Volume 33, Number 9 · May 29, 1986
City of Dreadful Night
By Ian Buruma
The City of Joy
by Dominique Lapierre, translated by Kathryn Spink
Doubleday, 464 pp., $17.95
Calcutta, despite its former resplendence as the first capital of the British Raj, has a dark reputation. One thinks of the Black Hole, or as some Indians prefer to call it, 'the alleged Black Hole,' where British ladies and gentlemen died horribly during an uprising led by the nawab of Bengal in 1756. One also thinks of all the travelers' tales of living corpses gnawed by giant rats right in front of the best hotels; of terrible riots, crippling strikes. Even the goddess after whom the city was named is the most frightful in the Indian pantheon. Kali the Terrible, depicted with a tongue dripping blood and a garland of skulls around her neck is worshiped in Calcutta at a temple next to one of Mother Teresa's homes for the destitute and around the corner from a filthy stream where corpses decked in flowers are cremated. In front of the temple is a guillotine where goats bought by worshipers are sacrificed to the goddess.
Review, 3118 words
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