Weekend Story – Light Beyond Darkness

When the French writer and humanitarian Dominique Lapierre first arrived in Calcutta in the early 1970s, he expected to find a city drowning in poverty. What he discovered instead was a city overflowing with life, chaotic, noisy, but strangely luminous. It was, as he would later describe in The City of Joy, a place where “the poorest of the poor” taught him the true meaning of dignity and grace.

One evening, wandering through the narrow lanes of a slum without electricity, he saw people preparing for a festival. The houses were dark, no bulbs, no power lines, no electric glow spilling from windows. And yet, the lanes shimmered. Rows of earthen lamps flickered on mud walls, marigolds hung from bamboo poles, and barefoot children dashed about, their sparklers drawing brief golden arcs in the night. It was Diwali, the festival of lights.

Lapierre stood still, watching. The light came not from power stations but from people, from their laughter, their songs, their sheer will to celebrate life. Later, he would write:

“Although living in inhuman conditions, they do so with a smile, a dignity, an ability to share and celebrate that I have never seen elsewhere.”

That sight never left him. For Lapierre, the real radiance of Calcutta lay not in electricity but in the inner luminosity of its people. He found joy in the most improbable places, in a slum dweller’s laughter, in a mother’s generosity when she had nothing to spare, in the uncrushed spirit of those who lived close to the edge. “After being confronted with hunger, disease, and the absence of the basic needs of existence,” he reflected, “I no longer fight for a parking place when I return to Europe or America.”

Importantly, Lapierre never wrote of poverty as spectacle. He wrote of humanity, of courage, of light within darkness. Where others might have seen only squalor, he saw a quiet nobility. He dignified what could so easily have been exploited, reminding the world that deprivation need not mean defeat.

Perhaps that was Calcutta’s quiet gift to him, a glimpse of spiritual wealth that the materially rich world often lacks. In cities of abundance, light blazes but warmth is missing. In these dim lanes, light was scarce but the glow of contentment was unmistakable.

Lapierre never saw poverty as deprivation. He saw it as a different dimension of living, one where the human capacity for finding inner joy outweighed the absence of material means. The people he met had drawn from an infinite source, a wellspring of acceptance, resilience, and faith. They lacked possessions, yet possessed what the world most urgently needs an unshaken belief in life’s beauty.

Years later, when The City of Joy found global acclaim, Lapierre used its royalties to build schools, wells, and clinics in the same communities that had once welcomed him. When he asked Mother Teresa where he should direct his efforts, she told him simply, “You have been sent by God.”

 And perhaps he had been, not to illuminate others, but to be illuminated by them.

 As Diwali returns each year, its lamps remind us of that same truth, that the power to dispel darkness does not come from electricity, but from the steady flame that burns within the human heart: the light of compassion, laughter, and love.

For some, light comes from a switch.
For others, it comes from the soul.
And that, Lapierre discovered, is the brightest light of all.

You may also want to read my piece on:  The Book Of Life

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