Calcutta (18 page)

A few of his fellows will doubtless mature into goondas. The goonda, when fully fledged and at the height of his powers, is almost the nastiest customer in Calcutta. A straightforward
definition
in the dictionary will call him a ruffian, but in Bengal he is a ruffian who is prepared to kill and rob as well as to brawl in back alleys. The police detectives, who study goondas as closely as anyone, are apt to place their origins far away in the time of the East India Company and toss up a quotation from Macaulay to emphasize their point. And, indeed, his Lordship did once write that ‘The servants of the Company obtained, not for their employers but for themselves, a monopoly of almost the whole internal trade. They forced the natives to buy dear and sell cheap … Every servant of a British factor was armed with all the power of his master, and his master was armed with all the power of the Company. Enormous fortunes were thus rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while thirty million of human beings were reduced to the last extremity of wretchedness. They had been accustomed to live under tyranny, but never tyranny like this.’ Having fed you Macaulay, the detectives will remind you that these wealthy British Moguls employed armed servants, called paiks or lathials, to attend to their defensive and offensive
interests. When the Indian Mutiny was over and the Company was disbanded, the Queen Empress ordered the dissolution of these small private commandos and the dismissed paiks and lathials promptly began to use on their own account their highly cultivated skills of bullying, blackmail and robbery.

These, say the detectives with assurance, were the spiritual ancestors of the goondas; and though that isn’t faultless history – for the dacoit was somewhat in the same line of business even before Job Charnock came to Bengal – it isn’t entirely beside the point. The Goonda Act of 1923 was directed against political hotheads as much as barefaced brigands and the true goonda’s most immediate model was the mobster who appeared in
numbers
during the Second World War, when Calcutta was a
strategic
centre of South-east Asia Command and there was a vast and illicit traffic in military equipment, military rations and military luxuries; when some highly respectable members of local society needed good men and true to help them seize this main chance and no questions asked. And shortly after, there were two years of almost continuous communal riots, in which the strong-arm men were able to consolidate a distinctive position in the city and an unhealthy respect.

The goonda will generally have taken to his trade in the middle of his teens and he will be at the peak of his unpleasant performance between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-five. More likely than not he will live in a bustee or, if not there, in a building of some sort; he is very rarely homeless. He probably lives in Central Calcutta, though he is almost as likely to come from somewhere north of Chowringhee and is scarcely ever based in Alipore or any of the richer southern suburbs. If he has a comparatively regular income it will not often amount to Rs 250 a month, and more frequently it will be less than Rs 100. And while the city’s prisons at any time will accommodate goondas who have come from all India, even from China and from Burma, the vast majority are born and bred in Calcutta; but very few refugees find their way there, and those that do tend to be novices. Very rarely do goondas have much in the way of education, though when the police made a close investigation of those in their custody some years ago they discovered that two
were good painters, twelve were decent singers, three could play the tabla (the drum that accompanies the sitar) and one wrote tolerable poetry. There was also an international footballer among them.

The goonda is not always a splendid physical specimen. He tends to be more efficient with a medium build and he is very often handicapped in some way, minus an eye or a hand, or totally deaf. But always he has an excellent pair of legs. His choice of weapon depends upon his state of health. A dagger or a knife is commonplace, a pistol belongs to the most successful and to those with the greatest reputation in the hierarchy of goondas. Then there is the bomb, which is frequently just a bottle of soda water used as a formidable missile; you shake it vigorously until the gas is almost on the point of bursting the glass, whereupon you hurl it and generally achieve a most
spectacular
effect. Policemen in Calcutta long ago discovered that a well-trained goonda with only one hand was capable of throwing ten soda-water bottles a minute, which is quite enough to keep a crowd at bay twenty-five yards away. And this is what a
comparatively
weak goonda uses for his getaways, though the
majority
will mix their bombing of strong opposition with their knifing of feeble adversaries. This desperate talent is sometimes employed in the course of direct robbery and looting, and it is frequently placed at the disposal of the shiftier gentlemen of Calcutta’s commerce, who deem it prudent to equip themselves with protectors against rivals in trade and amorality, and
sometimes
against the police; they, at any rate, are in a direct line of descent from those old Nabobs and their henchmen. But for twenty-five years, at least, the goondas have made profitable alliances with the party politicians of Bengal, who have found them extraordinarily effective in resolving any uncertainties that might linger in the mind of a peasant voter as polling day
approaches
. No one party has had a monopoly of their services on these occasions, or even for sustained campaigning in between. The goondas have found themselves in the role of
highly-esteemed
party workers on behalf of at least ten different varieties of Communism, within the merely tepid ranks of Indian
socialism
and, as much as anywhere, among the political descendants
of Mr Gandhi, who now manipulate Congress in all its
internecine
manifestations.

The goonda’s prey can thus be almost anyone at all, and it is possible that those who suffer most from his terrorism are the very poorest people in Calcutta, who must be bludgeoned or bribed into a political allegiance they will not otherwise follow, or those hundreds of thousands in the city who live in genteel poverty and who offer some source of plunder without the means to defend it. Many of these last are refugee families from East Bengal. Their ancestors will have been zamindars and not so very long ago they themselves will have had great land holdings on the other side of the delta, with mansions of substance much patrolled by servants. But because they are Hindu and not Muslim they will have found, one agonizing day after the 1947 Partition, that the balance of local power was no longer to be endured and they will have assembled what possessions they could move and what money they could promptly convert to cash and carry on their persons, and they will have bumped and lurched across the border in a bullock cart or a rattletrap car or a collapsing lorry, leaving the bulk of their wealth behind them. And so you discover them one day in Calcutta.

They are dwelling now – Papa, Mamma, three children and perhaps a grandparent as well – in three rooms high above a street, though they also make use of the roof to hang out their washing and to get out of each other’s way from time to time. Papa will have secured a job as an insurance clerk and Mamma, being literate too, will have contemplated looking for work but after a dozen years will still be undecided, for such a thing is not quite seemly for a lady of gentle birth. A mutual friend will take you to them. You will remove your shoes on their threshold after climbing two flights up a dingy and communal staircase (for there are other families in this building, so many that your hosts have quite lost count) which is exposed to the street through high and barred openings on each landing. You will be received in a room decorated with calendars, with an antique radio, with a shelf full of books, with a plant in a pot; for these have been cultivated people. Mamma and Papa will insist that you be seated in the one easy chair, while they sit cross-legged
upon the large bed which fills a third of the room and which is where four people sleep every night, Mamma and Papa at one end, their two daughters at the other. They will offer you
refreshment
from a silver cakestand, savoury biscuits sprinkled with salt and poppy seed, and sweetmeats of almond paste, and small dishes of those tiny silver balls which are too sweet for words and which the children of the West love to have scattered across their birthday cakes. There will be a cup of tea with curdles of milk floating on the top, but before everything there will be a glass of water which it would be discourteous to refuse but which, as the mutual friend is making clear with sidelong gestures and frowns, is at the very most to be acknowledged with a token sip, for almost certainly it has been drawn from an unfiltered tap and will be teeming with every sickening bacteria in Calcutta.

Your hosts will pretend, with exquisite manners, not to notice your aversion to a cold drink on this parching afternoon, and they will talk with composure, without any emotion at all, of the opulent life they once led. They will discuss the dreadful state of Calcutta today and then, for old habits die hard even in so destructive a place as this, they will invite you to come and look at their landscape. They will take you to their roof, where two saris and a sheet are hanging limply in the fug, and there you can inspect the street below. It will reek with a refuse of
rotting
green coconut shells and other garbage, with crows hopping on top and pariah dogs poking below. Rickshaws will be
swaying
past that sacred cow which is sitting with confidence in the middle of the road. A beggar woman will be creeping up the pavement, bent more than double with infirmity or deception. She will be totally ignored by everyone passing her, except a couple of Sikhs almost as ragged as she, who surreptitiously slip a something into the tin which is held towards passers-by in a tentative gesture containing only half a hope of any return. Your hosts will contemplate this without a trace of sadness, without a suggestion that it marks a painful fall in their
fortunes
. Their bearing implies that it is as completely within the order of things as that sun which is sliding like a scarlet gong below the level of the roofline and beyond the waters of the
Hooghly at the end of the disreputable street. They see you to the top of the slatternly staircase, which is the threshold of their home, and bid you to return at any time and be welcome. And when you come back the following year you discover that the miniature car which your mutual friend presented to their son has been carefully preserved, its paintwork still immaculate, in a glass-fronted cabinet alongside six china cups and saucers and the silver cakestand; not a toy from Woolworth’s any more, to be gradually broken by a small boy, but a treasure from England to be marvelled at by all.

Not all the genteel poor are refugees. Most of them have been born here, have been given a fingerhold upon a Bengali’s greatest prize, which has always been education. They have been taken into the university and they have been spewed out again at the other end of it upon a labour market which has not for fifty years been capable of absorbing all their qualifications. Even Lord Curzon used to nag about that. At Dum Dum there is a beaming little man, maybe thirty years old, whose job it is to lead certain visitors from overseas out of the Customs hall and across the passenger concourse to where their airline bus awaits them
outside
, making quite sure that their baggage follows them intact. He is employed to do this and nothing else by the State Tourist Bureau. And if he discovers immediately that the traveller he has just picked up in Customs is disposed to be friendly, he will offer to be of service at any time he can possibly be helpful in
Calcutta
. He will casually hint that he has many times thought how splendid it would be if he could make his way to England and perform some more useful task there. And then, amid mutual smiles, best wishes and shaking of the hand, he will remember on the steps of the airline bus to present his card to the visitor. It identifies him as Gour Kanjilal, Master of Arts (Hons), tourist officer; and very thankful indeed to have a regular and secure job in the service of the nation and the foreigners.

Had he been luckier in his vocational search he might have become a teacher; in which case, being a graduate, he would have welcomed a report by a pay commission in 1970, suggesting that his salary for primary school work might be raised to Rs 300 a month, or in a higher secondary school to Rs 350; with
Rs 350 at that time being the equivalent of
£
19.50, or rather less than 50 American dollars. And though it is true that in Calcutta you could then buy onions for 50 paise a kilogram, a dozen eggs for Rs 4, a very small chicken for Rs 2.25 and baby hilsa caught in the estuarine waters of the Ganga for Rs 5.50 a kilogram, it was also true that an everyday sari for your wife would cost the best part of Rs 30 and an attaché case of papier mâché, whose handle came away the moment it was picked up full of clothes, anything up to Rs 75. Nor was any teacher or well-educated airport courier absolved from the need to queue at the ration shop for the weekly allowance of rice and grain and sugar; only people much more prosperous than they could afford the prices fixed and schemed upon the city’s ever ready and highly stocked black market.

*

The supply of any food in Calcutta is liable to run short at almost any time and even the rich are apt to bump into
restrictions
when they eat away from their carefully-planned and
well-provided
domestic pantries. A man taking his lunch at a
middle-class
restaurant like the Kwality in Park Street, and ordering mutton korma, is likely to be reminded that this is Tuesday and therefore a meatless day; on seeking prawn curry forty-eight hours later he will possibly be told that fish is off, it being
Thursday
, of course. There are maybe a thousand ration shops for rice and grain in the city because these are the basic foodstuffs for
almost
all its people and because if there were not a little to give to everyone each day there would be starvation for most and more corpses than usual upon the streets within a week. And lodged in everybody’s consciousness, located somewhere in many people’s memories, is the frightful time when this has happened and when famine has been declared.