Calcutta (23 page)

Some sort of quick remedy was needed, though, for the mess Mr. Shah had made.

One afternoon, Anitadi, midway through the tea, said cheerfully that she wanted to sell two Chinese vases. Would we keep that in mind in case we knew any buyers? We were taken aback and shocked, but, at the same time, felt almost privileged we’d been asked. Anitadi’s eyes had a mischievous and confidential gleam—as if this, too, were somehow a “fun time,” like the Naxal period had been. There was a quiet effervescence about her.

A few months later, they told us they were thinking they’d sell the painting in the drawing room. Did we know anyone who’d be interested? The painting, as you entered the room, occupied the wall on the right; it was fairly large, dark, and, to my eye, unremarkable. I presumed it had no importance except as a halfhearted piece of family history, bought more to decently cover a space than to be looked at. I either sat with my back to it, or opposite it, depending on which side of the centre table I was seated. Now that Samirda mentioned they might want to sell it, he turned his head, as if to check if it was still the same painting, and I saw Anitadi regard it steadily with her calm, democratic
gaze—a gaze that’s never either superior or obsequious—as if she were reassessing it, judging it in the light of something; as a result, I too felt encouraged—and obliged—to study it. I saw nothing in it that didn’t seem vague and phantasmagoric—the silvery glint of water, a solitary boat on a ghostly journey, and a kind of faint miasma at the back, which may have been foliage, rocks, or even cloud.

I didn’t care much for this kind of twilit pre-Raphaelite or Orientalist scene—I hadn’t decided which it was; whether the river was a tributary of the Ganges or a stream in Scotland or England—which is why I’d avoided looking at it carefully. It might have been done by a relative, or even a friend. But Samirda recently told me that the painting was a picture in the manner of van Ruisdaal, except that the signature was missing—which is why a benefactor called Amber Patra bought it for only 40,000 rupees. Who is van Ruisdaal? A seventeenth-century Dutch painter, he was well known for his wooded landscapes and his clouds. As I look at his paintings, while they appear, one by one, on the Net, restored to a strange newness and clarity, I think I like his work; it isn’t romantic, but worldly and precise—the clouds and woods and details are very real and still. A patina must have darkened the picture in Samirda’s drawing room, obscuring its colours and bringing to it that twilit, Orientalist mood—which eventually dampens my spirits, and which is maybe why I’d never acknowledged it.

There were other things the Mukherjees sold at the time that I had no idea of. For instance, a golden fob watch that he recounts to me suddenly in a conversation, when I’m asking him about the painting. “And, oh yes, there was a fob watch,” he says; and this is the last item in the inventory he’s made for me, before I hastily ask him to stop—I don’t want to know more.

They’d also sold a marble table to a lady I know slightly, a vivacious socialite. Samirda, inexplicably, begins to chortle; he can’t help finding the ups and downs of existence entertaining. I’d heard once that the socialite herself was now in straitened circumstances, but this may be no more than the pointless gossip that circulates among a very small set of people in the city.

However, I do know that Anitadi wanted to rid herself of a necklace. She brought it out into the drawing room, and showed it to R and me: I recall the moment, and seeing the ornament, but have absolutely no recollection of what it looks like. Anitadi describes it as a “Victorian necklace”; R thinks of it, for some reason, as an “Edwardian knot,” as a piece of jewellery belonging to and devised in the twenties or thirties. It was a long, long thing, strung with pearls, says R, ending in a knot, from which two short tassels hung. It wasn’t the sort of jewellery that she would wear—strange and impractical, despite being beautiful. Besides, it was probably too expensive. What sort of social gatherings would she have worn it to?

Whether Anitadi inherited this from her mother-in-law or from the Anglo-Indian side of her family I haven’t asked. It doesn’t require pointing out that it wasn’t a piece of traditional Indian jewellery. Firstly, the Indian woman prefers gold to any other precious metal or stone, except possibly the diamond. However, the Ingabanga had internalised, and paid homage to, the English ethos in a number of ways, including their taste in certain strains of jewellery. In the history of Indian jewellery—a history of longevity and continuity—the English ethos is a fleeting, almost momentary, interruption, and as good as a secret, since so few adhered to it. The Ingabanga, in that interim, went off the colour of high-carat gold, and even had it mixed with alloy for their ornaments, to dull their yellow gleam. What R
calls “blue-blooded Bengalis” would find this dilution outrageous, and another symptom of the ridiculousness of the Ingabanga world.

Among the ornaments my wife was gifted by her family upon our wedding was a gold bangle inherited from her tennis-playing maternal grandmother, Anila. My mother offered to have the bangle “broken” and redesigned by a jeweller: a common enough practice, where the Bengali will take an old piece to their jeweller and, instead of selling or exchanging it, will have it rejuvenated or updated to another form. R was, naturally, sentimental about the bangle; but, newly married, she was too polite to say no to this helpful suggestion. The bangle itself was a curious mixture of East and West, of the Bengali and the English, and was a perfect material example of the notion of the Ingabanga. Its circular body was made according to the traditional style of the “
lichukata bala
,” the “litchi-cut bangle,” so that tiny bristles like the ones on a litchi peel appeared on the gold. At one place on the bangle there was an embossed carving—the head of a dog. It was a Labrador with drooping ears. Beneath my mother’s helpful offer perhaps lay a disguised animosity towards the Labrador. And it was the dog, which R found absurd, which she in retrospect grew attached to—as a symbol of a history that may have been embarrassing, but was precious because of its short-lived uniqueness. “Should I ask him to remove the dog?” asked my mother. “You’ll never wear a bangle with a dog’s face, will you?” R appeared to agree. The agreement was only an instance of confusion and letting go. The Labrador disintegrated, and was replaced by a peacock, but the rest of the bangle returned intact.

The Mukherjees sold the Victorian necklace or Edwardian knot or whatever it was for one lakh rupees. Anitadi, at the time, was detached and rational about it—as she is about many things.
“What’ll I do with it? I’ll never wear it,” she’d said reasonably. “One lakh is a good price, baba,” says Samirda to me today. A moment later, he’s not so sure: “Or who knows? Maybe it’s not a good price. I never knew that much about money”—chortling again with pleasure. Ah, but he had his perfect spoken English, after all, his elocution. Where would he and his family have been without it? The conversation veers towards a subject seldom broached—his younger brother Prabir, who’s been living in Spain for decades. “He was much cleverer than me. Did better than I did at Cambridge.” As in? “He got a 2:2 in economics.” A 2:2—so not so much better, then. “I got a third—a matter of shame. It was because I never liked economics and never understood it.”

The apartment on the upper storey was Prabir’s. Yet Mrs. Mukherjee, in the late seventies, had asked her younger son to give her the flat so she could rent it out for a supplementary income. (The house, of course, was hers.) This had caused bad blood between her and the—if not estranged, then distant and distanced—younger son.

A Marwari family lived upstairs and paid a static, meagre rent. When I’d said to Samirda that selling the house would be a panacea to his problems—of all things that come to the rescue of the Bengali middle and upper classes, inherited property is the most commonly invoked, and the most effective solution—he’d said, “But there’s a garden at the back, baba. I go for walks in the morning with Anita. There’s a mango tree there, and wonderful birdcall. I don’t know what I’d do without it.” Samirda’s letters to the editor and to his friends were always fulsome and often lyrical, and so was his endorsement of this back garden. He also cited, as an obstacle to the sale of the house, the litigation with the charitable organisation; and, of course, the troublesome Marwaris upstairs.

Nevertheless, the house was sold in 2006 to a property developer
for a sizeable sum. This wasn’t surprising, given that property prices were going up and up in Calcutta in the new millennium, and given the house’s location on Lower Circular Road.

The Mukherjees—Anita and Samir—now live in a posh apartment building called Balaka on Ballygunge Circular Road. Mrs. Mukherjee Senior died only a few months after the move. She was ninety-five.

I’ve always liked these apartments. The building came up in the mid-seventies, almost opposite the erstwhile Tivoli Park (still, then, extant, with the Mukherjees occupying a “cottage”), a belated, elegant gesture towards corporate living in a city, by then, largely without corporations. One of my father’s colleagues lived in the building for a while; I remember visiting his son there in the early eighties, and taking in the magnificent view from the ninth-floor balcony—magnificent not because it was scenic, but marvelling at the city’s intricacy and difficulty, its distant humming and beeping, its various shades of brown and grey, its sudden stretches of green, its splendid, still, leaden sky, all revealed from left to right before darkness came. I loved Balaka for the smartness of its apartments and for its view; but I had no premonition that I’d one day enter it again.

Samirda’s drawing room has lovely wooden floorboards; but the teas have moved to the bedroom, so that he doesn’t have to take the trouble to emerge. We find him on his bed (a high hospital bed it is), seated and leaning backward, still proffering his hand oddly, and with that disarming gentility; part yogi in his posture (he has, in fact, started doing one of Baba Ramdev’s breathing exercises to keep his nasal passages clear), and part public schoolboy, as his feet are always in socks, whatever the weather, to protect him from the threat of a cold. Besides, as Tagore once pointed out, no person of Ingabanga descent would be caught in
human society without their socks on. The Mukherjees, you feel, live at last in the present—a shrinking of space and time into this apartment which has almost accidentally, but properly, become their home. And the present is always built upon the decimation of the past, its erasure, the drawing room with the new floorboards acquired only once the skeleton of the past has been taken out and laid to rest.

SEVEN
Italians Abroad

Italian food was
not
always a worldwide phenomenon. Pizzas may feel timeless, of course; it’s hard to recall when they didn’t exist. Even when they were physically absent in India (in the early seventies), you encountered them time and again in comic books. An insouciant boy named Jughead, eyes shut, was repeatedly interring the long triangle into his open mouth. It would have been impossible to guess then that in two decades the pizza—no toppings, just a lot of tomato purée smeared on a cardboard-flat circle of bread, covered by a supplement of cheese—would become an indispensable component in the diet of gregarious Gujarati and North Indian families (people without pretensions, but with an appetite), and even turn up not far away from
uttapam
and
rava dosa
on South Indian menus.

In the seventies, I remember from my visits to London, Italian restaurants did very modest business. Italian waiters in spotless white clothes were always seated in an abstracted way within, waiting, without a great deal of conviction, the customer’s arrival. When they did arrive, the waiter showed no great excitement, but an ironical air of vindication that some people had nothing better to do than eat at Italian restaurants. For the London customer, Italian restaurants were then principally famous—in an unarticulated way—for their red and white chequered tablecloths. Their unmistakable pattern, imprinted on the mind’s
eye, suggested the secluded world of Italian gastronomy. A strict and limited gastronomy it was: minestrone soup, comprising a lot of diced carrots, potatoes, and celery swilling about in reddish tomato-shot water (the tomato is the Italian chef’s default condiment, something to reach for absently before any thoughts or recipes have germinated in his head); spaghetti bolognese, as well known as Pompeii and the leaning tower of Pisa; spaghetti napolitana, where the chef had little more to do than empty a muck of tomato purée on a bed of worm-like pasta; spaghetti and meatballs, really more of a comic diversion for children or a prop on film sets than a real dish; and the layered and steaming lasagne, with its bright red tomato borders and its exorbitance of cheese. In that lonely world, visited once in three years, this was plenitude. In those days it didn’t matter that business was scarce; like a flag from a different country, restaurants could survive emblematically and indefinitely on foreign soil.

Spaghetti was, by silent consensus, the one respected pasta. Sometimes its blunt, midget-like, pug-nosed cousin macaroni would make an appearance in colleges and hospitals, even in India: food to amuse the convalescent. It was not just the increased activity of the European Union (morphed anew from the European Community) but the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rush of globalisation that would release into the world the bewildering variations on spaghetti—the flat, tapeworm-like tagliatelle; the slim linguini and anorexically slight tagliarini; spinach pasta and wholemeal pasta—as crazy and multiracially colourful as the Carnaby Street hairstyles of the sixties; and something called “fresh pasta” in English supermarkets, bunched-up, fluffy bundles.

This cataclysm approached India in a manner of speaking, without any seriousness of detail. All foreign food is doomed to be consumed in India not so much by Indians as by a voracious
Indian sensibility, which demands infinite versions of Indian food, and is unmoved by difference. However, come Italian food did, given momentum by its new world-conquering pedigree. And it first nudged Calcutta in its new avatar in 2003, in the form of an Italian chef, Alex Bignotti, who looked about sixteen years old, and who, one day, appeared in the Taj Bengal hotel in order to bring real Italian flavours to the menu. A frail, small, and perky young man, he did this successfully, introducing cappuccino of wild mushroom and cherry tomato bisque to the coffee shop. A few years after moving to Calcutta myself, I tasted this cappuccino and thought it was unusual: I asked to see the chef to check out his features and demeanour personally, and to compliment him. This was when Bignotti was brought to our table, like a tentative and slightly suspicious schoolboy. I was taken aback—not just by his pale youthfulness, his air of being an underage Gujarati bridegroom lost at his wedding, but the fact that he was here at all. He must have been Calcutta’s first skilled import in decades—at least from Europe. Although his name was blazoned on the new menu booklet, I don’t know if anyone properly registered his presence. Anyway, there would be a feeling, mordant and inevitable, and one that often attends visiting chefs in the city, that Bignotti’s presence in Calcutta meant that he couldn’t be good enough. Of course, his culinary skills belied this local prejudice. He’d come from Milan—actually, from a town a few miles outside it. Given his unassuming boyish looks, you thought of him less as a global chef than as someone you might glimpse on an afternoon, cycling up that town’s narrow alleys. Then, one day, just as we were beginning, patronisingly, to take him for granted, he had gone—to Bombay, we later heard, the latest stop on his mysterious journey outward from that Milanese suburb.