Calcutta (27 page)

I encountered this weird enchantment—the fairy-tale stillness of a globalisation that has no real resources—when my wife and I visited Pan Asia a third time, surreptitiously. It was afternoon; the glass doors were locked.

Was it a public holiday? (Within, the shadowy outlines of waiters lurked aimlessly. We stood like Hansel and Gretel, with nothing to fear really, only having to cope with a vague bourgeois deflation, a feeling of thwarted entitlement, at the end of our trek.) From Pan Asia—still, then, maybe the city’s most discussed
Oriental restaurant—we retreated in consternation, as from an illusion or a mirage, and were informed apologetically that all but two of the ITC Sonar Bangla’s dining places remained shut for lunch except on Saturdays and Sundays. There just weren’t enough customers to justify a daytime opening; so Pan Asia remained out of bounds, secret and semi-dark. Tellingly, the Sonar Bangla’s customers didn’t notice; they made robustly for the buffet at the coffee shop.

This inactivity at Pan Asia wasn’t emblematic; it felt accidental. No matter that industry and investment were failing to arrive in the city as they’d once, in the early 2000s, been expected to; new luxury hotels were planned regardless (as I write this, a new Marriott and a second Taj, to be erected near the Ruby General Hospital, are rumoured), like a transformation compelled to march into existence to a faraway drumbeat. So it was with residential buildings in general, even well after the crash of 2008, a setback which signified neither one thing nor the other to Calcutta—the gated enclaves kept coming up and multiplying, as did tall clusters of apartment blocks, fancifully renamed condominiums or “condos” for the Bengali buyer from New Jersey. On the ragged highway of the EM Bypass, and sometimes in the centre of the city, hovering over, say, a resistant traffic snarl on Camac Street, billboards promising the bucolic spaciousness, birdcall, and organic delights of new property rivalled the ubiquitous and conventional advertisements for gold jewellery and fairness creams. Among the stellar faces addressing the crowd- and traffic-entangled sojourner from those hoardings was the gifted actress Konkona Sen Sharma, looking unlike her usual self, and the tabla maestro Bickram Ghosh, as adept at playing complex time-signatures on his cheeks as upon his instrument, and his wife, the beautiful Tollywood star Jaya Seal. Bickram Ghosh, in particular,
bearded, with the alchemic air of a wizard (he is, not to forget, a genuine tabla wizard), proliferates everywhere, presiding over the city’s contradictions, its slightly inebriated, expanding property prices, and its ambiguous prospects, and, with his wife, smiles inclusively, without noticeable condescension, from a huge billboard near the Sonar Bangla, seeming to hold the key to the hope, the obduracy, and the curious fantasy of living in Calcutta.

To be asked to promote a new building is a peculiar accolade. Soon after I’d moved to this city in 1999, I was approached by someone representing a builder who asked me if I’d act as a presenter for a video meant for prospective buyers of flats in an already well-publicised development. To help me overcome my resistance, this man told me that the last presenter for one of their new and coveted apartment blocks had been Victor Banerjee, familiar to international Anglophone audiences for playing Dr. Aziz in David Lean’s fervid interpretation of
A Passage to India
. Victor (who is a friend) was, by now, a Bengali icon and a mascot and badge of honour for anyone who had anything to do with him in Calcutta. Once I’d disguised my embarrassment (after receiving the vituperative review in the
Statesman
on arriving here, I was steeled for any kind of interaction), I didn’t have the gumption to say “Yes” to the man on the telephone. Instead of an outright “No,” I quoted a fee more appropriate to Shah Rukh Khan than one who writes my kind of fiction. “I’ll get back to you,” said the man; but didn’t.

Globalisation may have come to Calcutta in relatively small doses, but it has nevertheless entered people’s bloodstreams; it makes them behave in certain ways. There was a time when bandh days—days of (usually) twelve-hour-long closure enforced by a political party or even the state government to protest one grievance or another—were total write-offs, neither working
days nor holidays (since no one risked going out till 6 p.m.), but, instead, longueurs of monastic contemplation. In today’s Calcutta, this doesn’t hold. I noticed this more than a year ago on going to the Forum—wondering if our tickets for the 6:30 p.m. show of a movie were any good after a bandh (introduced whimsically, without much prior warning) whose cut-off hour, as usual, was six o’clock. Instead, I found the Forum as stiflingly crowded with shoppers, film-goers, idlers, and the curious—generally, people at once importunate and at a loose end—as a rave is full of, and pulses with, revellers. They’d clearly rushed out of their abodes in the last thirty minutes (as had we), as soon as the clock struck six, to congregate here. This is what globalisation, more potent than a booster injection, more tenable than an infection, is capable of doing; of being, even before it’s a reality, a symptom.

Sunday, now, is the busiest day of the week. In the India I grew up in, Sunday reached its peak around midday with Ameen Sayani’s sonorities on the
Bournvita Quiz Contest
(which only had a following among proven devotees of radio), then declined into the ennui of afternoon and the Sunday Hindi film, all that happened later falling headlong towards the pointless human struggle that was Monday. In England (though things improved in the nineties), I was aware of Sunday being an abyss to the soul, a precipice that stealthily opened after Friday’s and Saturday’s crowded frenzy. Today, the fact that the Protestant work ethic (of which Monday is the prophet and beacon) has lost its reproachful edge in Calcutta is clear from how unbearably busy Sunday evenings are—with long traffic jams in front of South City Mall, and not a table free in restaurants on Park Street. All this—in a city without any demonstrable reasons for consumerist hope or activity. Shaped by student life in England, my wife and I are
aghast at this frenetic sociability before the new week begins, this almost philistine uncaringness for the idea of Monday morning. “Indians have no thought for tomorrow,” she says with Olympian finality, as if commenting on a race she’s recently discovered.

Malls, these days, are where you go in good times and bad, however variable or uncertain the future. When they first began to come up, they were looked upon by the last progeny of the bhadralok with a mix of suspicion, regret, and grudging pride, as standard bearers and omens of the city to come. Regret, because they often came up in what were, to the bhadralok, historic locations—as in the genteel calm (a calm that indicated, by the eighties, a condition close to extinction) of Elgin Road, from where the aristocracy had either departed, or closed ranks on the world. Here rose the Forum, a dazzling two hundred thousand square foot space on six levels, inclusive of a cinema multiplex and, later, a many-tiered car park. Almost next to it, on its right (if you’re facing the Forum from the Elgin Road entrance), is the art deco house which has always puzzled me, now in near-desuetude, wittily recalling a ship, complete with portholes, alluding to some maritime fancy, its driveway and porch obscured by foliage. How can it, with its air of being afloat, not bring to mind the de Chirico painting Naipaul describes? Opposite, the Forum overlooks the Netaji Bhavan, the house where Subhas Chandra Bose lived, and then fled the British, and India, in disguise, finally resurfacing in Japan as the Commander in Chief of the Indian National Army, never after to be glimpsed again. Next to this mysterious building, which is still pervaded by a misplaced undercurrent of loss for the youthful, bespectacled Bose, is Brajen Seal’s mansion—not the philosopher Brajen Seal, but another—which resembles a book open at several pages, a house in which no one could possibly live, so quiet it is, its gate fronted by an improvised
tea stall under a tree, and a phalanx of drivers biding their time while their employers shop in the Forum. I once trespassed into this place during the monsoons on the pretext of looking for someone, just after it had stopped raining at dusk, brazenly climbing up the stairs to the first floor, intuiting the presence of others, entering the hall that went past the closed doors of rooms, noting there was some medicine and a glass of water on a small table, and an easy chair, then shouting, “Hello! Anyone there?
Keu achhe?
” No one answered, but I now knew the house was inhabited. I was transfixed—both by my own transgression and by the potted plants on the terrace beyond the blurred window, quietly dripping water.

On the left of the Forum are the Roy Mansions, half of which is now demolished, and half occupied by Simaaya, a resplendent retail outlet for kitschy, expensive saris. Soon after we were married, and before Roy Mansions was forever altered in this way, I went with R and my in-laws to have dinner with her grand-aunt, the late Potty Mami, who lived in slightly shabby many-roomed grandeur in the immense flat on the ground floor, which is today’s Simaaya. There, I was served cold consommé as the first course for dinner, but, before that, instructed in helpful terms of the distinguished maternal lineage of my father-in-law’s extended family, Potty Mami’s recently deceased husband being the grandson of P. K. Ray, the first Indian principal of Presidency College, and she herself the unlikely but friendly granddaughter of the historian R. C. Dutt, author of the
Economic History of India
among other landmark works. I was only a few months married, and was just being made aware, in this well-meant, intrusive way, of a Calcutta I’d never known, missed, or mourned.

In the Forum, you could forget all about Calcutta, and spectate—the main occupation of the visitors, surpassing even shopping—on
the new breed of people walking past. This new breed (to which you yourself belong) may or may not be the citizens of a contemporary India, or even of a new Calcutta, but it’s here you see it in its full, surprising sweep and heterogeneity, ranging from members of the upper class, to the odd European, to college students, middle- and working-class people, and provincial families of different religions, some women fully enclosed in burqas, others flaunting bright saris, these families—especially the women and children—frequently creating an obstreperous distraction before the escalator, akin to inexperienced swimmers by a poolside, wanting, but hesitant, to take the plunge, pleased and shy at once at making an exhibition of themselves, cheered and scolded by the more daring members of the family, averted with an inured sigh by the veteran escalator-users, who dart past them straight into the moving staircase. Years have gone by since the Forum, and then the City Centre at Salt Lake, and then South City Mall near Jodhpur Park (at a million square feet, once the largest mall in Asia; then India; then East India—malls shrink constantly) were opened to the public, but this brief disruption and sundering—the awkward woman and child gazing with an air of judgement at the escalator, the husband and infant in his arms rapidly moving upwards and away from them—continues to recur. This is the new breed, and nowhere does it feel more at home than in the mall.

And it’s always possible to get a sighting of the famous. In the slightly quieter, halcyon days of the Forum, I often spotted June Maliah, reputed for her roles in Bengali cinema and especially soap operas, as she suddenly appeared from the edge of an escalator, or floated easefully a level below with her children. More than once, I’ve noticed the ebullient Bickram Ghosh somewhere in the distance,
mast
or happily preoccupied like the rest of us. Recently, I saw Srikanto Acharya, the dapper singer
of Tagore songs, waiting expectantly before the lift with his family.

What takes place in the malls seems unconnected to what’s happening in Calcutta, or West Bengal, or even to markets globally—I say this as one who’s visited them when things looked optimistic for the Left Front; when the future became murky for them; after they were jettisoned; before the recession; after the Indian markets limped back to life. The new breed has found its own rhythm here, a rhythm that might be hard to decipher, but difficult to deny. This is also where—besides exploring their options and assessing each other—they appear to find themselves. Never have I seen, in malls in other countries, the number of people I’ve noticed at South City or the Forum leaning against balconies, studying the lower levels, or the people ascending, apparition-like, on the escalator. It might be a mood that’s an offshoot of our weather (with its warmth and torpor) which gives us, childhood onward, a lonely, godlike vantage point on life. I know that to spectate thus on the movements of other people is a deep comfort to the purposeless and the homesick. I had a friend in Bombay, a classmate from school who couldn’t kick his drug habit, who, every twenty minutes into our conversation, would go out into the balcony, to involuntarily lean upon the banister and regain his inner calm. I’ve also noticed, often by chance, the silhouettes of maids who’ve worked and lived in our apartment, leaning and looking out into the compound while the world grows dark. What do they see?

In the South City Mall, especially, with its bewildering turnover, I’ve almost felt emboldened to stop passers-by and ask them where they’re going—what they’re doing here; what they want to buy; where they come from. I haven’t done so. The only time I approached someone out of the blue within the mall’s special
shell, unintroduced, was when, ascending to level two, I was startled to see five or six large African men ranged gracefully across the balcony. They turned out to be Nigerian soccer players in the employ of Mohammedan Sporting Club; celebrities with a tentative air, desiring, impossibly, not to be noticed, and somehow achieving this desire. From maybe the beginning of the twentieth century, football had been the prime passion in sport in Bengal, and, in the late seventies, the game was commercialised unbelievably, with star players departing for rival teams for the lure of a big reward, in the manner of their better-known European counterparts. Team coaches emerged as indefatigable personalities in their own right—the balding P. K. Banerjee, referred to as “Peekay,” once a star footballer himself, became the immensely successful brain behind East Bengal and, later, its rival, Mohun Bagan. Of course, Bengali football (synonymous, then, with Indian football) was played on a planet distinct from the one international football thrived in; football persisted in Calcutta as many obsessions did, as a miniaturist’s art, undertaken ferociously but microscopically, for its own delight.