by Clark Blaise
Coming from Kolkata, the old Calcutta — in my case, even from well-off circumstances — I’d been formed by life-and-death dangers that define survival in that city. In California, I appreciated personal security I could take for granted, the friendliness of landlords, neighbours, fellow students and professors, and the respect that was paid to me — even as a foreigner — by the business and investment community. I could go to a bank with good credit and a business plan and compete for a loan. In America, I could trust in contracts and know that they actually worked for mutual protection. I cannot imagine a more hospitable country than the United States of the early 1980s.
America gave me everything I ever wanted. But somehow, I, or America, could not deliver on what I really needed. In the spirit of honesty, I must say: it has become time for me to leave.
On the streets of my childhood, I also knew love and security. Back in those days, Sunny Park was green and serene, the bungalows widely spaced behind high walls. I knew the names of chowkidars who night and day sat on wooden stools in our neighbours’ driveways, and the danda-walas who walked the street by night, hour by hour, chiming their thick wooden dandas on the concrete, waking us to the reassurance that no miscreants had breached the security of our streets and walls.
We were trusting souls.
I was the little boy in a St. Xavier’s white shirt, gray shorts and a loosened tie who would sit at the feet of gnarly old chowkidars, absorbing the people’s history of Bengal. The old men’s memories and passions stretched back before Partition, to their youthful love for the leader of the Indian National Army, “Netaji” Subhas Chandra Bose. Netaji saw the mortal threats to Britain from Germany and Japan as the God-given opening for India’s immediate independence. Allying himself to Britain’s enemies — what could be more obvious? According to Bimal Nag, my toothless, chowkidar-informant, Netaji broke with those Congress Party traitors, Nehru and Gandhi. Nehru was even (“pardon me, young sir”) on intimate terms with Lady Mountbatten. What kind of Independence could such a twisted man negotiate?
“We know, don’t we? Bishwasghatak.” Treachery. “Mountbatten’s vengeance on Nehru was slicing us up in Partition. They robbed us of our homeland. Your people are from East, no?” Yes, they were. I was born in Kolkata, but both of my parents were born in Dhaka. At home we spoke the eastern dialect and in soccer we lived and died with East Bengal.
Those had been thrilling days in old Bengal, when the Japanese Army was raking through the jungles of Burma to the edge of “British” India. Soon, the Japanese Army would link up with Netaji’s INA, Calcutta would welcome them, and Delhi would automatically fall to our home grown liberators. The British and all the vermin who’d sided with them would be swept away to England or Australia. My grandmother remembered — with mixed pride and terror — the Japanese bombing of Kidderpore Docks. “They meant no harm to Indians,” her father had assured her. “Their fight is only with the Britishers.”
We hadn’t yet learned what the Japanese had done to their fellow Asians in China, the Philippines, Korea, Singapore and Indonesia. Indian nationalists like my grandfather would have called those pictures of bombings and beheadings “Churchill propaganda”. He trusted only his two heroes: Netaji and Adolf Hitler. My father remembered his first meeting with American airmen, running up to them in welcome, and being offered a few paise to shine their dead-cow shoes, an untouchable’s job. He was a proud man: he never forgot.
Today, Kolkata’s airport, (which used to be called Dum-Dum, after the village where the British made their bullets), is named Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport.
One morning, as I walked past him on the way to school, Nirmal Nag didn’t snap to attention and offer a fake-military salute, as he often did. He was slumped against the wall, head nearly in his lap. I walked over to him, asking, “Mr. Nag, are you keeping good health?”
A necklace of dried blood stretched across his throat from ear to ear. You would think that was enough to alienate me forever from my hometown.
At dinner, my father declared, “It seems our Maoist friends are sending a message.” But what “message” were the Naxals sending, murdering a patriotic old man and wiping out the only history book I could trust?
“Naxals!” my mother cried. “They’ll kill us in our beds. They’ll feel our soft hands and kill us on the spot!” The Naxalites were our local Maoists. They wanted to exterminate all educated, soft-handed capitalists like us.
“It must have been a garrote,” my father explained. He spelled the word. Nag’s death helped me learn a useful new word, never to forget it. “Fear not,” he said. “The police will protect us.” My father was very friendly with Mr. Ranjit Gupta, the Chief of Police.
“Army and police are all with the Naxals,” my mother persisted.
My father was an avid golfer, a member of two clubs with 18-hole courses; one of them designated “Royal.” His threesome was usually made up of “Slicer” Sinha, his personal banker, and Dr. “Peppy” Peppermintwala, his arthritis man. When I was twelve, I was allowed to carry my father’s bag, and then to scour the greens and roughs for old golf balls. I was present the day “Slicer” laughingly said, “Now I will demonstrate the rationale behind my nickname,” and proceeded to skewer a drive into a dense strip of scrub and trees. Just beyond the trees, on the other side of a high wall topped with barbed wire, we could make out the tin roofs and smoke from the cooking fires of a teeming bustee. That’s how it always is in Kolkata: splendor and squalor cheek-by-jowl.
Slicer Sinha went to assess his lie, and never emerged. A few months later, when my father thought I could absorb the news, he casually mentioned that two days after the unfortunate incident, Slicer’s head, wrapped in an old sari, had been deposited on the lap of his dozing chowkidar. The poor old man went mad.
And I was friendly with the dhobis carrying a family’s laundry on their heads, and the istiri-walas — the ironers — standing under broad trees, dropping hot coals into the belly of their heavy appliances to keep them steaming-hot. I knew the names of their children who would sit at their father’s feet with a notebook, keeping accounts. The children, somehow, had learned to read and write (as their fathers never had), and to add, and I don’t think those children ever missed charging for the ironing of a sheet, a school uniform, a sari, or was any item ever lost or over-charged. My mother doublechecked every expense. That’s the old Calcutta: double-check, then verify.
If I’d been able to put two-and-two together, I would have placed those dhobis and istiri-walas and their big-eyed children under the tin roofs of the bustee next to the golf course. I would imagine them drawing tea-water from a rivulet where thousands of people had dumped their night’s slop-buckets, where wives and mothers squatted for hours turning chapattis and stirring a pot of daal on an open fire fueled by cow-dung patties plucked by the delicate hands of diligent daughters from the dust of roadways. I can still smell the acrid smoke, augmented by millions more street-dwellers cooking the same items by the same cow-dung on the streets of Kolkata, which would turn our winter skies black with smog.
But I was a St. Xavier’s boy, skipping along the wide footpaths under a canopy of trees, without a care. It came to me much later, when I’d made my fortune, that I began thinking of the millions of such children in India: bright, curious, adaptive, and how we’d wasted their lives. Back in the days when I could walk without canes or assistance, I toured those bustees. I might not be able to alter the country’s fate, but a few million dollars entrusted to an honest contractor could provide clean water, trees and gardens and school rooms with computers and dedicated teachers.
My wife called it a pipedream.
Even today, especially today and the past few months, I can conjure the smell of coal-fired ironed sheets, my mother’s saris, and my school uniform. I knew our driver, Naseer Ahmad, and the names of his twelve children and three wives, and our Christian primary cook, Samuel, whose wife an
d children lived somewhere in Orissa, and Mohammed, our replacement cook, or sous-chef, as I learned to call him, who took over during Samuel’s month-long Christmas and Easter breaks.
The major Christian holidays made serious demands on Samuel’s time. At Christmas, and at Easter, many of Samuel’s children magically found their way hundreds of miles to Kolkata, to Sunny Park, and materialized on our verandah with their hands out. So did Naseer Ahmad’s and Mohammed’s at Id. With a domestic staff of Hindus, Christians and Muslims, we were always short a driver, a cook, a bearer or chowkidar. We were not a particularly religious family, but we were communally tolerant. We were Hindu and we knew our gotra and tried not to violate it by ill-considered marriage. My family had expended all their energies getting out of East Bengal, settling in Kolkata and educating their children.
My father earned his electrical engineering degree in Britain, in the uncertain years just after Independence. India dithered. Should we align ourselves to the East, West, or stay neutral? Socialist, Communist, Capitalist? We were a little of each. And so, four dreary, hopeless decades passed, with Five-Year plans, promises and no delivery. The energy of two generations was wasted, their aspirations thwarted. We fashioned a culture of bribery. We created the land of eternal legal stalemate. We became a stagnant pool of incredible talent, turning cynical and corrupt.
Before leaving for London, my father had married. When he returned he went to work at Calcutta Electric Supply Company. He created a family: my oldest sister, born nine months after marriage, then two more girls after his return, then two boys, and me, the baby. By then — we’re up to the early 60s — he was able to leave CESC and start his own company, Dasgupta Electric, which he merged with his father’s Dasgupta Construction. We built housing then furnished them with television sets and the transistor radios and recorders and later, microwave ovens. Eventually we eliminated the need for istri-walas, dhobis and door-to-door appliance repairers. Dasgupta C&E was the company that I was sent to IIT-Kharagpur, then to Stanford, to bring into the late-20th century. In my father’s incessant planning, my job would be to transform DE&C from retailers into manufacturers and salesmen into researchers.
How orderly and planned my life was to become! If I picked up all the bread crumbs scattered by my father — if I’d come back with the proper engineering degree, topped perhaps with an MBA, if I’d taken charge of Dasgupta Construction & Electric and hired my brothers and brothers-in-law to impressive-sounding positions, if I hadn’t fallen in love on my own — I would have led a comfortable and doubtless, rewarding life. I would have been one of Kolkata’s young shakers and movers.
I’d already discovered Smriti Roy, the girl I wanted to marry, but it never happened. I went to Stanford instead and she went to London and became a Muslim parliamentarian. Eventually, I married my father’s choice, Meena Mitter, and we have our son, and she divorced me and we got back together, for a while, and we now have a baby girl. And we have a second divorce.
Without a drop of rebelliousness in me, I systematically rejected every nugget of fatherly advice. I left Stanford before my degree. I didn’t go to business school. I went deep into debt to start my own company. Our son is a very different kind of genius. One night when he was sixteen, in the midst of the usual Indian immigrant “Harvard- Cal Tech or Stanford” debate, he announced: “I’m gay. The whole world will be my university.” He dropped out of high school and went on a bus-and-walking photographic safari of India. He took pictures — high quality, I must admit, and much honoured — of all the places boys from good families had been taught to avoid. All the kinds of men and boys we’d whispered about. I hated myself for thinking: thank God my parents are dead. They will never see those photos of men dressing as women and men-on-boys and police raids on rail-station toilet stalls.
My father used to say, “When Manik is turning a picture, all of Calcutta is working.” This was never truer than the years of my adolescence when Manik-da — or, as he was known outside Bengal, Satyajit Ray — was making movies based on the novels of other friends of my father, Sunil Gangopadhyay and Moni Shankar Mukherjee. “Shankar” was Bengal’s most popular novelist, but with him novels were only a hobby. By day, he was an executive with Dunlop’s. Manik-da’s films of the 70’s were contemporary, not historic, appealing to a middle-class audience and based on the daily compromises made by middle-class, commerce-based Calcuttans. In other words, movies were being made about people like us, like our clubs, our colleges and our class.
When Manik-da was making a movie, all the taxi drivers, caterers, carpenters and electricians, all the part-time and full-time actors, the musicians who’d put away their instruments or packed away their dreams, found work one more time. So did the streetcleaners, repairmen and technicians. Dasgupta Electric provided the appliances and the generators. Middle-class Bengali-speaking children found walk-on parts. Has any artist ever been so attached to his city? Maybe Samuel Johnson, as I learned at St. Xavier’s, but I doubt even Doctor Johnson knew such connection, or received such adulation. “When you are tired of Calcutta, you are tired of life,” he might have said, had he known our city. Even I found a small walk-on, in Simabhaddo. For a few months, I thought of myself as an actor-in-training, dazzled by Sharmila Tagore, not an apprentice electrical engineer. I have known many of the world’s “great men” but in my mind, Satyajit Ray was the greatest.
Now I want to be Manik-da. Not to make pictures, but to count in the same way to my city, to be once again connected. All my life I’ve been a hero-worshipper. I know I can’t put this in print, but what I want is to be beloved in Kolkata, like Ray, like Netaji, like others I have known. But I left Kolkata, and all I have is money, and money never makes you happy, or loved.
My editor says, be ruthlessly honest. Be so honest that you might have to change the names and locations and maybe even call it a novel and not an autobiography.
Kolkata, with all its dangers, brings peace to my soul. America, with all its protections, is the more dangerous place. It has deranged me. It has taken away my son and my wife. It has left me in a wheelchair, pushed by a girl of twenty. Security and danger are reversed for me. A gated community in California is the most dangerous place in the world.
After Meena divorced me, she lived with many men. In those years, I also made many missteps. I called it “growing.” When I was a so-called “free man”, and one of the Bay Area’s “most desirable bachelors”, I tried to live up to the billing. This time, Meena refused to go back to India with me. She’s the true American. She was able to shed her old Indian identity, which I couldn’t do. She fell in with American feminism. I could only redeem my error-prone life through the application of lavish charities.
I’ve been through Heathrow, that ghastly catacomb, hundreds of times. And during the hours I’ve been left alone, I’ve sat with the telephone on my lap, thinking of Smriti Roy, the woman I didn’t marry, the woman with a “spotless reputation” that I alone besmirched. In England she became Firoza Imran, MP. We haven’t spoken in twenty-two years, the day she left from Dum-Dum for a new life in London. For one year in Kolkata, we frolicked like Australopithecines just down from the trees.
She’s Muslim, headscarf and all, a junior cabinet minister on the left wing of Labour and a divorced mother of two. One son is half- African, Rashid Imran, “Rash the Flash”, a footballer, son of her Ugandan ex-husband. But who’s the father of the other?
I’ve always believed, when I saw her that last time at Dum-Dum and she said, “I guess I’ll wake up in Heathrow”, that she was pregnant. Now, I’m free. A bright young Parsi banker has locked my fortune into a Foundation. My wife and children are well looked-after. I’m Executive Director of my own Foundation, meaning I can spend my money but no one else’s.
This time I made the call. Her secretary put me on hold, then said, “Miss Imran wishes to know your name and business and residence address.” I said, “My name is Pronab Dasgupta. She will know.�
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After a click, Smriti spoke, “So, you finally want to talk.” Her accent was perfectly English. Twenty-odd years in England, why wouldn’t it be?
“I’m very sorry for not having called,” I said.
“Why ever should you? I never thought of calling you.”
“I’m going back to India, permanently.”
“So, you’ve left your Meena? Poor thing, thrown out on the footpath without a penny? And I hear you have a much younger lady with you. What are they called these days, trophies?”
“She’s my secretary.” I’d been in England less than an hour. How could she know?
“Pronab, dear, try not to lie. If not to me, at least not to yourself.”
“She’s a friend of my son’s and she helped around the house. But she got homesick for India. There’s nothing between us.”
I waited for her response, but the air was dense and challenging. I counted her breaths, as she must have been counting mine. Finally I said, “I’m not lying.”
But I was lying. I heard it in my voice. Nothing had occurred between us, but the will was there. She flirted. And I keep thinking about it. A middle-aged man in a wheelchair, a pretty girl pushing him; I could read the faces and smirks of passersby.
“How ghastly for you,” she said. “So near, and yet so far. Twenty, is she? Go ahead, there’s no guilt, is there?”
“Smriti? May I call you that?” She didn’t object. “I’m going back to Kolkata. I’ve set up a Foundation and I’m going to distribute all the money I made in America to the places where we had factories. Bangladesh, Malaysia, Cambodia, Bihar, Orissa, Bengal. Yes, I’m a guilty immigrant. I’m a very lonely, very rich, very guilty immigrant. And if you ever find yourself tired of Britain or looking for new work, I’ll make you the managing director ...”
