Calcutta (32 page)

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Speaking with Sandip Roy confirmed for me what I’ve long known—that my experiment isn’t singular—that all kinds of people (professors of history, gay couples, critics in “cultural studies,” rock guitarists, journalists, bankers) are living here with parents or parents-in-law either because they think
someone
has to, or as a filial duty—some returning to the city to be with them out of a sense of obligation. Naturally, the pressure of obligation or duty is felt most strongly by the only child, perhaps the Bengali only child. This makes Calcutta an odd kind of city at least where a few people are concerned—that they are drawn to it not by work or opportunity, but some other, atavistic concern. Bombay is about money; Delhi about power; Calcutta is about parents—the three cities can’t really be compared to one
another. Perhaps Banaras is a better analogue of my Calcutta at the moment: a place where people come to be facilitated into the afterlife, while their children and relatives hover there primarily to perform the necessary preparations for that journey. Certainly, it seems a whole bunch of corporate executives, surgeons, doctors, officers in the armed forces, professors, who’d all lived in other parts of the country during their working lives, returned quietly, in the last three decades, to Calcutta after retirement, just as widows, at one time, used to make their way to Banaras, or Kashi, for contemplation and solitude. And at least some of the children of those who’ve returned follow them to this city to enable their parents to be easeful before they’re finally, one day, gone. The other such person I met, besides Sandip Roy, is Devakinandan Chatterjee, whom I’ve mentioned before in passing, earlier a wealth manager with Standard Chartered Bank in Bombay, now with Citibank, an only son but not an only child, who suddenly moved to Calcutta in 2010 with family because his father was falling down and hurting himself. Of course, he continued to be a wealth manager—but the stakes here are significantly lower. In that sense (at least where the middle class is concerned), Calcutta is no more a
karmasthal
—the old Sanskrit word for a place where people go traditionally to seek work or employment. It has some other, hidden dimension to it—which makes it not quite Banaras, admittedly, but not quite Bombay or New Jersey either. When I bring up that ancient, forgotten, resonant term to my mother—a term that encompasses so much: life’s endeavour; human ambition—she says without hesitation: “Your karmasthal is East Anglia.” Ah, yes. What I do in Calcutta—writing, music—can’t be counted as
work
. “Calcutta is your
basasthan
,” my mother informs me—that is, my place of habitation. More likely, it’s
her
basasthan; for me, it’s a place of work, and that work comprises my parents. Not that I can
give my parents, or work, much time, because of my writing and music. Still, they are a reason—a compulsion—not to pack our bags and leave. Visiting a city that was not my karmasthal, our visits to our parents tended to grow longer; till we now live here. I have become the figure in the de Chirico painting.

I put to R Sandip Roy’s remark that Calcutta’s main concern is “Will you be eating at home this evening?” She concurs; and adds, “Also, all the studies we never did at school, and have to now.” My daughter’s schoolbooks are scattered around her on the bed. The rat race of secondary education means that the business of gathering knowledge in Calcutta is a traumatic family affair, involving and exhausting everyone at home, like a delinquency, a disability, or a teenage pregnancy. The only one who seems unaffected by this—at least, if our daughter is in any way representative—is the student herself. She alone sees, with a clarity of vision we no longer have, the irrelevance of the present education system. We, instead, are learning up her syllabus in large gulps; going over it with her, but more intent on mastering it ourselves than checking if she’s grasped it. We have now perfectly understood balancing equations in chemistry, the valency of elements and metals, we are quite adept at the congruencies of triangles, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the definitions of velocity and force are on our fingertips, we know, of course, that the Andes are fold mountains, in part like the Appalachians, which have a decisive climatic influence on North America. How much of this our daughter knows at the moment is uncertain; but living in this city means we have it by heart. The school itself doesn’t dispense education; it holds classes and periodically hosts exams. We, at home, don’t dispense education either, but find ourselves getting thoroughly educated. Almost everyone employs private tutors, especially for maths and that
increasingly neglected tongue, Bangla; we’re no exception. The private tutor is like someone out of another age, country, and genre; he belongs to the world of
Little Dorrit
. He is intensely interesting, either garrulous or shy, and we choose to know little about him. My daughter has had two private tutors for maths, a subject she’ll probably never think about again in five years, or at least until she has children of her own. The first is Rajiv, a thin man with a beard, about whom one of my daughter’s friends observed: “He’s your maths teacher? He looks like a poet.” Rajiv is in his mid-fifties, and was once a quasi-Naxalite; he now runs a small advertising company. I would put him in the class of “loquacious” private tutors—he’s even played a small but significant role in a well-received art film, where he’s a sort of political busybody, a functionary who tries to lord it over a vanishing neighbourhood: someone very unlike himself, and yet a character who’s a surprisingly convincing alter ego for Rajiv. The second tutor, Alok, I place in the “shy” category: highly accomplished, if awkward, he was doing a PhD in maths at what is probably India’s leading institution for research in the sciences, the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research. He then placed his doctorate on hold and returned to Calcutta because his father is severely debilitated by back problems, and he’s an only child. He’s now taken upon himself the task of consolidating my daughter’s shaky maths knowledge. It was he who made me think of Dickens; of how uniquely dated and specialised his profession, which we take for granted in India and especially in Calcutta, really is. Many private tutors are exceptional students who, for one reason or another—family; temperament; in some cases, I sense, a resistance to worldliness—haven’t made the logical transition to glittering careers. It sometimes seems, when they dutifully appear, that they have no homes (though of course they do); that they’re destined to linger and ruminate in others’ houses. Their wards’
childhoods pass with an unusual rapidity, like the quick, busy frames of the early movies, from month to month, term to term; while their days have, at least in these years of our children’s education, a relatively detached stillness.

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People begin to arrive in the mornings. The young man, Raja, who cleans the cars in the building, strides in to collect the car keys; the cook rings the doorbell; then the part-time help, Kamala, my father’s daytime carer. They’re here from different parts of the city. You’re careful not to call them
chakor
any more. The word derives from
chakuri
or
chakri
, meaning “employment”; but it was mainly used to slight and humiliate. But chakor, like “servant,” reflects more poorly on the user today than on the person being alluded to; the preferred term is the neutral and politically acceptable (and slightly anodyne)
kaajer lok
—“people who work,” “working people.”

The chakor was often addressed as
tui
—the informal second-person pronoun, reserved for children, younger relatives, and best friends. This was the case irrespective of the age of the servant, though children
were
instructed to refer to older retainers as
dada
, or “older brother,” as in “Laxman dada,” while Laxman dada might also, paradoxically, refer to the master’s son as
chhoto babu
, or “young master.” Today, the kaajer lok are addressed as
tumi
—the semi-formal second-person pronoun for equals. However, the kaajer lok mostly address their employers as
aapni—
the formal second-person pronoun, used for superiors or older people, or as a respectful address for all strangers and acquaintances. It has no equivalent in English any more, but does in some European languages, the German
sie
being one. Just as you
might address an older kaajer lok as aapni, or, if you’re exceptionally liberal or wish to make a point,
all
kaajer lok as aapni, there are some kaajer lok who might, familiarly, address you as
tumi
. In doing so, they might be being friendly, or unmindful, or provocatively democratic. If they do so, however, you don’t do anything about it; you don’t, for instance, say, “How dare you address me as tumi?” To do that would be anachronistic; an admission that you’re petty and uneducated, as politicians in small towns are, which, for the bhadralok, is a worse thing to be than being powerless. It’s a patchwork democracy, heavily weighted against the poor, the people who arrive at your door every morning—the help; the cook; the man who cleans the cars—but the middle class imagines it’s also weighted against them. People have a range of demands, the demands of the poor being least attended to; but no one has any rights in this situation—the proper context for rights hasn’t been created yet. It would be unfair on the middle class, or the bhadralok, to say they want a return to old-style feudal obeisance from the help, an unqualified servitude; but they do want conscientious work, honesty, long-term commitment, intelligence, and evidence of training in return for a basic salary (which has gone up minutely over the years, but is little more than a small honorarium), two days of paid “leave” in a month, a Puja bonus and gift, no notion of a minimum wage, no workers’ unions and, in effect, no hint of an independent life encroaching upon the middle class’s own. And so, the middle class hardly ever gets what it wants. The kaajer lok are unstable, uncommitted, they vanish for days without warning and then come back again one day, and are allowed to resume work after caveats are issued, unless some kind of replacement, who will also flatter to deceive, has been found. The middle class is dependent on this floating, flickering population, a few of whom will always materialise at its door in the morning, but fantasises frequently about living
without it—mainly because it can’t stand the absence of commitment, the unwillingness to work, the air of being from a place that doesn’t accord with normal standards of behaviour and language, and also because it can’t bear to raise minimum standards of employment, salaries, and incentives. There’s no choice for the middle class, where kaajer lok are concerned, except to live from day to day, and indulge in fantasy and rhetoric.

Strictly speaking, there’s no bhadralok any more. Not only its heyday, its distinctive ethos—which produced the poets, novelists, painters, essayists; the Tagore family, Jamini Roy, Gopal Ghosh, Buddhadeva Bose, Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Kamal Kumar Majumdar, Bibhutibhushan Banerjee, Sudhir Khastgir, Jibanananda Das, Utpal Basu, Purnendu Pattrea; composers like Himangshu Dutta, Atul Prasad, Nazrul, Nachiketa Ghosh, and Salil Chowdhury; filmmakers like Paramathesh Barua, Satyajit Ray, Devaki Bose, and Ritwik Ghatak; the scientist Satyen Bose, who collaborated with Einstein in the Bose-Einstein statistics, and after whom the now-celebrated “boson” is named—that ethos is finished for good. Still, it’s possible to be a bhadralok—fleetingly, in a fitful way—in relation to the kaajer lok, and to Calcutta in general: as a sort of anomaly or exception, as a group of people who are around almost by accident.

The poor traditionally live in the
basti
. Basti is an Urdu word, meaning “neighbourhood”; in Bengali, however, it means “slum.” I remember the shock I felt when I was seventeen, when I first began to listen to Urdu ghazals, where the poet or singer might be pining for a woman living in a different basti from his own, because the word, with its connotations of squalor and anarchy, familiar to me from my visits to Calcutta, sounded incongruous in the ghazal’s fragrant world. These days, the person who comes in the morning as your domestic help doesn’t necessarily live in
a basti, but often in developments for working-class folk, such as Subhasgram, clusters of houses with poor facilities and inadequate drainage and roadworks, but with shops and a local railway station. The trains are dangerously full in the mornings with commuters making their way to work in South Calcutta—so full that cooks and maids have sometimes reached us in the tranquillity of our flat in Ballygunge—a posh residential area—with a leg or arm bruised, having fallen off or been pushed off by another commuter on to the platform. These signs—of the wear and tear and abrasions of commuting, of the cook limping dramatically into the apartment and receiving only moderate sympathy from her colleagues and her employer—aren’t that unusual.

When a domestic begins to shout in an unseemly way at another domestic, or even at her employer, the word “basti” invariably makes a reappearance. “Don’t behave as if this is a basti,” the employer will instruct the domestic. “This is a
bhadra
person’s house.” In fact, the word might come up when two middle-class people are shouting unrestrainedly at each other. “Remember,” one might interrupt the other, “this is not a basti.” It doesn’t matter if neither person has ever seen a basti; it’s meant to bring back to them, indirectly, the presence, or the trappings, of that elusive thing, a
bhadra
existence.

Disasters occur in Calcutta, mainly from a stupendous disregard for norms and regulations, and from a mixture of greed and apathy—but not frequently enough for the domestics to arrive late at our doors in the morning. The women come wearing saris meant for the journeys workward and then homeward later in the evening—sometimes saris with atrociously colourful prints—which they discard and change for a drab work-sari after they’ve entered their small room by the kitchen. All this in six or seven minutes.