The Epic City

by Kushanava Choudhury

  For Calcutta’s rich, the poor were an asset, not a problem. The aristocrats needed to live among their gophers, underlings and retinues of servants. Mullick’s Patronage was the basis of the big man’s bigness, as it still is today for the political bosses in Calcutta’s paras. The city’s design follows a logic entirely at odds with what we expect modern cities to be. All those forces and peoples that other cities have struggled to segregate and sequester have been here together from the start.

  The Epic City

  The harsh afternoon sun turned sepia. The panwalla rushed for cover, taking his pans, moist and wrapped in burlap, to stow away somewhere dry. The panwalla’s ‘boy’ huddled underneath the stall next to the crates of supplies. Two medical representatives had been waiting at the stall, talking shop, periodically interrupting each other to speak into their cell phones. They were going to Convent Road, then Deshapriya Park in South Calcutta. They grabbed their order quickly and rushed off. The ominous line of darkness was advancing from that side of the city.

  The winds came first. They arrived suddenly. What was the English word for these winds? Gusts? Gale forces? A tempest? In Bengali we call it jhor, aspirated, onomatopoeic. Jhawwwwr.

  The jhor upturned the tenuous lives of tarps and tenterhooks. The tarpaulin roofs of pavement eateries began writhing, then flying open like giant capes. The jhor propelled the darkness. I heard the whoosh of the wind, the gurgling gorjon of clouds, then the beating of rain. The monsoons had arrived.

  I took shelter under a shop’s tarp. The ferocity of those drops drew lakes on the pockmarked pavement. The lid of a jar floated by like a little round tugboat. Two teenage boys in vests and sandals rode up on a motorbike, drenched, looking to buy cigarettes, and rode off. A taxi with arthritic wipers passed by, all its windows rolled up, the passengers squished together exchanging their warm breath.

  A crowd of us had sought refuge under the tarp. It was pouring from above, from the side, from every direction. We teetered on ever-shrinking islands of dry earth. The tarp was now heaving with water. It sagged and water tapered though a furrow and poured down like from an open tap. Soon we would be soaked.

  Moments like these had seemed so thrilling were when we were small: rainy days off from school and paper boats to sail as streets turned to rivers, a Bengali boy’s vision of Venice. Now, I worried about all the trash piled in the streets, all that dog shit flowing together in those streams, ferrying disease and calamity.

  Our fights came like the jhor. It was a blessing that there were so many rooms in our flat – all the more doors for Durba and i to bang. This time it was about Barista, an upscale coffee chain that had come up in our para. Barista was air conditioned, set off from the road. What a difference air conditioning made in keeping all the elements out, not just the heat but dust, smells, and most of all, noise. The city is a soundscape – politicians’ street-corner speeches, loudspeakers belching Bollywood music, promoters yelling business deals into their cell phones, the cadences of passing hawkers, the tung-tung of trams, the calls of bus conductors from footholds. You could listen to a tea shop, a para, a city as if it were a symphony. Peering out from Barista, the city seemed set on mute.

  For Durba, the café was a place where she went to work, to relax, a refuge among the detritus. One morning, we were quibbling and I said, ‘You want to live and die in a Barista.’

  The jhor arrived. The whoosh and bang, sturm und drang, the maelstrom.

  ‘Who are you here?’ Durba asked. ‘You wouldn’t think twice about going to Starbucks in America, but here, oh no, you’re a Bengali bhodrolok. You must drink tea from a tea shop served by a ten-year-old boy while you discuss Marxism with your bhodrolok friends.’

  ‘All you want is to escape to a mini America,’ I said.

  ‘The person you are here has nothing to do with what you are like in America.’

  ‘What is so horrible about Calcutta that it needs to be escaped?’

  It was a way some people tried to live in Calcutta, pretending to belong to a world that is perpetually not only climate-controlled but socially controlled. From their little glass chambers, they had nothing but shame and disdain for the world in which they lived. ‘Ooof!’ they said when they stepped outside of their air-conditioned glass chambers and walked two steps to their air-conditioned, chauffeured cars. ‘Ooof!’ they said when they had to deign to interact with a guard, a shopkeeper, a clerk. Their haughtiness comprised entirely of surfaces, the way they intoned Bengali words with an odd inflection, the way they mixed in English words unnecessarily in their speech, not to express their thoughts but to make distinct their difference. Their city shamed them. They were only Calcuttan accidentally, they thought, born there by mistake when they really belonged in Paris, London or New York. But like Rajendralal’s Marble Palace, these creatures could exist only in Calcutta. Their Ooofs and sighs and Beng-lish intonations made no sense anywhere else.

  ‘What a world there is around you!’ I wanted to grab them and say, this city of such curiosities and possibilities, this amalgam of all that we modern humans have been, in all our glory and callousness, and all that we can yet become.

  ‘You are an American from New Jersey,’ Durba said. ‘You were born in Buffalo. You want to make me feel guilty about going to Barista, you American hypocrite? Who do you think you would marry who would be happy here? Except a little bou you can get from an arranged marriage who will cook you shukto and bhaat. Which of your friends from Yale or Princeton would last out here?’

  Then she would list a series of women as potential alternatives for the position of spouse, as if to say, ‘None of them is as tough as me. I am the best option around.’

  Durba’s way of thinking – as if I had gone comparison-shopping when falling in love – made no sense to me at all. When the feuds ended badly, she would say that I was ‘a fake Gandhian fraud’, that my return carried with it some bogus idea of salvation. Hypocrite. Fake. Fraud.

  In the end it always came back to themes we had debated from our earliest days together, between the Indian who did not want to live in India – amid its mediocrity and moral compromises – and the American who insisted on returning for reasons he could not yet fully articulate, for reasons that were sentiments and intuitions, not really reasons at all. In Calcutta those pitter-patter April-shower arguments became full-blown monsoons.

  How could a marriage be built in this climate? The city seemed to conspire against us.

  At night I lay alone, unable to sleep. The insomnia of earlier years returned, new miseries triggering familiar symptoms.

  ‘The neighbourhood lies in sleep with doors closed/But I keep hearing the night knocking at my door,’ the poet Shakti wrote, ‘In my heart, half-dissolved, long-travelled/I fall asleep within pain/Suddenly I hear the night knocking at my door.’

  Day after day, I lingered in bed till after noon, the hangover of dreams still clinging to me. I had a recurring dream of Calcutta covered in snow. Durba said it was my subconscious telling me I wanted to be back home in New Jersey. Was it her interpretation, or was it her twist of the knife?

  ‘Aha, you phoney, you would rather not be here yourself.’

  When we fall in love, we each feel our story is unique. But when we fight, we learn how pitifully common we are, how like every other warring couple everywhere. None of our education and upbringing has protected us from this banal fate. I could hear myself acting like my feuding uncles and aunts, shouting, ‘Bullshit-No Bullshit,’ playing insult ping-pong over the dinner table while the rice grew cold. Each time, I saw the jhor coming and I stood there, waiting helplessly for the torrent. It would be smooth sailing, they all said. The first year of marriage was supposed to be bliss. In those dreams of a tranquil snowcapped city perhaps it was not Calcutta I sought to escape, but our private hell.

  In Dida’s house my grandparents had had separate bedrooms, serving and volleying their invectives across the open air of the long dalan. In that game of long-distance disputes, there wa
s an aspect of sport. The capacious venue and our spectatorship provided each quarrel its due and then let it dissipate. That older order of living in a crowd with so many nosy mothers, brothers, nephews and aunts, seemed to buffer the blows between two people. I knew, too, from my own childhood that that older order was thick with politicking and intrigue. Better to go off and live apart, in separate rooms, separate flats. But in those truncated lives jammed into little boxes, those flats for a husband, wife and child, with 600 square feet and a cage called a veranda, where was the space to air discontent, and the people to serve as buffers and blunt the blows?

  Others in our position might have sought the services of an astrologer, made offerings at Moulali’s mazar or at Kalighat temple. Durba held fast to American dogmas. She had determined that we needed couples counselling. From somewhere she found a German marriage counsellor. I had never met a German in Calcutta – white people of any nationality were so rare that they acquired the status of local celebrity. We met the counsellor in her home in a high-rise flat. She had her blonde hair in two braids done up into a crown, and wore a maxi, the shapeless printed kaftans that some Bengali women wear at home when they are not expecting visitors. We spent forty minutes fielding sharp questions that felt like a police interrogation. When we left her office, for the first time in a long time, Durba and I were united about something. Better to risk divorce, we agreed, than to sit through that again.

  ***

  It had taken me a few tries before I found Allen Kitchen Restaurant in Sovabazar. For one thing, they are only open four hours a day, less if the food runs out. For another, they are more kitchen than restaurant. Allen is a throwback to the old-style Bengali ‘cabin’, with bare wooden tables and benches in the back, a tiny sink, and bulbs that are hardly more candescent than the kerosene lamps we used during power cuts in my childhood.

  Shrimp sells at astronomical prices in Maniktala Market, because the best stuff is exported to Europe or America. The coveted delicacy can still be found on plates during special occasions, like Jamai Shosti (the festival of the son-in-law) or a championship win of the Mohun Bagan football team. But the shrimp cutlet, the prince of street-food during my childhood, has morphed beyond recognition. What has replaced it in most Calcutta establishments is a mound of batter packed with filling of questionable provenance, deep fried in shortening with a fantail sticking out. The tail may be the only part of the cutlet that originates from a shrimp.

  Not at Allen. Each evening, the Saha brothers, who run Allen, make sixty-five shrimp cutlets and not one more. The shrimp sits in an icebox. Upon ordering, they are butterflied and then gently hammered into a flat cutlet shape, then battered and fried. No shortening, nor even vegetable oil, is used. At Allen, the shrimp cutlets are fried in pure ghee.

  Nostalgia is the feeling that always disappoints. The taste of something you remember from your childhood can almost never be recovered as an adult. The flavour is gone. The shrimp cutlets at Allen tasted like my childhood, only better. They were so delicious I could simply eat the batter alone. No filler, no skimping, no corners cut. It was a thing of beauty.

  The man who worked the fryer wore a white T-shirt stretched taut over a substantial belly. He looked like he could have been grilling burgers at White Rose System back home in Jersey. Allen was run almost like a speakeasy, known only by worth of mouth. There was a mention of the place in an article in the weekend section of Anandabazar, the Bengali daily, which was how I had heard of it, I said to him.

  He shrugged. Many such write-ups had come out, he said.

  Why didn’t they have them framed and adorning the turmeric walls? I asked, as was the norm in most eateries.

  ‘We’re not into that,’ he said.

  ‘Why don’t you fry more than sixty-five a night?’ I asked.

  ‘This is enough for us.’

  I felt like a philistine for suggesting they prostitute their God-given talent at making a shrimp cutlet into an enriching scheme. It was as if my logic, which demanded that a business seek to maximise profit, advertise and accumulate, was flawed. Frying shrimp cutlets was less an enterprise than a pastime, something to do between tea and dinner time, in a shack, with sixty-five shrimp. There was a momentary pleasure in a job done well. His logic was unimpeachable: This is enough for us.

  ***

  Durba and I kept walking, always river-bound. In the mornings we would stop for tea at the corner stall, pass the morning walkers in adda repose at Niranjan’s, and walk onward through Maniktala, towards the river. Along the Ganga, waterfront property comprised warehouses and old mansions. Residents peeked through the windows of the subdivided warrens. Others had become places to stack and store merchandise. In one old mansion, we spotted a roaring lion.

  We doubled back over the train tracks for a closer view. A row of lions, fangs bared, tongues precisely sculpted inside their gaping mouths, led from the entrance of the mansion down to the narrow corridor inside. They almost made me flinch. Accompanying each was a statue of Durga, the mother goddess, bearing weapons in each of her ten hands. At her feet lay Mahishashur, the demon with eight-pack abs like a Bollywood villain, being speared to death. Ten of these tableaus were lined up along the passage that led into the courtyard. In that narrow space, a divine drama was being readied.

  Under a naked bulb, a sculptor stood on a chair, daubing a clay and water mixture on the torso of the last Durga statue, preparing it for painting. Past him, inside the courtyard, were more statues. At one time, mansions like this one hired sculptors to construct the family’s Durga in the courtyard, where she would later be worshipped. But these deities, the sculptor said, had been commissioned for various neighbourhood pujos across the city. The mansion had become a workshop. It now belonged to that archipelago that was Kumortuli, literally, the neighbourhood of kumors, who are clay sculptors by caste. This was the time of year when the sculptors of Kumortuli transmuted Gangetic clay into divinity. The monsoons and their maelstroms would soon be a thing of the past. Everywhere scaffoldings of pandals would arise, bamboo lattices built several storeys high, blocking streets, houses for the goddess.

  ***

  On the first morning of pujo, we took a taxi to Sovabazar. A stone’s throw from Allen was the Sovabazar Palace of Nabakrishna Deb. The first ever major Durga Pujo in Calcutta was hosted by Deb. It was a victory party for the East India Company to celebrate the beginning of British rule.

  Wedged between a river and a swamp, the great Bay of Bengal a few miles below, Calcutta’s unsuitability for urban habitation can be matched only by New Orleans, that other tropical port city built by colonial capital. By the late 1600s, the Ganga was full of traders – the Danes, the Dutch, the French – who had set up trading towns under the protection of the local king. The British needed a base too and so the East India Company set up a trading post on these banks in 1690, the official year of Calcutta’s founding. Rivalries between European traders would cause the British to build fortifications in Calcutta, causing tensions with the host Nawabs. In 1757, the Company decided to pursue a hostile takeover. Fifty thousand of the Nawab’s troops faced about 3,000 troops of Lord Clive of the East India Company in a village north of Calcutta called Plassey. As the battle commenced, a flank of the Nawab’s troops, led by his traitorous general Mir Jafar, abandoned him and refused to fight, having been paid off by Clive and his Indian financiers beforehand. It rained a bit and by sundown, like a good day’s cricket, it was done. A corporation had won the wealthiest province in India in an afternoon, losing about twenty men in the process. It was the birth of British colonialism in India.

  What happened at Plassey was the final formality to a business deal. Clive walked away with Bengal’s treasury. The Company loaded the province’s gold and silver – equal to ₤2.5 million British Pounds (or about ₤200 million British Pounds today) – in a fleet of more than a hundred boats and sent it to Calcutta. Clive kept about 10 per cent of the booty for himself. When Clive came back to Calcutta, he was feted by the lo
cal merchant class that had bankrolled his intrigue, most notably Nabakrishna Deb of Sovabazar. Deb’s Durga Pujo was a victory party for Lord Clive and his men. A thousand and one animals were sacrificed, food and clothes were distributed among the poor, and dancing girls and Madeira wine were enjoyed by the British guests. To this day, the annual festivities at the Deb palace are called the ‘Company Pujo’.

  As per tradition, rifles are still fired to kick off the festivities. The dancing girls are gone, but the spectacle remains. The courtyard of the mansion is full of guests dressed in their finery to see Durga at her altar, as it has been for over 250 years.

  From Sovabazar, we walked northward to Bagbazar. Bagbazar’s Durga was housed in a temple-style pandal in a public park, just as I remembered from my childhood. Bagbazar was one of the first sarbajanin – literally ‘for everyone’ – pujos in Calcutta. It was founded about a hundred years ago, when pujos were democratised, moving from the courtyard altars of aristocrats into the streets. Among para pujos, Bagbazar was also the standard-bearer of tradition. It did not deviate according to the aesthetic whims of the moment: its deities and demons did not look like Bollywood icons; they did not levitate or wear sarongs. Durga’s skin was yellow, her eyes elongated, her face broad and flat and not naturalistic. Each year, they reliably presented the iconic traditional image of the goddess.

  The anjali, or serenading of the deity, had just started when we entered the pandal. The venue was packed, and in our midst were the drummers with dhols, or drums the size of barrels. The drummers built up a frenetic, deafening beat as they moved around in a circle. Around them danced men and women with lit bowls of incense, smoky and strong. The smoke entered us, obscured our vision. The deafening thump of the drums roared faster and faster. The beat resonated in our bones. We were in a pulsating cloud that demanded trancelike submission of mind, of thought. It was not something to think about, or observe. There was nothing to do but feel.