There can be only a few books - perhaps a few dozen - that have such power that they make you a different person in some way for the rest of your life. The dimming of your memory of the details of such a book with the passing of the years will not erase the permanent new slant it has given you.
How could I ever have predicted that The City of Joy would be such a book for me? It was the least likely kind of book for me to buy. I dislike long books, for one thing. I also dislike "slice-of-life" documentaries, especially ones about the gritty, ugly problems of life like poverty. While I am at my confessions, let me also confess that I have always disliked India. My stomach cannot digest Indian food, my mind cannot digest Indian philosophy, and my emotions cannot digest Indian fatalism. I also hate crowds, heat, and dirt. India is probably the last country in the world I would want to live in.
And yet I could not help falling in fascination (I will not quite say "falling in love") with India because of this book, and especially with that quintessentially Indian city, Calcutta. Underlying the many real heroes and heroines that live and die in its pages, the most massive presence in this book is Calcutta herself, that doddering dowager, that incorrigible hoyden, that earth mother breeding life infected with death and suffering infected with joy. She is both the great villain and the great heroine of this book. She is life itself.
What drew me to the book? At first the title, then the faces on the photo just inside the cover - the mingled joy and sorrow, the innocence, the intensity of the eyes. You do not see such passion, such eyes in this country. Then the eye-catching names on the cover blurbs: Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul II, winner of the Christopher Award, Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and a quotation from a New York Times Book Review that said "The book is imprinted on my mind, I think, forever."
Nine out of ten books I buy, I never finish; this one I could not put down. Why? For one thing, there is the clean power and honest truth of the telling, the style. But the main thing is the power and truth of the tale told, of the people in it - "some of the unknown heroes of this earth" - and of the elemental truths it forces upon you, primordial truths like birth and death and joy and suffering and celebration and tragedy and the universality of faith and hope and love. We slick, sophisticated moderns are very quick and efficient in wallpapering over these great mysteries, these holes in the walls of the world through which hellish and heavenly forces reach us if we let them.
Above all, this book is a compelling reminder of a lesson, not in the arguable and escapable forms of preaching of fiction, but in the unarguable and inescapable form of fact, a reminder of the simplest yet most frequently ignored rule of life: Love people and use things rather than love things and use people.
It is a lesson the increasingly Yuppiefied Western world increasingly needs to relearn. Mother Teresa told her audience at her Harvard commencement address that Americans should not call India a poor country. Rather, America was the poor country. The point electrified her audience. Harvard teaches many advanced lessons that Calcutta does not know, but Calcutta teaches the elementary lesson that America is in grave danger of forgetting:
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