Station. On every square inch of the enormous terminal, on its long platforms, its dead-end tracks, the swampy fields nearby, sat or lay thousands of emaciated people -under streams of rains, in the water and the mud; it was the rainy season, and the heavy tropical downpour did not abate for a moment. I was struck at once by the poverty of these soaked skeletons, their untold numbers, and, perhaps most of all, their immobility. They seemed a lifeless component of this dismal landscape, whose sole kinetic element was the sheets of water pouring from the sky. There was of course a certain, albeit desperate, logic and rationality in the utter passivity of these unfortunates: they sought no shelter from the downpour because they had nowhere to go -this was the end of their road- and they made no exertion to cover themselves because they had nothing to cover themselves with.

[...] An old woman next to me was digging a bit of rice out of the folds of her sari. She poured it into a little bowl and started to look around, perhaps for water, perhaps for fire, so that she could boil the rice. I noticed several children near her, eyeing the bowl. Staring -motionless, wordless. This last a moment, and the moment drags on. The children do not throw themselves on the rice; the rice is the property of the old woman, and these children have been inculcated with something more powerful than hunger.

A man is pushing his way through the huddled multitudes. He jostles the old woman, the bowl drops from her hands, and the rice scatters onto the platform, into the mud, amidst the garbage. In that split second, the children throw themselves down, dive between the legs of those still standing, dig around in the muck trying to find the grains of rice. The old woman stands there empty-handed, another man shoves her. The old woman, the children, the train station, everything -soaked through by the unending torrents of a tropical downpour. An I too stand dripping wet, afraid to take a step; and anyway, I don´t know where to go.”

Ryszard Kapuscinski, 2007, Travels with Herodotus, New York, Vintage, pp. 28-29. Trans. from the Polish by Klara Glowczewska.

Photo: Flyover kids, Calcutta, 2009 © Soham Gupta