Calcutta

by Amit Chaudhuri

  Tagore, the great Bengali poet, in Bankimchandra’s sense of the term, with his beard, long hair, piercing gaze, and loose robes, the very image of the Romantic, also had deep artisanal impulses that overtook him spasmodically. Witness to these is his interest in bookmaking, in block prints and in engravings; his wonder, as a boy, at discovering the typeface from a printing press; but, most of all, his absorption in not just the style or content of writing, but its primary medium—handwriting or, in Bengali, lipi. For Tagore, handwriting is a craft, upon which he lavishes a subtle affection and which also becomes a means of exploration—it’s no accident that Tagore’s paintings, embarked upon in old age, arise from his manuscript corrections and deletions. It’s also probably logical that one of the products that Tagore endorsed in an advertisement was Sulekha ink. No other modern writer, or culture, has given to handwriting the curious place of privilege that Tagore and bhadralok Bengal have. It’s where labour and design converge.

  * * *

  Just before the elections, a man called Sandip Roy and I met in a coffee shop near my house. Sandip had asked to interview me for a new web magazine set up by a television channel; he wanted my thoughts on the elections.

  We discussed the Trinamool Congress, Mamata Banerjee, the Left Front—and Calcutta, of course. We’d both just returned to the city—I, from a short trip to England; he, from a few years of working in San Francisco. His mother was old; he’d made the move with this in mind, and was barely beginning a new life here—where he’d grown up, unlike me. We began comparing Indian cities—a common pastime when you’re talking about one of them.

  “Well, Bombay’s main preoccupation is money, and Delhi’s is power,” I said, unconsciously parroting received wisdom. “Maybe Delhi these days is about both power and money. And Calcutta …”

  “Calcutta’s preoccupation is ‘Will you be eating at home tonight?’ ”

  He had echoed, verbatim, what my mother says to me, or to me and my wife, whenever we go out in the evening. It’s a question asked uninsistently, but with measured desperation—meant to exert a silent pressure on the person going out of the door. Sandip Roy’s words made me realise that neither I nor my mother are alone or unique. Very few people return to Calcutta today except to be with parents.

  When we moved to Calcutta, my father was nearing seventy-eight; he’d accomplished his three-score-and-ten without any major hitches; and, as I write this, he’s less than two months away from being ninety. At seventy-eight, he was still more active and agile than I am now, though, with hindsight, I can see the stealthy signs of dementia—mainly a slight loping oddness of gait—were already present.

  Our plan, from 1999 onward, if the world didn’t end on the stroke of midnight at the millennium’s end, as many had hinted it would, was to “divide time” between Calcutta and England. This was what we’d been doing anyway; but the intention was now to invert the previous allocations of the year—to spend fewer months in England, more in India. Part of the reason for this was I didn’t want to discover one day that I was old, not far from death, and still living in England; for some reason, it didn’t seem like the right ending for the story my imagination had constructed of my life. I’d seen it happen to others—couples who’d lived much of their adult life in Bicester, or Rochdale, or in Newbury Park; always deferring the day of departure, always behaving as if they were temporary residents who’d been in England for only the last few months; then, when the time of departure came at last, it was a further deferral of their plans—it was a departure to the afterlife, no doubt another limited stint before they made their way back to Bengal. They were the banal counterparts of the figure in the de Chirico painting which V. S. Naipaul invokes in order to reflect on what he’s still doing in Wiltshire after so many years. We do what we do only with part volition—that much is a truism. I was determined to be neither like Naipaul nor that figure—and to exercise a choice while I was still conscious of the need for it.

  My daughter’s coming to the world in 1998 gave me a reason to speed up that decision. And being an only child made necessary that anomalous arrangement—of living with my parents—upon our move. I say “anomalous” not only because such modes of coexistence are long out of date, and an embarrassment, but because they were adhered to not out of any sense of convention—both R and I grew up in nuclear families. So we did what we did as an experiment—the mirror image of what those Bengalis in Bicester do, testing a way of life until it becomes their own without having to acknowledge it. To participate in it, I needed my wife’s tacit agreement. This wasn’t the way she, or I, had conceived the future; for her, living with ageing in-laws in the city she’d grown up in, and with her own parents a five minutes’ drive away.

  But we were both fairly sure we were happy to give our daughter the childhood I’d never had, a Calcutta childhood; I’d intuited that, for the middle-class child at least, a Calcutta childhood is still a wonderful thing. It’s a city that (and my wife confirms this) lends itself to make-believe, if you’re open to make-believe, and to the kind of illusions precious to children. If you’re the more hard-headed kind of child, there’s also the rat-race to respond to, given the exacting emphasis the city’s secondary education system gives to exams; but, despite this—or because of it—there’s ample space for daydreaming.

  Putting off Norwich for a year, I see what a nuisance my father has become. Unsurprisingly, he was once the man we all depended upon. The CEO of a major company, a man of calm and integrity, a foil to my mother’s impetuousness, he had, after retirement, become my accountant. Six years ago, I had to wrest this responsibility from him gently, and give it to a professional. Today, he spends his spare time (when he’s not staring at Bengali soaps, or “serials” as they’re called here, and lying in bed) on the chair in the sitting room, his largely useless walker (since he can hardly walk a step without fear of falling) and his daytime carer by his side—he a sort of chowkidar, a gatekeeper, wearing a polite, abstracted expression. His main mission (as is my mother’s) is to protect our daughter from us. The faraway look is misleading; even a whispered reprimand from us to our daughter can stir him to a fury. Equally, my daughter is my father’s chowkidar. When he makes a move to get up, she raises the alarm as if the house is on fire. Ordinarily, she’s utterly lax, and notices nothing. But it’s clear that something deep-seated in her knows my father has poor short-term memory; that he falls almost each time he rises from his chair and, positioning himself against the walker, makes off for somewhere in his low-headed precarious way; knows, too, that he’ll have no memory of the fall after twenty minutes. So the house is in a constant state of tension, my daughter preternaturally anxious for my father’s welfare, my mostly incoherent father anxious that she may be under attack—from us, her parents and lifelong enemies. “The mad led by the blind”: that’s how a well-known city academic, Prof. Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, quoting King Lear, once mildly described to me Calcutta’s middle class. Also, children leading the old, and vice versa.

  * * *

  Speaking with Sandip Roy confirmed for me what I’ve long known—that my experiment isn’t singular—that all kinds of people (professors of history, gay couples, critics in “cultural studies,” rock guitarists, journalists, bankers) are living here with parents or parents-in-law either because they think someone has to, or as a filial duty—some returning to the city to be with them out of a sense of obligation. Naturally, the pressure of obligation or duty is felt most strongly by the only child, perhaps the Bengali only child. This makes Calcutta an odd kind of city at least where a few people are concerned—that they are drawn to it not by work or opportunity, but some other, atavistic concern. Bombay is about money; Delhi about power; Calcutta is about parents—the three cities can’t really be compared to one another. Perhaps Banaras is a better analogue of my Calcutta at the moment: a place where people come to be facilitated into the afterlife, while their children and relatives hover there primarily to perform the necessary preparations for th
at journey. Certainly, it seems a whole bunch of corporate executives, surgeons, doctors, officers in the armed forces, professors, who’d all lived in other parts of the country during their working lives, returned quietly, in the last three decades, to Calcutta after retirement, just as widows, at one time, used to make their way to Banaras, or Kashi, for contemplation and solitude. And at least some of the children of those who’ve returned follow them to this city to enable their parents to be easeful before they’re finally, one day, gone. The other such person I met, besides Sandip Roy, is Devakinandan Chatterjee, whom I’ve mentioned before in passing, earlier a wealth manager with Standard Chartered Bank in Bombay, now with Citibank, an only son but not an only child, who suddenly moved to Calcutta in 2010 with family because his father was falling down and hurting himself. Of course, he continued to be a wealth manager—but the stakes here are significantly lower. In that sense (at least where the middle class is concerned), Calcutta is no more a karmasthal—the old Sanskrit word for a place where people go traditionally to seek work or employment. It has some other, hidden dimension to it—which makes it not quite Banaras, admittedly, but not quite Bombay or New Jersey either. When I bring up that ancient, forgotten, resonant term to my mother—a term that encompasses so much: life’s endeavour; human ambition—she says without hesitation: “Your karmasthal is East Anglia.” Ah, yes. What I do in Calcutta—writing, music—can’t be counted as work. “Calcutta is your basasthan,” my mother informs me—that is, my place of habitation. More likely, it’s her basasthan; for me, it’s a place of work, and that work comprises my parents. Not that I can give my parents, or work, much time, because of my writing and music. Still, they are a reason—a compulsion—not to pack our bags and leave. Visiting a city that was not my karmasthal, our visits to our parents tended to grow longer; till we now live here. I have become the figure in the de Chirico painting.

  I put to R Sandip Roy’s remark that Calcutta’s main concern is “Will you be eating at home this evening?” She concurs; and adds, “Also, all the studies we never did at school, and have to now.” My daughter’s schoolbooks are scattered around her on the bed. The rat race of secondary education means that the business of gathering knowledge in Calcutta is a traumatic family affair, involving and exhausting everyone at home, like a delinquency, a disability, or a teenage pregnancy. The only one who seems unaffected by this—at least, if our daughter is in any way representative—is the student herself. She alone sees, with a clarity of vision we no longer have, the irrelevance of the present education system. We, instead, are learning up her syllabus in large gulps; going over it with her, but more intent on mastering it ourselves than checking if she’s grasped it. We have now perfectly understood balancing equations in chemistry, the valency of elements and metals, we are quite adept at the congruencies of triangles, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the definitions of velocity and force are on our fingertips, we know, of course, that the Andes are fold mountains, in part like the Appalachians, which have a decisive climatic influence on North America. How much of this our daughter knows at the moment is uncertain; but living in this city means we have it by heart. The school itself doesn’t dispense education; it holds classes and periodically hosts exams. We, at home, don’t dispense education either, but find ourselves getting thoroughly educated. Almost everyone employs private tutors, especially for maths and that increasingly neglected tongue, Bangla; we’re no exception. The private tutor is like someone out of another age, country, and genre; he belongs to the world of Little Dorrit. He is intensely interesting, either garrulous or shy, and we choose to know little about him. My daughter has had two private tutors for maths, a subject she’ll probably never think about again in five years, or at least until she has children of her own. The first is Rajiv, a thin man with a beard, about whom one of my daughter’s friends observed: “He’s your maths teacher? He looks like a poet.” Rajiv is in his mid-fifties, and was once a quasi-Naxalite; he now runs a small advertising company. I would put him in the class of “loquacious” private tutors—he’s even played a small but significant role in a well-received art film, where he’s a sort of political busybody, a functionary who tries to lord it over a vanishing neighbourhood: someone very unlike himself, and yet a character who’s a surprisingly convincing alter ego for Rajiv. The second tutor, Alok, I place in the “shy” category: highly accomplished, if awkward, he was doing a PhD in maths at what is probably India’s leading institution for research in the sciences, the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research. He then placed his doctorate on hold and returned to Calcutta because his father is severely debilitated by back problems, and he’s an only child. He’s now taken upon himself the task of consolidating my daughter’s shaky maths knowledge. It was he who made me think of Dickens; of how uniquely dated and specialised his profession, which we take for granted in India and especially in Calcutta, really is. Many private tutors are exceptional students who, for one reason or another—family; temperament; in some cases, I sense, a resistance to worldliness—haven’t made the logical transition to glittering careers. It sometimes seems, when they dutifully appear, that they have no homes (though of course they do); that they’re destined to linger and ruminate in others’ houses. Their wards’ childhoods pass with an unusual rapidity, like the quick, busy frames of the early movies, from month to month, term to term; while their days have, at least in these years of our children’s education, a relatively detached stillness.

  * * *

  People begin to arrive in the mornings. The young man, Raja, who cleans the cars in the building, strides in to collect the car keys; the cook rings the doorbell; then the part-time help, Kamala, my father’s daytime carer. They’re here from different parts of the city. You’re careful not to call them chakor any more. The word derives from chakuri or chakri, meaning “employment”; but it was mainly used to slight and humiliate. But chakor, like “servant,” reflects more poorly on the user today than on the person being alluded to; the preferred term is the neutral and politically acceptable (and slightly anodyne) kaajer lok—“people who work,” “working people.”

  The chakor was often addressed as tui—the informal second-person pronoun, reserved for children, younger relatives, and best friends. This was the case irrespective of the age of the servant, though children were instructed to refer to older retainers as dada, or “older brother,” as in “Laxman dada,” while Laxman dada might also, paradoxically, refer to the master’s son as chhoto babu, or “young master.” Today, the kaajer lok are addressed as tumi—the semi-formal second-person pronoun for equals. However, the kaajer lok mostly address their employers as aapni—the formal second-person pronoun, used for superiors or older people, or as a respectful address for all strangers and acquaintances. It has no equivalent in English any more, but does in some European languages, the German sie being one. Just as you might address an older kaajer lok as aapni, or, if you’re exceptionally liberal or wish to make a point, all kaajer lok as aapni, there are some kaajer lok who might, familiarly, address you as tumi. In doing so, they might be being friendly, or unmindful, or provocatively democratic. If they do so, however, you don’t do anything about it; you don’t, for instance, say, “How dare you address me as tumi?” To do that would be anachronistic; an admission that you’re petty and uneducated, as politicians in small towns are, which, for the bhadralok, is a worse thing to be than being powerless. It’s a patchwork democracy, heavily weighted against the poor, the people who arrive at your door every morning—the help; the cook; the man who cleans the cars—but the middle class imagines it’s also weighted against them. People have a range of demands, the demands of the poor being least attended to; but no one has any rights in this situation—the proper context for rights hasn’t been created yet. It would be unfair on the middle class, or the bhadralok, to say they want a return to old-style feudal obeisance from the help, an unqualified servitude; but they do want conscientious work, honesty, long-term commitment, intelligence,
and evidence of training in return for a basic salary (which has gone up minutely over the years, but is little more than a small honorarium), two days of paid “leave” in a month, a Puja bonus and gift, no notion of a minimum wage, no workers’ unions and, in effect, no hint of an independent life encroaching upon the middle class’s own. And so, the middle class hardly ever gets what it wants. The kaajer lok are unstable, uncommitted, they vanish for days without warning and then come back again one day, and are allowed to resume work after caveats are issued, unless some kind of replacement, who will also flatter to deceive, has been found. The middle class is dependent on this floating, flickering population, a few of whom will always materialise at its door in the morning, but fantasises frequently about living without it—mainly because it can’t stand the absence of commitment, the unwillingness to work, the air of being from a place that doesn’t accord with normal standards of behaviour and language, and also because it can’t bear to raise minimum standards of employment, salaries, and incentives. There’s no choice for the middle class, where kaajer lok are concerned, except to live from day to day, and indulge in fantasy and rhetoric.

  Strictly speaking, there’s no bhadralok any more. Not only its heyday, its distinctive ethos—which produced the poets, novelists, painters, essayists; the Tagore family, Jamini Roy, Gopal Ghosh, Buddhadeva Bose, Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Kamal Kumar Majumdar, Bibhutibhushan Banerjee, Sudhir Khastgir, Jibanananda Das, Utpal Basu, Purnendu Pattrea; composers like Himangshu Dutta, Atul Prasad, Nazrul, Nachiketa Ghosh, and Salil Chowdhury; filmmakers like Paramathesh Barua, Satyajit Ray, Devaki Bose, and Ritwik Ghatak; the scientist Satyen Bose, who collaborated with Einstein in the Bose-Einstein statistics, and after whom the now-celebrated “boson” is named—that ethos is finished for good. Still, it’s possible to be a bhadralok—fleetingly, in a fitful way—in relation to the kaajer lok, and to Calcutta in general: as a sort of anomaly or exception, as a group of people who are around almost by accident.