Calcutta (31 page)

The lighting, done by “the men from Chandannagar,” a town about thirty miles away from Calcutta, also contributes to this realm of astonishment. They follow no convention of “beautiful lighting”; the counterpart of the Puja lights are not the Christmas lights hung on Regent Street, but the patterns created by the plastic spiral stencils sold on streets, going round and round with your pen in different ellipses; the shards of colour that rearrange themselves within a kaleidoscope; covers of exercise books; pictures
blazoned in the local tabloid; “breaking news” messages and TV bulletins. Sometimes they swirl and form patterns; sometimes they depict the treasures contained in a child’s textbook, even something like the secrets of the inner ear, with the eardrum, the anvil, and the cochlea; often, they will represent—in repeated, moving sequences—an event that’s recently captured the imagination: rumours, in 1990, of a plague in Calcutta; Satyajit Ray receiving an Oscar for lifetime achievement; Princess Diana’s sudden death in a car crash; Amitabh Bachchan hosting the Indian version of
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
; the two aircraft flying straight into the doomed Twin Towers. They flash; they swiftly enact an episode; they begin again immediately. They’re meant to tell those stories until dawn, even when there’s no one in their proximity; just as, in some secret reflex, you’ll think of them after that year is over.

The myth of the Pujas is a simple one—full of rural sweetness. Durga, the mother, comes to our world from her world in the Himalayas, usually in early October, to slay the moustached asura who’s sprung out of the body of a buffalo and is now oppressing us all. Some such episode involving a bully must have occurred in our childhood, and we’d called upon our mother then to set it right. The Pujas are, in part, an ever-returning homage to that magical sense of being rescued, so indispensable to children. But we’re mostly grown up now, as we mill around the pandals, and we know that asuras aren’t easily disposed of, that mothers aren’t all-powerful; and it has to be admitted that it’s this sense of irony about the mother, and our stubborn denial of reality, that gives the Pujas their tenderness, and makes Durga, paradoxically, so strong. For she’s infinitely empowered by our need.

She arrives on a lion. Her ten arms are as familiar as some other physical deformity might be in someone you’ve long known. She’s
also called
mahishasuramardini
, “she-slayer of the buffalo-asura.” Arrayed on both sides are her children, Saraswati, Lakshmi, Kartik, Ganesh. According to the ordaining of the almanac, Durga may use a canoe or an elephant for transport. But she’s always depicted upon a lion. By the end of the Pujas, the myth moves into its second phase—of valediction, reminiscent, once more, of the sweet, powerful yearnings of rural life. By now, Durga has become our daughter; it’s time for her to go back to her husband, Shiva, in the Himalayas;
her
holidays—not just ours—are done. We’ve become her father; and, like every father, we know it’s futile to want to keep back a married daughter—she’s not ours to keep. In the Pujas’ ten days, we’ve somehow aged and spanned a lifetime, from being child to parent, as characters often do in the course of a novel.

Usually, I’m in Norwich before the goddess arrives, let alone before she’s departed for the Himalayas. At least, that’s been the case since 2006. But, in 2010, I asked for “study leave.” And though I stayed in Calcutta in 2011, the Pujas, before I knew it, were gone, with that faint, bittersweet surprise that overtakes you when things long anticipated are suddenly over. A day later, the pandals looked prematurely empty, the idols had been transferred to trucks and taken to the Hooghly River to be immersed; and, in two days, those pandals were being shorn patiently of their phantasmagoric and duplicitous outer covering, whatever it was that made them look, in the past week, like mock-landmarks or mock-monuments. I went past them in a car that week, as they became naked, overarching outlines of bamboo, tied together by rope—an extraordinary experience of illusory joy, to see them thus, almost exactly as they’d begun to appear three weeks ago. It’s as if some lost part of your life had returned to you, in a second lease of life, in a way it can’t from a photograph or recording—it’s
that moment when the Pujas will soon begin, it’s late September and the pandals are being hurriedly completed, and you haven’t gone to Norwich. It’s a twin season, just as sharath is to spring, dusk to twilight. This interval hasn’t been named yet, but it does come up before the week reaches proper closure.

Those frail bamboo husks are, for the time being, the last evidence in the year of the great craftsmanship of rural Bengal—the old ingenuity that’s channelled, yet again, into an event such as the Pujas. Something like the shapeliness of those husks, so finely put together despite their angularities, with none of the ricketiness that bamboo scaffolding has when buildings are being painted, is what the traveller Al-Biruni must have run into when he was here, in Bengal, in the tenth century, and found, he claims, not an agricultural but an artisanal society—people everywhere, not growing things, but making things with their hands and implements. I too feel as if I’m witnessing the products of some gift, or talent, special to these parts for centuries as I watch the bamboo structures being dismantled.

By craftsmanship I mean a quality of tactility, of “madeness.” It comes from the instinct to shape and touch things, to impart an intimacy to materials. By the 1860s, that urge seemed, superficially, to have been superseded; Bengalis had ceased becoming artisans and had begun to become artists—poets, sculptors, composers, and, later, filmmakers. As if keeping pace with this change, certain words developed new and startling meanings. For instance,
sahitya
, which had meant “text” or “textual content” or even “literary content,” came, by the end of the nineteenth century, to mean, specifically, “literature,” or the literary canon. Similarly,
kabi
, which was the word for an author of a scholarly or orthodox kind, now referred to a “poet,” in the modern sense of the word. The Bengalis had become moderns; no,
they
were
moderns. Speaking of Ishwarchandra Gupta, the great idiosyncratic poet of the nineteenth century, and the major poet of Bengali literature before it became a proper literature, Bankimchandra Chatterjee pointed out in 1885: “Ishwar Gupta is a kabi. But what kind of kabi?” He proceeded to clarify that Gupta might be a kabi, but that he was not a “poet”—deliberately using the English word. But the desire to be an artisan—such as, in a sense, Gupta was—would never quite die in the modern Bengali. The major Bengali painter of the twentieth century, Jamini Roy, a well-to-do bourgeois who studied the conventions of European painting at Calcutta’s Government College of Art, achieved his stylistic breakthrough by turning to the
pats
, or paintings, by the anonymous patuas of the nineteenth century who plied their works on a variety of sacred and profane subjects in the vicinity of the Kalighat temple. “I am a patua,” said Roy, firmly distancing himself from the term “painter,” in an unwitting but obverse mirror image of Bankimchandra’s remark about Ishwar Gupta.

Tagore,
the
great Bengali poet, in Bankimchandra’s sense of the term, with his beard, long hair, piercing gaze, and loose robes, the very image of the Romantic, also had deep artisanal impulses that overtook him spasmodically. Witness to these is his interest in bookmaking, in block prints and in engravings; his wonder, as a boy, at discovering the typeface from a printing press; but, most of all, his absorption in not just the style or content of writing, but its primary medium—handwriting or, in Bengali,
lipi
. For Tagore, handwriting is a craft, upon which he lavishes a subtle affection and which also becomes a means of exploration—it’s no accident that Tagore’s paintings, embarked upon in old age, arise from his manuscript corrections and deletions. It’s also probably logical that one of the products that Tagore endorsed in an advertisement was Sulekha ink. No other modern writer, or culture, has given to handwriting the curious place of privilege that
Tagore and bhadralok Bengal have. It’s where labour and design converge.

*  *  *

Just before the elections, a man called Sandip Roy and I met in a coffee shop near my house. Sandip had asked to interview me for a new web magazine set up by a television channel; he wanted my thoughts on the elections.

We discussed the Trinamool Congress, Mamata Banerjee, the Left Front—and Calcutta, of course. We’d both just returned to the city—I, from a short trip to England; he, from a few years of working in San Francisco. His mother was old; he’d made the move with this in mind, and was barely beginning a new life here—where he’d grown up, unlike me. We began comparing Indian cities—a common pastime when you’re talking about one of them.

“Well, Bombay’s main preoccupation is money, and Delhi’s is power,” I said, unconsciously parroting received wisdom. “Maybe Delhi these days is about
both
power and money. And Calcutta …”

“Calcutta’s preoccupation is ‘Will you be eating at home tonight?’ ”

He had echoed, verbatim, what my mother says to me, or to me and my wife, whenever we go out in the evening. It’s a question asked uninsistently, but with measured desperation—meant to exert a silent pressure on the person going out of the door. Sandip Roy’s words made me realise that neither I nor my mother are alone or unique. Very few people return to Calcutta today except to be with parents.

When we moved to Calcutta, my father was nearing seventy-eight; he’d accomplished his three-score-and-ten without any
major hitches; and, as I write this, he’s less than two months away from being ninety. At seventy-eight, he was still more active and agile than I am now, though, with hindsight, I can see the stealthy signs of dementia—mainly a slight loping oddness of gait—were already present.

Our plan, from 1999 onward, if the world didn’t end on the stroke of midnight at the millennium’s end, as many had hinted it would, was to “divide time” between Calcutta and England. This was what we’d been doing anyway; but the intention was now to invert the previous allocations of the year—to spend fewer months in England, more in India. Part of the reason for this was I didn’t want to discover one day that I was old, not far from death, and still living in England; for some reason, it didn’t seem like the right ending for the story my imagination had constructed of my life. I’d seen it happen to others—couples who’d lived much of their adult life in Bicester, or Rochdale, or in Newbury Park; always deferring the day of departure, always behaving as if they were temporary residents who’d been in England for only the last few months; then, when the time of departure came at last, it was a further deferral of their plans—it was a departure to the afterlife, no doubt another limited stint before they made their way back to Bengal. They were the banal counterparts of the figure in the de Chirico painting which V. S. Naipaul invokes in order to reflect on what he’s still doing in Wiltshire after so many years. We do what we do only with part volition—that much is a truism. I was determined to be neither like Naipaul nor that figure—and to exercise a choice while I was still conscious of the need for it.

My daughter’s coming to the world in 1998 gave me a reason to speed up that decision. And being an only child made necessary that anomalous arrangement—of living with my parents—upon our move. I say “anomalous” not only because such modes of coexistence
are long out of date, and an embarrassment, but because they were adhered to not out of any sense of convention—both R and I grew up in nuclear families. So we did what we did as an experiment—the mirror image of what those Bengalis in Bicester do, testing a way of life until it becomes their own without having to acknowledge it. To participate in it, I needed my wife’s tacit agreement. This wasn’t the way she, or I, had conceived the future; for her, living with ageing in-laws in the city she’d grown up in, and with her
own
parents a five minutes’ drive away.

But we were both fairly sure we were happy to give our daughter the childhood I’d never had, a Calcutta childhood; I’d intuited that, for the middle-class child at least, a Calcutta childhood is still a wonderful thing. It’s a city that (and my wife confirms this) lends itself to make-believe, if you’re open to make-believe, and to the kind of illusions precious to children. If you’re the more hard-headed kind of child, there’s also the rat-race to respond to, given the exacting emphasis the city’s secondary education system gives to exams; but, despite this—or because of it—there’s ample space for daydreaming.

Putting off Norwich for a year, I see what a nuisance my father has become. Unsurprisingly, he was once the man we all depended upon. The CEO of a major company, a man of calm and integrity, a foil to my mother’s impetuousness, he had, after retirement, become my accountant. Six years ago, I had to wrest this responsibility from him gently, and give it to a professional. Today, he spends his spare time (when he’s not staring at Bengali soaps, or “serials” as they’re called here, and lying in bed) on the chair in the sitting room, his largely useless walker (since he can hardly walk a step without fear of falling) and his daytime carer by his side—he a sort of chowkidar, a gatekeeper, wearing a polite, abstracted expression. His main mission (as is my mother’s) is to protect our daughter from us. The faraway look is misleading;
even a whispered reprimand from us to our daughter can stir him to a fury. Equally, my daughter is my father’s chowkidar. When he makes a move to get up, she raises the alarm as if the house is on fire. Ordinarily, she’s utterly lax, and notices nothing. But it’s clear that something deep-seated in her knows my father has poor short-term memory; that he falls almost each time he rises from his chair and, positioning himself against the walker, makes off for somewhere in his low-headed precarious way; knows, too, that he’ll have no memory of the fall after twenty minutes. So the house is in a constant state of tension, my daughter preternaturally anxious for my father’s welfare, my mostly incoherent father anxious that she may be under attack—from us, her parents and lifelong enemies. “The mad led by the blind”: that’s how a well-known city academic, Prof. Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, quoting
King Lear
, once mildly described to me Calcutta’s middle class. Also, children leading the old, and vice versa.