I love the music of pen scratching on paper

Lapierre, who shot to fame when he co-authored Freedom at Midnight with Larry Collins in 1975, has since then returned to India on several occasions, apart from spending two years researching for The City Of Joy in Calcutta. “I spend just about three months in my Paris apartment, as most of my time is spent travelling for the various causes I support in Africa, Poland, Brazil and, of course, West Bengal,” he says. In India, help from Lapierre comes in the form of funds to dig drinking-water wells (541 so far), open schools, dispensaries (like the two mobile boats in the Sudarbans that cater to eight lakh inhabitants on 57 islands) and rehabilitation centres for the poor.

“How will a bureaucrat sitting at the UN Headquarters know what a poor Bengali farmer in the 24 Parganas needs?” says Lapierre. His close interaction with them has made him acutely conscious of their needs. “I can write a cheque sitting in my apartment in Paris, but I want to be near them to understand their problems,” explains this philanthropist. And this brings him to India at least three to four times a year. “I fight all the way to make sure the money reaches the needy and I have no overheads. I fight with the Paris banks to cut down their transfer commission, I fight with Indian banks to give me a good exchange rate… I even know the price of bricks that are used for constructing the centres I support in Calcutta.”

And he reels of the prices to prove his point. “It’s Rs 4 for an intact brick, Rs 3 for one broken in one corner, Rs 2.50 for one broken in two corners, and Rs 2 for a brick broken in half.” Lapierre’s commitment to Calcutta’s poor was never more evident than when he sold off his eleven-room Saint Tropez house in France for a three-roomed one. “I have no regrets,” he says, “Calcutta has given me more than I have given it. I had 50 kilos of excess baggage when I left Calcutta after my two-year stay, and all because every slum-dweller I knew insisted on giving me a gift.”

So popular is this Frenchman in the city that when he accompanied President Francois Mitterand to Calcutta, he was the one who was cheered, which made Mitterand remark: “In Calcutta, you are the one who deserves people’s applause.” Incidentally, the President had spent two weeks as an assistant nurse in Calcutta way back in 1971 because he wanted to see a developing country at close quarters.

Lapierre is assisted by his wife who shares his name, Dominique — “she’s the big Dominique, I’m the small Dominque,” he says, and no, they don’t have any Dominique Jrs. Lapierre’s wife is his typist, researcher and editor all rolled into one. “A Thousand Suns was 28,000 pages of my handwritten scrawl, which she typed and edited for me,” he explains, adding that he loves “the music of a pen scratching on paper”.

He dismisses the accusations that he presented Calcutta to the world as a great slum full of destitutes. “Those who criticised me were people who had never set foot in a slum,” he says. “I celebrated Calcutta as a city of love and courage and that is how my readers perceived it in the West.”

Calling himself an author with a journalistic and historical technique, Lapierre calls his new volume, dedicated to his friend and former co-author, Larry Collins, a tribute to all those who overcame adversity. “This book is about extraordinary people who made a difference,” he says. Needless to say, his Indian experiences account for a huge section in it.