Calcutta (8 page)

Flurys was full of afternoon revellers. We would need to wait for fifteen minutes to enter; I had a sudden urge—not so sudden, the thought was at the back of my mind—to check out Ramayan Shah’s. “Could I … you could come with me”—but my wife
shook her head and indicated she’d wait for my return
here
, in the small queue keeping vigil outside Flurys, “OK—back in ten minutes—we should have a table by then”—and I went down the steps and past the magazine vendors and across the road, having loosened my tie, folded my jacket (the last sign of the Bengal Club luncheon) on the crook of my arm. There was activity at the petrol station and in front of Mocambo, of course, but, coming to Ramayan Shah’s, I found an odd solitude, a release of purpose. A strange cessation reigned here. This wasn’t only because Ramayan Shah was missing again (did it really matter if he was there or not?—more and more he seemed a symbol of elusiveness, like Godot), but that the inner rhythm here was different—from the rest of the neighbourhood and from its own incarnation on normal days. Right next to Nagendra’s ironing stand were two figures asleep on string beds, covered from toe to head in sheets keeping out, in the shroud-like form of rural Indian sleepers, what this country has in such abundance and what makes it so attractive: sound and daylight. They were still, but crawling with flies; Christmas, possibly, had given them justification to withdraw into this cocoon. “Where’s Nagendra?” I asked; thinking, too (Fitzgerald once defined the writer as one who can harbour two incompatible thoughts in the head simultaneously), that our table at Flurys might now be available. A man dicing vegetables gestured towards one of the motionless figures on which dozens of Christmas flies had alighted—alighted, it became clear in a second, with no long-term commitment to the venue. A little further off, Ramayan Shah’s son Hridayanand was scouring a pot with a dreamlike containment, neither happy nor unhappy. I think he was probably incapable of being unhappy, or, like most children, was unhappy about immediate rather than overarching matters. Right now he was more bored than unhappy. Since sociological rigour is essential when you’re writing of a city, I
asked the man dicing vegetables who he was and, intrusively, what his earnings were like. He said he was Gupta, proprietor of the Chandan Hotel (I’d noticed the unostentatious handwritten sign long ago and had been cautioned that it was
not
the name of Ramayan Shah’s outfit). This neglected space, this bit of nothing, left for future use between Nagendra’s stall and Ramayan Shah’s stove, I’d always presumed “belonged” to the latter, that it served a function in his two-decade-old enterprise; but on meeting Gupta the Chandan Hotel acquired, for me, a tenuous territorial shape. Gupta, in reply to my socio-economic query, said he earned a hundred and fifty rupees a day (this was odd, because I’d never seen him plying his trade; but it was clearly either the average on the pavement near Mocambo, or a number that tripped easily off the Bihari tongue). On Christmas Day, he admitted he made less. I would’ve questioned him further about this disappointing dip in his income, but wanted to get back to Flurys while I still stood a chance of getting a table.

At the traffic lights, I saw a deeply familiar figure on the opposite side, sitting, amidst the concourse of motley people any festive day in Calcutta comprises, on the white parapet outside the large window of Flurys, studying me with a mixture of distant empathy and interest. It was my wife, R. She’d abandoned the queue and opted, as she often does, to sit down. She looked at me as if she’d never expected to see me again. I was simply surprised to find her where she was. But the queue had dissolved, and we got into Flurys almost instantly. “Did you notice the woman beside me?” she asked when we were seated. Although I do notice women, I often find that I don’t notice the same kind that R does. She’d been sitting next to a small family on the parapet. Now that she mentioned her, I
did
recall someone at R’s side—“The person in the green salwaar kameez,” she said exasperatedly—but the colour of the clothing hadn’t registered
itself on my mind’s eye. What
had
imprinted itself there was that she was, for the want of a more delicate expression, someone from a different class background, someone with a very different horizon, someone ordinary and well known and yet, at the same time, little known. All this, as it were, I knew, although I hadn’t noticed the colour of her salwaar kameez. It was she, on seeing that R wanted to sit down, who had invited her to: “There’s space here.” And there was; the parapet distends just there like a swelling lip, and becomes ample. R told me how this woman came here with her family at this time of the year, annually, because the ledge outside Flurys provided her with a view of an incredible stream of life on the 25th. “She spoke to me first in Bengali and then in Hindi,” R said, and this was worth remarking on because, only a generation ago, Bengalis spoke a risible, embarrassing Hindi, and even looked down upon that language. In the last thirty years, not only had Bengal fallen, but so had the once-vaunted Bengali language; and, in the meanwhile, a new kind of Bengali person had come into being and increased in small towns, suburbs, outskirts, and even in the metropolis (which these days felt as if it were on the outskirts of somewhere itself, or like an agglomeration of little towns), in which people watched Hindi films on DVDs, and a daily ration of Hindi reality shows and Bengali soaps. Most of this audience couldn’t but be proficient in Hindi. The woman in the green salwaar kameez was one such Bengali, while R and I had a foot sufficiently planted in a superannuated Bengal for us to find this unselfconscious lapsing into Hindi worth commenting on. Streamers hung from the ceilings of Flurys, as it always does during Christmas. After ordering the menu’s relatively recent “brewed filter coffee” (earlier it was simply “coffee”), I apologised to my wife and said I’d like to step out for ten minutes and speak briefly to the woman she’d been sitting next to. Clearly, I’m not good company these days; R sees
me not so much as a person occasionally seized by inspiration or curiosity but by inklings of excitement. Either it has to do with music, or a particular sound, or idea; or, as was the case now, with Christmas and the city. “Go,” she instructed me. “The coffee will take at least fifteen minutes.” Like me, she too was vaguely stirred by the notion of a family sitting outside Flurys on the ledge, looking at the same world that we were from behind the window, but at greater proximity.

So as not to unduly alarm the woman in the green salwaar kameez, I introduced myself as the husband of the person who’d been keeping her company five minutes ago. She was cautious but not hostile; she made room for me in the space R had just vacated. I’d seen faces like hers before—in Northern Spain; in China: a new kind of provincial who populates the globalised world, who changes with its changes without ever travelling outside of the country, even beyond their city or town. This lady, for instance—she lived in Salt Lake, a suburb created in the late seventies not far from the airport, and she’d come here to Park Street to spend the afternoon. She introduced me to her son, a shy boy of seventeen or eighteen, who she said studied at “Something Institution” (I couldn’t catch the name), and to her sister, who resembled her, but was older, less pretty, and seemed to know it. She was waiting, she said with a tremor of humour and anticipation, for her husband to return from the KFC on Middleton Street. The only false note occurred when I asked her what he did; withdrawing a tiny bit, she said, prevaricatingly, “Service.” This could mean any kind of regular employment: an ordinary white-collar job. Anything grander, and she’d have been specific. I felt, again, that I’d seen people like her in other parts of the world, out on a walk, going down a promenade or past some shops, entirely of a locality, a place, but also entirely of the present, the here and now. Sitting next to her, waiting for her
husband to return, I thought I could have been, and probably was, anywhere.

*  *  *

“Could you go and see your bara mamima this evening? She might die any time now.”

So my mother to me, before Christmas Day was over. Those childhood visits—now translated into belated deathbed visits! Never to see bara mamima again—my late maternal uncle Jyoti Prasad Nandi Majumdar’s wife—to allow her to sneak away without so much as a greeting or a sighting!

She lay, that Christmas evening in Golf Green, very still on the divan in the little sitting room in the one-bedroom flat. We’d heard for about a week that she was fading. R and I sat talking with her daughter and sole companion Rini. Golf Green is an odd colony that came up next to waterbodies and wilderness in the mid-seventies, its blocks of apartments divided candidly into “lower income group” and “middle income group,” perfectly capturing the prudent ambitions of a new generation of Bengali homeowners. My aunt, all these years, had been here, in MIG. Childhood flooded back, mainly because of the stillness that I only ever used to encounter in this city in December. The temperature falls to a level that makes the fan unnecessary. And the child in me begins to attend to details—the pinpricks of sound, of voices and televisions in other apartments, for the rest of the year made fuzzy by or mediated through the fan’s shuttling. Even now, I noticed that the decorative peacock feather on top of the fridge was still. That stillness comprises, for me, an inalienable continuity with the child who first observed this world of relatives in Calcutta.

“Have you noticed who’s come?” said Rini didi, as, on our way
out, we stood at the door. With an effort bara mamima opened her eyes and nodded—barely.

*  *  *

A friend visiting from London tells me how he likes the Calcutta Christmas much more than he likes the English one. I do too; but he has specific reasons. And he has no memory of a Calcutta Christmas to refer back to; Calcutta, in effect, has no past for him—he’s only been here once before.

“There’s not much sign of the crucifix here,” he says. “You don’t have that awful mournfulness of Christianity. It’s all about Santa,” he concludes, nodding. He has seen gigantic simulacra of the bearded gift-bearer in shopping malls; in front of restaurants. Although globalisation, in its full-blown form, is yet to reach Bengal, its apparitions, this December, are clearly visible: thus the striking Kumbhakarna-like dimensions of many of the Santa Clauses. “And there aren’t that many nativity scenes,” he says. “In fact, I haven’t seen any.”

He’s right; it’s an absence I hadn’t noticed, perhaps with good reason. In Aparna Sen’s lovely first film,
36 Chowringhee Lane
, the director almost forces an analogy when she plays a recording of a tenor singing, stratospherically, “Silent Night” over visuals of destitutes sleeping on bridges and pavements. To find a representation of the nativity, one might need to go to a church; but, on the whole, the miraculous birth is unremarked upon. The predominant atmosphere of Christmas here has never been one of solitary stocktaking or of the notion of the return of God to earth, but of make-believe.

For me, the principal emblem of Christmas in Calcutta is neither Santa, nor the nativity, nor the Cross, but the Christmas
tree. Almost no one in Calcutta has seen a real one. It enters certain spaces—the middle-class living room; the showroom and shop; the cafe—but it’s we who, with its seasonal proximity, are travelling inadvertently towards the faraway. With its fake, shiny bristles, it represents a journey. It’s also a reminder that the faraway can be manufactured—perhaps is
always
manufactured. No one misses the actual Christmas tree; to eventually see one is not so much a disappointment as a matter of slight puzzlement. I saw real Christmas trees again recently, being sold on a pavement in the Angel in London, unloaded from a truck, arranged, and covered in gauze, so that they resembled, somewhat, the inert botanical figures in
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
. I was fascinated by them, but received no final illumination, as they seemed a bit off the point; as Christmas outside of Calcutta seems generally. Once you’ve experienced a genuine transplantation (a genuine fake, as it were, an offshoot that takes on its own life), you lose, strangely, your appetite for, and your capacity to recognise, the original. This might explain, from more than four decades of living memory, the historical radiance of the Christmas trees of New Market.

What do people in this city, now that it’s neither moored to its past nor part of a definite future, do as the new year approaches? They celebrate; they eat out. The rich and well-to-do have an internal map (mostly of avenues and lanes in South Calcutta) of houses and parties they must visit or avoid; or they’ll romp in a club, dancing on a lawn to a band as the old year dies out. Others go to Park Street.

This New Year has probably been around in Bengal for two hundred years. The Bengali new year, which might be more than a millennium old, is the first day of the month of Baishakh, in early summer, usually the 14th of April, give or take a day for the
variations in the almanac. Once, the New Year must have been a curiosity, a strange, amusing diversion to be smiled at, neither comfortably of this place nor to be wholly ignored (what
was
this thing?); but now it’s the Bengali new year that’s become ceremonial and arcane, part of a continuity that’s even more make-believe than Christmas. On the first day of Baishakh, at least some men dress up for a day as “Bengalis,” wearing the intricately pleated cotton dhuti that was, even until the sixties, the most elegant attire a Bengali man could be seen in, horribly difficult, like the sari, to master, but worn always with a suggestion of casualness. Such were the contraries of the bhadralok.

My wife, who works as a scholar on the nineteenth century, has pointed out a poem to me called
“Ingraji Naba Barsha”—
“The English New Year”—by the (she thinks underrated) poet Iswar Gupta. It first appeared in 1852, a time just preceding the tumultuous change of 1857 (when the Sepoy Mutiny led to colonial power passing from the East India Company to the Crown, and formalised the Raj), and is canny and mildly satirical; R reminds me it’s also deeply attentive to the real, in the way it captures that occasion with the urgency of a bulletin. Iswar Gupta was a tremendously popular poet in his time—perhaps
the
Bengali poet—but, after the preponderance of the new bhadralok humanism from the 1860s onward, after the ascendancy of the “new” Calcutta (which, one hundred and fifty years later, is old, ruined, maybe even dead), he was no longer deemed a serious poet, and then ignored and forgotten. Iswar Gupta is not a poet of “emotion recollected in tranquillity,” as Tagore, at certain moments, might seem to be.