Calcutta

by Amit Chaudhuri

  I’d based the characters in Freedom Song on people I knew and was even related to; I decided to keep three names unchanged. Khuku, my mother’s pet name; and Shanti and Mini. To refer to and in a sense address them by their first names gave me a specific, private joy.

  One reason for doing so was the generation these three belonged to, and the kind of women they were. Although they were unlike one another, they shared certain characteristics, such as an immense breadth of knowledge of Bengali literature, of its classic names, like Bankimchandra and Saratchandra and Bibhutibhushan (all referred to with easy familiarity by their first names—as is the Bengali convention), and also its slightly less canonical ones, like Manoj Basu and Premankur Aturthi. They also had a fair knowledge of classical heritage, especially Shanti mashi, who could speak of the Mahabharata as if it were a text by Shakespeare, in terms of character, psychology, and conflict. Mini mashi and my mother in particular had a tendency towards laughter; although Mini mashi, having been a schoolteacher, was slightly pedantic, while my mother, never having fared well at school, was less reverent. But they could also be perverse and stubborn; and they were, I think (even Mini mashi, despite her affiliation to a school run by the Sister Nivedita order), completely irreligious, with, shockingly, no regard for any kind of religion or god (this is particularly true of my mother) whatsoever. All in all, they were like some kind of new genre that had emerged in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century—like a film by Ghatak or Renoir, or a painting by Paul Klee, or a poem by Jibanananda Das, or a song by Cole Porter or Himangshu Dutta. They were perennially new. So it felt right to keep, and refer to them by, their first names in the novel, in order to hint at the paradox, in these ageing women, of that youthfulness and surprise. Can the modern ever grow old, and less appealing? For this reason, too, I found it easy to be friends with them in real life—with my mother, with Mini mashi and Shanti mashi—because, once I saw it, I was attracted to that newness in them, that dimension of the strange and delightful, as I was drawn, when I found it, to it in Mrs. Dalloway and “At the Bay” and “Banalata Sen.” They so belonged to the new kind of writing they’d admired while growing up, which had burgeoned in Bengal and other parts of the world, that it was almost logical for me to rediscover them in fiction, in my own writing.

  * * *

  In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the North was where the many Bengalis of dubious provenance who made their fortunes out of the growing city, and from their “importexport” transactions with Englishmen, built their mansions. These great houses, which came up well before the high-thinking bourgeoisie would establish itself in Calcutta in the 1860s, were what most probably gave to the city its appellation, the “City of Palaces”: not palaces, really, but pretentious nouveau riche villas. Some of these were astonishingly ambitious. I am thinking especially of the grand house in Mini mashi’s stifling area, the Marble Palace, which the gold trader Raja Rajendra Mallick built in 1835—a neoclassical mansion with a neighbouring temple and traditional Bengali courtyard, today a kind of museum with a menagerie of exotic birds, a laidback spear-brandishing watchman, two clouded-over paintings apparently by Rubens, two others by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and a startling range of classic, covetable kitsch. In some ways—building fancy homes in a bewildering variety of native and European styles; giving to charity; setting up schools—the Bengali was the Marwari of the early nineteenth century. In fact, early nineteenth-century Calcutta was a lot like what India—even the world—is today: a place of hustlers making good and on the make, of boom and bust (as in Tagore’s grandfather “Prince” Dwarkanath’s case, who made a fortune and then died in debt), a place with little time for culture. The difference between popular writing and “literature”—that is, a kind of writing whose primary concern isn’t commercial success—hadn’t emerged, just as that distinction has now vanished again; a host of pamphlets and books on scurrilous, contemporary, and vivid themes came out from the battala (literally, “under the banyan tree”) press, the verbal counterpart of the Kalighat pat. And the North itself, despite its rich, was an impromptu marketplace, trading in commodities, livestock, and even song, women, and stories. We, today, are in the shadow of that great bat, that banyan tree, again; capitalism has transformed our world into the sort of marketplace the North once was; but, as my mother and I go up Central Avenue in the car, I notice North Calcutta itself is more or less untouched by globalisation: no malls, no coffee shop chains.

  By the 1870s, some of the sons and grandsons of those very hustlers would become poets, and, running counter to their family’s purely material ambitions, while still feeding off their material wealth, bring into existence the “Renaissance.” In the meanwhile, my mother and I are still headed in that direction. The neighbourhood we are about to enter is described thus by Kaliprasanna Sinha in his great battala offering Hutom Pyanchaar Naksha (The Night-Owl’s Sketches) from 1860—the account of the night-time scene is translated by Bankimchandra Chatterjee:

  Fisherwomen in the decaying Sobha Bazar market are selling—lamps in hand—their stores of putrid fish and salted hilsa, and coaxing purchasers by calling out, “You fellow with the napkin on your shoulder, will you buy some fine fish?” “You fellow with a moustache like a broom, will you pay four annas?” Some one, anxious to display his gallantry, is rewarded by hearing something unpleasant of his ancestors. Smokers of madat and ganjah, and drunkards who have drunk their last pice, are bawling out, “Generous men, pity a poor blind Brahman,” and so procure the wherewithal for a new debauch.

  We’re as good as back in this Calcutta again.

  * * *

  The Naba Jiban Nursing Home was in a lane on the right from the direction we were coming from, a lane easy to ignore, but which sucked you in as a drain or crevasse might suck in a trickle of water. It accommodated one car at a time, because a quarter of the lane was taken up by cars parked on the side.

  The ground floor of the nursing home was like the ticketing area of a railway station: long-term waiting written on the faces of people hunched in chairs; everyone gathered around reception jostling each other; spontaneous shouting employed as a means of overcoming impediment; the well-to-do quite provincial, with a grim, set-in-stone air of entitlement. My mother and I might as well have arrived from Massachusetts or Bombay, so deceptively privileged and peripheral were we.

  Yet we’d reached there just before the visiting hour shrank and vanished. The crowd before reception needed passes to go upstairs. For the ICU, you definitely required a pass; and two were allowed per patient. So my mother had to call Mini mashi’s carer’s husband, Sripati, a small and reassuring figure—so small and reassuring we might have missed him when he descended into the melee. He handed us two pink cards. We proceeded a few steps to the small lift with collapsible gates, which looked, implausibly, as if it had twenty-five or thirty people striving to enter it. Sripati, despite his unprepossessing looks, ushered us in with a decisive gesture, because he knew the ways of Bombay and Massachusetts weren’t respected in these parts. But the liftman too was impressive, and knew how to spot a Massachusetts type, and was determined to treat them like anyone else. This was complicated by the fact that we too were unobtrusively bent on being treated like all the others. My mother’s classical Bengali maternal qualities, a mixture of ferocity and warmth, won him over.

  When Mini mashi opened her eyes, I noticed she could move her arms and roll her eyes, but not speak, given the tube in her mouth and also what the stroke had accomplished. Both my mother and I spent about ten minutes observing her watch us in a state of agitation, fall asleep, and then wake up and regard us, particularly me, in bafflement and urgency, and work herself to a state from wanting to say something. I calmed her by touching her arm, “You’ll soon be going home, you’re getting better,” while noting her sallow complexion, her hair combed back, and the two tiny spots on her left cheek. The doctor-in-charge had said her condition had improved, though she was unstable, owing to the sudden f
luctuations in her heartbeat.

  Downstairs amidst the throng, we got embroiled in family politics, instructed in whispers by two relatives that Sripati, who’d given my mother news of the stroke, was, with his wife, removing Mini mashi’s money, and they might also have their eye on the flat. As we returned southward, it became dark, and my mother and I worried about the two sisters, and decided we should see them again quite soon—Shanti mashi was, at that moment, home in her flat in the CIT Buildings—if we were to solve the Sripati problem, which had been pushed gently in our direction. We’d also been struck by the force of Mini mashi’s recognition of me, her startlement, when she opened her eyes. Whoever she’d been expecting to see, it wasn’t me.

  * * *

  She died four days later, two days after she was moved back home from the nursing home. My mother and I found that, already, we’d have to return to the North, sooner than we’d presumed, for a last sighting of her childhood friend before she was cremated.

  My relatives are East Bengalis, from Sylhet, a province once known for the mystic Sri Chaitanya, its artistic milieu, its enterprisingness, and, after Partition and, even later, post-Bangladesh, its orthodox Muslims (it was a Sylheti mullah who “issued” a fatwa against the writer Taslima Nasreen), the taxi drivers and pretzel sellers of New York City, and for England’s much-maligned, much-loved Indian restaurants. We know now that you put scare quotes around the “Indian” food in those restaurants not just because the menu was composed in Britain, and replicated in every neighbourhood there, but because its perpetrators were a bunch of loud, indefatigable Sylheti Muslims.

  My relatives, located in various parts of the city, had made their way here a little before and during Partition. They were crucial coordinates in my holidays, and set those holidays’ tone—of oddity and the absurd. My relatives, mainly on my mother’s side, had among them one or two traders and country yokels; but mostly they were engineers, with a few school headmistresses and provincial civil servants in their ranks, and were among the funniest people I knew. They were, I think, cosmopolitans. One sign of the cosmopolitan is their proprietary stake in the world of reading and books; another sign, emerging from the last one, is the tendency to quote constantly; a third sign, probably because it seems their true habitat should be within the covers of a book, inside a fiction, is that they seldom own property—which adds imperceptibly to their air of not belonging. In my relatives’ cases, many of them didn’t own property until late in life because of their displacement. Their intrinsic oddness was accentuated by their speaking to one another not in Bengali, but in Sylheti—a dialect and offshoot that was, to me, and particularly to them, a riot. For korchhi or “doing” in Bengali, they’d say kortesi; for hae or “yes” they’d say the imbecilic haw; for kano or “why” they’d utter the plangent kané. “Chh” sounds would become the sibilant, childish “s”; the “k” sound approach “h,” as in Arabic. Their jokes were rude, freely and opportunistically making use of farting and shitting—insistently expressing a side less savoury than their lofty Rabindrik or Tagorean loyalties. Naturally, we children enjoyed this humour to a point. One of the things that earned an almost regretful laugh from the elders was the faux-limpid but inadvertently exculpatory line from a Tagore song, “Tari te pa dei ni ami,” or “I didn’t step into the boat.” But if the words pa dei ni (“didn’t step”) are said together, as in the song, they merge into padini, or the hasty clarification, “didn’t fart.” And Tagore’s line becomes indistinguishable from “I didn’t fart in the boat.” I doubt if I’d have entered that dimension of the Bengal Renaissance but for the tastelessness of my uncles and my mother.

  Going out now to the government-made flat in the CIT Buildings—a prefabricated socialist structure, like something out of Prenzlauer Berg—was to make yet another Calcutta-type visit. No visit for the emigré—whether it’s a family visit or of another kind—is anything but a rehearsal of a past journey to a meeting place, a civilised interregnum in which pleasantries and gifts are exchanged in homage to that first visit in the home town, which was just a simple visit. No visit, later, is what it appears to be, but an echo of that earlier meeting, when we were beginning to know each other, and in lieu of the meeting that will take place when we return to where we then met. I recall Mini mashi and Shanti mashi making their entrance into my uncle’s house on Pratapaditya Road before lunch—they must have been in their late forties—with a pot of Bhim Nag yoghurt from their neighbourhood. Even then, some part of me knew that this journey had been made with a previous journey in mind, which had been covered on familiar terrain, and that civilities would be exchanged, jokes laughed at, and the pot of yoghurt given, all in a rehearsed, unencroaching manner, in expectation of the original setting being restored in the future. Till then, this, evidently, is where they were.

  Acknowledgements

  I’d like to thank Peter Straus, my agent, for first suggesting, in 2005, that I write this book, and for not minding too much when I shot down the idea. Having written three novels about Calcutta, I felt reluctant to write about it again, not least because I thought that the city that had once excited me in all kinds of ways had changed permanently. It was when I began to come to terms with that change, and the new city that had resulted from it, that I relented and realised that I had a book to write. For Peter’s continuing belief in my work, I’m grateful.

  I’m grateful to Sonny Mehta for the same reason, and for commissioning this book. My thanks to Chiki Sarkar and Rosalind Porter for their great enthusiasm and responsiveness, and for bringing a freshness to my life as a published writer. To Diana Cognialese, I remain indebted, as ever, for her intelligence and support.

  Jaishree Ram Mohan should be acknowledged for the high standards of her copy-editing. I’d like to thank Maharghya Chakraborty for being my cheerful amanuensis for the manuscript, and my wife for chipping in kindly—and substantially—at the end. Whatever little remained I typed with one finger from my longhand original.

  Roughly half of Chapter Five appeared as a Diary piece in the London Review of Books; my thanks to the editors.

  I should also thank Sukanta Chaudhuri, editor of Calcutta: The Living City (OUP), from whose pages I’ve quoted R. K. Dasgupta.

  The excerpt quoted from Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (Penguin Modern Classics) is translated by Jamie McKenrick.

  I’m grateful to Dwaipayan Bhattacharya and Rudrangshu Mukherjee for helping with information.

  To my wife, Rosinka, I’m indebted in ways too various to enumerate; but I’d especially like to say that her discussion of the poet Iswar Gupta, quoted in these pages, can be found in her critical study of poetry in nineteenth-century Bengal, The Literary Thing: History, Poetry, and the Making of a Modern Cultural Sphere (OUP). This book and her work in general have been an invaluable, irreplaceable resource.

  The book was written roughly between August 2009 and December 2011, and is a personal record of that time. Needless to say, whatever has happened in West Bengal and its capital since then is, given the period Calcutta covers, beyond the book’s parameters.

  18 August 2012

  A Note About the Author

  Amit Chaudhuri is the author of several award-winning novels and is an internationally acclaimed musician and essayist. Freedom Song: Three Novels received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. His many international honors include the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; most recently, he became the first recipient of the Infosys Prize for Humanities—Literary Studies. He is a contributor to the London Review of Books, Granta, and The Times Literary Supplement. He is currently professor of contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

  Other titles by Amit Chaudhuri available in eBook format

  The Immortals • 978-0-307-27300-0

  A New World • 978-0-307-42447-1

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  ALSO BY AMIT CHAUDHURI

  Afternoon Raag

  A Strange and Sublime Address

  Freedom Song

  A New World

  Small Orange Flags

  Real Time: Stories and a Reminiscence

  St. Cyril and Other Poems

  The Immortals