We cross the road to Mocambo; from a distance I see someone at the ironing stall, not Nagendra, but a deputy — the figure is diligently pressing clothes, now, at 11:15 p.m. On his haunches, Ramayan Shah is flattening dough for puris; some he has compressed into pastry-like shapes. A kadhai reveals the filling — tiny cauliflower florets, their tips rusted like dried blood. This snack costs a paltry two rupees a plate.
Back in Park Street, we are stranded in front of the erstwhile Skyroom. Motorbike after motorbike passes down the road, two men on each one, and, as midnight approaches, the men at the back raise both arms, in a strange symbolic gesture, and roar; the crowd in leather jackets streaming behind us roars in response. It is like a victory lap.
The couple standing beside us clearly don’t belong: a dark, distinguished-looking man of South Indian origins in a blazer; his slight, unobtrusive white wife. We are nervous, and are undecided about whether or not to be participatory; “It’s like Times Square,” she says in an unidentifiable American accent, smiling, “except Times Square’s worse.” Their daughter and their adopted son (who, it emerges, was born here) are partying at Park Hotel further up; while they’re awaiting their hired car, which is clearly stuck in the slow rerouted traffic inching into Park Street, to pick them up. They live, says the slightly harried gentleman in the blazer, in Philadelphia. I’m interested in his wife’s remark about Times Square; I believe there used to be genuine concordances between New York and Calcutta — of mood, atmosphere, ethos — but it never occurred to me to compare the drifting menace of Times Square with what used to be the enchantment of Park Street. Yet I also recognise this habit, of making comparisons under duress. Edward Said had written in an essay that “[m]ost people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that — to borrow a phrase from music — is contrapuntal. For an exile, habits of life, expression or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment.” I understand this completely, except that I balk at the bathos of the “exile.” I prefer “traveller,” with all its contemporary associations of banality — duty-free shops; frequent flyer miles; waiting for a car. In the midst of the ordinariness and exasperation of travel, it’s certain — or at least possible — that the past will come back to you. And, unbeknownst to us, midnight has crept upon us. There’s an unsettling roar, pre-verbal, vociferously threatening — intended not so much to express as to drown out. “Happy New Year,” insists the woman, to which I hastily add, “Happy New Year.” “Happy New Year,” “Happy New Year” concur, on the kerb, R and the distinguished-looking gentleman.
THREE. Names
Naturally, I’m queried sometimes about why I returned to India — and why to Calcutta. Although India, in the so-called boom, might be a place for a certain kind of professional to come back to, Calcutta, on that boom’s outer reaches, with its precipitous political future, is a curious place to make a home. Unless, of course, you belong to that species condemned, all over the world, to uniqueness — I mean the only child — and you have ageing parents. Only recently, a woman whom I know slightly told me on the telephone that she was going to leave Bonn and her thriving career in the UN in Europe and return to New Zealand. “I worry about my parents, especially about my father, these days,” she laughed with some embarrassment. “It’s the curse of the only child.” If not the only child, then, in India, the sole male offspring. Not long ago, my wife met a young, good-looking, clearly successful couple in a friend’s house for tea. She heard the man had relocated from an enviable position in a foreign bank in Bombay to a similarly responsible position in what is, however, today’s Calcutta. Was it disaffection that had caused the move? Not really. It was something that’s older in this part of the world than disaffection, and more obstinate: the sense of familial duty. The father had aged, and the son decided (after discussions with a tolerant wife) that he should be nearby.
Yet living in Calcutta is hardly to live in Kabul or Baghdad or even Johannesburg — nor is it comparable to inhabiting a suburb in Atlanta, or moving to Ipswich. As a city, it’s neither too threateningly alive, nor too defunct (if extinction can be measured and graded). Anyway, if Calcutta today suffers in comparison, it’s not really to other cities, but principally to itself and what it used to be. Anyone who has an idea of what Calcutta once was will find that vanished Calcutta the single most insurmountable obstacle to understanding, or sympathising with, the city today.
I had several reasons for coming back; some of them emerged without warning in the late nineties, and others had been with me for as long as I could remember. For instance, homesickness. I couldn’t recall a time when I hadn’t been homesick and lonely in England. Partly, this had to do with my own — as I discovered, very human — need for light. I was impressed when, in the early eighties, I read a report in an English newspaper about how people in the north of England wilted, psychologically and spiritually, as plants do physically, from an absence of light in the winter. To this lack, I’d add my abhorrence of silence — a high-pitched pressure on the eardrum clearly audible to me in an English room.
Connected to this is the often problematic fact that I’m a musician. I turned, in the late seventies, from what had been till then my favourite form — American folk-rock — to Indian classical vocal music. The regime of classical music — practising with my teacher and with accompanists; picking up new bandishes and compositions and ragas — ensured I spent several months a year in India even when I was a student in England. To be in India — in Bandra in Bombay after my father’s retirement — was to be reborn, to experience sunlight, stillness, birdcall, morning, evening, for a limited duration only, to realise it was possible to revisit some of the first experiences of your life as if they were new. Those student years consisted of a series of such rebirths, because of the end-of-term breaks in British universities, and the cheap flights (when my parents moved to Calcutta, I began to fly Bangladesh Biman and Royal Jordanian) out of London. But there were the flights back. If I got to know birth, I also got to know death. There’s no rationality to this — to why I’m possessed by posthumousness, uselessness, torpor — all symptoms and traits of dying — before I leave. But who ever said that clinging to life could be explained rationally? I suppose what I mean is — India, for whatever reason, is synonymous to me with life; and you don’t love life by weighing its advantages.
The Bengali poet Joy Goswami saw me in the doldrums, in my Calcutta flat, on the eve of yet another departure to England in 2002. A meeting had been arranged by a journalist from the Statesman; Joy and I were to be in conversation, covering, randomly, a range of interests. The Statesman would transcribe and publish this conversation. The only available time in our calendar was this afternoon prior to the flight early the next morning.
Generally, on the day before I leave — sometimes, even two or three days before departure — I stop doing anything; I stop moving. I don’t like engagements on the day. I’m giving myself completely to the time left me — in the process, becoming a bore. I go through the motions, inwardly disengaged; I’m convinced I have no right any more to be here. Dusk is the worst time — the closing of the day, which is as beautiful a time as the day’s beginning, because it has its own signals of continuity, gesturing towards return and the day that follows. This is what is most insulting; that none of those multifarious signals — the stripe on a shaalik’s wing, a schoolboy’s shout on coming home from school — are addressed to me. I am alone in the universe in knowing that this orchestration of the day’s close, leading to the new day’s arrival, is absorbing everyone else in its rhythm, but that I’m irrelevant to it. Joy is shrewd enough to notice (as he and Chitralekha of the Statesman are served tea) my isolation, my disguised posthumousness. He calls it bishonnota—“deep sadness.”