See Me Not

What a strange logic it is! Man, who has mastered the art of discovering solutions, is equally gifted in creating problems — this I had not fully realized until now. Suddenly, the air of Calcutta has begun to vibrate with noise. A new cry has arisen: “Save the city from visual pollution!”
 
And what is meant by visual pollution in our city? Walls plastered with endless rows of posters, distorted billboards, makeshift shacks crowding the pavements, the naked sprawl of slums flanking the railway lines, and the beggars and hijras who line the streets. All these, in the eyes of the so-called gentleman, have become intolerable. To beautify Calcutta — this cry was raised recently, and in the name of grandeur the hawkers were evicted. Now another thunderous slogan — “Stop visual pollution!”
 
But this matter of visual pollution is far more complex and many-sided. Suppose a man believes that women of refined taste ought to cover their entire form in public. To him, even a woman in a burqa may appear as a source of visual pollution. Or, for that matter, a veiled bride. We often see, in buses and trams, groups of men moving about with half their shirts unbuttoned, letting the breeze cool their chests. Are not these men, in equal measure, contributing to visual pollution? Another group argues that in a tropical country such as ours, where the heat is fierce, if men can enjoy the comfort of loose, airy clothing, why should women be denied the same? Why should a sleeveless blouse, a low-cut top, or a pair of shorts appear indecent in the very same environment? At the very least, is it not strange that such attire is regarded as abnormal? Every man gazes, of course. But if the open display of a man’s hairy chest is not called obscenity, why then should the sight of a woman’s bosom be branded offensive?
 
Our society lives with such simple hypocrisies in every sphere — and through these arrive problems, and through these too we seek solutions. To the rulers of the city, hawkers disfigure the streets, yet rows of Marutis and Mercedes parked along the same roads enhance beauty. When enormous glowing billboards mask the face of the city, they become its “signature identity.” But when a wall bears the slogan “We are Bengalis” or an advertisement for illicit liquor, that is suddenly condemned as vulgar.
 
High-rise buildings are praised as emblems of beauty, while clusters of huts are denounced as the city’s ugliness. I carry with me a sharper example still. Some time ago I had to travel through several district towns and remote villages of Bengal on a government survey. In a village of Burdwan, I encountered a scene I shall never forget: across a barren field stretched rows of huts, thatched with straw, half the height of a man. Not the kind of huts we read of in childhood tales from the Panchatantra. These had no champa trees nearby, no cuckoo’s call sweetening the air. Along the muddy road ran exposed electric wires, naked and unshielded, ready to kill anyone who touched them — yet no home had a single light. Not only light: when I peeped inside, I saw four or five souls sharing one hut with nothing but a couple of quilts, bowls, and pitchers.
 
On the verandah of one hut sat an old grey-haired man. “What do you want?” he asked. I explained I was there for a government survey. At that moment, my eyes fell on a frail woman seated on a broken cane stool, holding in her lap a crippled child. The child’s head kept drooping forward. Again and again the mother pressed his face to her dry breast; again and again the child turned away.
 
The old man grew furious. “Leave! What business have you here?” He rose to drive us out. Somehow, calming him, we learned that the child had been afflicted since birth with a mysterious disease. There was no doctor at the village health centre — only a lone female health worker, who, despite all efforts, had failed to diagnose the ailment. The old man cried, “We want nothing. Tell me, will your government care for this sick child?” To that question, we had no answer. We felt guilty, condemned by our own immorality. The entire government survey appeared to me a sham, a deception. In that village, if a family managed to earn twenty rupees a day, it could still scrape together a living for six or seven mouths.
 
Leaving that hellish village, as we returned to our car on the high road, I turned back and saw a scene of haunting beauty. The rows of huts upon the wide field seemed suddenly picturesque. Autumn was near, the breeze flowed over the white kash-grasses, a little plateau rose behind the village, with a low hill and uneven land, and in the blue sky, the clouds of Sharad drifted like gooseflesh upon the horizon. In the last light of day it seemed a place fit to build a hut and stay forever. Then the memory of the dying child on his mother’s lap returned — and swiftly we climbed into the car.
 
Meanwhile, this scorched land’s population swells endlessly. In the hands of a few, through the open embrace of liberalized economy, piles of money accumulate; while for the larger mass, poverty grows ever deeper. Yet to our eyes, this does not appear as “visual pollution.” We middle-class urbanites indulge instead in hollow socialism — in politics, in literature. For the poor, no one spares a thought. No government acts for them. Some of them, driven by despair, take trains to Calcutta; when they lie down on the pavement with their boxes and bundles, we cry visual pollution! We assume that, if we corner them long enough, they will one day vanish altogether. We will erase our shame, erase poverty itself. Evict the slum-dwellers, build flyovers upon their ruins, raise high apartments. Let the wounds of the city be thrown outside the city. Thus we imagine we are beautifying the earth. Which means — let all ugliness vanish from our eyes. Behind closed doors the butchery may continue, but not in public view. Let filth and squalor remain within our houses, within our minds — but not upon the city’s highways. It matters not if hearts are ugly; what matters is that eyes must not be offended. Nayan samukhe tumi nai, nayoner majhkhane dekhite na pai. So long as we do not see, it does not exist.
 
But if garbage lies on the surface of the city, then there is danger! For then the refined sensibility of the polished babu is disturbed. Hence, whatever offends the eye must be hurled into a prison of invisibility.
 
Look at the televised images of foreign cities — how sparkling clean, how free of slums and refuse! They seem like dream-cities. Why can’t Calcutta be like that? Our Tilottama, our jewel of a city. Why should we not be proud citizens of a high-tech metropolis, with dazzling streets, gleaming towers, every speck of dust washed away?
 
And yet the tragedy of this crusade against visual pollution is this: in order to keep the city neat, the livelihood, the shelter, the very existence of one class of people must be snatched away. Some are pushed into darkness so that others may feel enlightened. To the city-dwellers, the cleansing of vision seems to purify even their moral character.
 
This beauty, sir, I do not desire! For decades now, villages have been sacrificed to feed the city’s wealth. Garibi hatao — “remove poverty” — has long meant kill the poor to remove poverty. Not by improving their education, their health, or by giving them work, but by bribing them with a meagre dole to secure their votes. Around Calcutta, most wetlands have been filled in. Not even a rat’s burrow remains. Promoters have seized it all. Filling the fisheries, monstrous cities rise, and as a result, many homes now sink under monsoon waters. In this wretched country, “development” never means employment for the poor — it means hunger gnawing deeper into their bellies. To build, here, is not to strengthen the weak, but to destroy the vulnerable and sing hymns to modernity. To ruin nature with reckless hand.
 
Better, perhaps, to endure visual pollution with our eyes — so that we may daily confront the country’s fractured reality. Perhaps then our conscience might ignite!
 
I myself believe: the sight of a woman’s nakedness and the sight of a city’s dustbin differ little in literary beauty. For both are naked, both are real. In the West’s glamorous metropolises, citizens bear their loneliness, their dislocation, their uncertainty; in the East’s Calcutta, the ragged beggar-woman on the pavement bears the same human beauty. Physical hunger and hunger of the soul — both arise from the same human experience. Is there any justification to exalt the poverty of the mind while degrading the poverty of the body? If to cleanse the city we must erase beggars in the name of ending visual pollution, then surely the first to be exiled from every city ought to be the despairing, the deranged, the joyless. In my eyes, mental despair is uglier than physical despair. The corruption of the mind, the decay of ideals, the selfish tyranny of greed — these are far more terrifying than the shameless life of a beggar.
 
And if such an exile were truly carried out, the city’s jungle would roar in emptiness. Who can place a hand upon his heart and say he lives by truth, justice, and ideals? Are these cities we inhabit truly hospitable to humane values? Those who refuse to acknowledge the poverty of their own vision, and instead declare the surroundings polluted — they merely reveal the poverty of their own lives. To me, this is the first squalor that must be exiled from urban life.
 
Before cleansing the dirt around you, cleanse the dirt within your own soul.