Calcutta

by Amit Chaudhuri

  So as not to unduly alarm the woman in the green salwaar kameez, I introduced myself as the husband of the person who’d been keeping her company five minutes ago. She was cautious but not hostile; she made room for me in the space R had just vacated. I’d seen faces like hers before—in Northern Spain; in China: a new kind of provincial who populates the globalised world, who changes with its changes without ever travelling outside of the country, even beyond their city or town. This lady, for instance—she lived in Salt Lake, a suburb created in the late seventies not far from the airport, and she’d come here to Park Street to spend the afternoon. She introduced me to her son, a shy boy of seventeen or eighteen, who she said studied at “Something Institution” (I couldn’t catch the name), and to her sister, who resembled her, but was older, less pretty, and seemed to know it. She was waiting, she said with a tremor of humour and anticipation, for her husband to return from the KFC on Middleton Street. The only false note occurred when I asked her what he did; withdrawing a tiny bit, she said, prevaricatingly, “Service.” This could mean any kind of regular employment: an ordinary white-collar job. Anything grander, and she’d have been specific. I felt, again, that I’d seen people like her in other parts of the world, out on a walk, going down a promenade or past some shops, entirely of a locality, a place, but also entirely of the present, the here and now. Sitting next to her, waiting for her husband to return, I thought I could have been, and probably was, anywhere.

  * * *

  “Could you go and see your bara mamima this evening? She might die any time now.”

  So my mother to me, before Christmas Day was over. Those childhood visits—now translated into belated deathbed visits! Never to see bara mamima again—my late maternal uncle Jyoti Prasad Nandi Majumdar’s wife—to allow her to sneak away without so much as a greeting or a sighting!

  She lay, that Christmas evening in Golf Green, very still on the divan in the little sitting room in the one-bedroom flat. We’d heard for about a week that she was fading. R and I sat talking with her daughter and sole companion Rini. Golf Green is an odd colony that came up next to waterbodies and wilderness in the mid-seventies, its blocks of apartments divided candidly into “lower income group” and “middle income group,” perfectly capturing the prudent ambitions of a new generation of Bengali homeowners. My aunt, all these years, had been here, in MIG. Childhood flooded back, mainly because of the stillness that I only ever used to encounter in this city in December. The temperature falls to a level that makes the fan unnecessary. And the child in me begins to attend to details—the pinpricks of sound, of voices and televisions in other apartments, for the rest of the year made fuzzy by or mediated through the fan’s shuttling. Even now, I noticed that the decorative peacock feather on top of the fridge was still. That stillness comprises, for me, an inalienable continuity with the child who first observed this world of relatives in Calcutta.

  “Have you noticed who’s come?” said Rini didi, as, on our way out, we stood at the door. With an effort bara mamima opened her eyes and nodded—barely.

  * * *

  A friend visiting from London tells me how he likes the Calcutta Christmas much more than he likes the English one. I do too; but he has specific reasons. And he has no memory of a Calcutta Christmas to refer back to; Calcutta, in effect, has no past for him—he’s only been here once before.

  “There’s not much sign of the crucifix here,” he says. “You don’t have that awful mournfulness of Christianity. It’s all about Santa,” he concludes, nodding. He has seen gigantic simulacra of the bearded gift-bearer in shopping malls; in front of restaurants. Although globalisation, in its full-blown form, is yet to reach Bengal, its apparitions, this December, are clearly visible: thus the striking Kumbhakarna-like dimensions of many of the Santa Clauses. “And there aren’t that many nativity scenes,” he says. “In fact, I haven’t seen any.”

  He’s right; it’s an absence I hadn’t noticed, perhaps with good reason. In Aparna Sen’s lovely first film, 36 Chowringhee Lane, the director almost forces an analogy when she plays a recording of a tenor singing, stratospherically, “Silent Night” over visuals of destitutes sleeping on bridges and pavements. To find a representation of the nativity, one might need to go to a church; but, on the whole, the miraculous birth is unremarked upon. The predominant atmosphere of Christmas here has never been one of solitary stocktaking or of the notion of the return of God to earth, but of make-believe.

  For me, the principal emblem of Christmas in Calcutta is neither Santa, nor the nativity, nor the Cross, but the Christmas tree. Almost no one in Calcutta has seen a real one. It enters certain spaces—the middle-class living room; the showroom and shop; the cafe—but it’s we who, with its seasonal proximity, are travelling inadvertently towards the faraway. With its fake, shiny bristles, it represents a journey. It’s also a reminder that the faraway can be manufactured—perhaps is always manufactured. No one misses the actual Christmas tree; to eventually see one is not so much a disappointment as a matter of slight puzzlement. I saw real Christmas trees again recently, being sold on a pavement in the Angel in London, unloaded from a truck, arranged, and covered in gauze, so that they resembled, somewhat, the inert botanical figures in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I was fascinated by them, but received no final illumination, as they seemed a bit off the point; as Christmas outside of Calcutta seems generally. Once you’ve experienced a genuine transplantation (a genuine fake, as it were, an offshoot that takes on its own life), you lose, strangely, your appetite for, and your capacity to recognise, the original. This might explain, from more than four decades of living memory, the historical radiance of the Christmas trees of New Market.

  What do people in this city, now that it’s neither moored to its past nor part of a definite future, do as the new year approaches? They celebrate; they eat out. The rich and well-to-do have an internal map (mostly of avenues and lanes in South Calcutta) of houses and parties they must visit or avoid; or they’ll romp in a club, dancing on a lawn to a band as the old year dies out. Others go to Park Street.

  This New Year has probably been around in Bengal for two hundred years. The Bengali new year, which might be more than a millennium old, is the first day of the month of Baishakh, in early summer, usually the 14th of April, give or take a day for the variations in the almanac. Once, the New Year must have been a curiosity, a strange, amusing diversion to be smiled at, neither comfortably of this place nor to be wholly ignored (what was this thing?); but now it’s the Bengali new year that’s become ceremonial and arcane, part of a continuity that’s even more make-believe than Christmas. On the first day of Baishakh, at least some men dress up for a day as “Bengalis,” wearing the intricately pleated cotton dhuti that was, even until the sixties, the most elegant attire a Bengali man could be seen in, horribly difficult, like the sari, to master, but worn always with a suggestion of casualness. Such were the contraries of the bhadralok.

  My wife, who works as a scholar on the nineteenth century, has pointed out a poem to me called “Ingraji Naba Barsha”—“The English New Year”—by the (she thinks underrated) poet Iswar Gupta. It first appeared in 1852, a time just preceding the tumultuous change of 1857 (when the Sepoy Mutiny led to colonial power passing from the East India Company to the Crown, and formalised the Raj), and is canny and mildly satirical; R reminds me it’s also deeply attentive to the real, in the way it captures that occasion with the urgency of a bulletin. Iswar Gupta was a tremendously popular poet in his time—perhaps the Bengali poet—but, after the preponderance of the new bhadralok humanism from the 1860s onward, after the ascendancy of the “new” Calcutta (which, one hundred and fifty years later, is old, ruined, maybe even dead), he was no longer deemed a serious poet, and then ignored and forgotten. Iswar Gupta is not a poet of “emotion recollected in tranquillity,” as Tagore, at certain moments, might seem to be.

  Bankimchandra Chatterjee, the first Bengali novelist, called him “jaha achhe tahar kobi,” or the “poet
of what’s at hand” (for his subjects included pineapples and goats); my wife, echoing D. H. Lawrence, says he’s a “poet of the present.” Iswar Gupta is not a poet of memory, or the personal or historical perspective; but that doesn’t mean he’s ahistorical. History is not the annals; it’s what happens around us when we’re unaware it’s history. It’s Gupta’s unawareness of himself, his subjects, or of Calcutta as something separate called “history,” in a static, retrospective sense, that makes them all bustle with it. As a poet, he has recourse to devices common to traditional Bengali poetry—such as onomatopoeia—that later poets would use temperately, if at all, in a more Sanskrit-derived, literary manner, but which he employs shamelessly and with a radical outrageousness, as a response to the odd transitory society he inhabits. R writes that, in “Ingraji Naba Barsha,” the poet “initially describes a white man … joyous and indulgent, well-dressed in his well-decorated home. At his side, his wife looks ‘fresh’ in a ‘polka-dotted dress’ (‘maanmode bibi shab hoilen fresh/Feather-er folorish phutikata dress’).” The English words dropped liberally in the two lines—“fresh,” “feather,” “dress”—aren’t really comparable to the comfortable melange-like contemporary chatter of the globalised Indian middle class; they’re used in the way the lower classes traditionally use English—to pepper a sentence; to mutter a jocular barb; to pass a sexual insult about an upper-class woman. Midway into the poem, “the poet imagines himself to be a fly accompanying these two”—the Englishman and his polka-dotted wife—“on their carriage to church” (all these churches still exist mysteriously in different parts of the city), “sometimes sipping from their glass of sherry, sometimes sitting on her gown or her face and happily rubbing its wings.” In what incarnation but that of a pest would the man on the street partake of the slopes of a memsahib’s breasts? For Iswar Gupta, at this point, “poet” and “pest” seem interchangeable. The next scene describes the astonishing dinner back at the Englishman’s house, “evoked almost entirely and only through sound”:

  Very best sherry taste merry rest jaté

  Aage bhage den giya srimatir haaté

  Kot kot kotakot tok tok tok

  Thhun thhun thhun thhun dhok dhok dhok

  Chupu chupu chup chup chop chop chop

  Shupu shupu shup shup shop shop shop

  Thhokash thhokash thhok phosh phosh phosh

  Kosh kosh tosh tosh ghosh ghosh ghosh

  Hip hip hurré daké whole class

  Dear madam you take this glass.

  As R points out, this doesn’t, largely, need translating, “except the framing couplets, of which the first one says that the very best sherry that makes the rest merry is to be given to the missus before anybody else, while the one at the end is almost entirely in English except for the word daké, which means calls.” A great deal of movement and physical activity is captured from that New Year’s Day—“Kot kot kotakot tok tok tok” probably the sound of heels ascending the steps and then authoritatively hitting the floor of the drawing room; “thhun thhun thhun” the pitch of the cutlery; “dhok dhok dhok” the sound ascribed usually to the rapid drinking of water, but here, almost certainly, of alcohol. The particular shape and form of these sounds were still unexpected to the Bengali ear. The terse, consonantal sound of English is also probably being alluded to, and mocked. Indians who didn’t and don’t know English, and want to mimic the way it’s spoken, make brief plosive noises: “phat,” “phoot,” “phut.” So there’s a belligerence to Iswar Gupta’s poem, the petulance of the poet/pest; it bubbles with resentment and energy.

  Some of these sounds are audible in the Bengal Club as 2010 arrives, as they are in other clubs and residences—the “thhun thhun thhun” of forks, spoons, and knives, the “dhok dhok dhok.” Then, on Russell Street, there’s a great deal of what was absent from Iswar Gupta’s time: the honking of horns. These are the cars that have queued up, in futility, for Park Street. In the Bengal Club New Year’s Eve garden party, meanwhile, they’re playing “Scarborough Fair” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” R writes, of the onomatopoeia in Iswar Gupta’s poem, that its “sheer presence of being” turns the poem into a “live playback recording of the changing shape of the everyday on New Year’s Day, 1852 …” Tonight, too, is noise.

  We’re foolhardy to be in Park Street. We’ve eaten at a Chinese restaurant, and my parents and daughter have gone back home—the press is daunting as my wife and I make our way towards the traffic lights. We shouldn’t be here (because, really, we have nothing to do) and never are at this time of the year (except in a car, in crippled transit), but I’m drawn to it for many reasons: for the narrative I myself have woven around it in the course of writing this book, and am now entangled in; for the people themselves—those who’ve gathered here and of whom Utpal Basu said to me gravely in a different context: “Erai amader nagarik”—“These are our citizens.” This wasn’t an admission of defeat; it was an assertion that you can’t deny change or say it has nothing to do with you. Young men in mock-leather jackets swarm the pavements; the street pulsates with excitement as the year dies. Park Street isn’t their natural terrain; out of a suppressed sense of exclusion, maybe, and from genuine excitement, they walk about in proprietary groups in front of the famous restaurants of the middle class—Bar-b-que; Moulin Rouge; Peter Cat. A resentment simmers, which somehow gets channelled into the celebrations.

  We cross the road to Mocambo; from a distance I see someone at the ironing stall, not Nagendra, but a deputy—the figure is diligently pressing clothes, now, at 11:15 p.m. On his haunches, Ramayan Shah is flattening dough for puris; some he has compressed into pastry-like shapes. A kadhai reveals the filling—tiny cauliflower florets, their tips rusted like dried blood. This snack costs a paltry two rupees a plate.

  Back in Park Street, we are stranded in front of the erstwhile Skyroom. Motorbike after motorbike passes down the road, two men on each one, and, as midnight approaches, the men at the back raise both arms, in a strange symbolic gesture, and roar; the crowd in leather jackets streaming behind us roars in response. It is like a victory lap.

  The couple standing beside us clearly don’t belong: a dark, distinguished-looking man of South Indian origins in a blazer; his slight, unobtrusive white wife. We are nervous, and are undecided about whether or not to be participatory; “It’s like Times Square,” she says in an unidentifiable American accent, smiling, “except Times Square’s worse.” Their daughter and their adopted son (who, it emerges, was born here) are partying at Park Hotel further up; while they’re awaiting their hired car, which is clearly stuck in the slow rerouted traffic inching into Park Street, to pick them up. They live, says the slightly harried gentleman in the blazer, in Philadelphia. I’m interested in his wife’s remark about Times Square; I believe there used to be genuine concordances between New York and Calcutta—of mood, atmosphere, ethos—but it never occurred to me to compare the drifting menace of Times Square with what used to be the enchantment of Park Street. Yet I also recognise this habit, of making comparisons under duress. Edward Said had written in an essay that “[m]ost people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that—to borrow a phrase from music—is contrapuntal. For an exile, habits of life, expression or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment.” I understand this completely, except that I balk at the bathos of the “exile.” I prefer “traveller,” with all its contemporary associations of banality—duty-free shops; frequent flyer miles; waiting for a car. In the midst of the ordinariness and exasperation of travel, it’s certain—or at least possible—that the past will come back to you. And, unbeknownst to us, midnight has crept upon us. There’s an unsettling roar, pre-verbal, vociferously threatening—intended not so much to express as to drown out. “Happy New Year,” insists the woman, to which I hastily add, “Happy New Year.�
� “Happy New Year,” “Happy New Year” concur, on the kerb, R and the distinguished-looking gentleman.

  THREE

  Names

  Naturally, I’m queried sometimes about why I returned to India—and why to Calcutta. Although India, in the so-called boom, might be a place for a certain kind of professional to come back to, Calcutta, on that boom’s outer reaches, with its precipitous political future, is a curious place to make a home. Unless, of course, you belong to that species condemned, all over the world, to uniqueness—I mean the only child—and you have ageing parents. Only recently, a woman whom I know slightly told me on the telephone that she was going to leave Bonn and her thriving career in the UN in Europe and return to New Zealand. “I worry about my parents, especially about my father, these days,” she laughed with some embarrassment. “It’s the curse of the only child.” If not the only child, then, in India, the sole male offspring. Not long ago, my wife met a young, good-looking, clearly successful couple in a friend’s house for tea. She heard the man had relocated from an enviable position in a foreign bank in Bombay to a similarly responsible position in what is, however, today’s Calcutta. Was it disaffection that had caused the move? Not really. It was something that’s older in this part of the world than disaffection, and more obstinate: the sense of familial duty. The father had aged, and the son decided (after discussions with a tolerant wife) that he should be nearby.

  Yet living in Calcutta is hardly to live in Kabul or Baghdad or even Johannesburg—nor is it comparable to inhabiting a suburb in Atlanta, or moving to Ipswich. As a city, it’s neither too threateningly alive, nor too defunct (if extinction can be measured and graded). Anyway, if Calcutta today suffers in comparison, it’s not really to other cities, but principally to itself and what it used to be. Anyone who has an idea of what Calcutta once was will find that vanished Calcutta the single most insurmountable obstacle to understanding, or sympathising with, the city today.