The Epic City

by Kushanava Choudhury

  Newspaper men were divided into desk and beat. The beat guys were streetwise; they went out every day covering the dirty rotten world around them. By sundown they were at the Press Club, drinking. The desk sub-editors came to work in the late afternoon and stayed past midnight. They turned the beat reporters’ filings into palatable prose, designed and laid out the paper, and produced headlines. They never left the air-conditioned office. The subs saw the reporters as no better than the wild monkeys that sometimes laid siege on Indian cities. The reporters saw the subs as house plants. Mike was an assistant editor at the Statesman, a desk man with the heart of a beat reporter. His education was on the city’s streets; he had barely lived anywhere else.

  Every evening Mike’s office was given over to the sweet Bengali pastime of aimless digressive conversation called adda. To call mere conversation an adda is like confusing a jazzy ring tone with Billie Holiday. There was the bureaucrat who ran the city’s malaria-control unit and wrote Kafkaesque short stories from the perspective of the mosquito. His name was Debashis, but we called him Mosha (mosquito). Mosha was often accompanied by young Debjit, who wanted most of all to be a journalist and hoped to accomplish this by hanging around editors’ offices instead of writing articles. Next to him sat the admirers: the dancer, who always smiled and never spoke, and occasionally the Amazon, whose boom was heard across the newsroom. Then came the ‘race men’ with their pamphlets full of numbers and prospects, their talk full of conspiracies and false hopes that reliably turned into disappointments every Saturday afternoon at the Calcutta racecourse.

  In this configuration of unlikely persons, Mike would largely keep quiet, a lit Gold Flake between his fingers as he edited away, paring down the turgid prose on screen. He was a master whittler, and while his name never appeared in a byline, many a hapless writer’s articles were buoyed by what he called ‘my gift of language’.

  When I first met Imran in Mike’s office, he had just written an article about a bar that had illegally opened in proximity to a school. After the article appeared, the city was forced to close the bar. One evening at the adda, Mike told us that the bar’s owner had come to see him. ‘He had a suitcase full of money. He said, “Mr Flannery please type a retraction. I will pay.” He had twenty-thousand rupees in his briefcase.

  ‘I said, “Are you aware that this room is bugged? Everything you have told me has been recorded.” You should have seen the face of that bugger.’

  Henceforth the 20,000 figure would climb to over 200,000 with each telling, as an ever-swelling testament to the power of Imran’s pen. Imran had grown up in a village in north India and now lived with his uncle in Calcutta. We were the same age, far from home, both new and hungry. Naturally, we became fast friends.

  There are no jobs in this city, Mike told me in one of our evening addas, so every guy on every street corner is running some small-time hustle to survive. It might simply be stealing power from the overhead lines to run a paan shop, or paying off a cop to look the other way while you squat on the pavement selling aphrodisiacs. Then there were the big-men’s scams: surgeons charging for bogus operations, builders constructing high-rises with sand passed off as cement, or medical suppliers reselling used syringes to hospitals. The most poignant were the cases of government callousness: the retired schoolteacher reduced to begging on a railway platform because his pension was never paid, the schools where no teachers ever appeared at all, or the babies who died in the children’s hospital because not enough oxygen cylinders had been allotted.

  Calamity could befall you at any moment in Calcutta. A century-old portico could fall on your head on the way to work, or you could plummet into an unmarked manhole, or be hit by a runaway bus. The only power people had in such moments was in the fury of the mob. If a road accident happened, the driver could be yanked out and lynched, his vehicle doused in kerosene and set ablaze. If a pickpocket was caught, every passer-by would get one free thwack, a consolation for all the everyday tragedies for which there was no justice, no recourse.

  As a reporter at the Statesman, sometimes I wrote a few hundred words to make sure that an accident victim’s medical bills were paid by the reckless driver who struck him. Sometimes, all it took was a phone call, identifying myself from the Statesman, and things would happen: justice, fairness or, more often, the water supply would be restored. In a sea of helplessness, newspaper work made you feel like you could be, as the motto had said, of service.

  ***

  A group of students from Princeton arrived to spend their spring break volunteering with the Missionaries of Charity, the order established by Mother Teresa. I met them for beers at their hotel, the Kenilworth, just off Park Street. Even around the Kenilworth, political graffiti covered the walls, hawkers sold goods on the pavement, taxis blared their horns incessantly among crowds and stray dogs nestled in the garbage piled up on the street. Where are the nice parts of Calcutta, they asked me.

  You are in the nice part!

  In the days when the city was the capital of the British Raj, Park Street had been the heart of the old White Town. In theory, the White Town was manicured, administered and didn’t stink. In its institutions, dogs and Indians were often not allowed. All around the White Town was the overcrowded Black Town. There the natives – both the elite and their minions – lived to serve the White Town. Even then, that division was imperfect, for the white sahibs lived with retinues of personal servants, just like the native elite. Now, White and Black Town were all jumbled together. There were no neighbourhoods that were ‘gentrified’, that is, cleansed of filth and the poor. The rich and the poor lived everywhere on top of one another, amid the roadside hillocks of garbage, the baying of stray dogs and the ubiquitous stench of urine. The city offered few of the escape hatches of a typical Third World metropolis. There was no historic district in Calcutta, frozen in amber and packaged to lure tourists. The whole place simply looked old. Its colonial buildings were mostly just falling apart. Even the new concrete boxes looked mildewed and ancient. For a global elite, the city had neither the comforts of modern leisure nor the easily digested ‘character’ that is available even in other poor cities. Calcutta was clueless about the global aesthetic – which is the same in Berlin or Shanghai – of urban cool. Its strangeness was truly strange.

  The Princeton students were amused by the apparent anachronism of the city’s Communist politics. It was so old school. They had interpreted the red flags across neighbourhoods, which demarcated area control, as kitsch. The students had cut their teeth volunteering in inner-city Trenton, as I once had. We never went to Trenton to walk the streets, idle on corners, to hang out. The Third World became Trenton writ large, a place without any redeeming qualities, full of people who were by turn to be feared and pitied, understood only as the recipients of redemption. Beyond the tourist sites, the places themselves, the people and their ways of being were defined by failure, by what they lacked. For the Princeton students, when they left and resumed their lives in America among the powerful and the well-intentioned, Calcutta would only be the city of poverty and Teresa, suffering and its redeemer, and nothing more.

  ***

  Imran and I were hanging out at the pavement tea shop outside the Statesman, drinking sweet tea out of clay cups and smoking Filter Wills cigarettes. Imran was complaining: Every day you make the rounds of phone calls, buttering up bureaucrats and then stretch out your beggar’s bowl: Dada kichu ache? Brother, have you got something for me? Meaning, a story to leak?

  Most of the news that filled the paper emanated from government reports and press briefings. The 5 p.m. daily round up at Lalbazar police headquarters, the daily dose from Calcutta Corporation and Writers – city and state governments – the daily declarations of the ruling Communist Party of India (Marxist) (or CPM) and the non-existent opposition, the politics of he said, she said, then fires, accidents, crime. We attended the daily press briefings, noting down what the public relations officer said, and regurgitated it back in the newsroom
, all digested into 400-word pellets.

  The rote of newspaper work, I said, could be done by monkeys.

  Meanwhile, the worlds of the city went on. Millions toiled in workshops and on pavements, never ate enough, shat outdoors, slept ten to a room or under the night sky. The stories of those people could not make the news, because they did not hold briefings or employ press relations officers. You could not call them from the cool comforts of the office to stretch out your beggar’s bowl. Their everyday lives fell into no beat. They only appeared in our pages when they marched in rallies or barricaded roads, as bit players in a production of political theatre. Their voices were only heard in the fury of the mob.

  In the afternoons, increasingly I joined Mike and his coterie at Chota Bristol in Esplanade, across the tram lines that ran down Lenin Sarani, for their ‘liquid lunch’. No one has their own table at Chota. Instead you sidle up next to any party that has a few empty chairs and order your drinks. You pay first. Then the waiter fetches the drinks from the bar. There are other waiters at Chota who come around with trays full of snacks which are slung around their necks like hawkers on local trains. In fact, Chota has the feel of a place of transit, not repose, a waiting room to delay returning to the places you wished you did not have to go.

  Chota is the last bar in Calcutta where only men are allowed. There are stories of female journalists attempting to infiltrate Chota in disguise, but none to my knowledge has ever breached the gates. It is a place full of men who are avoiding the women who await them at home. In the bustle of waiters serving Old Monk and ferrying trays of fish fingers, there is the appearance of a hall full of activity, of things happening. The shared tables at Chota are full of whispers, insider talk. And a first-time visitor may mistake this for intrigue – for back-room banter among dons and thugs, journalists communing with their sources, traders paying off pols. There are other bars and restaurants for such clandestine matters. The talk at Chota is among strangers who know each other’s predicament, which does not bear talking about. No deals, no business, no work, no home – talk is of booze, and jokes about booze. Maybe a bit of banter about betting pools, cricket and races, a little wagering by men of small means who have given up hopes of ever making it out. I met a man in Chota once who had been cuckolded by his own brother. The brother was a bachelor who lived under his roof. Everyone knew the score, but they kept living in the same home – a triangle of unhappy souls, none with any hope of escape.

  ***

  From time to time, Sir needled me slyly for not having a girlfriend. ‘Go see a movie,’ he would say, when I hung around the house on a Sunday afternoon. ‘Poor thing. You don’t even have anyone to go with.’

  Whenever my mother called from New Jersey, he would say, ‘When are you going to marry this boy off? He seems to be taking no initiative at all.’

  He was right. I was taking no initiative. If I had returned to find a bride, then I was doing a very poor job. On some nights, I would ride the late bus home from work thinking of as many of the hottest girls from New Jersey as I could remember. At each stop – Ganesh Avenue, Ram Mandir, Girish Park – I would try to remember a face, a body, as if to remind myself that I had had another life too, another reality, which seemed to have slipped away. While I came to Calcutta and fell off the map, those of my friends from Princeton who did not become bankers or consultants were becoming doctors or lawyers. I was twenty-four years old, single and earning less than $200 a month. What was I doing with my life? Many nights I had fantasies of a life without Calcutta, of exorcising this part of myself and becoming the corporate conquistador I’d been trained to be. I had no idea what this work entailed, but in my imagination it involved cracking open emerging markets for multinational firms, assessing the creditworthiness of Latin American plutocrats, and merging and acquiring anything in sight.

  In time, Sir left Calcutta for Boston, to spend a year with his son’s family. My confusion became compounded by loneliness. Each Sunday I cooked rice and chicken curry and stowed it in the freezer. In the evenings I came home from work and chiseled away a couple of pieces and made do for dinner. I ate the reheated rice and chicken curry in front of the television, to fill the house with voices. It felt better than eating alone. The ghosts of my high-school midlife crisis returned to haunt me. Some nights I lay awake till dawn. On such nights I would get the food cravings of a pregnant woman from New Jersey, for cheese steaks, Sicilians and sushi, the tastes of the inaccessible America. Soon, I stopped going to work.

  Manash, the local doctor, sat in a windowless room in the back of Shyamal’s pharmacy. He was in his sixties, an old-style medic who still made house calls. I told him I couldn’t sleep. He did the requisite check-up, measured my blood pressure, my pulse, my deep breathing under a stethoscope.

  Then he said: ‘When one can’t sleep, does one watch things one should not?’

  Manash was referring to the after-midnight fare offered by the neighbourhood cable operators on local access, the guilty pleasure of every man from fifteen to ninety-five.

  I confessed to all charges. The windowless chamber began to feel airless. I felt panic that he would telephone all my geriatric relatives to rat me out straightaway.

  ‘At this age, it’s most natural,’ he said. ‘Those images excite the mind and make it even harder to fall asleep. Think happy thoughts instead.’

  He prescribed a bottle of ‘tonic’, a rosewood-coloured syrup that looked like something Queen Victoria may have been prescribed by her royal physician if she complained of insomnia and confessed to impure thoughts.

  Colleagues at the Statesman insisted I visit a psychiatrist for my woes. The shrink sized me up for about five minutes and jotted down the details of my biography. Then he asked: ‘Why have you come here?’

  He was wondering why anyone in their right mind would return to Calcutta.

  I wasn’t sure any more.

  It took two monsoons in Calcutta to wash away all the idealism that I had brought across the seas. Calcutta grinds you down. There is so much to which you have to react that you have little time or energy left to act. You arrive with grand plans, and soon you are merely surviving. All around were shells of men who had given up, and given in to tedium. What I was doing was not enough, I knew. But I did not know how to do any better, or protect myself from being indifferent about the difference. I could feel myself becoming deader by the day. I felt like one of those characters in an R. K. Narayan short story, who returned home with blueprints of schemes whose absurdity in Indian conditions was somehow never detected when they were formed in America.

  I took a vacation and went home to Jersey. My parents, always anxious to see me back home, asked that I stay on. After two years in the city, I had no real reason to go back. I had done my time in Calcutta. I had tried to change things and I had failed. The Statesman had no future. The city had no future. It had no place for me.

  I entered a PhD programme at Yale University. My scientist parents were relieved. I was no longer falling off the map. Princeton, now Yale – that was a narrative that made sense, which could be explained to friends at Bengali dinner parties. For them, I had returned to the trajectory of my real American life.

  PART I

  Umbrella Park

  One of my first memories of Durba is of seeing her in a coffee shop in New Haven, curled up in a big armchair, reading a novel. We had met as PhD students at Yale and become friends. She was studying anthropology while I studied political theory. Among our closest friends were Colombians, South Africans, Turks and Spaniards. Durba had grown up in New Delhi. Her father was Bengali and his side of the family all lived in Calcutta. Yet when we eventually became a couple, in the cosmopolitan cocoon of graduate school, our common background seemed almost incidental.

  In the fall of our fourth year of graduate school, Durba went to India to do a year of field research for her dissertation on how globalisation had changed the Bengal countryside. That winter, she was living with her grandparents in Calcutta, so
I planned a visit to the city. Her grandparents did not know of our relationship. So, after many months apart, we reunited in Calcutta on a street corner. She was wearing a fitted T-shirt and tight jeans. I watched her as she came up the sidewalk to where I was standing. Any public display of affection, or even holding hands, was socially taboo. We just stood there, looking at each other lustfully. In Calcutta, Durba and I felt like actors who had wandered off the set of an indie romantic comedy and onto an instructional video shoot for the Taliban. In the few zones where romance was allowed, guards were on the prowl to offset any hints of an excessive public display of affection.

  ‘Sitting and touching are forbidden here!’ a guard barked at us at a shopping arcade that seemed to exist precisely so that couples could sit in pairs and whisper sweet nothings to each other. In most places, a kiss or a caress could get you booked for indecency or, more commonly, could be used as a pretext to extort a bribe. Instead, in designated areas like Rabindra Sadan, you could sit two by two on benches with your arms around one another, feeling lustfully constipated.

  One day, we were passing by what looked like an ordinary city park, except it had a ticket counter at the gate. ‘What’s inside the park?’ I asked the ticket seller, wondering why he charged admission. ‘Inside,’ he said with a meaningful smile, ‘is a park.’

  We paid and strolled in. Sure enough, there were trees, shrubs, trails, a lake. It was a hot afternoon and initially we seemed to be the only ones there. Then, everywhere we looked, we noticed umbrellas. They were resting against the boundary wall, among the shrubs, along the lakeside – all opened up like shields. Occasionally a man would stand up from behind one such shield, zipping up his pants, followed by a woman.