Calcutta (9 page)

Bankimchandra Chatterjee, the first Bengali novelist, called him
“jaha achhe tahar kobi,”
or the “poet of what’s at hand” (for his subjects included pineapples and goats); my wife, echoing D. H. Lawrence, says he’s a “poet of the present.” Iswar Gupta
is not a poet of memory, or the personal or historical perspective; but that doesn’t mean he’s ahistorical. History is not the annals; it’s what happens around us when we’re unaware it’s history. It’s Gupta’s unawareness of himself, his subjects, or of Calcutta as something separate called “history,” in a static, retrospective sense, that makes them all bustle with it. As a poet, he has recourse to devices common to traditional Bengali poetry—such as onomatopoeia—that later poets would use temperately, if at all, in a more Sanskrit-derived, literary manner, but which he employs shamelessly and with a radical outrageousness, as a response to the odd transitory society he inhabits. R writes that, in “
Ingraji Naba Barsha
,” the poet “initially describes a white man … joyous and indulgent, well-dressed in his well-decorated home. At his side, his wife looks ‘fresh’ in a ‘polka-dotted dress’ (‘
maanmode bibi shab hoilen
fresh/Feather-
er folorish phutikata
dress’).” The English words dropped liberally in the two lines—“fresh,” “feather,” “dress”—aren’t really comparable to the comfortable melange-like contemporary chatter of the globalised Indian middle class; they’re used in the way the lower classes traditionally use English—to pepper a sentence; to mutter a jocular barb; to pass a sexual insult about an upper-class woman. Midway into the poem, “the poet imagines himself to be a fly accompanying these two”—the Englishman and his polka-dotted wife—“on their carriage to church” (all these churches still exist mysteriously in different parts of the city), “sometimes sipping from their glass of sherry, sometimes sitting on her gown or her face and happily rubbing its wings.” In what incarnation but that of a pest would the man on the street partake of the slopes of a memsahib’s breasts? For Iswar Gupta, at this point, “poet” and “pest” seem interchangeable. The next scene describes the astonishing dinner back at the Englishman’s house, “evoked almost entirely and only through sound”:

Very best sherry taste merry rest jaté

Aage bhage den giya srimatir haaté

Kot kot kotakot tok tok tok

Thhun thhun thhun thhun dhok dhok dhok

Chupu chupu chup chup chop chop chop

Shupu shupu shup shup shop shop shop

Thhokash thhokash thhok phosh phosh phosh

Kosh kosh tosh tosh ghosh ghosh ghosh

Hip hip hurré daké whole class

Dear madam you take this glass
.

As R points out, this doesn’t, largely, need translating, “except the framing couplets, of which the first one says that the very best sherry that makes the rest merry is to be given to the missus before anybody else, while the one at the end is almost entirely in English except for the word
daké
, which means calls.” A great deal of movement and physical activity is captured from that New Year’s Day—
“Kot kot kotakot tok tok tok”
probably the sound of heels ascending the steps and then authoritatively hitting the floor of the drawing room;
“thhun thhun thhun”
the pitch of the cutlery;
“dhok dhok dhok”
the sound ascribed usually to the rapid drinking of water, but here, almost certainly, of alcohol. The particular shape and form of these sounds were still unexpected to the Bengali ear. The terse, consonantal sound of English is also probably being alluded to, and mocked. Indians who didn’t and don’t know English, and want to mimic the way it’s spoken, make brief plosive noises: “phat,” “phoot,” “phut.” So there’s a belligerence to Iswar Gupta’s poem, the petulance of the poet/pest; it bubbles with resentment and energy.

Some of these sounds are audible in the Bengal Club as 2010 arrives, as they are in other clubs and residences—the
“thhun thhun thhun”
of forks, spoons, and knives, the
“dhok dhok dhok.”
Then, on Russell Street, there’s a great deal of what was absent from Iswar Gupta’s time: the honking of horns. These are the cars that have queued up, in futility, for Park Street. In the Bengal Club New Year’s Eve garden party, meanwhile, they’re playing “Scarborough Fair” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” R writes, of the onomatopoeia in Iswar Gupta’s poem, that its “sheer presence of being” turns the poem into a “live playback recording of the changing shape of the everyday on New Year’s Day, 1852 …” Tonight, too, is noise.

We’re foolhardy to be in Park Street. We’ve eaten at a Chinese restaurant, and my parents and daughter have gone back home—the press is daunting as my wife and I make our way towards the traffic lights. We shouldn’t be here (because, really, we have nothing to do) and never are at this time of the year (except in a car, in crippled transit), but I’m drawn to it for many reasons: for the narrative I myself have woven around it in the course of writing this book, and am now entangled in; for the people themselves—those who’ve gathered here and of whom Utpal Basu said to me gravely in a different context:
“Erai amader nagarik”—
“
These
are our citizens.” This wasn’t an admission of defeat; it was an assertion that you can’t deny change or say it has nothing to do with you. Young men in mock-leather jackets swarm the pavements; the street pulsates with excitement as the year dies. Park Street isn’t their natural terrain; out of a suppressed sense of exclusion, maybe, and from genuine excitement, they walk about in proprietary groups in front of the famous restaurants of the middle class—Bar-b-que; Moulin Rouge; Peter Cat. A resentment simmers, which somehow gets channelled into the celebrations.

We cross the road to Mocambo; from a distance I see someone
at the ironing stall, not Nagendra, but a deputy—the figure is diligently pressing clothes, now, at 11:15 p.m. On his haunches, Ramayan Shah is flattening dough for puris; some he has compressed into pastry-like shapes. A kadhai reveals the filling—tiny cauliflower florets, their tips rusted like dried blood. This snack costs a paltry two rupees a plate.

Back in Park Street, we are stranded in front of the erstwhile Skyroom. Motorbike after motorbike passes down the road, two men on each one, and, as midnight approaches, the men at the back raise both arms, in a strange symbolic gesture, and roar; the crowd in leather jackets streaming behind us roars in response. It is like a victory lap.

The couple standing beside us clearly don’t belong: a dark, distinguished-looking man of South Indian origins in a blazer; his slight, unobtrusive white wife. We are nervous, and are undecided about whether or not to be participatory; “It’s like Times Square,” she says in an unidentifiable American accent, smiling, “except Times Square’s worse.” Their daughter and their adopted son (who, it emerges, was born here) are partying at Park Hotel further up; while they’re awaiting their hired car, which is clearly stuck in the slow rerouted traffic inching into Park Street, to pick them up. They live, says the slightly harried gentleman in the blazer, in Philadelphia. I’m interested in his wife’s remark about Times Square; I believe there used to be genuine concordances between New York and Calcutta—of mood, atmosphere, ethos—but it never occurred to me to compare the drifting menace of Times Square with what used to be the enchantment of Park Street. Yet I also recognise this habit, of making comparisons under duress. Edward Said had written in an essay that “[m]ost people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions,
an awareness that—to borrow a phrase from music—is contrapuntal. For an exile, habits of life, expression or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment.” I understand this completely, except that I balk at the bathos of the “exile.” I prefer “traveller,” with all its contemporary associations of banality—duty-free shops; frequent flyer miles; waiting for a car. In the midst of the ordinariness and exasperation of travel, it’s certain—or at least possible—that the past will come back to you. And, unbeknownst to us, midnight has crept upon us. There’s an unsettling roar, pre-verbal, vociferously threatening—intended not so much to express as to drown out. “Happy New Year,” insists the woman, to which I hastily add, “Happy New Year.” “Happy New Year,” “Happy New Year” concur, on the kerb, R and the distinguished-looking gentleman.

THREE
Names

Naturally, I’m queried sometimes about why I returned to India—and why to Calcutta. Although India, in the so-called boom, might be a place for a certain kind of professional to come back to, Calcutta, on that boom’s outer reaches, with its precipitous political future, is a curious place to make a home. Unless, of course, you belong to that species condemned, all over the world, to uniqueness—I mean the only child—and you have ageing parents. Only recently, a woman whom I know slightly told me on the telephone that she was going to leave Bonn and her thriving career in the UN in Europe and return to New Zealand. “I worry about my parents, especially about my father, these days,” she laughed with some embarrassment. “It’s the curse of the only child.” If not the only child, then, in India, the sole male offspring. Not long ago, my wife met a young, good-looking, clearly successful couple in a friend’s house for tea. She heard the man had relocated from an enviable position in a foreign bank in Bombay to a similarly responsible position in what is, however, today’s Calcutta. Was it disaffection that had caused the move? Not really. It was something that’s older in this part of the world than disaffection, and more obstinate: the sense of familial duty. The father had aged, and the son decided (after discussions with a tolerant wife) that he should be nearby.

Yet living in Calcutta is hardly to live in Kabul or Baghdad or even Johannesburg—nor is it comparable to inhabiting a suburb
in Atlanta, or moving to Ipswich. As a city, it’s neither too threateningly alive, nor too defunct (if extinction can be measured and graded). Anyway, if Calcutta today suffers in comparison, it’s not really to other cities, but principally to itself and what it used to be. Anyone who has an idea of what Calcutta once was will find that vanished Calcutta the single most insurmountable obstacle to understanding, or sympathising with, the city today.

I had several reasons for coming back; some of them emerged without warning in the late nineties, and others had been with me for as long as I could remember. For instance, homesickness. I couldn’t recall a time when I hadn’t been homesick and lonely in England. Partly, this had to do with my own—as I discovered, very human—need for light. I was impressed when, in the early eighties, I read a report in an English newspaper about how people in the north of England wilted, psychologically and spiritually, as plants do physically, from an absence of light in the winter. To this lack, I’d add my abhorrence of silence—a high-pitched pressure on the eardrum clearly audible to me in an English room.

Connected to this is the often problematic fact that I’m a musician. I turned, in the late seventies, from what had been till then my favourite form—American folk-rock—to Indian classical vocal music. The regime of classical music—practising with my teacher and with accompanists; picking up new bandishes and compositions and ragas—ensured I spent several months a year in India even when I was a student in England. To be in India—in Bandra in Bombay after my father’s retirement—was to be reborn, to experience sunlight, stillness, birdcall, morning, evening, for a limited duration only, to realise it was possible to revisit some of the first experiences of your life as if they were new. Those student years consisted of a series of such rebirths, because of the end-of-term breaks in British universities, and the
cheap flights (when my parents moved to Calcutta, I began to fly Bangladesh Biman and Royal Jordanian) out of London. But there were the flights back. If I got to know birth, I also got to know death. There’s no rationality to this—to why I’m possessed by posthumousness, uselessness, torpor—all symptoms and traits of dying—before I leave. But who ever said that clinging to life could be explained rationally? I suppose what I mean is—India, for whatever reason, is synonymous to me with life; and you don’t love life by weighing its advantages.

The Bengali poet Joy Goswami saw me in the doldrums, in my Calcutta flat, on the eve of yet another departure to England in 2002. A meeting had been arranged by a journalist from the
Statesman
; Joy and I were to be in conversation, covering, randomly, a range of interests. The
Statesman
would transcribe and publish this conversation. The only available time in our calendar was this afternoon prior to the flight early the next morning.