* * *
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the North was where the many Bengalis of dubious provenance who made their fortunes out of the growing city, and from their “importexport” transactions with Englishmen, built their mansions. These great houses, which came up well before the high-thinking bourgeoisie would establish itself in Calcutta in the 1860s, were what most probably gave to the city its appellation, the “City of Palaces”: not palaces, really, but pretentious nouveau riche villas. Some of these were astonishingly ambitious. I am thinking especially of the grand house in Mini mashi’s stifling area, the Marble Palace, which the gold trader Raja Rajendra Mallick built in 1835—a neoclassical mansion with a neighbouring temple and traditional Bengali courtyard, today a kind of museum with a menagerie of exotic birds, a laidback spear-brandishing watchman, two clouded-over paintings apparently by Rubens, two others by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and a startling range of classic, covetable kitsch. In some ways — building fancy homes in a bewildering variety of native and European styles; giving to charity; setting up schools — the Bengali was the Marwari of the early nineteenth century. In fact, early nineteenth-century Calcutta was a lot like what India — even the world — is today: a place of hustlers making good and on the make, of boom and bust (as in Tagore’s grandfather “Prince” Dwarkanath’s case, who made a fortune and then died in debt), a place with little time for culture. The difference between popular writing and “literature”—that is, a kind of writing whose primary concern isn’t commercial success — hadn’t emerged, just as that distinction has now vanished again; a host of pamphlets and books on scurrilous, contemporary, and vivid themes came out from the battala (literally, “under the banyan tree”) press, the verbal counterpart of the Kalighat pat. And the North itself, despite its rich, was an impromptu marketplace, trading in commodities, livestock, and even song, women, and stories. We, today, are in the shadow of that great bat, that banyan tree, again; capitalism has transformed our world into the sort of marketplace the North once was; but, as my mother and I go up Central Avenue in the car, I notice North Calcutta itself is more or less untouched by globalisation: no malls, no coffee shop chains.
By the 1870s, some of the sons and grandsons of those very hustlers would become poets, and, running counter to their family’s purely material ambitions, while still feeding off their material wealth, bring into existence the “Renaissance.” In the meanwhile, my mother and I are still headed in that direction. The neighbourhood we are about to enter is described thus by Kaliprasanna Sinha in his great battala offering Hutom Pyanchaar Naksha (The Night-Owl’s Sketches) from 1860—the account of the night-time scene is translated by Bankimchandra Chatterjee:
Fisherwomen in the decaying Sobha Bazar market are selling — lamps in hand — their stores of putrid fish and salted hilsa, and coaxing purchasers by calling out, “You fellow with the napkin on your shoulder, will you buy some fine fish?” “You fellow with a moustache like a broom, will you pay four annas?” Some one, anxious to display his gallantry, is rewarded by hearing something unpleasant of his ancestors. Smokers of madat and ganjah, and drunkards who have drunk their last pice, are bawling out, “Generous men, pity a poor blind Brahman,” and so procure the wherewithal for a new debauch.
We’re as good as back in this Calcutta again.
* * *
The Naba Jiban Nursing Home was in a lane on the right from the direction we were coming from, a lane easy to ignore, but which sucked you in as a drain or crevasse might suck in a trickle of water. It accommodated one car at a time, because a quarter of the lane was taken up by cars parked on the side.
The ground floor of the nursing home was like the ticketing area of a railway station: long-term waiting written on the faces of people hunched in chairs; everyone gathered around reception jostling each other; spontaneous shouting employed as a means of overcoming impediment; the well-to-do quite provincial, with a grim, set-in-stone air of entitlement. My mother and I might as well have arrived from Massachusetts or Bombay, so deceptively privileged and peripheral were we.
Yet we’d reached there just before the visiting hour shrank and vanished. The crowd before reception needed passes to go upstairs. For the ICU, you definitely required a pass; and two were allowed per patient. So my mother had to call Mini mashi’s carer’s husband, Sripati, a small and reassuring figure — so small and reassuring we might have missed him when he descended into the melee. He handed us two pink cards. We proceeded a few steps to the small lift with collapsible gates, which looked, implausibly, as if it had twenty-five or thirty people striving to enter it. Sripati, despite his unprepossessing looks, ushered us in with a decisive gesture, because he knew the ways of Bombay and Massachusetts weren’t respected in these parts. But the liftman too was impressive, and knew how to spot a Massachusetts type, and was determined to treat them like anyone else. This was complicated by the fact that we too were unobtrusively bent on being treated like all the others. My mother’s classical Bengali maternal qualities, a mixture of ferocity and warmth, won him over.
When Mini mashi opened her eyes, I noticed she could move her arms and roll her eyes, but not speak, given the tube in her mouth and also what the stroke had accomplished. Both my mother and I spent about ten minutes observing her watch us in a state of agitation, fall asleep, and then wake up and regard us, particularly me, in bafflement and urgency, and work herself to a state from wanting to say something. I calmed her by touching her arm, “You’ll soon be going home, you’re getting better,” while noting her sallow complexion, her hair combed back, and the two tiny spots on her left cheek. The doctor-in-charge had said her condition had improved, though she was unstable, owing to the sudden fluctuations in her heartbeat.
Downstairs amidst the throng, we got embroiled in family politics, instructed in whispers by two relatives that Sripati, who’d given my mother news of the stroke, was, with his wife, removing Mini mashi’s money, and they might also have their eye on the flat. As we returned southward, it became dark, and my mother and I worried about the two sisters, and decided we should see them again quite soon — Shanti mashi was, at that moment, home in her flat in the CIT Buildings — if we were to solve the Sripati problem, which had been pushed gently in our direction. We’d also been struck by the force of Mini mashi’s recognition of me, her startlement, when she opened her eyes. Whoever she’d been expecting to see, it wasn’t me.
* * *
She died four days later, two days after she was moved back home from the nursing home. My mother and I found that, already, we’d have to return to the North, sooner than we’d presumed, for a last sighting of her childhood friend before she was cremated.
My relatives are East Bengalis, from Sylhet, a province once known for the mystic Sri Chaitanya, its artistic milieu, its enterprisingness, and, after Partition and, even later, post-Bangladesh, its orthodox Muslims (it was a Sylheti mullah who “issued” a fatwa against the writer Taslima Nasreen), the taxi drivers and pretzel sellers of New York City, and for England’s much-maligned, much-loved Indian restaurants. We know now that you put scare quotes around the “Indian” food in those restaurants not just because the menu was composed in Britain, and replicated in every neighbourhood there, but because its perpetrators were a bunch of loud, indefatigable Sylheti Muslims.