Calcutta (22 page)

Far from being crushed, life is teeming in its shadows. Early in the morning there is a market down here, where scores of people sell thousands of flowers in garlands of orange, in swathes of blue, in bunches of crimson and in posies of white, and the servants of the rich come in hordes to buy the freshest tiny blooms to decorate their masters’ dinner tables, while others scramble and barter for something beautiful and precious to give to Kali and the other gods. Lithe young men stand in rows or in intermittent ones and twos, their naked torsos gleaming with sweat while they press up and touch toes and swing long dumb-bells in dangerous-looking arcs, in something that is a combination of physical jerks, religious exercise and sheer racial pride. Nearby, corpulent old men lie like sows bereft of their litters, while some wiry helot pummels each back and massages each gut and rubs each scalp and strokes in oil from top to bottom. And always there are people washing here, slapping clothes up and down against the stone steps of the ghats,
jumping
into the water and splashing just for fun, or quietly ladling the sacred liquids of the Hooghly from tin bowls upon their almost private parts. They pay no attention at all to the
occasional
rime of ashes and sodden fronds of marigold that come
drifting down from one of the burning ghats above the bridge. For there is much death here as well as life; and daily, bodies are cremated on steps like these on a bonfire of logs, with a blowing of flutes, before being scattered in the river. But
sometimes
in Calcutta a man will die and his people will not even have the money for his burning; so they quietly slip him into the Hooghly and the next day, on mudflats a mile or two
downstream
, dogs are seen chewing over a floppy, seemingly
rubberized
thing, which by some mysterious chemistry has been bleached almost totally white from head to toe.

Below the bridge lies the shipping and all the river traffic of the East. Every craft here was built for merchandize. There are no posh liners in the Hooghly, come to see how the other half lives. It has not been possible to cruise up here in all the old Imperial splendour of the P and O, with lascars on the decks and foxtrots in the lounge, since 1931, though Bombay was still enjoying an occasional whiff of that past until the spring of 1970. The shipping at Calcutta comes from the strictly
tradesmen’s
lines of Ellerman, Elder Dempster, Bank, Clan, American Export and half a dozen others. It has tramped in the hard way from the River Plate, from St John and Halifax, from Odessa and Varna, from Singapore and Port Swettenham, from
Liverpool
and Hamburg, from Melbourne and Yokohama. It has rust dripping down its sides and underpants drying on its stanchions and only small bikinis of awning to protect its crews from the sun. It waits very patiently, sometimes for weeks on end, while lighters clutter its sides and the Hooghly is much more busy with the comings and goings of smaller fry.

There are flat boats moving round here with cargoes of hay so huge and overwhelming that the boat itself is invisible and all you can see is a floating haystack on the water; they are often moored in their dozens just above Howrah Bridge, like an aquatic farmyard, and their crews have created a tunnel inside each stack, which makes a sort of home. There are tipsy little boats, long, slim, with low pointed prows, canting over at speed as the wind leans into their lateens. Outriggers flick by, bearing
fishermen
off to look for bhekti and hilsa. Sharp-stemmed and narrow lighters, with a canvas shelter stretched tight in a hump over the
sterns, are parked in rows where they toss and bump each other like a flotsam. And down the middle of the Hooghly there is always a procession of vessels moving rather grandly under square sails cocked at a jaunty angle, known as junks to the European and noayka to the Bengali. They are to be seen at their best when the wind has dropped, however, or when they are trying to make way against it. For on the high curved poop, the serang leans against his tiller above the great triangular sweep of a rudder plunged vertically into the water, while in front of him four or six men stand up and work oars the size of saplings in one of the most graceful movements imaginable. In perfect time together they take three measured and swinging paces along the deck, dip in the blades and then lean back from the shafts while the boat slides forward under their pull.
Rhythmically
, almost studiously, they and their craft get the better of this turbulent river, which flows so fast that any boat trying to move straight across it rocks and rolls like a mad thing.

The Hooghly bears all this traffic along, past the ghats and beyond the strollers along Strand Road, which Lord Hastings created as a promenade for ladies and gentlemen. It carries it past the point where the master mariners could satisfy
themselves
that Calcutta knew how to deal with pirates, whose bodies were hung from gibbets there until 1820; for the next thirty years they were drowned instead off Prinsep Ghat.
Opposite
is Shalimar, with its ropeworks and a big red neon sign
advertising
Shalimar Paints, though once it was a country retreat with a miniature garden modelled on the original Shalimar in Lahore, which had been laid out by Shah Jehan’s chief engineer and where pale hands were loved by heartsick young
Englishmen
. On the Calcutta side is the opening of Tolly’s Nullah, the creek that wriggles away up to the temple at Kalighat and then on to Warren Hastings’ old house and wealthy Alipore; Major Tolly dredged it afresh in 1775 so that pilgrims should still be able to bathe in Ganga water when making sacrifice to Kali; water buffalo now hide in it from the heat, with only nostrils, eyes and horns poised above the surface, and children play skidding games on its steep banks of greasy black mud. The Hooghly is broadening now, turning into its dogleg, and at an
angle the Kidderpore Docks have started to succeed the rich southern suburbs, infinitely more complex than Colonel Watson could have imagined when he started to engineer the first berth within a few days of acting as second to Philip Francis in the duel with Hastings; for now the docks sweep away in range after range of warehouses and gantries and superstructures which are all locked in against the disturbance of the tides.

Calcutta is not quite finished yet, but the worst is over by the time the Botanical Gardens come up to starboard, which Bishop Heber thought just like Milton’s idea of Paradise and which Sir Joseph Hooker used as a base while he was collecting and
compiling
his famous flora of British India before returning to his Directorship at Kew; and in the gardens is the largest banyan tree in the world, which is supposed to have started life two centuries ago on top of a wild date-palm, under which a fakir would sit and beg, but which is now an astonishing growth like a self-made jungle, with over six hundred trunks of its own, covering so much ground that you can never quite get it all into one photograph however far back you stand. There are
occasional
brickworks to follow beside the river after this, and a vast Bata shoe factory to port, with two or three townships posted along the banks, but now the Hooghly is making speed, full of intimidating little eddies and swirls, through proper Lord Jim jungle to the Bay of Bengal. In spite of all the horrors that it passes and occasionally inflicts, it is a captivating river, and its romance is precisely the romance of Conrad, who saw it briefly once, when he sailed as mate in the
Tilkhurst
, bound from Singapore to Dundee in 1885, just before he wrote his first short story.

It is famous for its sunsets, whose exhausted transformations are best witnessed from somewhere near the Gwalior Monument on Strand Road, where Sepoy Ganga Din and Sepoy
Juggernauth
Misser and Naick Runmust Singh and a variety of
Bombardiers
, Roughriders and Farriers, led by a Major-General C. H. Churchill, are commemorated for a battle they fatally won in 1843. Almost always the sun has become a disc the colour of blood orange by the time it is apparently motionless just above the factories across the Hooghly. The cloudless sky is pure
orange by now, the river is nearly golden not khaki, the Howrah Bridge has lost its hazy, noon-time pallor and turned to hard grey steel instead. Suddenly, the sun begins to move, not
changing
colour by even the slightest fading of its heat, but the sky begins to shift from orange to pure white and the river begins to dazzle with more light, as though it were going to recover from a false alarm of dusk. Immediately, the junks and the other boats still plodding up and down acquire a new and sharp
outline
, which makes them individual and distinguishes them from the blur of the opposite bank. You can now see the sun sliding perceptibly down near the sign of Shalimar Paints, its circle
unbroken
in one instant, its bottom edge flattened in the next. Everything changes rapidly now. The sky moves again from white to something less vivid than orange, more nearly the colour of burnished gold. Behind you, bats begin to skim and skirmish around the squat grey bastions of Fort William, lying low
within
its earthworks. On the river, guttering lights are lit inside those tight-humped shelters on the barges, the neon sign at Shalimar begins to jerk and splutter into advertisement, the Howrah Bridge begins to dissolve upstream. As the last kite flogs itself hastily home past the fort and over the tree tops of the Maidan, the sun has become a crescent, thin as a wafer and pure blood now, and the sky has almost completed its spectrum to deep mauve. The bridge has almost vanished, the opposite bank is a lurking shadow, the boats between are the vaguest shapes. Suddenly, like the throwing of a switch, darkness. And a
thousand
small lights, flickering over and beside water, with a
mustard
glow in the sky behind as Calcutta makes ready to pass the night.

*

Flowing into Calcutta like the Hooghly is a rich commodity of human beings. It has been thus ever since the foundation and it has never for a moment diminished. Over the past half century this flow has become a torrent, too. These people have been an indirect source of Calcutta’s wealth since the day they were born and they have come to the city to share it at last, for there has been scarcely anywhere else for them to go if they were to have a chance of living above that dreadful line marking absolute
poverty. At the start of the sixties the hinterland from which
Calcutta
has drawn its wealth contained 145 million people – and it now has well over 150 millions – living in one of the least urbanized areas in the whole of India. According to the 1961 census the proportion of urban to total population throughout the nation was 19 per cent. At that time only West Bengal, with 24.5 per cent, exceeded the national average among the states of Eastern India and this was entirely due to the vast compression of people into the 200 square miles of Greater Calcutta; outside the metropolitan district only two and a half million Bengalis out of 28.4 millions lived in towns, a proportion of only 9.2 per cent. Even today, in the four hinterland states of West Bengal, Bihar, Orissa and Assam, there are only sixteen cities with populations exceeding 100,000; and on the Indian scale of being, 100,000 is very nearly an insignificant number of anything; there are almost that many people on the pavements each night in Calcutta. In such a situation Calcutta represents, for all its well-known poverty, the possibility of personal wealth not to be obtained elsewhere. At the beginning of the sixties the average
annual
income per head of population was Rs 194 in Bihar, Rs 259 in Orissa, Rs 319 in Assam and Rs 327 in West Bengal. In the whole of India it was no more than Rs 334. But in Calcutta it was Rs 811. Only Delhi and Bombay could better that, and they are much too far away for any Bihari peasant to contemplate migration in their direction; he can walk to Calcutta if need be in a matter of weeks, but he would be dead before he was even half way to the capital of India. And even if, when he reaches the city, he cannot find work he can find many rich people from whom he can beg enough to stay alive until something better turns up. There is no one to support the destitute in a Bihari village, for everyone there is almost destitute himself.

The plight of such people was displayed with much subdued militancy and a great deal of warm camaraderie at a congress of peasants in the village of Barasat, not far beyond Dum Dum, at the beginning of 1970. It was held under the auspices of the Communist Party of India which, within India’s great and
perplexing
variety of communism, is the party which holds most strongly to the undefiled truths revealed by Moscow alone.
Barasat 
is where Bengali serfs rose up against the infamous planters in one of the local revolutions which followed the Mutiny, and in the literature of the congress there were even references to ‘the notorious despot Warren Hastings’. There were many
displays
of propaganda, of course; stands bearing drawings to
illustrate
the domination of India by the British, others showing the life and times of Lenin, photographs demonstrating the people’s struggle in Vietnam. Very small and articulate boys led illiterate old men round these displays, gravely pointing to the pictures with their canes while they described the meaning and
significance
of each one. Older girls dispensed tea and chappatis to hungry comrades while their brothers, wearing red berets and carrying bamboo quarter staves, marshalled crowds who were not in the least disposed to be unruly. It must have been a bit like this in Russia when the Narodniks were planning revolution before Lenin turned up, or in the backblocks of Kweiyang
before
Chiang Kai-shek was sent packing into Formosa. There were many, many speeches for days on end, for this is what the congress had been called for, and there were delegates to hear them from every part of India.

One of them was a man called Sibsankar Jha, who had
fraternally
come from his party cell somewhere in Bihar. He was small, he was dark, he had a shy, attractive smile and he wore his party badge dangling lopsided on the breast of his dhoti. He was
forty-six
years old, he was the father of seven children and he and his family inhabited one room made of brick and five others
constructed
of thatch in a little compound of their own. He was a peasant farmer owning five acres of land, which meant that he was far better off than the average peasant farmer of Bihar. Most of it was rice paddy but the crop had failed for three
successive
years and so the family income had depended almost entirely upon what they could grow of sugar cane instead. The rice would bring them in Rs 3,500 in a decent year but the sugar cane had a smaller market and made only Rs 2,000.