The Epic City

by Kushanava Choudhury

  He advised me to get a business card.

  ***

  Behind College Square, the lanes were narrower than my living room. Both sides were lined with those metal boxes that opened up to reveal books. A lane forked. I picked the narrower lane – they are always more interesting. It was dense with vendors and covered like an arcade by the canopies of trees and blue tarps that block the rains. In one of the stalls there, I found pocket ‘Shaayari SMS’ books. Romantic couplets from Urdu poetry, or shaayari, had been transliterated into English and packaged to send as text messages, or SMS’s. On page 62, above a cartoon of a man on his cell phone, it read: ‘Hamare dewanepan ki bhi koi dawa nahi, humne tow who bhi sun liya jo unhone kaha bhi nahin.’ There is no medicine to fix my love sickness. I have already heard the words which my beloved has not yet uttered.

  The SMS books were an index of ready-made pickup lines for any man with a phone and a target. Thankfully, there were also ‘Sorry SMS’ books. Just like the essays on summer vacation and Mahatma Gandhi that you could find in the reference books without ever going on summer vacation or reading Gandhi, there was no need to read and memorise Mirza Ghalib’s couplets or even write down Gulzar’s film lyrics to impress your potential girlfriend. Even a love affair could be done by rote.

  Around me, cycle vans and hand-pulled rickshaws carried binding, galleys and books, bound and unbound. A Tempo truck was trying to get out of the lane as an Ambassador car was trying to get in. In between them, the rickshaws had stopped to make deliveries. Everyone was yelling at everyone. No one was moving, except the nimble pedestrians trickling through, who made the snarl worse. Right there, squatting on the pavement, was a man with a sepia glass box, lit with an incandescent bulb and full of chicken patties, doing business as usual.

  The big publishing houses control archipelagos around College Street. Aside from their offices and store fronts, they occupy islands of space – containing workshops, printing presses and bookbinders – in the lanes and gullies. Little is shipped out, offshored or outsourced. The brain and brawn work of making and selling books all happens here. Van rickshaws pulling goods, delivery men rushing with stacks of books on their shoulders – the hustle and bustle all around reveals a place where thousands of people make a living. Street into lane into gully into courtyard, these telescoping tunnels of bibliomania support a whole industry at work, inside stalls and one-room presses, on rickshaws and on foot.

  Heading off College Street, I turned into an alley that was only a yard wide. Nabin Kundu Lane went past a sweet shop, an open garbage dump, a Kali temple with a fantastic sculpture glaring through a grill, and several offices of book publishers. Through all this, Nabin Kundu Lane never widened beyond a yard until it dropped me off on College Row. Two steps down and I was at Naren Sen Square, sipping tea at a stall with a few old timers while taking in the cricket match on the dirt-patch square. An old man in white pyjamas watched from the veranda above. These people were blessed, I thought to myself, to have such miniature perfection in the heart of the city.

  From there I followed a rickshaw into a lane with bits of genteel slum on one side, middle-class solicitors’ houses on the other. In the front rooms of both were workshops and presses. On a roak – a Calcutta stoop – a woman from the slum sat in a cotton sari with freshly oiled hair. She looked as if she should be sunning herself while chatting with neighbours. Instead a two-foot stack of sheets, fresh from the press, sat next to her. She was folding pamphlets that said ‘University of Calcutta’.

  Through the window of one house I saw a fringe of sari and yelled, ‘Oh, sister!’ The woman who appeared passed me a pack of Filter Wills through the bars as if she was trafficking contraband in prison. The window was a cigarette shop – no storefront, no counter, no metal box. The lane ended and suddenly I was in front of Saint Paul’s School, where my Boro Mama went to school, and morphed from Kiddo to Ashoke, on august Amherst Street.

  I turned right again and on Sitaram Ghosh Street were more presses, and front rooms with squatting boys heating sheets of metal on stoves. A man cycled past with a rolled-up metal sheet as wide as a twin bed tied behind him. On the sheet were mathematical proofs and diagrams – the pages of a geometry book. Briefly I was back out among the wedding-card printers on Mahatma Gandhi Road, before again submerging into Beniatala Lane, where there were more workshops, publishers, little magazine offices, which led back to College Row. In the old houses, each courtyard led into a shop, a press, a warehouse, a cyber café, a coaching centre or some form of a place of business. In the lanes, scenes of domestic life unfolded. Courtyard, corridor, gully, lane, street, the publicness of private homes blended with the privateness of public spaces. The whole world of College Street, with its narrow lanes and tarps and tree-cover, felt unified, intimate and indoors. Sometimes the courtyards were wider than streets. Some streets had steps, like in a house. Was I inside or outside? I felt I had entered an Escher painting. For College Street was not just a street, but a labyrinth made of books.

  ***

  Bankim Chatterjee Street, named after our first novelist, turns off from College Street at the Coffee House. A flock of sheep passed through Bankim Chatterjee Street each afternoon. Every day they marched through the book neighbourhood as if in a pasture, about forty poor bleating fellows headed to slaughter. An old man trailed them. He was a real-life shepherd, like those in the Bible. If one sheep tried to mount another for a last bit of fun, the old man beat both down with his switch.

  Run! I silently screamed at them. Escape your death march with the flock. Each one of you take a separate gully, past the van rickshaws, the presses and the women folding pamphlets, and you shall be free! They were so docile.

  Why blame the sheep? The fault is ours. For thousands of years, we have bred sheep to be this way. The courageous ones that sought to flee were slaughtered first, martyrs with no offspring to pass on their valour. The docile ones rushed to the centre of the flock, into captivity. They lived and reproduced more of their kind. This story has been repeated for countless generations.

  We were bred to be clerks. The British gave us Western education so that we could do the busywork of their empire. We were trained to sit in offices at Writers’ Building and a myriad other buildings, draw salaries and copy ledgers. It is said that if a dead fly fell onto the page of a ledger while it was being copied, a clerk would kill another fly and set it down in just the same spot in the ledger he was copying to, inspiring the Bengali phrase, ‘a fly-swatting clerk’. Get notes, memorise, vomit them out onto exams. Copy, don’t create. From the beginning this has been the mode of our modern education.

  Colonial education made us clerks for the traders of that era just as the prized technical learning in computers today is making us clerks anew. Now, in Sector Five and elsewhere, instead of ledgers, we fill up screens with code, eagerly doing the ‘back-office’ busywork of America’s global corporations.

  We are perhaps as blameless as the sheep. To stay safe you have to pass the exams, then get a degree, then a job. The job will kill your spirit, but at least you won’t starve to death. After two hundred years, is it a surprise that there is a fly-swatting clerk in all of us?

  ***

  Joy had taken his parents away with him to Delhi. Two weeks later, my uncle called from exile: ‘There is a problem. The insurance people have sent a letter to the university saying the release certificate has been tampered with.’

  The work of the clerk who had changed the ‘4’ to a ‘5’ had come undone. It took me two full days of crisscrossing the city to get that one elusive digit altered.

  Yet, for all this fastidious officiousness, it was possible to get fake documents for anything. A birth certificate, a business receipt or even a college degree could be cheaply acquired.

  In New Jersey, my father still carries the business card of an old Calcutta colleague in his wallet, which he sometimes pulls out as a party trick. It reads:

  Prof. Col. Dr Haridas Pal

  FDS RCS (Edi
n.), PGTOS (London), DOS (Leiden), PhD, LL.B (Kol.), DA (Jad.), FAScT

  Senior Consultant Head and Neck Surgeon and Oncologist

  Prof. & Head, Head and Neck Surgery, Katihar Medical College

  Visiting Professor, Forensic Science, Kolkata University

  Criminal Detection Training School, Govt of India

  Included in the International Directory of Distinguished Leaderships, USA

  Honoured by the Commonwealth, UK

  Formerly Prof. & Head, Oral Surgery Unit, Kolkata Medical College

  Chittaranjan Cancer Hospital

  Lecturer, University College Hospital, Eastman Dental Hospital, Italian Hospital and Whipps Cross Hospital, London

  Author of 11 Medical Books and 1 Law Book

  When you have finished reading this astonishing list of accomplishments, my father always grins as he delivers the punchline: ‘The man is a dentist’.

  Along Mahatma Gandhi Road, a whole industry thrives to legitimise any claimed accomplishment. Among the stationers who sell bulk quantities of book wrappings, paper sheaves, dangling lines of metal clips and staplers are the lines of shops that make rubber stamps, print business cards, and engrave medals and trophies. As a child who won no trophies, I was tempted to now crown myself ‘Captain’ or ‘Best Striker’ of a football club of my imagining. More realistically, I wanted a business card. I could crown myself Professor, Reporter or Writer, but without a card I felt like a nobody.

  ‘For to articulate sweet sounds together,’ W. B. Yeats wrote,

  Is to work harder than all these, and yet

  Be thought an idler by the noisy set

  Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen

  The martyrs call the world.

  But sometimes we idlers have clerical fantasies. We, too, wish we could spend our days stamping things, pushing paper, feeling important.

  From one of the printers’ shops on Mahatma Gandhi Road, a shopkeeper led me into a gully, and then into a niche where I took off my shoes before entering as if it were a Hindu prayer room. A young man sat in front of a computer with the design motifs for wedding cards laid out before him. On the board above were samples of various visiting cards. One had a multi-coloured collage of Lamborghinis and zooming 747 jets.

  ‘That’s for a neighbourhood car-rental company,’ the man said. ‘Yours should be understated.’

  In twenty-four hours, I had 200 cards printed, which began: ‘Dr Kushanava Choudhury, Research Scholar.’ And behold! I was somebody.

  ***

  No one who came to the Budh-Bikel adda off Tamer Lane was famous. Well-known poets like Sunil Ganguly had their own addas. But here, an ordinary writer – even a first-time poet – could read his work in public, have an audience and, maybe, have it published in a little magazine. There is a lot of politics in the literary world, one of the writers warned me, patronage combined with clubbiness and deceit. Who will take my piece in their magazine? thinks the poet. Who will pay me a one hundred-rupee donation to keep my magazine going? thinks the publisher.

  Many of those who came to the adda ran their own little magazines, like Jagabandhu Kundu’s Sahitya Setu (The Bridge of Literature), a magazine on literary criticism that also features poems and short stories. Kundu has been publishing it since his college days – he had just done a special issue on the biographies of Rabindranath Tagore. He had retired from his job with the municipality in Hoogly, a town near Calcutta. Now he practised homeopathy and brought out the magazine.

  One evening, Ranjan’da said: ‘Listening to the poetry and short stories being read here, I feel that we’re stuck in one place. I would like Jagabandhu to speak on this.’

  Jagabandhu is tall, taciturn and bent like a palm. Recycling old ideas didn’t work any more, he said. Readers want contemporary themes.

  ‘This goes back to the old debate,’ opined a retired professor of Bengali. ‘Art for art’s sake, or art for people’s sake. You are saying the latter . . .’

  Jagabandhu was taken aback. His career had been spent pushing files in a municipal office, not in faculty rooms. ‘Of course you have to think about readers! Many days I leave here and think, ‘That was not a poem.’ But I encourage everyone and keep it to myself. Just writing down your thoughts is not a poem.’

  ‘Ah, well,’ said Prof, ‘now we are coming to structuralism versus deconstruction—’

  ‘This isn’t an academic debate,’ Ranjan’da said.

  ‘To write poetry, you need to know the evolution of poetry, beyond Tagore to Jibanananda Das to Benoy Majumdar and on down,’ said Jagabandhu. ‘Today’s poets don’t read.’

  ‘Yes, reading is important,’ said IBS, ‘I have also said—’

  ‘I think something is missing,’ said Ranjan’da ‘We don’t know where world poetry is going. We need to know about that and write poetry based on it.’

  As we left Budh-Bikel, Nilkashyap was cornered by a younger poet at the mouth of the gully. The other man’s glasses had photochromatic lenses. Under the amber street light they had turned brown, making him look like a villainous spy from a B-movie. He was listing all the places where he had contacts: the Russian consulate, the American embassy, the Swedes, the Norwegians, the Danes – as if poetry were a cover for espionage. ‘You should have seen my program on Doordarshan,’ Spy said, of his appearance on the state-run TV channel. ‘They gave me fifty minutes.’

  Another poet passed by and requested Nilkashyap to buy her new book. ‘Only fifty rupees,’ she said.

  ‘Fifteen?’ asked Nilkashyap. ‘No, fifty,’ she said. He demurred. ‘I can’t sell any of my own books, and they’re only twenty.’

  Nilkashyap returned to Spy: ‘You should have seen me at Nandan. I was on for five days. They couldn’t stop praising my work.’

  Spy promised to send Nilkashyap’s work to Norway. ‘Are you willing to pay?’ Spy asked. ‘How much? Five thousand?’

  ‘No, no fifteen hundred, two thousand,’ Nilkashyap said. They sounded as if they were conducting an arms deal in the gully off Tamer Lane.

  ***

  Ranjan’da had a tidy two-storey house on the wrong side of the tracks in Dhakuria, an area in South Calcutta that was now being filled up by new construction. When he bought the property there was nothing around but slums. But it was something, a piece of land in the city. He had saved for years to build the house.

  ‘They say poets are careless with money,’ Ranjan’da said, when I went to meet him at home. ‘Poets are the most careful. They have to be.’

  He felt that most of the poetry read at Budh-Bikel did not count as such. ‘I encourage everybody to keep writing, but poetry today is technical. You have to love the crafting of poetry to become a good poet.’

  Writing poetry is always a fool’s errand, he said. Even most good poets are not remembered a generation afterwards. The muse is fickle. ‘It picked out Tagore, then Jibanananda Das, and then skipped over the rest to Shakti Chatterjee, and then to Joy Goswami. Even Sunil Ganguly won’t be remembered as a poet.’

  Sunil, who said he had the world at his feet when he was in America, but chose to return to Calcutta for poetry’s sake. He may be read as a novelist, Ranjan’da suggested, but not as a poet.

  Ranjan’da knew something of the fickleness of fate. His father had been an administrator for a wealthy landlord near Dhaka, the capital of today’s Bangladesh. He had enjoyed hunting, fishing and leisurely evening teas on the estate. In 1943, the British created a famine by diverting rice away from rural Bengal for the war effort. Prices skyrocketed as colonial police seized grain in the villages. In Calcutta, prices were kept low by the colonial government because the city was a part of its war machine. But three million people died in the countryside during the Bengal Famine. Ranjan’da’s father helplessly bore witness as hundreds of people starved to death on the estate. He had a heart attack and never worked again.

  At the same time, sporadic riots and violence between Hindus and Muslims flared up in Bengal. They culminated in the Great
Calcutta Killing in 1946, which made Partition inevitable. When the British left the next year, Bengal was divided into India and Pakistan. East Bengal, which had a Muslim majority, became East Pakistan (and eventually Bangladesh); the Hindu-majority areas in West Bengal, including Calcutta, went to India.

  Ranjan’da’s family, like my father’s family, were Hindus from the east. They had to leave their homeland for ever and move to Calcutta. Becoming a refugee traumatised his mother, who sank into a depression from which she never recovered. For several years the family was split up, with each ailing parent living on the reluctant charity of a relative while the two teenage sons scrambled to make a living.

  ‘We were all scattered and none of us had any income,’ he said. ‘Those were terrible years. My brother had to sell diaries outside the high court to make money.’ Diaries like the one in which Ranjan’da now pens his poems.

  Partition bludgeoned his literary ambitions. He took a government job in the public works department. He was posted to remote areas in central India where he installed tube wells and built roads. He didn’t write anything for thirty years.

  The great poet of the post-Tagore years, Jibanananda Das, was also a son of the east. His verses called upon an elusive dreamscape of haunting images of bucolic East Bengal, of a world he had permanently lost to Partition. Das lived a reclusive life in Calcutta and had an unlikely death, killed by a speeding tram. A half-century after his demise, his work continues to emerge – both literally and metaphorically – like a slowly developing photograph.

  Ranjan’da began reading and writing poetry again when he was in his fifties. He had never published anywhere, didn’t know any writers. ‘I was already so old when I started. I had no self-confidence,’ he said.

  A chance encounter with a publisher led to a book of his poems being printed. Then came positive reviews, introductions to other writers and encouragement from various quarters. The same year, Ranjan’da retired and devoted himself to poetry full time. He has been coming to the adda ever since.