ONE
Ritwik raises the lower sash of the window and leans out, almost to his waist, letting the English rain fall on him on a darkening afternoon. His tiny room is on the top floor of a house on the corner of two cobbled streets. One of them is called Logic Lane; something out of Pope, he had thought on his first day in England, dragging his two heavy suitcases over random cobbles designed to defeat any movement on them except the one for which they were initially made. They ream through the thin soles of his Indian shoes. Walking on them is like wearing acupressure sandals, which have textured soles made of hundreds of raised points, except that these raised points are little mounds, and uneven, on top of that.
The room is so small he can hardly move around. It has what he will later come to call a celibacy bed, a row of white shelves against one wall, a desk and a chair, an armchair, a window with fluorescent peach curtains, a wardrobe and an upright wooden box with a glass front. The box contains a coil of thick rope and the glass has a sign, which says, ‘FIRE ESCAPE’.
For a long time he thinks, not wholly frivolously, that it is quite radical of his college to provide its depressed and clinically on-the-edge students with the means of escape from it all, till Gavin one day points out that you are meant to swing it out of the window and clamber down, stupid, Tarzan or Indian fakir style, take your pick, when everything is blazing to the ground.
Even the rain, so typical and so patly conforming to a stereotype of England the non-English assiduously propagate, begins to irritate him with its in-between status. It is neither the obliterating deluge of the Calcutta monsoon, nor the obliging short bursts of a life-giving natural force after an arid summer. All those clichés about the English climate trotted out by his friends, their parents, and anybody who knew someone who knew someone who had visited England, had only bored him. He had been prepared to deal with this skewed vision of the perfectly rainy land; after all, he had lived with rain for the four months of monsoon every year, for twenty-two years. After that, the English rain could only be a gentle variation in a minor key.
But nothing had prepared him for this. It is variation, all right, but muffled. For most of the time, it is not the actual physical thing, the element of water, which he experiences, but the intent to rain, a sort of pervasive threat in the dead gunmetal skies. He doesn’t understand how it is possible, this excess of wetness without downpour. It is in England he first encounters the infinite nuances of drizzle: soft spitting, a spattering of directionless spray blown by the wind here and there, sometimes a thinning out of even that insubstantial spume till there is nothing but wet jewels in the hair. At times, the stronger drizzle eventually gathers enough critical mass to reach down to his scalp and trickle coldly down. That is an unpleasant moment.
Then there are the changing dramas of the different darkenings of the sky, each one with its own subtle warning of imminent rain. The rain mostly never falls and when it does, the end precipitation is never commensurate with the fear contained in the threat of the changeable clouds. It is all very disappointing, and ultimately irritating, this long play of umbrous forms and shades between the potential and its fitful realization. Part of his impatience lies in the fact that he begins to appreciate this miniature drama of deferral.
As for the rain with which he had grown up, it was less rain than some primal frustration vented on little mortals. From June to September, everyone who lived under the vengeful path of the monsoons understood what rainfall must have been like in prehistoric times. The relentless sheets of water were unleashed unforgivingly. There was zero visibility in this all-erasing elemental fury — you couldn’t see beyond the edge of your helpless umbrella — but there was also the euphoria of end and destruction to it.
Ritwik had dissented stubbornly from all notions of the idealised monsoon, which school textbooks and the general culture propagated — all dancing farmers, overabundant fields, frolicking peacocks — for he had lived an infernal one of floods and water-logging on a miserable scale. Every monsoon, Calcutta became, intermittently, a city that stepped deeper and further into those capricious waters that swallowed towns and villages inch by inexorable inch. The open drains on the sides of the streets invariably overflowed and houses were left looking at their reflections in the muddy brown stream which their streets had become.
As children, both Ritwik and Aritra had played with the idea that this was what Venice must be like — waterways connecting houses — but without the excitement of hopping on a boat from your doorbank to get from point A to B. That was so typical of living in Calcutta, this festering mediocrity: there was neither the cruel extreme of the floods which ravaged neighbouring Bangladesh and made refugees of two million people every year, nor the transforming romance of a Venice-like watercity. In the absence of either, both brothers had sat with their legs dangling out of the railings of the verandah and floated flimsy paper boats, made from the lined paper of their school exercise books, in the stream between the roads and the open drains that formed the margins of the streets in this part of south Calcutta.
Every monsoon it was brought home to him how little people were, wading laboriously through waist-deep waters, their roads sunk, their houses leaking, suspended between the dull unforgiving sky and their land which was only fugitively land. What happened to the slums along Park Circus Maidan, in the back streets of Golpark and Rajabazaar, those makeshift tents of plastic and rotting blankets secured from the wind by a strategically placed brick or two? Where did those people go with their blue plastic sheets, their bundles of tatters and rags, and a couple of tin pans?
The flooding at the major intersection at Gariahat was so bad that for the monsoon months two or three buses and a few cars, all stalled and damaged temporarily by the water level, would become fixtures on the road, sticking out like dead relics from a lost underwater civilization slowly surfacing. The water frequently reached up to the waist, all traffic stopped, and people were trapped in offices, schools, homes, shops. Ritwik and some other friends often returned from school walking part of the way, and wading through the rest, satchels held on their heads.
There was anarchic joy in this disruption of normal life as the boys, all headed more or less the same way, giggled, waded and pushed the waters with one arm outstretched for balance and the other holding their satchels firmly on their heads. They swayed like flimsy reeds every time a rare passing bus or lorry generated what seemed like a huge wave in its wake and threatened to knock them off their already wobbling position, half under half above the water. More laughter as someone inevitably lost balance. Sometimes amused warnings, ‘Careful, don’t step into a ditch’, for no one knew what potholes and trenches lurked under the murky waters.
Those trenches were what made Calcutta a place that had leaped out of the pages of Dante and been transposed east. The road from Gariahat straight through to Jadavpur was relatively safe as far as these underwater holes were concerned but it was a different story in central and north Calcutta, in Kalighat, the area around the Maidan, the Monument, Chowringhee and practically all the stretch of the old, decrepit northern part of the city. Work on the metro, an unending labour, had meant large areas of dug-up roads. The trenches were deep; anyone could break his bones if he accidentally fell down one. He had never seen anyone working in them and once the holes appeared, they tended to stay, uncovered, unmarked by danger or roadworks signs, in one seamless connection between traffic, roads, pedestrians, and remain there for years. When sporadic activity on laying down or repairing telephone cables was added to this, the city became a nightmare of ditches and trenches, an eviscerated hell.