Calcutta (17 page)

In the elections that followed, I went nowhere near the Jute Technology building. I couldn’t possibly vote for the Left again simply because there was no other option, like a miserable undergraduate who goes to an awful social gathering rather than stay at home. Now, on election eve, the mood was once more different. It felt like there was an unspoken consensus that people would sooner commit suicide than return the Left to power. There was also an undercurrent of agreement that to vote for the Trinamool was to commit suicide. Yet there was a hopefulness in the air, a cockiness, even: the cockiness, say, of Rowan Atkinson in
Blackadder Goes Forth
, when he’s orchestrated events so that he’ll be in front of the firing squad in the morning, and receive a pardon just as it takes aim. As I entered the deserted Jute Technology
college (devoid now of the usually bustling jute technology staff and students), I knew I faced a quandary for tomorrow’s vote. I kept putting off thinking about it; writing about the event was a means of losing my focus on participating in it, in however small a way. But it was my knowledge that I’d infinitesimally influence the event by casting my vote that brought a muted excitement to the idea of writing about it. Yet my plan for voting was depressingly perverse, and deliberately designed to achieve nothing. The CPI(M) candidate in my neighbourhood was the Speaker’s son, Fuad Halim, a young, self-effacing doctor who did social work, a man no one knew and who’d for some inexplicable reason decided to join the fray. His main opponent was the former mayor Subrata Mukherjee, who’d jumped ship and changed parties many times in his career, and for whom neither I nor my wife (who was displaying, on election eve, a more carefree, less tortured resolve in this matter) cared to press the button. But to vote CPI(M) yet again? I felt the exhaustion of one who’s belatedly understood the illusory nature of choice, and feels bitter. Entering, I was politely asked by a young Border Security Force guard to explain myself. Having fobbed him off with some high-falutin nonsense about writing a piece, I went into one of the two halls that would be used for voting (which were otherwise, I imagined, spacious jute technology classrooms), where three polling officers were seated, shirtless, behind a table. With their consent, I began to ask them—especially (out of a sense of symmetry) the one in the centre—general questions. They were government employees with day jobs (the mild elderly man on the left worked in the main branch of the State Bank of India), and they’d done election duty in previous years; like jury members, they couldn’t refuse the job, for which they were paid a modest fee, if asked to do it. The moment I wondered aloud if the elections on the 27th were any different from previous ones, my main interviewee grew
unapproachable, bureaucratic, as if he were at a desk in a bank, and clarified tersely that every election, where he was concerned, was exactly the same. When I pressed him, a man who’d been sitting before the vest-wearing officials, myopically going through papers, said firmly I must leave. I’d noticed him, and noticed that he’d noticed me and was pretending, like a consummate actor, to be oblivious; he had a deft, intelligent air, and was sorting out the papers with a ferret-like concentration. “Excuse me,” I said, not to challenge him, but to satisfy my curiosity, “who are you?” “The presiding officer,” he said, not making a big issue about it. An older BSF officer with an automatic gun—moustached, dark, more of a physical presence than the boy outside—took my arm, and, when I respectfully loosened it, very gently escorted me out; in an attempt to be cheerful and subtly difficult, I reminded the three men I’d see them again the next day, and they naturally behaved as if they hadn’t heard.

Further up Ballygunge Circular Road is a beautiful colonial building, the David Hare College, named after the nineteenth-century Scottish watchmaker and fiercely non-evangelical educationist, beloved of Bengalis, both privileged and underprivileged, of the time. The place was lighted up, and swarming with convivial-looking policemen. Given the number of plastic chairs and charged atmosphere, it might have been a policeman’s wedding. I was seated opposite a man in khaki regalia, with epaulettes and tassels, a cap on his head, who was speaking hurriedly into a walkie-talkie. It emerged that the policemen were waiting with bated breath for the “stand down” order, when they could finally go home. It had been a big day. The college not only had a polling booth, but (and this explained the number of policemen congregated there) was a centre at which electronic voting machines were received, and then distributed to ninety-one booths in the area. When I shamelessly informed the busy, nervous-looking
khaki-clad man I was a novelist, he said, “What do you write? Are you addressing society’s many problems?” He added, “Literature is a mirror to society.” Policemen in Bengal once had a reputation for being unusually, perhaps unexpectedly, intellectual. Monobina Gupta, in
Left Politics in Bengal
, mentions that Louis Malle, in Calcutta in 1968, received permission to film a political demonstration from a policeman who was a fan, and who, on meeting Malle, told him he’d “watched
Zazie
a week ago, at the Metro theatre, barely a stone’s throw away from the protest … Oh, yes, he had completed a course in French and also translated Louis Aragon’s
Elsa at the Mirror
.” “What kind of problems do you have in mind?” I said, deciding it was best to engage my companion in conversation. “Problems take three forms,” he informed me, while a policeman of lower rank eavesdropped, agog. “You can be born with problems. People can
create
problems for you. Thirdly, people can make you
think
you have problems.” He meant me to be perplexed by this last category, and I was. “This group is the most difficult. It fosters the resentment that leads to terrorism.” “But terrorism is not a real concern in this city, is it?” I asked. As we tackled these themes, I noticed him glance with alacrity at an urbane-looking bespectacled gentleman who was approaching us, a bhadralok bureaucrat out of a Ray movie. I was momentarily seized by a nostalgia for Ray’s world; at the same time, a strange thought passed through my head: “If this guy doesn’t recognise me, I might as well give up writing.” This was followed, swiftly, by the pre-emptive voice, “There’s no reason why he should recognise me.” It turned out he was Mr. Chakrabarty of the Calcutta Port Trust. My companion, who, as it happens, was Mr. Chatterjee, an assistant commissioner of the police, introduced me affectionately, as if I were a precocious teenager. “I’ve been telling him that the writer must deal with society’s problems,” he said in English, to which, impeccably, Mr.
Chakrabarty replied, “Ah, Mr. Chaudhuri has more than fulfilled his responsibilities to society.” I was struck that it was possible to have a brief exchange on the role of the writer approximately twelve hours before what people had once predicted would surely be a violent election.

I made from the David Hare College for Park Street. A young writer friend with two well-received books to his name—I’ll call him “Salim”—had emailed me a few days earlier about visiting Calcutta; it would be his second visit to the city. Salim lived in Delhi and England and other places, and I presumed he was covering the elections for a British newspaper. But, in the last day, I’d been getting frantic texts about a bad stomach; the messages conveyed the panic of being in a city where one doesn’t know anyone who knows any doctors. Then the message language had stabilised; medication had been administered, and, tomorrow (election day), Salim would leave for less unsettling territory: Bombay. I wondered if he were too weak now to meet me; but a text told me that company was what he craved.

Salim was lying recumbent in his air-conditioned room in Park Mansions when I finally saw him; he had a visitor at the bedside—a middle-aged, stocky gentleman, someone who, in his matter-of-fact gentleness, was again out of Calcutta’s past, like the Port Trust’s Mr. Chakrabarty. Salim thanked the man profusely when he took his leave soon after I’d entered the room. Park Mansions was a block of colonial flats with a compound, hidden from the main road (which was Free School Street), very still and charming at this time of the evening. To step on the wooden floorboards at the entrance, walk towards the old lift, and to ring the bell and be let in by the caretaker was, to me at least, full of history and promise.

“It’s a lovely place,” I said, to which Salim smiled and said,
“Ye-e-s,” sceptically, as if he were weighing my remark. We discussed, for a bit, the nuances of a habitation such as this one—what was it that kept it from having a dull, numbed, governmental quality? Past privilege is what it exuded; but present well-being too. There was still money here; it was quietly in possession of the old building. It had the walls painted a white that looked silken in the lamplight. What was it about white walls—here; or in old institutional buildings in London; or nursing homes for the convalescent to recuperate in—that had a safe, patrician glow?

“So what are you doing here?” I asked. “I’m not actually sure,” he confessed. “Yesterday, I was following a campaign trail in Barrackpore, asking people questions. Then I began to feel very ill.” “I wasn’t feeling so good myself yesterday—it was horribly humid all of a sudden,” I said. “Was it something you ate here?” He quickly wanted to absolve the city of guilt. “You know, I don’t think so. I think it’s an infection I had earlier that hasn’t gone away.”

We had slipped, unbeknownst to him, and without self-consciousness on my part, into what for Bengalis is a returning subject of conversation: the state of their digestion. The English are supposed to open conversations with the weather, and then reference it again as a sort of join or punctuation between one thought and another: it sounds ridiculous, but is largely true. It’s their daily, sometimes hourly, reassessment of the fact of existence—something that neither their religion, work, nor education any more expects from them. Bengalis talk constantly about food to express an irrational joie de vivre in the midst of a jaded present; and they speak of their digestion—especially a mysterious complaint called “gas,” or
gash
—to register melancholy, a persistent dissatisfaction with life. This phenomenon, which has been studied by a German sociologist, Stefan Ecks, explains the constant outflow of antacids and cures for dyspepsia,
like Gelusil and Aqua-ptychotis, and laxatives such as Isabgol and Dulcolax, from pharmacists’ shelves in Calcutta: these are actually a curious kind of mood-enhancer, a crutch to the Bengali mind. Dyspepsia is the curse of the sedentary man, who probably appears in Calcutta well before Macaulay speaks of his intention of conjuring up “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.”

“What’s the situation like out there?” I asked Salim.

“Not good at all,” he said, shaking his head grimly. “I had the sense that people are in a state of despair, that they’re really between a rock and a hard place.”

“Did you talk to anyone interesting?”

“Well, I was following this guy around—Dinesh Trivedi.” General Secretary of the All India Trinamool Congress, MP from Barrackpore, Trivedi was the Trinamool’s conciliatory (and non-Bengali) face. “I liked him,” said Salim. “He was open and made no bones about the fact that steering the state in the right direction under Trinamool wouldn’t be a straightforward thing.”

I was interested in this portrayal. I’d met Trivedi several times at Manoj’s parties, and our encounters were brief and unmemorable. We had to be reintroduced each time by Manoj, and behave as if there had never been a previous meeting.

“So is this for a piece, then?” I persisted.

“I thought I might have written something—but now …” Salim waved at himself in the bed, “I’ve given up the idea. Anyway, I like being here, I like this city. I thought it would be good to spend some time here.”

I’m intrigued by this admission of admiration for Calcutta from friends visiting from Europe and America; they often tell me it’s the Indian city they like best. Although I feel like an outsider to Calcutta myself, with hardly any close friends here, I must have become both inured to and invested enough in it to
not be able to experience it as they do. I find today’s Calcutta intriguing myself, but for altogether different reasons; and, as I’ve pointed out before, I’m haunted and impeded by my childhood vision of it in the sixties and seventies, when it was a great city. What must it look like today to the visitor? I try again and again to perform the imaginative feat, to put myself in his or her place, but can’t quite succeed. Akhil Sharma’s quizzical but considered “You feel something must have happened here” is the only clue I have to what appears before the visitor’s eye.

“Besides, I felt like my writing was closing up—I felt like I needed to get out,” he said. “Do you feel like that sometimes? That actually going somewhere new, getting ‘out there,’ might get your writing flowing again?”

Despite being a very good writer, Salim is attractively ingenuous; you feel protective towards him and his queries, whether or not he has a stomach bug, or is in need of a doctor—there’s a raw freshness to the persona.

I could see “going out into the world” as a Hemingway-like ploy; the writer as explorer and operative, undertaking an excursion specifically in the interests of surviving, remaining alive, as a writer. I didn’t see Salim as a Hemingway-type figure, though—there was an Indian softness about him which set him apart from Hemingway’s hard, sentimental individualism; a softness that hinted at dependency—possibly a mother he was close to.

I myself had never consciously adopted “going out into the world” as a programme for rejuvenation, and I said as much to Salim. “In fact,” and I was thinking aloud for the first time about this in the room in Park Mansions, “I can feel trapped in the whole business of writing, especially writing fiction, and have in the past. I find that what works best for me is a different kind of travel: between genres—into the essay, or story, or into music. I can’t stay with one genre, especially with the novel, for very
long. I feel restless, and must move in another direction—which is usually another form.”