Calcutta (4 page)

Naxalbari is not far from Darjeeling in West Bengal; still obscure, it would be fair to say, despite its mythic elevation since 1967, as few people seem to know anything about the actual place. The “actual place” is yet another Indian village, with the characteristic
vulnerability such villages have had, over several centuries, to the brutal mastery of the landlords and the state. In 1967, two radicalised communists, Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal, of bhadralok origins (admittedly, bhadralok has all sorts of contradictory registers: “bourgeois,” “elite,” “educated but not necessarily propertied petit bourgeois”—indeed, the whole cultured ethos of liberal modernity), organised a peasant rebellion there; in doing so, planting the seeds, firmly, for a movement whose long-term aim was not a series of local rebellions, but total revolution. From Naxalbari, the forgotten village, sprang an adjective, “Naxalite,” for a movement espoused by the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), a radical Maoist breakaway faction of the more mainstream Communist Party of India (Marxist), which would be elected to power in West Bengal in 1977, and still rules it—precariously—as I begin writing this book. “Naxalite,” however, is more commonly a noun, describing an adherent of the movement; a noun that, until six or seven years ago, defined a type that had been consigned to Indian political history just as princely states and the British Raj were: a romantic, probably bookish, university student from the late sixties, ideologically transformed, or seduced (according to your vantage point), by Maoist rhetoric, or even coerced by circumstances into a movement that believed in nothing less than an apocalyptic reordering of the system. The type disappeared in the early seventies. After committing several of what Auden called “necessary murders” (of landlords, policemen, corrupt professionals), these proto-Bolsheviks were rounded up, imprisoned, and broken, or—more often—killed during the time of the arraigned Congress government. No modern middle class—this one was very much, in a sense, of the sixties—has responded to Marx in quite this way; and comparisons to early-twentieth-century Russia and mid-century China don’t hold, and not only because of the failure
of the Naxal revolution. That generation—literally “lost”—has certain correspondences with the one apostrophised by Ginsberg in
Howl
a decade earlier—“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” et cetera—though, here too, despite the ritual invocation of “best minds” in both cases, there are differences: between madness and ideology, self-destructive ecstasy and utopian rage. Nevertheless, the cliché goes that a generation of the “best minds” in Calcutta more or less vanished in the early seventies, in the manner Charu Majumdar, one of their leaders, did: in captivity.

The Naxalite, as the Maoist, has made a comeback—for, in the midst of the supremacy of the free market and the march of industry, and with corporate power and political interests converging, and land being wrested from local people for “development,” there has been unrest in the countryside. Calcutta, today, is surrounded, from its outskirts onward, by unrest. But the word “Naxalite” has a slightly different resonance now from its earlier one: of the bhadralok radical, destined, in a sense, for failure. The Naxalite or Maoist today represents not so much a romantic transgression as a genuine, probably unbridgeable, rift. In 1967, the independent nation-state was still young and relatively untested; but the revived movement puts the great myth of Indian democracy, which—according to its apologists—has worked for sixty-five years in spite of itself, in doubt. It clearly doesn’t work for a very great number of people.

With the emergence and then the crushing of the Naxalites, Flurys went quiet in the early seventies—as did Christmas in Park Street. Until, say, 1969, Calcutta had the most effervescent and the loveliest Christmas in India—probably, I’d hazard, based on my experience later of Christmas in England, the loveliest in
the world. Warm, convivial, unfolding in smoky weather, it had the vivacity of a transplanted custom that had flowered spontaneously, but still retained the air of an outing, of an encounter with the strange. Its beauty and atmosphere derived not only from the Anglo-Indians, or the last of the English living and working in Calcutta, but also from a certain kind of Bengali who had embraced the festival. I was reminded of this Bengali type when walking through the Jewish Museum in late 2005 in Berlin, a striking building in an area called Hallesches Tör. Our straggly bunch had followed the guide irresistibly until we came, on the first floor, to a rather sparse reconstruction of an educated Jewish household from the twenties with a piano at the centre. On a sort of noticeboard was a newspaper cutting from the time, with a satirical cartoon recording the stages through which a Hanukkah transmogrified into a Christmas tree—clearly meant to poke fun at the new secular Jew. Although I’d been silent so far, I couldn’t help interjecting at this point (the guide encouraged dialogue): “This was happening in other parts of the world as well—it was happening in Bengal.” Two or three people in my group nodded, as if they knew exactly what I meant; and, perhaps, for a moment, they had an intimation that the story of change that had taken place in Europe had also occurred further afield.

There were certain tables in Flurys at which you could reliably expect to see an Anglo-Indian customer, and tables at which large, imposing Chinese boys would be seated late in the morning, when business was slow. They’d get off their motorcycles on Park Street and walk straight in. There was a clear division to Flurys then; on the left-hand side of the main door was the vaguely horseshoelike space in which people ate; on the right, the confectionary, where people crowded to buy, in a constant obstreperous stream, bread, cakes, muffins, sausage rolls. On this side of the division were two large rectangular tables for customers, and I’d see the
young Chinese men in possession of one of them whenever I went to Flurys in the morning. Near an aquarium at the other end—frugally populated with unremarkable fish—I also remember spotting many times an Anglo-Indian regular, who, with his light eyes, looked something like the Mussoorie writer Ruskin Bond. This was after the other Anglo-Indian families who ate there—“Dings,” as they came to be known superciliously among the children of the Calcutta rich—had disappeared without our quite noticing their disappearance. The story was that the Anglo-Indians left for better jobs and better lives in Australia; also that, being neither one thing nor the other (neither Indian nor European), they felt underconfident in independent India. There was also the old allegation, that they were sympathisers in secret of our erstwhile rulers. However, the Ruskin Bond lookalike persisted at his table by the aquarium. Those large boys also vanished from their table; some of the Chinese had anyway started gradually departing India after the 1962 war (it clearly wasn’t pleasant being of the victor’s kin in a country that had lost a battle), and some left presumably as Calcutta’s fortunes declined. This is to say that being inside Flurys doesn’t cocoon you from history—instead, it eddies around you, as the waiters with their trays and teapots do. History in here is circular and repetitive and, in a way, enervating, as it is in the restaurants in Buñuel’s films, with their pointless conversations and white-liveried waiters constantly hovering; which is to also say that, although one might not see the Chinese boys sitting casually at their tables, they continue to occupy the corner of one’s eye.

*  *  *

On Sunday, emerging from lunch at the plush and largely septuagenarian Bengal Club, I walked towards Park Street, and
turned right towards Flurys. Here, abandoning my family for the afternoon, I had a cup of coffee, and then set out without intention to Free School Street, thinking about this book which I had taken upon myself to write. How would it start? I had the opening paragraph; where would the rest of the chapter go? It was while thinking of these questions that I came upon Ramayan Shah’s “hotel” on the pavement, in front of the peeling wall that said Sarabhai Chemicals. It being a Sunday, the few people there seemed half-asleep, and Ramayan Shah, as usual, was away somewhere. Earlier, I would have denied this place its existence, would have seen it but shut it out, would have looked upon it as a stubborn aberration while my mind pieced together, image by image, the “real” Free School Street as it had existed twenty-five years before. Now, for the first time, I studied it properly, not for the sake of ethnography, or from a sense of duty, but to experience again the ways in which people belonged to the city I lived in. As I said, the two or three casual itinerants on the bench were half-asleep, though Nagendra—flanking with his ironing stand the pots and pans of Ramayan Shah’s dubious retail and those of the six feet of space enigmatically called the Chandan Hotel—was pressing clothes. Also, a boy was squatting by the gutter, scouring a pot with what looked like mud. It was a little island of desolation—an island, but still very much of the city I now live in nine months of the year—and I sensed how it was almost an address, a port of call, to its patrons and even its proprietors. I walked onward, passed another bunch of seemingly homeless people, bored, doing nothing, but intimate with the piece of pavement they possessed, towards where the many second-hand record stalls and bookshops—quiet on a Sunday—faintly echoed the Free School Street I’d known. I was trying at once to remember and quickly, involuntarily, forget, forget the pots and pans; to inhabit, as I walked, both the “real” Calcutta I’d visited as a
child, and which had touched me significantly, and the city in which I found myself this afternoon. I returned along the same pavement, and saw that the boy who’d been scrubbing the pot was now lying on his back on a large table—something like a pantry shelf—apparently asleep from fatigue. Then I noticed he was twitching, and crying out in pain, his body racked by angry tremors when he sobbed. He seemed to be in emotional distress; the pointed way in which Nagendra was ironing suggested he’d decided the boy should be left alone—that this was some private agony. “What’s the matter with him?” I asked Nagendra, though I still didn’t know any of the people in this space. “Something wrong with his arm and fingers,” he said, looking up, his expression humane and approachable, without any sign either of undue concern or of taking offence at my question. “They get stiff,” he said in Hindi, “and he can’t move them.” When I went up to the boy, I saw his fingers were clenched oddly. “Have you had an illness?” I asked him; he looked at me calmly, though his face was tear-stained. “I had
peela
”—jaundice—“a month ago.” I gave him fifty rupees, for some reason checking once again to see that he was genuinely suffering. “Is there a pharmacy nearby?” I asked a man in pyjamas and vest who was sitting upon a bench—the customers’ bench in the stall. He nodded and got up and pointed to a lane on the right: “There’s one over there. It has a doctor.” Then he offered a piece of information: “In fact, the doctor prescribed him some medicine but he hasn’t bought it.” The boy was still miserable, but distracted; as if he were realising, again, that the world was composed of other things besides the immediacy of pain. “But you must spend the money on medicine and nothing else,” I remonstrated with him sternly.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve loved going to Park Street, and still do: and not just for Flurys. Once there was the legendary Skyroom
to step into, among whose loyal clientele were not only the gregarious Punjabi and Marwari ladies who all sat at one long table and would then, post-coffee, presumably advance to a kitty party, but also the reserved, extraordinarily tall filmmaker Satyajit Ray. Typically, the space that Skyroom occupied remained, till recently, unsold and unconverted; if you looked closely at the facade, you noticed the remnants of the red lettering with which the relevant trade union first inscribed its discontent and threatened closure. It was a bit of Park Street that had survived the early seventies and, even ten years later, when most of Bengal had shut shop, contained some of the discredited magic you could once breathe in within these restaurants. So my friend P, working for his articleship for the chartered accountancy exams, already making his way in his gentle but focussed manner towards success and the wider world, came here on one appointed day a week with a girl whom he was desperately trying to court, while combining that courtship with some elemental form of happiness: which is why they always had the prawn cocktail, and sometimes nothing else. The silver goblet in which the prawn cocktail was served, the bottle of soda with gleaming balls trapped and dancing inside, the cabbage-shaped-and-painted pot of coleslaw, the rectangular glassware in which “continental” dishes were baked and which, peculiarly, you were asked to eat straight out of, the long, flat box of post-meal spices: these special rituals and accessories of service at Skyroom survive, in memory, the food itself.

This bubble-world—so real it seemed—couldn’t but vanish with the changes. Today there are other places to go to in Park Street. There’s the Oxford Bookstore, which had a makeover about fifteen years ago, turning it from a fusty behemoth—I used to go there as a child to just sniff the piled books—into a sort of bright retail site that symbolises the liberalised Indian’s lack of interest in
any one thing; selling stationery, DVDs, CDs, and tea upstairs. It’s a so-so bookshop but a better meeting-place; somewhere you can retreat to from the fumes and activities of Park Street, touch the books and magazines, and get acquainted with their covers, as you wait, without getting overly dispirited, for your appointment to crystallize, or without being overcome by anxiety if they are late. Further on, across the road near the traffic lights—next door to Flurys—is Music World, the main outlet for CDs in Calcutta. Musicians are keen that their products are stocked here if nowhere else; in the evocative jargon of marketing, Music World has “maximum footfall.” This, too, is a good place to retreat to, especially just after a meeting, after you’ve parted ways; to withdraw into yourself after a spell of human interaction, and, fundamentally, switch off as you’re faced with a range of decisions. All this holds true as long as you’re indifferent to the largely senseless music that’s played in Music World most of the time, from all the latest releases.