The city to which I returned as a reporter was caught in a conspiracy of silence. The lines drawn by Partition went right through the city, pulling some people in and cutting others out. But everyone pretended not to see those lines at all. In the paper, there was no coverage of the Muslim parts of the city, unless there was a ‘communal’ issue, meaning when Muslims complained that their religion had been offended and took to the loudspeakers and the streets. What was the need? Everyone knew all there was to know.
Ask for directions and a man might get to talking about how you have to be careful these days who you ask – ‘Muslims are everywhere, you know, not that they’re all bad, but as a community they are full of criminals and pickpockets.’ For me, it became like a game to see how it would pop up, how the communal angle would be worked into the most unlikely conversation. I once did a feature article on one of the oldest neighbourhood Durga pujos in North Calcutta, a feel-good story that papers run during the holidays. One day, when I went to interview the elderly doctor who headed the pujo committee, apropos of nothing, he began ranting that there were too many Muslims in the next neighbourhood. For a time, Imran was part of a team of reporters who reported on civic problems in each municipal ward. The problems were always the same: power cuts, water shortages, and so on. One day, Imran was in a Hindu neighbourhood abutting Muslim-majority Rajabazar, interviewing residents about civic problems. He asked one local if he had any complaints and the man responded: ‘Our civic problem is Mohammedans.’
Of course, had the interviewee asked the reporter’s name first, his response would surely have been, ‘Lack of drinking water.’ Quickly I learned the code of the street. What is your name? Where do you live? Those two questions unmasked your identity. Rajabazar, Taltala, Zakaria Street, Eliot Road, Park Circus, Topsia, Tiljala, Iqbalpur, Metiabruz, Watgunj, Garden Reach, Kidderpur. In these neighbourhoods, you would find the Muslim fifth of the city.
One’s name and one’s neighbourhood are the dead giveaways. I was read as Bengali and Hindu. Doors opened and closed based on those two signifiers. Trust was given and taken away based on them. There were many times when a man would begin talking and then change his tune once he had found out your name and your neighbourhood. When I reported on problems at the Calcutta madrasa, Muslim students would complain about Hindus until they discovered I was not Muslim, at which point the mask would come on. They would mouth the rhetoric learned from political speeches and schoolbooks about how all of us were brothers.
What was unsayable politically was enacted everywhere else. In Hindu paras, a Muslim couldn’t rent a house. In many Hindu firms, a Muslim couldn’t get a job any more. In many Hindu homes, a Muslim couldn’t even work as a cook or a driver without taking on a fake Hindu name. There were no Muslim quotas for government jobs or college admission as there were for lower-caste Hindus, and little legal recourse for the daily discrimination, which was quite straightforward.
In the years when Imran and I reported for the Statesman, every day was an exercise in masking and unmasking. Nowhere was this more the case than when we reported on issues that might have a communal component. Hindus and Muslims look alike but yet wear entirely different masks around one another. You can’t always tell a man’s community by his comportment. While working on an article about a banned Islamist student organisation, Imran and I were once caught in a jam together, surrounded by a mob of Muslim students at the university’s Muslim hostel (a relic of the colonial past when Hindus and Muslims ate and boarded separately). The local student-union dadas were leading the pack, accusing us of inflaming communal sentiments, threatening to call the police and their local political patron. They did not dare to pummel us – we were Statesman journalists after all – but they were scared, and their fear led them to swaggering bluster.
The daily activity of a reporter is mostly banter, employing the gift of the gab to get behind the mask to the man, flattering his ego, assuaging his fears, inflaming his jealousies, all to get the story. Imran and I had sufficiently diffused their fears to quell the mob, and left unscathed that day. A few days later, one of the union leaders ran into Imran on College Street. ‘Hey, aren’t you that Imran Siddiqui?’ he said.
Ever the artful dodger, Imran said, ‘Who me? No I’m Kushanava Choudhury. You must have confused me with the other guy.’
Perhaps as telling are those times when a Muslim source has turned to Imran, in confidence, and said of me, ‘He is a Hindu, but he is all right,’ or when a Hindu has said the obverse to me in appreciation of my friend, ‘the good Muslim’.
Partition made two countries, a Pakistan for Muslims, and an India for . . . whom? Hindus alone, or everyone who lived in it? That question was being asked long before the British left, and long after. In the monsoon of 1946, that question had been asked with daggers and bombs in the paras of Calcutta, when thousands of dead bodies rotted in the streets. Out of those carcasses had oozed Partition. A year later, on 15 August, the British divided their colony into two new nation states and left. For the next half a century, the city had been recovering. But that tearing apart, in our paras and in our hearts and minds, has never ended. Partition is still going on.
***
When I worked at the Statesman, every day I crossed the Beleghata Canal on the way to work and back. The stench of the canal brought back childhood memories of dead pigs floating in its black waters. My father was old enough to have seen cargo boats on the canal, ferrying timber and fish from the Sundarbans to the sawmills and cold-storage units along the banks. In Bagmari, I had grown up hearing the sawmill’s siren and seeing lines of overloaded lorries being stopped by the traffic policemen to siphon bribes. By then, the boats had ceased, the waters stagnated and thousands of people had begun living on the canal banks. They were some of the poorest people in the city, below the ranks of the millions who lived in slums. Pushed out of the countryside by debts, hunger or feuds, they had failed to be accommodated anywhere in the city, and ended up at the canal of last resort.
The canals were part of Calcutta’s drainage system. When they got blocked, each monsoon the streets flooded. Since my childhood, the Beleghata Canal had become progressively more constricted. Now it resembled a sewer. One day an item appeared in the paper stating that the state government would dredge the canal. I wondered what would happen to the people living there. It was a story worth following.
When I called the urban development minister, he informed me that the land belonged to the government and the people living there were squatters. They would be evicted without any kind of compensation or resettlement, because they were breaking the law. To give compensation here, the minister explained, would only reward the law-breaking and encourage more people to squat on government land.
The minister’s argument sounded familiar. When I was a student at Calcutta Boys’ School, it was this same argument that certain teachers would use to refuse to let us go to the bathroom. If you let one boy go, they reasoned, it would only encourage the others to go as well, producing a shitting outbreak of epidemic proportions. Those teachers had been sadists and tyrants, holdovers from a colonial form of schooling whose whole ideology could be boiled down to one dictum: spare the rod, spoil the child. I could not understand how a democratic government, a democratic Communist government, could render thousands of its poorest citizens homeless without even giving them a check.
I had seen the squatters’ shacks a hundred times from my bus window. One day, I got off the bus to meet the people there and see their world up close.
The whole area stank. The canal bank was lined with huts several rows deep. Each hut was made of corrugated metal and plastic sheets to make a windowless room with a stove in one dark corner. Each room had a bed raised up with bricks to make two levels. The parents would sleep on one level, separate from the children for a little privacy, a semblance of a normal life.
From the road, I walked down muddy paths toward the stench of the canal. Along the water’s edge, rising up from the muck
were little bamboo towers that looked like birdwatching stations in a sanctuary. Each tower was covered on all sides by discarded plastic tarps. In the middle was a hole through which to shit right into the canal. They were the communal toilets.
I met Gora Ghosh, who ran a school along the canal, which was full of kids who lived in the shacks. He used to work in a government job, but there all he did was sit in a chair year after year. Nothing changed except the bedbugs, he told me. He left and started the one-room school. The municipal schools were a disgrace, but these children had no birth certificates and no addresses, so they could not even go to those schools. Of late, the government had started running mass-education camps, where they would swoop in on a poor area for a few days as if they were running a blood drive. By the end of it, they made sure the children who attended knew how to sign their name. Then everyone was declared ‘literate’. In this way, every decade the government’s literacy statistics miraculously shot up, much to the delight of economists and development experts worldwide.
Most of the kids in Gora’s one-room school worked in workshops along the canal in the battery-recycling business. They sat on the roadside sifting through piles of garbage looking for used batteries. Their job was to extract the carbon sticks in the batteries. In the workshops between the shacks and the toilets were vats of chemicals in which the sticks were dunked, without any gloves, and treated before they could be reused by local battery manufacturers. It was toxic, but it was work.
Most of the men did not have any work. Some did odd jobs hauling goods from place to place in cycle vans. Others did seasonal work in construction, building pandals in the pujo season or showing up near Ultadanga station in the early morning, hoping to be picked for a day’s work as a labourer on a building site. They were men with irregular wages and irregular habits. There was a liquor store at one end of the road that stayed busy from morning. By 11 a.m. there were already men gathered in groups lounging on cycle vans, betting on cards and drinking. By mid-afternoon, little parties were underway on the flat-beds.
The only people with steady work in the area were the women. They worked as domestics in houses around the canal, sweeping floors, scrubbing dishes and doing laundry, twice a day, seven days a week. There was always housework in Calcutta, always jobs for women to do. If you could scrabble together jobs in four houses, you could at least survive.
In the villages the men had worked the land. But there was no land in the city for them to work, no job that felt like a man’s job for them to do. In the city, it was as if everything was turned upside down. The women became the breadwinners and the men became superfluous.
One day I asked a group of card players what they thought about the evictions. They will never evict us, they said, and kept right on dealing.
Gora, the teacher, was worried about what would happen to the children if the shacks and workshops were demolished. He feared their families would scatter all over the city, putting an end to their schooling. He was looking for powerful people who could stop the demolition. One morning, he introduced me to a political worker from SUCI, one of the smaller opposition parties in the state assembly. His party was going to launch protests again the demolition, the man said. They were going to have demonstrations. There was no way there would be any evictions on their watch, he said, his bluster buoyed by a breakfast of booze that I could smell on his breath.
Slowly, I realised something about the squatters. Unlike the millions who lived in slums, these were people who had not been organised by any political party. No one had arranged their birth certificates or ration cards. No one had got them voter cards. The census-takers did not come to their door. Along the canal, on the Maniktala side, the squatters were Hindu. On the Rajabazar side they were Muslim. But otherwise they were precariously the same. No one knew how many people were going to be evicted because no one had bothered to count how many people lived there in the first place. They were people unaccounted for, people who were not people at all.
The settlements along the canal stretched several miles. Taken together, they were as many as 50,000 people. If they had lived in one dense patch and formed a great slum, some leader would surely have come along and got them fake birth certificates and arranged their voter cards, turned them into a constituency and championed their cause. But they were stretched thin across several city wards, and so they did not count as a voting bloc, and hence did not count at all.
All the politicians I called, the ministers, municipality officials and Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLA), said something had to be done, of course. A local MLA met me at Flury’s, the gaudy bakery on Park Street, to discuss his grand vision for the canal. Over pastries and tea, he showed me plans that looked like a fantasy from a children’s colouring book. In his plan, an elevated highway would rise above what was now a row of toilets upon a river of shit. In the drawings, there were of course no shacks nor workshops, and no plans for the people who lived and worked there. They had been wiped out of the picture.
What I saw was this: a democratically elected Communist government was following a colonial law that denied its people a basic foothold in the city. The Communists had even stopped working with the World Bank, because it had a policy of providing resettlement to all affected squatters on its projects while the government did not. In my Princeton days, I had supported the anti-globalisation protests, which targeted the World Bank as the very symbol of capitalist exploitation in the Third World. Now ‘capitalism’ and ‘Communism’, ‘democracy’ and ‘development’ all seemed like terms whose meanings had been unmoored from their original forms. They were just empty words used by politicians with which we filled the pages of our newspapers and stuffed our brains.
What mattered was power, the power of having bodies you could put in the street to block traffic and votes you could stuff in a ballot box. Who got what was determined by who could make the most noise, who could block the most roads, who could show the most power. Each would be compensated according to their nuisance value. The meek would lose their hearths.
I wrote the stories; the evictions were delayed. But I was just skimming the surface. I was playing my part in a pantomime made of up minister’s statements and government press releases, of 5 p.m. briefings and committee reports, of paper upon paper upon paper, of that typhoon of paper that governments produce and newspapers reproduce that in a city like Calcutta didn’t mean a thing. There was so much below the surface that structured how things worked, that determined how power was organised and that I did not know how to write about. I only knew that it had little to do with what we wrote, or the big words we used, when we filed our 400 words each night.
After the Factory
Durba and I were riding home in an auto rickshaw from Maniktala one evening. The auto ascended the hump of the Beleghata Canal and stopped. On the bridge, a drunk was pantomiming a policeman, standing in the middle of the line of cars, buses and autos, directing traffic that was going nowhere. The road ahead was blocked. There was an aborodh – a barricade – in Bagmari.
The auto idled on the bridge. The driver in the next auto started telling his passengers how the drunk on the bridge used to be a dada, a local Party boss. ‘Who knows how many murders he has committed?’ To kill time, the driver began to narrate the drunk’s former exploits. We waited a while and then followed the passengers in the nearby autos as they alighted and crossed the bridge on foot. On the other side, the dadas of the opposition party, the Trinamul Congress, had placed a line of cycle vans across the road. Behind the barricades, rows of trucks were idling almost as far back as the rail bridge. Police vans had arrived. In the sea of faces at the barricades, we saw clumps of men in white uniforms negotiating with the public. It turned out that there had been power cuts all day in Bagmari. The power had not been back long enough to run the water pumps, so now residents had neither water nor electricity. Hence the dadas had corralled a few van rickshaws and gathered their flock, and a barricade had been erected on one of the main
arteries in North Calcutta at rush hour.
A few weeks earlier, in Maniktala, there had been another aborodh. Then, the public had pelted stones. The autos adjusted, shifting their route and avoiding the main road. At other times, these productions of street theatre required more fireworks, like after the killings in Nandigram, when a couple of buses on this road were set ablaze. Then there were the bandhs, or shutdowns, when all offices, shops and public transport were shut down for a day. The practice had come down from colonial times, when it was used against the British. In Bengal, the Communists had invented a new form of protest in the 1960s called the gherao, or encirclement, where a boss in an office was encircled by his protesting staff, and held captive for hours at a time, until labour demands were met. Aborodh, bandh, gherao – these words had become as much a part of our vocabulary as bus, tram and traffic. They were such commonplace events that everyone knew how to act. Are they blocking traffic, pelting stones, burning buses? We can grumble and adjust. Durba and I wriggled around the barricade and walked home.
Durga Pujo was over, that burst of creative genius had blazed and burned out. Now it was back to the same sourpuss city. Sometimes I sat in the front seat of an auto with half my ass hanging off the driver’s seat, which I had to share with three other people, and scanned the faces at the crossing, looking for ‘one of us’. I wanted to find a face without the creases of disappointment, without the contortions borne of petty deceptions, without the cloud of gloom. Just a normal fresh face. How rare they were those days in Calcutta.
The sea of glum faces was most overwhelming on the Metro. On a bus, there was the regular hustle and circulation of conductor and passengers, the ruckus of the tickets rustling and change jangling in the conductors’ bag, the helper belting out the names of the stops like a chorus. But underground, without that ensemble of noise, the typical Metro compartment felt like a morgue. Each face was covered by a dour mask unique to itself. There were pancha faces and bhoot faces, pocha faces and alu-bhatey faces. The sheer range of their sullen gomra faces exhausted my vocabulary. It was just like Sukumar Roy had rhymed:
The Epic City Page 15