Calcutta

by Amit Chaudhuri

  Prof. Chattopadhyay, if I remember right, pointed out that independent forest kingdoms often sprang up in India, and were seen as a threat to the ethos and sovereignty of the mainland. It was for this reason that Vali would have had to die; because, for Rama, he represented a threat to the norm, to the absolute sway of dharma.

  As to how much Bengal would open up again to the world, as it had in the eighteenth century, was a question left hanging in the air. People were trying to shrug off, in a sheepish way, the feeling of having missed the boat that had troubled them until May 2011. For the middle class, international isolation was measured by the number of direct flights there were to London; there was none. Lufthansa, too, providing the last umbilical lifeline to a tarnished but persistently desirable Western capitalism, announced, in December, the scrapping of its flight to Frankfurt, a punishment for poor business-class activity. Nevertheless, we in Calcutta were still in the year’s most paradisial time, heading for another Christmas. It was around now I was reminded, because of an academic paper I happened to read, of Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, a record of a year (1935–36) spent under duress in two obscure towns in Southern Italy, Grassano and Aliano, the latter renamed “Gagliano” in the book. Levi, exiled there by Mussolini, says, “The title of the book comes from an expression by the people of ‘Gagliano’ who say of themselves, ‘Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli’ which means, in effect, that they feel they have been bypassed by Christianity, by morality, by history itself—that they have somehow been excluded by the full human experience.” I once saw a Penguin Modern Classics edition of this book in Oxford, in 1987; picked it up; put it back again. My memory refreshed and piqued by the paper, I was thinking of Levi’s memoir while listening to Rakhi Sarkar, active in the Calcutta art world, married to Ananda Bazar Patrika’s Aveek Sarkar, give an impassioned account at an event of why she and others had resolved in 2003 to put into motion the idea of KMOMA, or the Kolkata Museum of Modern Art; for the first major Picasso exhibition in India had come to Delhi and Bombay, but bypassed Calcutta for its paucity of museum space and infrastructure. The insult was deep—to a region of the world that had fostered India’s first home-grown style in modern art, the Bengal School, and where (it was doubtful if Calcutta itself remembered this) the works of the Bauhaus painters were exhibited in 1922 at the prodding of Tagore—who much admired Paul Klee—and as a consequence of the critic Stella Kramrisch’s enterprisingness. I happened to be in Delhi during Picasso’s visit there, and, no great admirer of the Spaniard, went obediently from room to room to study again what I’d seen reproduced in encyclopedias and magazines a hundred times. But the hurt hadn’t healed in Calcutta, or so it seemed from Rakhi Sarkar’s speech. Flippantly, I considered naming the book I was writing Picasso Stopped at New Delhi—but remained tempted, at the same time, by the all-purposive, ambiguous Calcutta.

  * * *

  I’ve used the pronoun “she” of the kaajer lok because they are, mainly, women—except the drivers, who are a special breed and a cut above the kaajer lok. Shampa, who was married off hastily before succumbing to TB, experienced marriage for what it is in its first celebratory phase in a working-class woman’s life—a rescue and absolvement from a future of domestic work. If the man is sober and relatively well-off—that is, if he owns a small shop or a taxi—it’s possible his wife will be spared from becoming part of the immense churning that is kaajer lok. But even if he isn’t a destitute alcoholic, she, once the bliss of early married life is over and reality crowds in, might well start work as a maid, especially if the family is ambitious, and wants to give their children an education better than they had. Most often the men aren’t sober. This is what adds, in periodic waves, new women to the ranks of the kaajer lok. These days, very few women search for work cold, in the streets, or dependent on their friends’ advice, but turn up at one of the several “centres” in Calcutta that supply houses with domestics and carers. The advantage for the domestic of working via the centre is that they’re paid a daily wage rather than a monthly salary, and this works out better for them, as the wage adds up to a more substantial salary than they’d have got as a full-time employee. In return, the centre keeps a small percentage. My father’s carer, Kamala, comes to us from one of the smaller and less greedy of these centres, and she has to give to it only ten of the one hundred and ninety rupees she earns daily. In return, she’s with my father for a full twelve hours, sometimes nodding off, as she has a punitive routine, and on certain days wakes up at three o’clock in the morning to collect water because of a recurrent drinking water shortage in her area, VIP Nagar. (No problem with running water for bathing, she says; it’s the mishti or “sweet” drinking water that’s in short supply, and is provided by municipal corporation trucks at dawn, distributed by a pipe three times a week to people who’ve presumably been lining up with the resolution of shoppers at a sale.) She’s here at eight to attend to my father. When she rises and walks about, it’s in a scalded tiptoe, like the devout negotiating a bed of coals, an effect created by her corns. My father, whose main aim now is to be left alone, can’t stand Kamala; but it’s with my mother that she has repeated spats, as once daughter-in-law and mother-in-law did, mysterious, bottled-up outbursts, indicative that each has a strong view on truth and reality, but also of the wearingness of human contact, which rarely ever does credit to human beings.

  I recently called the person who runs the centre through which we employ Kamala; he was loath to meet me. “Let’s talk on the phone please,” he said. “I don’t know enough about this business—it’s my wife who really runs it. She’s away.” His wife had been a nurse at Ruby Nursing Home, and then Divine Nursing Home, and had made good use of the networks she’d built up of carers and nurses when they started the centre in 2009. This man, Debashish Das, had been a manager in a small fertiliser company, then branched out, with the impulse towards freedom common to middle-class Bengalis, into the fertilisers business himself. That venture (as is also often the case with those Bengalis’ bright ideas) was a non-starter; unrewarding, with farmers deferring payments, and too demanding. He then got into the private car hire business, first with a Tata Indigo, and then an Indica; it changed Mr. Das’s life, and became a limited but flourishing trade. This centre for domestics was his latest essay, established upon his wife’s contacts, and an enterprise he was pretty confident about. “There’ll always be demand,” he told me.

  Supply was ensured too. Cyclone Aila, or Hurricane Aila as it’s often known locally, had devastated crops and cultivation in North and South 24 Parganas beyond the city in 2009, the year of Mr. Das’s centre’s inception, and its after-effects still sent a steady trickle of women towards him, and from him eventually to our part of the city. The women from these centres—not Kamala, though, for she’s very much a Calcutta person—have the sullen, shell-shocked air of refugees, of people who don’t know where they are and what they’re doing there. They are unimpressed by upper-middle-class luxury; they’re swiftly bored; they’ve worked in one kind of world all their lives, and are now being asked to comprehend different appetites and demands which make them look despondent and probably feel homesick. “Women also have to work because their men drink,” said Mr. Das. “They drink and die.” We discussed the adulterated liquor—country liquor or “hooch” as it’s romantically called by newspapers—that claimed, in mid-December, the lives of one hundred and seventy men in a town near the Bihar border. What had struck me was not just the scale of the tragedy, but how little sympathy was expressed in the media for these fatally misguided drinkers.

  When a domestic with whom you’ve had a long-term, rocky relationship—one that goes on and off, on and off—begins to feel restless, there may well be signs, so indecipherable as to be non-existent, that she’s about to go again. I’m thinking of Lakkhi’s last stint with us—by “last” I don’t mean “final,” but “most recent.” There’s never anything but a cursory finality in one’s interaction with a domestic; renewal is
usually in the offing.

  After Lakkhi’s husband’s painful demise, she returned distractedly to the fold. In two months, her timings were awry again; midday when it should have been ten o’clock; then later than midday. And she deftly smuggled a little companion into the room adjoining the kitchen. At first, only his voice could be heard—high-pitched, pointed, intermittent, making no kind of sense; then I caught glimpses of his wispy figure.

  I realised I’d seen him before. He’d been smaller then—Lakkhi’s grandchild, who’d come with her before on a couple of visits. He was still small for a four-year-old, and I was drawn to his high spirits. The boy, whose name was Raja, brought out the vagrant in me; I’d go off in the middle of my writing to investigate his whereabouts.

  Raja was flattered by my attention and made a big show of avoiding me. We began to understand, after a week, that his appearances weren’t going to be exceptional—they’d be the norm, for he was arriving at our flat every day with his careless-seeming grandmother.

  He was very dark: what Bengalis call kuch kuche kaalo or “extremely black”—his late grandfather’s complexion, apparently. He had an undernourished, springy agility and bright eyes. Lakkhi had no choice but to bring him along for now. Her younger daughter, Raja’s mother, was mentally challenged—that much we knew. She’d been married off six or seven years ago with the usual transactional resolve that Indians have—that life, sociability, and procreation must continue regardless, that marriage is a simple counter to the untoward. Husband and wife produced this child: further evidence of marriage’s primordial normalcy. Then, as husbands will, the man vanished. The younger daughter returned to Lakkhi, abstracted and strangely discontented. She had little awareness of or interest in Raja. He, in the meanwhile, had begun to go out on excursions, and Lakkhi found the mother in one place and the boy in another. She fretted; but she had the cooking to do. So she began to bring him to our apartment and deposit him in the kitchen.

  He was a clever boy and, once he got over his shyness, full of a specious bravado. It was extraordinary to hear him in the kitchen—disrupting a place of work.

  “Are you going to put him in a school?” I challenged Lakkhi. It may have slipped her mind.

  “Yes, I’m looking for a place for him, somewhere I can keep him while I’m here,” she said in her characteristic way, suggestive that every decision she has to take, including removing food from the fridge, is onerous.

  “A place you can pick him up from on the way back, or a place he can stay in?”

  “It would be best to pick him up,” she said, again with that tortured look.

  “Then it should be somewhere around here,” I said, gesturing vaguely at the haute bhadralok vicinity of Ballygunge. “I have a school in mind.”

  I had a stealthy feeling my efforts would come to nothing—I’ve noticed, from a review of past actions, that my attempts to help people are usually oddly thwarted, by a combination of circumstances and probably by an overestimation by me of the wider world’s receptivity to my ideas. This prior knowledge didn’t keep me from calling Tim Grandage, who lives in my building. I know Tim slightly, but I’ve been aware that his school for orphaned children—fortuitously located in the very area we live in—is regarded by all as a genuine success. What a good place it would be for Raja, for both disposing of the problem of this boy and giving him a future—and also for giving Lakkhi a relief from chores other than cooking. Tim, however, was in England; he’d be back, I was told by his flat’s caretaker, after the Pujas. Ironically, I was just barely getting used to not being in Norwich and embracing the season’s new-found calm. Otherwise, now, I’d be teaching students as it grew dark, or sipping on an americano at Starbucks.

  “I’ll pursue this when my friend returns from England,” I told Lakkhi. She nodded moodily and continued to scrape the potol, or rinse the moong pulses, or cut the chhana into little squares.

  Raja began to lose his shyness. At first, it was an unconscious shedding of inhibition after lunch, when there was a lull in kitchenly activities, and an abnegation of power among those who ruled over the apartment—my parents withdrawing into nap time; I into writing; my daughter not yet back from school. Normally difficult to inveigle from the kitchen, Raja emerged in the drawing room and took over the furniture. He was quickly lost in a daydream; he’d sit on the divan or on the sofa and spend his time in one or the other posture, either with a leg in the air, or half-lying against a cushion. He was a little parody of a despot.

  After eight or nine days, he was wholly not in awe of me, and as interested in my whereabouts as I’d been in his—possibly more interested. His new lack of regard and presumptuous four-year-old friendliness were my doing. I had “encouraged” him. My reasons for fraternising with Raja were selfish; I found him hilarious. Besides, “all things can tempt me from this craft of verse.” In the midst of writing about the city, I was susceptible to distraction. And now, in a manner of speaking, he was all over me. He was a tough and single-minded taskmaster: just as we demanded timely meals from his grandmother, he wanted constant diversion from me. As with my mother’s and R’s view of my work, Raja wasn’t convinced that a man sitting around with a notebook and pen was seriously occupied. I was most probably doing nothing. His way of hinting to me that he was available was by coming straight to my room after Lakkhi arrived (she was now keeping pretty erratic times), smiling vaguely, and clicking on his palate with his tongue, producing a soft, insinuating sound. When I mimicked this to R, she fell about laughing; but to me it was becoming tiresome, something which I at once looked forward to and dreaded. Familiarity was also beginning to make him provocative, and test how much of the upper hand he could gain. He had to have ownership of the remote control (irrespective of whether the TV was on or not), transporting it, like a courier, from room to room; but he also claimed, in his limited, blithe pidgin, that his TV was bigger than ours. Besides, he had his eyes on the cheap English biro with which I pursue my writing, making off with it on impulse; I hadn’t sufficiently appreciated that he had his own pen, and, in our tussle to retrieve our rightful paraphernalia, I’d sometimes take his pen and upset him deeply—but briefly, as he still had no understanding of prolonged deprivation or lack. We became a kind of exasperating drama to the maids, who felt I was ineffectual and said: “You must holler at him properly.” At the peak of our interfaces, they’d pick him up, and remove him, ignoring his scandalised cries, from my room; but he was like some sort of spring, and in five minutes he’d bounce back, ebullient, making the soft clicking noise in his mouth. I began to lock my door, which I never like doing.

  The Pujas ended, I kept calling Tim Grandage’s flat and speaking to the caretaker, but Tim showed no signs of returning. Meanwhile, Lakkhi’s hours were becoming unacceptable, she was arriving close to late lunchtime, and was unrepentant and had no explanation but “I’m thinking of giving up work. I can’t take it any more—after all, I’m fifty years old.” “You’re more than fifty,” I informed her. “I’m forty-nine.” I was secretly astonished at how old I was. I would probably die one day in Calcutta—which, anyway, was as I’d planned it: that I mustn’t, by mistake, die abroad but live and spend and maybe bring to a close the second half of my life in India. It just happened that India, at this point of time, was Calcutta. Maybe most of us, without knowing it, have plans of this kind. I’m reminded of César Vallejo, who states it baldly, as a prophecy: “I will die in Paris, in a rainstorm, / On a day I already remember.” That second line—“On a day I already remember”—is shrewd, and it speaks to exactly what I have in mind—that, when it comes to such matters, the future and the past, memory and speculation, are hopelessly mixed up and devoid of chronology. Vallejo actually managed to die in Paris despite being expelled from France in 1930, eight years before his death. But his poem is meant to voice the classic melancholy of the exile with finality—for Vallejo was born in an impoverished Peruvian town. In my case, my aim—whether or not it works out—is to eventually draw my days
to a close at home. After twelve years in Calcutta, I realise this notion of “home” is an invention: that, though I was born in Calcutta, I didn’t grow up here, and don’t belong here. Each year, I suspect I’ll begin to understand this city better, be more at ease with it: and every year I find this is less true.

  When I think of Lakkhi’s behaviour before and during and after the Pujas, her dishabille entrances, infuriated and infuriating, her grandchild in tow, I wonder if she was telling us, in a sort of code, of her disenchantment. She knew Raja had begun to interrupt my writing and tried to enforce a stricter demarcation for him where kitchen and drawing room and my room were concerned. Then, just as I was warily testing these arrangements, she stopped bringing him. There was no busybody to contend with! I was relieved, because I’d begun to think Raja would be a nuisance for the foreseeable future; but, given the grass is always greener on the other side, I was, in a negligible way, bereft. At times of my choosing, I wanted to be interrupted by Raja; just as there are occasions when a cancelled trip answers a secret prayer. “My friend will be back soon,” I told Lakkhi. “You should let me know if you still want me to talk to him about the school.” But she’d found a school in Subhasgram, she said, where he’d be looked after night and day: a better deal, given Raja’s unmindful—in more than one sense—mother. In this way, I held steadfastly to my own, on the whole unbroken, record—of being unable to intervene positively even when I wanted to.