Calcutta (19 page)

I walked cautiously towards the primary school—that’s what the low building was. It was more basic than the school at Rajpur; it had no more than two or three rooms. The big room, where the polling officers, the presiding officer, and the “micro-observer” from the Election Commission were gathered, overseeing the mildly diffident but perpetual trickle of voters, was the main classroom: the wall on the right had painted on it large black Bengali vowels and a handful of consonants, as well as the face of the godlike educationist of the Bengal Renaissance, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar.

I wasn’t allowed to ask a single question: the Election Commission had ensured a mood that was sociable and regulatory, festive, but with a respect due to an occasion like, say, public examinations. Bantala clearly had a more notable record of unrest than the other stops on my tour. Feeling that I was impeding the smooth turnover of the queue, I went outside into the compound, where, again, women stretched in one line on the right, the men on the left. There was something resistant about these figures: they weren’t peasantry, and neither were they wholly urban—poverty had made them small and wiry. They didn’t belong to Satyajit Ray’s world, or Bibhutibhushan Banerjee’s, but to a political dispensation under which even the vegetation looked stunted, and the greenery, once you took the “highway” departing Calcutta, grew black with soot and dust. The village Bengal of books and films, a version of which I’d seen in my childhood on the road from the airport to the city, had been made sickly in the last
twenty-five years—although its naturally bountiful colours still looked lush from the aeroplane window. These people were of, and like, that landscape, economically unviable but politically alive—they were what was left of that pastoral.

Were these people from Calcutta, though? Strictly speaking, I was still in the city. But throughout that day, during which I moved from the more far-flung southern reaches back to middle-class Ballygunge, voting in the afternoon with R, dropping her home at Sunny Park, and then being driven by Mahinder into the narrow lanes of Dum Dum-Rajarhat in the north, just as the elections were winding down after four o’clock, I felt the presence of a new city that had come up where the old had been. To be
in
it was not to be any closer to comprehending it than when I’d studied it from the aeroplane window a few days ago, with its once-magical clusters of plantain and palm trees and small terraced houses. Mamata Banerjee fits in well here, having emerged, like this tentative city itself, and the people I’d met on election day, without a past, and without that enervating legacy of humanism and high culture. As to whether she would give it a future we would discover on 13th May, when the results would be declared, and in the long-anticipated years to follow.

SIX
High Tea

In April 1999, almost as soon as my fellowship in Cambridge in England came to an end, I transferred what worldly possessions I couldn’t ship back to India—mainly studenty things, plates from a Latin American shop, posters, a CD player—into the damp New Court cellars at St. John’s College. Panting at the end of the Herculean undertaking, I felt ready to surrender to the fantasy that had gripped me for almost two decades: of returning “home,” to India. But, for more than one reason, I didn’t close my bank account on King Street. Fed up though I was with what Thatcher and Blair had done, between themselves, to Britain, I wasn’t ready to give it up altogether. I also had some inkling that neither India nor Calcutta, my birthplace, was the sort of nation and city to receive their returning sons emotionally, with open arms.

In fact, I was welcomed, on my arrival, by a negative review of
Freedom Song
(which had been published seven or eight months earlier) in the
Statesman
, still, at the time, Calcutta’s leading English-language daily. Reviewing is often a form of thuggery in Anglophone India, territorial, threatening, a way of roughing somebody up; and the Books pages are a bit like a lawless part of town, from which you have to be thankful to slip away with your writerly life—not to mention your dignity—intact. This review, which my father had kept from me, and which had shocked him slightly, had begun by quoting from Plato, and
proceeded to claim that “novel is dead” after Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie. My poor novel—an example of the genre that had the temerity to persist after its demise—had been called an “entomologist’s notebook,” and its characters compared to stick insects. To add to these insults was the insult of the review being quite poorly written by the Plato-reading reviewer, bristling with bad syntax and self-importance, and unaware of its missing articles. At thirty-seven, I was still young, but not entirely surprised. But some wishful part of me had longed for a warmer greeting.

Not everyone in Calcutta had viewed me with hostility, though a few people had. There were, for instance, readers who were effusive about my first novel,
A Strange and Sublime Address
, saying it had noticed the minutiae of their lives, details that lay perpetually before them, and which, as a result, they didn’t look at. I was grateful for this generosity when it came my way, but I was also—for what reason I didn’t know—suspicious, as if I couldn’t accept the praise at face value. Among the people who sought me out was a couple called the Mukherjees. Their via media was a journalist who’d interviewed me for
Desh
, the leading Bengali-language weekly, who said, “Would you mind if I passed on your address to this couple? The gentleman wants to write to you. They love literature, and entertain writers sometimes. Of course, they might be a bit insistent.” I reflected on this and enquired, “Are they all right, though?,” as if to preclude the possibility of their having a violent streak. The journalist (who, I’d soon find out, wasn’t entirely “all right” himself, and who’d take against me after my second novel,
Afternoon Raag
) thought about this briefly, and said, “Yes, they’re fine.”

So it was that Anita Mukherjee invited my wife and me to afternoon tea.

The Mukherjees lived on the ground floor of a two-storeyed building on Lower Circular Road. A narrow driveway led to the parking space by the entrance. A collapsible gate barred the doorway to the flat; behind it was the actual door, which was generally opened by the beaming Mrs. Mukherjee.

Once we were inside this gently peeling, charming apartment, we’d turn left into the sitting room, where Mr. Mukherjee would be seated on a chair in a newly ironed shirt and trousers, barely containing his excitement. He would then proffer his hand in a strange way, for us to hold and shake. He would be terribly apologetic, but mutedly euphoric.

Samir Mukherjee’s reason for being apologetic was his inability to stand up to greet us, or come to receive us at the door. This was because he’d contracted polio long ago, in 1959. Polio, in Calcutta, was a disease that had disfigured the lives of the upper classes besides affecting the poor; I knew of at least two other people from Mr. Mukherjee’s generation who belonged to that same vanishing, near-extinct corporate world in the city, who’d got polio at some point and dealt with it in their own manner.

The disease had reached a stage—when I first met the couple in 1992 or 1993—where Mr. Mukherjee stepped out of the house infrequently. The Mukherjees’ teatime, as a result, was less about the guests than about Samirda (as we’d begun to call him), although Samirda himself didn’t so much hold forth as urgently—but solicitously—question his guests, almost interviewing them, as if they were famous. He asked me, for instance, about books, about writing, about my parents, about Calcutta, and listened agog to my replies. I, on my part, felt I had to perform: felt that this self-deprecating man on the chair had the best seat in the house, that I was on a makeshift proscenium, that he was obscurely important and mustn’t, at the end, be left unhappy.
But I quickly began to feel at ease with this couple, not least because they laughed with what seemed like genuine delight at my jokes and occasionally rude observations about people—of which, obligingly, I delivered a constant stream over tea. There was something about the Mukherjees that invited this nonchalance; I’d take refuge in my careful, invented social persona when there were other guests around. This didn’t mean that I had completely let go of the innate suspiciousness I felt in relation to people who claim to like my work. Samirda had made his thoughts known to me in a letter written on lined paper; it went on to a page and half, and informed me, eloquently, of how he’d been moved by my enshrining of the everyday objects of which a middle-class Bengali’s life is composed. (Later, I’d find out that the polio had also affected Samirda’s arm; that he’d dictate his letters—and the various missives he’d send to the editor of the
Statesman
at the time—directly to his wife, in whose neat handwriting Samirda’s sometimes ornate sentences were transcribed. This explained, too, the odd, oblique, almost ambivalent way the hand was extended towards you for a handshake.) I was touched when I received this letter; then I began to wonder if there was more to it than met the eye. When Anita Mukherjee first called us to tea in her melodious, measured English, I had a—as it turned out, unnecessary—sense of foreboding.

After two or three visits, I noticed that the Mukherjees didn’t join us for tea. A bowing and diffident servant in a short dhuti would bring in tea on an enormous tray about twenty minutes after we arrived, along with food on plates and, what seemed most important of all, spotless napkins. Then Anita would wait for seven minutes for the tea to brew, before pouring it, with an erect swan-like sureness, into our cups.

At some point, I asked them if they wouldn’t join us. And this
led, on Samirda’s part, to a fumbling for words—an upper-class Bengali version of harrumphing. No, he explained, both he and his wife managing to become conspirators, they’d already had their tea.
This
was a sort of public ritual, at which they were purely spectators. For this reason—and not just because of the unexpectedly heavenly sandwiches Anitadi made—they appeared to their guests as transcendent, at a slight remove, belonging to a different sphere from the partakers of the tea, who had a more routine access to the world. I also began to realise that, having had their own tea at four, they’d begin to prepare for their guests’ arrival; that, by six o’clock, they’d be in the sitting room, patiently waiting for the sound of the car coming up the driveway, which would be a signal—sometimes a false one—that the second teatime, the much-anticipated one, was under way. Possibly because there was such an undercurrent of excitement to this period of waiting, Anita Mukherjee, when she received us at the door, was warm, serene, even a little distant. True excitement is contained, and doesn’t overstep its own measure.

There was another presence in the room, whom we encountered the moment we entered it, and then, as the tea unfolded, forgot. This was Samirda’s mother, by then in her mid-eighties. She was seated right next to the door of the sitting room; at first, I found this odd—it was as if she was being kept apart from the inner circle of the tea: almost like a chowkidar whom no one notices. Then I realised she was positioned in a way that would facilitate an early exit, when she became tired. Her vantage point added a dimension to the room: just as Samirda and Anitadi spectated, with a sort of visible pleasure, upon their guests having tea and offering up opinions, Mrs. Mukherjee looked upon this small spectacle—of her son and daughter-in-law entertaining their friends—with an enjoyment imprinted on her face as a small
smile of contentment. She was a bit deaf; so her pleasure must have been largely visual and—though she sat separate from us—participatory. Her presence also clarified for me what I’d just had an intuition of during this elaborate ritual: that Samirda, like most Bengali men, myself included perhaps, had never entirely grown up—that there was a continuity, for much of his life (possibly enchanted, possibly oppressive at times), with his childhood.

Mrs. Mukherjee Senior was birdlike, but she was still beautiful, her straight hair parted in the middle and tied back severely, with a puritanical simplicity. She had a Roman nose. She also had a squint; what in Bengali is called
“lokkhi tera
,” or a squint that gives an auspicious femininity and softness to a woman’s face. Quite a few years after her death, when I saw de Sica’s film version of Giorgio Bassani’s novel
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
, the matriarch of the doomed Jewish family—who is only ever glimpsed in passing, in the drawing room, or taking a walk in the estates with her husband—reminded me fleetingly of Samirda’s mother. Both women seemed—the real and the fictional one—to have been situated in a bygone aristocracy, and to know their precise place in it, while their children may have realised that the world they presided over had really disappeared.

On our first visits, my wife and I noticed that Mrs. Mukherjee Senior said “thet” for “that,” “beck” for “back.” It was a late Victorian pronunciation of English words, and should have survived, at most, to the forties. Samirda’s mother must have picked it up in school, and she was quite unselfconscious about her distinctive approach to vowels. My wife, secretly, was startled into remembering her grandmother—her father’s mother—whenever Mrs. Mukherjee spoke; she was tickled (there’s no other word for it) at this return, without warning, of what she thought was a bizarre and unique part of her ancestry. Her grandmother had died three years ago of cancer. R waited till the next meeting before asking
Mrs. Mukherjee (who always stooped forward slightly and clasped our hands when we said hello to her): “Did you know my grandmother Anila Bose by any chance? You speak so much like her”—as if mere diction might open a doorway onto a once-known world. “Bhona!” exclaimed Mrs. Mukherjee—almost all Bengali pet names are supposed to be embarrassing, and my wife’s grandmother’s was no exception—“Of course I know her! I was her junior by a few years at Loreto! Why, this is wonderful!” The Mukherjees, as a family, had a way of making emphatic, jubilant assertions; and it was now my turn to watch as they went into a huddle with R.