Calcutta (26 page)

At the apex of this society are the clubs of Calcutta. There are two kinds of commercial traveller regularly making their way into the city from some other part of India, or even farther afield. One is the man in small business who is hoping to
improve
an uncertainly secure position by some careful barter around the side streets of Dalhousie Square or along the
calculating
length of Brabourne Road. He will probably spend his few days in town lodged in some entirely Indian hotel like the Minerva, where foreigners are looked upon as curiosities, where the rooms glare with neon strip-lights and the shutters are
always
firmly shut, where the bathrooms
en
suite
are walled in undecorated concrete, where food is taken in a slightly jazzy restaurant next door, where the servants sleep on the staircase at night because the hotel is home as well as work to them, and where the lad who carried your bags briskly demands a second rupee on top of the tip you have already given him. The traveller lodging in such a place will probably be entertained one evening by his most benevolent or most anxious contact to the high life of the Blue Fox or some other resort in Park Street. He will proceed no higher than this up the social scale of Calcutta.

But let some captain or rising subaltern of industry fly into Dum Dum, and one of the first things he will pass after his transit through the arrival lounge is a notice board with gilt lettering upon a gravy-coloured varnish. This is a roll of the eighteen clubs in Calcutta available to anyone who might be welcome and at ease in White’s or Boodle’s or the Athenaeum or some other equivalent in St James’s, London. Here is the
Automobile
Association of Eastern India Club, the Ordnance Club, the Calcutta South Club and others of a second rank. Above them rise the Royal Calcutta Turf Club, the Bengal Club, the Tollygunge Club and the Calcutta Club itself. The man who has an entrée here would never dream of staying at a purely Indian hotel, but will instead book himself into the Great Eastern Hotel or the very Grand Hotel, whose clientele is cosmopolitan, whose lobbies have their own shops, whose bedrooms are as ample and highly equipped as almost anything that Europe and the
Americas have to offer, and whose commissionaires, rigged in turbans and cummerbunds like princes on one of the old durbar days, are employed to spend a proportion of their time shooing the beggars away from the immediate vicinity of the entrance; and, when they are not doing that, to open and shut the door
before
any guest can even contemplate the risk of fatiguing himself, while they offer him a smart salute and a great clumping
together
of heavily-booted heels in the process.

At the Tollygunge, which is said to be the most select of these establishments nowadays, they have acres of parkland, quite apart from other possessions up to and including stables, a golf course and a swimming pool, and here people can sit and toy with their drinks upon easy cane chairs beneath trees, while they perhaps imagine themselves on an uncommonly stifling day at home in or on a visit to the suburban woodlands of England; and half of them are probably quite unaware that in the lee of the wall that encircles this oasis, lies yet another of Calcutta’s bustees. At the Royal Calcutta, apart from the usual club
amenities
, there is of course the racing, which can be observed from the grand enclosure for Rs 15 (please note that no cheques or IOUs can be accepted at the ticket boxes). At the Bengal Club, which was once the supreme unofficial headquarters of the Raj and which would never permit an Indian to pollute its
membership
, they sadly have had to auction their impressive
Chowringhee
frontage and retreat into reduced circumstances at the back. At the Calcutta Club they were always more civil to the natives of the country, and the main staircase is hung with the
photographs
of club presidents whose faces have from the start very carefully been alternately white and brown; and in this amiable atmosphere, two thousand gentlemen who have each subscribed Rs 1,500 to belong, can further enjoy the sensation that goes with the knowledge of four thousand other gentlemen anxiously waiting to get in.

There is a common form to all the clubs, whatever their
distinctive
caste marks might be. These are places where you can sit out on a lawn as trim and almost as close shaven as a bowling green while the rest of Calcutta, at the very worst, merely roars at you from somewhere beyond the high and mighty wall. You
can probably take your good lady along for a drink before dinner and if the servants, who are uniformed in the same style ordained for those commissionaires at the Grand and the Great Eastern, do not attend to your needs smartly enough, you can punch the highly-polished brass bell provided on each open-air table to bring two or three of them scurrying at once. But in spite of the heterosexual lawns and lounges and dining rooms, the focal point of all this clubmanship remains the purely masculine smoking room and bar.

Here you may encounter the Maharajadhiraja of Burdwan, spruced up in his brocade smoking jacket, or the vigorous
Commissioner
of Police, Mr Ranjit Gupta, who when not engaged in his constabulary duties can be discovered playing polo or
reviewing
books for
The
Statesman
or delivering witty lectures on the Battle of the Jhelum, in which Alexander the Great is
supposed
to have crushed the Indian Prince Porus in 326 BC. Here are doctors who, like the majority of men in their profession, have at the earliest opportunity rushed out of the State medical service, where the emoluments are so low that a teaching
professor
will collect no more than Rs 2,500 a month; they are said to make quite Rs 20,000 a month in Calcutta out of private
practices
which exact Rs 128 (or about
£
7) for a house visit. Here are barristers who, in this litiginous place, are reputed to amass Rs 50,000 a month, which puts them more or less on the same financial footing that Sir Elijah Impey and Thomas Fairer enjoyed when they were here. Here are men who help to keep the immaculately white premises of Hamilton’s, the jewellers, in very fine fettle in Old Court House Street, and whose weekly
shopping
generally includes its ration of St Emilion at the equivalent of
£
10 a bottle and Dry Monopol at
£
14. There are gentlemen around these mahogany tables who still seal their
correspondence
with red wax and who complain about their laundry bills, which must indeed be taxing when a chap who wishes to clothe himself in white drills and ducks all the time – as many in
Calcutta
do – reckons that he needs fourteen pairs of trousers and shirts to keep himself going, with another ten of each in reserve, just to be on the safe and presentable side. Then they poke each other in the ribs, and take a rise out of old Shanti there, who is
keeping himself very much to himself because he either won or lost Rs 600 at gin rummy here last night.

There is another manner of clubman in Calcutta and he is the most judiciously rich fellow in the whole city. He has positively insisted on entertaining you in his house, which lies in one of the thoroughfares beyond Park Street. It has not been an excessively opulent home, judging by appearances, but it has been distinctly well-appointed, with a skinned tiger lounging over the back of the sofa, and a terrace beyond the dining room on which the family are wont to sit with their guests in the evening, while the fans whirl and click overhead and the crickets jingle in dozens among the bushes beneath, and the occasional cries of people in poverty are heard from the alleys beyond the trees. There have been subsequent visits, for it has been difficult to refuse such great warmth and hospitality pressing you almost daily to
return
. There has even been an excursion with your host’s wife (tactfully chaperoned by your host’s daughter) who has very badly wanted to show you the latest exhibition of the arts centre that she patronizes; and joy has completely though a little
nervously
been unconfined when on the threshold of the club
premises
Lady Mookerjee, the grand patroness of Calcutta’s arts and crafts, has descended from her chauffeur-driven car and graciously exchanged pleasantries.

Your host, in these few days, has meanwhile been dragging the conversation over his whisky away from arts and crafts and people and his business and yours, and towards the verge of politics. On discovering that you are a moderately radical soul yourself he has confessed that, by Jove, he is of much the same mind. He has then told a quite remarkable story, in the
circumstances
of these surroundings. He has mentioned once before that he owns an hereditary piece of land and bungalow near a village several miles south of the city, which he and his family use for weekends and holidays. The story is that one weekend he went down and found that someone had daubed his gateposts with the hammer and sickle. Your host summoned the village headman and asked him, with great sternness, who had done this thing. On tracking the fellows down he put on a great display of anger until he had them trembling before him. And then (he
begins to chuckle at this point) he pointed out to them that he was very angry indeed; but not because his gateposts had been daubed. His anger proceeded from the dishonour thus done to the hammer and sickle. He made them an offer on the spot and it was that if ever again they felt like proclaiming their politics on his premises, they should bring a proper flag, that he would then provide the rope and the flagpost to fly it from.

Your host has been watching you very carefully while he has been telling this tale and when you have smiled rather feebly he has let it be known that he has some contact with the
Communist
world in Calcutta. And indeed he has. Before you know where you are, he has taken you to meet the ancient Muzaffar Ahmad, one of the founding fathers of Indian Communism, by whom he has been received (somewhat distantly) as a kind of disciple. A few nights later he has taken you to a great rally on the Maidan, conducted by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), where all the party bosses have been speaking, led by the former Deputy Prime Minister of West Bengal and the most powerful Communist in India, Jyoti Basu. The highly
disciplined
young party militiamen on the makeshift gate have
refused
you both entrance, whereupon your host has written a note to Mr Basu and within minutes the pair of you have been escorted to a couple of the best seats beneath the platform. Your host has very kindly translated the speeches, when he has not been applauding them, for they have almost all been in Bengali. When the rally has finished, he has suggested a nightcap in his club, and just before he has driven you both into the car park he has asked that you will … er … of course … er … not mention where we have been in front of his other friends and colleagues upstairs. In that smokeroom, a little later, your host has been sitting in a circle of cronies, jesting about the richness of life in Calcutta, poking hearty fun at the card losers, complaining with the best of them about the local breakdown in law and order since these damned Communists were first allowed to get away with it. And no casual observer could possibly tell that he was not as distant from Jyoti Basu as the Maharajadhiraja of
Burdwan
himself.

That clubman is not by any means unique, and it would be
unreasonable to be too scornful of his running with both hare and hounds. A man born into the landed customs of Calcutta has been born into a tradition of cynical opportunism which has been more obvious here from the first foundation than in most places on earth. He is living in a city where the instincts for
self-preservation
have always been primitively uppermost in a
majority
of its people out of awful necessity; and where things have reached the stage that even the rich can no longer think
themselves
confidently insulated by their wealth from the possibility of catastrophe. They are beginning to betray themselves, as they have never been obliged to before in many generations, as
creatures
not substantially different, when it comes to the pinch, from impoverished peasants who abandon or sell their children in time of famine. A rich man called Roger Drake once
established
some such precedent in this city, even if it was not already to be found somewhere in the area before him. And a compatriot of his, much later, ran off another of his gaudy little verses, not entirely inconsequential, to fix Calcutta as he knew it eighty-odd years ago:

If Kipling had been composing today, he might just have
sacrificed
his scansion to turn his last line the other way round. For there is many a man in the city today, with gold in his hands and the worry of imminent doom twitching his nostrils.