The Epic City

by Kushanava Choudhury

  The study Boro Mama built soon merged into the entropy of the house. In the monsoon it leaked; in the summer it baked. He had neither the energy nor the calm to draw blueprints there, much less to paint. It quickly became another area of the house that was overtaken by the detritus of sprawling decline, the place where you would find a rusted steering wheel, or a full-length mirror of Belgian glass. In short, it became another corner that the adults had abandoned to our enchantment. There were piles upon piles of things: things collected at auctions Dadu used to frequent – toys, figurines, photographs; things given as gifts, bought by relatives who were long dead, forgotten or excommunicated. Just as Dadu had assiduously collected the hand-me-downs of the British, amassing a trash heap of empire, so too we revelled in his hand-me-downs, the rejects of a Bengali bourgeoisie in decline.

  In my childhood, the garage Boro Mama built remained empty. He never bought a car. Other sisters had to be married off and architectural commissions came slowly. The kitchen, where my aunts laboured, was cramped and airless. It had clearly been designed by someone who had never cooked in Indian conditions. In time even the fibreglass roof began to tear, unable to withstand the monsoons. For nine years, Boro Mama fought with his father, his brothers, his wife, his colleagues, his city, his society. Then he gave up.

  Calcutta had changed. The Communists were now in power. Contracts became ever more beholden to politics. By the early 1980s he was thoroughly defeated by the nexus of developers and politicians in Calcutta. The money had also dried up. There was no work for him to do.

  When Ashoke left Calcutta for good, out of a locked closet emerged life-size canvases, vast Rothko-esque works which he had painted during his Berkeley years. They were the first abstract paintings I had ever seen. They were a vision of the life he had imagined in that study. They went back with him in a wooden crate, back to Berkeley where they belonged.

  ***

  ‘Pushed out, that’s what it was. What else would you call it?’ Dida used to say. Dadu wouldn’t let Ashoke stay. From the start, with each window replaced, each beam moved, each gate installed, there was resistance, reproach, and always in that house, the reverberations of men yelling. She always blamed Dadu, but it wasn’t just that. The city had become less hospitable for our kind – the educated, the ambitious and the mobile – and once we leaped abroad, we seemed to develop amnesia about the reality of Calcutta’s conditions. This was why Ashoke left again, why my parents left. It was why I had left, and thousands of others were shown the door.

  Among Dida’s seven children only Mejo Mama and Jayasree, my mother’s eldest sister, were left in Calcutta. They were barely on speaking terms. Periodically they would launch complaints to Boro Mama in California to settle their sexagenarians’ feuds. When I had been in the city the previous summer, Jayasree sat me down on the day bed in their Ballygunge house and said her brother had threatened to kill her. ‘Right there in front of Ma he said this,’ she said to me.

  ‘He’s probably not going to kill you,’ I had offered.

  ‘Who knows, with his political contacts.’

  Within days of Dida’s cremation, Shampa and Joy, Jayasree’s children, arrived from New Delhi. Joy and I were a year apart. Over the years, we had competed against each other in hundreds of rounds of ‘hand tennis’, table tennis and bare-knuckle fights. He came up the stairs and embraced me in the dalan. We had shared a magical childhood in that house. Dida’s room, which was the family gathering place, was about 25 feet long, with ceilings that were at least half as high. In our childhood, it felt like a great hall. There, we played hand tennis, a game of our own invention, kneeling and swatting rubber balls with our bare hands on a court drawn out in chalk. On the same floor, during family feasts we would sit in rows and eat elbow to elbow, our mothers crouching to serve us food. After we had finished, Dida and her daughters and daughters-in-law would sit together with all the pots around them – for there was no one to serve them – the handis of rice and dal tottering on the craters of the moonscaped floor.

  Most of our days in that house were spent running all through the three floors, as if the running was an end in itself. The centre of the house was Dida, constantly in motion, cooking, clearing, cleaning, sending servants off to market, slipping a tenner in this one’s pocket, in that one’s blouse, for singaras from Ganguram’s, for medicine to soothe a grandson’s cough. It was a vast anarchic empire, which she navigated and kept afloat.

  Our pictures of Dida’s room are always formal: group photos of rows of brothers and sisters, one row seated on the floor, another on the bed, couples together, with Dadu and Dida in the centre. Where are the photographs of the graffiti we wrote in orange chalk on the pockmarked floors? Where are the pictures of the daybed that sat in the middle of the room, all mesh and tangled springs like a giant Brillo Pad, and a refuge to generations of mice? Where are the images of the late afternoons, with curtains drawn, when the grandchildren lay down on Dida’s giant square bed like fish at Maniktala Market? The floor turned into a bed then too, with mattresses unrolled, pillows and bolsters for the mothers. No one napped, they talked instead, until perhaps at four a quick wink, and then soon enough, the curtains pulled back, the French windows opened to the cacophony of the veranda, hot tea and biscuits for the grown-ups, and for the kids the welcome sounds of wickets being planted on the street below, beckoning us to a cricket match. Why did no one photograph those moments, which exist only as fading images in my mind?

  Joy and I went up to the terrace, away from the gaze of grown ups, to have a smoke. Joy took a drag of his Filter Wills and declared: ‘This is the last time I enter this house.’

  ***

  Soon the rest of Dida’s children were back home at D. L. Roy Street, sitting together in her room for the first time in decades. Manjusree, my middle aunt, arrived on an early morning flight from Dubai. Jayanti, the youngest aunt, flew home from London. My parents were already there. Mejo Mama hosted the family uneasily. What could we have to say to each other?

  Mejo Mama had assiduously memorialised the past. There were pictures of the whole family at my youngest aunt’s wedding, the portrait in oil of my aunt, Parna, Mejo Mama’s wife, who died in a road accident far too young. Dadu was featured too, in a black-and-white photograph with a colour touch-up. A picture from a brunch in my parents’ New Jersey house had been transposed to Calcutta. Our Ikea table had been Photoshopped out and replaced with the round marble tabletop of D. L. Roy Street. In a Bhai Phota photo, taken in Dida’s room, our English cousins had been Photoshopped into the back row from a photo taken in London. Stalin removed his purged enemies from old group photos to sanitise the past. Mejo Mama was like Stalin in reverse, adding instead of subtracting, to fashion a false memory of utopia, when we were all united together at home. In reality, that frenetic house of my childhood had long been emptied.

  There were thirteen days between the cremation and the funeral, a sea of empty time. Durba and i drifted from room to room, unsure of where we belonged. Between the four sisters there was a loose bond forged from living in a house of male grandiloquence, though each now occupied a separate universe. Lounging on Dida’s bed in various states between sitting and lying down, the four sisters spoke in overlapping conversations that fell on each other like untangled threads. The men sipped tea at the round marble dining table – where my cousins and I had played hundreds of games of table tennis – surrounding the space with silence. More tea, fitful bursts of talk in starts and stops, words to fill up the space, to pass the time. Stories began to slip out, of Manjusree jumping off the veranda onto bales of hay, of Jayasree unleashing cockroaches on house guests, the sisters sneaking out to the movies – tales long forgotten, and tales repeated countless times before. The house of mourning filled up with laughter. It was the one thing Dida had always wanted, my mother said, the family together and joyous.

  The funeral took place in a Vaishnav prayer hall inside a gully off D. L. Roy Street. The prayer hall was older than our house,
and Boro Mama remembered accompanying his aunts there when he was a boy. At the funeral, he sat next to the priest, dressed in a dhoti, to give offerings and mumble incantations. Those of us who were Dida’s kin took turns, like a supporting cast, performing truncated versions of the same act. Then we ate in rows, sitting on the floor, elbow to elbow. The food was served the way it used to be in Dida’s room when I was a boy. I am not a believer, and yet by the afternoon’s end, I felt that lightness of which Hindus speak, a thing like detachment which is called boirag.

  We carried the flowers, the wreaths and sweets from the prayer hall down D. L. Roy Street, up the stairs past the dalan and into Dida’s room. Servants were beckoned to make tea. We lingered after tea, staying on into the evening, talking and sharing each other’s company. There were two French windows that led from Dida’s room to the long veranda that looked out onto the street. Between the two fluttering curtains was Dadu’s portrait. On a side table below, Mejo Mama had placed a portrait of Dida. Each day, new visitors brought garlands to adorn the photograph. Each evening, a lamp was lit in front of the portrait while Dida’s soul was still in transit from this world to the next.

  ‘Ma will get us tonight,’ Mejo Mama said, lighting the lamp one last time. ‘All this laughing and joking. Tonight, Ma’s coming for us.’

  The next day would mark the end of a fortnight of mourning. After two weeks of abstaining from eating meat and fish, from wearing stitched clothes, the brothers would resume their normal diets, their normal lives.

  ‘I’ll die when you all go,’ Mejo Mama said. ‘What will I do with myself?’

  When we left that evening, the family gathered on the long veranda. They were all there, my uncles and aunts, and my cousins Shampa and Joy. Everyone fitted comfortably, with their elbows resting on the balustrade, as they watched us go. I imagined all the times we had stood on that veranda anticipating arrivals and waving goodbyes, and wondered if Joy was right, if this would be the last time we shared this house together.

  ‘Let me take a photograph,’ I said to Durba, stopping in the street.

  ‘Wait!’ I yelled up to my family. I fished out my camera and clicked. It was too dark.

  ‘Tomorrow!’ Durba yelled. But of course, the next day the circle was broken, life was un-paused. Soon everyone scurried back, to Delhi, Dubai, London. My parents returned to New Jersey and my uncle Ashoke went home to California.

  Flyover

  A Mr Basak was buzzed up to our flat by the guard downstairs. Sumitro arrived, wearing a T-shirt and trousers, green bag on shoulder, and ever more rings on his fingers.

  ‘Nomoshkar!’ he said, palms pressed together in salutation. He made himself at home and started talking about the new money in Calcutta, and their poor taste in furniture. They either want to return to feudal four-poster beds, he was saying, or this Delhi Punjabi fashion of covering everything in marble, indicating the decor of our flat. It is like we are incapable of developing tastes of our own.

  Sumitro was an artist. We had become friends almost a decade earlier when he used to moonlight as an illustrator at the Statesman. The art market in India had exploded in the years since I lived in Calcutta, largely buoyed by the growing coffers of black money among India’s new business class. The new money had been kind to him, enabling him to become a full-time artist.

  When I was a reporter, on Sundays I often went to his house, to eat luchis for lunch, and have adda. His higgledy-piggledy paintings of that time were full of social commentary and cutting humour, with juxtapositions of mythology and the popular culture of the street. In those days, armed with a water bottle and a snack in his nylon shoulder bag, he would set out to uncover the hidden old worlds that made up the city.

  Calcutta was a collection of the whims of the communities who migrated there and became rich – Bengali and British, as well as Armenian, Jewish, Marwari, Bohra Muslim, Haka Chinese, Punjabi, Gujarati, Portuguese, Greek and Dutch. In Phoolbagan, within walking distance from my house, there were graveyards of Jews and Greeks, Chinese and Bohras. Their tombstones told of men and women who had been born in Budapest and Constantinople and died of cholera in Calcutta. Sumitro and I had walked the city’s streets, discovering airy Sephardic synagogues, Armenian churches, and temples to the Jain saint Mahavir. In the old Black Town, we had mingled with the deity-sculptors among the lanes of Kumortuli, communed at the annual chariot festival at the Marble Palace and witnessed clandestine human hook-swinging during the Raas festival.

  Off Beadon Street, in Satubabu and Latubabu’s Bazar, so named after the two nineteenth-century Bengali business titans who founded it, metal hooks were dug into the backs of penitent believers and then hung from what looked a great balance scale made of bamboo. Then the hooked swung high in the air around the pivot of the scale, like giant gliding birds. The practice had been banned for nearly two hundred years, but it still took place, surreptitiously, in the heart of Calcutta.

  A few nights after his first visit, I received a text message from Sumitro: ‘Going to Rath in Bowbazar tomorrow. Coming?’

  The police had blocked off the intersection at Bowbazar. Powdered and bejewelled housewives ate noodles in neatly pressed saris under the naked bulb of a chow-mein stall at Bowbazar crossing. The local toughs were promenading in the garish panjabis that local toughs keep for special occasions. Parked on the road was a house-sized chariot – or rath – featuring the gods Balaram, Subadra and Jagannath. Two priests were seated inside, receiving offerings on behalf of the holy trio before their journey. The Rath Jatra festival was literally a chariot journey of the three gods to their grandmother’s house. Among mortals, the festival was commemorated with a parade in which groups of men pulled chariots carrying the deities down city streets so the gods, too, could promenade. Those house-sized raths were accompanied by pint-sized ones too, made by children out of tinsel and wood and wrapping paper, built like two-foot-tall skyscrapers, and tugged along to the beat of a rat-a-tat drum.

  Bowbazar was Sumitro’s childhood para. As a kid, he had pulled his rath down its streets, and remembered the lanes by the houses of the girls who once lived there and had long since been married off. He led me down a lane to a sweet shop. It was a place so obscure that only a boy who grew up in that para would know it. The two shelves inside the shop’s glass display case were lined with trays of various types of sweets. Two flies buzzed inside. The magnification on the glass made both the shondesh and the flies look bigger than they were. Try the gujia, Sumitro said, and ordered two. I sampled the sweet, and felt the bliss of those two flies in the showcase.

  The lanes of Bowbazar were the entrails of the nineteenth-century capital. Once, these lanes were choked with magnificence, the spectacles of mercantile wealth. Sumitro knew which mansions brought out the biggest chariots. Together, we went inside mansion after mansion. One had green tile work, Italian mosaics, an altar with cupids and vines in relief. In its courtyard was a chariot decked in silver and gold, but the family did not have the wherewithal to organise a parade. We went into another house, in Crouch Lane, where the offerings for the gods also now took place indoors. ‘Forty years ago, when I was a boy, they had cockatoos and macaws and beautiful pedigreed dogs,’ a man with salt-and-pepper stubble staggered toward us to lament. ‘This year they didn’t even take out the rath. The whole house has been divided and subdivided.’

  On Hidaram Banerjee Lane, the Deys’ mansion housed a chariot with a silver throne for Jagannath. They were also not taking out their rath. But their cousins, two doors down, were readying their chariot. ‘My father was one of seven brothers. From this corner to that corner was our homestead,’ the scion said, showing a block of attached houses that stretched across half a football field.

  At one time, the Deys used to have tea warehouses. But the British did not continue their lease and their workers made off with the loose tea in their sandals. The Deys used to have large marble platters with handiwork from Agra. All sold. Their remaining possession was a chandelier that they belie
ved to be worth over $200,000. That too would soon be sold to a dealer on Ballygunge Circular Road. They could have been my uncles, these men, retelling the mythical past as if it were yesterday, holding on to appearances as all the accoutrements of status slowly disappeared. Are we perpetually in decline, I wondered, only so that we can lay claim to more glorious antecedents than our present status betrays? After all, on the face of it, they looked just like every other Bengali middle-class family, like us. When I was growing up, my family acted as if their wealth had been momentarily misplaced, as if until just the other day, we had owned the whole block on D. L. Roy Street. The reality that I saw was a family clinging to one house, kept afloat by remittances from California. And yet, as my aunts keep repeating, we come from declining Old Money, we are actually somebodies. For proof, simply look at our four-poster beds and Victorian wardrobes, and our grand old house. It was the same story we told ourselves as a city. You may only see squalor now, but once, once Calcutta was the fabled City of Palaces.

  The Deys’ rath had brass-domed turrets. The domes used to be made of copper, they told us, but the copper domes were stolen during a wedding a few years back by a servant, who purportedly used the money for an elaborate rice ceremony for her newborn son. Then the child died. ‘We didn’t put a curse on the child,’ the scion of the family said. ‘We didn’t want him to die.’ But it just went to show, he explained, that their deities were very potent.

  The family lived in Garia now, on the southern edge of the city. But today, on Rath, they reprised their roles as feudal figures. They became somebodies. Their rath was fully bedecked and ready to roll. A brass band led the parade. A whole procession of people followed, pulling the chariot slowly as it lit up like fireworks on Kali Pujo night.