“Let’s go to Flurys,” I said, knowing fully we’d have to wait to get in. In my mind was the undeniable realisation, “Christmas comes once a year,” uttered by the angel floating ministeringly at one shoulder, with the devil at the other shoulder adding, “And you’re half a minute away from Park Street.” Perhaps they were both angels? And in which part of the world could you have such a Christmas afternoon, with its special aimless anticipation — except in Calcutta, and here? People were at large. They looked unaware of various things, of the complex history that killed Christmas on this street and now for whatever reason had resurrected it. There’s something almost miraculous about the continual return of Christmas to Park Street; it’s a miracle that (despite the fact that all miracles are apocryphal) I didn’t want to miss. As with all festive occasions these days in this city, what had once started probably in the nineteenth century as part of a secular metamorphosis (the emergence of a new, busy, pleasure-loving middle class; a fresh air of celebration) is now woven into a cheery provincialism, of a city no longer emblematic but ordinary, yet uncannily lit by its past. The strollers on Park Street seemed as unmindful of yesterday as they were of history: Christmas Eve didn’t survive even as memory. They were on their way somewhere, for no good reason, as we were, to Flurys; the hawkers were selling the little clay Santas with the mildly nodding heads and parsimonious beards, as if Christmas Eve were still a few days away. It didn’t occur to them, or to the passers-by, that you mightn’t want anything to do with Santa — clay or otherwise — once Christmas Eve was over. I had once bought one for my daughter, a few years ago, and she didn’t want anything to do with it then; it stood on a shelf for two weeks, its head vibrating every time you struck it with your finger, and then its one colour began to fade, the already faint red ebbing into something like an impressionist’s wash. Its inside was white, and hollow like a bell. As with such objects, they become hand-me-downs to the less privileged, and a maid took it for her daughter after I reluctantly consented to part with it.
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.