Calcutta Read online

  The “modern” is man-made; but it’s also a way of conferring life upon things. These things, as a result, enter your world organically. What I remember from the Calcutta of my childhood has that living quality—a neon sign over Chowringhee, of a teapot tipping into a cup; tangled clumps of hair—wigs—at the entrance of New Market; the judiciously dark watercolour covers of my cousins’ Puja annuals. To these man-made objects, modernity, as it governed Calcutta, gave an inwardness and life. This extended to elements of architecture, elements I thought were essentially Bengali—never having seen them anywhere else—but which must have arrived here as Calcutta grew through its contact with Europe.

  The most ubiquitous of these are the French windows that are a feature of the older residential and office buildings of North and South Calcutta; unless the house belongs to North Indians and Marwaris, in which case the architecture often echoes the ancient, and even more foreign, haveli style. (I’m talking of the older Marwari buildings. The new ones can echo everything from Roman villas to a Disney illustration.) The French windows are, for some reason, always green. My uncle’s house had them; if you parted the slats using the spine (in Bengali, the onomatopoeic word for this lever is kharkhari), the street would flood in through the crack, without any part of you seeping out. This was another feature of this city’s modernity: the importance—for no discernible reason—of looking. The windows were foreign and yet part of my conception of Bengaliness—and they possibly conveyed what I felt about Calcutta intuitively: that, here, home and elsewhere were enmeshed intimately. Subconsciously, I may have presumed the windows were part of Calcutta’s colonial history; but, since they were hardly to be seen in England, this explanation didn’t hold.

  The windows probably came here in the late seventeenth century. In 2007, I’d been invited to preside over a prize-giving ceremony in Chandannagar, where, in 1730, the French general Dupleix had set up his grand colonial headquarters in what was already then, for almost sixty years, a French colony. Power—and the struggle for malarial Bengal—was poised tantalisingly between the French and the British, until it tilted decisively towards the latter in 1757. However, Chandannagar remained a curious and remote French outpost until recently—not so much a quasi-colony, like Pondicherry, but imprinted distinctively with a Franco-Bengali ethos. The prize-giving, ironically, was for excellence in the English language. It took place in the lawns next to Dupleix’s beautiful, sepulchral house.

  It takes about three hours of breathing in dust and smoke, then gazing in resentful wonder at the new Indian autobahns that are replacing the old alley-like “highways,” then turning into one of those highways and travelling vacantly past small towns and countryside awash with plastic bags, tarpaulin, fields, and crushed mineral water bottles, to finally enter this bit of French history: a beginning on the banks of the Ganges, a hazy but still-indelible sketch. The promenade, which surprises you as you enter the town, is still very French, as is the jetty that hangs like a promontory on the river; the Ganges is pure Bengal, but the jetty is elsewhere, and one can imagine a young Frenchman and his fiancée standing on it, absorbed in each other, more than two hundred years ago, feeling “home” revisiting them, dizzied and dwarfed, at the same time, by the East.

  Not so with the French windows: they are French only in name; they’ve become indivisible from what Calcutta and Bengaliness mean.

  Do we actually see these windows—through whose slats I looked out at the world as a child? Can the windows begin to look back, as if we were on the outside?

  They inserted themselves in Calcutta’s consciousness very subtly. Testament to this are some extraordinary, but rather odd, paintings. As Calcutta began to grow from clusters of neighbourhoods into the monstrous, unprecedented metropolis it would become, with teeming settlements and certain luminous landmarks—high court, hospitals, jailhouses, university—a new kind of city type began to emerge from every kind of social class, a little before the advent of the bhadralok—the genteel Bengali bourgeois—and his suddenly all-encompassing way of being. (“Bhadra” means polite and “lok” is person; this polite person’s culture, books, and way of approaching things would reign over Bengal from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s.) The patuas belong to this nineteenth-century churning (when the British had already been entrenched in the city for a hundred years): anonymous painters, some of them Muslims, working on Hindu devotional themes outside the temple of Kalighat, selling their products to the common-or-garden urban devotee. Their work is associated with watercolour and with economical but emphatic outlines, as well as the styles of the metropolis: Shiva and Parvati and Ganesh looking like contemporaries of their worshippers, the embarrassingly handsome Lord Kartik (Parvati’s son) appearing up-to-date and fashionable, in buckled shoes and a Prince Albert haircut. This is not to mention the secular scenes depicting Calcutta—of lascivious babus, their mistresses, and their domineering wives. None of these pictures exhibit the obliqueness or psychological realism of bhadralok modernity: only the vivid footprint of a new, impatient, marching being—the common man.

  Although, for much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the work of the anonymous patuas was done in watercolour, there is an aberration, an experimental foray, maybe in the early nineteenth century, when their counterparts in Chinsura town outside Calcutta tried out a new medium: oil. These paintings are astonishing: they have the resplendence of oil painting but none of the gloating that oil brought to a great deal of the European Renaissance—where it coincided with the new supremacy of perspective, with a manufactured realism, and the world, henceforth, condemned to becoming a spectacle in every gradation of colour. These Chinsura oils are like secret visions of an ancient mythology, brought to light in a moment of change; most of them are owned by the newspaper magnate Aveek Sarkar. They are displayed not in his drawing room, which is populated by other artefacts, but in the dining room—which means people must access this inner sanctum, and partake of the ritual of dinner, to view the pictures. During dinner, they are illuminated by overhead lights; if, turning your attention from the orchestrated courses and movements through which dinner unfolds, you glance at them, you’ll see that their subjects are epic or devotional. There is the mystic Chaitanya, in an ecstatic, free-floating dance, with his entourage; there, and there again, is the god Shiva, with his family and a group of tranquil stragglers—presumably followers. The oils glow and simmer in, and reflect, the electric lights: you have to squint to catch all the activity and nuances. Behind these figures, you may, one day (looking at a reproduction, or if you’re lucky enough to be invited to dinner a second or third time), notice the French windows—so unobtrusively have they become a part of our lives that there is no context in which we might find them incongruous, or even worthy of comment. The French windows are attached to colonial-style buildings. Has Mr. Sarkar stopped in his dining room to look at them? I’d been unaware of them until, almost by chance one day, they inched into my field of vision; there to stay. Part of the difficulty of noticing the windows is the relative abstention from perspective in the paintings, so that they are not so much in the background (they can’t be, as everything, in a sense, seems to compete equally for the foreground) as self-contained and iconic: among the magic points of focus and revelation comprising the scene. Once you see them, you realise what you’re looking at is the emergence of a metropolis, with its eccentric visual field—something that hadn’t existed a few decades earlier. In front of the slatted windows and those colonial buildings, Shiva—unsurprisingly louche, but unexpectedly pot-bellied—and at least some members of his party begin to resemble what they were probably modelled on: the common people of the day, the ones who entered, irresistibly, the city’s spaces without really owning them, and surge into them still. The bhadralok is nowhere in sight. In fact, now that he’s departed (this time, surely, forever) after that unique interim of more than one hundred and fifty years (during which his imaginary universe was all that was real), Shiva, his family,
and his gang seem, once again, very close. They occupy and visit the public spaces of our persistent city. They are, as Utpal Basu said of the old woman in Sealdah, our “citizens.”

  In mid-2007 I saw that another one of the genteel bourgeois houses of South Calcutta, this one in a frequently used by-lane in Ekdalia, had come down. Nothing unusual about that; it’s been happening for twenty-five years, and, these days, this destruction is almost a daily occurrence. In fact, though I must have passed this particular house a hundred times, I hadn’t really noticed it until now, when it was already demolished—that, too, wasn’t wholly surprising. What caught my attention, as the car went past, were the French windows that, loosed from their original locations, had been stacked vertically against each other on one side. They’d been left facing the pavement; I got out of the car to look, never having seen the windows like this, out of context, before.

  That night, I had a brainwave—that I would buy one of the windows. What I’d do with it I still had no clear idea. Was it part of some incipient project I’d been half-heartedly entertaining for the past two years—another flabbergasting branching out, moving from novel-writing to music-making, from music-making to musical composition, from composing to collecting? Whatever the reason, I wanted to acquire that window.

  When I told my wife the next day, she didn’t throw her hands up in despair, but nodded in a way that suggested that what I’d said made perfect sense. That evening, we took a detour—because Ekdalia is both near her parents’ flat and near Gariahat Market—and entered the by-lane to see those windows. She was transfixed by them. We wondered what would happen if we just lifted one and took it home, except that would be stealing—besides, it was too big (and dirty, the frame covered in dirt) for our car. A watchman at the shop opposite and a boy observed us, but no one could give us anything but vague advice about whom to contact if we wanted to buy a window. A few days later, half-expecting them to have gone, I convinced myself and my wife to visit the lane again—but during the day—to make one last effort. The windows were there; this time my wife, more curious and more of an explorer than I am, slipped into the site, lost to her own speculations, and called me after a few minutes. “Look at that,” she said—a door from the same house was leaning against a wall. It was painted a green—the generic colour of the French windows in Calcutta—which was still bright in patches, though much of it had peeled off in scabs. What was striking—at least to us—about the door, which comprised two doors contained within a doorway, were the rectangles on the upper halves, which themselves framed two nubile lotus-shaped iron grilles. These would have been inner doors then, but not the main one (given their slightly decorative and pervious quality)? It was difficult to be certain.

  The family—like the house—had vanished. Everything pointed towards them being Bengali: the location of the house; the kind of house it was; their inability, or desire, to hold on to it. Possibly West Bengali—that is, people from these parts; it was unlikely (but not impossible) that a displaced East Bengali family could, after Partition, have afforded property in this area. The house might well have come up before Partition, of course; its remnants, the door, especially, reeked of bygone bhadralok respectability.

  It was proving difficult to contact them now. Neither the watchman at the shop nor the boy nor any of those who hung out on the pavement had any idea how to, nor saw it necessary to have any idea. Someone on the site finally gave me a mobile number and a name—not a Bengali name—and told me to call this man if I wanted a window. He was neither the builder nor the contractor, but had something to do with the construction of the new building.

  At least two kinds of migration have shaped Calcutta in the last thirty years. The first has to do with the flight outward of the middle and upper middle classes, which began close on the heels of the flight outward of capital—leading, eventually, to the sale of houses like the one in question. You can wager that the story behind the sale is simple and typical. The younger generation is elsewhere: New Delhi, or even New Jersey. The ageing parents (or parent) live in the house, which they may or may not have built, but where the children were born. Upkeep is difficult. One day, their secret wish comes true—a “promoter” makes an offer: a large sum of money, and two flats in the building that will come up where the house was.

  The second type of migration has been taking place within the city itself, feeding the property boom of the last decade, in that false dawn of investment in the state. Although people woke up from that dawn in 2009 to find things reverting to a stubborn, paradoxical, politics-induced changelessness, that migration—and, to an extent, the incongruous boom—continues. It involves Marwaris who’ve been moderately successful as traders and who’ve lived traditionally in the North, moving to the more desirable South, where the boxwallah, or corporate employee, once lived—not to mention the bhadralok, and, long ago, in places like Alipore, the old colonial rulers, and, even today, the great Marwari industrialist families (Birla, Goenka, Jalan, Khaitan), who are to be found behind immense gates, in serenely ensconced estates. The other principal candidates for buying up flats and condominiums in the new buildings are the dreaded NRIs, who are of the city and yet not of it, who are Bengali despite being something else. These are people who left thirty years ago for Michigan, New Jersey, or Atlanta—the ugly acronym stands for Non-Resident Indian, and encompasses movement, desire, pride, memory, and, plausibly, disappointment. The NRIs are not necessarily coming back; against their better judgement though, they do want to keep one foot planted in the city in which they grew up.

  The two- or three-storeyed bhadralok houses of South Calcutta, with their slatted windows and floors of red stone, their rooftop terraces, are less valuable than the land they stand on. In London, the prices of the narrow Victorian houses with their dark facades go up and up because the affluent want to move into them. In Prenzlauer Berg in East Berlin, inaccessible to West Germans until the wall collapsed, the bohemian and artistic set pushed property prices upward because they wanted to occupy those mysterious, socialist, pre-fabricated apartments. People in South Calcutta shake their heads when an old house comes down—but are also plotting, of course, to move to a better city. When I was last in Berlin three years ago, the memorialisation of the past was relentless, but the attempt, by Berliners, to embrace and re-inhabit the city’s troubled post-War history was striking too. Calcutta has still not recovered from history: people mourn the past, and abhor it deeply.

  “Kaun baat kar raha hai?” Who’s this?

  Every time I called the number the man on the site had given me, I got to speak to Ram Singh’s brother or brother-in-law. Ram Singh was either at the site or having lunch. Two days later, he answered the phone himself.

  “Hello—haan—kaun?”

  “Ram Singh?”

  “Haan, Ram Singh”—a distant concession, coming from one distracted all day by construction work—now in Ekdalia, where he was never to be seen; now, as I was told, in Dover Lane—and unscheduled lunch breaks in the afternoon.

  “Woh jo Ekdalia mei khidki hain, main ek kharidne chahta hoon.” Those windows in Ekdalia—I’d like to buy one.

  There was nothing at the other end except the silence of prevarication—as he tried to piece together what I was on about.

  Then, quite patiently, he repeated, “Khidki?”

  Yes, one window—and the door.

  In a business-like way, he told me (as if he were inured to this kind of query) that they’d cost me three and a half thousand rupees; this excluded the price of having them delivered in a tempo. Although I didn’t know what the market price of used windows was—my guess was nothing—I thought the offer reasonable. I immediately asked him to take down my address, and provided directions.

  For three days, the door and the window stood parked against the wall outside our flat, while I worried if they’d outrage the neighbours. I still hadn’t any notion of what to do with them. I called Mr. Mitter, who has a carpenter’s workshop on Rafi Ahmed Kidwai R
oad, and who often gets shelves and fittings done for us. I asked him if he’d take them away for a while. Mr. Mitter didn’t waste time asking questions; he was gracious enough to insist he’d take no rent; to a storage space near his workshop went the window and door.

  After a year, Mr. Mitter informed me that he was short of space; and that the door might be destroyed by termites. So the two objects returned to where they were previously—the corridor outside the door to our apartment. It was unlikely I’d find a way of exhibiting them; or, more problematic still, find a context for that exhibition. The context was a city in which things were being disinterred and dislodged from their moorings, and being washed ashore by an invisible tide.

  My wife said we must bring them in, hang up the window, fit the door—but where? The flat was already colonised by furnishings; each object had its immovable caste and assignation. Firstly, a door was discovered, behind a cupboard stacked with vinyl records, which had been doing nothing in years; it was a connecting door between the drawing room and the guest room that was never opened—and couldn’t be because of the cupboard, and the objects on the other side. This door had to be de-hinged, and the corners of the two doors with their rusting lotus-shaped grilles planed for them to be fixed to that frame. That left the French windows: some impulse in me militated against them serving a window-like role in the flat. After much scouring, I found a space in the tiny passage between the front door and the entrance into the sitting room: the wall on the right was vacant. No matter that it’s always in shadow and obscured by an inner door: we put the windows there.

  As a result of their positioning, neither the doors nor the windows are noticed by visitors. Once their attention is drawn to them (by me), people are always too polite to make anything but approving noises. Whatever’s in their mind—obviously, I can’t really know—it gives me an excuse to study these purchases again: self-indulgently, maybe, but also, now, with a sort of recognition.