Calcutta (36 page)

Raja was flattered by my attention and made a big show of
avoiding me. We began to understand, after a week, that his appearances weren’t going to be exceptional—they’d be the norm, for he was arriving at our flat every day with his careless-seeming grandmother.

He was very dark: what Bengalis call
kuch kuche kaalo
or “extremely black”—his late grandfather’s complexion, apparently. He had an undernourished, springy agility and bright eyes. Lakkhi had no choice but to bring him along for now. Her younger daughter, Raja’s mother, was mentally challenged—that much we knew. She’d been married off six or seven years ago with the usual transactional resolve that Indians have—that life, sociability, and procreation must continue regardless, that marriage is a simple counter to the untoward. Husband and wife produced this child: further evidence of marriage’s primordial normalcy. Then, as husbands will, the man vanished. The younger daughter returned to Lakkhi, abstracted and strangely discontented. She had little awareness of or interest in Raja. He, in the meanwhile, had begun to go out on excursions, and Lakkhi found the mother in one place and the boy in another. She fretted; but she had the cooking to do. So she began to bring him to our apartment and deposit him in the kitchen.

He was a clever boy and, once he got over his shyness, full of a specious bravado. It was extraordinary to hear him in the kitchen—disrupting a place of work.

“Are you going to put him in a school?” I challenged Lakkhi. It may have slipped her mind.

“Yes, I’m looking for a place for him, somewhere I can keep him while I’m here,” she said in her characteristic way, suggestive that every decision she has to take, including removing food from the fridge, is onerous.

“A place you can pick him up from on the way back, or a place he can stay in?”

“It would be best to pick him up,” she said, again with that tortured look.

“Then it should be somewhere around here,” I said, gesturing vaguely at the haute bhadralok vicinity of Ballygunge. “I have a school in mind.”

I had a stealthy feeling my efforts would come to nothing—I’ve noticed, from a review of past actions, that my attempts to help people are usually oddly thwarted, by a combination of circumstances and probably by an overestimation by me of the wider world’s receptivity to my ideas. This prior knowledge didn’t keep me from calling Tim Grandage, who lives in my building. I know Tim slightly, but I’ve been aware that his school for orphaned children—fortuitously located in the very area we live in—is regarded by all as a genuine success. What a good place it would be for Raja, for both disposing of the problem of this boy and giving him a future—and also for giving Lakkhi a relief from chores other than cooking. Tim, however, was in England; he’d be back, I was told by his flat’s caretaker, after the Pujas. Ironically, I was just barely getting used to not being in Norwich and embracing the season’s new-found calm. Otherwise, now, I’d be teaching students as it grew dark, or sipping on an americano at Starbucks.

“I’ll pursue this when my friend returns from England,” I told Lakkhi. She nodded moodily and continued to scrape the
potol
, or rinse the moong pulses, or cut the
chhana
into little squares.

Raja began to lose his shyness. At first, it was an unconscious shedding of inhibition after lunch, when there was a lull in kitchenly activities, and an abnegation of power among those who ruled over the apartment—my parents withdrawing into nap time; I into writing; my daughter not yet back from school. Normally difficult to inveigle from the kitchen, Raja emerged in the
drawing room and took over the furniture. He was quickly lost in a daydream; he’d sit on the divan or on the sofa and spend his time in one or the other posture, either with a leg in the air, or half-lying against a cushion. He was a little parody of a despot.

After eight or nine days, he was wholly not in awe of me, and as interested in my whereabouts as I’d been in his—possibly more interested. His new lack of regard and presumptuous four-year-old friendliness were my doing. I had “encouraged” him. My reasons for fraternising with Raja were selfish; I found him hilarious. Besides, “all things can tempt me from this craft of verse.” In the midst of writing about the city, I was susceptible to distraction. And now, in a manner of speaking, he was all over me. He was a tough and single-minded taskmaster: just as we demanded timely meals from his grandmother, he wanted constant diversion from me. As with my mother’s and R’s view of my work, Raja wasn’t convinced that a man sitting around with a notebook and pen was seriously occupied. I was most probably doing nothing. His way of hinting to me that he was available was by coming straight to my room after Lakkhi arrived (she was now keeping pretty erratic times), smiling vaguely, and clicking on his palate with his tongue, producing a soft, insinuating sound. When I mimicked this to R, she fell about laughing; but to me it was becoming tiresome, something which I at once looked forward to and dreaded. Familiarity was also beginning to make him provocative, and test how much of the upper hand he could gain. He had to have ownership of the remote control (irrespective of whether the TV was on or not), transporting it, like a courier, from room to room; but he also claimed, in his limited, blithe pidgin, that his TV was bigger than ours. Besides, he had his eyes on the cheap English biro with which I pursue my writing, making off with it on impulse; I hadn’t sufficiently appreciated that he had his own
pen, and, in our tussle to retrieve our rightful paraphernalia, I’d sometimes take his pen and upset him deeply—but briefly, as he still had no understanding of prolonged deprivation or lack. We became a kind of exasperating drama to the maids, who felt I was ineffectual and said: “You must holler at him properly.” At the peak of our interfaces, they’d pick him up, and remove him, ignoring his scandalised cries, from my room; but he was like some sort of spring, and in five minutes he’d bounce back, ebullient, making the soft clicking noise in his mouth. I began to lock my door, which I never like doing.

The Pujas ended, I kept calling Tim Grandage’s flat and speaking to the caretaker, but Tim showed no signs of returning. Meanwhile, Lakkhi’s hours were becoming unacceptable, she was arriving close to late lunchtime, and was unrepentant and had no explanation but “I’m thinking of giving up work. I can’t take it any more—after all, I’m fifty years old.” “You’re more than fifty,” I informed her. “
I’m
forty-nine.” I was secretly astonished at how old I was. I would probably die one day in Calcutta—which, anyway, was as I’d planned it: that I mustn’t, by mistake, die abroad but live and spend and maybe bring to a close the second half of my life in India. It just happened that India, at this point of time, was Calcutta. Maybe most of us, without knowing it, have plans of this kind. I’m reminded of César Vallejo, who states it baldly, as a prophecy: “I will die in Paris, in a rainstorm, / On a day I already remember.” That second line—“On a day I already remember”—is shrewd, and it speaks to exactly what I have in mind—that, when it comes to such matters, the future and the past, memory and speculation, are hopelessly mixed up and devoid of chronology. Vallejo actually managed to die in Paris despite being expelled from France in 1930, eight years before his death. But his poem is meant to voice the classic melancholy of
the exile with finality—for Vallejo was born in an impoverished Peruvian town. In my case, my aim—whether or not it works out—is to eventually draw my days to a close at home. After twelve years in Calcutta, I realise this notion of “home” is an invention: that, though I was born in Calcutta, I didn’t grow up here, and don’t belong here. Each year, I suspect I’ll begin to understand this city better, be more at ease with it: and every year I find this is less true.

When I think of Lakkhi’s behaviour before and during and after the Pujas, her dishabille entrances, infuriated and infuriating, her grandchild in tow, I wonder if she was telling us, in a sort of code, of her disenchantment. She knew Raja had begun to interrupt my writing and tried to enforce a stricter demarcation for him where kitchen and drawing room and my room were concerned. Then, just as I was warily testing these arrangements, she stopped bringing him. There was no busybody to contend with! I was relieved, because I’d begun to think Raja would be a nuisance for the foreseeable future; but, given the grass is always greener on the other side, I was, in a negligible way, bereft. At times of my choosing, I
wanted
to be interrupted by Raja; just as there are occasions when a cancelled trip answers a secret prayer. “My friend will be back soon,” I told Lakkhi. “You should let me know if you still want me to talk to him about the school.” But she’d found a school in Subhasgram, she said, where he’d be looked after night and day: a better deal, given Raja’s unmindful—in more than one sense—mother. In this way, I held steadfastly to my own, on the whole unbroken, record—of being unable to intervene positively even when I wanted to.

About a week later, a young, distraught maid who’d just taken up work confessed to us of her own volition that Lakkhi had
persuaded her to place a plastic bag with pieces of fish from the freezer behind the fire extinguisher near the lift, half an hour before her departure to Subhasgram, and had, since then, been asking her to do it again. We were gripped by a sense of disbelief at Lakkhi’s ingenuity and by a surge of vengefulness. But we knew we needed to strategise—besides, there was a man in the house who was pretty old and had special dietary needs. So we said nothing and only marvelled when Lakkhi came in. But she had her informants and found out she’d been snitched on. Her mood deteriorated. Without the fish being openly discussed, Lakkhi stopped coming, except once, dourly, like one betrayed (as she had been), to collect her dues.

Getting a substitute wouldn’t be easy, but we took up the challenge.

NINE
A Visit

Twice a year, I’d think, with a start, that I hadn’t been to see Mini mashi for months. It was like an email I had to reply to—the memory of it jolted me at the wrong moments: say, after I was in bed, and had switched off the lights. When I woke up, the thought was gone. Then, when there was a lull in the monsoons of 2011, my mother got a phone call saying Mini mashi had had her third stroke, and, increasingly stingy with time though I’ve become, I knew the journey couldn’t be postponed.

These strokes occurred at astrological intervals, every few years. Each time, they took from Mini mashi’s learned vocabulary in Bengali a few more words. They were tectonic and decisive, making their presence felt indisputably in her and Shanti mashi’s small flat, like a supernatural being. The strokes weren’t silent and insidious, like the ones that pursued my father, leaving his face and features unchanged, transforming him from within.

She’d been shifted to the intensive care unit of a nursing home in Shobhabazar, and my mother and I decided we must set out in time to catch the visiting hours. She was my mother’s oldest living friend—they had been thick with each other in Sylhet—and they were also very, very distantly related: technically, she
did
qualify as my maternal aunt—or
mashi
.

Shobhabazar is in North Calcutta; so is the narrow lane in which Mini mashi and her elder sister lived doggedly in a government
flat, a five-minute walk from the Tagores’ house in Jorasanko, two minutes from Mallickbari or the Marble Palace, and not far at all from Mahajati Sadan, the playhouse; an area as littered with the relics of history as Shobhabazar is thriving (besides still being home to the obscure mansions of erstwhile rajas and landlords) with stalls selling wedding cards, saris, dress material—but predominantly wedding cards.

North Calcutta is not just a geographical location; it is, in fact, the other Calcutta. That is, it’s approximately what’s left of the old or “black” town—which was, with the exception of a few areas in the south, the great city of the nineteenth century—the environs in which all the cultural innovations of the Bengal Renaissance took place. When people refer to “Calcutta” or “Kolkata” today, though, they mean the south, and have meant it for some decades, as urban life flowed and shifted in that direction, and, from the mid-nineties, the merciless property boom extended deeper and deeper southward. No wonder it took me years to visit Mini mashi, on what turned out to be just a few days prior to her death; it wasn’t so much the distance, which, by the standards of contemporary cities and their suburbs, is moderate to small (a forty-five minutes to an hour’s drive in the traffic). It may have had to do with this sense of having to push in the opposite direction, of bracing myself to travel against the current.

*  *  *

You say,
What’s this Renaissance you’ve kept mentioning? Is it true Bengal had a Renaissance—if that’s so, what was its nature? Where are its monuments, its landmarks, its cathedrals? Does it have a Sistine Chapel?

Reformists like Keshab Chandra Sen, nationalists such as Bipin Chandra Pal, and the Hindu revivalist Swami Vivekananda
had begun by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to speak of the
naba jagaran
or “new awakening” that had occurred in Bengal, and call it, in English, the “Renaissance.” But the person who probably gave the term its admittedly short-lived academic aura was the Marxist historian Susobhan Sarkar, in his brief tract from 1946,
Notes on the Bengal Renaissance
, where its provenance, characteristics, and canonical moments were duly recorded.

Conventionally, the beginnings of this putative Renaissance might be fixed either at 1814, when Raja Rammohun Roy founded the Atmiyan Sabha with reform in mind, especially on behalf of Hindu widows, who couldn’t, at the time, remarry; or in 1828, when he founded the Brahmo Samaj, a unitarian sect that refuted Hinduism’s polytheism, turning instead towards an immanent, formless—
nirakaar
—divinity apparently first intuited by humans in the Upanishads and Vedas. But the full-blown effects of this turn would only become palpable from the 1860s onward. It’s clear, then, that the Bengalis, in their transition into self-consciousness, went down routes opened up for them by now relatively obscure Orientalist scholars, like the Welshman William Jones, translator of, among other writers and texts, the fourth-century court poet Kalidasa, and the Frenchman Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, translator of the Upanishads. For these Europeans, the unusual ferment of the time—the late eighteenth century—that brought them into contact with Indian Brahmins and, through them, Indian antiquity had a particular significance: with these hoary, beautiful texts they established the extraordinary lineage of the East, and also proved that the story of humanism—authored by the European Enlightenment—had an ancient and important setting in India, and not just, as had been presumed, in Greece and Rome. For Indians like Roy and Tagore, though, these texts didn’t only represent the glory of the
Indian past (which they did), or the Indian’s place in the larger world (which they did too); they pointed out a way to what India, and they themselves, would be in the foreseeable future. Roy could have been content with the wonder and prestige of Indian antiquity; his great innovation, whether he knew it or not, was to make the Upanishadic heritage a basis and pillar of the secularism we’ve come to take for granted, to read it, in effect, as a contemporary resource that showed Indians how to be modern. Tagore began to perform a similar innovation with the Sanskrit poet Kalidasa, and with that same Upanishadic tradition, from the 1890s onward: to regard them not just as “our great tradition,” as dead heritage, but as essential to fashioning the modern poem and literature.