The little magazine originated in early-twentieth century America. Many of the radical strands of modernism – like James Joyce’s Ulysses, which was first serialised in the Chicago-based Little Review – first appeared in little magazines before anyone bet on their viability in the capitalist market. The early works of T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, Tennessee Williams, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner and many others were all published in the little magazines of their day. Unlike regular magazines, they relied on patrons and modest sales rather than advertising. Shielded from market pressures, they provided a place for writers to be read, even if by a small number of people, and they gave intrepid readers a way to discover new writers. In Calcutta, like so many other aspects of life taken from the West – the tram, homeopathy, Communism – once adopted, little magazines then took on a life of their own and became central to how we understood ourselves. In a proper capitalist system, these magazines would have vanished long ago, taking with them thousands of writers. But like those 1950s Chevrolets in Havana, the Bengali little magazine rolls on, patched up, creaky, a source of local pride, as if it were uniquely ours and as integral to Bengali-ness as a fish curry and rice lunch.
Tapan Ghosh had come from a small town about an hour and a half’s train ride south of the city to drop off the latest issue of his magazine. Its topic: Simone de Beauvoir. Tapan was also editing a volume on the Sundarbans, the tiger-infested mangrove jungle in southern Bengal. He was compiling dozens of articles on the Sundarbans, he told Sandip. ‘It’s going to be a big, expensive book.’
We got to talking about the gods of the Sundarbans. There is one god for protection against crocodiles and another for protection against Royal Bengal tigers, called Dakkhin Roy. There was a temple to Dakkhin Roy, Tapan said, with a larger-than-life statue of the moustachioed deity in a dhoti, carrying a shotgun. ‘Buy a seven-rupee ticket from Sealdah station to Dhopdhopi on the Lakkhikantapur line,’ Tapan advised me. Then three rupees by rickshaw. ‘Dakkhin Roy.’ He said again. ‘Go see it.’
Another man arrived, shirt tucked in, folio in hand, obviously on his way home from work. His neighbourhood club was having a short-story competition. Could they get the names of some little magazines to contact?
Sandip did not have a list written down. It was in his head. He suggested picking up a catalogue at one of the book stalls. The man noted down the name of the stall Sandip suggested. He did not get up.
‘I didn’t expect this place to be like this,’ he said finally. ‘You’re also a collector?’
Sandip began to pick up each curio on his desk and describe it. He opened a diary the size of a thimble. ‘I write something in it every day,’ he said. ‘Sometimes we don’t pay enough attention to the small things.’
He opened a minuscule snuff box to reveal Ganeshas so tiny you needed a magnifying glass to see them. Inside a mini vase was a chili pepper with a curved stem. It looked like an umbrella in a stand. ‘I don’t know why I put it there,’ he chuckled, ‘Probably it’s for flowers, but I just thought, why not?’
I have met many men in Calcutta like Sandip over the years, who devote their lives to obsessive, apparently useless pursuits. Some collect matchboxes. Others build wax statues, or cameras out of found objects. On the surface, they appear to share something with the American hobbyist, the comic-book nerd or the antique-car builder. Except hobbies are a leisure activity, something to do when you have more time and money on your hands than you can use. Here, the job is just a place where you have to show up for a few hours every day, do little work and draw a salary at the month’s end. A job is more like a hobby. The obsession is the true vocation.
***
Hindu School, Presidency University, Medical College and the University of Calcutta all sit on the two city blocks that make up College Street. These four British-built institutions have carried countless Bengalis from short pants into middle age. Between them is College Square, the great public swimming pool at the centre of the swirl. In the monsoons the water is not only in College Square, but everywhere.
On College Street, the saying goes, it takes one pissing frog to cause flooding. Ten years ago, my cousin Joy and I trudged through monsoon waters to get his migration certificate from Calcutta University. Joy and I grew up together. I came and left and came back, oscillating between Buffalo, Calcutta, St Louis, Calcutta, New Jersey, Calcutta. Joy stayed put. From birth until he graduated college he lived in the same flat in Ballygunge. On summer afternoons there we played cricket, bowling underhand in front of the temple and round-arm fast in the dead-end lane. As happens in Calcutta, Joy’s friends were all my friends too. On their roof, I learned to play soccer with a tennis ball, dodging defenders and clotheslines. On that same roof, I came back and learned to smoke cigarettes.
We were on College Street because Joy had been accepted into a masters programme at Jawaharlal Nehru University, in Delhi. Like so many of our generation, he was leaving the city for good. But not without a migration certificate. Like a bonded labourer, he had to be released by the University of Calcutta before he could join JNU. Getting the certificate can take weeks. Like Majnun seeking Leila in the desert, many have wandered in vain amid the university’s vast Sahara of clerks. Its halls are full of rows of tables with men sitting among piles of discarded files undoing the top three buttons of their bush shirts and saying, ‘Uff, ki humidity!’
Bengali last names when transliterated into English often have multiple spellings. For instance, my name, Choudhury, can be Chaudhuri, Chowdhury, Chaudhry, and so on. These variations are used by aunts and cousins in my own family. Other Bengali last names even have varying pronunciations. As with Bob and Robert, so too everyone recognises that Banerjee and Bandopadhyay are the same name. Everyone, except the University of Calcutta. Each name has a prescribed university version. If your birth certificate says Choudhury when the university accepts only Chaudhuri, there will be forms you will have to fill out and get attested, clerks you will have to flatter and treat to tea while you wait to be renamed. Like Yahweh, Ellis Island and the slave masters from Roots, not only will the university play name-giver – on your certificate you will become Chaudhuri, of that there is no doubt – but whether they will recognise your life prior to your conversion is a matter left up to the fates themselves.
These are the fears that run through you on a monsoon morning as you wade waist-deep in rainwater and dog shit on the way to collect a migration certificate. Fortunately, Joy’s father, as a retired professor, still enjoyed the goodwill of a clerk or two. With their munificence, it took only six hours for us to acquire Joy’s release from the university, and from Calcutta.
Ten years later, the two of us were back in the same university building on College Street. Joy’s mother, my aunt, had just had an operation and we had come to drop off about one hundred pages of hospital bills, pharmacy receipts and doctor’s certificates, collated and photocopied in triplicate, to file the insurance claim. Joy was now a professor in Delhi. Dida’s death had loosened our collective mooring to the city, and my ailing aunt and uncle were now leaving Calcutta to reluctantly join Joy in exile. The clerk inspected the papers. In one of the pages submitted, he noticed that the date of release had been incorrectly written by the nursing home. All the other documents had the right date. ‘You’re going to have to get this redone,’ he said.
Mentally I quickly worked out the steps: It meant tracking down the hospital clerk who made the error, convincing him that he had in fact erred, creating a new ‘hospital release certificate’, then tracking down my aunt’s doctor to sign off, before finding the university clerk who was before me now. This would easily take days of wandering through the various layers of Calcutta’s myriad bureaucratic hells. Then the clerk had a change of heart – perhaps he remembered my elderly uncle, the retired professor – and changed the ‘4’ to a ‘5’ himself.
As we stepped out of the university gate, men hissed at us: ‘What can I get you, brother? First year
or second year?’
On College Street, shopkeepers sell books the way dealers elsewhere sell crack. The railings along the University of Calcutta, Presidency University, Hindu School and College Square are all lined with shops that look like large metal lunchboxes. The boxes open up into stalls full of books. There are over a hundred book shops on these side streets and lanes, making it the largest book market on earth. In Bengali, we call College Street ‘Boi Para’, the book neighbourhood.
They say you cannot find good used books on College Street any more, but especially along the railings of Presidency University, there are still stalls that offer treasures that are worth a look. You can find second-hand gems, like early Naipaul paperbacks, nineteenth-century tomes on colonial law, and coffee-table books from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, in Chinese. The books are stacked high against the counters in no particular order. Sometimes I would see Graham Greene fourteen volumes down, and use all my Jenga talents to extricate The Quiet American so that all the other books above it did not fall. Then I would act as if the book was worthless: For this old thing, how much? The bookseller, who may not always read English, would quote a price and tell me what a ‘famous’ book it is, ‘foreign’, ‘classic’. I would bid at half his price. He would demur. Even the pages are coming apart, I would say. He would resist. I would threaten to walk off. He wouldn’t budge. I would walk off. He would call me back. We would settle on a price, and then I would probably end up buying two more books from him, which I would never read.
In those wanderings, I always scanned the towers of fraying spines for Maxim Gorky’s Mother. I was in the middle of reading Joy’s copy of Mother when I moved to New Jersey at age twelve. In Highland Park, hurled into the bewildering society of American middle school, the public library became my shelter, just as it was for the elderly, the homeless and the mentally ill. There, unprompted by parents or teachers, I read Thomas Hardy, P. G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Noel Coward, Ernest Hemingway, Oscar Wilde, Hermann Hesse, G. K. Chesterton, Somerset Maugham. There was no method to my reading, except that these were authors I had heard of and believed were important. It is no accident that books by these writers are still sold in Calcutta in the used-book stalls of College Street. In addition to the ‘great books,’ my reading had a second track. Like an autodidact, I picked up whatever ‘Indian’ name I could find on the public-library shelves. I read Nirad C. Chaudhuri and Mahatma Gandhi, R. K. Narayan and V. S. Naipaul, Anita Desai and Jiddu Krishnamurti, Raja Rao and Pico Iyer, and even the Inspector Ghote mysteries, which were set in Bombay and written by an Englishman who had not even visited India. Yet through all that reading in my new home, I never found Gorky’s Mother. Neither the school nor the public library had a copy. Gorky had been a Soviet writer. Mother is a Communist novel about the revolutionary awakening of Russian factory workers, and such texts were still hard to find in early 1990s America. For years, as if by habit, I would search for Mother whenever I visited a new bookstore, but I never found the book.
Within weeks of returning to Calcutta, I tracked down a copy at a pavement stall. The cover had been torn off and replaced with a makeshift binding, and the book’s title was written in with a marker pen. I bought it anyway. After more than a decade, a simmering private quest was over. I thought it was a homecoming.
The funny thing is, I never finished reading Mother. That loose end of my disrupted childhood remained untied. I was after something else.
***
When I was a student at Calcutta Boys’ School, our academic year was marked by three term exams. The tests would be in at least a dozen subjects. Preparations would take over a month of mugging up. During exam time, a hush settled over Calcutta’s families, as mothers fretted, cajoled and provided warm glasses of milk, while the little one prepared for his term exams. The SATs were a breeze compared to my Calcutta first-grade final exams. No test I would take in the US – not even the field exams in graduate school – ever required the amount of mindless memorisation, or produced as much competitiveness and anxiety, as those grade-school exams.
After each term exam we would be ranked among our peers. The status of the kid who topped the rankings, the ‘First Boy’, can be compared only to that of an American high-school quarterback. He was typically bespectacled, oily haired and a bit of a bore, but students revered him, teachers granted him the equivalent of diplomatic immunity, and other kids’ mothers wanted to copy notes from his ma. Perhaps I have neglected to mention that each day, mothers lined up along the schoolyards during lunchtime with hot fish curry and rice tiffins to spoon-feed their progeny. Since my mother worked as a scientist for much of my childhood, my tiffins were cold butter sandwiches carried from home, and I was spared this maternal attention.
All those years of spoon-feeding and exams led up to the standardised tests in tenth, and then twelfth grade. Six hundred thousand tenth graders took the state’s final exam in 2009. The boy who ranked first was featured on the front page of the newspaper, just under the article on the national parliamentary elections. On the inside pages each year are stories of kids hanging themselves because of a poor exam result. The preferred mode of suicide for spurned lovers is drinking acid. The preferred mode for exam victims is hanging.
The target of every Bengali family is to produce a doctor or an engineer. Both fields have rigorous entrance exams at the end of twelfth grade, known in Bengal as the joint entrance exam. By the time you reach twelfth grade, exams have provided the entire drama of your existence. These results are the measure of your self-worth. Each year, with each new report of suicide, there is talk of easing the stress, perhaps doing away with some tests altogether. Nothing much changes except that more shortcuts appear – more reference books, more coaching centres, more compilations of old exam papers – and more people pass.
May was the peak shopping season on College Street, because the new academic year was about to start. On College Row, the Chhaya Publishers’ storefront was blocked by a collapsible metal gate, as you would find at a para liquor store, to avoid a stampede on the counter. Uniformed guards were temporarily on hire. A crowd of distributors from across the state had honeycombed around the gate. The men in the crowd were an instant community as such men often are, cracking jokes with one another. They came from Burdwan, Murshidabad, Nadia, each with several of the large woven bags you take to the fish market. They were waiting for their orders, to fill up those bags with books and take the evening trains home to the countryside.
Since the 1970s, the book business has increasingly become the notes business. Most of the books on sale in the stalls now are for Brilliant’s, Competition Success, Manorama Yearbook – all preparation manuals for competitive exams. They comprise a publishing business that is like Princeton Review on steroids. Publishers have realised that what little money there is to be made comes from cashing in on the insecurities of the young. Chhaya is one of the biggest textbook publishers on College Street. Yet the bulk of its business is not textbooks but ‘practice books’, ‘workbooks’, ‘companion books’, ‘reference books’ – a whole set of euphemisms for made-easy test-preparation manuals. A book is a window into a world. These books are, first and foremost, tools with which to avoid reading other books, to crib for exams and pass through the next hoop.
The Chhaya offices were on the ground floor of a mansion on College Row. There I met T. Dey, a thirty-something with red highlights in his hair. This was go time. His phone kept ringing. For these few weeks, while guards were stationed outside the store, Dey was like a medic passing out first aid in a refugee camp.
In the past, there was no need for reference books, he explained, but now the notes business thrives because they are a necessity. During the school year, Chhaya’s representatives fan out to educators across the state with their book samples. They aim to ensure their books are prescribed by teachers. ‘The marketing works just like medical representatives,’ said Dey. ‘Teachers write out prescriptions of books for students. Studen
ts in turn demand the books from distributors. Then the distributor comes to us. We create demand.’
The first run for popular test-preparation books for the tenth-grade exams is 100,000 copies. Chhaya provides a whole bank of ready-made prose you can memorise and copy into the competitive exam. These books are usually written by teachers and professors, with their qualifications noted up front. The Higher Secondary English Tutor, a bestselling ‘companion’ book for eleventh and twelfth graders, is written by a retired professor whose degrees include ‘MA (Double), M. Litt., PhD’. You never need to read ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, John Osborne’s plays or Mark Antony’s speech from Julius Caesar. The many-degreed professor will give you the answers, within the prescribed word-length, for every single question in the assigned readings for eleventh- and twelfth-grade English. Also provided are sample letters and formulated answers for each of the last fourteen years’ higher secondary exams, to mentally copy and paste at exam time. Follow this, or the hundreds of less illustrious guides that are for sale on College Street, and you will be spared the pain of thinking. As the saying goes, ‘Commit to memory, and vomit.’
‘What subject did you study in college?’ Dey asked.
‘Political science,’ I said.
‘Well, then you must have read Prof. Nimai Pramanik’s book.’ Prof. Pramanik has written several books of notes in Bengali for BA, MA and M Phil courses in poli sci.
I had studied in America, I told him. I hadn’t needed his drugs.
Dey didn’t like that at all. ‘I have told you all this based on trust,’ he said. ‘How do I know you are not a competitor?’
The Epic City Page 9