So as not to unduly alarm the woman in the green salwaar kameez, I introduced myself as the husband of the person who’d been keeping her company five minutes ago. She was cautious but not hostile; she made room for me in the space R had just vacated. I’d seen faces like hers before — in Northern Spain; in China: a new kind of provincial who populates the globalised world, who changes with its changes without ever travelling outside of the country, even beyond their city or town. This lady, for instance — she lived in Salt Lake, a suburb created in the late seventies not far from the airport, and she’d come here to Park Street to spend the afternoon. She introduced me to her son, a shy boy of seventeen or eighteen, who she said studied at “Something Institution” (I couldn’t catch the name), and to her sister, who resembled her, but was older, less pretty, and seemed to know it. She was waiting, she said with a tremor of humour and anticipation, for her husband to return from the KFC on Middleton Street. The only false note occurred when I asked her what he did; withdrawing a tiny bit, she said, prevaricatingly, “Service.” This could mean any kind of regular employment: an ordinary white-collar job. Anything grander, and she’d have been specific. I felt, again, that I’d seen people like her in other parts of the world, out on a walk, going down a promenade or past some shops, entirely of a locality, a place, but also entirely of the present, the here and now. Sitting next to her, waiting for her husband to return, I thought I could have been, and probably was, anywhere.
* * *
“Could you go and see your bara mamima this evening? She might die any time now.”
So my mother to me, before Christmas Day was over. Those childhood visits — now translated into belated deathbed visits! Never to see bara mamima again — my late maternal uncle Jyoti Prasad Nandi Majumdar’s wife — to allow her to sneak away without so much as a greeting or a sighting!
She lay, that Christmas evening in Golf Green, very still on the divan in the little sitting room in the one-bedroom flat. We’d heard for about a week that she was fading. R and I sat talking with her daughter and sole companion Rini. Golf Green is an odd colony that came up next to waterbodies and wilderness in the mid-seventies, its blocks of apartments divided candidly into “lower income group” and “middle income group,” perfectly capturing the prudent ambitions of a new generation of Bengali homeowners. My aunt, all these years, had been here, in MIG. Childhood flooded back, mainly because of the stillness that I only ever used to encounter in this city in December. The temperature falls to a level that makes the fan unnecessary. And the child in me begins to attend to details — the pinpricks of sound, of voices and televisions in other apartments, for the rest of the year made fuzzy by or mediated through the fan’s shuttling. Even now, I noticed that the decorative peacock feather on top of the fridge was still. That stillness comprises, for me, an inalienable continuity with the child who first observed this world of relatives in Calcutta.
“Have you noticed who’s come?” said Rini didi, as, on our way out, we stood at the door. With an effort bara mamima opened her eyes and nodded — barely.
* * *
A friend visiting from London tells me how he likes the Calcutta Christmas much more than he likes the English one. I do too; but he has specific reasons. And he has no memory of a Calcutta Christmas to refer back to; Calcutta, in effect, has no past for him — he’s only been here once before.
“There’s not much sign of the crucifix here,” he says. “You don’t have that awful mournfulness of Christianity. It’s all about Santa,” he concludes, nodding. He has seen gigantic simulacra of the bearded gift-bearer in shopping malls; in front of restaurants. Although globalisation, in its full-blown form, is yet to reach Bengal, its apparitions, this December, are clearly visible: thus the striking Kumbhakarna-like dimensions of many of the Santa Clauses. “And there aren’t that many nativity scenes,” he says. “In fact, I haven’t seen any.”
He’s right; it’s an absence I hadn’t noticed, perhaps with good reason. In Aparna Sen’s lovely first film, 36 Chowringhee Lane, the director almost forces an analogy when she plays a recording of a tenor singing, stratospherically, “Silent Night” over visuals of destitutes sleeping on bridges and pavements. To find a representation of the nativity, one might need to go to a church; but, on the whole, the miraculous birth is unremarked upon. The predominant atmosphere of Christmas here has never been one of solitary stocktaking or of the notion of the return of God to earth, but of make-believe.
For me, the principal emblem of Christmas in Calcutta is neither Santa, nor the nativity, nor the Cross, but the Christmas tree. Almost no one in Calcutta has seen a real one. It enters certain spaces — the middle-class living room; the showroom and shop; the cafe — but it’s we who, with its seasonal proximity, are travelling inadvertently towards the faraway. With its fake, shiny bristles, it represents a journey. It’s also a reminder that the faraway can be manufactured — perhaps is always manufactured. No one misses the actual Christmas tree; to eventually see one is not so much a disappointment as a matter of slight puzzlement. I saw real Christmas trees again recently, being sold on a pavement in the Angel in London, unloaded from a truck, arranged, and covered in gauze, so that they resembled, somewhat, the inert botanical figures in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I was fascinated by them, but received no final illumination, as they seemed a bit off the point; as Christmas outside of Calcutta seems generally. Once you’ve experienced a genuine transplantation (a genuine fake, as it were, an offshoot that takes on its own life), you lose, strangely, your appetite for, and your capacity to recognise, the original. This might explain, from more than four decades of living memory, the historical radiance of the Christmas trees of New Market.
What do people in this city, now that it’s neither moored to its past nor part of a definite future, do as the new year approaches? They celebrate; they eat out. The rich and well-to-do have an internal map (mostly of avenues and lanes in South Calcutta) of houses and parties they must visit or avoid; or they’ll romp in a club, dancing on a lawn to a band as the old year dies out. Others go to Park Street.
This New Year has probably been around in Bengal for two hundred years. The Bengali new year, which might be more than a millennium old, is the first day of the month of Baishakh, in early summer, usually the 14th of April, give or take a day for the variations in the almanac. Once, the New Year must have been a curiosity, a strange, amusing diversion to be smiled at, neither comfortably of this place nor to be wholly ignored (what was this thing?); but now it’s the Bengali new year that’s become ceremonial and arcane, part of a continuity that’s even more make-believe than Christmas. On the first day of Baishakh, at least some men dress up for a day as “Bengalis,” wearing the intricately pleated cotton dhuti that was, even until the sixties, the most elegant attire a Bengali man could be seen in, horribly difficult, like the sari, to master, but worn always with a suggestion of casualness. Such were the contraries of the bhadralok.