The Lost Generation

by Nidhi Dugar Kundalia

  Shadows of memories, those of the first, stinging awareness of classism, taint Nawazuddin’s recollection of his childhood years. He puts these scattered memories together, slowly, shivering again as a soft breeze sighs past us. He remembers his father bowing before the babus in Kolkata as they walked on the streets, the babu’s son instructing him to carry his school bag in exchange for sugarcane juice, or being served cold leftovers for dinner by a family to whom his father sold water.

  ‘“Come, help me clean the mashq,” my father, the big guy, would say. I also helped Abba carry his mashq, which was made of camel hide. It was a beautiful water bag, quite durable, unlike the goatskin bags we carry now, and it kept water from the tube wells cold for at least six hours without imparting any odours,’ he lets on, forgetting for a while the time and his surroundings. ‘On the nights when we travelled too far in the city with the water bag, we’d sleep under a tree. I would count the bats hanging upside down above me, staring into my eyes, perhaps hoping I’d play with them. But I had work to do the next morning, so I’d ignore them. They’d pester me, making clicking noises to nudge me awake, but I would press my eyes shut tightly,’ he recalls, staring at the rivulets of sand, blood and feathers trickling down the street, making rude, lapping sounds. ‘And while Abba poured water for men after namaz during the Holy fasting month of Ramadan, I’d sit on the benches outside Jama Masjid in Delhi, gazing at its minarets. It was such a beautiful pair.’ An old married couple, maybe; calm, unblinking, keeping a close watch over the devotees. And the bhisti returned their favour too.

  ‘I would be there to help Abba during the days of roza, providing cupfuls of water before dawn while the drum beaters5 served their roles as human alarms, walking around the homes, waking people up for their pre-dawn prayers and feast. We went to their homes after that, filling water and then pouring it in the pots the women would keep out. We’d knock on their doors once the job was done and they’d leave us a few coins and, sometimes, a handful of dates, to break our fast. But the world has been evolving, and so have we. When direct water lines were provided to homes, and municipal corporations started providing water tankers to neighbourhoods, we had to migrate to Calcutta for work. I hated it. Delhi was calm and peaceful. In Calcutta, I felt a constant vertigo, chakkar, chakkar . . . like I had been violently cut and pasted from Delhi to this city. There were people everywhere here. Too many people. The city didn’t even sleep at night. Butchers, vegetable hawkers, masjid, mandir, all coexisted in the chaos. I had to pay the local goons hafta to work here. It was in Calcutta that I started imagining the “red rains”.’

  ‘Red rains?’

  ‘I kept seeing red rain everywhere, even when the sky was clear,’ he says, shaking his head.

  ‘In some places, the bhisti wallahs have switched to plastic and metallic pots, but their water does not taste as good. In here,’ he pats the bag, ‘the water is cool even in the summers. Today, the cost of camel hide is expensive and it’s barely available here in Calcutta. Camels are desert animals that naturally try to retain water and keep it fresh the longest. Our ancestors used only those bags. But we use the ones that are made from goatskin.’ He hesitantly pours some water for me in my cupped hands. Most of it slips through my untrained fingers and the rest of it smells like earth, like musk . . . like skin that is clean out of a shower. ‘Thanda hai [It is cold],’ I tell him, and earn an extra cupful.

  ‘Where does he get these bags made?’

  ‘We sew them on our own, mostly, sourcing the goatskin from the tanneries in China Town or Tangra.6 Most tanneries have now been taken over by Bangladeshi Muslims who don’t make leather as good as the Chinese used to in my father’s time. Even the shops that made mashqs have shut down . . . There is one guy, though, who still makes them on order. He lives a few streets away.’ We decide to walk there right away, through the grime and gunk.

  A little rooting through a few almanacs will tell you that bhistis were once cogs in the Kolkata municipal corporation machinery, watering roads and supplying water to those living in the sticks. Enter modern plumbing and soon they had to shed their key position as the water supplier of their neighbourhoods. Carriages, and later trucks, bearing water and supplying on call further caused the disappearance of bhistis. But with feeble plumbing in many areas, water wasn’t supplied to homes in Kolkata regularly. They were a familiar sight in the Park Circus areas as they filled up buckets and tubs in the bathrooms of crumbling buildings occupied by Anglo-Indians and Chinese.7 ‘Handpumps took their place,’ laments Nawazuddin. Now that most of these houses have been replaced by modern apartment blocks, bhistis too are on their way out. Miles away, they operate in a few pockets in central Kolkata. Bow Barracks is one such area where bhistis are still seen with their goatskin bags.

  Seated beside the patio of one of the houses closest to the street, we discover another bhisti wallah—Saif, a dark, old man, probably in his sixties, he is far from cheerful about being buttonholed.

  ‘Yes, I’m a bhisti.’

  ‘No, my family is not here—my wife and my children all left me many years ago.’

  ‘Why, I’m sixty-two.’

  And then, when I needle him to say something about his day’s routine, he says, ‘Your questions are funny and beyond my understanding. Why don’t you go look for someone else.’

  ‘He is always a bit grumpy,’ whispers Nawazuddin, drawing back when Saif starts forming his sausage-like fingers into a fist. ‘When he was still in his mother’s womb, his father and mother were travelling by train to Pakistan, where his relatives had settled. But his mother had to be taken off the train before they crossed the border because she went into labour.’ Saif loathes that fact. According to him, if he had been born in Pakistan, he’d be a richer bhisti. No one is sure how he reached this conclusion; perhaps there was a massive bhisti migration to Pakistan in the nineteenth century and they switched to being small prosperous business owners there. Perhaps his mother told him this story every time she gave him a gruel of salt and rice for supper, but, even now, he resents having been deprived of a good life.’

  Nawazuddin continues, ‘I feel sorry for him, so I let him work in my area.’ Bhisti groups operate in established areas, with tacit agreements not to impinge upon each other’s realms. The aggregate number of bhistis, cited at anywhere from fifteen to eighteen in Kolkata, is unascertained. They charge six to eight rupees to supply water to the lower floors of buildings and a little more for the higher floors. A large amount also has to be capitalized for a new mashq every year. ‘I service almost twenty homes in the morning and evening, filling water at the handpumps, and all the shops lining this street . . .’ Nawazuddin says, heaving as he drags his bag through the streets of old Kolkata—Tiretti Bazaar, Kalakaar Street and then Burra Bazaar—a mishmash of wires, glutted buildings with people packed like sardines together, their locked windows choking them within, the swollen doors of long-discarded homes creaking from the damp air. Peculiar insects appear like redundant thoughts around the sleeping handcart pullers, buzzing unsolicited conversations in their ears, flitting away just as quickly.

  Under a craggy makeshift tent full of tools and bits and scraps of tanned animal skin, we find Rashid, a rotund man with a toothless smile, chatting with a group of indolent men, mostly chewing tobacco and playing with stone chips on a dirty mat.

  ‘I have been very happy since I moved here from Bombay about thirty years ago. My relatives, mostly bhistis, and their families, used to live in this area—all of us bhistis usually live in a cluster,’ says Rashid, pointing in the direction beyond the masjid. This was in the last century, when housing was pigeonholed according to the vocation of the people from various castes. ‘But no one who lives in these houses is a bhisti any more. We make do with huts in the surrounding paras. I make bags now. And repair shoes and belts for a living.

  ‘We make world-class mashqs,’ he continues, waving his hand at the four mashqs tied on to a hook. ‘In a good season, my father would have thir
ty mashqs hanging in our shop. Goatskins would come from Punjab, buffalo skins for the belt and buckle from Uttar Pradesh. We cured them in salt, then cooked them in Dalda, and polished them with the lids of tobacco boxes. It would take two months to make one. A lot of hard work . . . They are still in demand. I still sell at least five a month, all buffed with ghee,’ he boasts, while Nawazuddin jeers at him with an extravagant sneer. ‘Rashid bhai, look at your patched kameez before you lie.’ Rashid ignores him after a hard stare, disappearing into the back of the shop, mumbling cuss words under his breath.

  ‘He barely sells two or three a month,’ Nawazuddin whispers through his teeth. ‘And he doesn’t make them with ghee. The mashqs aren’t how they used to be.’

  ‘Have you heard of traders from Iran and Iraq who could be interested in mass-manufacturing similar bags for travellers in the deserts? Maybe that could help your business survive?’ I ask the gathering.

  ‘Don’t build castles in the air,’ an elderly man in a skullcap, who has crept up to the edge of the crowd, suddenly roars. ‘Everybody is cattle for breeding now. Buffalo skin is expensive and I have heard they have banned it some states. Hindus anyway refuse to drink water from these mashqs . . . It is a paap, they say. Why waste time, madam? Talk to those mineral-water-bottle wallah companies. That is the future. This Nawaz fellow, he is blessed to be alive after all these years of dragging that mashq around.’ He shakes his head.

  ‘There are times when I go to bed and I feel I’ll never wake up again,’ whispers Nawaz, lifting his mashq back on his shoulders, goatskin patches sewn on in several places with thick thread. ‘What is the point, anyway? We earn extra money only if someone sleeps beyond their everyday alarms, or forgets to switch on the municipal taps in their kitchen, or needs more water for visitors,’ he says, walking back towards the masjid where he lives. ‘There’s no more money in this job,’ he sums up, removing his now-creased thumb from the enclosed mouth of his leather bag to pour some water for a street dog. ‘Sometimes, I do not even have the wherewithal to feed my three children. From where will I find the money to teach them after the government school closes?’ he says. I look into his eyes at this point. They stare back at me, tired of everything. A terrible exhaustion.

  ‘What about the OBC benefits?’ I ask him.

  ‘Who has the money to get the certificates made,’ he snaps back. ‘So many babus there! That can take a lot of money.’

  Saif, Nawazuddin and most other bhistis are bent forward, and they lean to the left, which is accounted for by their carrying of the bag on that side. But the crushing blight is the toll this labour-intensive work takes on them: ‘Remedies from our para people keep me going,’ he adds. Bhistis mostly resort to al-Tibb al-Nawabi, or the medicine of the Prophet, a loosely defined discipline of traditional herbal remedies based on the Koran and other Islamic texts. ‘It relieves the pain, but doesn’t restore anything. The doctor says my knees and hipbone have all taken a beating from carrying water from corner to corner on the streets and up edifices for over twenty years now. Sometimes, my charitable neighbours step in. But there is only so much that they can do.’

  Vertigo deeply affects Nawazuddin. Perhaps it is the fall on the head he took a few years ago, when climbing the stairs of a building to deliver water. ‘The red has intensified in my eyes, and the rain seems to fall harder and harder. At times, my emotions are so raw, I can’t even tell what is real and what are just my thoughts. My wife thinks I’m going mad. She quietly listens as I often rant. She sometimes takes the children out to buy sherbet when this happens. But I don’t even bother—or simply don’t have any power left—to figure out what this red rain is and why I see it, everywhere, all the time,’ he says as turns on to the main roads again.

  Why doesn’t he look for other work, I ask him. ‘Nobody will give work to a hag like me. Carrying water, keeping it cool, knowing which handpump in the area is rusted and which one has the least sullied water—that is all I know. At least I’m not someone else’s servant with this job,’ he says, shivering a bit as a breeze blows past. ‘I’ll marry my daughter off and slow down . . .’

  ‘Does she go to school?’ I ask.

  ‘No, she never went. We don’t send our girls to school. They must stay at home and learn to be good wives. My son, he has to look elsewhere. Become a driver maybe,’ he says, guardedly, murmuring something about their salaries and air-conditioned cars. For Nawaz, there was a clear route tracing back to his ancestors that was tangible, but erasing this path for his son is inevitable. ‘At least my grandchildren will have a better life.’ While, he, a bhisti wallah will become a story for them.

  It’s getting darker. But for Nawazuddin, the day has not yet ended. There is water to be delivered from his almost-inexhaustible mashq to a family of eight. They have hired him, briefly, until the government fixes their water pipes. He walks away, pulling the mashq back on as it slips from his shoulder—struggling to carry the burden of the past that this profession has bestowed upon him.

  11

  THE LETTER WRITERS OF BOMBAY

  Dilip Pandey sits behind a wooden bench flanked by plastic sheets—he is clad in dark pants and a white shirt, the lapel streaked with sweat marks; the bottoms are oddly short, revealing his mismatched socks. An ink spot stains his shirt pocket, a hallmark of his profession. He pats his oiled hair nervously and often, but his fingers are steady. Stretching his lips in a tight, rehearsed smile, he says, ‘It is tragic that we letter writers are done with our time here.’ A weary disinterest filters through his words, as if narrating the plot of a long, dull book.

  Over the last few years, scribes from tabloids and journals have been dropping by his establishment every few weeks for a bankable story, which is something of a contradiction because it relates to Dilip’s flip in fortune. ‘They want to know how we feel about the death of letters, stamps and the post office. Mostly, I tell them it’s sad. But all I want to tell them is to get the hell out of here,’ he mutters, his voice dry and grating, seared by the polluted air of Bombay. Instead, he tells me, he finds himself nodding his head politely, conveying the expected sadness over their fast-decaying legacy.

  Dilip is stationed under a tent along with a few other colleagues, opposite the heritage structure of the Mumbai General Post Office—now shedding gargantuan flakes of plaster, its windows rattling in its frames every time a door opens in this British-era structure, the sound drowned out by the commotion caused by the hundreds of passing cars and the mass of humanity on the streets. A couple of decades ago, when the air outside this gigantic structure was still fragrant with the smell of champa trees and the cobbled streets held but a few rusty Premier Padminis, Dilip started working with about twenty of his colleagues outside this GPO. He would lend an ear to a largely illiterate India, penning letters on their behalf to be dropped into the red letter-box. The letters would then make their indefinite and, most likely, laborious journey by truck, train, ship, camel, donkey either to the next state or across many time zones to places that you and I can’t even begin to envisage.

  An ailing father and dwindling finances brought Dilip to Mumbai. ‘I was fascinated with this city,’ he says, easing into the conversation, reclining in the chair, crossing his legs at the ankles and intertwining his fingers over his stomach. ‘Bombay tells you a new tale every day. It speaks, this city, of people who are stumbling as they learn to walk, or of those who have learnt to talk its talk. But nobody learns to breathe here.’ He smiles, wistfully and wearily. ‘If you stop for a breath, you will die of hunger. Gourishankar told me this the day I arrived here.’

  After a two-day journey from Varanasi, Dilip spent his first few nights with a relative’s friend, Gourishankar. He hailed from Dilip’s home town—a large, burly man with a hirsute chest and a vast mouth that curved downwards; he had developed, by osmosis, the disposition and mannerisms of Bombay.

  Gourishankar gave Dilip lessons on letter writing. He took him around the circuitous GPO and pointed out some influentia
l people who got the post offices running; he made him admire the city’s deep, dark underbelly; he narrated the great tales of how to handle clients depending on their backgrounds—brief with ex-criminals, tart with daily-wage workers and chatty with government office peons. He painted the canvas of letter writing in a few simple strokes: ‘Listen, write two lines for one word and do not forget to write “Missing you” at the end of the letter. It makes the wives and lovers happy, and the senders, in turn, happier.’

  ‘The railways, postal services . . . would be but shards of broken glass in this massive country, divided by great rivers and mountains, if it wasn’t for the British. India owes the British a lot,’ Dilip declares, launching into a long monologue on how good the colonizers were for the country, lightly rubbing the thicket on his forearm as he speaks, as if congratulating himself. After the British set up India’s modern postal network in 1854, they introduced professional letter-writing services outside the post offices, allocating licences to the letter writers.1

  ‘Gouri told me I could be popular as a letter writer because I knew a lot of languages. I could read and write in English, Hindi and Sanskrit already, and while I was in Bombay, I also quickly picked up Marathi from the newspapers and the locals,’ he reminisces. ‘I read cartoons in local newspapers, heard the Marathi channels on the radio every morning for an hour.’

  Over the years, he established a work ritual that involved arriving early in the morning, feeding the pigeons swarming the square outside the GPO, offering a short prayer to the idol of Ganesha placed on his office desk and then, finally, taking in his first client at nine in the morning while sipping a thimbleful of tea from a chai wallah stationed outside. Life, for him, started emulating a recognizable, comfortable pattern until things started changing in 1995.