Calcutta

by Amit Chaudhuri

  A newly created landscape engenders new names: this must be as true of India post-globalisation as it once was of earth. The Bible tells us how Adam, after his entry into Eden, went about naming the animals. But it doesn’t tell us if he named them correctly—if what he called a “horse,” for instance, was really a horse. Perhaps the Bible doesn’t remark upon this because it didn’t really matter. And something very similar is happening in the “new India.”

  My wife and I once slipped into an expensive restaurant in the Taj Hotel in Bombay during a visit. The experience I had there isn’t unrelated to what I’ve just described above, and possesses some of the characteristic resonances of life in the “new India” (most of these post-globalisation epiphanies arise from eating out).

  I found ginger pudding on the menu: one of my favourites, a fragrant piece of colonial stodge, available once in some schools and now in a club or two but hardly on a restaurant menu. Though it was teatime, I ordered one with alacrity.

  The waiter brought me a pudding encircled by thin white single cream. I scooped a section up greedily, already made nervous by the numerous raisins in it, and snapped it up. I called the waiter.

  “This isn’t ginger pudding,” I said to him. “It’s Christmas pudding.” It was early January; no hint of ginger on my palate. The waiter stood before me with an old stoic calm; then, as if he’d understood, he nodded. If I, a customer of the “new India,” had named the pudding “Christmas pudding,” he, a mere attendant in Eden, wasn’t going to argue it was something else. With an apathetic dignity, making no comment on my wastefulness, he lifted up the plate and left.

  He returned with another plate of pudding that looked identical to the previous one.

  “Ginger pudding, sir,” he said, smiling.

  I looked at it with apprehension. It could be, I said to my wife before transferring a spoonful mouthward, that the Bombay Taj ensures that both Christmas and ginger puddings look exactly like each other.

  I called the waiter. He approached me as he would a violent lunatic, warily but deferentially.

  “It’s still Christmas pudding,” I said. I made a supercilious remark of which, in retrospect, I’m ashamed—but maybe the context justifies, or at least exculpates, it: “Do you know there’s a difference between Christmas and ginger pudding?” My trouble is that my weakness for ginger pudding is matched by my distaste for Christmas pudding. Anyway, the Taj charges its customers a high price for what it puts on its menu. Was there a secret falling out, in India, between chefs and customers? Had the former realised that the “new Indian” was incapable of tasting what he or she ate? And had Indian chefs, consequently, embarked quietly on a deliberate plan of mystification—quite distinct, for instance, from the low-cholesterol crusades that many Western chefs are busy with?

  A portly gentleman with a conciliatory air came to my table and said he was the chef. He leaned forward and whispered, as you would when warning a reckless friend: “Sorry sir, there’s no ginger pudding left today. We only have Christmas pudding.”

  By this time, I’d almost forgotten what ginger pudding tastes like. My foundations had moved slightly; I was ready to accept anything offered to me by that name. I was willing to be naturalised into the “new India,” when the chef’s explanatory words brought back to me a flood of memory.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t like Christmas pudding,” I said.

  “Indians are not very experimental,” says chef Mukherjee. He gestures towards a handsome, giant jar of black olives in the buffet. “Nobody eats those.” Then adds: “Even cheese. They have no interest in cheese.”

  “I see. What kind of cheese do they know then?” For a largely vegetarian middle class, relatively newly empowered, the tepid enthusiasm for cheese is striking. For decades after Independence, Indians made do, happily, with Amul, a tough, feisty, all-purpose government-processed cheese, more an unanswerable piece of legislation than a dairy product, with which it seemed you could do almost anything. Its great virtue was that it took an unthinkably long time to go stale.

  “Cheddar,” he replies. “They’ve also heard of the usual stuff—Gouda and Emmental, but not much else.”

  “What about olives?” I ask. “Those olives you pointed out are bottled olives. We hardly get fresh olives in India.”

  “Indians don’t like fresh olives,” says chef Mukherjee, making it pretty clear he doesn’t like them himself. “They’re extremely salty.” Briefly at a loss, he breaks into Bengali—“Ki rokom ekta kash achhe na?” (“Don’t you think they have an acidic aftertaste?”) It’s an aside: as if we are sharing a little-conceded but incontrovertibly plain fact.

  Fresh olives are among the main upper-class travellers of globalisation; they’re also one of its chief acquired tastes. Their saltiness, to the initiate, seems excessive; they then swiftly become addictive.

  India has traditionally ignored the olive; and, it seems, the “new India” will continue to do so. Even chef Mukherjee’s bottled black olives, which are duller and less tart than fresh ones, are destined to be looked askance at and avoided by the diner. One lazily presumes the Middle East is closer—spiritually, culturally, geographically—to India than it is to countries like Greece, Italy, and Spain. But the olive’s absence from our lives tells us otherwise. The well-to-do Indian’s view of the olive is still predominantly, and narrowly, Victorian: it’s the putative source of an oil which is occasionally applied to the bodies of infants and the aged.

  No wonder Bignotti and Medda wondered, at times, where they were.

  Sujan Mukherjee brings a paradox to my attention. “Most chefs worldwide use local, fresh produce and local ingredients.” This is true; the use of local produce in cuisine is a fetish in the capitalist West.

  “People here don’t want local produce when they come to a five-star hotel,” he tells me. “They want something from far away.”

  That’s odd: because what he’d said so far (confirmed by my own experience of liberalised India) is that the well-off, when they eat out, don’t particularly like engaging with the unfamiliar. Or could it be that they believe they do?

  “For example, they’re unimpressed when they see a begoon on the menu,” he says, spontaneously, acerbically, using the Bengali word for “aubergine.” He then approximates the supposedly cursory speaking style of a Bengali customer: “ ‘Why have begoon,’ they say, ‘when I can get it in the bazaar?’ ”

  I’m now beginning to wonder if the Taj Bengal has acquired any foreign chefs after Medda and Bignotti. “In fact we have a foreign chef at the moment,” confesses Sujan Mukherjee brightly. “Really?” “Yes, the head chef at the Chinoiserie, the Chinese restaurant—chef Lian Yu Li of Nanjing.”

  “That’s wonderful!” I say. The Chinoiserie is too expensive for even a dedicated and foolhardy eater-out such as myself; I haven’t dared go near it in years. “How does he feel about being here?”

  “Oh, he’s very happy!”

  “He’s happy to be here?” I’m making comparisons, thinking to myself whether unhappiness and an unrealistic streak of perfectionism (which inevitably leads to unhappiness) are congenital to Europeans like Bignotti and Medda; whether some Asian reserve of contentment and compromise allows Lian Yu Li to feel at home here, and maybe in the world.

  “Oh yes!”

  “What does he think of Calcutta?”

  “He doesn’t have much to do with Calcutta,” says chef Mukherjee, moving in his chair and making a clarificatory gesture. “No, no—he comes to the Taj, goes to the kitchen, then leaves with me for the Taj apartments. We come back together the next day, and it’s the same thing again. He hasn’t seen much of Calcutta at all.” So it’s a cycle of sleep and waking, then, of making dim sum and hot soup; then returning to an apartment and going to sleep.

  It’s an intriguing arrangement. Even Calcutta, in the “new India,” can be turned into a kind of non-place: a lounge or lobby which you need never exit, except to finally go to the airport to get on to the flight to Ku
nming.

  “He’s very pleased about the direct flight to Kunming,” reveals chef Mukherjee.

  Chinese food has long been Calcutta’s favoured foreign cuisine: it belongs to the eternal, and now paradoxically lost, childhood of the Bengali middle class. Its bottles of soya sauce and Han’s chilli sauce, its minutely chopped green chillies swimming in vinegar, its chicken sweet corn soup, chilli chicken, sweet and sour prawn, spring rolls, and American chop suey are all part of a delectation free of guilt about fried food and unburdened by connoisseur-ship: a simple, elemental pleasure. It goes back, this cuisine, to the time when Calcutta was a Bengali city, and never dreamed it would be otherwise. To the old guard belonged restaurants such as Waldorf (on Park Street), Jimmy’s Kitchen (which my maternal uncle, always emphatic in his loyalties, swore and even threatened by), Mandarin (which was born in the post-Naxal era as a downmarket imitation of the older restaurants), Hatari (a meeting place for middle-class couples, its shabbiness the perfect milieu for its spring rolls), Peiping on Park Street (always preternaturally crowded, I recall from childhood, with every kind of bhadralok, of which little remained when I visited it in the late seventies but its inflated reputation). There are others, except their names elude me. But, even as I formulate that sentence, two return: one is near Statesman House, on Central Avenue on the way to North Calcutta, a mysterious, disreputable place, such as Chinese restaurants—at least the good ones—were classically designed to be; and another one is located on the “arcade” on Chowringhee near the Grand Hotel, on the vestibule thronging with tourists, locals, magazine vendors, blind beggars, and sellers of little plastic toys, to which my father came once weekly (so he’d told me in his lucid days), when he was a student, for the pure, solitary joy of a plate of American chop suey. I know the first one no longer exists; the second, even if it does, as good as doesn’t. I’ve seen them both at some point in my life, but can’t summon up their names. I go to R, a truer Calcuttan than I, and describe the first one; “I know the place you mean—wasn’t it Nanking?” I dismiss the suggestion outright. I go to my father and ask him, very loudly, if he can recall the Chinese restaurant he used to visit on Chowringhee. At first, alarmed by the volume at which I’m speaking, he’s anxious, and worried that something’s wrong; then he’s got it, his face is lit by a smile of comprehension, he nods vigorously. He still has the ability to remember many things, my father, but can’t any longer express himself coherently. “Is it the Hong Kong?” I ask loudly but, I hope, tenderly; he shakes his head, the Hong Kong rings no bell. It’s my maternal uncle, finally, who supplies the names over the phone; at eighty-five, he’s clear-headed and still a great advocate of those restaurants. “That was Nanking near Statesman House!” he exclaims, proving my disagreement with R, a bona fide Calcuttan, was ill-advised. “What an amazing place it was! I took my in-laws to eat there soon after I was married. It wasn’t much to look at from the outside, so they weren’t sure about it—but they loved the food!” He’s puzzled by the second one; there was never a Hong Kong restaurant in Calcutta, he says. Then he knows the one I mean: “New Cathay—of course, New Cathay! Fantastic place!” That’s it. When I tell my father, he nods, his eyes bright, and mumbles the name. He’s relieved I have my answer. When my uncle says “New Cathay,” and I repeat the name to him, then to my father, a sensation passes through me, an imperceptible lifting of the diaphragm, as if the excitement might, who knows, make me weep—not for my father, not for New Cathay, but for something gone, which I can no longer make present.

  The new international Chinese food came to Calcutta well before chef Lian Yu Li arrived at Taj Bengal—with the advent, in the nineties, of a new luxury hotel, ITC Sonar Bangla, on the featureless EM Bypass. Word began to spread, via Anglophone dailies and among the affluent, that Pan Asia had the most chic Chinese food in town. No sooner was news circulating than I was invited by a well-worn society magazine, called, uncannily, Society, to have lunch with my wife at the Pan Asia for a feature. I wanted to be snobbish and turn down what was surely an improper request to a serious writer (as I’d begun to see myself), but gave in, as I sometimes do, at the prospect of what promised to be a terrific free meal.

  I didn’t quite know what to expect, but the name itself—Pan Asia—carried the clipped accent of globalisation, and had little to do with the smoky Orient of colonisation, which had given birth, everywhere, to restaurants with names like Nanking and Golden Dragon. The interior was dark, but not dark in the way that Chinese restaurants used to be—atmospherically dark, so that you had to peer hard in the barely lit gloom before you spotted the chillies submerged in the vinegar, and only ever saw your soup in half light and half shadow; and its few colours came from the suspended Chinese-lantern lampshades and the red dragons on soup spoons. No, Pan Asia was dark in a business lounge way, the dark and quiet of a space in which you don’t expect to be threatened by crowds of people, its decor angular and minimal, without undue references to the Orient. Speaking of crowds, not far from the ITC Sonar Bangla was where the post-middle-class bastion of Chinese cuisine—post-Waldorf; post-Nanking; pre–Pan Asia—had sprung up in the last two decades, in the tannery district, Tangra, catering to the vernacular clientele of this city that was now without a definite name—Calcutta, Kolkata—serving all kinds, from real estate promoters and their families to academics and theirs, all who’d been levelled out into one harmonious congregation by Left rule, serving anyone who’d brave that intricate maze of lanes and plunge headlong into the stink of the tanneries. Tangra was, thus, at once famous and infamous. The Chinese had traditionally been in the tannery business; and, at some point, as the respectable Chinese eateries of yore became a spent force, the Tangra families must have decided it was an opportune time to set up restaurants. In the early eighties, as Calcutta imploded and the middle-class migration outward soared and eating out dipped, Tangra began to gather a reputation for providing “real” Chinese food cooked by “real” Chinese families, this “realness” authenticated and properly endorsed by the smell of the tanneries and drains surrounding places like Golden Joy and Beijing.

  Now, here was the crystalline, refracted Pan Asia, offering not only real, upmarket, international Chinese cuisine, but international Mongolian and Japanese food too. Chinese food once belonged to the domain of the neighbourhood—not just Chinatown; any neighbourhood—an ethos of loiterers killing time on workaday porches and signs with a particular kind of English lettering denoting the Chinese were nearby. Pan Asia implied there were no neighbourhoods; there were lounges, constituting brief, tranquil arrests on overnight journeys. At least that’s what we felt it was telling us as we slipped from the early afternoon sun into its interior. Its already celebrated, blade-thin, rectangular grill was on the left, with bar stools on every side. There was almost no one in the restaurant but us; it’s an experience I’ve only had in the static sadness of Indian small towns, of eating out without the general—and, really, indispensable—accompaniment of other customers, enrhythmed in the semi-animal bliss of now noticing, now ignoring, now being noticed, now being ignored; no, in the small town, you are alone, being lavished attention by three waiters who’ve been galvanised by your sullen otherness, and item after item which you’d abstractedly ordered now stubbornly makes its way towards your table. At Pan Asia, the three of us, the journalist from Society, my wife, and I, sat side by side on the bar stools like partners at a séance, and watched the short, agile young chef’s hypnotic dicing of vegetables, his playful shoving and retrieval of cuttlefish from different directions, as if they’d never once been alive and were no more than a kind of ornament, like pasta shells. His spatula was at once a magician’s wand, bringing forth an illusion, and a conductor’s baton, making music. Everything he touched—vegetables, cuttlefish, prawns—were somehow reduced: he knew the art of transforming the plentiful into the economical. When we asked this performer respectfully if he was from China, he said no, he came from Nepal. “Chinese chef come and give me training,” he exp
lained.

  The food had been made with finesse. It had what we now think of as the strengths of good Chinese food: delicacy, simplicity, a fastidious avoidance of overcooking, a resultant crunchiness, a hushed regard for the taste of fresh ingredients. All this was new to Calcutta: an alien and as yet untested idea. We were later—though we were uncomfortably full—forced to try Japanese ice cream, in green tea and litchi flavours. We succumbed completely to Pan Asia. We set aside our vestigial dignity. We even took in our stride the cheesy photographs of ourselves that appeared later in Society magazine.