Calcutta (20 page)

Samirda’s lineage was what was once derisively called
“Ingabanga.”
So was my wife’s father’s maternal line. Bhona played tennis, knew which knife and fork to use during the various stages of dinner, was aware that the knife and fork must meet in perpendicular unison on a plate to indicate a meal was finished, and called the coconut-flavoured, sugar-coated tea biscuit “nees,” where ordinary people said “nice.”

The Ingabanga was a mutant produced by British rule and by aspiration—an obsessive desire to approximate and reproduce Englishness. This is not to say that the Ingabanga—or Anglo-Bengali; predecessor of the “wog” and of the “coconut” (brown outside, white within)—was Westernised, while the dhutipanjabi-wearing bhadralok was pure and native. In fact, the latter was deeply cosmopolitan; even European, in some ways. He would have probably learnt English as a second language; but that didn’t impede the bhadralok’s intimacy with the West. While the bhadralok might know Milton and Marx as well as he knew the novels of Bankimchandra Chatterjee, he might not—unlike the Ingabanga—pronounce English words perfectly, or be conscious of the difference between Camembert and Stilton, or
have tasted asparagus. One of the joys of Anitadi’s teas was listening to the conversation, mainly because of how beautifully the Mukherjees spoke English: it lost its Anglo-Saxon consonantal hardness, and became a liquid murmur in their mouths. Tagore wasn’t Ingabanga: he lamented, often histrionically, his lack of command over the language, exaggerating, deliberately, his deficiency—a calculated and inverse showing off. He was actually very well-read in English literature. But he did confess, as I said earlier, to not being able to distinguish between the pronunciation of “warm” and “worm”: a common Bengali conundrum. An Ingabanga wouldn’t have that problem. Still, simply being an Anglophile didn’t ensure you were Ingabanga. For instance, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, who dedicated his first book to the memory of the British Empire, was an East Bengali provincial raised in a small town; he had an extraordinary breadth of reading and was a master of English prose style, but had learnt English as a second language. That he took to wearing a bowler hat and a suit after moving late in life to Oxford, or interrogated his often famous guests about wine and Mozart, couldn’t change him from being an eccentric Bengali Anglophile into an Ingabanga: nor would he have wanted to be one. For the Ingabanga was a person of privilege, yes, but also caricatured as a slightly fatuous servant of the British: the member of a disliked minority in Bengal that had surrendered to the English way, of which the observance of table manners was just a symptom.

By the time we met the Mukherjees, the exacerbations caused by Empire and the British were distant enough for us not to mind too much whatever remained of that age, in whatever form—even anecdote, or tea and sandwiches. In fact, in the 1990s, privileged pasts, with a sort of fin-de-siècle energy, were making a comeback. This energy coincided with the advent of globalisation
and economic liberalisation, and with the end of the Nehruvian era, with its various self-imposed austerities and hypocrisies. People—some of whom even claimed to have socialist leanings—said they were descended from maharajahs, although titles and their hereditary privileges had been emphatically rescinded by Indira Gandhi: one of her few near-autocratic gestures that had a moral rightness to it.

In the nineties, though, almost every upper-class person boasted of having a familial connection with either a maharajah or a governor, or a legendary name in the freedom struggle; in Bengal, people disclosed how they were distantly related to some iconic figure in the Bengal Renaissance, or to a colonial aristocracy that counted Sir and Lady So-and-So among its members. India, under the new free-market dispensation, was having to manufacture a new elite, and shamelessly plunder, recoup, and excavate the old elite while doing so. So, not only was the maharajah, with his turban and tiger skin on the floor before him, returning from the dead, but, in Calcutta, the Ingabanga too.

The irony, of course, was that Samirda was genuinely the progeny of an old elite that was petering out.

Having grown up in Bombay, with the sort of parents I had, I knew almost nothing of the importance of family connections. I couldn’t say I was related to a celebrated figure or household, and didn’t spend too much time wondering about these things; maybe, in the seventies, this was still not a way of conceiving of your place in the world.

Besides, I am an only child, and so is my father; I lived with my parents in a luxurious island of self-sufficiency. “Family”—especially my mother’s family—was synonymous to me with the faraway (since many of my uncles had settled in small towns after Partition), with whatever was different from ourselves, and
with being a seedbed for human foible. I knew my uncles, my mother, my aunt, were gifted, and that I might have inherited a bit of whatever little talent I had from them; but those uncles were great time-wasters too, and could spend an entire morning expending a great deal of emotion and even reasoning deciding which was the better fruit, the mango or the custard apple, the more melodious singer, K. L. Saigal or Sachin Deb Burman. So I came to believe, perhaps mistakenly, that families were not distinguished by their connection to history, but that they were a counterpoint to it; that history paled into dullness in comparison with the strangeness of family.

*  *  *

“Aristocracy—tell us another!” says Bassani’s narrator of the last patriarch of the Finzi-Continis, Professor Ermanno, and his wife, Signora Olga. “Instead of giving themselves such airs, they’d have done much better, the both of them, not to forget who they were, and where they came from, if we’re to believe that the Jews—Sephardic and Ashkenazi, Western and Levantine, Tunisian, Berber, Yemenite and even Ethiopian—in whatever part of the world, under whatever skies history has scattered them, are and will always be Jews, which is to say close relatives.” The narrator, who’s in love with the young daughter of the family, is reminding us, with bitter irony, that, at a certain point in history, no Jew, whatever their hubris about pedigree and wealth, could escape the disgrace of who they were. Rich Jew and poor, dark and fair, were part of a single unhappy family.

The Calcutta upper class was also all related to each other: I realised this after I moved here. More exclusive than the Jews, less endangered, they seemed to know each other by name, and, if they didn’t, had the knack—or helpless habit—of unearthing
connections. They might have once married outside their immediate circle: into a bhadralok or educated middle-class family, for instance. (The word “bhadralok” is admittedly slightly slippery; since it’s synonymous with “gentleman,” it could well be claimed by any member of the landed gentry or even the suited Ingabanga clan who wished to be part of the new dispensation that came into being by the end of the nineteenth century, of secular individuals identified by their sophistication and learning, rather than the extent of their property and land.) Whatever the nature of these marriages, it’s true that my family (East Bengali landlords on my father’s side, who lost their properties with Partition; colonial engineers on my mother’s side, who lost face and status after her father’s early death) could hardly claim to be part of this web of relations in Calcutta.

My wife herself is a product of a series of marriages that travelled, confusingly, in several directions. Her mother was a daughter of a manager of a Tata factory in Jamshedpur, outside Calcutta. Naturally, the family had bhadralok ambitions, and my mother-in-law had talent—which is why she went to Santiniketan to study Tagorean dance. Not long after, my father-in-law, an engineer, fell in love with this undeniably beautiful woman. In proposing to her, he was departing his small, charmed, stifling circle; but he was too besotted to bother—besides, he was in secret rebellion against his parents: the distinguished father and the high-nosed mother. His father, Satish Ranjan Khastgir, was of a Brahmo bhadralok family, a noted physicist, a colleague of the great Satyen Bose, and a D.Sc. from Edinburgh. The painter Sudhir Khastgir was Satish Ranjan’s younger brother.

My father-in-law’s mother, Anila, came from one of the most accomplished Ingabanga families in Bengal; her grandfather was P. K. Ray, the first Indian principal of what was then surely India’s
premier institution of higher education, Presidency College; her grandmother, Sarala Ray, founded the Gokhale School. Anila’s grand-uncle, Satish Ranjan, had founded the intimidatingly renowned Doon School.

When I met R, this personal lineage—not that she was overly aware of it—had all but dissolved into the everyday. It was now available in anecdote, transitorily. By the time I married R, her father had retired from a public sector job in Hindustan Copper. Still, she couldn’t entirely escape her past: this was apparent from the way she thought she heard her grandmother speaking the first time she heard Samirda’s mother, and was startled by her narrow, anachronistic vowels.

R’s grandmother Anila—echoed belatedly, and unwittingly, by Mrs. Mukherjee—hadn’t been wholly happy marrying a dhuti-wearing physicist. Her sights had been set on, and imagination fired by, the celebrated Bengali physicist Prasanta Mahalanobis. But the shy man in the dhuti, bespectacled, serious, had been invited to the house to meet the middle sister, herself a studious, reticent type. While leaving the house, he noticed a young woman seated on the staircase behind the banister, giggling. He asked her parents for her hand, leaving, in effect, the older sister forever single—or, as they called such women at the time, a spinster. My wife was close, I think, to her grandfather, and to the sister who was spurned by him in favour of Anila. When I was getting to know R, I discovered she still dreamed of her Mejo thakuma and her dadu.

What Anila Khastgir née Bose really felt about her marriage to the physics professor in lieu of the legendary Prasanta Mahalanobis is difficult to tell from the stories she told my wife—and no one else. Certainly, Satish Ranjan Khastgir earned the devotion of his students, and his granddaughter’s affection, but not the sort of national eminence that Mahalanobis or Satyen Bose did.
After retiring from his post as Khaira Professor of Physics at Calcutta University, he and his wife withdrew to the pastoral of Santiniketan, which was, by then, in the late sixties, just beginning to go to seed. Anila survived her husband, who, despite being a teetotaller, died of a mysterious liver disease; and R remembers an incident from a weekend when her grandmother came to visit them in their flat in Mandeville Gardens in South Calcutta. A man who lived in a neighbouring street, Suren Thakore Road, unexpectedly called on the family, asking if he could talk to her. He had spotted her on her arrival, he said; he used to live near the big house in Dhaka where her father, a barrister, was once posted, and he and his brothers would climb up a wall and watch, unobserved, as the two sisters played tennis with their English friends. Anila Khastgir was amused, but, after the man’s departure, she confessed to being a bit down-hearted—that so little remained of that girlhood, and also of the barrier defining it, which had, all those years ago, made that act of spying necessary.

It was difficult for me, at first, to understand the significance of these special Calcutta families, with their past careers, and their often unexceptional present-day representatives. I began to realise that there were a fair number of them around. Many of the worthy people in Calcutta’s upper-class history had never quite reached my consciousness when I was growing up, and if they did—say, the founder of this or that school—they remained at a great distance which I didn’t feel any impulse to cover. Similarly, the Mukherjees: I had no curiosity about their forebears, but kept going back, primarily, for Anitadi’s incomparable sandwiches.

These were made of an ordinary but soft sandwich bread which Anitadi bought from the “market”; she never used the posh Calcutta Club loaf which was evidently good for morning toast but not for the teatime sandwich. They had canonical
fillings—chicken and mayo, egg, cheese, and tomato—but, on occasion, Anitadi would give us the idiosyncratic, very personal yoghurt and chives, or add spring onion to the cheese. Even when it was just egg, the sandwich had the capacity to surprise us. It was as if it possessed some of the irreducible ingredient that made the Mukherjees what they were. I could never bear to eat the sandwiches—except in interrupted stretches—because, otherwise, they were gone as soon as they’d arrived. They were perfect to look at, spotless rectangles, but—a fact hidden till you tasted them—quite unresistant; a mouthful announced itself to your palate and then immediately melted to a residue. There were other attractions on the plate, usually expensive high-calorie tarts or a mousse from the nearby Kookie Jar, all meant to convey a surplus of a very un-Bengali well-being. Never, for example, were we served the traditional Bengali teatime meal: the deceptively light, puffy, deep-fried luchis with aubergine or potatoes.
That
sort of tea would have engendered its own over-familiar universe, its protagonists and rooms, the home of the bhadralok—but not Samirda’s and Anitadi’s world, with its silently paired sandwiches and the still life of the Kookie Jar cakes.

*  *  *

Mrs. Mukherjee sat upon her chair in the ground-floor flat in Lower Circular Road, almost meditating, except for the wicked, abstracted look the squint gave her, and the inward smile. She ruled the tea from the margins, like a person who wields an obscure power but holds no office. Going in and out of the room, Anitadi would bend to take a query, clarify something, laugh at what the older woman had said.

It had not always been so harmonious. When Samir Mukherjee got polio in 1959, Mrs. Mukherjee had been certain that her
son should never marry. No woman would look after him properly, or be patient enough: the marriage would be a disappointment for her son.

Then, in 1965, Samirda met his wife-to-be on her twenty-first birthday: 17th July. It was at a rooftop party at the plastic surgeon Jaya Roy’s house on Landsdowne Road: as in the perennial moment of noticing that precedes love and sometimes marriage, Samirda saw that she was “sitting quietly,” not talking to anybody. The heroine must always be reticent and unsociable until the protagonist arrives. He asked to be introduced, and informs me they “clicked” at once. Samirda had probably a great deal to give of himself to the right person. He gives a bit of himself to his guests at tea, and what he offers at some point struck me—once my natural distrust began to wear off—as true and simple, almost too simple (this might have been a cause of the distrust), undiminished by circumstances and even the delusions of his class. So it wasn’t surprising that Anita Roy, as she then was, liked him: for being “well-turned out” and for his “impeccable manners.” He, in turn, liked her “charm and reserve,” her “baby’s face” and her “tall, willowy figure”: what he calls, touchingly, her
“mojar chehara.” “Mojar chehara”
could be translated, variously, as “funny looking” or “interesting looking” or even “charming to look at.” Today, Anitadi still has that mojar chehara; tall for an Indian woman of her generation, her hair is steely grey, but, otherwise, she is attractive, partly because of her contained demeanour and the emotion and laughter she holds in check—she’s perhaps more attractive now than she was at twenty-one, with a retrospective allure that’s rare and not to be discounted. She almost always wears pale tangail saris, and her complexion is what racist Indians, when they’re being polite, call “dusky.” Spotting her and then winning her over hints at what Samirda’s chosen function and project in life would be—not to be a man of great ambition
or corporate vision, as his immediate ancestors had been, but a self-deprecating connoisseur of comeliness. In his wife-to-be, he’d found someone who didn’t regard this project (she couldn’t have known, and nor could he, that it was going to be a lifetime’s work) as mere indulgence.