India (57 page)

‘Traditionally in India the dealer network is a very potent force. They’re a breed apart. They may even be different from dealers in other countries. To a very large extent people in the dealer community have not been educated. But they are naturally talented at making money. They take pleasure in making money, and more
money. It’s a family business, handed down from generation to generation. They will sit from 10 to 10 at night in their little shops and think nothing of it – that’s their life. They keep rolling the money they make into more and more profitable ventures. And they like to show that they have money. The dealers’ houses might have chandeliers and wall-to-wall carpeting, quite unnecessary, imported TV colour sets, and curtains and cushions in the most garish colours.

‘But these people are important to companies. So you have these sophisticated organizations with their trained manpower from management institutes, who then have to learn to deal with people who are semi-literate but extremely savvy when it comes to money matters. We need them more than they need us, at this moment in our country’s development.

The strength of a dealer’s shop or “counter” – that is how it is referred to: So-and-so is a good counter or a poor counter or a reliable counter – comes from his having been, or his family having been, in business for generations. He knows what his market will take.

‘The targets are worked out on a counter basis for each town. We might say of a dealer: “He’s a good 500-TV-set counter, and I must get him to sell 200 of mine.” That’s the kind of thinking that’s taking place in an executive’s mind. And once he returns to his base city or town, with his head muzzy with too much drink and travel, he’s on to his computer, feeding it with all this information. No sales manager worth his salt can be found without his strips of Alka-Seltzer – they all have stomach problems – along with their calculators. They’re drinking till 11 or 12 at night, and they’re up again at 8.30 or 9, to face the new day.

The boxwallah of the bygone era was really, typically, a shallow fellow, interested in appearances and the good life. We’ve swung the other way today. Professionally, the executive today is superior to his counterpart of 15 years ago, but his development as a human being is retarded. He is becoming more of an automaton. He physically has little time to think about anything except the turnover and collection targets for the month.

‘If I had known that marketing was going to turn out to be like this, I probably wouldn’t have wanted to go into it when I was young. I’ve turned down requests from the company to move into direct selling jobs. I don’t want to pay that kind of price. I prefer
to stay on the advertising side. And I don’t have to do the extra things the sales executives have to do – going to the airport to meet this boss and that boss and take them home and spend an evening with them. I don’t have to do that at all.

‘Life is hard now for the executive, and the city of Calcutta adds to this pressure, by offering so little in return to a person who’s putting in so much effort. After a hard day’s work you can find yourself stranded in a car for hours on end, and when you return home there is no power. There are generators, but they make a dreadful din, and are limited. Apart from visiting one of Calcutta’s clubs, if he’s fortunate enough to be a member, an executive has little choice of places to go. He cannot go out walking because the pavements and the roads don’t allow it. The parks are overcrowded. Most of these parks are infested with rich young men and women who take their cars and turn up their car stereos and eat all evening – junk food from hawkers – and throw the litter around.

The infrastructure of the city is crumbling. The drainage system is perhaps the worst in the world. In the monsoon, major areas of the city are waterlogged for anything up to 72 hours at a time. One year the water never drained away. Carcases of animals appeared, and we were afraid of an epidemic.

The only section of people here who seem to be thriving in Calcutta are the Marwaris. They came from parts of Rajasthan a couple of hundred years ago. They thrive by being middlemen, buying and selling. This is what they were good at, and they continue to be. They were never known for cultural or technical skills. And they just grew as a community. They have been the only ones, in the last 15 or 20 years, who are able to buy properties in the posh areas where previously only the rich Bengalis or expatriate executives lived. They have participated in the property boom. Today in these areas you have multi-storey buildings coming up – one more nail in the coffin of the city: more cars, more sanitation problems, etc. – with the Marwaris themselves occupying most of the apartments.

The other aspect is that some of the very rich Marwaris keep buying up companies after buying just enough shares to gain control. And so a number of old firms are now in the hands of Marwaris. Most of them do not nurture or invest in these companies. They strip the assets. They are quite happy to let the
company become more and more sick. It is also true that in the earlier era the British didn’t bother very much about growth. Their main concern was repatriation of a certain amount of profits in foreign exchange to the parent company, and most British managing directors came here for a short-term period of three or five years.

‘At the other end of the spectrum you have the red-flag-waving unions constantly playing cat-and-mouse with the management. The union leaders themselves don’t do any work at all. The unions represent what ultimately the true Bengali is like: he is indolent, doesn’t want to work, but he wants something for nothing, and he must protect his dignity at all costs. He will publicly despise the Marwari trader, but he wouldn’t be able to do the same job himself.

‘We put in a great deal of effort. We draw a monthly pay cheque. And for people like us, who are not businessmen, we feel that the city in which we live must offer us something in return. We must at the end of the working day have more than the prospect of just coming back home. You can’t go to any cinema house, because most of them have poor sound systems and virtually non-functioning air-conditioning systems – they don’t renovate them. I haven’t been to a cinema hall in Calcutta for five or six years.

‘I have told you how as a young man I longed to break into the world of marketing. I have done that, and I can say that professionally I have done well. But that profession hasn’t turned out to be what I thought, and now I feel that those of us in Calcutta who are in the middle between the Marwaris and the trade-union Marxists – the executive class, who used to be an influential part of the city – are slowly being squeezed out of existence.

‘The fact is that the problems of Calcutta are of a magnitude that cannot be endured. My wife and I feel now that we won’t see improvements in our lifetime. We feel we should be trying our luck somewhere else, and saying goodbye to Calcutta.’

My own days in Calcutta had been hard. When I had first come to Calcutta, in 1962, I had, after the early days of strain, settled into the big-city life of the place; had had the feeling of being in a true metropolis, with the social and cultural stimulation of such a place. Something of that life was still there. But I was overpowered this time by my own wretchedness, the taste of the water, corrupting
both coffee and tea as it corrupted food, by the brown smoke of cars and buses, by the dug-up roads and broken footpaths, by the dirt, by the crowds; and could not accept the consolation offered by some people that in a country as poor as India the aesthetic side of things didn’t matter.

My feelings went the other way. In richer countries, where people could create reasonably pleasant home surroundings for themselves, perhaps, after all, public squalor was bearable. In India, where most people lived in such poor conditions, the combination of private squalor and an encompassing squalor outside was quite stupefying. It would have given people not only a low idea of their needs – air, water, space for stretching out – but it must also have given people a low idea of their possibilities, as makers or doers. Some such low idea of human needs and possibilities would surely have been responsible for the general shoddiness of Indian industrial goods, the ugliness and unsuitability of so much of post-independence architecture, the smoking buses and cars, the chemically-tainted streets, the smoking factories.

‘Everybody is
suffering
here,’ a famous actor said at dinner one evening. And that simple word, corroborating what Ashok had said, was like an illumination.

For years and years, and even during the time of my first visit in 1962, it had been said that Calcutta was dying, that its port was silting up, its antiquated industry declining. But Calcutta hadn’t died. It hadn’t done much, but it had gone on; and it had begun to appear that the prophecy had been excessive. Now it occurred to me that perhaps this was what happened when cities died. They didn’t die with a bang; they didn’t die only when they were abandoned. Perhaps they died like this: when everybody was suffering, when transport was so hard that working people gave up jobs they needed because they feared the suffering of the travel; when no one had clean water or air; and no one could go walking. Perhaps cities died when they lost the amenities that cities provided, the visual excitement, the heightened sense of human possibility, and became simply places where there were too many people, and people suffered.

Calcutta had had a left-wing or Marxist government for years, and I was told that the money nowadays was going to the countryside, that the misery of Calcutta was part of a more humane
Marxist plan. But things are often as they appear, and it is possible that this is one of the ways cities die: when governments are dogmatic or foolish, killing where they cannot create, when people and governments conspire to frighten away the money and the life they need, when, in a further inversion, the poetry of revolution becomes its own intoxication, and Marxism becomes the opiate of the idle people.

Perhaps when a city dies the ghost of its old economic life lingers on. So, in Calcutta, old firms with famous names are taken over and their assets are broken up; and people invest in real estate, since people always have to live somewhere; and there is an illusion of an economic life. Every few days, in a further illusion of activity, there is a political demonstration; and idle young men, morose and virtuous-looking, take their red flags and slogans through the self-perpetuating misery of the streets; and money and ambition and creativity go elsewhere in India. Without the rest of India to take the strain, the death of Calcutta might show more clearly, and Bengal might show as another Bangladesh – too many people, too little sanitation, too little power.

At the back of the hotel was a market: I looked down on its low, spreading roof. Buzzards perched on the ledges of the hotel, waiting. The ledges were black with an accumulation of blown dust and the grit of brown traffic smoke. The style of the British-built red-brick building opposite the market – the formality, the symmetry, the elegance, the thought, the confidence, the reference to classical ornament – was now oddly at variance with the life of the street, and seemed to come from a dead age.

The sticky-looking asphalt of the cambered street lay between wide, irregular drifts of dust that had hardened to earth in the gutters at the side; the streets would be washed now only by the monsoon. The once paved footpath outside the market had crumbled and in places merged with the earth in the gutters. People went about minute tasks. Men pulled rickshaws. In 1962 this had been offensive to see, but it was said that the poor needed employment. Twenty-seven years on, the rickshaws were still there. The same thing was said about employment for the poor; but the Calcuttans, with their low ideas of human needs and possibilities, appeared genuinely to enjoy the man-pulled rickshaw as a form of transport; and many of the rickshaws looked nice and new, not like things on the way out. Minute tasks: one man walked
by carrying a single, limber, dancing sheet of plywood on his head. Other people went about perfectly seriously carrying tiny loads on their heads, no doubt for very small fees.

On important days big circular baskets of trussed white chickens appeared outside the market, and one or two men seemed idly engaged for some minutes throwing trussed chickens from one basket to another. Then one noticed that the basket from which the chickens were being thrown was full of movement, and the basket into which the chickens were being thrown was still. And then one saw that the gesture of chicken-throwing also contained another, the wringing of the chicken’s neck: two jobs combined in a single, fluent, circular gesture.

One man might then be seen taking away his own little load of dead white chickens: the chickens artistically arranged into a big feathery ball hung on the handle of his old bicycle, the feathers of the stiff dead chickens hanging down the other way and showing brown-yellow rather than white, with the stiff brown claws and legs like spokes in the feathery ball, like sticks in candyfloss. The man had trouble arranging the load on his bicycle. When he first tried to get on the bicycle and ride away, the chickens got in the way of his knees.

At the end of the day a little green pick-up truck came, and the wide circular baskets, empty now, were stacked in the truck in two piles. When the truck went away, there remained – in this city where rubbish was seldom cleared – only a few scattered white feathers in the dust of the broken and silted-up street.

The British were in Calcutta for a long time. It might be said that the Anglo-Bengali culture – out of which modern India grew – is as old as the United States. Raja Ram Mohun Roy, the first exponent of that culture, was born in 1772, four years before the Declaration of Independence. From Raja Ram Mohun Roy there is a direct line to Rabindranath Tagore, whom Chidananda Das Gupta saw in 1940 when he first went to Tagore’s university at Shantiniketan.

On that visit Chidananda heard Tagore, nearly eighty, deliver a talk in the Shantiniketan temple on ‘Crisis in Civilization’. In that talk – a famous talk, published a few months after Chidananda heard it – Tagore said he had always believed that ‘the springs of
civilization’ would come out of ‘the heart of Europe’. Now, with the war and the coming cataclysm, he could no longer have that faith. But he couldn’t lose faith in man; that would be a sin. He lived now in the hope that the dawn would come from the East, ‘where the sun rises’, and that the saviour would be born ‘in our midst, in this poverty-shamed hovel which is India’.