Calcutta (7 page)

Marvelling at the journeys that had brought us to the front of Music World and the large glass windows of Flurys, I asked her, crudely, why she wasn’t begging in Howrah. She admitted, without any of the pride that was implicit in her simple appearance, that she didn’t want to be spotted by people she knew. Her journey to Flurys seemed to me, then, both entirely understandable and slightly mad; given she wasn’t so well—and despite her deceptive air of reasonableness.

Her husband, Munna, was now far away; he’d gone back to his des, as labourers in Calcutta do frequently, to a place that sounded—on Baby Misra’s tongue—like “Raksaul.” Jitinder, who was five years old, was clearly on an outing; he carried a little stick, probably to entertain himself or, in his own made-up universe, to protect himself and his mother. Like him, I too was not immune to the charms of Free School Street in December—a poor, dirty, congested road, with an open gutter on either side, but busy with insignificant enterprise, and with residues, everywhere, of an earlier bohemian life. I crossed the street and soldiered on—the pharmacy was not where I’d expected it, and bystanders kept promising, “Just there—further on”—while, doggedly,
Baby Misra followed, with her son, confidently brandishing the stick, unimpressed by the crows and stray dogs. I was thinking that there was something else I was supposed to be doing, which I was being kept from, and my stride became more urgent; and then realised that this—whatever it was I was doing now on Free School Street—was exactly what I’d set out to do. “What is it that’s troubling you?” I asked her; she said, quietly, that she had a shooting pain in her right leg, a pain like a “current.”

Bihar, Bengal’s neighbour, has one of the grandest histories of all Indian provinces; home to India’s first great empire, to two great and austere religions, Buddhism and Jainism, and to the ancient teeming city of Pataliputra. It’s a world that the Indian child knows from comic books—the kingdom of Magadha; the resplendent emperor Chandragupta Maurya on his horse; the tonsured sages gathered round a holy tree; the sensuous women that the artists of the Amar Chitra Katha comic book series drew with lascivious satisfaction. While you glimpse that dreamworld of eternal India, you don’t make the connection, either as a schoolboy or as an adult, with Bihar, byword for abhorrent ministers and bureaucrats and policemen, minor warlords and ignorant peasants, whose once-poetic tongues—Bhojpuri and Maithili—now, spoken by the likes of Ramayan Shah, make people laugh. There’s no reason to think that the Biharis, who constitute a substantial percentage of the floating population of Calcutta, like the pompous remnants of the Bengali bourgeoisie at all, flattened by decades of left rule, or that the Bengali thinks of the Bihari as anything other than a rickshawalla. It’s a testament to Bengali self-absorption that the city is still fundamentally thought to be a Bengali one—although grudging concessions are made to the fact that the economy, now, is almost entirely controlled by Marwaris. But what of the Bihari? On Park Street and Free School Street, and in other parts of the city, he is everywhere; leaning out
of a taxi window, eyes glazed, buying gutka from a vendor (who’s also, possibly, Bihari) to keep himself going for the rest of the day; or selling chanachur masala in front of a mall; engaged in small trade or the perennial construction work; living apart from his family, then mysteriously withdrawing to his des for a month.

J. P. Medico.

Here was the pharmacy! But the corrugated shutter was down three-quarters of the way. I bent down and could sense there were people there; I was told from within that they’d reopen at five o’clock. Yes, I think it’s true that some pharmacies—and maybe pharmacies alone—take a long siesta in Calcutta. Do they do such bad business in the afternoon that even keeping the ceiling fan and tube light on makes little sense? “Open up please! We’ve come a long way!” I said, taking on the moral tone of my class, the educated class, impatient with the laxity of the poorly educated. Baby Misra seemed quietly relieved and respectful upon seeing me in this incarnation. To my surprise, the shutter went up with a juddering clatter, and the three of us stepped into a small space that, here and there, displayed cheerful signs for shampoos and ointments. One of these showed a radiant little boy with a bottle saying HORLICKS, and, soon after the two men (a younger and an older) had glanced at the prescription (Baby Misra’s treatment was very simple: calcium tablets and vitamins), young Jitinder pointed to the sign and, charmingly, without the pressing ways of other children, indicated he wanted the Horlicks. The wisdom of asking for Horlicks rather than chocolates or lozenges was interesting: did he know the former had greater nutritional value—or did he like the picture of the child? The two men, who were giving us the vitamins—annoyingly, they’d run out of calcium tablets—smiled without, however, being certain of how much to smile; they could tell Jitinder wasn’t my son and were balancing a demand from an undeserving down-at-heel boy
(albeit decently dressed in white shirt and shorts, armed with a tiny stick) with the possibility of a further sale. Baby Misra was having none of this; unimpressed by Jitinder, she collected him from the shelf she’d allowed him to perch on, and placed him on the ground unfussily, as if they had to be on their way. The manner in which she did this acknowledged to me: “I know your patience is wearing thin.” I paid for the vitamins without a word.

We walked back some distance towards Park Street, and, near Ramayan Shah’s “hotel,” where I thought I’d stop for a chat, I bid the lovely Baby Misra and her handsome boy farewell. On our way, while passing a dingy-looking eating place, Jitinder, with the candour of a child, growing gradually familiar with me, had expressed an interest in chow mein. This time, with the inexorable softening of the maternal heart, Baby Misra looked at me—in expectancy and faith. I felt a small constricting of my own heart immediately, and, for a second, felt this mother and child I hardly knew were threatening to deluge my life. Simultaneously—it was impossible to disentangle it from this anxiety—I thought buying Jitinder chow mein was an excellent idea; only the fact that he’d asked me made me resistant to it. We went in, and Jitinder had vegetable chow mein—“chow,” as it’s called in Calcutta, the commonest, most munificent street food, limp white noodles tossed around in oil and soya sauce with gratings of vegetable or chicken (I myself have never tasted it)—and then, deliberately to disarm me, said, “Thank you,” in the way of one who knows only those two words in the English language, and uses them at moments such as this one.

*  *  *

“You shouldn’t have given her the money,” said Munna moodily. “She’ll never spend it on medicine.”

By now, I’d seen the back of Baby Misra; we’d had a final conference near Ramayan Shah’s. I’d offered to drop her at a “free” hospital near Number 4 Bridge, for treatment and X-rays, and she’d refused. Maybe it was time to get back to Howrah. She, in turn, had asked me if I knew of any jobs going; “You can always tell these people if you need me,” I said, pointing my chin towards Ramayan Shah’s ramshackle world, as if it were an institution I’d have an enduring association with. She tilted her head sideways—our sweet Indian gesture of assent—and asked if she could have money to buy the calcium tablets.

Soon after this, Munna (clearly a popular Bihari name) passed his remark—he’d ignored me before, absorbed in his aluminium platter of rice and vegetables, but now was unexpectedly, if intrusively, interested—with the air of a persecutor who turns out to be menacingly concerned about your welfare. What do you care? I thought. A mistake one makes constantly is to judge people by their looks—it’s the infallible urge to stereotype, conflated inextricably with the urge to fictionalise—and Munna had the large, moustached, glowering features that convey, and incite, animosity. But, as you grow older, experience tells you to distrust your first impression (this can be fatal when it comes to people who have an aura of villainy, and very useful in connection with those who have an air of “niceness”); so I thought I’d engage with Munna in spite of not wanting to.

“That boy’s half-mad,” he said, as he scooped up rice from the dented plate. The boy he’d described smiled enigmatically. He was too busy to be bothered: splashing the utensils, dicing the aubergine. He turned out to be Ramayan Shah’s son; he said he was “fourteen or fifteen” years old, but looked younger—small, enigmatic, and spring-like. As I took in his features from different
angles, I did see that he looked a bit like his father; but lacked, naturally, his air of calm acceptance. Clearly, Munna and he didn’t like each other. The boy was cheery but homesick (he missed the
“khelna kudna,”
the abandon, of his village); and Munna was a bully.

“He eats a kilo and a half of rice every day,” said Munna, rapidly consuming rice himself. “He doesn’t eat food: food eats him.”

The boy’s name was (probably appropriately) Hridayanand—“joyful of heart.” His response to my queries was one of gobsmacked (this ugly English word is the only one that comes readily to mind) disbelief; he’d never encountered such a specimen before. Munna’s was supercilious distaste and suspicion. He wasn’t sure if I was a scam-artist who was going to exploit him, or whether I was an imbecile up for exploitation—the perpetual and urgent Indian dilemma. Nevertheless, as if he were reluctantly doing me a good turn, he volunteered a potted life history. He had been “here”—the word could have meant anything—since 1986. That was in one of the worse decades in Calcutta’s history, even worse in some ways than the Naxal years, when middle-class children, like the children in Victorian novels, read for their finals by candlelight, when the city seemed to implode and the interminable power cuts earned the chief minister Jyoti Basu—whose first name means “light”—the nickname Andhakar or Darkness Basu. Since such was at least the middle-class perspective on 1986, it made me wonder how much worse it would have been in Munna’s home town to make the move. Everyone around “here” was Bihari, he proclaimed: a generalisation, of course, but with a germ of truth in it.

They—four of them—slept on these latticed string cots and narrow benches—the rudimentary furniture that occupied the pavement at various angles. He cleaned cars and earned one hundred and fifty rupees a day (almost double the minimum wage in
this country of starvation deaths and millionaires); and sent back two and a half thousand monthly. At home in Munger zilla, he had two daughters.

“Police cause trouble,” he said, with the wariness of one whose domain depends upon offering small bribes to the law.

No, I didn’t have a great deal to learn from Munna—nothing that, by now, I didn’t already know. But Munna was aware of the value of his time and information. “Arrey, at least give me something for a cup of tea!” he said as I got up to go—careless of the decorousness that had characterised the others I’d socialised with till now at Ramayan Shah’s. Nagendra was ironing away within earshot, and his expression could have meant anything: “I wish I was somewhere else,” or “Serves him right!”

*  *  *

25 December 2009: the Bengal Club Christmas lunch menu had lobster bisque as usual. Then there were the other things—fish buried under almond sauce; roast ham with a sort of dark twinkling lacquer veneer; turkey, of course, most unexciting of meats. But how could you have a Christmas lunch without turkey? And Christmas pudding in brandy cream. It was the sort of weather in which a jacket and tie—the club’s dress code for men for the event—is just fine. Most people were into their mid-fifties and beyond; and there was a lot of sipping of cocktails and mocktails, donning of paper hats, a mild, unselfconscious, bravura indulgence in silliness. The club was once designed to keep natives at bay—“Dogs and Indians not allowed”—but now, I’d say hesitantly, it’s old-fashioned, yet lacking in hauteur. We were here en famille; with my wife, my daughter, who, with a friend, ate separately from us in the Oriental Room, my parents, parents-in-law, my sister-in-law and her husband, Kabir (who live in a
remote London suburb). Kabir had retrieved a pale khaki linen suit for the afternoon.

After occasions like this, we generally scatter. My father is no longer clear about what his intentions are, and seems ready to be led almost anywhere; my mother isn’t certain why my father has changed in the last two years into this indeterminate human being. My daughter is easily bored; barely eleven years old, she had, that day, some tantalising rendezvous to keep at home—it made her restless. My parents-in-law are excessively polite, as almost all Bengali in-laws are if they’re in the disadvantageous position of being of the daughter’s family: they convinced me (as they do each year) of the exceptionally good time they’d had. Kabir looked as if he’d had enough of wearing his khaki-coloured linen suit.

And so they dispersed, one by one, from Russell Street, which opens at this end on to Park Street. And, as on our wedding night, my wife and I were eventually left alone with each other—but on the compound of the Bengal Club. I didn’t want to leave the neighbourhood; I’d half-succumbed to the same wishful enchantment that I do when I’m here. Besides, I’d eaten too much; the residue of the piece of Christmas pudding saturated in brandy cream not only didn’t fit in with my experience of Christmas Day—it felt out of place in my stomach. My arteries were, predictably, asking for caffeine.

“Let’s go to Flurys,” I said, knowing fully we’d have to wait to get in. In my mind was the undeniable realisation, “Christmas comes once a year,” uttered by the angel floating ministeringly at one shoulder, with the devil at the other shoulder adding, “And you’re half a minute away from Park Street.” Perhaps they were both angels? And in which part of the world could you have such a Christmas afternoon, with its special aimless anticipation—except
in Calcutta, and here? People were at large. They looked unaware of various things, of the complex history that killed Christmas on this street and now for whatever reason had resurrected it. There’s something almost miraculous about the continual return of Christmas to Park Street; it’s a miracle that (despite the fact that all miracles are apocryphal) I didn’t want to miss. As with all festive occasions these days in this city, what had once started probably in the nineteenth century as part of a secular metamorphosis (the emergence of a new, busy, pleasure-loving middle class; a fresh air of celebration) is now woven into a cheery provincialism, of a city no longer emblematic but ordinary, yet uncannily lit by its past. The strollers on Park Street seemed as unmindful of yesterday as they were of history: Christmas Eve didn’t survive even as memory. They were on their way somewhere, for no good reason, as we were, to Flurys; the hawkers were selling the little clay Santas with the mildly nodding heads and parsimonious beards, as if Christmas Eve were still a few days away. It didn’t occur to them, or to the passers-by, that you mightn’t want anything to do with Santa—clay or otherwise—once Christmas Eve was over. I had once bought one for my daughter, a few years ago, and she didn’t want anything to do with it then; it stood on a shelf for two weeks, its head vibrating every time you struck it with your finger, and then its one colour began to fade, the already faint red ebbing into something like an impressionist’s wash. Its inside was white, and hollow like a bell. As with such objects, they become hand-me-downs to the less privileged, and a maid took it for her daughter after I reluctantly consented to part with it.