The Epic City

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The Epic City Page 11

by Kushanava Choudhury


  ***

  The rumour is that College Street was once awash in addas, and nowhere were there more addas than at Coffee House. By the time I arrived, the mythical poets with ruffled hair and cigarettes on lips, who recited Baudelaire and Buddhadeva Bose, had long left the building. The young writers of the 1950s graduated from coffee to country liquor by making the southward trek from College Street to Wellington. Khalasitola is a legendary bar in Wellington that serves only Bangla, or country liquor. Kamalkumar Majumdar was the figure who turned Khalasitola into a pilgrimage place for intellectuals. Kamalkumar was like Socrates, writes Sunil Ganguly, holding forth among the benches at the bar with a crowd of young poets around him. His knowledge of Bengali folk music, the theatre and French literature was unparalleled. Those addas in Khalasitola gave birth to the Krittibas generation – Sunil, Shakti, Sandipan and the other poets and writers who put out the little magazine, Krittibas, which was both a forum for their work and a vehicle for their unruly, chaotic form of Bengali literature, which defined the turbulent Calcutta of the late 1960s. Initiated into the glories of Rimbaud, Ginsberg and Bangla, the Krittibas generation would devote ink to their drunken hallucinatory visions of the city.

  I was standing at Wellington crossing at dusk. The number 5 tram came down Lenin Sarani, turned left, climbing northward toward College Street and I latched on. As we rode through Bowbazar, I looked through the large open windows of the tram. Stray dogs ranged upon the dunes of garbage at the open public dump. Parathas were being made at the corner shop on white tiles and under bright lights. Each vista became a freeze frame in a motion picture of the city.

  Nilkashyap was late. It had been a week of unrest. A transport strike, torrential rains and an opposition party bandh – literally a ‘shutdown’ of all businesses for one day – had hit Calcutta in succession. A hundred miles away, the villages of Lalgarh were at the front lines of India’s civil war between the state and the Maoists. A generation ago, the Naxalite uprising had turned Calcutta into the epicentre of the first Maoist rebellion. Like those urban ancestors, the new Maoists sought a violent overthrow of the democratic state. They were operating in the jungles, organising in the forested areas in half of India’s states. Beamed in through twenty-four-hour cable news, we now watched as Indian army commandos took on tribal people who subsisted in the forests as hunter-gatherers. They represented a mortal threat to the nation, we were told. But on TV, the commandos wielded automatic rifles while the indigenous people they called ‘terrorists’ had bows and arrows. A war waged with such asymmetrical weaponry made any sensitive viewer uneasy.

  Nilkashyap started reading. He was wearing an orange panjabi. His poem was about Lalgarh: ‘Aagun je andho, angun janena ki mondo.’ But fire is blind. It knows not right from wrong.

  He finished and looked straight up at me: ‘You liked it, yes?’ He was impressed and delighted with himself as always. ‘Aagun je andho, angun janena ki mondo’ he repeated. ‘Chirag!’ he said, using the Urdu word for fire. Before I could follow what he meant, the next poet started reading.

  Shyamal’da recited a poem called ‘Belpahari’s Sita’. Belpahari is an area where tribal people had starved to death in 2005 – something shocking in contemporary Bengal – a region beset by food shortages each year while the Communist government looked away. Now Belpahari was slowly seceding from the state and being ‘liberated’ by Maoist guerrillas. The poem described the first day after a long time when there was rice to eat. Heaps of white rice. It was cause for relief and celebration. But, the poet asks, ‘Sita, what shall I eat this heap of rice with?’ Sita replies: ‘Khidey diye bhaat mekhe kha.’ Mix it with your hunger.

  After Shyamal’da, Anirban, poet and publisher of a little magazine, read another Lalgarh poem.

  ‘Political events are coming into poetry,’ Ranjan’da said, ‘That’s fine. We are human beings too. But please, remember to honour poetry. Poetry should not be a “statement”.’

  Nilkashyap was nudging the lady next to him. She spoke up: ‘Ranjan’da, Nilkashyap would like you to say something about his poem.’

  Ranjan’da asked Nilkashyap to read it again. The poem had the subtlety of a telenovela. When he finished, Ranjan’da deftly turned to his left and said, ‘Anirban, why don’t you say something?’

  ‘Your poem, it is almost a short story,’ Anirban said. ‘The line between poem and short story is getting blurred, but I will take it in my upcoming issue of short stories.’ Nilkashyap, as ever, was pleased. Anirban said nothing about the quality of his poem.

  Nilkashyap said: ‘At Nandan, Anirban said, “Nilkashyap’s poems are beyond criticism.” That’s my asset.’

  On my way home, I ran into Nilkashyap in the gully of the phantom urinal. It was brighter at night than in the daytime. Under the amber street lights, Nilkashyap in his orange panjabi emerged like a flame. He looked lost.

  ‘Do you go home this way?’ he asked me.

  We were standing in front of a house that opened into the gully. A beautiful girl entered through the gate as a rat exited and darted away. Under the lights the gully took on a charming new complexion.

  ‘Swatilekha eshob kotha tomae kokhono bola jabe na,’ he started quoting himself in verse, ‘shob shotti ki bhag kora jae.’ ‘“Swatilekha, I can never say these words to you. All truths are not to be divulged.”’

  ‘There are some things you can’t tell your wife. Or they will create domestic distress,’ he said, ‘I was always writing this poem away from her, keeping in mind the visions of that Rajasthani girl. That’s why I’ve written, “Every night I seat her in my poems facing me.”’

  A few years back, Nilkashyap was flying to see his daughter in Bombay. There was a young woman who sat next to him. They exchanged a few pleasantries, nothing more. On the flight back, there she was again, sitting a few rows away. So when the plane was landing, ‘I went to the bathroom. They told us to sit down, but I thought, this is my chance. I went up to her and I said, “Madam, I think we have met before.” And she said, “Yes I think so also.” And I said, “Are you a Parsi?” because there are many Parsis in Bombay, you see, and they are very beautiful.’

  The woman turned out to be Marwari, from Calcutta, which was nothing as exotic as a Zoroastrian from Bombay. But it was the start. ‘I’m telling you the origins of this poem. Listen.’

  At his local public library, where Nilkashyap is a member of the governing body, he encountered an English poem about an Irish girl’s love for a bearded tour guide. ‘It is midnight, and the girl says, “Take me to the tour guide, the man with the face full of beard.” It’s midnight, mind, and she is saying this.’

  That was the second inspiration. The trifecta was achieved when he met the tour operator in Rajasthan. The Marwari girl’s face, the Irishwoman’s longing and the Rajasthani’s body fused together. The poem, ‘Festival of Melancholy’, practically wrote itself.

  ‘She only touched me once,’ he said of the Rajasthani tour operator. ‘She grabbed me to help me cross a puddle. So I’ve written: “When we crossed that slippery road, she once held my hand, an impish smile on her face. The deer left the forest and silently ran into her eyes.”’

  ‘I am forever in the thrall of poetry,’ Nilkashyap said as we crossed Mahatma Gandhi Road, dodging taxis and autos. ‘Poet Kalidas said, “Poetry is like a woman. You cannot force it. That is like rape. You have to let it come of its own will.”’

  A tram came at us. ‘This is how we poets die!’ Nilkashyap said, scampering across the road to avoid what fate had dealt to Jibanananda Das.

  I walked him to the tram stop on College Street. Somehow, I did not care any more about the quality of his verse. I admired him, and the countless poets and writers attending addas, self-publishing books and filling up the pages of little magazines. They could have stopped long ago, caved in to the pressures of family and work. They could stay home and watch television like the rest of the world. But they persevered, because to craft verse, however unappreciated or inadequate
, still brought satisfaction. After a lifetime of dodging trams and buses in a city like Calcutta, Nilkashyap could still be moved enough by a beautiful young woman to compose a poem. He would never woo her with it. It probably would not make him famous, no matter how many times Nilkashyap told me little mag editors were begging to publish his poems. But there it was, a retired assistant bank manager’s bittersweet lament.

  Nilkashyap got on the tram headed south towards Khalasitola. I helped him up and waited till the tram started moving, as if he were my own uncle. I felt responsible that he get home safe. I wanted him to keep writing.

  Victoria

  In primary school, we had read that India was the birthplace of one of the world’s first civilisations. Along the Indus River over four thousand years ago rose the great cities of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa. Their written language has not yet been deciphered, but archeologists believe that the cities were commercial centres. We do know that the cities were laid out as grids. Their most impressive feature, which was always mentioned in our school books, was that the cities had extensive covered sewage systems.

  And yet, four millennia later, to live in Calcutta is to perpetually stop, sniff and wonder, is it, can it be . . . the smell of piss? But I’m entering a top-flight private hospital. But I am walking along a busy corridor in a government office. But I am standing at a bus stop in the middle of five thousand people. And yet there it is, that unmistakable bouquet. One day I saw a man urinating on the median of the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass, with his goods exposed to three lanes of heavy traffic. The woes of women are at an altogether different level, especially those who are up at dawn to work in houses as maids, where they are still not allowed to use the bathroom, long after we have ceased to speak publicly about untouchability and the violations of caste. For us men, the city is simply one big pisspot.

  Men piss everywhere: on the streets, in alleys, on highways and, improbably, even in the dark corners of office corridors. There are no uncontaminated piss-free zones in Calcutta, no elite enclave without the stench. To combat the contagion, there are murals all across the city that look like para portrait galleries. This is how homeowners protect their turf from the ubiquitous urination. The portraits are of our pantheon of nationalists, poets and reformers. They are the faces you can’t piss on.

  There’s Raja Rammohun Roy, turbaned and moustachioed. Rammohun was among the first generation of Bengalis to take to European education, the father of the so-called Bengal Renaissance. He knew several languages and many holy texts, campaigned against widow-burning, and started a kind of polite, Quaker version of Hinduism called Brahmoism, bereft of deities, with prayer meetings and progressive zeal.

  Then you will find Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, the exemplary poor Brahmin’s son. His life was chock-full of instructive anecdotes: young Iswarchandra used to study under street lights, we were told as kids. He learned English by reading milestones as he walked from his village to Calcutta. Young Iswarchandra once swam across the Ganga, we were told, to see his ailing mother in the village. When not making interesting commutes, Iswarchandra standardised the Bengali language and campaigned for social reforms. He produced elementary-school primers, which even I used, and mobilised in favour of widow remarriage, which still remains taboo.

  His friend Michael Madhusudan Dutt, was a more colourful man. Madhusudan became Michael, a convert to Christianity, then went to Europe, turned Francophile and married a Frenchwoman, failed as a poet in English, then came home and reverted to writing in Bengali. As the father of Bengali free verse, he wrote revisionist Hindu epic poems, borrowed lumps of cash from the prudent Vidyasagar, and died an indebted and unrepentant drunk. On the wall murals, Michael always sports killer mutton chops.

  Following Michael is Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, clean-shaven, turbaned, looking austere. Bankim was the first Indian novelist. He, too, wrote initially in English, then reams upon reams in Bengali. He penned some of the earliest ‘nationalist’ novels, essays and songs. For his role in conceiving the nation, Bankim remains an icon not just to the Bengali bourgeoisie but to all Indian nationalists.

  Rabindranath Tagore, of course, is omnipresent. His pensive bearded visage, looking like a Bengali version of Michelangelo’s God, can deter even a piddle emergency. After all, he was Asia’s first Nobel Laureate, our Shakespeare, our Homer, our Moses. The scion of a wealthy trading family, Tagore was a poet, playwright, novelist, painter, essayist, philosopher, lyricist, choreographer and interior designer who also founded a liberal-arts university in his spare time. He delivered us to our modern idiom, largely inventing the Bengali we speak today.

  Alongside him is the bearded Ramakrishna, his eyes half shut in a trance. A village mystic and Kali devotee who travelled to the city, Ramakrishna became the patron saint to the nineteenth-century Bengali bourgeoisie. Venerated in life and deified in death, his image is on sweet-shop calendars and cab-drivers’ dashboards across the city.

  His best pupil, Swami Vivekananda, was an English-educated Calcutta boy who went native. On the murals, he is always painted in ochre robes and turban. Inspired by Ramakrishna, the city boy turned monk, and founded the Jesuit-style Ramakrishna Mission, whose celibate priests run some of the best schools and social service organisations in India.

  Finally, there is always Netaji – literally ‘the Great Leader’ – Subhas Chandra Bose. In the murals he is an amalgam of chubby cheeks and glasses paired with military fatigues and cap. Netaji was Bengal’s greatest freedom fighter, and Gandhi’s political and ideological rival. Netaji believed his enemy’s enemy to be his friend. He raised an army to fight the British by joining hands with the Nazis and the Japanese, and was hopelessly defeated near Burma, his army killed and captured by the British. His mysterious, untimely disappearance – in a plane crash en route to Japan – makes him a modern-day messiah. In Bengal some are still awaiting his return.

  These are the Bengali all-stars. There are many others on the murals, among them scientists, bomb-throwers and saints. The only post-colonial faces you can’t piss on belong to Satyajit Ray, Mother Teresa and Amartya Sen. The rest all lived during the two centuries of British rule, as if the colonial oppressors left, and Calcutta ceased to produce great men and women.

  In street-corner busts and in parks, in street signs and on school gates, Rammohan, Bankim, Vidyasagar, Rabindranath, Netaji, Ramakrishna and Vivekananda are memorialised over and over. In Shyambazar, Netaji rides a horse over the five-point traffic snarl; in College Square Vidyasagar keeps watch over students rushing to tuition; in Gol Park Vivekananda stands tall, asking us to arise, awake to the new dawn. And Rabindranath Tagore peers down at us everywhere, at Rabindra Bharati University, or the concert hall at Rabindra Sadan, on a tram in Rabindra Sarani or while stealing a kiss along the lake at Rabindra Sarobar.

  After the British left, most of the colonial statues were taken away and the colonial names changed. Dalhousie Square became Binoy-Badal-Dinesh Bagh, Amherst Street became Rammohan Sarani, Landsdowne Road became Sarat Bose Road, making a city in which the colonial past was reinscribed as an age when Bengali giants strode the earth.

  In 1911 the Calcutta football club Mohun Bagan had defeated a visiting English military team at their own game, playing barefoot. Every kid in Bengal who had ever touched a football knew that story. Recently, a statue of that famed 1911 team had been erected on Mohun Bagan Row in Shyambazar. Yet Mohun Bagan today is routinely defeated by teams from the most obscure corners of Asia’s steppes and deserts. Maybe that was the last great trick of the rulers, to leave us with a tropical variant of Stockholm syndrome, so that the time when we were ruled would also be the era we would remember as our most glorious. It echoed my Dadu’s lament: our golden age was when Calcutta had been the capital of the empire, its port the conduit of the loot of Asia. With the sahibs gone, our best days were done.

  ***

  ‘Nothing happens in Calcutta, yaar,’ a Bengali émigré said to me at a farmhouse wedding in Delhi. ‘It just sucks you up in
its shit.’

  Durba and I were in her hometown to attend the wedding of one of her school friends. Delhi was flush with a sense of sudden self-importance as it prepared for the upcoming Commonwealth Games, Delhi’s answer to Beijing’s recently completed Olympics. The newspapers kept calling it a ‘world-class city’, whatever that was. Delhi-ites began to see its renewal in millennial terms. After all, the planned city of ‘New’ Delhi had grown as a colonial tumor upon ‘Old’ Delhi, which had been the capital of successive kingdoms for a thousand years. In Delhi, Durba showed me the ruins of past empires, which were casually strewn in residential neighbourhoods like Khirki and Hauz Khas. She took me to Lodi Gardens and Humayun’s Tomb, which were iconic heritage sites that drew international tourists.

  What could I possibly show Durba in my city? Calcutta, by contrast, was yesterday’s child. Born as an English trading post on the Ganga and only three hundred-odd years young, for the camera-lugging foreigner who has visited Delhi, Calcutta offers nothing to see, nothing to do, and no one famous. Say this to a Calcuttan and he will become immediately defensive and retort: Why? What about the Victoria Memorial?

  In the centre of Calcutta is the Maidan, a great green that stretches from Esplanade to the river and is a favoured grazing ground for the city’s flocks of sheep and unemployed men. In the middle of the Maidan is the Victoria Memorial, our deranged Taj Mahal.

  In the days of Umbrella Park, like all lovers in the city, we had eventually ended up in Victoria Memorial. The lawns in front of the Memorial are for families with kids. It was the only place in Calcutta that had elbow room. The grounds behind it are unofficially reserved for couples. On the southern lawn, nestled behind shrubs, they get busy, Victorian-style.

  In Calcutta, love is sitting two by two at Victoria Memorial, whispering moodily to one another. The manicured lawns, peanut vendors and bribable police offer an opportunity to take your beloved in your arms and sneak a quick peck. Along the benches, young couples solemnly sit two by two, waiting for just such an opportunity. The brazen bring umbrellas. Sitting on a park bench, umbrella open in one hand, lovers briskly and arduously make out.

 

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