At different points of time in those three years, a maidservant and a cook who worked in our flat began to visit the rear-balcony in the afternoons with an aimless look in their eyes. Both had made a long-distance, incommunicado relationship of looks and gestures with someone on the building site. There was some doubt about this at first, but on one definitive occasion, my parents were told by an informer — perhaps the sweeper-woman — that the cook (who, before she found love, was a slow-moving, turtle-like woman with luxuriant hips) had made a friendship with a Nepali watchman, a matter of waves, smiles, and glimpses, but then a serious affair of meetings when she would disappear from the house for what she thought were unnoticeable intervals. Returning, she would say she had been to the toilet. Romance was dead among the middle classes, but among domestic servants it was still a disruptive force, giving them a secret life that had the fraught emotions, the atmosphere and the singing beauty of old Hindi films. When a servant fell in love, the implications were felt all over the house, and became a subject of conversation; my guru would interrupt his tuition to speak about these matters of the heart, glancing sideways when the servant being discussed entered the room.
Meanwhile, the new houses were completed. Each family, in those matchbox-like flats, put up paintings, placed decorations on the window-sills, hung up lamp-shades, as if life, taken out of the bundle of cloth in which it had been hurriedly wrapped, had settled down and resumed its ordinariness. As the cottages fell, and buildings came up, Hindus moved into the area to live alongside the Christians — Sindhis, a tall, migratory business people, who brought with them a passion for cars and noisy weddings, extended families consisting of grandsons and cousins, and women-folk who sang an unimpassioned, strangely tranquil, version of devotionals in the evening; hovering wistfully somewhere on the border of tunefulness, it brought the quality of a faraway time and place to the area. By the time my parents decided they could no longer live in Bombay, and in those months of waiting for the flat to be sold, until at last when they packed up everything, leaving every room with crates full of possessions, the character of the lane had changed perceptibly.
20
That year, full of those odd coincidences that brought Shehnaz and Mandira and me together, my parents moved from Bombay to Calcutta.
Calcutta is my birthplace. It is the only city I know that is timeless, where change is naturalized by the old flowing patterns, and the anxiety caused by the passing of time is replaced by fatigue and surrender. It is where my father, having left Sylhet, came as a student fifty years ago. Those were the last years before independence; and my father lived in a hostel in North Calcutta. He ate great quantities of rice in the canteen, and never left a fishhead uneaten. He was an only child, parentless, in this city where people spoke Bengali differently and more coldly than he did. North Calcutta was then classical and beautiful, with Central Avenue and the colleges of Tropical Medicine and other sciences, the imposing colonial buildings, the institutions of learning and the roads matching the nobility of their names. And my father saw that nobility with his own eyes. In all the world then he had nobody. It was before history was born, and he himself became who he was, studying in a city that is always prenatal, pre-nascent. The tiny village in East Bengal he was born in, with its village school he went to in early childhood, seems to have never existed. It is now on the other side of the border, in Bangladesh. It is as if my father came into being from fantasy, like an image, in 1923. Yet it is an image full of truth, to think of him studying in Calcutta, or taking a tram-ride, one of the marginal, anonymous people who were neighbours with history, one of the millions, studying, discussing politics, listening to songs, living in hostel rooms, eating in the ‘cabins’ of North Calcutta, who were bypassed and yet changed, without their names or the quality of those moments ever being known, by independence and partition. So India took on a new shape, and another story began, with homelands becoming fantasies, never to be returned to or remembered. What did it mean to him, then, without brother and sister, alone, to be part of so many? He loved that life. When Tagore died, millions flowed through the streets, some taking turns to be pall-bearers, some surging forward to touch his feet or his body and then being left behind while others took their place, my father one of those who had momentary proximity to the dead poet, touching him before he disappeared from view, so that, whenever Ray’s documentary on Tagore is shown on television, my mother leans forward towards the end of the film and peers at the screen to catch a glimpse of my father. Thousands, without name or face, but known perhaps to one other person somewhere else, appeared and disappeared around the body of the dead poet held aloft, indistinguishable from each other, weaving in and out of that moment.
Strange to think that a poet should have suddenly brought to the world’s brief attention a small corner of the earth, where a rounded, musical tongue was spoken, where freshwater fish was eaten daily and its bones sorted nimbly with the fingers, where small, earnest men walked in white dhotis with tender, overlapping folds in the heat. An unknown tongue, unknown emotions, strange, impoverished Bengal! From the dense forests and swamps of the Sundarbans, to the magical place, Kalighat, a port and a people grew, a poet and singer in each family, ideals and romance and the love of art nurtured among these frail quick-tempered people, and the wide Hooghly flowing in the midst of all this. Wide rivers, the Hooghly and the Padma, with indistinct horizons on either side, a constant thoroughfare for river-transport and civilization, with lonely passages of water and horizon where ferrymen journeyed from one side to the other.
For many years, my father’s family was hardly known to me. Two portraits, of my grandfather and grandmother, hung upon the wall above the doorway to my parents’ bedroom in the houses we lived in. The family had once been landowners, and then they scattered and gradually became poor, settling down in towns on this side of the border, while the great house became a memory in Bangladesh, with a few relatives still living in it. I remember in childhood travelling with my parents to a town in Assam, and being taken in a car to the outskirts, and entering a place without electricity, where people lived in a small house among other houses; we were greeted by a family: a father, his daughter, her husband, and a child, and the old man had the same surname as I. My father addressed him with the Bengali word for ‘paternal uncle’, and they spoke in the Sylheti dialect, and fragments of that world in which the remnants of my father’s family lived came alive in the light of a hurricane lamp.
My father’s ancestral village was on the banks of a tributary of the Surma. To leave that village and approach the outside world one must use the waterway and the canoe, and emerge eventually into another world. Heat, mud, water, the flight of water-insects, roots holding the earth, women washing clothes, their heads covered by saris, ponds made green by water-hyacinth, the flat, wide sails of the lotus — such images come to me of journeying down that river. It is a Bengal that missed the changes taking place elsewhere, the middle class reforms of Brahmoism, the intellectual movements in Hinduism. More important, there, than the secular nationalist figures, Rammohun Roy and Tagore, initiators of modern Bengali culture, was a native strain of Vaishnavism, the worship of Krishna, Ganesh, Parvati, an ecstatic love of their images, sung out in unwritten songs and poems.