The City of Joy

I originally read this around 2005, when I picked up a copy in a cheap secondhand bookshop in Asia. I recently found it when tidying up my shelves, looking for space and given it is pretty grubby, dog-eared and worn, and seems to be a cheaply photocopied and bound book from India, I would sell it on.
The thing was, I couldn't really remember it. It was well before I joined GR that I had read it, and like many books I had read before I joined I gave it a default 3 star rating. So I figured I would read a bit and see if it was worth a re-read.

It was worth the re-read, but the three star rating remains, although just - for me it is a 3.5 star book, rounded down.

Lapierre states in the introduction that the contents are all real, but the names are all changed. The place names, the peoples names, professions etc all appear to be different, and as such it is recognised as a novel.

The quick version - Father Stephan Kovalski a Polish priest travels to Calcutta, India to live among the poorest people, and help raise them up. In parallel, a man brings his family to Calcutta from West Bengal, having lost his family lands to loan sharks. Hasari Pal, and his family take up residence on a footpath, and they struggle for survival until eventually he is helped into a job as a rickshaw puller, and eventually takes a place in the City Of Joy - the name given to the slum in this book. Midway through the book an American doctor, Max Loeb, arrives to join Kovalski, setting up a small dispensary. Lepers, the mafia, corruption, festival, a wedding, eunuchs, mother Teresa, the bureaucracy Indian government departments, the hardships of obtaining drinking water, the lack of sanitation, all feature heavily. These are, or course, the realities of slum life in India, and many other countries.

Lapierre lived for two years in the slum to record the experiences for this book, but he doesn't feature within the narrative.

For me the story was uplifting and showed the best of humanity, but more interesting for me was the descriptive writing of life in the slums. The impermanence, the hardships, the disparity between those with and those without (everything or anything).

I have a soft spot for books like these, set in the poorest areas of India - more commonly they deal with Mumbai, this one is Kolkata. They always contain story lines of morality despite poverty; selflessness from those who can least afford it; compassion and community spirit.

3.5 stars, rounded down.