Calcutta (35 page)

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By the time five or six months had passed from the elections, some people may have wondered when Calcutta would bear the marks of visible change; others would have been surprised if it had. It was too soon. If someone had boarded a time machine in March and been transported forward to November, they, on disembarking, their atoms reassembled, may not have known they were no longer in Marxist Bengal. They might or might not have noticed at once, though, the dim, ghostly racket emanating from the traffic lights: the garbled sound of Tagore songs. This repetitive loop, comprising old recordings by Hemanta Mukherjee, Suchitra Mitra, and others, is what didi—Mamata Banerjee—in one of her early gestures to “civil society,” had prescribed for stressed drivers. Some people felt that listening with half your attention to Tagore songs at a red light subtly heightened, rather than reduced, anxiety. My feeling was Mamata Banerjee was gently—perhaps unwittingly—attempting to simulate, everywhere, the characteristics of a petit bourgeois
para
such as the one she grew up in, in Kalighat; or like my uncle’s house in Pratapaditya Road. Here, at any opportunity—usually festivals and
public holidays—amateur singers would sing from loudspeakers, as would professional singers of local repute; or, more often, recordings would be played of Hindi film and Tagore songs. One would wake up to that tinny, melodious, intrusive atmosphere; one could nap to it; in the end, when it was gone, one would be disoriented by its lack. Mamata Banerjee would have a deep memory of that ethos—indeed, given she still lives in Kalighat, it must be her perpetual present.

In November, it was reportedly too early for Bengal’s future to take shape. And people wanted to know if didi would enter into a dialogue with the Maoists in “jungle mahal” (an inaccessible region roughly sixty miles north-west of Calcutta, girded by forest), since, at one point, she’d expressed her readiness to hold talks; or whether she’d crush them, as the free market demanded; or if “jungle mahal” might even be her Vietnam, as it had once threatened to be the Left Front’s. Then, well into “study leave,” on 24th November, I woke up to read how Kishenji had been shot dead, in a joint operation in the forests near the Jharkhand border, by the upliftingly named Combat Battalion for Resolute Action (COBRA) and the Central Reserve Police Force, historically lauded for restoring order to difficult areas. Who was Kishenji? I’d never heard of him. He was the Maoists’ military leader. In a photo, the lower right side of his face seemed to be missing, probably from close-range gunfire. There was talk about Kishenji having been killed not in a battle, but—as is frequently the case with terrorists-criminals-revolutionaries (the categories are a matter of perspective)—in an “encounter”; that is, a staged escape or confrontation meant to dispense with the fugitive after his capture. For a few days, there was no official confirmation that the dead man was Kishenji; and, following the confirmation, no public response, unusually, from Ms. Banerjee—though, on
occasion, it might feel either premature or impossible to exult openly.

When I saw, on TV, Kishenji’s mother mourn in her home in Andhra Pradesh, I was struck by how middle-class the family looked, with a dated bhadra socialist air even in grief. Kishenji’s name was Mallojula Koteswara Rao. He came from a family of poor village Brahmins, but Kishenji’s father was a freedom fighter, and he himself had graduated with a degree in mathematics and then begun to study law. He’d ended up a martyr to the revolution. In all but the final development—revolution and death—his life mimicked one of the classic routes taken in the time of colonialism by the “great men” of Indian culture, especially of the Bengal Renaissance, and even by men who were born in its wake (I’m thinking of Nirupam Sen): the beginnings in small-town or village poverty; a context of educated utopianism, often created by the father; the emergence into the professions, such as law, or into writing, or into politics and nationalism, and, occasionally, into a kind of greatness. I’d thought the constrictions of independent India had shut down such trajectories in Kishenji’s generation (he was a little more than five years older than me); but here, summarised in his life and death, was that trajectory again.

In a room in All Souls College, Oxford, straining to listen to the faltering voice of Prof. Braja Dulal Chattopadhyay as he spoke of the
Ramayana
, I became aware of the timeless lineage of these conflicts now assailing our land. Prof. Chattopadhyay’s lecture concerned certain inexplicable actions perpetrated by the virtuous Lord Rama, the repository of Hindu dharma. One of these was the heinous slaying by Rama of Vali, the valiant monkeyking of a forest kingdom, whom he killed with an arrow shot from behind as Vali wrestled with his own brother. Rama’s action is attributed to Vali’s conflict with this brother, Sugreev, Rama’s
friend: for, certainly, Rama and Vali had not been antagonists, and the former had no other reason to kill the latter. In fact, as Vali lies dying, he asks Rama: “What was my crime?”

Prof. Chattopadhyay, if I remember right, pointed out that independent forest kingdoms often sprang up in India, and were seen as a threat to the ethos and sovereignty of the mainland. It was for this reason that Vali would have had to die; because, for Rama, he represented a threat to the norm, to the absolute sway of dharma.

As to how much Bengal would open up again to the world, as it had in the eighteenth century, was a question left hanging in the air. People were trying to shrug off, in a sheepish way, the feeling of having missed the boat that had troubled them until May 2011. For the middle class, international isolation was measured by the number of direct flights there were to London; there was none. Lufthansa, too, providing the last umbilical lifeline to a tarnished but persistently desirable Western capitalism, announced, in December, the scrapping of its flight to Frankfurt, a punishment for poor business-class activity. Nevertheless, we in Calcutta were still in the year’s most paradisial time, heading for another Christmas. It was around now I was reminded, because of an academic paper I happened to read, of Carlo Levi’s
Christ Stopped at Eboli
, a record of a year (1935–36) spent under duress in two obscure towns in Southern Italy, Grassano and Aliano, the latter renamed “Gagliano” in the book. Levi, exiled there by Mussolini, says, “The title of the book comes from an expression by the people of ‘Gagliano’ who say of themselves, ‘Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli’ which means, in effect, that they feel they have been bypassed by Christianity, by morality, by history itself—that they have somehow been excluded by the full human experience.” I once saw a Penguin Modern Classics edition of
this book in Oxford, in 1987; picked it up; put it back again. My memory refreshed and piqued by the paper, I was thinking of Levi’s memoir while listening to Rakhi Sarkar, active in the Calcutta art world, married to
Ananda Bazar Patrika
’s Aveek Sarkar, give an impassioned account at an event of why she and others had resolved in 2003 to put into motion the idea of KMOMA, or the Kolkata Museum of Modern Art; for the first major Picasso exhibition in India had come to Delhi and Bombay, but bypassed Calcutta for its paucity of museum space and infrastructure. The insult was deep—to a region of the world that had fostered India’s first home-grown style in modern art, the Bengal School, and where (it was doubtful if Calcutta itself remembered this) the works of the Bauhaus painters were exhibited in 1922 at the prodding of Tagore—who much admired Paul Klee—and as a consequence of the critic Stella Kramrisch’s enterprisingness. I happened to be in Delhi during Picasso’s visit there, and, no great admirer of the Spaniard, went obediently from room to room to study again what I’d seen reproduced in encyclopedias and magazines a hundred times. But the hurt hadn’t healed in Calcutta, or so it seemed from Rakhi Sarkar’s speech. Flippantly, I considered naming the book I was writing
Picasso Stopped at New Delhi—
but remained tempted, at the same time, by the all-purposive, ambiguous
Calcutta
.

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I’ve used the pronoun “she” of the kaajer lok because they
are
, mainly, women—except the drivers, who are a special breed and a cut above the kaajer lok. Shampa, who was married off hastily before succumbing to TB, experienced marriage for what it is in its first celebratory phase in a working-class woman’s life—a rescue and absolvement from a future of domestic work. If the man
is sober and relatively well-off—that is, if he owns a small shop or a taxi—it’s possible his wife will be spared from becoming part of the immense churning that is kaajer lok. But even if he isn’t a destitute alcoholic, she, once the bliss of early married life is over and reality crowds in, might well start work as a maid, especially if the family is ambitious, and wants to give their children an education better than they had. Most often the men aren’t sober. This is what adds, in periodic waves, new women to the ranks of the kaajer lok. These days, very few women search for work cold, in the streets, or dependent on their friends’ advice, but turn up at one of the several “centres” in Calcutta that supply houses with domestics and carers. The advantage for the domestic of working via the centre is that they’re paid a daily wage rather than a monthly salary, and this works out better for them, as the wage adds up to a more substantial salary than they’d have got as a full-time employee. In return, the centre keeps a small percentage. My father’s carer, Kamala, comes to us from one of the smaller and less greedy of these centres, and she has to give to it only ten of the one hundred and ninety rupees she earns daily. In return, she’s with my father for a full twelve hours, sometimes nodding off, as she has a punitive routine, and on certain days wakes up at three o’clock in the morning to collect water because of a recurrent drinking water shortage in her area, VIP Nagar. (No problem with running water for bathing, she says; it’s the
mishti
or “sweet” drinking water that’s in short supply, and is provided by municipal corporation trucks at dawn, distributed by a pipe three times a week to people who’ve presumably been lining up with the resolution of shoppers at a sale.) She’s here at eight to attend to my father. When she rises and walks about, it’s in a scalded tiptoe, like the devout negotiating a bed of coals, an effect created by her corns. My father, whose main aim now is to be left alone, can’t stand Kamala; but it’s with my mother that she
has repeated spats, as once daughter-in-law and mother-in-law did, mysterious, bottled-up outbursts, indicative that each has a strong view on truth and reality, but also of the wearingness of human contact, which rarely ever does credit to human beings.

I recently called the person who runs the centre through which we employ Kamala; he was loath to meet me. “Let’s talk on the phone please,” he said. “I don’t know enough about this business—it’s my wife who really runs it. She’s away.” His wife had been a nurse at Ruby Nursing Home, and then Divine Nursing Home, and had made good use of the networks she’d built up of carers and nurses when they started the centre in 2009. This man, Debashish Das, had been a manager in a small fertiliser company, then branched out, with the impulse towards freedom common to middle-class Bengalis, into the fertilisers business himself. That venture (as is also often the case with those Bengalis’ bright ideas) was a non-starter; unrewarding, with farmers deferring payments, and too demanding. He then got into the private car hire business, first with a Tata Indigo, and then an Indica; it changed Mr. Das’s life, and became a limited but flourishing trade. This centre for domestics was his latest essay, established upon his wife’s contacts, and an enterprise he was pretty confident about. “There’ll always be demand,” he told me.

Supply was ensured too. Cyclone Aila, or Hurricane Aila as it’s often known locally, had devastated crops and cultivation in North and South 24 Parganas beyond the city in 2009, the year of Mr. Das’s centre’s inception, and its after-effects still sent a steady trickle of women towards him, and from him eventually to our part of the city. The women from these centres—not Kamala, though, for she’s very much a Calcutta person—have the sullen, shell-shocked air of refugees, of people who don’t know where they are and what they’re doing there. They are unimpressed by upper-middle-class luxury; they’re swiftly bored; they’ve worked
in one kind of world all their lives, and are now being asked to comprehend different appetites and demands which make them look despondent and probably feel homesick. “Women also have to work because their men drink,” said Mr. Das. “They drink and die.” We discussed the adulterated liquor—country liquor or “hooch” as it’s romantically called by newspapers—that claimed, in mid-December, the lives of one hundred and seventy men in a town near the Bihar border. What had struck me was not just the scale of the tragedy, but how little sympathy was expressed in the media for these fatally misguided drinkers.

When a domestic with whom you’ve had a long-term, rocky relationship—one that goes on and off, on and off—begins to feel restless, there may well be signs, so indecipherable as to be non-existent, that she’s about to go again. I’m thinking of Lakkhi’s last stint with us—by “last” I don’t mean “final,” but “most recent.” There’s never anything but a cursory finality in one’s interaction with a domestic; renewal is usually in the offing.

After Lakkhi’s husband’s painful demise, she returned distractedly to the fold. In two months, her timings were awry again; midday when it should have been ten o’clock; then later than midday. And she deftly smuggled a little companion into the room adjoining the kitchen. At first, only his voice could be heard—high-pitched, pointed, intermittent, making no kind of sense; then I caught glimpses of his wispy figure.

I realised I’d seen him before. He’d been smaller then—Lakkhi’s grandchild, who’d come with her before on a couple of visits. He was still small for a four-year-old, and I was drawn to his high spirits. The boy, whose name was Raja, brought out the vagrant in me; I’d go off in the middle of my writing to investigate his whereabouts.