Calcutta

by Amit Chaudhuri

  Mrs. Mukherjee was much too fond of her son, though, for the estrangement to last long. After three months, returning from Ranchi, where she’d fled to escape what Samirda calls the entirely “imaginary” scandal of the marriage, she met the newly-weds and “forgave” Samirda. The couple continued to live in Tivoli Park, though, in the magic of what can only be called a “service apartment.” Strictly speaking, what they lived in was a “cottage,” being provided with lobster thermidor and fish Portuguese and gateaux by a cook called Daniel, who catered to some of the building’s fortunate tenants and homeowners. One of the legacies of the Bengali Ingabanga community is its fanciful obsession with “continental,” what in these plebeian times is briefly, and with proprietary nonchalance, referred to as “conti”: not French cuisine, or Italian, or Spanish, or even English, but a sui generis colonial variant, much of which, like Indian food in England, is unavailable anywhere else in the world; you must come to Calcutta to procure and taste it, and you must leave Calcutta to understand it is a fiction. Some of these dishes (like chicken Tetrazzini, which I first heard of from Samirda, immediately deciding it sounded like a hoax) remain as stubbornly unchanged since they first appeared on the menu as the old government buildings facing Chowringhee. When Samirda wishes to convey to me that the ten years he spent with Anitadi at the pied-à-terre were happy ones, it’s not his own life or hers but the lunches and dinners he describes. In 1978, there was a rumour that Tivoli Park might be purchased by a contractor and torn down; the Mukherjees thought it was time to depart the pied-à-terre. By now, the mansion in which Samirda had grown up had been sold to Viswa Bharati; a wall had been erected in the middle of what had been his late maternal grandfather’s garden, and, on the other side, a two-storeyed house had come up. To the ground-floor flat of this building moved Mrs. Mukherjee Senior and her long-forgiven son and daughter-in-law; here, roughly fifteen years later, after going up the narrow driveway, we encountered the small family of three gathered discreetly to receive us.

  The professional antecedents of Samir Mukherjee’s immediate forefathers, and his own, belonged to a company called Martin Burn Ltd. Created originally in 1890 by Sir Thomas Acquinas Martin and Rajen Mookerjee (later Sir Rajen), it went on to become Calcutta’s foremost construction company, and build landmarks like the Esplanade Mansion. This building, if you make eye contact with it during a traffic jam, still, in that brief, lethargic duration, has the power to arrest you with its art nouveau take on the Tower of Babel, to be both of and not of the billboards, the swarms of hawkers, the buses that take off without warning at terrifying speed, and the pedestrians constantly rushing about the Esplanade. It is one of those many things that make Calcutta at once a European city and a Bengali one.

  Burn and Co. also built the monument that serves as a metonym for the city on magazine and book covers, and in documentaries on television—when, that is, the destitute and Mother Teresa aren’t standing in. The work of William Emerson, the architect of Bombay’s magnificent Crawford Market, Calcutta’s Victoria Memorial is a monstrosity, the curiously private and laborious vision of a person who either didn’t know Calcutta or deeply disliked Queen Victoria. A leaden idea, it weighs down resignedly on the generous expanse it occupies not far from the Race Course, given an intractable presence by Burn and Co., inspected and ignored today by tourists from obscure Bengali towns.

  Sir Rajen Mookerjee’s son was Sir Biren—I don’t think knighthoods are hereditary, so to produce two Knights of the Empire was no mean feat for a single Bengali family—and Samirda recalls him being in charge of Martin Burn (which was created in 1946 after a merger) when he was working there. Sir Biren was, among other things, Samirda’s maternal granduncle. His wife was Lady Ranu, who excites few fond thoughts in Samirda, and whom he tersely calls a “skinflint.” Growing up in Bombay, I was completely unaware of Sir Biren, and later only tangentially. In the seventies, in the nation-building calm of what remained of the Nehruvian age, the idea of an Indian Sir Someone was no more or less than embarrassing: but, then, many things embarrassed us at the time which don’t any more. Later, when I was told that there existed, in Calcutta, someone called Lady Ranu, I was mildly scandalised and sceptical, and a little concerned too, as you would be if you caught someone you knew leading, stealthily, a life of make-believe. The make-believe, surely, was not only on Lady Ranu’s part, but the person who’d mentioned her as if she were not a figment of the imagination. Yet, she—despite my initial refusal to take her existence at face value, and despite Samirda’s glum assessment—was a minor celebrity in her time, beautiful, a socialite who socialised with Tagore, but, in the end, famous, simply, for being Lady Ranu. Names like “Sir Biren” and “Lady Ranu” continued, for a while, to be oxymorons; until I saw them finally as someone’s uncle or aunt, or husband or wife, or, importantly, someone’s boss.

  Samirda joined Martin Burn in 1956, soon after returning from Cambridge. Many of the male members of his father’s generation, and his grandfather’s, presided over this company in positions of power. Samirda, however, was content not to leave his mark; he was merely, as he puts it, “visible” in the office. In Cambridge, he’d had an astonishingly good three years. Still not entirely comfortable with the opposite sex, he’d gone merrymaking and drinking with his upper-class English friends. He’d come back to Calcutta from Trinity with a Third in History (“Wasted an opportunity to learn anything”). Then he settled tentatively into employment, into becoming strategically, and merely, “visible.” But he continued, nevertheless, the business of enjoying himself: of flirting with the pretty taansh or Anglo-Indian secretaries, of listening to Pam Crane singing at Trinca’s at Park Street, of eating out at Firpo’s and the Skyroom. In other words, instead of pursuing his ambitions (he tells me he had none), he set out to take pleasure in the bits of the city he delighted in. He couldn’t have known, then, that the city—eventually a certain stretch on Lower Circular Road, leading from the Mouchak sweetshop towards Exide Batteries and Calcutta Club—would become, over the next five decades, his permanent abode; that he’d go away from it less and less, even for holidays. He was a bit like the traveller in the de Chirico painting that V. S. Naipaul invokes, “The Enigma of Arrival,” where, according to Naipaul, the visitor to the city in the picture, with a ship in the background, gradually forgets he’s supposed ever to go back—except that Naipaul’s visitor is a migrant, while Calcutta, to Samirda, is home, and it was home he wouldn’t be leaving. For isn’t the idea of home premised upon departure, and travel upon the possibility of return, and the foreclosing of that possibility? Although he’d often enlighten our teas with his heavy, dramatic nostalgia for England, Samirda had forgotten, in some basic way, that it isn’t necessary to live and die at home. In that sense, and other ones, the Calcutta he inhabited when we first met him in 1993 wasn’t a real one.

  * * *

  By all accounts, he’d begun to lead a secret life at Martin Burn. He’d become a regular reader of Encounter. He also became an executive in the purchase department of Indian Iron and Steel, an important subsidiary of Martin Burn, but spent much of his time making conversation with the clerks, some of whom, deceptively unprepossessing, were startlingly well read and genuine enthusiasts. He himself had embraced Evelyn Waugh—A Handful of Dust, et cetera. From the crowded shelves of the Calcutta Club library he’d pick up writers in vogue who are no longer read today—as is the fate of most authors stocked in clubs—writers like Elspeth Huxley, for instance. Then he contracted polio and experienced pain and, almost for the first time, hours of palpable boredom; this must have been easily alleviated by human company, however, no matter if the company comprised doctors, because he recalls them noting he was cheerful and jovial even in his discomfort. I can’t imagine Samirda not being polite, despite being in the presence of doctors, because politeness is a sort of oxygen for him, and he derives from it both happiness and a reason for being. He’s better at it than most people I know. And the matter of happiness: it’s true—
I’ve sometimes wondered if he’s incapable of being unhappy. It’s not the contentment of a man who’s achieved something, or the natural well-being of an altruist, or the joy of a mystic whose source of pleasure is elsewhere, or in the divine: it’s something else. Perhaps it’s a deficiency. It’s the strange contentment of one who’s largely happy to be alive, to be helped by his wife on and off the bed (after polio, he acquired callipers for his legs, and, for many years, walked for short stretches with a stick), to offer a vicarious sort of hospitality to his guests, to be, in the best sense, even when his powers were diminishing, perpetually on the mend.

  When we first met the Mukherjees, Samirda was largely home-bound, but still making the occasional excursion—twice a month to the Calcutta Club, for instance. Samirda and I had brief discussions about the club, because we had a minor difference of opinion about the sort of recreation and relaxation it offered. Having then just become a member myself, I had no real moral leg to stand upon; but I still hadn’t forgiven the club for throwing me off its premises repeatedly in the seventies when I would come visiting from Bombay in the obligatory costume of the teenager: kurta, jeans, and chappals. What put me in a perverse militant mood each time I approached the Calcutta Club in that decade was not just the obfuscatory regulation concerning attire that inevitably denied me entry—clearly I already knew the regulation and what was awaiting me from each previous experience I’d had, and was deliberately, with the bit of Quixote in me that every person has, going clubward looking for a joust—it was the high-handed way I was disposed of I had most trouble with. I’ve been twice to the Athenaeum in London on a lunch invitation and lent a jacket and tie both times at the entrance by staff who had an air of brisk understanding and commiseration. At the Calcutta Club, I was treated as millions are daily in India: as one intrinsically below par. Then, in a final act of subterfuge, I became a member, before membership became unaffordable. Even so, I felt staff recognised me, with their unerring instinct, as one who’d taken up membership not for the usual reasons, but suspect ones. This staff is mostly new, and ignorant of my history; but I believe they have found me out, and the first thing they do when I step into the club is gaze steadily at my feet, to check, presumably, if I’m wearing shoes, strapped sandals, or the inadmissible strapless sandals. I’m clearly capable of anything. Now and then I will have a complaint whispered to me by a steward, that what I’m trying to pass off as my trousers are actually jeans. Both the staff and the club’s members are great connoisseurs of people who are pretending to wear one thing but are actually wearing another, of those who look, to the untrained eye, rule abiding, but are not.

  Samirda, though, was well loved at the club—with good reason: he was still “impeccably turned out,” as Anitadi had noticed on their first meeting; he was charming; he hailed from a distinguished Calcutta family—and the receptionists and khansamas who studied me with icy contempt wouldn’t have dared greet him with anything but a smile.

  But it was becoming increasingly difficult for Samirda to climb up the steps to the foyer without help or without drawing excessive attention to himself. Steps, now, were a ubiquitous impediment to his enjoyment of society. He refused dinner invitations, including mine—God knows I wanted to reciprocate in kind what had by now become substantial cups of tea and a limited but delectable array of sandwiches—but he turned down these invitations whenever he had a premonition that steps were involved. And since he didn’t like the fuss made over him at the Calcutta Club—“spectacle” was the word he used of himself—he stopped going there by the end of the nineties.

  More and more, over the years, when we went to visit the Mukherjees—perhaps three or four times annually, perhaps more, perhaps less—I had the sense of a man in a very particular kind of space: living in Calcutta, but a Calcutta he saw relatively little of, a city reported on by a stream of visitors and read about in the morning newspaper. The city I’d moved to in 1999—Kolkata—he hadn’t experienced much of first-hand. Yet he couldn’t help being of it—despite the fact that the Cambridge of the fifties, with its “old chaps” and “backs” and cycling students, was still very—almost ludicrously—real and immediate to him. I’d just moved back from Cambridge, in fact: a wet, miserable, redneck town as far as I was concerned, which became inert and ear-splittingly silent after six in the evening. But the way Samirda questioned me about it made me realise that he presumed I’d returned from the Cambridge of the fifties, with the same people going about their business, without hiatus or interruption, today as they had then. Similarly, when I mentioned my ongoing trips to Europe, he couldn’t understand why I so hated travelling. He’d gone to Europe once, at the end of his Cambridge stint, with his father and brother, passing through Austria and being astonished by the glamorous Alps, catching a glimpse of snow, a great valedictory passage, without him necessarily thinking of the tour in those terms at the time. Now he wanted to know, rapt, whether it was that Europe I was flying to. He had trouble believing it was anything else. Did the pâté de foie gras and the strawberries not have the same flavour?

  What of Calcutta? It was that troubled and tragic time between 1968 and 1972 that he and Anitadi seemed to find most vivid. This was the period when the Naxalite revolution exploded, and then, in a few years, was brutally suppressed. “It was a fun time,” says Anitadi, with an odd, subversive excitement as I sip tea late into the evening; and it’s intriguing to hear those years, known mainly for their violence, invoked for their charm. But never before had the Mukherjees experienced the closeness and the thrill of danger—ideology breathed new life into their drawing room in Tivoli Park, and into the incipient adventure of their married life. Naxalite artists and filmmakers like Utpalendu Chakrabarty became interlopers during teatime. Samirda began to subscribe to and read the Naxalite journal Deshabratyi, and its English version, Liberation. Chaperoned and guided by the swanlike Anita, he saw his first Bengali play, Tiner Talowar (The Tin Sword), written by the great, vociferous Marxist playwright Utpal Dutta.

  This mood—of cultural ferment and economic and social unrest—had been building up for years. It would, with its animosity to the oppressor, put an end to companies like Martin Burn and others. But it produced an incongruous gaiety. Utpal Basu tells me there was a “new Renaissance” then—by which he means a sort of efflorescence that rivals and parodies the famous Olympian Renaissance of the late nineteenth century, which produced Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, Swami Vivekananda, the Tagore family, and many other mythic actors. Utpalda’s list of figures from his Renaissance in the sixties is provocatively wide-ranging: the filmmakers Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, the sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, the football player Sailen Manna. To this must be added Utpalda himself, and his fellow poets, friends, and contemporaries who, like him, are associated with the journal Krittibas: the poets Sunil Ganguly (sober but epic), Shakti Chattopadhyay (perpetually drunk, often missing, quickly dead, and frequently worshipped), Sarat Mukherjee (famous for his first book of verse, Rimbaud, Verlaine evam nijaswa), and the sly prose writer Sandipan Chatterjee. And, of course, there was the “Hungry Generation” group of poets of which Shakti Chattopadhyay was also a part, and with whom Utpalda hung out: he reminds me that the rubric “Hungry Generation” came from Keats’s passionate remonstrance to the nightingale: “Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!/No hungry generations tread thee down …” Indeed, the portrayal of humanity—and perhaps England—in Keats’s ode is not too far from the circumstances in which many young people found themselves in Bengal at the time, conditions that would eventually galvanise Naxalbari: “The weariness, the fever and the fret / Here, where men sit and hear each other groan: /… Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies.”

  My first remembered impressions of Calcutta are of that troubled, pulsating time. I would come to my uncle’s house in Pratapaditya Road for a month and a half during my summer vacations, and sometimes three weeks in the winter—and the volatile atmosphere, the hammer and sic
kle painted on walls, the home-made bombs being detonated in the distance (Pratapaditya Road was an area of disturbance), the refulgent Puja annuals that my cousins got as gifts, the adhunik songs on the radio, with their peculiar but characteristic melodic leaps, would be mixed up for me with the enchantment of the holidays, and with their melancholy, their inevitable coming-to-an-end. I didn’t want Calcutta—that Calcutta—to come to a close. Like Samirda and Anitadi, for whom the Naxal years are inextricable from the romance of their early married life, that period for me is inseparable from vacations and a sudden, infinite surplus of time. The Naxals were liberating Bengal from the bourgeoisie; Samirda, thrown out of his house by his mother, was liberating himself from Martin Burn and his own high bourgeois ancestry; and I was liberating myself from studies, discipline, knowledge, and my home in Bombay.

  I pointed out earlier that Samirda and his wife like to listen to their guests at tea, to—and this is especially true of Samirda—throw them a question, draw them out, and then to quietly watch. But it’s clear from what I’ve written that Samirda must also tell, that he is a raconteur. Some of what he revealed I fleshed out and filled in later, but much of it—anecdote, reverie, throwaway observation—emerged over teatime.

  Samirda has met a long procession of people during these teas, and many more before his sedentary style of existence began; behind his shield of politeness, of one who has nothing significant to offer, he’s studied them and their delivery closely. Now and then he’ll mimic somebody: become, for instance, one of the privileged, possibly dead, “duffers” in his family (“duffer” is an epithet he uses of his more benign Ingabanga relations), and, at another moment, assume the shrewd, narrow-eyed air of an East Bengali politician, letting loose a bangal snippet from the corner of his mouth.