Calcutta

by Amit Chaudhuri

  J. P. Medico.

  Here was the pharmacy! But the corrugated shutter was down three-quarters of the way. I bent down and could sense there were people there; I was told from within that they’d reopen at five o’clock. Yes, I think it’s true that some pharmacies—and maybe pharmacies alone—take a long siesta in Calcutta. Do they do such bad business in the afternoon that even keeping the ceiling fan and tube light on makes little sense? “Open up please! We’ve come a long way!” I said, taking on the moral tone of my class, the educated class, impatient with the laxity of the poorly educated. Baby Misra seemed quietly relieved and respectful upon seeing me in this incarnation. To my surprise, the shutter went up with a juddering clatter, and the three of us stepped into a small space that, here and there, displayed cheerful signs for shampoos and ointments. One of these showed a radiant little boy with a bottle saying HORLICKS, and, soon after the two men (a younger and an older) had glanced at the prescription (Baby Misra’s treatment was very simple: calcium tablets and vitamins), young Jitinder pointed to the sign and, charmingly, without the pressing ways of other children, indicated he wanted the Horlicks. The wisdom of asking for Horlicks rather than chocolates or lozenges was interesting: did he know the former had greater nutritional value—or did he like the picture of the child? The two men, who were giving us the vitamins—annoyingly, they’d run out of calcium tablets—smiled without, however, being certain of how much to smile; they could tell Jitinder wasn’t my son and were balancing a demand from an undeserving down-at-heel boy (albeit decently dressed in white shirt and shorts, armed with a tiny stick) with the possibility of a further sale. Baby Misra was having none of this; unimpressed by Jitinder, she collected him from the shelf she’d allowed him to perch on, and placed him on the ground unfussily, as if they had to be on their way. The manner in which she did this acknowledged to me: “I know your patience is wearing thin.” I paid for the vitamins without a word.

  We walked back some distance towards Park Street, and, near Ramayan Shah’s “hotel,” where I thought I’d stop for a chat, I bid the lovely Baby Misra and her handsome boy farewell. On our way, while passing a dingy-looking eating place, Jitinder, with the candour of a child, growing gradually familiar with me, had expressed an interest in chow mein. This time, with the inexorable softening of the maternal heart, Baby Misra looked at me—in expectancy and faith. I felt a small constricting of my own heart immediately, and, for a second, felt this mother and child I hardly knew were threatening to deluge my life. Simultaneously—it was impossible to disentangle it from this anxiety—I thought buying Jitinder chow mein was an excellent idea; only the fact that he’d asked me made me resistant to it. We went in, and Jitinder had vegetable chow mein—“chow,” as it’s called in Calcutta, the commonest, most munificent street food, limp white noodles tossed around in oil and soya sauce with gratings of vegetable or chicken (I myself have never tasted it)—and then, deliberately to disarm me, said, “Thank you,” in the way of one who knows only those two words in the English language, and uses them at moments such as this one.

  * * *

  “You shouldn’t have given her the money,” said Munna moodily. “She’ll never spend it on medicine.”

  By now, I’d seen the back of Baby Misra; we’d had a final conference near Ramayan Shah’s. I’d offered to drop her at a “free” hospital near Number 4 Bridge, for treatment and X-rays, and she’d refused. Maybe it was time to get back to Howrah. She, in turn, had asked me if I knew of any jobs going; “You can always tell these people if you need me,” I said, pointing my chin towards Ramayan Shah’s ramshackle world, as if it were an institution I’d have an enduring association with. She tilted her head sideways—our sweet Indian gesture of assent—and asked if she could have money to buy the calcium tablets.

  Soon after this, Munna (clearly a popular Bihari name) passed his remark—he’d ignored me before, absorbed in his aluminium platter of rice and vegetables, but now was unexpectedly, if intrusively, interested—with the air of a persecutor who turns out to be menacingly concerned about your welfare. What do you care? I thought. A mistake one makes constantly is to judge people by their looks—it’s the infallible urge to stereotype, conflated inextricably with the urge to fictionalise—and Munna had the large, moustached, glowering features that convey, and incite, animosity. But, as you grow older, experience tells you to distrust your first impression (this can be fatal when it comes to people who have an aura of villainy, and very useful in connection with those who have an air of “niceness”); so I thought I’d engage with Munna in spite of not wanting to.

  “That boy’s half-mad,” he said, as he scooped up rice from the dented plate. The boy he’d described smiled enigmatically. He was too busy to be bothered: splashing the utensils, dicing the aubergine. He turned out to be Ramayan Shah’s son; he said he was “fourteen or fifteen” years old, but looked younger—small, enigmatic, and spring-like. As I took in his features from different angles, I did see that he looked a bit like his father; but lacked, naturally, his air of calm acceptance. Clearly, Munna and he didn’t like each other. The boy was cheery but homesick (he missed the “khelna kudna,” the abandon, of his village); and Munna was a bully.

  “He eats a kilo and a half of rice every day,” said Munna, rapidly consuming rice himself. “He doesn’t eat food: food eats him.”

  The boy’s name was (probably appropriately) Hridayanand—“joyful of heart.” His response to my queries was one of gobsmacked (this ugly English word is the only one that comes readily to mind) disbelief; he’d never encountered such a specimen before. Munna’s was supercilious distaste and suspicion. He wasn’t sure if I was a scam-artist who was going to exploit him, or whether I was an imbecile up for exploitation—the perpetual and urgent Indian dilemma. Nevertheless, as if he were reluctantly doing me a good turn, he volunteered a potted life history. He had been “here”—the word could have meant anything—since 1986. That was in one of the worse decades in Calcutta’s history, even worse in some ways than the Naxal years, when middle-class children, like the children in Victorian novels, read for their finals by candlelight, when the city seemed to implode and the interminable power cuts earned the chief minister Jyoti Basu—whose first name means “light”—the nickname Andhakar or Darkness Basu. Since such was at least the middle-class perspective on 1986, it made me wonder how much worse it would have been in Munna’s home town to make the move. Everyone around “here” was Bihari, he proclaimed: a generalisation, of course, but with a germ of truth in it.

  They—four of them—slept on these latticed string cots and narrow benches—the rudimentary furniture that occupied the pavement at various angles. He cleaned cars and earned one hundred and fifty rupees a day (almost double the minimum wage in this country of starvation deaths and millionaires); and sent back two and a half thousand monthly. At home in Munger zilla, he had two daughters.

  “Police cause trouble,” he said, with the wariness of one whose domain depends upon offering small bribes to the law.

  No, I didn’t have a great deal to learn from Munna—nothing that, by now, I didn’t already know. But Munna was aware of the value of his time and information. “Arrey, at least give me something for a cup of tea!” he said as I got up to go—careless of the decorousness that had characterised the others I’d socialised with till now at Ramayan Shah’s. Nagendra was ironing away within earshot, and his expression could have meant anything: “I wish I was somewhere else,” or “Serves him right!”

  * * *

  25 December 2009: the Bengal Club Christmas lunch menu had lobster bisque as usual. Then there were the other things—fish buried under almond sauce; roast ham with a sort of dark twinkling lacquer veneer; turkey, of course, most unexciting of meats. But how could you have a Christmas lunch without turkey? And Christmas pudding in brandy cream. It was the sort of weather in which a jacket and tie—the club’s dress code for men for the event—is just fine. Most people were into their mid-fifties and beyond;
and there was a lot of sipping of cocktails and mocktails, donning of paper hats, a mild, unselfconscious, bravura indulgence in silliness. The club was once designed to keep natives at bay—“Dogs and Indians not allowed”—but now, I’d say hesitantly, it’s old-fashioned, yet lacking in hauteur. We were here en famille; with my wife, my daughter, who, with a friend, ate separately from us in the Oriental Room, my parents, parents-in-law, my sister-in-law and her husband, Kabir (who live in a remote London suburb). Kabir had retrieved a pale khaki linen suit for the afternoon.

  After occasions like this, we generally scatter. My father is no longer clear about what his intentions are, and seems ready to be led almost anywhere; my mother isn’t certain why my father has changed in the last two years into this indeterminate human being. My daughter is easily bored; barely eleven years old, she had, that day, some tantalising rendezvous to keep at home—it made her restless. My parents-in-law are excessively polite, as almost all Bengali in-laws are if they’re in the disadvantageous position of being of the daughter’s family: they convinced me (as they do each year) of the exceptionally good time they’d had. Kabir looked as if he’d had enough of wearing his khaki-coloured linen suit.

  And so they dispersed, one by one, from Russell Street, which opens at this end on to Park Street. And, as on our wedding night, my wife and I were eventually left alone with each other—but on the compound of the Bengal Club. I didn’t want to leave the neighbourhood; I’d half-succumbed to the same wishful enchantment that I do when I’m here. Besides, I’d eaten too much; the residue of the piece of Christmas pudding saturated in brandy cream not only didn’t fit in with my experience of Christmas Day—it felt out of place in my stomach. My arteries were, predictably, asking for caffeine.

  “Let’s go to Flurys,” I said, knowing fully we’d have to wait to get in. In my mind was the undeniable realisation, “Christmas comes once a year,” uttered by the angel floating ministeringly at one shoulder, with the devil at the other shoulder adding, “And you’re half a minute away from Park Street.” Perhaps they were both angels? And in which part of the world could you have such a Christmas afternoon, with its special aimless anticipation—except in Calcutta, and here? People were at large. They looked unaware of various things, of the complex history that killed Christmas on this street and now for whatever reason had resurrected it. There’s something almost miraculous about the continual return of Christmas to Park Street; it’s a miracle that (despite the fact that all miracles are apocryphal) I didn’t want to miss. As with all festive occasions these days in this city, what had once started probably in the nineteenth century as part of a secular metamorphosis (the emergence of a new, busy, pleasure-loving middle class; a fresh air of celebration) is now woven into a cheery provincialism, of a city no longer emblematic but ordinary, yet uncannily lit by its past. The strollers on Park Street seemed as unmindful of yesterday as they were of history: Christmas Eve didn’t survive even as memory. They were on their way somewhere, for no good reason, as we were, to Flurys; the hawkers were selling the little clay Santas with the mildly nodding heads and parsimonious beards, as if Christmas Eve were still a few days away. It didn’t occur to them, or to the passers-by, that you mightn’t want anything to do with Santa—clay or otherwise—once Christmas Eve was over. I had once bought one for my daughter, a few years ago, and she didn’t want anything to do with it then; it stood on a shelf for two weeks, its head vibrating every time you struck it with your finger, and then its one colour began to fade, the already faint red ebbing into something like an impressionist’s wash. Its inside was white, and hollow like a bell. As with such objects, they become hand-me-downs to the less privileged, and a maid took it for her daughter after I reluctantly consented to part with it.

  Flurys was full of afternoon revellers. We would need to wait for fifteen minutes to enter; I had a sudden urge—not so sudden, the thought was at the back of my mind—to check out Ramayan Shah’s. “Could I … you could come with me”—but my wife shook her head and indicated she’d wait for my return here, in the small queue keeping vigil outside Flurys, “OK—back in ten minutes—we should have a table by then”—and I went down the steps and past the magazine vendors and across the road, having loosened my tie, folded my jacket (the last sign of the Bengal Club luncheon) on the crook of my arm. There was activity at the petrol station and in front of Mocambo, of course, but, coming to Ramayan Shah’s, I found an odd solitude, a release of purpose. A strange cessation reigned here. This wasn’t only because Ramayan Shah was missing again (did it really matter if he was there or not?—more and more he seemed a symbol of elusiveness, like Godot), but that the inner rhythm here was different—from the rest of the neighbourhood and from its own incarnation on normal days. Right next to Nagendra’s ironing stand were two figures asleep on string beds, covered from toe to head in sheets keeping out, in the shroud-like form of rural Indian sleepers, what this country has in such abundance and what makes it so attractive: sound and daylight. They were still, but crawling with flies; Christmas, possibly, had given them justification to withdraw into this cocoon. “Where’s Nagendra?” I asked; thinking, too (Fitzgerald once defined the writer as one who can harbour two incompatible thoughts in the head simultaneously), that our table at Flurys might now be available. A man dicing vegetables gestured towards one of the motionless figures on which dozens of Christmas flies had alighted—alighted, it became clear in a second, with no long-term commitment to the venue. A little further off, Ramayan Shah’s son Hridayanand was scouring a pot with a dreamlike containment, neither happy nor unhappy. I think he was probably incapable of being unhappy, or, like most children, was unhappy about immediate rather than overarching matters. Right now he was more bored than unhappy. Since sociological rigour is essential when you’re writing of a city, I asked the man dicing vegetables who he was and, intrusively, what his earnings were like. He said he was Gupta, proprietor of the Chandan Hotel (I’d noticed the unostentatious handwritten sign long ago and had been cautioned that it was not the name of Ramayan Shah’s outfit). This neglected space, this bit of nothing, left for future use between Nagendra’s stall and Ramayan Shah’s stove, I’d always presumed “belonged” to the latter, that it served a function in his two-decade-old enterprise; but on meeting Gupta the Chandan Hotel acquired, for me, a tenuous territorial shape. Gupta, in reply to my socio-economic query, said he earned a hundred and fifty rupees a day (this was odd, because I’d never seen him plying his trade; but it was clearly either the average on the pavement near Mocambo, or a number that tripped easily off the Bihari tongue). On Christmas Day, he admitted he made less. I would’ve questioned him further about this disappointing dip in his income, but wanted to get back to Flurys while I still stood a chance of getting a table.

  At the traffic lights, I saw a deeply familiar figure on the opposite side, sitting, amidst the concourse of motley people any festive day in Calcutta comprises, on the white parapet outside the large window of Flurys, studying me with a mixture of distant empathy and interest. It was my wife, R. She’d abandoned the queue and opted, as she often does, to sit down. She looked at me as if she’d never expected to see me again. I was simply surprised to find her where she was. But the queue had dissolved, and we got into Flurys almost instantly. “Did you notice the woman beside me?” she asked when we were seated. Although I do notice women, I often find that I don’t notice the same kind that R does. She’d been sitting next to a small family on the parapet. Now that she mentioned her, I did recall someone at R’s side—“The person in the green salwaar kameez,” she said exasperatedly—but the colour of the clothing hadn’t registered itself on my mind’s eye. What had imprinted itself there was that she was, for the want of a more delicate expression, someone from a different class background, someone with a very different horizon, someone ordinary and well known and yet, at the same time, little known. All this, as it were, I knew, although I hadn’t noticed the colour of her salwaar kameez. It was she, on seeing that
R wanted to sit down, who had invited her to: “There’s space here.” And there was; the parapet distends just there like a swelling lip, and becomes ample. R told me how this woman came here with her family at this time of the year, annually, because the ledge outside Flurys provided her with a view of an incredible stream of life on the 25th. “She spoke to me first in Bengali and then in Hindi,” R said, and this was worth remarking on because, only a generation ago, Bengalis spoke a risible, embarrassing Hindi, and even looked down upon that language. In the last thirty years, not only had Bengal fallen, but so had the once-vaunted Bengali language; and, in the meanwhile, a new kind of Bengali person had come into being and increased in small towns, suburbs, outskirts, and even in the metropolis (which these days felt as if it were on the outskirts of somewhere itself, or like an agglomeration of little towns), in which people watched Hindi films on DVDs, and a daily ration of Hindi reality shows and Bengali soaps. Most of this audience couldn’t but be proficient in Hindi. The woman in the green salwaar kameez was one such Bengali, while R and I had a foot sufficiently planted in a superannuated Bengal for us to find this unselfconscious lapsing into Hindi worth commenting on. Streamers hung from the ceilings of Flurys, as it always does during Christmas. After ordering the menu’s relatively recent “brewed filter coffee” (earlier it was simply “coffee”), I apologised to my wife and said I’d like to step out for ten minutes and speak briefly to the woman she’d been sitting next to. Clearly, I’m not good company these days; R sees me not so much as a person occasionally seized by inspiration or curiosity but by inklings of excitement. Either it has to do with music, or a particular sound, or idea; or, as was the case now, with Christmas and the city. “Go,” she instructed me. “The coffee will take at least fifteen minutes.” Like me, she too was vaguely stirred by the notion of a family sitting outside Flurys on the ledge, looking at the same world that we were from behind the window, but at greater proximity.