This bubble-world — so real it seemed — couldn’t but vanish with the changes. Today there are other places to go to in Park Street. There’s the Oxford Bookstore, which had a makeover about fifteen years ago, turning it from a fusty behemoth — I used to go there as a child to just sniff the piled books — into a sort of bright retail site that symbolises the liberalised Indian’s lack of interest in any one thing; selling stationery, DVDs, CDs, and tea upstairs. It’s a so-so bookshop but a better meeting-place; somewhere you can retreat to from the fumes and activities of Park Street, touch the books and magazines, and get acquainted with their covers, as you wait, without getting overly dispirited, for your appointment to crystallize, or without being overcome by anxiety if they are late. Further on, across the road near the traffic lights — next door to Flurys — is Music World, the main outlet for CDs in Calcutta. Musicians are keen that their products are stocked here if nowhere else; in the evocative jargon of marketing, Music World has “maximum footfall.” This, too, is a good place to retreat to, especially just after a meeting, after you’ve parted ways; to withdraw into yourself after a spell of human interaction, and, fundamentally, switch off as you’re faced with a range of decisions. All this holds true as long as you’re indifferent to the largely senseless music that’s played in Music World most of the time, from all the latest releases.
The rise of stores like Music World is related to the decline of shops like Melody. The latter still exists and does business — in Gol Park and near Lake Market — but has become at one, as it were, with the old market ethos of those areas: of traders and workers; of bargains argued on the pavement; of fluctuating, fitful sales; of being indistinguishable, in a sense, from the sweet shops and flower shops next to it. There was a time when it exercised a sort of bureaucratic control on customers; when, behaving freely in a record shop in Calcutta (and, to a certain extent, in India), you risked censure from the proprietors. At the Melody in Lake Market, I recall from the late seventies, I had a heated conversation with one of the staff; a small, myopic man who used to be consistently taciturn and rude. “Do you have any records by Bade Ghulam Ali Khan?” I asked. Without a word, but clearly unhappy to receive my superfluous request, he took out three LPs. I chose one and said: “Could you play this one?”; knowing, in doing so, that I was inviting turbulence. The shop had a turntable on which records were played for customers; but only with reluctance, and a fine sense of discrimination about who was deserving of this favour. “What for?” he said. “What’s there to listen to in a Bade Ghulam Ali record? Everything he sang was superlative.” This — what I saw to be the worshipful, mean Indian attitude, where some artists were simply placed beyond criticism, while ordinary people were snubbed — outraged me; I also thought these words to be in the tradition of a specifically Bengali mode of daily interaction: “gyan deoa”—“imparting wisdom”—a common form that the put-down took in Calcutta. I replied with a blasphemy: “This is not the response I would get in a shop in Bombay.” The man lost his moribund equilibrium. “Don’t give me that Bombay-Fombay stuff. That doesn’t work over here!” I descended the two steps out on to the pavement in a huff.
That’s from more than twenty years ago, but the injustice of it is still fresh. It embodies the way time, and everything in time’s continuum, behaved, and in many ways, continues to behave in Calcutta: as if there were always a slight excess of it, in which to have a pointless encounter, or to exchange an unnecessary word or two. But today, there’s the alternative of slipping anonymously into the shiny Music World — as long as you can avoid stumbling on to, or hearing, the new releases.
Cross the road from Music World and you are in Free School Street — now called Mirza Ghalib Street after the great nineteenth-century Urdu poet who lived here for a few years and witnessed, bemused, the advance of the British Raj — and then, going past a petrol station, you are, in a minute, in front of Mocambo. Always, there are people — often couples, often small families — loitering before the door and the saluting watchman with no noticeable aim except, as it turns out, to get in: fair-eyed, starved Europeans, who cultivate a look of simplicity and subsist largely on sex; the well-to-do, smart Marwari families, who rally around each other (their great strength and cause of success) even when standing on the pavement; the solitary bohemian or the left-wing Bengali couple who, like their radical nineteenth-century precursors, sometimes still make a point of eating beef steak; the ordinary, young Bengali customer, motorcycle helmet in hand (for he can’t afford a car), who knows no home or horizon but Calcutta, yet is entirely dispensable to its fortunes, and who experiences a sporadic passion for drinking beer and eating out. The group gathers here because Mocambo takes no reservations. Inside, where not a table is empty (thus, the apologetic crew that waits outside, bearing the brunt of the heat or absorbing what’s left of the evening breeze), is a scene of murmuring incandescence. The lights are low; but, to make up for it, the upholstery is red, as it must have been in the fifties, when the restaurant opened: you feel, when you step in, that you’re back in the singular world created by the Cold War, when one half (a fraction greatly exaggerated, of course) of the people of the world was eating out, and the other half standing in queues. Red, in that epoch, not only signified revolution, but, depending on its context, was also a constituent of psychedelia: and it’s as a remnant of the latter, with its subterranean glow, that it resurfaces here.
Again, the prawn cocktail — that most debased of starters — is, here, justly famous. It is part appetiser and part dessert; the generous pink sauce that drowns the prawns is not Rose Marie, but almost a liquid confection — as it was in the Skyroom; but thicker, like melted ice cream — something that’s sweeter than Rose Marie, but also sharper, with suggestions of Tabasco, black pepper, and — as the black-suited steward once told me in private — mustard. It’s something with which to disarm and surprise a hostile party. There’s a sinister undercurrent to Mocambo—“sizzlers,” fizzing chunks of meat on hot plates, is the other, more audible, speciality — perfectly in accord with what was once the infantile quality of the bhadralok’s fantasy life. On the left of the entrance, the wall is divided into four sections with gigantic dancing girls from Degas, the blue having been retouched and paled again, once painted with a mixture of gaucheness and zeal by Shiv Kothari — the restaurant’s late owner.
Further up from the entrance to Mocambo, thirty or so steps away, is where Ramayan Shah has his pavement stall, if one could call it that. These days when I come to Park Street for some reason — to superficially browse at the Oxford Bookstore or spend time at Mocambo — I’m usually off in that direction later, and the people there must view me approaching with mixed feelings. As ever, Nagendra is ironing clothes, in pyjamas and spotless white vest, his hands moving automatically and swiftly. I’ve never seen him stubbly or unkempt; his clean-shaven cheeks have the enviable green halo of one who is meticulously, and naturally, clean. His thick hair is perfectly combed and immovable and, since it’s jet black, I suspect he dyes it. Later, I found out that this is where he lives and sleeps — here, next to the ironing stall, on one of these benches — but I still haven’t asked him how he manages to look the way he does: transcendental and not of his surroundings. On the other hand, Ramayan Shah is hardly ever in his surroundings when I am there — he’s gone again to the market to buy stuff which he’ll later cook for his customers.