Calcutta (26 page)

I didn’t quite know what to expect, but the name itself—Pan Asia—carried the clipped accent of globalisation, and had little to do with the smoky Orient of colonisation, which had given birth, everywhere, to restaurants with names like Nanking and Golden Dragon. The interior was dark, but not dark in the way that Chinese restaurants used to be—atmospherically dark, so that you had to peer hard in the barely lit gloom before you spotted the chillies submerged in the vinegar, and only ever saw your soup in half light and half shadow; and its few colours came from the suspended Chinese-lantern lampshades and the red dragons on soup spoons. No, Pan Asia was dark in a business lounge way, the dark and quiet of a space in which you don’t expect to be threatened by crowds of people, its decor angular and minimal, without undue references to the Orient. Speaking of crowds, not far from the ITC Sonar Bangla was where the post-middle-class bastion of Chinese cuisine—post-Waldorf; post-Nanking; pre–Pan Asia—had sprung up in the last two decades, in the tannery district, Tangra, catering to the vernacular clientele of this city that was now without a definite name—Calcutta, Kolkata—serving all kinds, from real estate promoters and their families to academics and theirs, all who’d been levelled out into one harmonious congregation by Left rule, serving anyone who’d brave that intricate maze of lanes and plunge headlong into the stink of the tanneries. Tangra was, thus, at once famous and infamous. The Chinese had traditionally been in the tannery business; and,
at some point, as the respectable Chinese eateries of yore became a spent force, the Tangra families must have decided it was an opportune time to set up restaurants. In the early eighties, as Calcutta imploded and the middle-class migration outward soared and eating out dipped, Tangra began to gather a reputation for providing “real” Chinese food cooked by “real” Chinese families, this “realness” authenticated and properly endorsed by the smell of the tanneries and drains surrounding places like Golden Joy and Beijing.

Now, here was the crystalline, refracted Pan Asia, offering not only real, upmarket, international Chinese cuisine, but international Mongolian and Japanese food too. Chinese food once belonged to the domain of the neighbourhood—not just Chinatown; any neighbourhood—an ethos of loiterers killing time on workaday porches and signs with a particular kind of English lettering denoting the Chinese were nearby. Pan Asia implied there were no neighbourhoods; there were lounges, constituting brief, tranquil arrests on overnight journeys. At least that’s what we felt it was telling us as we slipped from the early afternoon sun into its interior. Its already celebrated, blade-thin, rectangular grill was on the left, with bar stools on every side. There was almost no one in the restaurant but us; it’s an experience I’ve only had in the static sadness of Indian small towns, of eating out without the general—and, really, indispensable—accompaniment of other customers, enrhythmed in the semi-animal bliss of now noticing, now ignoring, now being noticed, now being ignored; no, in the small town, you are alone, being lavished attention by three waiters who’ve been galvanised by your sullen otherness, and item after item which you’d abstractedly ordered now stubbornly makes its way towards your table. At Pan Asia, the three of us, the journalist from
Society
, my wife, and I, sat side by side on the bar stools like partners at a séance, and watched the
short, agile young chef’s hypnotic dicing of vegetables, his playful shoving and retrieval of cuttlefish from different directions, as if they’d never once been alive and were no more than a kind of ornament, like pasta shells. His spatula was at once a magician’s wand, bringing forth an illusion, and a conductor’s baton, making music. Everything he touched—vegetables, cuttlefish, prawns—were somehow reduced: he knew the art of transforming the plentiful into the economical. When we asked this performer respectfully if he was from China, he said no, he came from Nepal. “Chinese chef come and give me training,” he explained.

The food had been made with finesse. It had what we now think of as the strengths of good Chinese food: delicacy, simplicity, a fastidious avoidance of overcooking, a resultant crunchiness, a hushed regard for the taste of fresh ingredients. All this was new to Calcutta: an alien and as yet untested idea. We were later—though we were uncomfortably full—forced to try Japanese ice cream, in green tea and litchi flavours. We succumbed completely to Pan Asia. We set aside our vestigial dignity. We even took in our stride the cheesy photographs of ourselves that appeared later in
Society
magazine.

For a week later, our mood alternated between a marvelling at the green tea ice cream and a corroding guilt about the Mephistophelean pact we’d entered with
Society
and Pan Asia, in a country in which farmers frequently subsist on mango leaves and every other day kill themselves. Then, a year later, we set aside our scruples and revisited Pan Asia. We perched on almost the same bar stools. We stared, agog, at the performance. But something had changed. It was the food. The prawns were covered in a giant melt of thick, rich, creamy sauce. The green tea ice cream had become, mainly, home-made vanilla; you had to strain with fanatical, blind faith to believe you could taste green tea in it. I had one of those schizoid moments I’d had with cheesecake and
ginger pudding: had I simply imagined, or invented, the earlier experience?

“No,” said the chef, confirming I was still moderately sane, “Indians not liking those subtle flavours so much. They’re saying what is this ice cream, it’s not sweet. When American or Chinese visitor come, I making food more Chinese way.”

“Then you should have made it more Chinese way for us,” I said, barely able to contain my frustration.

“I’m not knowing, sir,” he responded wistfully. “Next time …”

If, indeed, there is a next time. “Kormaisation” is what this process, integral to Indian cuisine, might well be termed: a suffocation of individual ingredients in the interests of the sauce poured over it, the result of a dozen impossibly unlike condiments brought to a simmer and then turned into this all-purpose national deluge. It’s what had happened to the prawns. That chic, suggestive, but eventually vulnerable taste had perished only a year after it had arrived here.

There’s indeed a “new India” in Calcutta, although we place it generally in Bombay and New Delhi. It has risen stubbornly on the remains of the city as it was, and has even been extending it outward since the mid-nineties. The Taj Bengal, where I’m interviewing the restive chef (he must go to a staff birthday party), arose in a serene, historic location in Alipore a little before the “new India” came into being; the hotel was almost an afterthought on the ubiquitous Taj franchise’s part. You could view it as an early sign of investors’ faith in Jyoti Basu’s West Bengal; Basu, who, by 1989, when the Taj Bengal came up, had noted the changes sweeping the Eastern bloc and the world, and begun making terse noises about attracting “multinationals” to Bengal. A historic spot it occupies, the Taj, the half a square mile around it more or less as the British left it: early pastoral Calcutta,
defined by a sort of rural calm, on the right, with a rivulet running through it towards Kidderpore; and, to the left, a five minutes’ walk away, the grand mansions and estates once occupied by the literature-loving Warren Hastings, governor general of India, who was tried and impeached when he finally left this city for his native country in 1784. Important intellectual work was achieved here, just outside the Taj, or within a two-mile radius from it; work we either take for granted or have forgotten. For instance, the fact that the
Bhagavad Gita
has long been a book known worldwide owes much to Hastings’ advocacy of that text, which he noticed when it was translated into English by Charles Wilkins of the East India Company. Hastings’ onetime mansions have, fittingly, been converted since Independence into the National Library. Even closer to the Taj Bengal than the National Library is Alipore Zoo, a mere two minutes’ stroll across the road, another great, and fatally damaged, colonial heirloom. Its vivaciousness, comprising caged animals and middle-class children, survived to the late sixties, from when I recall not only the Bengal tiger, but loping white albino tigers, a gruesome, vile-tempered, and evidently miserable hybrid of a tiger and lion called the “tigon,” a patient, reptile-long queue waiting to enter the House of Reptiles, and a cafe in which we ate sliced egg pakoras with ketchup—although an aunt tells me her son and I spent our excursion urgently keeping track of crows. The zoo, today, hardly has a middle-class visitor; what you see, instead, is an array of humanity, tourists from small towns, villages, and suburbs, casually strewing plastic bags in their wake, lower middle class, working class, or plain poor, come to admire and wonder at and heckle the animals, whose responses range from indifferent to bewildered to contemptuous. These visitors are themselves hardly better looked after by the nation than the inarticulate inmates of the zoo, but are full of energy and noise,
exotic in their colours and behaviour, a reminder that, often, it seems in Calcutta that the bhadralok never existed, and we’re back in the extraordinary world of the early Kalighat paintings. Having “done” the zoo, this lot will then proceed desultorily to other significant colonial landmarks in and around here, throng the Victoria Memorial, laxly explore the maidan opposite the Race Course, and sit beneath the statues of British Tommies, Indian freedom fighters, and great Bengali visionaries and writers munching
jhaalmuri
and sucking ice lollies bought from the men positioned with carts. They may not muster up the courage, though, to invade the Horticultural Gardens, which is in the other direction, further up from the National Library, because it’s still the domain—with its prim, carefully nurtured plant life—of the shorts-wearing affluent. The other parts of colonial Calcutta in the immediate environs, however, they’ve annexed, and are at ease in. Inside the Taj, with chef Mukherjee, it’s hard to be aware of this ebb and flow; but, even if you’re ignorant of the existence of the zoo opposite, you’ll hear the tigers roaring, or surely the elephants trumpeting, at night—the cool nightfall of Bengal. The Taj is Janus-faced; one face looks towards, and is blind to, the historical city; the other face gazes welcomingly at the imminent (since 1989 at least) arrival of that “new India.”

Globalisation first made its presence palpable in Calcutta in the nineties with gated clusters of buildings which had peculiar names like Hiland Park and South City and Merlin. Some of them rose rapidly; others, caught in some legal tangle or other, took years to complete. These gated buildings had, or were meant to have, their own gymnasiums, swimming pools, and recreational clubs—sometimes even their own schools, Jacuzzis, shops, and cinema multiplexes. In contrast to their near-nonsensical names, names at which you could neither laugh nor rage, but register as
a mark of a puzzling shift of mood—in contrast to these names, their messages to the potential buyer were solemn and ingratiating. For example, Hiland Sapphire, an ongoing part of the Hiland Park project on Ballygunge Park Road, almost next door to where I live, gravely informs (mostly expatriate) customers: “A symbol of sophistication, a mark of dignity, Hiland Sapphire certainly is the residence of choice for the manor born.” By becoming a microcosm, by being self-sufficient, they fulfil a fantasy that many Calcuttans have secretly had for years: to live in the city without in any way depending on it, or being beholden to it, or subject to its vagaries.

In the meanwhile, two new hotels came up near Salt Lake, a suburban development that, by now, was beginning to feel derelict—came up without too much explanation, the ITC Sonar Bangla and the Hyatt, on stretches of wilderness that had no past, overlooking the EM Bypass. Who would stay in them? Surely business was going to be disappointing? The answer was—they were coming up as part of a larger wave. Calcutta was changing, was going to change, and the hotels would be there, prepared to participate and contribute when the change came.

On some such foresight was built New Town in Rajarhat, about twenty minutes away from the Hyatt, emerging on flat expanses of horizon and land on which the sun had been setting and rising without anyone taking note, except for straggly peasant families who could now be pushed aside with impunity, or appropriated as labour for the planned offices and residential tower blocks. The new IBM office compound was demarcated here. It appeared, for a while, that Rajarhat might spawn a Bangalore, a city geared towards the future. Then, one day, it felt like Rajarhat’s plans—like Calcutta-Kolkata’s—had been arrested midway, abandoned in a moment of despair and indecision. There’s a long highway cutting, in a series of right turns, through
Rajarhat to the airport, and people take it as an alternative to the old route via VIP Road, to avoid the slow-motion bazaar-like stoppages on the way, at outposts like Ultadanga and Baguihati. (I should add that this “old route” is itself a “new route,” and I remember well the older route to the airport through Manecktala in the early seventies, when, in the aftermath of the Naxal agitation, to be spotted in an Ambassador car was still a sign of bourgeois hubris, and a dangerous provocation to the crowd.) I probably first took the Rajarhat detour to the airport one dawn five years ago, and felt oppressed: because I’m always intimidated by silence and emptiness, and hadn’t realised there was so much of them to be found on this journey. That year, the buildings and offices began to rise in a spurt of brashness and colour, and with the swagger of liberalisation—a swagger that, like a card sharp’s bravado, promises it can pull off any trick, and does. It’s the swagger that produced the township of Gurgaon on the outskirts of Delhi. But from 2008 onward, I began to feel on my airport journeys that the project had been hastily set aside: that new buildings were coming up, but the card sharp had made an exit. Rajarhat was now a frozen city, nascent, like one of those unfortunate kingdoms in children’s stories where everything is pretty and spotless, but has a dread spell cast over it.