Calcutta (34 page)

After three and a half years, the standards in our kitchen—precarious anyway after Lakkhi’s departure—had declined strikingly. A good cook is near impossible to find. People who take up that line of work are conversant with the stereotypical protagonists of Bengali cuisine—daal,
maacher jhol
(fish curry),
kasha mangsho
(dry mutton curry), even the sought-after
malai
curry, made with prawns and coconut milk—and they know the motions of cooking, of vigorously and convincingly scraping the
kadhai
with the spatula; but only have a dim sense of what the food tastes like. This may have to do with Bengal’s economic setbacks; yet great artist-cooks were in more plentiful supply when Bengal, in the twentieth century, was as economically devastated as it is today, if not more. Partly it’s a symbol of rural and urban Bengal’s gradual loss of its past, with its delicate artisanal textures. This food too was delicate. Now it is watery. For there’s a thin line separating the delicate from the bloodless, in art as in food. Partly it has to do with the nature of Bengali modernity, which emerged in the nineteenth century as a secular puritanism—evident most clearly in the tenets and practices of Rammohun Roy and Debendranath Tagore’s Brahmo Samaj. This puritanism, which rejected the Hindu gods and goddesses and their antics in favour of an immanent radiance, and which, in the realm of the arts, preferred the implicit to the over-the-top, also kept its distance from strong and violent flavours in food. That modernity is on its last legs, as is its food. What was once implicit is now insipid.

For these and other reasons, feelers needed to be sent out to Lakkhi. Besides, R, who works at a research centre from morning to evening, doesn’t have time to toil over food and research at once. I, who live in Calcutta when I’m not travelling or in Norwich, and who once honed my culinary skills in England, am presently too lazy to take on the responsibilities of the kitchen. My mother is in her late eighties, and can hardly be expected to rustle up meals. Also, what we spend on Lakkhi’s monthly salary and food is roughly what R and I would spend on two or three dinners at decent restaurants. Our approach regarding Lakkhi isn’t unique to Calcutta; it’s the machinery—cheap labour—on which India, even the world, runs today. I say this not to exculpate
myself, but to point out that I’m complicit not in a local mode of exploitation, but in a global arrangement. Lakkhi was doing bits-and-pieces work when we sent out the feelers; she was reluctantly happy to, on a marginally higher salary, take up her rightful position again. Calm came back to the kitchen—the false calm around the returned exile, the resumption of a status quo that conceals inner trouble.

I actually like Lakkhi, and I think she likes us. She takes from us little in comparison to what we take from her; but sometimes she also gives. Her gifts are food she’s cooked at home and brought with her when we’re still at breakfast, before temperatures have spiked
—taal
fritters, brown outside, white within, with a faint sweet aftertaste; the quintessential
pithé
, cooked in the way my mother abhors, in milk; little trumpet-like flowers from the pumpkin plant that grew from seeds she planted next to her home, which will be deep-fried in a yellow
besan
batter.

If I’m right, then it’s not the sort of liking that arises from conversation and shared views. But I remember first experiencing this mutual—what is the opposite of antipathy?—affection after she invited us to her older daughter’s wedding in 2004, just after the rains. She’d insisted we must come, and we were intent on going. We saw Subhasgram as in a waking dream—the level-crossing, the railway tracks, the road, the array of built-up houses, the row of bricks that were partly submerged in the undrained monsoon water, and which we negotiated gingerly to reach the porch of Lakkhi’s sister-in-law’s house—which, signalling the auspicious day, had a light raiment of fairy lights. There, I experienced the onrush of Lakkhi’s love, her unexpected hand stroking my arm with a sisterly pressure, her mixture of happiness and sadness when we made our way back, wavering on that line of bricks. She didn’t serve us food that evening, but sat beaming beside us
as we ate. It was a small room, with folding chairs and long tables on trestles; and, briefly, during the wedding, our old selves—with their distrust and animosities—died. That strange, transcendental mood lasted till we left Subhasgram.

After Lakkhi took up her job for the third time, there was yet another glitch in her narrative of employment in our household. Her husband, the grocer, developed cancer of the mouth: the outcome of dedicated gutka-chewing. Christopher Hitchens, just a few days dead as I write this, said in an interview that death didn’t scare him, it was a nothing, an annulment, no surprises there, but that “a sordid dying” did. “Cancer can do that to you,” he told Jeremy Paxman sombrely. I think Lakkhi’s husband and most (mainly poor) gutka-addicts I know, who use the narcotic as a pick-me-up in the day, are similarly unafraid, and can’t not know of its corrosive reputation for causing cancer, but toss it mouthward, without a care for tomorrow. But gutka punishes with a “sordid dying,” and this is what happened very quickly to Lakkhi’s husband. She was put on paid leave, but would come anyway to cook for us well after midday. On some days, she’d have to be with him in the government hospital for his treatment. That invariably spelt trouble for us and our lunch. Lakkhi’s husband’s mouth, in the meanwhile, was out of action; he was being drip-fed by a tube inserted in his throat. I asked Lakkhi if he’d had chemotherapy in the hospital; she didn’t think so. She looked a bit vague, exasperated, and out of it. I asked for the doctor’s papers. Having promised me she’d bring them, Lakkhi vanished for ten days. We heard soon after that her husband had died. Then, wounded but mildly relieved, Lakkhi, like one who’s come back from a rough vacation, took up employment again.

*  *  *

There are times when the kaajer lok situation is in chronic disarray, and there’s no remedy, and
Shampar baba
—“Shampa’s dad”—must be called. Shampar baba lives in Digha, a seaside resort that’s a holiday destination, but is held in vague disrepute. He runs a “hotel” there; that is, a streetside eatery such as Ramayan Shah’s near Mocambo, serving luchi and vegetables for breakfast and fish or vegetables for lunch and dinner to a constituency of about fifty people a day. He’s not a professional supplier of domestics, but can occasionally think of someone in his neighbourhood who requires a job, and send them promptly in our direction. Or he’ll accompany them himself, usually a diffident girl in her early twenties who’s never worked or seen a city before, but might be lately ditched by her spouse, or unable for whatever reason to get married—the choice is always between the devil, the husband, and employment, the choppy ocean—and on arrival, she must come to an agreement on terms in our drawing room. If the terms don’t work out, they immediately depart, without ostensible hard feelings, to make the journey back to Digha after having obtained the return fares from one of us. If an agreement is reached, Shampar baba will mutter mantralike bits of advice and probably reassurances to the diffident girl as he leaves her on the strange, bookshelf- and photograph-lined, decoration-adorned, furnished terrain of our Sunny Park apartment.

My mother is particularly addicted to Shampar baba; because he has a palliative tone on the telephone, and never forgets to promise even if he can’t deliver. My mother’s never heard him say “No”; at the very worst and least hopeful it’s been “Yes, I know someone, Ma, don’t worry, she’s tied up now but will be free to work in a month.” Who wouldn’t want to talk repeatedly to a man who’s dispensed with the negative? Only last month, in a thankfully short-lived period of flux, my mother said, “I’ve just
spoken to Shampar baba, he said it’s all right, he’ll send someone soon.”

R commented reflectively to me, “It’s strange we still speak of Shampar baba when Shampa herself is no longer around.” That’s true—Shampa died this year in May, barely nineteen years old. Shampar baba—whose real name is Nagen—is someone we got to know courtesy of Shampa, who first came to our apartment (I must have been away, because I didn’t see her then) when she was fifteen; there was a vacancy, and someone who works in the building asked her to turn up for the job. R and my mother couldn’t put her to work, realising she was underage; during the day, my mother made her practise reading, which she’d lost touch with since leaving school. She tells me Shampa read from my daughter’s Bengali books in the drawing room, loudly and solemnly. R pricked up her ears when Shampa complained impatiently in the kitchen: “Stupid cough—wonder when it’ll go!” She noticed Shampa got mild recurrent fevers. She and my mother were scared, since our daughter at the time was around ten. R sent Shampa to Dr. Lal, our physician, who suspected tuberculosis. This turned out to be true. After having spent ten days in our house, Shampa went back home with her father, while R began to pay for her medication and treatment. TB, in theory, is treatable today, though there’s a growing number of drug-resistant mutations.

When Shampa came to visit us two years ago, when I saw her for the first time, the tuberculosis had relapsed, though I noticed no sign of it. I saw a fairly small girl with full lips and dark eyes and a wheatish colour, hair parted in the middle and tied at the back, a familiar smile—probably because she’d seen my pictures earlier on a shelf or wall, and heard me mentioned—and no cough, nothing that remotely brought to mind mortality. No cause for
anxiety, then; this was the twenty-first century; people who’d got the flu looked far worse off. The first rebuttal of suspicion was, as is often the case, Shampa’s cheerfulness. She was in no mood—and didn’t really seem to have the time—to be terminally ill.

At that point, in fact, she probably wasn’t. And I think she took the prospect of taking on the role of a domestic in the future—there weren’t that many job alternatives for her—robustly, as something that was, for now, being discreetly deferred. Of course, a young girl like Shampa can remain cheery in spite of a possible future of domestic work, because she’s expecting, any day, to get married. Pretty and demure working-class girls like Shampa, blithely less than semi-literate, will get snapped up by bridegrooms, vanish, and then be reincarnated as young mothers raising children. Despite the general misery and constraints of these arrangements, I’d say part of Shampa’s air of happiness came from the status of the girl child in Bengal—where the daughter isn’t, unlike in parts of North India, viewed as a threat to be nipped in the bud. Female foeticide is common in North India, but I sense that rules governing the revealing of the sex of the foetus are followed quite strictly in Calcutta hospitals, whatever other rules are disregarded. And I know many kaajer lok who don’t grudge educating their daughters. Not that girls in Punjab and Haryana, who’ve missed being aborted by a whisker, don’t have an air of natural contentment as they grow up, before becoming wives. But my sense is that, while the birth of a daughter almost everywhere in India is a disappointment, it isn’t, for people like Nagen, an absolute calamity. Does this have something to do with the Left Front government? I know that they attempted actively to educate people in this regard. At any rate, it was impossible to know the exact cause of Shampa’s happiness.

Nevertheless, the news, probably from Nagen, that the illness had relapsed—without too many visible symptoms, as far as I could see—was cause for concern. TB had disappeared from Calcutta
and the world, and then it resurfaced here in the eighties, initially as treatable as any minor infection, and then emerging in fatal variants. Was it “too late” for Shampa? It hardly seemed so. Yet, bantering lightly with her, I was nervous—mainly for my daughter. Shampa spent no more than one or two or three afternoons with us on that visit, but that felt like one afternoon too many. When I looked upon her, I felt the odd disquiet I’d felt, in 1986, watching my music teacher singing raga Abhogi on the stage, and noticing something about his colour that made me uncomfortable. I’d had a premonition, then—not of death, but of death that could be averted. I had the same hunch when I viewed Shampa. We decided to send her to Dr. Nandy, our new physician, with an array of medical reports and X-rays. Dr. Nandy wasn’t too happy: “She hasn’t been cured,” he said, “and it’s coming back. The treatment hasn’t been right.”

Looking for a phone number in a notebook kept in my bedside drawer, I find Shampa’s name and contact details in my wife’s handwriting, and the following:

PRESCRIPTION

—Cap R Cinex (600) 1 capsule daily in the morning after b’fast.

—Pyzide (750) 1 tab twice a day after food

—Sthambitol (100 mg) 1 tab daily after food

—Benadon (40) 1 daily

The words are antediluvian—like much of the other information in the notebook, they’ve become irrelevant; yet they retain an air of pressing importance.

Usually, in the case of tuberculosis as with antiretroviral therapy for HIV, the reason for a setback is simple: an interruption in the regime of medication. In South Africa, where TB is the major
killer, larger in scale than AIDS, I’d heard repeated and emollient radio announcements in a taxi, asking patients not to ever stop taking medicine, even for a day, until the course was complete. Some such thing must have happened with Shampa, and from a lack of discipline and organisation rather than from not having access to the medicine. R had paid for Shampa’s treatment for more than a year, until Shampar baba told her to stop, because free medication was now available from the district hospital. I’m not exactly sure what occurred later. But I told Shampar baba, after Dr. Nandy’s diagnosis, that his daughter was in danger, that he must take her to the hospital to find out what was wrong. Shampar baba, in his simple, reassuring style, told me that this was what he intended to do. We said goodbye for the time being to Shampa, who had inherited from her father his conciliatory demeanour, a demeanour of this world, and entirely at home in it, and remote from startlements and anxieties and hints of the afterlife. We couldn’t forget her, of course, because she’d call my mother from time to time to chat with her (distance, and a lack of prolonged intermingling—the curse of human beings and of domestics and their employers—ensured they got on well); also, my mother needed habitually to phone Shampar baba, because kaajer lok are forever in flux. Then we heard she was married! She must have healed! We could relax, although our quest for stable and good kaajer lok would of course be eternal. Marriage, as an endorsement, as a long-term enterprise that will brook no distraction, has a weight of finality about it. “Shampa is married” means “Shampa is well; the sputum tests are now irrelevant.” There was still, in me, a subconscious undertow of fear; when, holidaying in Bombay, my daughter developed a dry, irritable cough which she unthinkingly displayed everywhere—crossing the street, in restaurants, watching TV—my thoughts telescoped, and my head swam with Shampa’s visits. It was ascertained before too long that
it was an allergic cough. Peace again: life’s full of such inhalations and exhalations. Then, back from a short trip to England in May 2011, I was at home when my mother phoned Shampar baba and he said,
“O chole gechhe, o aar nei”
—“She’s gone, she’s no more.” When my mother runs over Shampa’s story, her lip quivers—for, at eighty-six, still relatively youthful, she’s survived many friends and relations and acquaintances, known many people—real and fictional—who lived and passed into oblivion; as we grow old, we’re unsettled not by our need of those who are suddenly absent, but by the coalescing of an old, quite familiar, disappointment.