Calcutta

by Amit Chaudhuri

  Samirda’s drawing room has lovely wooden floorboards; but the teas have moved to the bedroom, so that he doesn’t have to take the trouble to emerge. We find him on his bed (a high hospital bed it is), seated and leaning backward, still proffering his hand oddly, and with that disarming gentility; part yogi in his posture (he has, in fact, started doing one of Baba Ramdev’s breathing exercises to keep his nasal passages clear), and part public schoolboy, as his feet are always in socks, whatever the weather, to protect him from the threat of a cold. Besides, as Tagore once pointed out, no person of Ingabanga descent would be caught in human society without their socks on. The Mukherjees, you feel, live at last in the present—a shrinking of space and time into this apartment which has almost accidentally, but properly, become their home. And the present is always built upon the decimation of the past, its erasure, the drawing room with the new floorboards acquired only once the skeleton of the past has been taken out and laid to rest.

  SEVEN

  Italians Abroad

  Italian food was not always a worldwide phenomenon. Pizzas may feel timeless, of course; it’s hard to recall when they didn’t exist. Even when they were physically absent in India (in the early seventies), you encountered them time and again in comic books. An insouciant boy named Jughead, eyes shut, was repeatedly interring the long triangle into his open mouth. It would have been impossible to guess then that in two decades the pizza—no toppings, just a lot of tomato purée smeared on a cardboard-flat circle of bread, covered by a supplement of cheese—would become an indispensable component in the diet of gregarious Gujarati and North Indian families (people without pretensions, but with an appetite), and even turn up not far away from uttapam and rava dosa on South Indian menus.

  In the seventies, I remember from my visits to London, Italian restaurants did very modest business. Italian waiters in spotless white clothes were always seated in an abstracted way within, waiting, without a great deal of conviction, the customer’s arrival. When they did arrive, the waiter showed no great excitement, but an ironical air of vindication that some people had nothing better to do than eat at Italian restaurants. For the London customer, Italian restaurants were then principally famous—in an unarticulated way—for their red and white chequered tablecloths. Their unmistakable pattern, imprinted on the mind’s eye, suggested the secluded world of Italian gastronomy. A strict and limited gastronomy it was: minestrone soup, comprising a lot of diced carrots, potatoes, and celery swilling about in reddish tomato-shot water (the tomato is the Italian chef’s default condiment, something to reach for absently before any thoughts or recipes have germinated in his head); spaghetti bolognese, as well known as Pompeii and the leaning tower of Pisa; spaghetti napolitana, where the chef had little more to do than empty a muck of tomato purée on a bed of worm-like pasta; spaghetti and meatballs, really more of a comic diversion for children or a prop on film sets than a real dish; and the layered and steaming lasagne, with its bright red tomato borders and its exorbitance of cheese. In that lonely world, visited once in three years, this was plenitude. In those days it didn’t matter that business was scarce; like a flag from a different country, restaurants could survive emblematically and indefinitely on foreign soil.

  Spaghetti was, by silent consensus, the one respected pasta. Sometimes its blunt, midget-like, pug-nosed cousin macaroni would make an appearance in colleges and hospitals, even in India: food to amuse the convalescent. It was not just the increased activity of the European Union (morphed anew from the European Community) but the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rush of globalisation that would release into the world the bewildering variations on spaghetti—the flat, tapeworm-like tagliatelle; the slim linguini and anorexically slight tagliarini; spinach pasta and wholemeal pasta—as crazy and multiracially colourful as the Carnaby Street hairstyles of the sixties; and something called “fresh pasta” in English supermarkets, bunched-up, fluffy bundles.

  This cataclysm approached India in a manner of speaking, without any seriousness of detail. All foreign food is doomed to be consumed in India not so much by Indians as by a voracious Indian sensibility, which demands infinite versions of Indian food, and is unmoved by difference. However, come Italian food did, given momentum by its new world-conquering pedigree. And it first nudged Calcutta in its new avatar in 2003, in the form of an Italian chef, Alex Bignotti, who looked about sixteen years old, and who, one day, appeared in the Taj Bengal hotel in order to bring real Italian flavours to the menu. A frail, small, and perky young man, he did this successfully, introducing cappuccino of wild mushroom and cherry tomato bisque to the coffee shop. A few years after moving to Calcutta myself, I tasted this cappuccino and thought it was unusual: I asked to see the chef to check out his features and demeanour personally, and to compliment him. This was when Bignotti was brought to our table, like a tentative and slightly suspicious schoolboy. I was taken aback—not just by his pale youthfulness, his air of being an underage Gujarati bridegroom lost at his wedding, but the fact that he was here at all. He must have been Calcutta’s first skilled import in decades—at least from Europe. Although his name was blazoned on the new menu booklet, I don’t know if anyone properly registered his presence. Anyway, there would be a feeling, mordant and inevitable, and one that often attends visiting chefs in the city, that Bignotti’s presence in Calcutta meant that he couldn’t be good enough. Of course, his culinary skills belied this local prejudice. He’d come from Milan—actually, from a town a few miles outside it. Given his unassuming boyish looks, you thought of him less as a global chef than as someone you might glimpse on an afternoon, cycling up that town’s narrow alleys. Then, one day, just as we were beginning, patronisingly, to take him for granted, he had gone—to Bombay, we later heard, the latest stop on his mysterious journey outward from that Milanese suburb.

  Not long ago, I met the head chef of the Taj Bengal, Mr. Sujan Mukherjee. We sat in the Hub, the very place that had been reinvented in the early 2000s from a previous incarnation of the coffee shop, the Esplanade, and among whose first smart initiatives was the acquisition of Bignotti. Mr. Mukherjee had heard of Bignotti, but narrowly missed running into him. He himself reached Taj Bengal from Delhi in 2005.

  At this time, he says, the Taj appointed Bignotti’s successor—Anteleno Medda.

  “Can you spell that?” I ask him, my pen raised.

  However, Googling him, I find no trace of him—unlike Alex Bignotti, who readily springs up on a couple of sites. He seems to have aged, and departed his late teens. He’s also left behind a favourable impression before moving on to wherever he is now (chefs are like the double agents of yore, playing on all sides of the international divide); I say “left behind” because among the results comes up a plaintive message: “Where is Alex Bignotti? I used to know him in Mumbai …”

  There’s no denying that Anteleno Medda, or whatever his name was, did exist—because I saw him myself at the Hub, a short, stocky man in a chef’s pristine white uniform, moving about the tables with an easy familiarity, stopping to chat with a bunch of foreigners (foreigners to us Indians; they may, of course, have been his countrymen). I thought, Now who is this?, intrigued by the European men in chef’s attire filing into this city.

  Today, Signor Medda is not to be found—not just on Google, but also in the Taj Bengal.

  “What did these chefs think of Calcutta?” I ask Mr. Mukherjee.

  This seems to me a paramount question—I believe that, given the unique extremities of the profession, its frayed tempers and tears, its hunting after the aroma of perfection, a chef’s view of a city is different from anyone else’s. Which is why I returned to it twice.

  Mr. Mukherjee gives me, inadvertently, three different responses in the conversation.

  “The weather,” he says. “They cannot stand the weather. Of course, David Canazi”—noticing my blankness, he adds, “You know David Canazi, who started the Italian restaurant at the Hyatt, and is now running the one at HHI”—that is, Hotel Hindusta
n International (Indians adore abbreviations); noticing I’m nodding vigorously, if implausibly, Mr. Mukherjee continues—“for him it is different, he loves the place, he fell in love with a Bengali woman and married her—oh, he loves it here!”

  The matter of love and the intercultural Cupid (the Orientalist William Jones had anyway pointed out that Cupid and the Hindu god Kama, with their aerial vantage point and amore-inducing bows and arrows, belong to the same teeming family of divinities)—this matter of love distracts me momentarily with the thought of Shaun Kenworthy. He’s someone who, thirty years ago, would have been an oxymoron or a contradiction in terms: an English chef. Well before the idea of the expatriate British chef (not to mention the rude, hyperventilating British chef) was turned into a commodifiable oddity by Gordon Ramsay, Shaun Kenworthy had come to Calcutta, to work at the Park Hotel. Given our residual fascination with our former colonial masters, Kenworthy was given a warm, overweening welcome; given our disenchantment with ourselves and the city we live in, the welcome was accompanied by a suspicion that he wasn’t good enough. Nevertheless, Kenworthy had a life in Calcutta outside the kitchen, and Kama took aim, ensuring he made this place his home. Calcutta’s Page 3 readers—followers of tabloid trivia—were, a few years ago, made privy to Mr. Kenworthy’s wedding pictures.

  The second explanation Mr. Mukherjee gives me for the restiveness of the Italian chefs is that they “fail to understand totally vegetarian food.” Why is this so? Vegetarianism in Europe is hardly the outré fad it used to be in George Bernard Shaw’s era: in fact, many morally irreproachable people in the West are now vegetarians, as we well know.

  No, it emerges that Mr. Mukherjee means a community that constitutes his regular clientele: he is too civilised to single them out by name, but it’s clear he’s referring to the Marwaris. This community has, as a rule, and for centuries, adhered to “total vegetarianism.” It’s logical that the economic demography in a city will be reflected in the demography of the restaurant in a five-star hotel; that, eventually, whoever it is that pays for the food will determine what shape and form the menu takes. Anteleno Medda may not have had time to grasp this; but Mr. Mukherjee, the head chef, knows it very well, as do other Bengalis, seething with envy at their lapsed suzerainty in their city.

  I guide him gently towards this area of resentment.

  “There are people who say,” I put to him, “that menus in Calcutta cater excessively to vegetarians.”

  “No, that’s not true,” he says. “Of course, the largest group of customers which keeps coming back is Marwari.” This, in contrast to Bombay, say, where no one community necessarily possesses greater spending power than another and all kinds of people and tastes are encompassed by that ambiguous, uncomfortable category, “the rich.” “But Bengalis come as well—mainly during the Pujas and the Bengali New Year and of course during Christmas and New Year.” At other times they are presumably simmering resentfully about Marwari eating habits or migrating to America—there’s no use denying the undercurrent of contained disdain that the Bengalis and Marwaris feel for each other, a tacit staking of territory in which the latter now has the upper hand; nor that, without them, there would be relatively few partakers of night life and eating out—indeed, of the recent, celebrated, tinselly glimmer of the “new India”—in Calcutta. Not that the Bengalis in any way represent the values of the old bhadralok Calcutta, though they might like to think they do; their values are no different from the Marwaris’ or anyone else’s today, except they appear to be more at sea about how they relate to them, and to their own singular history. But Mr. Mukherjee, the head chef, is undoubtedly a bhadralok, or at least astute; he makes no tasteless remarks about the vegetarians. “It’s easy to have a non-vegetarian menu. One pork dish, one seafood dish, one chicken, one beef, one lamb, and you’re done! But it’s harder to think up a vegetarian menu with flair and variety. That’s why people keep saying things like there’s very little interesting vegetarian fare in this restaurant.”

  Of all human types, the Bengali experiences the most acute deprivation I’ve noticed anywhere on being denied his or her quota of animal protein at mealtime. It could be goat’s meat, chicken, fish, or even the common egg; but one of these needs to make an appearance before lunch and dinner draw to an absolute close. A vegetarian meal is not a meal; it’s a preamble, a preface. And animal protein isn’t a main course for the Bengali; it’s what wine is for the Frenchman—something integral to the meaning of mealtime, something to unconsciously savour.

  This preference, of course, could be explained away by looking at the past, but exactly which past it’s difficult to decide. For instance, Bengali Hindus are traditionally, and roughly, divided into two sects: the Shaktya (or the followers of Kali) and the Vaishnavas (the devotees of Krishna). These are no longer living categories, but the yearning, in the Bengali, for something more interesting than vegetables in his or her diet could be a remnant of the influence of Shaktya sacrifice, involving the bloody and passionate slaughter of the goat during the Pujas, portrayed with a mixture of horror and amusement by Nirad C. Chaudhuri in The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. My father’s family belonged to the Vaishnava sect, known more for its ecstasies and devotional pieties and its figurehead Chaitanya’s message of love. My mother used to once tease him for his family’s symbolic slaughter, in Sylhet, of a white pumpkin during the Pujas, in lieu of a goat. Indeed, vegetarian food used to be reserved as a punishment, an austerity, for Bengali widows, who had to wear white, shave their heads, and even forgo garlic, onions, and root vegetables in order to repent at leisure the deaths of their husbands. Though that world is largely vanished, you see that unmistakable widow’s air of lack—a strange, irremediable melancholy—among Bengalis at parties where no meat or fish is being served. On the other hand, goat’s meat at a buffet or wedding immediately attracts a queue, and brings back that sacrificial mood of revelry, the upbeat, impatient hunger for the recently killed animal.

  The other event that comes to mind in this context is the birth, out of nowhere in the early nineteenth century, of the modern Bengali—a person (unlike, say, the Marwari) without much of a history, as Bankimchandra had lamented. From the very beginning, this arriviste and upstart anointed himself with the blood of the animal—in fact, of the so-called sacred cow. Members of the radical boys’ club, Young Bengal, began in the 1820s to scandalously, and pointedly, eat beef—in order to subvert outdated and hollow mores, to outrage their contemporaries, to transgress taboos. Beef-eating was at once the precursor and the opposite of the Gandhian hunger strike; not a moment of self-denial, but an unthinkable self-indulgence—a political, anti-religious action undertaken (as these things are) with religious fervour. It earned the perpetrators much scorn and laughter.

  Perhaps only wine, in the Western world, possesses these several, contradictory associations: orgiastic, excessive, religious, transubstantiating. And possibly this is why the Frenchman sips his red so slowly and thoughtfully. And also why many educated Bengalis, even now, attack their steak with a peculiar satisfaction.

  “Also, the Italians couldn’t stand the way Indian diners are always interfering with the menu,” continued chef Sujan Mukherjee, heading for the crux of the matter. “It drove them mad.”

  “Interfering? In what way?”

  “The Indians want things prepared in their own way. It was too much for the Italians to take.”

  Again and again, I’d confront the same story in relation to this subject—of chefs who’d fled the city and what little of the “new India” they had to cater to within it because of the latter’s careless ignorance and contempt of some of the sacrosanct protocols of Italian food.

  “Like—al dente,” said the head chef. “Indians don’t understand al dente. They say the pasta hasn’t been cooked properly, that it needs to be boiled for longer.” He shook his head. “They couldn’t take it.”

  The hazards and travails of a foreign climate! In the nineteenth century, entire colonial fam
ilies used to be wiped out in these parts over summer and the monsoons by humidity, cholera, and malaria; the headstones and plaques in the Park Circus cemetery bear testimony to the variety of the dead, from the dribbling infant to the newly-wed, the hopeful English bride to the senile Anglo-Indian. More than a hundred years later, it was the new India that had both inveigled and assaulted these chefs, Bignotti and Medda and others, paying them no less than $5,000 monthly and then threatening them with a kind of annihilation.

  “You know, the Italians like to use fresh tomatoes as a base and not do too much to them,” said Mr. Mukherjee. “Just sauté the tomatoes lightly, sprinkle basil on them. While Indians use tomato ketchup in their pasta sauces. They don’t understand the concept of fresh tomatoes.”

  Outrage after outrage … It was clear that there were many things that this new India, as it resided and thrived in Calcutta, wanted to eat or own, but essentially didn’t comprehend or care for. Many memories and spots of time to do with my encounters with the new India—mostly here, in out-of-the-way Calcutta, but not exclusively here—coalesce for me as Mr. Mukherjee and I talk over cups of black coffee.

  For instance, cheesecake. It was not until early 2011 that I tasted an authentic version of this dessert in India, in—and why not?—a recently opened American coffee-shop chain. Oddly, colonialism hadn’t introduced the cheesecake to the Indian middle class, but globalisation did—triangular pretenders that were dead ringers for the original, but tasted exactly like mousse. The new India was consuming this happily, paying more for the doppelgänger than many can afford for the real item. I once interrogated a chef about our national inability to produce real cheesecake. It seemed to me that a country that was replicating and inventing software but couldn’t make cheesecake simply wasn’t interested in doing so. Naipaul, in 1970, had observed mischievously in his excoriating An Area of Darkness that Indians still hadn’t learned to make cheese and bleach newspaper. I recall Khushwant Singh scolding Naipaul—who was in absentia—on television for the remark about paper, pointing out that he was clearly ignorant of local problems and conditions. I didn’t want to get into this sort of debate about something as trivial and rarefied—though in Europe it’s a pretty humble object—as cheesecake. Nevertheless, the chef I’d put the question to—the chef, as it happens, of a new-fangled luxury hotel then recently opened in Calcutta—said the local problem in this case was lack of recourse to Philadelphia cheese: an essential element in cheesecake, he said apologetically. I was struck by the fact that a high-fat cream cheese marketed by Kraft held the key to a dessert that had reportedly been eaten in ancient Greece; and that its absence should be responsible, in some way, for cheesecake arriving in India as a sort of creamy soufflé. Of course, these were agonised but private preoccupations: too embarrassing to share with and disclose to friends. Yet they were related to the conundrum of the “new India.” In the meanwhile, people in Calcutta were, and still are, eating this soufflé/mousse at regular intervals, blissfully calling it cheesecake. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” someone said; and sweetness may have been the issue here—that, as long as it was sufficiently sugary (the great requisite of Indian, especially Bengali, sweetmeats is they be true to their name), it didn’t matter what it was called.