The Epic City

by Kushanava Choudhury

  ***

  When we were kids, pujo meant closed books, new clothes and cap guns. The guns were made of rough-hewn metal that scraped your fingers. Each pop set off an igniting flash, then smoke. Pop, pop, pop! Everywhere on D. L. Roy Street, where we spent most of our pujo holidays, boys with guns fired all day long. The loudspeakers in the background played Bollywood tunes, songs forbidden in my house, as in many bhodrolok Bengali homes where Tagore still reigned.

  ‘Ek do tin, char panch chhae saath aath now daas egaaara, bara tera’ – ‘One two three, four five six seven eight nine, ten eleven, twelve thirteen. I count while I wait for you . . .’ I learned most of the Hindi I later used as a journalist from those loudspeakers. Of course, sometimes the lyrics were pre-linguistic yelps ripped from Gloria Estefan, like: ‘Oye Oye, Oye Oye Aaaah.’ (Translation: Oye Oye, Oye Oye Aaaah.)

  In my childhood the neighbourhood pujo was still funded by local collections. Young men from the local club came around to each house with receipt books to take up contributions to fund the para pujo. Now the para boys went instead to the big fish, the businesses and large corporations who viewed pujos as an advertising vehicle, paying for banner ads around the pandal. But the way pujo was organised was still the same. From the running lights to the drummers, everything was arranged and coordinated by the para dadas, the men who sat on benches drinking tea, smoking Filter Wills and playing carrom at the one-room para clubs, people like my Mejo Mama and his Congress cronies.

  A club down the street from our flat had built Kerala’s Padmanabhan Palace, with an ornate spire covered with sculpted gods and dancers. Around the corner, on a two-bit patch of grass grandiosely called ‘Triangle Park’ – a pocket too small even for an ordinary sized pandal – the organisers had installed a Megatronesque Mahishashur being vanquished by a Robot Durga who looked as if she had emerged from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. There were over 500 pandals across the city. Each was made of bamboo lattices built several storeys high, covered with cloth and a great deal else, to morph into the sinking Titanic, Hogwarts School, Machu Picchu, the White House, the Trevi Fountain or the ruins of Angkor Wat. In style, the deities were as varied as the pandals, but the story was everywhere the same: a duel between good and evil. Durga, the mother goddess, weapons in each of her ten arms, astride a lion, vanquishing Mahishashur. For one week, the city was taken over as the scene of the celestial battle. Calcutta was rebuilt and redrawn for gods and demons to stride upon.

  During pujo, we went from spectacle to spectacle, ‘pandal hopping’. Among us kids, pandal hopping was a competitive sport. How many deities had you seen, how many pandals? How about running lights at night? Each stop could take a couple of hours of waiting, in snaking lines through mazes built from bamboo poles, all to go inside the pandal for a quick viewing of the goddess in full regalia. The devout raised clasped hands to pranam the deity, but for us pujo had nothing to do with devotion. It was about racking up the digits. Did you catch the big attractions: Bagbazar, Ahiritola, Mohammad Ali Park, College Square, Shimla Bayam Samiti, Vivekananda Sporting, all in the North? Well then, did you do the South – Park Circus, Ekdalia, Jodhpur Park, Mudiali, Behala? During pujo, a whole new geography emerged, subverting Dalhousie and Esplanade, Victoria and Park Street. The centre of Calcutta lost prominence as an epic city arose, inscribed by a new architecture.

  ***

  In New Jersey, pujos are held pragmatically on weekends, in high-school cafeterias. Food is served on styrofoam plates. In high-school auditoriums, musicians from Calcutta are brought in for evening programmes. Pujo is an indoor affair, perhaps more intimate, perhaps even more devout, full of the good intentions of organisers who want their children, raised in America playing travelling soccer and Xbox, to learn something of their ‘culture’. But there are no loudspeakers, no pandals, no street crowds. At those pujos, I feel that Calcutta is mocking us – for leaving, for the hubris to think that something like a city and a culture can be packaged and plopped down anywhere. Can there be jazz, Second Line, Mardi Gras, without New Orleans? Can it exist without the overgrown cemeteries from which it arose, without the streets, narrow and crowded by houses packed close together so that the sound of funeral marches reverberate, beckoning all to empty out into the streets to join? Can it exist without the people who marched while playing their dirges? Can you put all that into an iPod and press play? The architecture of a city is not just big buildings, but corners and clubs and pandals, sounds and bodies and moments. Its social fabric is held together like bones and tendon and muscle and skin, to form a whole. You cannot carve one piece out and plop it in the middle of suburban New Jersey, served on styrofoam plates in a high-school cafeteria.

  Another city rises during Durga Pujo, an epic city full of possibilities and visions, heroically redrawn. From the profane Company days, pujo was never about private piety. It was about strangers coming together for spectacle. That is why even a non-believer like me believes in pujo, believes in its epic narrative power to rewrite the destiny of a place. There is nowhere else in the world where such a spectacle exists, no other city where hundreds of para clubs put on a pageant that transforms a metropolis into an epic stage. It makes you believe in the endless possibilities of which human beings are capable when they choose to come together in millions to form a unique cosmopolis. It is only when the pujos arrive that we realise that our way of being is not finished yet.

  PART III

  Crossing the Canal

  ‘Work hard, play hard.’ That had been the mantra when I was at Princeton, which really meant ‘work work work’ until you forget what ‘play’ even means.

  When I first came back to write for the Statesman, no one was working hard or playing hard. I used to wonder how a daily newspaper could be produced in this climate. After decades, telephones finally worked, but no one wanted to do an interview over the phone. ‘Come over,’ they always said, and then, when you arrived, they would be ‘not in their seat’. Waiting in the corridors of government offices soon became my favourite pastime, at Medical College, in Lal Bazar, at the Writers’ Building, waiting and drinking tea.

  For one of my first assignments, I had to speak with an official in the health department. After a week and a half of postponed interviews, the official finally granted me a hearing on a monsoon afternoon. I arrived drenched, with a photographer in tow, only to hear that the big babus at the Writers’ Building had not given him authorisation to comment on the story. ‘I’m very sorry. If there’s anything I can do. Perhaps you would like some tea?’

  Sit, have tea, and roll with the punches. There is no place you have to go that you are not late to anyway. So drink up.

  The Statesman employed an army of men to serve tea at regular intervals. There were the liveried waiters in all-white uniforms, like Moulvi and Ashraf, who served tea in cups and saucers to the editorial department – the newspaper’s bourgeoisie – at our desks four times a day. The office handed out little coupon books for two rupees, which contained seventeen coupons. In exchange for a coupon, Moulvi would serve you your morning cup of tea.

  By late afternoon when the proletariat who operated the presses arrived for duty, a second battalion of tea-servers appeared, dressed in shorts. The ‘half-pant’ tea was intended to fortify the muscle power of the workers. It was strong and syrupy-sweet, and served in chipped cups without saucers. Officially, there was to be no fraternising between half-pant and full-pant tea; each class was to remain confined to its own cuppa. A press man would never dream of ascending to the cup-and-saucer elysium of editorial, just as a subeditor from the newsroom could be reprimanded for rubbing shoulders with the proles below. Yet every evening, the shorts-clad servers of half-pant tea did a surreptitious round of the newsroom. For half a rupee, I soon learned, you could score a cup of the contraband.

  The Statesman House contained a whole society frozen in a time warp. Inside that stately edifice were hallways with hillocks of discarded files, patrolled by cats. They led to labyrinthine narrow
corridors and secret stairs and mezzanine floors, to departments carved out by partitions and sub-partitions. In those back alleys of the building worked hundreds of peons, liftmen, waiters, cooks, typists, chauffeurs and clerks, and only about a dozen reporters.

  I had just started working there when I met the bard of the peons, Nanhe Singh.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he whispered, beckoning me like a bookseller on College Street as I passed him in the corridor. ‘I shall make a poem from it. I have written poems about hundreds of people at the Statesman.’

  Then he ratted them off one after the next. Over cups of half-pant tea, he would recite poems on Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, the Mughal emperor Akbar, or Indrani in the classified department. Nanhe wrote epic verse about Ram and Krishna, and he penned rib-tickling satires of local political leaders. Aside from poetry, Nanhe’s other passion was politics, and he was a vocal union man. After decades, management had connived to chuck out the Communist labour union, CITU, from the premises, along with the life-size cutouts of Marx and Lenin, and replaced them with a docile company union. But Nanhe remained loyal to the CITU union, writing couplets mocking the management that he spread like samizdat.

  When not penning revolutionary rhymes or writing epic verse, he perched on a backless wooden bench outside the newsroom, smoking bidis and watching a board of little red lights. A light went on when someone in editorial pressed the buttons we each had fitted below our desks. It meant that Nanhe was being summoned to carry a memo from editorial to the sea of clerks in accounts, or fetch takeout from Saina across the street. He was a gopher. Some peons brought lunches, some deposited their bosses’ electric bills, some sold ganja to the reporters, and all peddled in gossip. There were more peons at the paper than reporters. Many were second- or third-generation Statesman employees. Among them, one peon was dedicated to polishing the walking stick of the editor in chief, C.R. Irani, a.k.a ‘the Boss’, a.k.a. ‘the Old Man’. Our relationship to the Old Man was that of serfs to a feudal lord. We never saw the Old Man. We felt his aura from time to time, like while being apologetically shooed out of the elevator by Topiwala, the lift-man, because, ‘the Boss is coming’. The Old Man rode the lift solo.

  The Old Man was only known to us by his symbols: his car, his cane and his column. He wrote a ‘Caveat’ column, which appeared with alarming regularity on the Statesman’s front page, typically hectoring some government official to ‘sit down’ or ‘stand up’, as if it were written by the headmaster in a primary school.

  The Old Man was a member of the Bengal Club, which in British times had a policy of ‘no dogs and Indians’. For a time, one of the officers at the club had run afoul of the Old Man. The Old Man unleashed a barrage of Caveat columns asking sundry club members to sit down and stand up.

  The last British editors at the Statesman had left in the 1970s but even when I arrived almost thirty years later, the trappings of empire were intact. Bengali old-timers still ate fish curry and rice lunches with knives and forks, deboning rohus with surgical skill gleaned from the sahibs, who were long gone. Willie, the operator still announced, ‘Stay-es-mun’, when you called the main telephone line, his stentorian voice carrying the gravitas of its century-old colonial tradition.

  At one time the Statesman had been the largest paper in Asia, back when Calcutta was the capital of British India. It had exposed the famines of the late 1800s, which had been engineered by the British, sending reporters into famine-stricken districts for months on end, just as it was the first paper to report on the British-manufactured famine of 1943, when three million Bengalis had died. At a time of war, it had defied the embargo on the news by printing photos of dead bodies on the footpaths of Calcutta. In my childhood, it had exposed an international arms scandal which had implicated a sitting prime minister. The Statesman had a reputation for reporting the news impartially. For a hundred years, it had been the standard-bearer of Indian journalism. So, even though the paper’s ageing readers were dying daily by the dozens, and even though the Old Man was doing nothing to compete with the newer newspapers to attract young readers, in Calcutta, the Statesman was still tenuously the king.

  ***

  One morning, Mike called Imran and I to his office. Topiwala’s son had gone missing. The boy was three and had wandered out of his mother’s sight sometime that morning. Topiwala – ‘the Hat Man’, so called because he wore a golf cap at all times – was a lift-man, one of the legions of men from the downstairs world who were to remain unseen and unheard. Topiwala had come to Mike knowing he would be the most likely man upstairs to help. Mike turned to us.

  In the afternoon, Imran and I took a trip across the Ganga to the city of Howrah, a cemetery of factories whose chimneys stood like tombstones. Topiwala stayed in a couple of rooms around a courtyard in a tenement. Less than a mile away was Howrah Station, where you could take a train to any destination from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. If the boy had been kidnapped, he could be anywhere in the country. But why kidnap a lift-man’s son?

  There were other more likely possibilities. Perhaps Topiwala had a feud with a neighbour who wanted to teach him a lesson, or had become a target of local toughs out to extort cash. But Topiwala had just moved into the area. He hadn’t had time to make enemies. His wife stayed home alone all day with their children, without any family or friends to keep a watchful eye. Imran and I trawled the lanes and main roads. We spoke to the neighbours, the landlord, the local political dadas, the boys at the para club. We chatted with the paan and cigarette sellers. The boy had last been seen at around 11 a.m. There were a couple of Bihari women in the para who begged professionally at Howrah Station every morning. Imran bantered so well in Bhojpuri that the beggar women offered to buy us tea. But they had seen nothing. No one had any leads. But we made our presence felt: we were from the biggest English paper in Calcutta, and we were watching. Topiwala was not a man to be pushed around.

  Over the next couple of days, we kept making calls to the local police station so that they would actually look for the boy. Two days later, the police found Topiwala’s son not far from where he had disappeared. He appeared to have been fed, and was unharmed. Whoever had picked him up realised he had to be let go. That was the only time in my life I have been bear-hugged by a battalion of lift-men. To this day, Topiwala maintains that we found his son. Imran and I had done no such thing, really. We had only tried our best to help. We had exerted our influence. For anyone who was not in a position of power, who did not sit in an air-conditioned office, that was more than you could hope for.

  That was the best part of being a reporter. You could be looking out the window while your bus was stuck in traffic, and see something that might lead to a story, or go to the hospital to visit a recovering relative and discover a man at the next bed who had a story worth writing about. A story could come from anywhere, at any time, if you kept your eyes open. Being a reporter meant having a blanket licence to go anywhere and ask anyone anything. There was no other line of work that would allow such latitude, the chance to go so many places and meet so many people. No other job gave you such a chance to understand the city.

  Imran and I thought like reporters twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. We talked about stories constantly, at the tea shop around the corner, or at Islam saab’s stall in the gully that ran along Tipu Sultan Mosque, wolfing down samosas with fillings that were never clearly classifiable as meat or vegetable. All along the gully were cheap restaurants selling biryani, parathas and mutton. By day the editors sent off their favorite peons to fetch the slow-cooked savouries. Night after night, Saina restaurant sent clay containers soaked in oil, mutton chaanp – ‘mutton chops’ braised in spicy juices all day long – to the newsroom. They went perfectly with a bowl of biryani or a greasy paratha in a combination that today makes me salivate and feel ill at the same time. At the mouth of the gully, at six every evening a man arrived with a vat of raw beef and cow innards, squatted on the pavement and began skewering. The skewered mysteries wer
e then stuffed into parathas with some onions, cut chillies and a squeeze of lemon, and wrapped into a roll with notebook paper. Within an hour, all the five-rupee beef rolls would be sold out. It was no Nizam’s for sure, but it kept you going just like the half-pant tea and the endless cigarettes that fuelled our prose.

  Imran lived in Kidderpur, a vast Muslim area around the port. His coordinates in the city were thoroughly different from mine, and that difference was coded by religion. Hindus lived among Hindus. Muslims lived with Muslims. Calcutta was a segregated city, and at least the Hindu side, the side that ruled, had long ago decided not to see this fact. One in four people in the state of Bengal was Muslim. At least one in five people in the city was Muslim. But you rarely found Muslims in newspapers, on television channels, on university faculties or even in government offices. A generation of Communist rule had stopped the riots and killings that happened elsewhere in India. The Hindu right couldn’t spew its ideology here. It was considered odious ‘cowbelt politics’, the madness of people from the North, with their backward, fanatical ways. When Bengali Hindus, whether Congress or Communist, spoke, they sounded like Frenchmen, parroting abstract universals. But like Frenchmen, they protected their bounded society with wordless codes.

  The Statesman staff was full of Muslims. They worked in the kitchen, delivered tea, ran the presses. There were no Muslims in the newsroom until Imran arrived. There were no Americans either, until I did. But somehow I could slide back uneasily into a former self, Bengali, Hindu, bhodrolok. Imran had no such fallback. Our friendship, in turn, was often suspect. Was I a CIA agent sent by the Americans to uncover terrorist plots, recruiting a young Muslim to help me penetrate clandestine worlds? Such were the divisions in Calcutta that this sort of theorising seemed more plausible than the friendship of young reporters.