Calcutta (25 page)

The province is terminated to the North by the busy brash line of Park Street, which links Chowringhee and the Maidan with the tough underside of Calcutta represented by the Lower Circular Road. In a sense, Park Street is its focal point also, for this is where many rich drift when work is done, where they take much of their amusement, where many of their values are paraded in public, where they can be seen making fastidious
contact
with the poor; or very carefully and blankly avoiding it. Park Street was not always a combination of honky-tonk and
urbane shopping centre, as it mostly is today. Its name came out of the deer park which Sir Elijah Impey had here. The
exclusively
erudite Asiatic Society built headquarters at the
Chowringhee
end, where the spiritual descendants of Jones and
Colebrooke
still come to pore over the twenty thousand increasingly dusty volumes of orientalia. And towards the Lower Circular Road, where the bright lights have faded, where garish neon has given way to butter-coloured and standard electric, is the
cemetery
where the old British masters of India buried their dead and raised astonishing monuments to their memory. But the pyramids of Park Street Cemetery are now almost (though not quite) a world and a century or two away from the general flavour of the thoroughfare at its upper and fashionable end. Right alongside the Asiatic Society’s drab and unobtrusive frontage is a high and faceless hotel whose cultural origins lie somewhere in the post-war concrete jungles of the midtown United States; and, indeed, this is where the Pan American limousine finishes its journeys from Dum Dum, depositing its last passengers at Reception before being parked itself in the
mezzanine
garage. And this is the aspiring tone of the next five hundred yards of Park Street.

The Park Hotel contains a night club called the In and Out, where there is ‘Cabaret by Heather. Also Mina in exotic Oriental and Continental dances. Music by Paul Correia with Hazel at the mike. Panday with his telepathic wonder show. Reva, the lady with the radar mind, answering all the innermost
questions
.’ There are many other niteries along the road, like the Moulin Rouge, the Blue Fox, the Mocambo and Trincas (‘
Enchanting
Eve, popular Toto, Shilling’s Fentones, irresistible Iqbal Singh. Morning discotheques from ten a.m. to noon’) and once you are over the threshold it is scarcely possible to
distinguish
one from the other. The lighting is concealed and barely adequate even for flirtation, the menus are almost the size of the tables-for-two and the liquor comes at a price to make an
Englishman
gulp in this wettest of all Indian cities, where only Thursday is theoretically non-intoxicating. When an irresistible Iqbal Singh or an exotic Mina is not performing, the ledge at the top of the room is invariably occupied by a three-or
four-piece
band whose players may have been born and bred in
Bombay
or points East but whose music, deafening even when it is meant to be soothing, was beginning to die down in London or Manchester ten or fifteen years ago. There are usually special lighting effects playing upon the band, a succession of greens and oranges and blues slowly flooding glass panels behind and around the instrumentalists, which are identical to those which used to suffuse the most popular British cinema organists in the thirties and the forties. It is generally a nostalgic indulgence to be there and a relief to get outside again, even though this means forsaking the crisp pleasure of air-conditioning for the sopping humidity of the night.

The shopping style of Park Street is Westernized, too. There are occasional cubby-hole tradesmen, usually dispensing tobacco or pan or bootlaces, but most business is conducted behind
plate-glass
windows with a till instead of an old tin to contain the
currency
. There are emporiums here which sell anything from plastic toys and lavatory paper to patent medicines, bottles of lime-juice, and biscuits which have been packaged by the factory in several layers of waxed or tin-foiled paper to prevent them going rotten in the climate. There are shops which do a roaring trade in nothing but saris and silks. There are businesses which specialize in pop-up toasters, or thermostatic irons but which, in all their electrical commodities, never offer a vacuum cleaner for sale, because in Calcutta a human carpet sweeper is infinitely less expensive and much more durable as well. Park Street also includes two or three of the best bookshops in town, where you can purchase your Basildon Bond notepaper as well as Mr
Manchester’s
account of a President’s death, but very little that is not written in English. It contains a rambling auction sale room, where bargains can be obtained in garden statuary, middle-aged upholstery, mounted buffalo heads and bundles of electro-plated cutlery which have been abandoned by the latest British family to leave the land. At several points there are news stands – a sheet or two of cardboard on the ground, bearing five or ten yards of Indian newspapers and Western magazines running a gamut from
Time
to
True
Confessions,
from
New
Statesman
to
Health
and
Efficiency.

It has restaurants as well as eating places which are chiefly night clubs, and here there is a very fine demarcation line
between
those which cater for the shopkeeping or the
rickshaw-owning
rich and those which pander to the executive rich. The first of these people are rather more likely to eat in family
outings
at the Chinese house next to the auction rooms, alongside Westerners who feel like a break from curry. The decor is
universal
chinoiserie and
My
Fair
Lady
is coming moderately loud and clear through amplifiers, but when the dhobi arrives with his enormous load of newly-laundered tablecloths he counts it piece by piece with the management upon the floor beside the diners. Somewhat more polished than this is the Kwality just over the road, where the clientele is in rather better business or still clinging, like the handful of Anglo-Indian ladies who pop in at teatime for a gaudy icecream confection with nuts on top, to the fading remnant of an ascendancy which the British and mixed blood once gave their sires and their grandams.

At the Kwality the tinned music is so perfectly muted when it is there at all that you cannot identify the tunes, the
management
would not dream of exposing their laundry before the
customers
, and their own professional aspirations were perhaps
accomplished
by the beginning of 1970 when they finally achieved wall to wall carpeting throughout their establishment. Before that, the long aisle between the tables was bare, and all day a humble man in khaki would move up and down crabwise on his haunches, swabbing the floor with a damp cloth around each chair leg and between each dining foot, without ever raising his eyes from his task. Nobody seemed to notice his presence; in fact, nobody was obliged to, for the slightest movement in his direction from customers, waiters or anyone else, was enough to make him deftly swivel his body out of the way, to avoid all possibility of contact.

India sometimes seems to be the intruder here; it becomes the great amorphous power which the British used to feel
claustrophobically
surrounding them and threatening them. It is still there, waiting to be harnessed and bidden and used for the pleasure and necessity of alien values. There is no getting away from it. At almost every intersection along Park Street there are
rickshaws waiting for passengers. There are small boys waiting to clean shoes. There are men of no apparent vocation gossiping around the tobacco stalls, smoking beedies which they have lit From a smouldering length of rope that someone has
thoughtfully
tied to a lamp-post. There are people coming and going perpetually, bearing burdens of indiscriminate size and
composition
, heaving and sweating until late at night behind bullock carts that are not rumbling and lurching fast enough, their storm lanterns swinging and jerking at the back. They are all in some way at the disposal of the other people moving in and out of the shops, the restaurants and the clubs, whose colour may be identical, whose dress (particularly in the case of women) may often derive from the same tradition, but whose mannerisms suggest both ownership and alienation.

In the Kwality at lunchtime some ascending young
entrepreneur
, who has had his two girl friends round-eyed and giggling at his story of a dashing drive up the Grand Trunk Road to Durgapur, will suddenly shoot his elegant cuffs and bellow ‘Bearah’ across the room; what he really wants is the waiter with the bill, but the jargon of command was settled long ago in this city by men infinitely paler than he, and he can even imitate to perfection their intonation as well as their vocabulary. At night he and his blood brothers will emerge from a similar restaurant or club, together with their women, and they may pause for a moment before collecting their cars or hailing a taxi to purchase a balloon from a man who is almost hidden beneath a bobbing mass of them; or to buy a garland of those small, white,
bell-shaped
and stickily sweet-smelling flowers whose name is mogra. Then they will stroll, more easily, more indolently, much more slowly than any Westerner would dare to, past every beggar on Park Street without even a glance in their direction. And if a beggar should persist in his entreaties while these rich people are chattering and laughing at the kerb before getting into a car, he will be dismissed without anyone actually looking at him, with a gesture which is at once one of the most delicate and one of the most appalling that a human being ever contrived. It is a movement of the hand and wrist at the end of an arm which is not quite outstretched. Ladies of the British royal family are
inclined to render their own stunted version of one element in it, to signify gracious condescension as they pass their subjects by in a car. But here the hand is upturned, the wrist rotates freely and the fingers flow one after the other away from the body. The gesture is delivered with the suspicion of a shrug in the shoulder and it means, at one and the same time, ‘I don’t even recognize your existence’ and ‘Don’t you dare to pollute me with your presence’ and quite simply ‘Fuck off’. In it you detect a dismal truth about the gap which separates the people who frequent Park Street. For it is not India which threatens and
encompasses
on the outside, but the poor. And it is not the merely Westernized who are surrounded and besieged but the rich, who were in this land when all its people were Hindu, whose original alienation is vanished in antiquity, being simply fortified by the Moguls and buttressed by the British, being grafted into both these strains, the mannerisms being those of the last who
happened
to lead along this way.

And because the British were the last rulers, because the
ambitions
of the nation are rising towards an economy and a form of civilization that has been instrumentalized in the West, the
executive
rich of Calcutta are to be found casting themselves as
carefully
as they can in the same mould. The home revolves around the drawing room and if there is a concession to Mother India it is not very often taken farther than the food or the row of dolls or masks or brightly-painted clay animals or other native craft symbols ranged along the mantelpiece or upon the shelf over the pelmet. There will be a radiogram, possibly a tape recorder, and even here there will be a refrigerator, for that is a symbol as well as an important piece of equipment. There will be a bottle or two of whisky, for that lubricates business friendships as splendidly in Calcutta as it does in Cape Cod. The adolescent and mature women of the household will wear the sari or other forms of Indian dress, for nothing the West has yet devised is more
graceful
or engaging than such local garments; but the men, the boys and the little girls will have imported clothes in their wardrobes and little else. The children will be encouraged to call their parents Daddy and Mummy with, as nearly as they can manage it, both the accents and the sentiments of Surbiton. Daddy will
play golf if he can pass muster with the very particular
membership
committee of exclusive Tollygunge, and both he and Mummy will go to regular parties at which the pattern is
invariably
one of ball-room dancing with dinner following around midnight, because the Indian habit is to go home after you have dined with your host; which may or may not be one reason why the executives of Calcutta, faithfully following the precedents of the West, are notoriously subject to chronic gastric troubles. The dancing will be strictly ‘ball-room’, with nothing nearly as vulgar as the Twist or its subsequent variations. The music will come off the radiogram and its general tempo is suggested by the list of best-selling long-playing records issued by the
Gramophone
Company of India Ltd (part of the EMI empire) for 1969; which included, among the top eight discs, Nat King Cole, Danny Kaye, Mantovani, Joe Loss, Enoch Light, The Ventures, The Seekers and ‘All Star Discotheque Dance Album’.

This is a confused culture, then. It can have an executive arriving in the office at the start of Durga Puja, which is Bengal’s major Hindu festival, and greeting his staff with ‘Happy Puja’ – which precisely identifies the man for the hybrid he is. For
although
he himself will be nominally Hindu, he will have been curiously claimed by his position, his wealth and his ambitions, for a variety of Christian British rituals. There will be no great family reunions at Christmas or New Year because, more likely than not, sisters and brothers will still be firmly settled in Hindu traditions, but there will be heavy drinking and there will be
all-night
parties; it is even known for a family like this to consume hot-cross buns for breakfast on Good Friday. An advertisement recently offering refrigerators for sale, did so with the picture of a lady in a sari regarding the latest model, under the inviting heading ‘Wilt thou take this Leonard …’ And just as the
relationships
between parents and children, generally prized in India as in few Western societies, can be seen crumbling under the
pressures
of extreme poverty in the bustees, so they can be noticed splintering under the blandishments of wealth and alien custom in the executive suburbs. The children tend to be left with grandparents when there is a foreign business trip to be awarded
and increasingly when there are annual holidays to be taken up in Kashmir or down at Gopalpur-on-sea.