The Epic City

by Kushanava Choudhury

  ***

  I had put off the inevitable. It was time to go to the Statesman. From Kankurgachi, I clambered on to a minibus headed to Dalhousie. Our siestas and rice bellies notwithstanding, there is one trick that we all learned at a young age: how to get on a moving bus. First, I latched on to the handle with my right hand. Second, I started running till I caught up to the speed of the bus. Third, while running, I leaped with my right foot and clambered onto the foothold. A sea of hands, like octopus tentacles, dragged me inside, into a sponge of flesh. There was only room enough for me to stand exactly as I was, as the mass of bodies surrounded me like a coating, buffering me against all the jerking and potholes that were part of the commute. I surrendered to the mass.

  I reminded myself to be vigilant of pickpockets. If you are pushed from the right, check your left pocket. Sudden jerks to the left, then check your right.

  ‘Maniktala, Girish Park, Ram Mandir, Medical, Bowbazar, BBD Bagh,’ called the conductor’s helper to passers-by, banging against the bus as if it was a bongo. ‘BBD Bagh! BBD Bagh! BBD Bagh!’

  From another end of the mosh pit, the conductor ran his thumb repeatedly across the stack of tickets in his palm to make a familiar rustle, like the sound of a thumb being run along a deck of cards. The rustle was his calling card. ‘Ticket, ticket, ticket.’

  ‘Dada, ticket’ta korun,’ I yelled to the conductor.

  Above the passengers’ heads, I saw his free hand lunging towards me.

  ‘Dalhousie,’ I said and paid.

  The hand took my money and disappeared. Meanwhile the helper on the footboard kept wooing more passengers – ‘BBD Bagh, BBD Bagh, BBD Bagh!’ – as if the amount of squeezing you could do inside that metal box was infinite. On the bus we went from being individuals to a mass.

  The conductor’s headless hand lunged again with change and a ticket. The bus made its way up Central Avenue, past the Ram Mandir and the Calcutta Medical College, picking up speed. As it turned into Ganesh Avenue, I started my slow roll to the gate. ‘Dada, nambo!’

  When I got off the bus, squeezing out through the narrow space with a throng of office-goers, I felt like I was being reborn.

  ‘Bah bah! Banchlam!’ we all said, as we dislodged from the mass and reverted back into being individuals again. We were sweating even though it was March, and momentarily disoriented, but only momentarily, because this is of course a lifetime’s habit and soon even the creases on our shirts and saris recovered as we made our way back into the gentility of bhodrolok life. Every morning, but not before 10 or 11 a.m., thousands thronged to Dalhousie and Esplanade, the office para, jammed into passenger trains and buses. The hardest part of having an office job in Calcutta, my father used to say, is getting to work and back.

  ***

  Dalhousie is big British buildings, the police headquarters at Lalbazar, the railways headquarters at Fairlie Place, the palatial Governor’s House, the General Post Office, and Writers’ Building, which takes up a whole city block. Writers’ was the administrative centre of British India when Calcutta was its capital. From here they ruled their Raj.

  In 1930, three Bengali revolutionaries named Benoy, Badal and Dinesh entered Writers’ Building and shot dead the British inspector-general of prisons, a terrorist attack to strike at the heart of colonial rule. It was at a time when Bengali boys were throwing bombs and firing revolvers to make Bengal ungovernable. After India became free in 1947, Dalhousie was renamed Benoy Badal Dinesh – BBD – Bagh. The governor-general’s residence became the home of the governor of West Bengal. Writers’ Building became the administrative centre of the state of West Bengal, and the office of the chief minister of West Bengal. As Orwell might have said, the pigs turned into humans.

  It was inside Writers’ that I was once trapped in the health minister’s cabin by the health minister himself. My friend Esha and I were reporting on the conditions of the state’s mental asylums – places where patients were abandoned like Spartan children on a mountainside. They were abysmal institutions, lacking medicine and with electro-shock machines which malfunctioned fatally. My crime had been to ask the minister, a medical doctor, how much of the health budget was devoted to mental health. The minister would not say. I then repeated the question and, realising the minister would provide no information at all, closed my notebook – apparently too noisily – to get up and go. The minister, who seemed unperturbed by the deaths of patients, was apparently insulted by my expression of impatience. He locked the door and called security.

  There were two of us, Esha and I, and so it had been difficult to saddle me with a false charge or take me to a police station and rough me up. Besides we were reporters from the Statesman. He let us go. Instead, he sent a huffy letter to the editor saying I had insulted him. Esha could verify that the insult had comprised my asking the minister a basic question to which he had no response. To the editor’s credit, after making some perfunctory enquiries, I was left to do my job. Nothing came of the minister’s note.

  Months later, when seventeen children had died in forty-eight hours at the Bidhan Roy Children’s Hospital due to a lack of sufficient oxygen tanks, the same minister would preside over a press conference and say that the mortality spike was absolutely normal, statistically speaking. Didn’t the press understand statistics?

  It was amazing to think that this same Communist government, when it first came to power, had actually shut off the air conditioning to the minister’s offices in Writers’ Building. This same government whose ministers now rode in motorcades, who threatened reporters, and refused to take responsibility for the death of babies in its hospitals.

  They had arrived from modest, monkish origins. A stone’s throw from Writers’ is Dacres Lane, home to the famous ‘cabin’. There are four tables inside a dim cave of a room. A long bench is placed like a hurdle on the side of the street. There are two stoves on the street with kettles going. Back in the days when the undivided Communist Party offices were around the corner, Jyoti Basu – the man who would run Bengal as chief minister for the first two decades of Communist rule – used to haunt this shop. Outside, customers sat next to each other on the long bench, enough room between them to set down their teacups and saucers and plates of toast. The tea is strong and sweet, the toast is thick, buttery and sprinkled with sugar.

  It is not clear where Dacres Lane ends and its legendary cabin begins. The lane is the cabin, and the cabin makes the lane. All of Dalhousie is like that. The sidewalk is literally a movable feast. Along Fairlie Place there is hardly any place left to walk. ‘Chow-mein hobe, rice hobe, veg momo, chicken momo, fried rice . . .’ hawk the pavement maitre-d’s. The biggest draws are the fish curry and rice ‘hotels’. A few benches and narrow wooden tables are laid out under a tarp. The food is served from metal trays full of crimson kalia, the big fish heads pointing upward like Aztec pyramids to the sun.

  Just off Old Court House Street, hawkers sell black plastic wristwatches in shallow tubs of water, exactly as fishmongers keep live magur fish in the bazaar. ‘Yashika brand,’ the vendor announces, ‘waterproof.’ Next to him, at a pavement stall, is a wall of suits hung up for sale. Beside the suits, someone is selling pirated VCDs advertising bare-breasted white women on the covers; next to him there are sellers of packets of mothballs, colourful combs splayed like pick-up sticks, doormats, ashtrays, mugs, flashlights, immersion heaters, magnifying glasses, banned Chinese toys – every possible human need can be met during lunch hour.

  Under blue and violet tarps, typists sit outside the railing of Bankshall Court. Touts ask ‘Attestation? Stamp Paper? What do you need? I have it.’

  In front of the General Post Office, spread out on the pavements, are forms of all kinds: employment forms, admission forms. Between them sit the munshis, or letter writers. They look like semicolons marking a long sentence.

  The Telegraph office is on a side street on the way to the Chinese shoe stores on Bentinck Street. In its lobby, magnetised ID cards hung from everyone’s neck
s, and security cameras abounded. The city’s number-one English daily had a policy against adda. No one could come up into the newsroom, so all conversations took place below on narrow Prafulla Sarkar Street, which doubled as the paper’s parking lot and café. The Telegraph was ascendant. The paper’s owners had recently built white columns on the building’s facade, which made it look like a stage version of the Statesman. The Statesman’s decline had only infused the Telegraph with talent. Every third person passing under the columns on Prafulla Sarkar Street was someone I once worked with at the Statesman. I could stand outside their office and be plied with endless free cups of tea.

  Imran now worked at the Telegraph. He and I were hanging out on the sidewalk, drinking tea, resuming our addas of old. He was telling me about how the jute mill closings had affected the munshi business outside the General Post Office. The munshis used to write out the money-order forms for the illiterate Bihari jute-mill workers. But the workers had no remittances to send home any more. Maybe you could put that story in your book, Imran said.

  ***

  From the outside, Statesman House looked the same. Its Georgian columns and wrought-iron gate were there, its grandeur intact. I noticed a new sedan in the sickle-shaped driveway. In the past, only the editor-in-chief, who had ruled the premises as a kind of feudal lord, had been allowed to park in the drive. But two years ago he had passed away.

  I walked through the heavy revolving doors into the foyer and hit a wall of darkness. Where were the classified department’s bustling counters to the right, or the counters to the left where officious receptionists signed in visitors and doled out passes? Where were the ‘cash’ counters, behind metal bars, where generations of dour Mullick men, frowning beneath their fair moustaches, had dispensed salaries at month’s end? All that was gone. Behind what had been classifieds I could make out a banner covering the whole wall, which said ‘Emaar’, with an Orwellian slogan below. Emaar are the people who own Burj Tower, in Dubai, the tallest building in the world.

  There were a couple of men at a table at the foot of the stairs, writing out visitors’ slips. They looked like squatters in a zamindar’s abandoned mansion. ‘Only Michael saab and I are still around,’ Topiwala, the liftman said, as he offered me a ride upstairs.

  I took the unlit stairs instead. I remember those wide stairs from the first time I went to the Statesman as a teenager, and the impression they had made of institutional grandeur. I remembered, too, the days of union wranglings when I worked there, when these stairs would be plastered with posters and slogans which dubbed the management ‘dogs’. Now cobwebs crept down from the ceiling. Red paan stains crept up from the floor. They were unswept, with empty cigarette packs strewn everywhere. No one was even keeping up appearances.

  Each floor was like ascending a new circle of hell. Upstairs, where Advertising had once been, walls had been broken through. Doors had been torn down. Exposed brick was everywhere. There was no longer the halls full of clerks in accounts, nor the canteen where the waiters read namaz. There was no longer the office where the editor sat, nor the corridor where his peon polished his walking stick. The building was completely hollowed out. On the third floor, the photographers’ room, the reporters’ room, the library, the offices of the assistant editors, Mike’s old corner office that doubled as an adda khana, nothing remained. It was all empty, exposed like the innards of an abandoned factory.

  The blown-out walls opened up to another vast emptiness below. Behind the main building used to be the workers’ residential quarters. Management had installed the presses below the quarters, I remembered, to try to drive out the workers. Now, the presses had been taken off-site; most of the workers had been offloaded too. The whole building was gone. An area as large as a softball field was growing wild. It was all turning back into jungle.

  For two years, this place had been my home in the city. And now it was gone.

  The top floor, where the editor had maintained a penthouse, had been converted into the truncated offices of the newspaper. Suku’da, the layout designer, was playing a video game on his computer. It was the game where a paddle slides along the bottom of the screen hitting a bouncing ball against a wall. The game is called Breakout.

  ‘That game is so old,’ I said.

  ‘Everything here is old,’ he replied, without taking his eye off the screen.

  I ran into Mishra, one of the last peons, now on the verge of retirement. Mishra had always been a stock-market geek. He was explaining to me the effects of the American crash on Indian equities. It was too complex for me to understand, but he said he could make 300 here, 300 there and scrabble together about 10,000 rupees a month. ‘You can’t depend on the Statesman any more,’ he said. They had not paid salaries for five months.

  In the last few years, I was told, circulation and ads had dropped precipitously. The story was that management was waiting for a few more clerks and peons to retire before salaries could resume. But there is hardly anyone left to let go.

  ‘Some people are affected by the recession,’ one of the staff photographers told me, ‘And others are making the most of it.’

  Meanwhile, the bottom three floors of Statesman House had been leased out to the Dubai-based developer, Emaar, which planned to build a shopping mall there. ‘Buy a newspaper and get two underpants free,’ said the wags in the nearly vacant newsroom. But then, for some reason, the construction had stopped halfway through, creating Dresden instead of Dubai below.

  Mike’s office was locked. He was inside, smoking.

  The AC was cranked up so high that it was freezing in the unventilated cabin. Mike sat in a frigid haze of smoke. ‘I’m not supposed to smoke in here,’ he said, ‘but who can be bothered to go to the balcony every time?’

  He was sneezing. He said he had had malaria the previous week, and then proceeded to tell me about the horses he had bet on over the weekend. ‘JB and I were at the races . . .’ he said and he was off, narrating one of his equestrian tales that none of us ever understood.

  Soon we were sitting in a bar called Relax, under pink and blue lights, in an alley off Abdul Hamid Street. Popcorn arrived and red-eyed men dug in. A skinny Marwari man with almond eyes was telling dirty jokes. At the table was a mix of Bengalis, Marwaris, Biharis and Anglo, drinking beer, whisky and mostly watered-down rum.

  Behind us a table full of men had just come back from the races. When I worked here, the race men always returned to the newsroom on Saturday afternoon, having nearly won something. There was a race in Calcutta that Sunday. I mentioned I had read about races which were fixed.

  ‘We’ve seen horses bleeding from the nose,’ Suku’da said. No matter what anyone said, he was sure the jockeys sometimes pulled back the harness so tight that the horse was restrained, not allowed to go as fast as it knew it could.

  Mike was telling a story about a ‘Naxal psychopath’ in his old neighbourhood who stabbed a player from a rival football team on Bright Street. Mike now lived in draughty quarters on Grant Street, above Dr Lama’s Sex Clinic, by Chandni Chowk Market. It was within spitting distance of the Statesman. His wife’s Burmese forefathers had stayed there since the 1800s, so the rent was less than 250 rupees a month. The landlord wanted them out. He was offering around 2.4 million rupees, Mike claimed, but they were holding out till he offered 3 million.

  Like most Anglo-Indians, he had family in England. He went there once, years ago. When he came back, one of the peons asked why he did not migrate like most of his kin. ‘Baba,’ he retorted in Hindi, ‘but who can I call behenchod there?’

  He claimed he had a property in England, and received rent in pounds, hard currency. Who knows whether this was true. Mike’s fibs never had malice in them as much as wishful thinking. They were a way to order the world as it ought to be. When I first started at the Statesman, Mike told me that every Sunday morning he took his two young sons on a tram-ride adventure to an unfamiliar part of the city. They would hop on any tram they wished, ride as long as they fanc
ied, and then hop off to explore a new neighbourhood. And so, Sunday by Sunday, para by para, father bequeathed his legacy, his city, to his sons. It seemed wonderful, and of course it was utterly untrue. These days, Mike rarely ventured past Esplanade. Once an ex-colleague invited him to join the faculty of a journalism school in Thakurpukur, a forty-five-minute tram ride away.

  ‘I’ll need a bloody passport to go to Thakurpukur,’ he said, turning down the offer. For him, it may as well have been Timbuktu.

  Relax was a new pilgrimage place for Mike and Suku’da. When I worked here, my favourite bar was a place called Majestic which had high ceilings, French windows and liveried waiters, and felt to me like a continuum of the Statesman. Mike and Suku’da’s favourite haunt was Chota, just across Lenin Sarani from the Statesman House, where women were not allowed and the booze was the cheapest in town. Until the 1970s, the great avant garde figures of their generation treated Chota Bristol like their office. I had heard that Ritwik Ghatak used to come to Chota, in the years before his liver finally gave way.

  ‘I met Ritwik Ghatak once, in Chota,’ Mike said, ‘in 1975.’

  ‘Ritwik said to me, “I like the look of this boy’s face.’’’

  ‘I said something back and he said, “Dhamnami hocche? Bhalo bhalo.” Playing smart, eh? Good good.’ Mike did a surprisingly good imitation of Ritwik’s slurred, gravelly speech.

  Ritwik Ghatak was a contemporary of Satyajit Ray. But while Ray became internationally renowned as the colossus of Indian cinema, Ritwik completed only a handful of films, which were mostly commercial failures, and died of alcoholism. Ray and Ritwik: both brilliant, one buoyed by the city, the other broken by it.

  Ray was from an august North Calcutta line. Ritwik was from the verdant fields of East Bengal, which the political logic of the twentieth century had made into East Pakistan and then Bangladesh. In the 1950s, Ray’s first film, Pather Panchali, had run to empty theatres until Cannes anointed it with a prize. Then, seeing Ray’s films became a form of middle-class sacrament. The city’s public embraced Ray, to bask in reflected glory, for Ray had garnered awards in the capitals of Europe. No such luck for Ritwik. His final film, the semi-autobiographical Jukti Tokko aar Golpo – Reason, Debate and Story – trails a group of social castaways through contemporary Bengal, led by a ‘finished-off’ intellectual with a bottle of country liquor always in his shoulder bag, played by Ghatak himself. It is a film about failure, intellectual failure, moral failure, artistic failure. The city had been Ritwik’s subject, the heartless city that never made him feel at home.