Calcutta (5 page)

The rise of stores like Music World is related to the decline of shops like Melody. The latter still exists and does business—in Gol Park and near Lake Market—but has become at one, as it were, with the old market ethos of those areas: of traders and workers; of bargains argued on the pavement; of fluctuating, fitful sales; of being indistinguishable, in a sense, from the sweet shops and flower shops next to it. There was a time when it exercised a sort of bureaucratic control on customers; when, behaving freely in a record shop in Calcutta (and, to a certain extent, in India), you risked censure from the proprietors. At the Melody in Lake Market, I recall from the late seventies, I had a heated conversation with one of the staff; a small, myopic man who used to be consistently taciturn and rude. “Do you have any records by Bade Ghulam Ali Khan?” I asked. Without a word, but clearly unhappy to receive my superfluous request, he took out three
LPs. I chose one and said: “Could you play this one?”; knowing, in doing so, that I was inviting turbulence. The shop had a turntable on which records were played for customers; but only with reluctance, and a fine sense of discrimination about who was deserving of this favour. “What for?” he said. “What’s there to listen to in a Bade Ghulam Ali record? Everything he sang was superlative.” This—what I saw to be the worshipful, mean Indian attitude, where some artists were simply placed beyond criticism, while ordinary people were snubbed—outraged me; I also thought these words to be in the tradition of a specifically Bengali mode of daily interaction:
“gyan deoa”
—“imparting wisdom”—a common form that the put-down took in Calcutta. I replied with a blasphemy: “This is not the response I would get in a shop in Bombay.” The man lost his moribund equilibrium. “Don’t give me that Bombay-Fombay stuff. That doesn’t work over here!” I descended the two steps out on to the pavement in a huff.

That’s from more than twenty years ago, but the injustice of it is still fresh. It embodies the way time, and everything in time’s continuum, behaved, and in many ways, continues to behave in Calcutta: as if there were always a slight excess of it, in which to have a pointless encounter, or to exchange an unnecessary word or two. But today, there’s the alternative of slipping anonymously into the shiny Music World—as long as you can avoid stumbling on to, or hearing, the new releases.

Cross the road from Music World and you are in Free School Street—now called Mirza Ghalib Street after the great nineteenth-century Urdu poet who lived here for a few years and witnessed, bemused, the advance of the British Raj—and then, going past a petrol station, you are, in a minute, in front of Mocambo. Always, there are people—often couples, often small families—loitering
before the door and the saluting watchman with no noticeable aim except, as it turns out, to get in: fair-eyed, starved Europeans, who cultivate a look of simplicity and subsist largely on sex; the well-to-do, smart Marwari families, who rally around each other (their great strength and cause of success) even when standing on the pavement; the solitary bohemian or the left-wing Bengali couple who, like their radical nineteenth-century precursors, sometimes still make a point of eating beef steak; the ordinary, young Bengali customer, motorcycle helmet in hand (for he can’t afford a car), who knows no home or horizon but Calcutta, yet is entirely dispensable to its fortunes, and who experiences a sporadic passion for drinking beer and eating out. The group gathers here because Mocambo takes no reservations. Inside, where not a table is empty (thus, the apologetic crew that waits outside, bearing the brunt of the heat or absorbing what’s left of the evening breeze), is a scene of murmuring incandescence. The lights are low; but, to make up for it, the upholstery is red, as it must have been in the fifties, when the restaurant opened: you feel, when you step in, that you’re back in the singular world created by the Cold War, when one half (a fraction greatly exaggerated, of course) of the people of the world was eating out, and the other half standing in queues. Red, in that epoch, not only signified revolution, but, depending on its context, was also a constituent of psychedelia: and it’s as a remnant of the latter, with its subterranean glow, that it resurfaces here.

Again, the prawn cocktail—that most debased of starters—is, here, justly famous. It is part appetiser and part dessert; the generous pink sauce that drowns the prawns is not Rose Marie, but almost a liquid confection—as it was in the Skyroom; but thicker, like melted ice cream—something that’s sweeter than Rose Marie, but also sharper, with suggestions of Tabasco, black pepper, and—as the black-suited steward once told me in private—mustard.
It’s something with which to disarm and surprise a hostile party. There’s a sinister undercurrent to Mocambo—“sizzlers,” fizzing chunks of meat on hot plates, is the other, more audible, speciality—perfectly in accord with what was once the infantile quality of the bhadralok’s fantasy life. On the left of the entrance, the wall is divided into four sections with gigantic dancing girls from Degas, the blue having been retouched and paled again, once painted with a mixture of gaucheness and zeal by Shiv Kothari—the restaurant’s late owner.

Further up from the entrance to Mocambo, thirty or so steps away, is where Ramayan Shah has his pavement stall, if one could call it that. These days when I come to Park Street for some reason—to superficially browse at the Oxford Bookstore or spend time at Mocambo—I’m usually off in that direction later, and the people there must view me approaching with mixed feelings. As ever, Nagendra is ironing clothes, in pyjamas and spotless white vest, his hands moving automatically and swiftly. I’ve never seen him stubbly or unkempt; his clean-shaven cheeks have the enviable green halo of one who is meticulously, and naturally, clean. His thick hair is perfectly combed and immovable and, since it’s jet black, I suspect he dyes it. Later, I found out that this is where he lives and sleeps—here, next to the ironing stall, on one of these benches—but I still haven’t asked him how he manages to look the way he does: transcendental and not of his surroundings. On the other hand, Ramayan Shah is hardly ever in his surroundings when I am there—he’s gone again to the market to buy stuff which he’ll later cook for his customers.

The second time I went looking for this stall, I was hoping to see how the boy was—the one who’d been lying on what seemed like a pantry table, his arm stiff and fingers clenched, sobbing. Had the medicines brought about an improvement; was he OK?
In fact, he was nowhere to be seen—I turned to ask Nagendra where he was, but the man had as good as forgotten him; I had to reconstruct that episode, while he listened to my inelegant, rambling sentences, for him to get a sense of what I meant. Light glimmered:
“Woh ghar chala gaya”
—“He’s gone home”—“Home,” as I began to realise from these encounters, being most often some place in Bihar. The unperturbed tone of voice told me that no emergency had made the departure necessary; that toing and froing between Bihar and Calcutta was unremarkable, and happened repeatedly.

Because Nagendra is so perfect and unflappable, I realise I’ve stopped short of interviewing him. However, I’ve had desultory conversations—conversations that I imagined were going to be at once rigorous and illuminating, but have turned out to be desultory and opaque in retrospect—with the interlopers who hang about in Ramayan Shah’s little space (or shelter, since part of it has a tarpaulin roof). Although the interloper might look as if he’s been sitting there permanently, or that he’s a stakeholder in the business, or a regular, or family, he may be none of these, and it is likely you will not see him a second time. What seems certain is that Ramayan Shah’s eatery is not an eating place in the way we middle-class people understand that entity; that is, you don’t actually have to partake of the food to while away hours over there, or to even go to sleep on the furniture. On the other hand, I’ve occasionally noticed (and in this, too, it differs from, say, Mocambo) people freely access food without paying for it, even when the proprietor is away—which, observation tells me, is a great deal of the time. I’m assuming that there’s some local system of scrupulousness and credit to keep this trade alive for so many years, which is not comprehensible at first, or second, glance; some notion of spontaneous self-service which allows
people from time to time to take advantage of the place, in keeping with its ramshackle do-it-yourself ethic.

A man was crouched in the centre, next to where it said Chandan Hotel, peeling potatoes. He was in his late twenties, slight, small, but fit, with a thin moustache; I wondered for a second if he was Ramayan Shah’s family, or an employee—in which case, he would be serious labour. It turned out he was just part of the constant drama of the place: he was helping out. He cast, naturally, a wary and resistant look on me; he didn’t hugely mind answering my questions, but wanted to know
why
I was asking them. Indeed, my hovering presence there was mysterious, if not a downright nuisance. I explained I was writing a book on Calcutta; this sort of satisfied him—he went back to peeling and slicing the potatoes, and to receiving my questions without any flicker of interest. No, he didn’t work here; he merely lent a hand sometimes in exchange for a plate of food; his work, in fact, was issuing parking stubs when cars parked themselves on Free School Street, and collecting money from them when they departed. He was, in other words, one of those inevitable parking attendants with whom no driver in Calcutta, as they start their engine and manoeuvre the car out of the parking space, can escape reunion—they materialise instantly without a hint of being caught unawares, and have already begun counting the change. At this moment, though, the man was entirely settled, poring over the potatoes; when I quizzed him about this, he reassured me that there was no car in peril of leaving—as if his intuition were generally dependable. His name, he told me, was Inder Kumar, and he ate both lunch and dinner (usually) at Ramayan Shah’s. What was the fare like, I asked, because I was interested, and, like anyone else, possess a streak of romanticism that wishes street food were more unexpectedly delectable than what you order in restaurants; and, yes,
there is street food that seduces you as your eyes skim over it, but the slop I see people hungrily consume in pavement stalls like Ramayan Shah’s has never stirred, but in fact only repelled, me. Rice was served during the day, Inder Kumar said, or roti (chapatis) if you preferred; and
sabzi
—cooked vegetables—and a choice of either
rui
fish (carp, most beloved of fishes in Bengal, most prized as well as the most humble and readily available, whose white flesh tastes to me similar to what I imagine blotting paper would taste like if you prepare it to the same recipe) or egg, which is, everywhere in the nation, the human being’s cheapest source of protein. The rate was thirteen rupees a plate if you had the egg slop, and fifteen if you chose the fish, which looked—especially the chunky
gaada
piece chopped from the middle of the carp—like a small but solid piece of wood.

Inder Kumar informed me it was seventeen years since he left a place called Mohammedpur in Bihar; that he went back monthly to be with his family; that he had two children in school, a son and a younger daughter; that he was employed by a contractor, who presumably let him keep a fixed amount of his parking collections and pocketed the rest. During this staccato construction, another was listening, someone unlike the people here (who avoid my glances in case I start to pry). He, instead, was more like one of those figures on the far edge of the screen when a random “member of the public” is being interviewed on a news channel—the one with the restive expression, as if he has a vital opinion to add. This man was, it turned out, Mohammed Khan; excessively wiry and red-eyed, though he clearly wasn’t ill. That much was certain because of his manner (physically, he might have fallen down any minute), which was, in contrast to the others, vociferous and ironic. Some part of him viewed the street, even himself, at one remove, and that made him more demonstrative and
engaged—over-engaged, almost—than either Inder Kumar or Nagendra. The conversation, now, quickly and without warning, veered towards politics; how exactly this happened I don’t know, though I think it had something to do with Mohammed Khan’s wide-ranging passions; his candidness; his loose-cannon manner. “You can call me Mataal,” he added matter-of-factly; and, soon, I found that everyone knew him by this name. He said it without embarrassment—the word means “drunk” (and now his red eyes and frail outline made sense), but it also has positive connotations: in devotionals, mystics will often refer to themselves as “matwala”—inebriated in soul and spirit with God. Mataal said he was definitely voting Trinamool—the main opposition to the ruling Left Front—when the time came. This set off an echo in the group, and everybody around us, including Inder Kumar and Nagendra, confirmed that it would be Trinamool for them too.

I wasn’t shocked by this absolute consensus; the historical moment (August 2009) was one in which the tide appeared to have turned after thirty-two near-unchallenged years of the Left-led government. Still, I was a bit surprised. After all, the Left Front had largely created the improvised universe in which Nagendra and Inder Kumar and Ramayan Shah survived, and I mean this on several levels. There was the pro-poor, pro-labour rhetoric of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), of course, heard until recently from a megaphone on every street corner; and the preponderant ideology of hammer and sickle that made this gradual colonisation of pavement and bus stop as potential shelter or spaces for trade possible. The fact that this ideology had once been embraced by almost every intellectual as well as moral person in Calcutta meant there could be no viable protests against these conditions, in which, through low-level corruption and a peculiar notion of patronage, generosity, and humanity, homeless families and illegal businesses were allowed to proliferate
in various available public spaces. Perhaps that notion of humanity wasn’t so peculiar really; one felt its deep pull as one walked on the streets and sat among their unexpected range of inhabitants. But the ethical person, the intellectual, who wouldn’t say a word against these conditions in public, cultivated, actually, a hypocrisy that was apparent everywhere. Still, the middle class had swung decisively towards the Trinamool Congress long ago, and each time been disappointed by its volatile leader Mamata Banerjee’s endemic mood swings, her violent unpredictability of policy, her missionary populism, the way she frequently threatened, out of a sense of sheer pique, to self-destruct. Gandhi had perfected the art of fasting, emaciation, and self-flagellation as a tool; Mamata Banerjee, to the nervousness of her supporters, was on her way to becoming the mistress of self-destruction, of swiftly attacking the nose because of a perceived slight from the face. Still, the state of the state of West Bengal was such that it was ready to have her as its leader; not just Nagendra and Inder Kumar, but even the members of the Bengal Club and the diners in Mocambo were in unison on this. Worryingly, there was no clarity, about not only what to expect from Ms. Banerjee, but whom she represented—was it the masses, or the middle class, or industry, or, impossibly, everyone and everything? The answer was elusive. That she’s single, and always wears a simple white cotton sari—a sign of abnegation—perhaps denoted she would take everyone, from Inder Kumar to the man ordering chicken Tetrazzini in Mocambo, under her wing. Revulsion against the Left Front had permeated everything; Mataal and Nagendra and Inder Kumar gave their assent to this feeling. And yet the Front had created the mood in Calcutta that greeted the largely unskilled labour such as themselves, arriving here daily from a neighbouring state—what might have been a mood of parochial animosity was, instead, one of absorption and, to a certain extent, of abetment.
But, whether you live and sleep and dream in a condominium in South City or on a bench on the pavement, you feel unsafe when you begin to sense that an epoch is dusted and finished. I turned to Mataal after everyone had expressed their unequivocal opinion, and asked my stock question—“What do you do?”—for it combines sociological rigour with an assumption of concern and friendliness. For the first time, he prevaricated; but his acquaintances were ready to help him out. “He supplies women,” said one of them; and others found other words to describe his profession. “Really?” I said, “Achha?,” because the pimps of Free School Street used to be well known; but I’d presumed that in a post-HIV world Mataal’s trade and the core trade of prostitution itself would have suffered, here, a terminal body blow. I was told otherwise. “I have many parties,” Mataal corrected me, making me catch a glimmer of an unknown world. “All kinds of people.” He looked vacant, for our conversation had abruptly come to an end. “In fact, I have to meet a party right now.”