Finally, one afternoon, I got to see Ramayan Shah: he was squatting near the edge of the pavement, not far from the gutter, surveying his world — the pot and its ingredients — with a masterful but concerned air (a gaze like a chemist’s) before embarking on the cooking itself. I, in a sense, already knew him; he, of course, not only didn’t know me but, as I stood behind him, showed no awareness I existed. He’d created his own universe, like a spider makes its web, and — though that universe may be invisible to the passer-by — he was far more centred in it than anyone I’d met over here. “Is this your shop?” I asked — how easy it is to assume the role of a questioner as long as you look the part — and “What is your name?” He seemed vaguely startled; then, his consciousness quickly recovered its continuity with its surroundings, and I didn’t really matter. The way he said his name softly made me think he was Muslim, and when I repeated what I thought I’d heard—“Rahman Shah”—he nodded in unworldly agreement, as if names and identities and details itself were dispensable. Only later did I guess — from talking to others — that he’d said Ramayan, not Rahman. He seemed older than his years: I presumed he was in his mid-fifties, but he looked closer to his early sixties. He had a thin grey moustache and a forbearing face; in his much-worn dhuti and kurta, he was like the North Indian peasant he was probably meant to be, resilient, adaptable. Agreement with everyone and everything, I sensed, was his tested strategy for survival — no wonder he’d let my mispronunciation of his name go; no wonder he hadn’t acknowledged I was standing behind him — it was not so much out of a wish not to be encroached upon as to not interfere, to not encroach upon. And this air of ready-made agreement gave Ramayan Shah a quality — perhaps deceptive, perhaps not — of innocence. It strikes me now, as I think of him, diligent on his haunches, that Gandhi’s mass movement must have been full of recruits exactly like him. How that galvanisation had once occurred was now mysterious.
Whenever I’m in Ramayan Shah’s stall in the afternoons — and it’s invariably afternoon, as I’ve used up my morning writing or practising music and then come straight here after lunch or a coffee at Flurys — I’m hot, and I’m also subtly aware, despite the heat, of the ebbing of the light. Afternoon’s the most dreamless and introspective time of day, a sort of midnight of the daytime, though you wouldn’t know that from the activity on Free School Street; but its span is also the shortest I know anywhere (as Calcutta is in the east), and, by half past five, you’re really preparing for the sudden advent — always unexpected — of evening. As I stand at Ramayan Shah’s, there’s a steady — and noisy — flow of congestion towards Park Street, and, even now, when it’s supposed to have been phased out of the city’s traffic, the hand-pulled rickshaw rolls onward, with an imperious shopper afloat. The rickshaw-pullers were said to be pimps and touts, and the way they made their function known to young men was through hungry eye-contact, and the muted clink of the bell in their palm. Further up, if you turn left after the second-hand record stalls and bookshops, you’ll come to New Market, or Hogg’s Market, for me, with its inexplicable and largely purposeless maze of shops, still the most enchanting covered market I’ve walked around in and, for short spells of time, been frustrated by. Free School Street is an old, important road; opposite the opening that leads to New Market is Calcutta’s main fire station. Further up, as the road ends, are the desperately impoverished Muslim families who live among debris and garbage, seemingly the preferred habitat of the swaggering, hirsute pigs they nurture. But parallel to Lindsey Street, on which New Market is situated, are the skeletal lanes with either quaint or seedy hotels in whose rooms European backpackers curl up, and who march in the short-lived afternoon (as transitory to Calcutta’s day as summer is to England’s year) towards Park Street, or march back from it, glancing momentarily in our direction as Ramayan Shah’s clientele and staff and neighbours and I exchange small talk cautiously.
* * *
Mid-December, and I was back in Park Street, having spent two and a half months in England, in Norwich. So I was doubly glad to be back in the setting I’d fantasised about there—“fantasise” may not be the right word, because it involves a degree of volition; while I suppose I’m talking about a random and involuntary yearning that would come to me during my stay in England. I don’t know where it came from, because I don’t actually like the Calcutta of today (of that, more shortly). Could it be a residue from my childhood, when, in Bombay, returning from the school I hated to the lovely, shining flat that was home, I thought constantly of Calcutta? These days, certain places and activities revisit me momentarily when I’m away, and, whatever I’m doing, I’m sucked into their memory: walking down Park Street, past Magnolia (a restaurant I couldn’t be persuaded to be caught dead in) and the stalls selling chewing gums and condoms, is one of them; settling down at a table at Flurys is another. Actually, I long for Park Street even when I’m not away; just now, as I write these words in my flat in Sunny Park, I feel a desire, like a muted undercurrent, to go to Park Street. In England, other pictures flash upon my eye, as part of that assortment that draws me homeward, towards Calcutta — which, as it happens, was never my home, and, I often feel, never will be. At least one of them is inexplicable: a spontaneous memory of The Good Companion, a spacious air-conditioned shop selling, mainly, frocks and dresses for children made by destitute women, managed by upper-middle-class ladies who want to do a bit of charitable work. What the particular pull of this memory is, I can’t tell; it could be that the shop has an unusual amount of space, and, invariably, relatively few customers, besides a society lady you might know vaguely, positioned behind the desk, speaking in perfect, commanding English; the juxtaposition of these elements might make it seem attractive and impossibly far in Norwich.