The Epic City

by Kushanava Choudhury

  At that time, Dadu even owned two cars. Then his brother suddenly died, and the British left India. As Dadu’s fortunes dwindled, he sold one car, then reluctantly the second, an Austin. He could not countenance it being driven by someone else, so he sold it for scrap, and kept the steering wheel. When I was a kid, the Austin’s steering wheel gathered rust on the terrace, where we would play with it.

  We kept talking until it was dark outside, and the evening cricket match had come on the TV. As Dida grew distracted by the action on screen, I crossed the threshold and said, ‘I’ll come back tomorrow, Dida, and we’ll talk about the game.’

  The next morning, my uncle called. Dida was dead.

  ***

  A caravan of cars followed the hearse down Beadon Street, to Nimtala. The great poet Tagore had gone home this way by open car in ’41. Mobs of Calcuttans had flooded the streets, snatching at his corpse. By the time he reached the crematorium, he hardly had a hair left on his head. In my childhood, lesser mortals were carried on foot. ‘Bolo Hori, Hori Bol, Bolo Hori, Hori Bol,’ the carriers chanted in rhythm with their footsteps as they nimbly wove through traffic, like stretcher-bearers from the wars of yore. Bolo Hori, Hori Bol, Bolo Hori, Hori Bol. In the name of God, in God’s name. In the name of God, in God’s name. Now the poor hire lorries and flatbed trucks. For the middle classes, there are air-conditioned hearses.

  I followed the hearse in the office car of the city’s chief engineer. In the back seat of the air-conditioned sedan, the hearse’s siren became a pleasant muted muffle. The chief engineer called the crematorium to let them know we were coming, and arranged for us to cut in line. Our grandfathers had been cousins, it turned out. ‘If I can’t do such a thing for my own grandmother,’ he said to me, ‘Who can I do it for?’

  The crematorium at Nimtala looked like a post office. Located on the banks of the Ganga, it was a squat one-storey red building with clumps of people trailing out to the street. Each group carried a corpse covered with a white sheet but for feet and face. Eyelids were blanketed with basil leaves, nostrils plugged with cotton wool, mouths taped shut.

  Aside from Chief Engineer, there were dozens of moustachioed men in our party whom I did not recognise. There were only three of us from Dida’s immediate family: my two maternal uncles, or mamas, and I.

  We unloaded Dida’s body from the hearse and hoisted the cot on our shoulders. Chanting, ‘Bolo Hori, Hori Bol,’ we skipped past the corpses of the less well-connected to jump to the head of the queue. The funeral pyres, like the one where Tagore was cremated, were built of wood upon the riverbank. In wind, hail or rain, the corpses would not burn. The electric ovens are more reliable, at least in theory. There were four such furnaces at Nimtala crematorium, but as at any government agency in Calcutta, two of the four counters were always closed. You had to line up and wait.

  When our turn came, we hunched down and lifted the cot to our shoulders. The great ugly machine opened its maw to show its red insides. We set my grandmother on the guiding rails. Bolo Hori, Hori Bol. I put some shoulder in to push her through, and said goodbye as they shut the oven door. Five thousand years of Hindu ritual, I thought to myself, have come down to this monstrosity, bereft of both the solid comforts of tradition and the merciful euphemisms of modern life.

  The incinerator would take forty minutes. Lining the roadside were shops for buying bed sheets, garlands and other necessities for a Hindu funeral. Between the funeral-provisions shops were tea shops, each beckoning us with benches laid out on the road. Mejo Mama – my middle uncle – bought a round of tea for everyone in our cortege. Mejo Mama was once the ‘right hand’ of the local member of parliament of the Congress Party. The MP had died a few years ago and Mejo Mama had whirled out of politics. But his friends and former underlings in the Congress were still his social world. The Congress guys slurped tea out of clay cups and reminisced about so-and-so’s time, when there was a queue of a dozen bodies and only one furnace running, or the time they had to wait three hours in the April heat, or another time, when it was pouring monsoon rain and the middle of the night, when no one went home till 3 a.m. For these men, ‘giving shoulder’ to the dead was like a profession. Everyone had a wealth of stories of this sort, except me, the cremation virgin.

  I was the only grandchild present to lend a shoulder when Dida died. In Delhi, Dubai, London, Chicago and California, my cousins would be woken up with phone calls to be informed of her death. You never knew how to act or feel when the phone rang in America with news of a death on the other side of the world. You went to the office, the gym, the grocery store, had dinner with friends – the world went on despite your private loss. You kept going as if nothing had happened, as if the papers you had to grade or the meeting you had to attend were more important than death. In your quiet moments, you felt only solemnity and guilt, thinking you should be feeling something, doing something, weeping maybe, lamenting without knowing how. That is how my cousins would be mourning, staring at computer screens, going through the motions, not knowing how to feel. I felt sorry for them. I was sipping tea in Nimtala, present in the moment at the centre of our world.

  The eldest son performs the last rites to ferry the soul to the next world. Dida worried that when she died, the body would have to be kept in an icebox in Taltala until Ashoke, my Boro Mama or my eldest uncle, arrived from California to do the last rites. It was a common fear of the middle classes, for whom the city had become a retirement home, and worse, a necropolis that the young had abandoned. But when Dida died, Ashoke was down the dalan in Dadu’s room, just as she would have wanted. You might even say, as my mother did, that she had willed it that way.

  After tea, we returned to the crematorium and descended the steps at the back of the furnace. There, the ashes and the navel were handed over in a clay bowl. The navel is the only part of the body that does not burn, the source of life carried forth into the afterlife. Bowl in hand, my uncles went down the steps to the Ganga. It was midday, low tide, and marigold garlands, plastic cups and Coke bottles were all caught in the muddy riverbank. Ashoke folded his hands in prayer amid the detritus. The silent chimneys of Howrah stood solemnly across the broad river. In the distance, passengers were boarding a ferry to cross over to the other side. The navel floated into the river. Our cord to Calcutta was cut. Dida was going home.

  ***

  Calcutta is ten and a half hours ahead of New Jersey. The morning after the cremation, jet lag jolted me awake before the muezzin’s first call. In the years when I worked as a reporter at the Statesman, on countless nights my bouts of insomnia would be calmed only by the distant call to prayer. The azan would lull me to sleep.

  Dawn breaks in an instant along the Tropic of Cancer, as darkness transforms to glaring haze. At 7 a.m. the city is bright but still manageable. The sounds of the street are muted and your clothes do not yet adhere to your body like duct tape. I set off to walk the streets.

  A collection of ‘morning walkers’ had gathered outside Niranjan’s Sweet Shop. Their broomstick legs rested on a bench barely holding up their lollipop bellies.

  ‘One boy, dancing with two girls,’ one said. ‘Eeesh.’

  ‘It feels so . . .’ said the other, searching for an English word to express the gravitas of the Bengali sentiment, ‘uneasy.’

  They were having tea out of clay cups served from the cubby underneath the cigarette stall, debating the merits of the various dance competitions now on Bengali cable TV. They lamented the rise of Bollywood’s Hindi music over Bengali standards. Why not more of Tagore’s songs? one said, and the others nodded. Their shorts suggested they had left home with the stated purpose of walking, while their bellies suggested that they often succumbed to the pleasures of adda at Niranjan’s Sweet Shop.

  Niranjan had just lit incense and was saying morning prayers to the deities hanging on the shop walls. That meant the frying was about to begin. ‘It will be ready soon,’ he said, recognising me. ‘The vegetables have already been cut.’


  I had a bhaar of tea and watched the street. On that February morning, mothers in fluttering saris marched their doddering progeny to the bus stop. The mothers carried the backpacks, hoisting them by the shoulder straps like Lyndon Johnson used to lift his cocker spaniels. The children’s heads and faces were covered with ski masks, which in Calcutta are called ‘monkey caps’, their bodies tightly wrapped in full-sleeved sweaters.

  When I was a kid, there was a persistent old beggar on this stretch of Kankurgachi. He had a stubbly beard and a square five-paisa coin plugging one ear. The man would leap on and off buses at the stop, asking for change. There were no beggars here any more. How did that man die, I wondered? Had it happened right at the bus stop? Who had carried him to Nimtala?

  The vast pot of potato curry arrived from across the street. Niranjan’s son-in-law squatted down next to it and set up the burner and the karahi on the sidewalk. He rolled the dough for kochuris, first between his palms into little balls, then into flat circles with a rolling pin. One at a time, they went into the fryer. Flat and flimsy like paper, initially they folded into themselves. In the hot oil, they slowly straightened out, floating like loungers in a swimming pool. As the oil crackled underneath, they swelled to become pot-bellied, like ourselves.

  ‘To eat or to take home?’ Niranjan asked. To eat. His son-in-law scooped four kochuris out with his strainer and placed them on a steel plate, ladled a serving of potato curry and passed it to me. With my index finger I perforated a belly. Steam rushed out. I waited a few moments, savouring the aroma. Then I tore a crunchy piece off, ambushed a potato in the curry, and ate.

  Kochuris were the saving grace of my insomnia spells when I worked at the Statesman. At 6.30 a.m., the Statesman would be flung through the balcony like a baton. Sir would bring in the paper, and seeing me awake, would send me to fetch kochuris. Off I would go to Niranjan’s, tramping through the bazaar, past the line of fishmongers, feeling a great sense of superiority for being up before the morning fish-buying crowd. In a half-hour’s time, I was triumphantly walking home through the hubbub of the morning market. On my person were twenty of those air-filled round kochuris, stuffed with dal, and a half-dozen jillipis curled and bright like neon signs, warm and stuck together with syrup. When you got it to go, Niranjan put it all in a paper bag, the potato curry in a clay bowl covered with newspaper and sealed with a rubber band. By the time I reached home, the curry made stains on the newspaper like the faded maps of empires.

  ***

  Mejo Mama had had a premonition that this might be Dida’s final winter. It was at his urging that Ashoke came to see his mother from San Francisco. Now his ticket would have to be extended till the funeral. In Boro Mama’s time, indeed, even in mine, the foreign airline offices were clustered around Park Street and Theatre Road, the heart of what had been ‘Sahib Para’, or White Town. The Lufthansa office was now in one of the glass towers that had emerged as if out of nothing in the last ten years in Sector Five. Even a decade ago, the traffic there comprised cycle vans and water buffalo. Now, when offices vanished in Cleveland or Kalamazoo, they sprouted up in such towers in Gurgaon, Bangalore and Sector Five, Calcutta.

  Sector Five was not my uncle Ashoke’s Calcutta. He was a creature of the north – North Calcutta, the Black Town – of neighbourhoods nestled in lanes and alleys, where the old Bengali business families had built houses with long verandas, courtyards and dalans. In Sector Five, where were the paras, the lanes, the double-decker buses? Where could you, while waiting for the bus, catch a whiff of roasting meat, dodge into a gully and emerge with a scrumptious beef kebab roll? Boro Mama looked up at the towers and said, ‘This might as well be Singapore or Syracuse.’

  He had heard that his fellow architect Charles Correa had built a mall in Salt Lake and wanted to see it. After my summer sojourn with Durba at Hangout, I was well acquainted with City Centre. I remembered that there was a café on a terrace of the mall. The view from up there is all water tanks and traffic circles, but among the swaying palms there was a pleasing late-afternoon breeze. We sat down at a table on the terrace, ordered cold coffees, and felt more human.

  Correa had called upon the city fathers to develop a waterfront on the Ganga, I told my uncle, but no one seemed to have heard his call. ‘The city that was built in British times is crumbling,’ I said. ‘Along the Ganga, the old British warehouses are shells of empire, reminders of an age when we were needed by someone somewhere.’

  The old houses in the north, like ours, with verandas and dalans, are being bulldozed. And everything everywhere that is coming in their place is concrete box upon concrete box upon concrete box. A metropolis crumbles, and what rises instead are pigeonholes of 650 square feet. Boro Mama sipped his cold coffee through a straw and listened quietly.

  The Bengal Renaissance, Tagore, Vivekananda, Netaji, I thundered. Was there a movement or an idea that had shaped modern India which had not been forged in the furnace of Calcutta? Here we were, in the twenty-first century, latecomers to India’s back-office boom, seeking solace in the tasteful construction of a shopping mall! Where was the vision to imagine the future of the city in a new way?

  ‘Do you know, in my childhood there used to be a traffic sergeant stationed at the Vivekananda Road crossing near our house?’ he said. ‘It was always a white sergeant. That is what we grew up with.’

  It was that way with his whole generation. A white sergeant always stood guard at the intersections of their minds, always checking that their thoughts were in order. How could such a generation dare to dream differently?

  ‘It will happen,’ he said, ‘but it will take time.’

  The Ambassador crawled through traffic as we made our way back into the city. As we passed Maniktala Market, Boro Mama looked longingly down Amherst Street toward his alma mater, and said: ‘Do you know that I didn’t have a first name until I started going to St Paul’s, in class six? That’s when they named me Ashoke. But I wanted a different name.’

  Up till then he had been called Khoka – kiddo. From a young age, Khoka had a talent for drawing.

  ‘I wanted to be called Chitro,’ he said. ‘Chitro Kerr.’

  Chitro Kar. ‘Chitrokar’ meaning ‘artist.’

  ‘Did you ever make your desire known? To name yourself?’ I asked.

  ‘Bah bah!’ he said, tilting his head back with laughter. ‘In what world are you living?’

  Young Ashoke, not Chitro, started school at St Paul’s on Amherst Street and went on to Bengal Engineering College, which had just started an architecture department to meet the needs of newly independent India. Art was not a form of self-fashioning that was acceptable, not for the first-born son needed to prop up an edifice of declining fortune. Architecture was more practical. Soon thereafter, he would be on his way to the University of California, Berkeley. The year then was 1959, when my mother was still in frocks.

  ***

  When Boro Mama went to Berkeley to study architecture, Indian students were rarer there than vegetarian restaurants. There, he became renowned for his red convertible, called Rosinante, in which, the story goes, Alice Waters bummed rides to visit a boyfriend who was in prison for his activities in the Free Speech Movement. Ashoke was young, single and in Berkeley throughout the whole of the 1960s, swept up by the dervishes of change. He lived in America for fourteen years, we were told over and over as kids, just like Ram had spent fourteen years exiled in the forest in the Hindu epic, the Ramayana. Then, like Ram, he returned to his rightful place at the head of his kingdom in Calcutta. Ashoke was our ideal immigrant. He went, and better yet, he came back.

  His masters thesis at Berkeley had been on building affordable middle-class housing in Calcutta. He packed his bohemia into wooden crates and headed home. His plan was to ride the double-decker bus to Jadavpur University twice a week to teach while he started his own firm. Boro Mama moved into the third floor of the family house. His first renovation project would be his home.

  Presiding over the ancestral home was
his father, who had not worked regularly since the 1950s. Instead he wore pajamas and an undershirt all day, arguing against the headlines in the newspaper. First Independence, and then Communist rule. For Dadu, history was going in the wrong direction. The dark and dank of a rustic Bengali existence was preserved in that house. In the courtyard, water was collected in open storage tanks and then hauled in buckets for baths. When the monsoons came, rain poured straight through the house, the winds sweeping water into the bedrooms.

  Above the courtyard, Ashoke built a fibreglass cover that would keep the rains out and let the light in. He sequestered the water tanks behind arches that looked like a Roman aqueduct and refinished the courtyard with bright yellow mosaic floors. He created an overhang above a part of the courtyard and built a narrow kitchen where natural light filtered through a wall of latticework. He broke down walls in Dida’s room to let in more air. He decorated the house with mirror-work vases he had brought back from Mexico. He installed new beams to create a garage with a grand entrance. Its red wrought-iron gates were installed across the facade of the house. Stenciled in wrought iron was the house number, 12, in a font reminiscent of Charles Demuth’s I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold. There was no other entryway like it in all of Calcutta. At each point – the fibreglass, the mosaic, the beams – Dadu fought him. At each point Boro Mama prevailed. Dadu’s room he left alone.

  On the third floor, he built a study with narrow windows that looked as if they belonged to a medieval turret. There he planned to draw blueprints, and to paint. This was the capstone of his efforts: a room of his own. My mother finished writing her PhD dissertation in biochemistry in that study. Soon thereafter, with Boro Mama’s support, she married a fellow graduate student in that house.