Calcutta (18 page)

Salim took this in with limpid receptivity; but I wasn’t certain if it convinced him.

For about twenty years now, I’d heard one dramatic English word—“bloodbath”—whenever that moment in the future was speculated upon, when power would change hands. Although this was now, for many, a certainty, the elections in Bengal were being completed without any major unrest, and when I went out on the morning of the 27th, the city was calm. There were theories explaining the tranquillity in a state whose villages and towns have been periodically agitated by political violence. The mercenaries who’d been the bottom-rung CPI(M) cadres were simply moving over to the other side, said one theory. The balance of power between the two parties was more equal than ever before, said another, and none would risk confrontation at this point. Most of all, everyone was quietly thanking the Election Commission which, with its no-nonsense “presiding officers,” was doing perfectly its job as impartial organiser and overseer and as conductor with multiple batons waving to an unthinkably intricate orchestra. The 27th had, strangely, been declared a public holiday. The roads, as a result, were sparsely peopled. Several times a year, Calcutta changes itself by suspending activity. It does this during
bandh
(“closure”) days, when a political party will call for a general strike from work on a certain date in protest against some oppressive measure. The city empties and hardly anyone leaves home until 6 p.m. It does it during festive days, when the streets may be crowded, but both work and traffic are slowed down, calculatedly impeded, or stopped by spectatorial crowds. It happens during the monsoons, when the antique drainage, choked with new, discarded plastic bags, can’t cope, and the
roads are waterlogged, trousers rolled up, sandals lost. These off-days merge with each other in their epiphanic registers of withdrawal, celebration, and calamitousness. At some point, reading a book, you might think, “But this isn’t a holiday—the rest of the world is working,” and marvel at the way Bengal cultivates—and simultaneously mourns and celebrates—its disconnect with globalisation. That entire, useless day will have no function but to defamiliarise a city where little otherwise changes. April 27 had, deceptively, a similar air.

“There’s nothing of interest in your area,” a friend, the political scientist Dwaipayan Bhattacharya, assured me. So, directed by him, I went to the faraway southern reaches of the city, which are still semi-rural, and to which development and real estate are threatening to come rapidly. A fairly recent highway, the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass, took me to Kamalgachi, where a man was selling watermelons from a cart on the side of the road, right next to a camp of casually congregated, but disciplined-looking, Trinamool Congress workers. “How’s voting been going?” I asked, and he grinned and confirmed it was going well. “So I presume you’re doing good business?” I said, glancing at the watermelons, to which he grinned again, enigmatic but not unmindful of the larger context I was drawing his attention to. I wanted to know if this was a regular spot for him; he shook his head, saying he had no fixed location. This strategic point on the curve of the bypass, not far from the narrow inlet of a lane that led to the polling booth, was, for the present, a useful place to be. He was dark, moustached, rakish-looking: I can’t imagine he was more than thirty-five years old. Two older men, customers, had sniffed something anomalous about my presence and become curious. They too wanted to be questioned, and, in an unspoken pact, I obliged them. “What do you do?” I asked. “Hawkery,” said one a bit apologetically, making a Bengali noun of his profession.
“I used to work for Usha Fans, but there are no jobs in the fan business any more.” His friend was a mechanic for two-wheelers. “Well, do you think paribartan will come?” I asked, deliberately throwing up the oft-repeated word. They laughed at the joke: “Come it will!” said the hawker and former Usha Fans employee. “Are you voting Trinamool?” “We’ve finished voting,” he said, with the air of a man who’s had his “high” early in the day, and isn’t entirely sure whether that’s a good or bad thing. “I used to vote CPI(M) once, but it’s Trinamool this time.” “Do you think they’ll do any good?” “I don’t know, but it’ll put an end to the
‘aamar lok’
mindset.”
Aamar lok
means “our lot”: the hawker was referring to the rampant partisanship of which the Left in Bengal is accused.

“Is it true, what someone just told me about aamar lok?” I asked one of the CPI(M) men sitting at a table on the opposite side of the by-lane that went in at a right angle from the bypass, and which tactfully separated the small Trinamool and Left Front contingents. He was a quiet, dark, portly man called Suleiman Sardar. He shook his head at the canard. “Look at me. I’ve spent all my life as a driver, and I still don’t have a government job.” “Really?” “Yes, and I’ve been working for the Party since 1980, when I was eighteen”—that made him my exact contemporary—“and I got Party membership in 2000. My friend, who was a Party worker, was an auto-rickshaw driver, and died recently.” So the Party was their life, but it didn’t follow it was their profession. “What do you think the outcome will be?”—I gestured towards the invisible polling station. “It’ll be tight,” he replied, echoing Nirupam Sen, making me wonder if this was a last-minute Party line; but his settled equanimity suggested he’d come to this conclusion himself. “Frankly,” he said, respectful but firm, “there’s no wind of paribartan blowing here.” It was as if this was a simple, physical fact of the weather—there
was either a wind (
hawa
) or there wasn’t. The young men of the Trinamool, to whom I’d spoken earlier, had a directly opposed view, however, and had volunteered: “There’s a wind of paribartan blowing here.” I tended to agree, but I was no longer sure if I could actually feel a wind or not. It was undoubtedly hot. I’d said to the Trinamool men, “Will you reject the aamar lok ethos, or continue the politics of patronage? And will Bengal emerge from the rut of reactive politics it’s been stuck in for two decades, where one party says to the other, ‘Whatever you do, I’ll do the opposite’? If it doesn’t, this state is doomed, notwithstanding the paribartan that may take place now.” Everyone I said this to on the 27th—because I repeated the questions at several places—nodded and shook their heads at the correct moments, with a sweet reasonableness peculiar to that day.

I went further south, past Narendrapur into Rajpur. The name invokes bygone grandeur, but, apparently even in the seventies, it was mainly rural, with fields predominant rather than houses. Boral, the village in which Satyajit Ray shot
Pather Panchali
, isn’t that far from here. It was now defined by a main road with a small-town procession of shops and low houses on either side, with a maze of lanes emanating from it: a place to be passed through, its life wondered at through a car window. In a characteristic narrow alley off this road, wide enough for a single car, sat the Left and Trinamool “camps,” ignoring each other, at least two hundred metres away, according to the Election Commission’s ruling, from the polling station. The Left greeted me jovially, among them my namesake, Amit Sarkar (known, he said, to friends as “Babu”), and his ebullient wife, Rupali. She was particularly upbeat, showering my cupped palm with Chloromint chewing gum, which, according to laboriously funny TV commercials, has unique cooling qualities. She probably had abundant access to the gum since Mr. Sarkar owns a medicine
shop. No signs of down-heartedness were discernible—as if this group was either naturally playful and voluble or buoyed up by an oxygen they’d been breathing in for thirty-four years. The Trinamool man, hunched over a desk, was quieter; he was welcoming, but there was a shadow over him. He had the air of one who’s been biding his time; in a sense, he was, even now, crouched in the wings, separate from the main drama. Serious and geeky, he turned out to be, sure enough, a computer graphic designer. He was doing this work from a sense of
apamaan
(of having been insulted) and
jaala
, he said—that is, a burning that may arise from resentment, envy, or a sense of injustice. “You can’t even get a tap installed in a new house unless you’re a CPI(M) man,” he declared bitterly. He had two energetic, waif-like working-class men standing on either side (they’d occupied the small porch of a house), who were muttering their own stories and contributions, as if they might be otherwise heard by Mr. and Mrs. Sarkar in the distance, with whom relations were, naturally, polite but frigid. One, Shyamal Ray, was a fishmonger (but the word he used was “hawker”) at Gariahat, and the other, Mahadev Dey, also plied his trade at Gariahat (a twenty-minute walk from where I live), selling bags in front of City Mart. His old stall had been wrecked and his possessions looted by CPI(M) workers during Operation Sunshine in 1997, at one o’clock in the morning, he told me in his low, urgent undercurrent of words—Operation Sunshine being the government’s attempt to rid Gariahat of hawkers and of the dreadful (now non-existent) stretch called, wishfully, the “boulevard.” Some say it was a bankrupt government’s response to the IMF’s demand that it clean up the city before it received yet another loan—a demand at which Jyoti Basu had reportedly sniffed dismissively,
“Mamar badi!”
or “Do you think Calcutta’s your personal backyard?,” which is what a
mamar badi
or maternal uncle’s house is traditionally said to be for delinquent
nephews. Mahadev Dey was a Left sympathiser but had grown disenchanted, until his vision of himself and his future had revived with his discovery of “didi.”

People were voting at the primary school on the same lane, the Rajpur Harkali Vidyapith (established 1967). Despite being peopled and busy, it looked like a municipal husk of what it was, as if it had been built almost inadvertently, and with a minimum of fuss, to dispense the Bengali and English alphabets to the children of the less privileged. A BSF officer, a handsome, gracious South Indian, permitted me to interview the voters standing in the two queues: one for men, the other for women. The young men looked like they had no regular employment; they broke into a strange laughter on being questioned. They’d decided I was hilarious, sidling up to them, and had a hard time remaining serious or even civil—and I, once again after my schooldays (how appropriate, then, that this should be happening in a school compound), felt conspicuous and silly in the eyes of the hardened boys. When I asked them if their vote today was of particular importance, they appeared offended and vigorously denied it. The women were friendlier and more personable, and I had an easier time with them: I spoke to two board-thin working-class women who described their occupation with the English word “housewife,” though they could well have been domestic help. I tried to make conversation with a beautiful, stand-offish girl in a smart salwaar kameez, a student of art history at a little-known art college; further up the queue, a girl who, as it turned out, worked at a travel agency, kept turning back to look. “Do you sometimes think you might need to leave Bengal for better opportunities?” I asked. “No, I don’t agree with that,” said the art history student, inching forward with the queue. But the girl at the travel agency, who was very close to the door to the classroom, swerved back again to look at me and said, “There’s
no future here in my profession.” I moved towards her, like a salesman who has limited time to make a pitch. “You think you’d have better prospects in Delhi and Bombay?” The art student, to whom I’d simultaneously flung this question through an instant of eye-contact, shook her head, sphinx-like and self-contained; but the girl at the travel agency conceded this with a helpless wisdom: “
I
think so. And that’s what others in my profession say so too.” “What do you think of Calcutta’s present position? Do you know, for instance, that it was once, and for a long time, India’s foremost city?” She confessed this was news to her. “Perhaps. But the Calcutta I grew up in is all I know.”

I was beginning to feel hungry. I still wanted to go to Bantala, though—partly for its fairy-tale name (“under the tide”), partly because it had been put on my itinerary by Dwaipayan, the political scientist. All these—Kamalgachi, Rajpur, Bantala—were locations, he pointed out, that had undergone a transformation in the local panchayat elections in the last three or four years; they were all steadfast traditional Left bastions that had, only recently, gone the Trinamool way. When I gave him a report at the end of the day, telling him that, to my surprise, I’d encountered nothing but calm and tolerance at the polling booths, he sounded both intrigued and gratified. More than a month later, though, he issued a caveat: “Amit, I think it would be wrong to arrive at any conclusions about these places on the basis of what you saw at the booths
at that moment
. That’s what they may have been like on
that
particular day. Traditionally, these are places with a history of political violence. The entire South 24 Parganas area has been volatile for years.” This, despite those names out of which once nursery rhymes and stories must have arisen, when there was darkness after sunset and little of Calcutta as we’ve long known it. “Rajpur,” city of kings; and Bantala, making me think
of the child’s rhyme that had transfixed Tagore when he was a boy:
“brishti pare tapur tupur/nade elo ban
”; “the rain falls tapur tupur/the flood comes to the river.”

Bantala was on the South’s outer reaches, and a sly diversion off the bypass took me and the driver Biswajit into a clean, slightly desolate road going into the countryside, a canal on the left, in which, he informed me with insider knowledge, shrimps were cultivated; and bright green expanses with power grids and “speed pumps” on the right. I can’t drive; I’d had to bargain with Biswajit to come to work that day. He had to be back by half past two, eat, and then vote—or so he claimed. Then my parents’ driver, Mahinder, who’d voted in the morning, would take me to my two other stops for the afternoon, on what otherwise should have been, for both of them, a day of gossip, discussion, and sleep—for such, for the working man, should be the day when power potentially changes hands. Instead, here was Biswajit at the wheel; and a few drops of
kal baishakhi
rain had begun to drop stealthily, threateningly, on the windshield. Where to go? For the first time, I felt far from home, because this road wasn’t leading anywhere I knew: it was headed for the coast, and for the Sunderbans, where the tiger still lives. The bus stops made of concrete were sans commuters now—and, here and there, a few jean-clad men and women in salwaar kameez suits stood next to motorcycles, or sat atop the open cycle-drawn carts that are called “vans”; these young people, absorbed in each other, and despite their casual sensual ease, seemed desperately impoverished and to have been plucked out of the wild. It was another world. It was mainly agricultural land that dwarfed these figures, who were neither of the metropolis nor out of it, neither of the land nor of the city—agricultural land that was predestined to be colonised one day, whatever the Trinamool or the Left had planned, by industrial projects. Amidst this paradox of desolation and bounty, we
passed an optimistic sign that said
MOOD
’
N FOOD INDIAN AND CHINESE RESTAURANT
—and, then, heralded by some fluttering paper Trinamool and CPI(M) flags threaded round one of the huge trees on the left, there it was on the right: a compound like a crevasse, well below the level of the “highway,” and, further on, near a colourless one-storey building, a long rickety line of voters.