Calcutta (30 page)

Europeans who visited Calcutta on the eve and in the wake of the British Empire each handled the experience differently. In
Hartly House
, the first English-language novel about the city, it’s as if we’ve been placed in a time machine and transported to a hazy future, and not back to the Calcutta of the late eighteenth century when the book is actually set—to a place where there are no Indians, Bengalis, or Hindus, only an odd Morlock-like tribe known as the “Gentoos.” In this city, the English had their weird recreational parties late into the night, until dawn approached, because it was too hot to move during the day. Summer, and the heat, in particular, had to be survived; Thomas Babington Macaulay grumbled with abrasive dignity in a letter to a friend, “We are annually baked for four months, boiled four more, and allowed the remaining four to become cool if we can.” The Bengali historian R. K. Dasgupta tells us with relish that Macaulay confided in his correspondent that the “local fruits were ‘wretched.’ ”

“The best of them is inferior to our apricot or gooseberry … A plantain is very like a rotten pear … A yam is better. It is like an indifferent potato.” He must have been all the more thankful for his expert cook, whom Lord Dalhousie pronounced “decidedly the first artist in Bengal.” … In brief, Macaulay could not find “words to tell you how I pine for England, or how intensely bitter exile has been to me.”

All this had to be overcome and outlasted, not to mention the diseases brought on by humidity. The obscure author of
Hartly House
, Phebe Gibbes, writes in the opening of her novel that “the Eastern world is, as you pronounce it, the grave of thousands.” William Jones himself died at the end of April, with the onset of another summer, in 1794, of, according to his friend Lord Teignmouth, “a complaint common in Bengal, an inflammation
of the liver … He was lying on his bed in
a posture of meditation
 …”

To these deaths and others must be added the millions who perished in the man-made famine of 1943, when local traders were hoarding grain while supplies were being diverted to British Tommies, a reminder that colonialism didn’t necessarily make life in Bengal any easier, or longer.

In comparison—and unrelated to the fact that Calcutta is hardly the historic centre it then was—Cananzi has weathered well. He points out to me the glass-paned, conservatory-like space at the end of the faux balcony we’re sitting on, where you can dine in greater, deeper isolation if you wish. Or, of course, you could remain in these imaginary outdoors. Before I leave, he introduces me to his latest contribution to “Calcutta fine dining”: an elegant, economically stated menu, as well as a charming “interactive” one, something between an iPad and one of those books of fairy tales with 3D illuminations shimmering as in a pool, that one got sometimes as a birthday present; you may not only choose from the menu, but design your own if you wish, by touching the icons, the small bright signifiers of pasta and risotto and antipasti. Immediately, predictably, I feel the lure of the seafood risotto. “You must come and dine here,” he says, this being the most logical and civilized progression from our peculiar acquaintanceship. “And you should surely let me know when you’re coming.” I already see there are advantages to knowing him.

EIGHT
Study Leave

I didn’t go to Norwich this autumn. I invoked “study leave.” And so it was that I got to be here during the season of
sharath
, which begins in mid-September. It occurs to me that, in other years too, I’m in Calcutta when sharath is barely beginning because I don’t fly to England before the end of September; but I must be too full of foreboding—at the thought of the flight—to heed it. By now, the rains are as good as ended—the showers are begrudged when they happen—and there’s a new stillness to be sensed, even in a city as busy as Calcutta. This ebbing of one season into another is near unnoticeable (and, as I said, hardly registered by me on the eve of departure), but must have been quite an event in small towns and villages. Tagore, in one of his songs, alludes to it as a time of valediction—but then, every month and a half brings on the mood of valediction to the Bengalis, a hiatus, in which the last intimacies of saying goodbye are performed: for, by mid-October, they’ll be bidding farewell to the mother-goddess.

Now, when I return to the song I was thinking of, introduced to me by my uncle in London when I was studying there, I see it’s about the end of a thundershower in the month of
bhaadra
, which just precedes the onset of sharath: “The rain-shower ends, I hear a tune of valediction/bring your songs to a close/you’re going far away.” In the beginning of September, as I think of Norwich, the lines sound as if they’re directly addressed to me.
“Chharbe kheya opar hotey/bhaadra diner bhora srotey re
,”
it continues—“The canoe starts out for the other bank/In the powerful current of a bhaadra day”; then “It rocks midway in the swirling water.” There are inner rhymes (
hotey, srotey
) in the Bangla lines I’ve transcribed. I can’t translate the finely judged words or the lines’ perfect symmetry, but they mainly achieve their beauty because Tagore adds nothing: he’s making a statement of fact, just as the remembered lines from a child’s primer (
jal pare/pata nare
; “rain falls/the leaf trembles”) that first drew Tagore to poetry state a fact. Here, Tagore seems to be telling us that no afflatus or elaboration is necessary, because the world is at its most compelling as it is.

When I think of that song, I hear my uncle singing in his low, unsteady, pleasant voice. It’s a voice that sounded as if it needed warming up before it got going, or wanted kick-starting—but it never did get going. “The pollen from the
kadamba
has covered the forest floor,/The bees have forgotten their way among the
keya
flowers,” he sang softly, with a mad intensity. He told me that there was nothing poetic about these lines—all was fact, evidently; the bees did get confused after rainfall; they lost their sense of scent and their way to the flowers. For a quarter of a century, he’d lived uninterrupted in north-west London; these songs approximated photos or home movies of where he’d come from. What made these photo-substitutes talismanic is that no one else nearby could understand them or knew very much of the place they’d recorded. In Belsize Park, in a bedsit that overflowed with carrier bags, Bengal didn’t exist except in those songs—and Tagore songs were both cheap and many, a dime a dozen. “The wind’s stopped in the forest today,/Dew pervades the air,/Memory’s aftermath in this light becomes shining drops of rain.” The last untranslatable image—“
alo tey aaj smritir abhash brishtir bin-dur
”—would bring him close to tears; for the Indian is genetically
programmed to feel an acute intimation of parting on any mention of the rain.

*  *  *

Sharath, I realised for the first time during this “study leave,” was spring’s mirror image. It had that gentleness and equanimity of light; June and July’s mulching, rotting humidity had almost vanished. There was a hint of a second flowering; illusory, but convincing. Whoever devised the six Indian seasons took into account this nuance and play; they knew the year, like a day, is not only a progression, a movement from one phase to another, but a passage through echoes, reminiscences, and expectation, through intermediary periods that recall one another, as dusk and twilight do in the day’s twelve hours. To these reminiscent moments—as when, after the monsoons, you were suddenly in the midst of spring—these devisers had given names, making them seasons, rather than tactfully ignoring them. In fact, part of the great unacknowledged joy of sharath was to know that it
wasn’t
, actually, spring. Spring, or
basanta
, is arguably the more famous season, given its bright flowers and sexual birdcall; but you’re always aware of—and are trying to ignore—the prospect of another withering summer. With sharath, there’s an intake and release of breath as you stand in the stillness;
there is no summer to come
; the temperature will rise for two weeks in October, then fall again; and the inevitable temperate calm of
hemanta
will continue into winter. All this I began to learn in the first few weeks into “study leave.”

Though one wouldn’t suspect it, there are concordances between Norwich and Calcutta. Both are geographically to the east of the nation. The east—except perhaps at the beginning of the day, or in the golden age—historically constitutes the margins.
People still “go West,” not eastward. Norwich confirms this by its isolation, especially from London—London might be an international financial hub, but Norwich has limited access to it. There’s no dual-carriage motorway connecting it to the capital; you enter Norwich by a road that’s slightly wider than a country lane. The railway track is ancient, and it makes some of the other obsolete railway lines around England look efficient and smart. Also, the towns just south of Norwich—from Diss and Manningtree to Ipswich—are where the most suicidal and unhopeful people in England live, and there are repeated “fatalities” on the tracks, whereby some poor, terminally life-hating soul becomes a reason for an abortive or delayed journey. These conditions make many self-proclaimedly normal people suicidal, meaning that the prospects of increasing fatalities in the environs of Norwich will continue to be high. Every weekend, “engineering works” have been taking place on the Norwich railway lines (to either modernise or salvage them) with an infinitely patient, scholarly regularity, so that commuters returning from a Saturday in London must be offloaded at Diss and transferred to a bus, arriving after four hours instead of the usual two into the familiar cathedral town.

Calcutta, until exactly one hundred years ago from when I write this the Empire’s “second city,” is today comparably cut off from London—from the rest of the world, even. (It was in 1911 that, alarmed by the swelling Swadeshi movement in the state, and forced to reunite the Bengal they’d partitioned in 1905, the British transferred the capital to Delhi; and it strikes me as odd that there were no centenary events in Calcutta to mark the advantages and disadvantages of not being a capital city.) Today, you may fly uninterrupted from Calcutta to Dhaka or Bangkok or Singapore; anywhere else, and you must be offloaded at Dubai, or Delhi, or Frankfurt, like the returning commuters to Norwich, and put on another flight—and not just on Sundays. Still, Norwich’s
isolation feels more ancient. Partly it’s because it’s so much older than Calcutta. In fact, in the eleventh century, Norwich was apparently a city of immense importance, second only to London; this, you’ll agree, has a disturbingly familiar ring. Perhaps to speculate upon what Calcutta will be centuries hence, one must study the Norwich of the twenty-first century: a place that has as good as forgotten its past. To me, travelling to it in the autumn is a bit like going to Africa in the colonial era, or at least what it was like for Marlow, in
Heart of Darkness
, to sit in England, back from the Congo, and feel the one inexorably flow into the other. So it is that I’ve stared out from the heavy glass-paned windows of my sixties-designed visitor’s flat into the broads, from which gulls rise periodically, and sensed the presence of the primordial; Marlow’s famous words come back—“I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago—the other day … Light came out of this river since … We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! … Sandbanks, marshes, forests, savages—precious little to eat fit for civilised men, nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian wine here, no going ashore.” Easy to feel, at certain moments, like that Roman when I’m in Norwich, especially as I stare out of the window from Suffolk Walk; and forget Calcutta, a much younger, more recent, city.

*  *  *

Hardly into my “study leave,” I notice the frail bamboo outlines for the Puja
pandals
begin to appear in street corners. Their context, in the intersection, is so urban; regulations permit these apparitions to hold up or divert traffic during the Pujas. But, in this phase of their construction, when they’re intricate husks, their fragility visible to the public eye, they’re reminders of an
ancient Bengal—which may not exist anywhere at all today except in these fleeting cameos.

There’s little doubt Durga Puja began as a harvest festival. One story has it that the first time it became an urban event was when Raja Nabakrishna Deb of the Shobhabazar Rajbari (or the princely family of Shobhabazar) in North Calcutta organised a Puja for Lord Clive in 1757, to celebrate the British victory at Plassey—to mark, as it were, the passage of power from Siraj-ud-daula to the East India Company. The Rajbari has recently issued an official rebuttal of this account. Anyway, as Kaliprasanna Sinha’s anarchic verbal record from 1860,
Hutom Pyanchaar Naksha
(The Night-Owl’s Sketches), shows, most of the powerful Calcutta families had appropriated the Pujas by the middle of the nineteenth century, making them an occasion for boisterous, often competitive, celebration. At some point, the Pujas passed from the domain of the families to the
paras
, or neighbourhoods—often, stifling, cloistered, ten-foot-wide lanes lasting no more than a quarter of a mile. It was at this time that the Pujas—despite their name, which means “worship”—must have become secular, roughly four or five days of pretending to pay obeisance to the goddess, of wearing one’s most uncomfortably new clothes, of commingling, communal eating, flirting with cousins, followed by more communal eating. For the middle class, there’s no withdrawal from the Pujas—it permeates the interior and the exterior, the apartment and the street, equally. It must have been in the late seventies and early eighties, after the Left Front had come to power to begin what surely no one thought would be a near-interminable tenure, and Bengal began to grow increasingly isolated, culturally and economically, that the Pujas started truly to prosper. By the early eighties, without anyone quite noticing or certain of what had happened, they’d become the world’s most extraordinary festival, holding absolute, even tyrannical, sway over the city for as
long as they lasted. By the early nineties, the noise and crowds were forcing what remained of the middle class in Calcutta to leave their homes, and check into a guest house or hotel in Ooty or Puri—in other words, to spend the Pujas elsewhere. Some of the elements of today’s Pujas must be immemorial—the sound of the
dhak
or drums in the morning approaching the apartment block; the actual worship performed (I use that word literally) by the priest, and his exhilarated
dhunuchi
dance later. Others may have emerged in the fifties or the sixties—the spectacular pandals in different parts of the city; the excursions undertaken to admire the goddess, whose likeness may be made on traditional lines, or to resemble a contemporary movie actress. (This year, I believe I spotted a Durga modelled on one of the blue people of
Avatar
.) But it’s in the early eighties, probably, that the attention shifted from the mother goddess and her family in the pandal—which is a marquee of variable size made of bamboo, papier mâché, cloth, and other material—to the pandal itself. The pandals have, in the last twenty-five years, been made to look like the
Titanic
; the General Post Office; the Fountain of Trevi at Rome; the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg; the Tagore house in Jorasanko; the Egyptian pyramids; old, disused theatres, houses, or temples—in fact, anything that catches the pandal-maker’s fancy that year. The intention is not so much to entertain as to disorient and astonish; to tap into the Bengali’s appetite for the bizarre, the uncanny.