At such times, the guru was like a pet, or a child, left to himself and intermittently tended to. As Mrs. Chatterjee and her husband prepared to go out they would talk about him as if he were a child they were leaving behind. Occasionally, if he heard her humming a song he’d taught her as she went out, he’d open his eyes, smile slightly, and close them again.
E-Minor
~ ~ ~
This city keeps growing, reconfiguring
itself; I came to it three and a half decades ago—
Kipling wrote of it as daybreak, colour,
and palm trees, ayahs. We came from Calcutta,
then the greater city. My father found a job
in a British company whose head office, like us, moved to Bombay.
We were put up at the Taj. This hotel’s appearance
is the outcome of its architect’s mistake. Commissioned
to create a facsimile of the Taj, he made
its front entrance face the city, its rear the sea.
It should have been the other way round; the entrance
we use is actually the rear; the Taj,
turned inside out, faces the city, which turns
its back to it, and the sea, looking upon
its back, won’t recognise it. The architect’s long dead — only
in the afterlife of his fancy do replica and original
become one, and city and building, reality, conception,
readjust themselves, to become as they’re not.
There are many Bombays; this is one of them.
We spent two nights at the Taj; the fried pomfret
gave me a bad stomach (I was one and a half);
my mother panicked. I can imagine her, combative,
cradling a sick infant inside that hotel room.
For many years, she’d think of that fried pomfret
with dismayed wonder. She was glad to leave
for the company’s furnished flat. For a while, in her new home,
she couldn’t find a cook who would suit her, so
interviewed impostor after impostor, a few of whom
she still remembers, as if they press upon her,
and bother her with their lies and evasions. My father
had come to Bombay after spending twelve years
in England, six of them with my mother. He had
overcome a fallow period, and, with her help,
now swotting at home, now drinking tea at Lyons,
passed the exams that would give him the grand letters
next to his name. He’s a chartered accountant,
and a member of the Institute of Taxation, and a Company
Secretary. These laurels gave him a job
as Assistant Company Secretary of Britannia Biscuits
Company, or BBC. This firm,
whose jobs were among the best in the “private sector,”
was still largely British-owned, a subsidiary
of Huntley & Palmer’s, and Peak Freens. My father started
as a student of English; he had an Honours degree
in English Literature from Calcutta University. He changed
direction later, and went on to study
accountancy; came back from England and took
this job as an expert on taxation law.
Once or twice, I’ve heard him quote, “Heard melodies are sweet,
but those unheard are sweeter,” a little self-consciously.
When I decided to study English, he was pleased. It was a choice
that might have bewildered other parents, but he
had ample warning. Meanwhile, biscuits
dominated our shelves. I never ate them.
Bourbon, Cream-cracker, Nice, I was familiar
with them all, but rarely touched them. I suspected,
during teatimes, that this was not the kind of food
our country needed. I rather wished
my father made bridges, or engines, or ingots,
anything instead of the round things with jam centres—
the only biscuits I liked. (Such are the whims
of fate, or whatever force binds destinies
together, that the woman who is my wife
is, as my mother puts it, a “biscuit junky.”
She dips her Marie in tea; the dipped bit tans,
and, moistened, the biscuit droops like a Dalí clock.
Thus biscuits recur in my life, long after
my father’s retirement, as if they were
reminding me of something.) Both my parents come from Sylhet,
which went to East Pakistan in 1947,
after a referendum; Sylhetis still blame Bordoloi,
then Chief Minister of Assam, for agreeing to the demand
for one. Sixteen years later, they found
— they, who’d known each other since childhood — themselves
in Khar, then in Cumballa Hill, and,
in 1971, in a flat — three bedrooms—
on the twelfth floor of a new building called
Il Palazzo (“the palace”) on Malabar Hill.
This building transcended the others, so that our flat
hung midway over the Arabian Sea
and watched the Queen’s Necklace from a vantage point
it would not have been possible to cheaply occupy.
For many days, the smell of new paint
hung like a benison on the flat, while shelves
and tables still not arrived at their final shape
had their naked wood whittled away by workmen.
That first night we came to the flat, those unfinished
chairs and tables and that first coat of paint
on the walls greeted us. To write about it in verse
is to make palpable to myself the experience
of living in that apartment, the pauses
and caesuras between the furniture, the dining
room, the overhanging balcony, the sea outside;
my father, recently made Finance Director, my mother,
like children gazing into a doll’s house. Sylhet,
no longer memory, nor country, but just themselves.
(Sylhet, from where it’s claimed, Sri Chaitanya’s
parents came to Nabadweep. There, the holy child
played in the dust on all fours in the courtyard
of their home, watched by his mother. Old songs
call him the “fair moon”; this was before he grew up
and became a wanderer.) Outside our balcony,
too, a fair moon hovered that night. Sylhet—
aeons of migration; even now, most of the
Indian restaurants in England are run by Sylheti
Muslims: the menu’s a delirious poem
on which the names of Moghlai and Punjabi and Parsi
dishes — chicken korma, bhuna meat, dhansak—
are placed in a proximity they’ll never be in elsewhere.
Relocated twice; the first time, when Bengal
was broken up in 1905, and Sylhet annexed
to Assam. When my father was a student in Calcutta,
a man from Chittagong said to him in his hosteclass="underline"
“Sylhet? So you’re from Assam! Don’t you eat humans there?”
My father said: “Yes, we do. Do drop in for lunch.”
In Il Palazzo, the transition was made
from humans to biscuits. There were cut-glass ashtrays
collected from Denmark, placed strategically
in a non-smoking house (my father’s one or two
attempts at a social cigar have left him ill),
guarded on all sides by a regiment of curios.