Calcutta

by Amit Chaudhuri

  Finally, one afternoon, I got to see Ramayan Shah: he was squatting near the edge of the pavement, not far from the gutter, surveying his world—the pot and its ingredients—with a masterful but concerned air (a gaze like a chemist’s) before embarking on the cooking itself. I, in a sense, already knew him; he, of course, not only didn’t know me but, as I stood behind him, showed no awareness I existed. He’d created his own universe, like a spider makes its web, and—though that universe may be invisible to the passer-by—he was far more centred in it than anyone I’d met over here. “Is this your shop?” I asked—how easy it is to assume the role of a questioner as long as you look the part—and “What is your name?” He seemed vaguely startled; then, his consciousness quickly recovered its continuity with its surroundings, and I didn’t really matter. The way he said his name softly made me think he was Muslim, and when I repeated what I thought I’d heard—“Rahman Shah”—he nodded in unworldly agreement, as if names and identities and details itself were dispensable. Only later did I guess—from talking to others—that he’d said Ramayan, not Rahman. He seemed older than his years: I presumed he was in his mid-fifties, but he looked closer to his early sixties. He had a thin grey moustache and a forbearing face; in his much-worn dhuti and kurta, he was like the North Indian peasant he was probably meant to be, resilient, adaptable. Agreement with everyone and everything, I sensed, was his tested strategy for survival—no wonder he’d let my mispronunciation of his name go; no wonder he hadn’t acknowledged I was standing behind him—it was not so much out of a wish not to be encroached upon as to not interfere, to not encroach upon. And this air of ready-made agreement gave Ramayan Shah a quality—perhaps deceptive, perhaps not—of innocence. It strikes me now, as I think of him, diligent on his haunches, that Gandhi’s mass movement must have been full of recruits exactly like him. How that galvanisation had once occurred was now mysterious.

  Whenever I’m in Ramayan Shah’s stall in the afternoons—and it’s invariably afternoon, as I’ve used up my morning writing or practising music and then come straight here after lunch or a coffee at Flurys—I’m hot, and I’m also subtly aware, despite the heat, of the ebbing of the light. Afternoon’s the most dreamless and introspective time of day, a sort of midnight of the daytime, though you wouldn’t know that from the activity on Free School Street; but its span is also the shortest I know anywhere (as Calcutta is in the east), and, by half past five, you’re really preparing for the sudden advent—always unexpected—of evening. As I stand at Ramayan Shah’s, there’s a steady—and noisy—flow of congestion towards Park Street, and, even now, when it’s supposed to have been phased out of the city’s traffic, the hand-pulled rickshaw rolls onward, with an imperious shopper afloat. The rickshaw-pullers were said to be pimps and touts, and the way they made their function known to young men was through hungry eye-contact, and the muted clink of the bell in their palm. Further up, if you turn left after the second-hand record stalls and bookshops, you’ll come to New Market, or Hogg’s Market, for me, with its inexplicable and largely purposeless maze of shops, still the most enchanting covered market I’ve walked around in and, for short spells of time, been frustrated by. Free School Street is an old, important road; opposite the opening that leads to New Market is Calcutta’s main fire station. Further up, as the road ends, are the desperately impoverished Muslim families who live among debris and garbage, seemingly the preferred habitat of the swaggering, hirsute pigs they nurture. But parallel to Lindsey Street, on which New Market is situated, are the skeletal lanes with either quaint or seedy hotels in whose rooms European backpackers curl up, and who march in the short-lived afternoon (as transitory to Calcutta’s day as summer is to England’s year) towards Park Street, or march back from it, glancing momentarily in our direction as Ramayan Shah’s clientele and staff and neighbours and I exchange small talk cautiously.

  * * *

  Mid-December, and I was back in Park Street, having spent two and a half months in England, in Norwich. So I was doubly glad to be back in the setting I’d fantasised about there—“fantasise” may not be the right word, because it involves a degree of volition; while I suppose I’m talking about a random and involuntary yearning that would come to me during my stay in England. I don’t know where it came from, because I don’t actually like the Calcutta of today (of that, more shortly). Could it be a residue from my childhood, when, in Bombay, returning from the school I hated to the lovely, shining flat that was home, I thought constantly of Calcutta? These days, certain places and activities revisit me momentarily when I’m away, and, whatever I’m doing, I’m sucked into their memory: walking down Park Street, past Magnolia (a restaurant I couldn’t be persuaded to be caught dead in) and the stalls selling chewing gums and condoms, is one of them; settling down at a table at Flurys is another. Actually, I long for Park Street even when I’m not away; just now, as I write these words in my flat in Sunny Park, I feel a desire, like a muted undercurrent, to go to Park Street. In England, other pictures flash upon my eye, as part of that assortment that draws me homeward, towards Calcutta—which, as it happens, was never my home, and, I often feel, never will be. At least one of them is inexplicable: a spontaneous memory of The Good Companion, a spacious air-conditioned shop selling, mainly, frocks and dresses for children made by destitute women, managed by upper-middle-class ladies who want to do a bit of charitable work. What the particular pull of this memory is, I can’t tell; it could be that the shop has an unusual amount of space, and, invariably, relatively few customers, besides a society lady you might know vaguely, positioned behind the desk, speaking in perfect, commanding English; the juxtaposition of these elements might make it seem attractive and impossibly far in Norwich.

  I was back in Park Street, and was buoyant for two reasons: First, for my proven ability to materialise yet again in the world that I (for some obscure but dogged reason) love. Second, I was irrationally, almost spitefully, cheered by the fact that I was back when it was increasingly going to be the best time to be in Calcutta (a week before Christmas) and, coincidentally, the worst time to be in Norwich. Decades of dispiriting travel between the two countries have made my experience of place not just comparative, but, occasionally, vituperative. Before the England–India divide that’s defined my life in the last twenty-five years, there was the Bombay–Calcutta one. When visiting Calcutta from Bombay, I would actually think to myself, “How glad I am not to be at home!,” while, back from England, I overhear myself exclaiming in the first few days: “How glad I am to be back!”—literally, at intervals, congratulating myself. In other words, the associations of “home,” “away,” “return,” are quite hopelessly mixed up in my mind.

  As I stepped out of Oxford Bookstore, my pace quickening as I turned in the direction of Music World, I found myself accompanied by a girl who’d been sitting on the pavement (there are always one or two people domiciled just outside the bookstore). I’d noticed, without paying attention, that she’d been sitting with an infant, a boy, both diverting themselves with what looked like a large, flat bottle meant for storing mineral water—a curious plaything. Seeing me come out of the shop, the girl immediately abandoned the infant and hurried after me. I thought I’d end her pursuit by giving her a few rupees; then it occurred to me that, since I was writing about the city, I may as well have a conversation with her. The thought, a contrived and implausible one, became more and more natural and plausible in a few seconds, when we began talking.

  “Naam kya hai?”

  She was briefly confused, and then probably made an assessment—that this man would be worth cooperating with in the interests of getting a few more rupees later. We kept up the conversation while steadily approaching the traffic lights, where I’d cross to Music World. She was anxious and waiflike, and wouldn’t have looked out of place in a page inside the National Geographic.

  “Pooja,” she said.

  “Do you live here?” I asked—meaning this area, Park Street; more precisely, the pavement
outside Oxford Bookstore. She shook her head. She told me her des, her native place, was Uluberia—not a village or town at all, but a downmarket locality on the outskirts of the city, near Howrah, which can be classified as the beginning of the end of Calcutta. Did she live there with her parents?

  No, she lived in front of Forum, the big mall that had come up on Elgin Road and altered that historical area (the mall, awash with radiance and activity till nine in the evening, was one of those locations I suddenly caught myself thinking about in the solitariness of Norwich). By now, Pooja—whose real name, I found out, was Shabnam (many poor Muslims, as we know, instinctively take cover under neutral-sounding Hindu names)—and I had crossed and reached Music World; here, sitting on a parapet before a Mama Mia stall—which claims to sell not ice cream, but “gelato”—I clumsily opened a notebook which I was carrying in case I encountered Ramayan Shah, and, glanced at by the beady-eyed magazine-sellers opposite and the slinky college kids who always gather here, taking stock of the situation or romancing, began to scribble Shabnam’s replies. Her brother—whom she’d left alone, daringly, in front of the bookshop—was called Nasir; she earned between ten and forty rupees each day; she (who was just ten) didn’t like her parents so much, preferring her grandparents, with whom she lived on the pavement outside Forum. Our conversation had made us conspicuous: not just to the magazine-sellers and the smarter, uniformed men behind the Mama Mia counter, but to other beggars, whose numbers had grown startlingly, in a matter of minutes.

  “I have to get back,” she urged. “My brother …” Yes, to leave an infant alone in front of Oxford Bookstore … I’d put that thought out of my head. How would she go back to Forum later? On foot, she told me. Other beggars were listening; and, when they saw me fish in my pocket and give Shabnam her reward for humouring me, they advanced in a proprietary way, demanding money.

  It was a lovely afternoon, of course, and an excellent time to be in Park Street—seven days before Christmas, which, with New Year’s Eve, would transmogrify the place with its paraphernalia and magic and leave its unmistakable trace there for pretty much the rest of the year. As for the beggars (mainly children and women), I knew they drifted around Flurys and Music World and the traffic lights as a matter of course—I felt I’d seen them before. This, though, was an illusion. Like everyone else on Park Street, they too were part of a whirl and itinerary of arrival and calculated lingering. People come to Park Street for a reason—to have a cup of coffee and forget the world; to try out a restaurant; to keep a business appointment; to become a couple; to study girls; to be a consumer—and once they’re done, they’re gone. The beggars, too, had their reasons for being here—they didn’t actually belong to Park Street. With the destitute, whom you hardly notice, you invariably make an assumption that they’re integral to the milieu and landscape they inhabit; as they don’t have a home, you presume their home is where they are. This wasn’t true of the beggars in front of Music World—like everything else (cars, shoppers, students, coffee drinkers) that made up the strange energy at that junction, they were ephemeral. Chance had brought me and them together, but, actually, there was no guarantee I’d run into them at this spot tomorrow.

  I discovered this while talking to them. One woman in particular stood out: sparse-haired, large, in a colourful rag of a sari she’d wrapped round herself, she sensed why I was here and promised me a story. “Listen to me, dada!” she cried. “Not now!” I said, “tomorrow!” She made a sign of disgust. “I won’t be here tomorrow!” she said, and walked off.

  The reason I was distracted was the other woman I’d begun to talk to over the din. She was plain-looking and reticent, and, in her way, I thought, lovely. She had a small boy with her. While the others asked for money, she asked for money to buy medicine—“Dada, oshudh kinbo”: a well-worn ploy. I countered this with “I won’t give you money, I’ll buy you the medicine,” to which, to my surprise, she nodded faintly and said, “All right.” Around this time the other woman warned me, “I won’t be here tomorrow!” and walked away, while I gestured to this young woman—she’d be in her late twenties—and her son to follow me to Free School Street, because there was a pharmacy there; as we waited to cross at the lights, and the other beggars quickly lost interest, I sensed that Park Street is, essentially (even for the destitute), a place of brief acquaintances and meetings—no one has too much time for anyone else, you yourself are part of a web of motivations that are fading and resurrecting—and you must be on the move constantly to be in the street’s ebb and flow of traffic.

  We crossed the road—Christmas preparations were already on, and, at the turning of Free School Street, opposite the petrol pump, I saw a man walk past carrying a large cotton wool beard and an immense red suit: bits that would coalesce, at some point, into a figure of Santa.

  At Ramayan Shah’s, I asked for the nearest pharmacy, as I had months ago when the boy had been lying on a shelf with clenched fingers, and, once again, someone pointed peremptorily ahead—“Aagey, aagey”—towards the right.

  I had thought the woman was Bengali—she fitted perfectly with my childhood notion of the Bengali woman: pretty, intelligent-looking, fairly small, an embodiment of puritan dignity, with the straight hair combed into a bun on either side of her parting—but she was, to my surprise, originally from Bihar, and her name was Baby Misra. She said she was thirty years old; and she’d shown me a prescription on a doctor’s letterhead to vouch for the authenticity of her plea. I was right to think, though, that she wasn’t a beggar—she lived just outside of Calcutta, in Howrah—the graveyard of Bengal’s industry—and there she was a part-time domestic help, washing dishes and cleaning up at two homes in the morning, earning two hundred rupees monthly at one house, three hundred at the other. That left her afternoons free, and she’d embarked for Park Street at 1 p.m.

  Marvelling at the journeys that had brought us to the front of Music World and the large glass windows of Flurys, I asked her, crudely, why she wasn’t begging in Howrah. She admitted, without any of the pride that was implicit in her simple appearance, that she didn’t want to be spotted by people she knew. Her journey to Flurys seemed to me, then, both entirely understandable and slightly mad; given she wasn’t so well—and despite her deceptive air of reasonableness.

  Her husband, Munna, was now far away; he’d gone back to his des, as labourers in Calcutta do frequently, to a place that sounded—on Baby Misra’s tongue—like “Raksaul.” Jitinder, who was five years old, was clearly on an outing; he carried a little stick, probably to entertain himself or, in his own made-up universe, to protect himself and his mother. Like him, I too was not immune to the charms of Free School Street in December—a poor, dirty, congested road, with an open gutter on either side, but busy with insignificant enterprise, and with residues, everywhere, of an earlier bohemian life. I crossed the street and soldiered on—the pharmacy was not where I’d expected it, and bystanders kept promising, “Just there—further on”—while, doggedly, Baby Misra followed, with her son, confidently brandishing the stick, unimpressed by the crows and stray dogs. I was thinking that there was something else I was supposed to be doing, which I was being kept from, and my stride became more urgent; and then realised that this—whatever it was I was doing now on Free School Street—was exactly what I’d set out to do. “What is it that’s troubling you?” I asked her; she said, quietly, that she had a shooting pain in her right leg, a pain like a “current.”

  Bihar, Bengal’s neighbour, has one of the grandest histories of all Indian provinces; home to India’s first great empire, to two great and austere religions, Buddhism and Jainism, and to the ancient teeming city of Pataliputra. It’s a world that the Indian child knows from comic books—the kingdom of Magadha; the resplendent emperor Chandragupta Maurya on his horse; the tonsured sages gathered round a holy tree; the sensuous women that the artists of the Amar Chitra Katha comic book series drew with lascivious satisfaction. While you glimpse that dreamworld of eternal India, you don�
�t make the connection, either as a schoolboy or as an adult, with Bihar, byword for abhorrent ministers and bureaucrats and policemen, minor warlords and ignorant peasants, whose once-poetic tongues—Bhojpuri and Maithili—now, spoken by the likes of Ramayan Shah, make people laugh. There’s no reason to think that the Biharis, who constitute a substantial percentage of the floating population of Calcutta, like the pompous remnants of the Bengali bourgeoisie at all, flattened by decades of left rule, or that the Bengali thinks of the Bihari as anything other than a rickshawalla. It’s a testament to Bengali self-absorption that the city is still fundamentally thought to be a Bengali one—although grudging concessions are made to the fact that the economy, now, is almost entirely controlled by Marwaris. But what of the Bihari? On Park Street and Free School Street, and in other parts of the city, he is everywhere; leaning out of a taxi window, eyes glazed, buying gutka from a vendor (who’s also, possibly, Bihari) to keep himself going for the rest of the day; or selling chanachur masala in front of a mall; engaged in small trade or the perennial construction work; living apart from his family, then mysteriously withdrawing to his des for a month.