them.â
Majumdar burst into laughter. âDonât, donât. I canât laugh and ride a bicycle at the same time. Bruce, do you really see me handing this subcontinent, With its four hundred million people, over to the Russians? I have never spoken to a Russian. They have enough to do for a hundred years, just putting together what Hitler has destroyed. Later we talk about this.â
They had come to a tiny hamlet, about three or four miles from what Bruce considered the city line. Majumdar dismounted, as did Bruce, and they walked their bikes into the center of the hamlet, where there was a well, a watering trough, twenty-three people by count, babies, women, and children included, and a cluster of poor wattle shacks. The men and women and children, like most men and women and children in the vicinity of Calcutta, were thin, their clothes patched and worn, some of them in rags. They welcomed Majumdar warmly, and then looked down shyly when they were introduced to Bruce.
Apparently, they had been waiting for Majumdar, for they settled down in front of the well, sitting cross-legged in the dust, while Majumdar unrolled his newspaper and began to read. Bruce listened intently, although he could not understand a word of the Bengali, but watching the faces of the illiterate village folk, he found responses that illuminated the brief summary that Majumdar had given him. When the reading was over, which took twelve minutes by Bruceâs watch, there were a few questions which Majumdar answered. Then he opened his pouch, holding his bike steady, while each one of the villagers, excepting the small children, dropped a single grain of rice into it. Then Majumdar closed the pouch, said a few words more to the group, led Bruce across the road, and mounted his bike.
âNext village,â Majumdar said. âAbout a mile from here. Much larger. Weâll have at least fifty people.â
âArenât any of them literate?â
âWould they stay there if they were?â
âAnd the rice â what did that mean? Is it a symbolic gesture?â
âSymbolic? I should say not. The rice is my pay. I try to cover at least twenty villages â sometimes less, sometimes only eight or ten if we have hot discussion. At the end of the day, I have a small bag of rice. For a few pice, a vegetable to cook in the rice. I remain well fed and healthy, more than most in this hellish famine.â
âThis heat is impossible. Iâm thirsty.â
âIt will be worse as the day wears on,â Majumdar warned him. âTry not to drink until ten. You know, you can still go back. Itâs mostly straight road.â
âAnd leave you to face the tigers alone? By the way, where do you keep them?â
âNot around here, no tigers, no maharajahs on elephants, nothing but very poor people and heat and sorrow.â
Majumdar had underestimated the size of the crowd at the next village, a place somewhat larger than the first one, a trifle more prosperous, some women weaving, and cows being milked. Three of the men engaged Majumdar in rapid conversation while the others pressed around to listen. It appeared, as he explained to Bruce later, that there were four families of Assamese here, who had come down from the hills, where they were starving, and the village could no longer take care of them and wished them to go off and find a way to live in the streets of Calcutta. But the people from Assam knew that no one lived on the streets of Calcutta; it was a place to die, not to live.
Bruce seated himself under a huge baobab tree, which the village was fortunate enough to possess, selling its leaves to the pharmacists in Calcutta â although only to the old-fashioned ones â yet sufficient leaves remained to give him a degree of shade, and there he rested, listening to the frantic discussion in a language of which he understood not a single word. The small children of the village gathered