The Epic City

by Kushanava Choudhury

  Durba looked at me, amazed: ‘My uncle comes here for his morning constitutional!’ she said.

  In fact, by late afternoon we spotted a few old timers at the park benches; some were even pretending to read the newspaper. Probably their families were entirely unaware of their voyeuristic perambulations in what we took to calling ‘Umbrella Park’.

  Umbrella Park typified what we felt was Calcutta’s conspiracy against romance. Sex outside marriage in any form still remains unseen and is unspeakable in the drawing rooms of the bhodrolok, i.e. the city’s dominant Bengali middle class. If you are an unmarried couple, no one will even rent you a house. Group sex, hooker sex and premarital sex are all more or less equivalent and all consigned to the netherworld of illicit activity. Just as most men smoke cigarettes, but not in front of their elders, lovers are free to do as they like, so long as they keep it out of sight. Prop open an umbrella in the middle of a public park, and well, anything goes. Or hire a boat on the Ganga, which comes with a bed and a boatman and can be booked by the hour. Or slip into one of the city’s old restaurants which still have ‘family cabins’ – booths which can be closed off with a drawn curtain. Like lovers the world over who are desperate with longing, most couples in Calcutta seek recourse in hourly hotels. There a young unmarried couple is on the same footing with a boss and his secretary or a prostitute and her john. When police raid such places, all are equally vulnerable, because none are married.

  The great Indian family remains the organising principle of modern Bengali society. It stands on two pillars: get married, have a child. The ‘get married, have a child’ formula is applied as widely as penicillin. Depressed, unemployed, gay? Get married, have a child. Once you have taken steps one and two, society will absorb you as a recognisable unit and extend its myriad protections. No matter the situation, a marriage can always literally be arranged between strangers, with the express objective of making babies. Defy the social structure and you may find yourself with your pants down in Umbrella Park. In New Haven, monogamy, not marriage, was the defining norm. For Durba and I, the lack of a marriage certificate had had little bearing on our shared life. In Calcutta it made all the difference.

  ***

  It is fair to say that Durba despised Calcutta. Her hometown, New Delhi, is the India of 8 per cent GDP growth. A massive subway system and new roads and highways were being built as the metropolis readied itself to be a ‘world-class city’ for the upcoming Commonwealth Games, Delhi’s answer to Beijing’s Olympics. New Delhi is India’s capital, the hub of a rapidly modernising nation state. Calcutta lacked what Durba considered the basics of her Delhi-ite life. To her, Calcutta felt closed, impenetrable, provincial. It was a city without street signs, and with many unwritten rules.

  Delhi is a city where I once overheard two twenty-something women at a doctor’s office debate whether Lee or Levi’s jeans feel better when you squat. Until twenty years ago, Delhi was downright sleepy. The new money and power has coalesced there, but Delhi has no distinct urban culture, no sense of its own swaggering particularity, no heart. Its broad avenues and countless identical traffic circles were built on a scale fit for giants. To me, Delhi is not so much a city as an agglomeration of ‘enclaves’, as many of its gated neighbourhoods are literally called. Its rich residents turn inward into the privacy of their own atomised lives; its poor are largely shunted out of sight. Stop and ask for directions in Delhi and no one knows, because no one is truly of the city. Ask for directions on any Calcutta street corner and a half-dozen mustachioed men will appear out of nowhere, determined to direct you somewhere. They may offer radically divergent views on the matter, a street fight may break out as a result, rival political camps may emerge, and traffic may be barricaded for the rest of the afternoon. But it is their city, their streets, their neighbourhoods.

  Since I had left, the city kept drawing me back. Each summer, I had returned to Calcutta for months at a time, without a project or a purpose, just to be there. The Statesman looked worse with each passing year. Most of my Statesman friends – those who weren’t lifers like Mike – had fled to the Telegraph or one of the national papers that had opened up offices in Calcutta. The times were changing. India’s corporate boom was trickling into the city. New jobs were emerging. Some friends had left journalism altogether to work in back offices, writing content and doing design for American corporations. On the verdant eastern edge of the city, a whole planned suburb called Sector Five had sprouted to accommodate them. Next to grazing fields dotted with palms and cows, the likes of IBM, GE and PricewaterhouseCoopers had built glittering glass temples to global capitalism. Premodern and postmodern India headbutted each other as if waiting to deliver the punchline to a cruel joke. A peasant and a programmer walk into a bar . . .

  I met a friend who had found such a position in an American firm at Sector Five. As she was showing me around her glass temple, she took me to a room full of rolled-up mats. They reminded me of the mats that some of the Muslim waiters used to spread out during prayer times at the Statesman canteen.

  ‘Are the mats for namaz?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘they are for yoga.’

  It was the first time I had heard anyone in Calcutta utter the word. She didn’t say joge, which is the Bengali term for the breathing exercises and body contortions that we had all been forced to practise as kids, exercises that were the realm of old geezers, much like consulting astrological charts, performing exorcisms or taking snuff. Joge to us was some grandpa forcing you to sit still for fifteen minutes and pretend to ‘meditate’. This avatar of grandpa’s joge as yuppie yoga was part of a prepackaged global lifestyle imported from America.

  At six o’clock, Sector Five was lined with more coach buses than South Point School. As those glass temples emptied into the streets, throngs of twenty- and thirty-somethings all lit Filter Wills cigarettes and fired off that last text message. And new masses replaced them, for another shift would start soon enough. It may have been quitting time in Calcutta, but somewhere in New York or California, the day had just begun.

  Sector Five was staffed by my people, my generation of the middle class. It employed thousands of men in Moustache jeans and women in Fab India salwars, the types that in my time would idle for years, having passed their college exams, offering tutoring, writing Charminar-fuelled poetry before finally giving up or moving out of the city. Those multitudes represented something unprecedented in my lifetime. Before, I had only seen such crowds of the young middle classes at cricket matches and during student demonstrations. This was new. They were not jeering Pakistani cricketers or attacking tuition hikes. They were working. In Sector Five, on parade was Bengal’s new bourgeoisie.

  Sector Five was part of a larger planned suburb of Salt Lake, where Durba’s grandparents lived. Salt Lake was an anti-Calcutta of identical traffic circles, unnamed streets and neighbourhoods identified only by block numbers. Its tranquillity made it a desirable area for some of the city’s middle class, who moved there and were then rapidly bored to death. In 2004, after I had left Calcutta, the Indian architect Charles Correa built a mall there to ameliorate their tedium. The mall has ample steps around an outdoor fountain, ideal for sitting two by two, sipping cold drinks and dating on the cheap. It also has several ‘multi-cuisine’ restaurants, a Pizza Hut, a Kentucky Fried Chicken and a multiplex. On the top floor of City Centre is its food court, Hangout. There you can buy chow mein, shish kabab, pad thai and other inedible fare from half a dozen countries, just like in Menlo Park Mall near my parents’ house in New Jersey. At Menlo Park, only tired shoppers would opt to eat at such a place. In Calcutta, Hangout was the capital of yuppie love.

  With nowhere to go and nothing to do, Durba and I began hanging out at Hangout. I imagined the indefinite future of our relationship, at Hangout every night, sitting on brightly coloured chairs, eating bad Thai food, the jangling of blue balls drowned out by the dhichak-dhichak soundtrack of the new shining India. Picking at her red-curry chicken
in disgust, Durba turned to me and said: ‘I will never live in Calcutta.’

  We had to get out, out of Salt Lake, out of the oppressive straight lines and traffic circles. One day, I mentioned to Sir in passing that a friend of mine would drop by the house. Durba arrived straight from the field, at the end of a day of interviews with bus drivers. She was dressed in a mud-coloured salwar kameez, a heavy bag over her shoulder. She looked like the kind of woman who comes to your door in India with information on how to prevent tuberculosis by consuming vitamin-fortified wheat. This was the outfit she preferred while working so as not to draw attention to herself.

  The disguise had little effect on Sir. ‘Make some tea,’ he commanded me, ‘and bring some biscuits.’

  He led Durba into the drawing room and regaled her with stories of driving around in his Studebaker, and steak and whisky dinners from his post-doc years in Minnesota in the 1950s. We had tea and biscuits. Sir invited Durba back for dinner. When she got up to leave, he made sure I dropped her home. After he was rid of me, he called Ma in New Jersey and asked, ‘When are they getting married?’

  A few days afterwards, Sir and I were having lunch together. While nibbling his fried okra, he said, ‘I’m going to a friend’s house in Alipur for lunch tomorrow. I won’t be back till six. There’s enough food for you in the fridge.’

  ‘Yes, Sir,’ I said.

  He paused. ‘Enough food for two, in fact.’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  ‘You could invite a friend over.’

  I nodded.

  ‘You could invite Durba.’

  ‘OK, Sir.’

  ‘I’m going to a friend’s house in Alipur for lunch,’ he said. ‘I won’t be back till six.’

  ‘Yes Sir! Yes Sir!’ I repeated vociferously. I feared he would next write me a set of detailed instructions on the art of courting.

  So it became easier, our Calcutta life. We began to take walks through the city. I took Durba to College Street, the book neighbourhood. We walked along the used-book stalls, looking for bargains and ended up at Coffee House, where people came not for the coffee but for adda. I had heard that writers and revolutionaries used to meet there to argue over Marx and Mao, but that was all before my time. No one had fomented a revolution over chicken cutlets in a generation. But the waiters still wore turbans, their manner was still brusque, their speed still glacial, and at Coffee House, they never ever asked you to leave. Durba and I drank cold coffee and talked politics, like lovers in a Satyajit Ray film who arrived on set thirty years too late. Then we weaved through the old North Calcutta neighbourhoods – Badurbagan, Parsibagan, Hedoa, Chaltabagan – with intimate lanes and century-old houses with beautiful wrought-iron balconies. She had never seen those neighbourhoods before. They seemed to her impossibly exotic. Peering through gullies, Durba was reminded of the Castelo section of Lisbon, which we had visited together a year before. While we had wandered the Castelo together, I told her, I had thought only of Calcutta. The jangling streetcars of Lisbon had made me ache for a tram ride through College Street.

  Years before, when I had been in Córdoba, Spain, I told her, I had relished croquetas because they tasted so similar to our Bengali ‘chops’. Upon discovering the towering legacy of Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona, I drew mental parallels to his contemporary, Rabindranath Tagore. I had been in Polokwone, South Africa and the sight of a barber buzzing hair across from a stall frying chickens had made me feel like I was back in Bowbazar. In tiny St George’s, the cadences of the bus conductor’s call transported me to the Jadavpur Airport minibus as it wound through Convent Road. I had stood on a street corner in Singapore at rush hour, and the sound of its silence had filled me with horror. In New York, the no-go areas of the Bronx disturbed my Calcuttan’s prerogative to wander any street. I found solace in Chinatown, where they sell fresh fish just like at Maniktala Market.

  As Durba and I walked together through the lanes, I wanted to make sense of the city that had escaped and defied me as a journalist, the city that exercised its magnetic pull. I wanted to walk these lanes press conferences, without deadlines. The journey down its gullies would take me into rabbit holes, each telescoping from one to the other to the other. In a city with no street signs, there is no other way to tell a story but to follow the lanes. I wanted to move back to Calcutta.

  Durba is a sceptic by temperament, and about this scheme especially. Even though she did field research in Bengal, she did not have any great desire to live in Calcutta. We could certainly not spend a year living as we were, we agreed, treated like outcasts and subjected to the indignities of Hangout and Umbrella Park. If we were to live in Calcutta at all, we both realised, we would have to get married.

  The first person to whom I told the news was not my parents or friends but Sir. One morning, Durba arrived at our house wearing an elegant salwar kameez, her long black hair cascading over her shoulders. Sir took us in a taxi to my grandmother’s house. Like most old North Calcutta houses, the entire facade of the second floor is a beautiful wrought-iron balcony. Above it are portholes along the terrace wall, like you would find on a ship. ‘What a magic house!’ Durba said.

  We walked past the courtyard and up the smooth, broad steps. Dida was reclining in bed, watching her soaps. Upon seeing Durba, she sat up: ‘Where have you been hiding her all this while?’

  Durba sat on the bed next to Dida while a servant brought tea and sweets.

  Sir pulled up a chair next to the bed. ‘These two,’ he said to Dida, ‘are going to get married.’

  ‘Amar tow dekhei bhalo legeche,’ Dida said, laughing. ‘I liked her right away.’ She repeated it several times. Then she turned to me and whispered, ‘Have you given her an engagement ring?’

  ‘An engagement?’ I asked. ‘Since when did we follow such American customs?’

  ‘Don’t be smart with me,’ she said. ‘Do you think I don’t know what goes on these days?’

  I led Durba up the wooden steps to the fourth-storey terrace. From there you could see the two bridges over the Ganga, the TV tower in Tollygunge, and the rooftops of almost all of the city. Maniktala, Sealdah, Moulali, Esplanade, the landscape of my former life stretched before me. For the first time in days, I felt like I could breathe. I took out a ring and asked Durba to be my wife.

  Flat Hunt

  In less than a year, we were back in Calcutta. I had finished my PhD at Yale. Durba and I married in New Jersey. We moved back so that I could write a book about the city, while she finished writing her PhD dissertation on transformations in rural Bengal.

  Oh, to be newlyweds in India! The difference between simply ‘going around’, as they say in Calcutta, and going seven times round the sacred fire is quite literally feast and famine. I had been cadging meals from Sugato and Jayanti for years, abusing neighbourly affection by arriving unannounced at lunch and dinner times. On one of the first times I met Sugato, in my Statesman days, he was holding forth with his father on Hannibal, the ancient Carthaginian general who had crossed the Alps with elephants to attack the mighty Romans. As a student of history, Sugato was well versed in the sagas of Hannibal, Alexander, Napoleon – figures he greatly admired. All this dead learning, I had said, just to rile him. I bet he couldn’t find Carthage on a modern map. Why not bet a plate of mutton biryani on it, he countered, unable to fathom how an upstart could challenge him on his Hannibal.

  The general came from what is today Tunisia. My biryani came from Shiraz in Phoolbagan.

  Now that I was a married man, Sugato wanted to feed us, properly. The plate was set with the standards: rice, dal, fritters and greens. Sugato had also prepared the great Bengali delicacies: a rich goat curry, thick and brown, which I loved, and hilsa fish in mustard sauce, Durba’s favourite.

  Sugato’s wife, Jayanti, had recently loaned me Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. I had been mesmerised by Bergman’s clarity of vision, I told them. ‘That man makes Satyajit Ray look like Swapan Saha,’ Sugato said, referring to the prolific Bengali director
of hits like Baba Keno Chakor, or Why Is Dad the Servant. Ray had died almost two decades earlier. His son made films now. But the sons of great men were always doomed, we agreed. When was the last time we heard from Tagore’s offspring?

  Didn’t Bengalis all suffer that stunting fate, I said. Weren’t we all unable to transcend the unquestioned glorification of our dead ancestors?

  ‘The modern Bengali has three deities,’ Sugato had once declared, ‘Tagore, Netaji and Vivekananda.’ The poet, the liberator, and the missionary. Without the trinity, he argued, the Bengali is without a world view, culturally lost.

  Stomachs bursting with goat and hilsa, our talk turned to girth. Durba was telling us all about a Roman senator who needed two slave boys to carry his overflowing belly around with him. When they had met as history students almost thirty years before, Sugato and Jayanti were both featherweights. As Jayanti pointed out, Sugato swelled with each promotion in the police service, while she, even after two decades as a college professor, remained preternaturally slim. Her husband did not protest. He went to the bedroom and returned with a volume by the seventeenth-century French writer, François de La Rochefoucauld.

  ‘We all know it’s bad to talk too much about your wife,’ he read. ‘It’s worse to talk too much about yourself.’

  ***

  In suburban Salt Lake or the more fashionable parts of South Calcutta there are real-estate agents and ‘houses for rent’ posted in newspaper classifieds. In the rest of the city, there are neither agents nor listings. There is only word of mouth. One night, as I bought a packet of biscuits from Tonoy, the grocer, I mentioned to him that I was looking for a flat. A tall man in a golden panjabi leaped from the darkness into the light like a lumpen genie.

  ‘What square footage?’ he asked. ‘How much per square foot? How about a place in Baguiati? Want to live in Kestopur?’

  ‘I don’t want to buy,’ I said. ‘I want to rent. And I want to live right here in our neighbourhood, our para.’ As quickly as he had emerged, the shimmering genie melted back into the darkness.