Calcutta (22 page)

What of Calcutta? It was that troubled and tragic time between 1968 and 1972 that he and Anitadi seemed to find most vivid. This was the period when the Naxalite revolution exploded, and then, in a few years, was brutally suppressed. “It was a fun time,” says Anitadi, with an odd, subversive excitement as I sip tea late into the evening; and it’s intriguing to hear those years, known mainly for their violence, invoked for their charm. But never before had the Mukherjees experienced the closeness and the thrill of danger—ideology breathed new life into their drawing room in Tivoli Park, and into the incipient adventure of their married life. Naxalite artists and filmmakers like Utpalendu Chakrabarty became interlopers during teatime. Samirda began to subscribe to and read the Naxalite journal
Deshabratyi
, and its English version,
Liberation
. Chaperoned and guided by the swanlike Anita, he saw his first Bengali play,
Tiner Talowar
(
The Tin Sword
), written by the great, vociferous Marxist playwright Utpal Dutta.

This mood—of cultural ferment and economic and social unrest—had been building up for years. It would, with its animosity to the oppressor, put an end to companies like Martin Burn and others. But it produced an incongruous gaiety. Utpal Basu tells me there was a “new Renaissance” then—by which he means a sort of efflorescence that rivals and parodies the famous Olympian Renaissance of the late nineteenth century, which produced Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, Swami Vivekananda, the Tagore family, and many other mythic actors. Utpalda’s list of figures from
his
Renaissance in the sixties is provocatively wide-ranging: the filmmakers Satyajit
Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, the sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, the football player Sailen Manna. To this must be added Utpalda himself, and his fellow poets, friends, and contemporaries who, like him, are associated with the journal
Krittibas
: the poets Sunil Ganguly (sober but epic), Shakti Chattopadhyay (perpetually drunk, often missing, quickly dead, and frequently worshipped), Sarat Mukherjee (famous for his first book of verse,
Rimbaud
,
Verlaine evam nijaswa
), and the sly prose writer Sandipan Chatterjee. And, of course, there was the “Hungry Generation” group of poets of which Shakti Chattopadhyay was also a part, and with whom Utpalda hung out: he reminds me that the rubric “Hungry Generation” came from Keats’s passionate remonstrance to the nightingale: “Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!/No hungry generations tread thee down …” Indeed, the portrayal of humanity—and perhaps England—in Keats’s ode is not too far from the circumstances in which many young people found themselves in Bengal at the time, conditions that would eventually galvanise Naxalbari: “The weariness, the fever and the fret / Here, where men sit and hear each other groan: /… Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies.”

My first remembered impressions of Calcutta are of that troubled, pulsating time. I would come to my uncle’s house in Pratapaditya Road for a month and a half during my summer vacations, and sometimes three weeks in the winter—and the volatile atmosphere, the hammer and sickle painted on walls, the home-made bombs being detonated in the distance (Pratapaditya Road was an area of disturbance), the refulgent Puja annuals that my cousins got as gifts, the
adhunik
songs on the radio, with their peculiar but characteristic melodic leaps, would be mixed up for me with the enchantment of the holidays, and with their melancholy, their inevitable coming-to-an-end. I didn’t want Calcutta
—that
Calcutta—to come to a close. Like Samirda
and Anitadi, for whom the Naxal years are inextricable from the romance of their early married life, that period for me is inseparable from vacations and a sudden, infinite surplus of time. The Naxals were liberating Bengal from the bourgeoisie; Samirda, thrown out of his house by his mother, was liberating himself from Martin Burn and his own high bourgeois ancestry; and I was liberating myself from studies, discipline, knowledge, and my home in Bombay.

I pointed out earlier that Samirda and his wife like to listen to their guests at tea, to—and this is especially true of Samirda—throw them a question, draw them out, and then to quietly watch. But it’s clear from what I’ve written that Samirda must also tell, that he is a raconteur. Some of what he revealed I fleshed out and filled in later, but much of it—anecdote, reverie, throwaway observation—emerged over teatime.

Samirda has met a long procession of people during these teas, and many more before his sedentary style of existence began; behind his shield of politeness, of one who has nothing significant to offer, he’s studied them and their delivery closely. Now and then he’ll mimic somebody: become, for instance, one of the privileged, possibly dead, “duffers” in his family (“duffer” is an epithet he uses of his more benign Ingabanga relations), and, at another moment, assume the shrewd, narrow-eyed air of an East Bengali politician, letting loose a
bangal
snippet from the corner of his mouth.

Samirda knows that it’s not just what you say but how you say it that makes you intrinsically interesting. His mimic’s knack is evidence that he doesn’t view his invitees without amusement; that he isn’t entirely at their mercy. He annihilates himself while attending to them as they finish their éclair from Kookie Jar; then, at some point, he annihilates them by
becoming
them in a little spontaneous display before another set of guests.

Someone I know, also a well-to-do victim of polio and frequenter of the Bengal Club, but one who continues to walk with crutches with a staccato, oppositional ferocity, once told me that Samirda hadn’t tried hard enough; that he could have been more mobile if he had. I’m not qualified to judge this statement. But with Samirda I’ve felt that he saw movement as he did his place in history—metaphorically: as something which he didn’t wish to struggle to attain, and which he was content to let slip and go its own way while he quietly went his. For this reason, his drawing room was where everything happened for him.

Mrs. Mukherjee Senior was becoming more frail; by the end of the nineties, she couldn’t observe the teas in their entirety. At a certain point in the evening, she’d go inside. She’d also grown more hard of hearing; but her curiosity was strong. She might want to know what had suddenly caused excitement or laughter; then Samirda would interrupt the flow of things in a loud dignified voice, shouting at her patiently in his perfect English—“NO MA, WHAT AMIT SAID IS …” because, invariably, the assumption was she’d misunderstood. And she would look startled and chastened, and remind her son with a pained, Victorian firmness, “There’s no need to shout, baba, I was only asking …” (“Baba” was a term this family of three used of each other—in fact, of anyone in their company—to express affection. They made it particularly forgiving and emollient.) Once these exchanges were done, conversation was resumed.

Samirda once told me that his mother’s finances had run out when she’d been forced to sell the one hundred thousand shares—“a decent number, giving her decent dividends”—in Martin Burn in the eighties. He’d left the company in 1986, ten years after its future had been sealed by nationalisation, and as the new Calcutta under the Left became a location inimical to private enterprise;
since then, he’d had no reliable, regular income, except the “measly,” ever-decreasing (in real terms) Rs 600 he got as a pension.

Towards the end of the millennium, Samirda also sounded more anxious than I’d known him to be. The property he lived in, the two-storeyed building, was tangled in some obscure but fatiguing litigation with a charitable and spiritual organisation. The organisation was behaving in this matter with less empathy and greater aggressiveness than it likes to be known for. Of course, Ramakrishna, sage and idiosyncratic figurehead of the organisation, had once astutely advised his fellow seekers: “You can’t be shy and retiring all the time. You need to know when to bare your fangs.” Those words had a powerful subterranean message in an age of colonialism. But the mystic may not have wanted his followers to bare their fangs at this Cambridge-educated bhadralok with polio. The problem had arisen from some reckless action by a loopy relative and his wife, who had involved the organisation in a transaction that had been interrupted upon their deaths. The organisation, as a result, had turned its attention to these surviving Mukherjees. In a state of panic, Samirda had begun disguising his voice when taking telephone calls, croaking “Hello” in an anomalous, dislocating manner to ward off bogus litigants. His relief was audible when he realised it was a harmless acquaintance at the other end; “Sorry, baba!” he’d say, sometimes adding “Dash it all!” before explaining the situation, and then finally let the conversation embrace the usual constellation of subjects—Sandipan Samajpati, the young classical vocalist; beautiful society ladies (Samirda, with his wife’s blessings and abetment, was a passive aesthete of feminine beauty); the present Marxist government (he and Anitadi had, at some point, resolved that they were fellow travellers).

*  *  *

Samirda was all praise for a certain Mayank Shah, whose virtues he began to enumerate to me in the mid-nineties. Shah was a Gujarati financial advisor through whom Samirda had discovered the infinite promise of equity. He’d put Samirda’s savings into the market; “He’s doing wonders with my money, baba,” I was told in a tone of grateful disbelief. “I hope he’s being careful with it,” I said at one point, sounding elderly, fussy, and superstitious about unforeseen material gain, and feeling a little envious of Samirda’s triumphant entry into the new financial order of risk and growth.

Then, in a few years, he was groaning and complaining bitterly. “Awful fellow—he doesn’t pick up the phone any more.” Mayank Shah, who’d come every week in the mornings bearing good tidings, had vanished temporarily. “I’ve lost lakhs, baba.” The reason for Shah’s new elusiveness was that he’d played with his clients’ money; he had, lately, become his clients’ debtor. “ ‘Give me one month, Mr. Mukherjee. I will return every paisa,’ he’s saying now,” said Samirda, unable to resist derisively replicating Mr. Shah’s Gujarati inflections. All this happened well before the crash of 2008, at a time when the market, like the unfathomable gods of Hindu mythology, was appearing fully incarnate to its devotees, and offering them boons and wishes of their choosing. People were reaping the most absurd and undeserved rewards: new cars, new houses, new lives that the market had the power to create, for its followers, out of a little bit of capital. As a result, a new faith in fate and destiny—
bhagya
—was in the air: I heard the word mentioned deferentially, with wonder, by speculators, Bollywood singers, even book distributors—anyone who had anything to do with success. I recall a conversation I overheard when my second novel,
Afternoon Raag
, was about to be published in 1993. I was visiting my distributor, the savvy and expansively affectionate Lal Hiranandani of India Book House, at his well-lit office in a dingy building on Lyndsay Street. I’d groped my way up the dark staircase, and spotted Lal: he was
speaking to a man (to whom he smartly introduced me) who looked like he’d never read a book in his life—probably a link in what was then a still fairly untested chain of Anglophone book distribution. They were staring, with a shared consternation and air of surrender, at the cover of the British trade magazine, the
Bookseller
, which announced news of Vikram Seth’s imminent
A Suitable Boy
. Lal’s interlocutor mentioned (in a dreamlike, rehearsed way, as if they’d had this exchange many times before, and would be compelled to have it again) the size of the near-imaginary advance the book had got—and, in a tic that Indian traders have, quickly translated the sum from pounds to rupees: “One and a half crores.” There was no more than a moment’s silence; then he touched his forehead and said,
“Bhagya.”
I’d never heard that word—immemorial, belonging to an arcane, resilient universe—used in such a context before, though I’ve heard it employed with that meaning since. It was as if the author, and his book’s merits, were irrelevant to the money it had earned: some ineffable element, which he called bhagya, but which was a bhagya that played upon, and through, the market, had produced this result—and confirmed the significance of his profession and calling, where he was an anonymous link.

Destiny, assuming Mayank Shah’s misleading persona, had, however, badly let down Samirda, and he was understandably bitter. About the matter of money, he was possibly a bit of a “duffer”; as we’ve all been proved to be.

The late nineties was a bad time for Samirda and Anitadi, coping with the charitable organisation and Mayank Shah. Apparently Anitadi would go to the court in the morning because of the litigation to do with the property, and come back dispirited and bewildered, not having followed a word of the legal gibberish.

And yet, at teatime, she was contained as ever; you relaxed as
you were taken out of the uncertain realm of your own decisions, your own volition, into a place where she was the one in control. She knew just how long she had to wait before she poured the tea; you didn’t have to get anxious about it, because she was obeying an invisible metronome. Even Samirda, despite his mild agitation, was calming and reassuring. They represented the continuance of a wishful gentility; we, their guests, needed to see them in that way for about an hour, or an hour and a half. We had an idea that their lives were falling apart, but the tea was a rebuttal, for all concerned, of this melodramatic piece of knowledge—we wouldn’t be here if things were really bad.