Ramgorurer chhana
hashte tader mana
hashir kotha shunle bole
hashbo na na na na.
The city was made up of fifteen million such faces, each unhappy in its own unique way. They drove Durba wild.
***
The therapist Durba and I settled on was a Freudian psychoanalyst who had been trained in America. She was an old-school dream interpreter. She saw patients in one room of her tidy two-bedroom flat near the Tollygunge Metro stop. Her flat was in a housing cooperative like the one where I had lived in Bagmari as a child. There was a patch of dimly lit garden ringed by low-rise apartment blocks. Who would suspect that in one of those little flats a respectable woman in a sari was exposing the Oedipal desires lurking in the bedrooms of an Indian metropolis?
On our first visit the Freudian seated us together across from her and asked us to introduce ourselves. Then she told one of us to leave and wait outside. ‘If I have you here together you will only argue,’ she said.
And so it started, our couples therapy, one flawed patient at a time. Different times, different days, in different languages – with Durba in English, with me in Bengali, though the Freudian herself spoke Hindi as her mother tongue.
The Freudian asked me if I was worried about getting divorced. Divorce was becoming increasingly common in Calcutta. Its number-one cause, she explained, was mothers-in-law.
In the 1970s, as Calcutta’s middle-class horizons shrank, our family sizes shrank with it. The arrival of birth control at this time dramatically reduced the norm of bhodrolok procreation from four or five to one. Those little mama’s boys, hand-fed fish curry and rice by their mothers during lunch break at school, were now getting married, and divorced.
‘Do you know that the more patients I see, the more I realise how right Freud was?’
She told me of the case of a couple who had come to see her with marital woes. Both were professionals who had met and fallen in love. Their marriage was not arranged. The only problem was, the boy’s mother slept between them in their bed.
Our case presented a conundrum: our mothers-in-law were on another continent. What she couldn’t work out, she told me repeatedly, was why we had a problem at all.
***
A three-storey department store called Pantaloons had opened in our para, fully air conditioned, with salesmen who popped out of every aisle like whack-a-moles and blurted random English phrases. In a city where just about everything was sold by a moustachioed man standing behind a counter, Pantaloons seemed from another world. It stocked aisles of perfume, clothes, appliances, groceries, books and beer, in an obstacle course filled with salesmen chanting, ‘Yes, sir,’ and, ‘No, ma’am.’ On its top floor was a food court like Hangout. Above the store, the building rose over a dozen floors into a high-rise with ‘luxury’ flats. The whole edifice was so foreign to the existing architecture of the para that it looked as if an alien armada had docked at the CIT Market bus stop. As you passed Pantaloons on CIT Road, two-storey-high hoardings of women in bras hung from the display windows. Each time I rode shotgun past them in an auto, those giantesses looked like the totems of another civilisation.
There used to be a Small Tools factory where Pantaloons now stood. Big noisy machines used to chug behind high walls. During our cricket matches, if a ball somehow sailed over into that compound, we would have to take up a collection to raise a rupee and a half. There was no prayer of getting that ball back. During shift changes, lines of men would enter it. Otherwise the walls were impregnable. The Small Tools factory closed down a few years ago; the machines went silent, the men disappeared, but the building remained. Then, when Durba and I moved back, all signs of its existence had vanished.
I sometimes went to Pantaloons to buy beer. Each time, I felt like grabbing one of the associates who parroted American salutations and saying: ‘Are you kidding me? Do you know how many balls I have lost here, in this vortex of roaring machines behind forbidding walls? There was a factory here!’ That past was so neatly erased that sometimes I felt as if I was the only person who remembered it.
From the rooftop of our building, you could see the sprouting of a new city. Like the Pantaloons high-rise, in Beleghata luxury apartment complexes were coming up where the Phillips factory had once stood. In Sealdah, another high-rise arose from the Raja of Cassimbazar’s compound. Then all along the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass, the eastern fringe of the city, out of wetlands and fishing ponds arose more towers. Once one high-rise arose, it effaced any sign of what had existed before – a factory, a fishery, a slum – not only on the space but also in our memories. Each deserved an epitaph, like the marble plaque outside the Armenian College on Free School Street that declared that the writer William Makepeace Thackeray had been born there on 18 July 1811. But outside the high-rises, there were no marble plaques, not even any commemorative faces you were forbidden to piss on. There was no memory of the industrial past. Soon the names of those past avatars would only remain as bus stops: Astabol, Phillips, Usha. Their memorials would be heard in the bus conductors’ calls.
***
From our rooftop you could see the smoggy outlines of a behemoth upon the southern horizon. South City was one of the largest housing complexes in India, with 1,600 apartments in four thirty-three-storey high-rise towers. The front part of the compound is South City Mall, the granddaddy of Calcutta’s malls, which would not have been out of place in Singapore or Dubai. On weekends, I had heard, visitors thronged the mall just to ride the escalators.
Durba’s college roommate had moved to Calcutta to work in a market research firm. She and her boyfriend invited us to lunch at a new Thai restaurant in South City Mall. One Sunday afternoon we hopped onto an empty Jadavpur Airport minibus headed south. The Jadavpur mini has always been my favourite bus route. When I was a kid it would take me from my house in Kankurgachi in the North to Joy’s house in Ballygunge in the South in half an hour. While the 45 bus was snarled up for an hour in central Calcutta’s twin snake pits of Sealdah and Moulali, the Jadavpur mini would carom through the wormhole of Convent Road, and reach South Calcutta in minutes.
In the season of ‘don’t touch’, Durba and I had once ridden the Jadavpur Airport bus together to go to Gariahat. Somewhere around Anandapalit, by Fortune’s grace, we got seats next to each other. Squeezed together on the narrow seat, our bodies made contact at multiple points. Our hands, our feet, our hips all touched, and stayed touched. As we passed Linton Street and Park Circus, Skating Rink and Bondel Road, electric currents seemed to traverse between us on that narrow seat. I had understood then the Victorians’ thrill at seeing a lover’s ankle.
Durba and I both remembered that thrill as we rode the minibus to South City. At lunch we exchanged good-natured banter in English over pad thai, spring rolls and beer. Afterward we explored the mall’s bookstore, which looked bigger than a hundred book stalls on College Street put together, all neatly arranged by category and in alphabetical order. You could wander and peruse and buy nothing for hours. Our companions departed; we made plans to meet again. South City’s escalators seemed to ascend to the heavens, its shops were full of svelte mannequins, everything was shiny and new, and bathed in air conditioning. It was a vast cathedral of comfort. On a hot day, one would be a fool to not escape there and ride the escalators all day. When we came out, it was the dirty, disorderly, teeming world outside that looked wrong.
***
Where South City Mall now stands, I remembered, there used to be an Usha factory, which made the sewing machines that were ubiquitous in my childhood.
The factory had vanished but the union office was still across the street from the new mall. ‘It used to be a parade here every day at quitting time,’ Manoj Roy Choudhury said when I met him at the union office. Manoj was the vice-president of the local unit of CITU, the Communist trade union. CITU offices were typically one-room affairs with functional wooden tables, red plastic chairs and portraits of Marx, Lenin and Stalin. A few m
en would be reading the paper or watching TV. CITU’s room inside the Statesman had been like that, just like hundreds of other little union rooms across the city. The CITU office of Jay Engineering – the company that manufactured the Usha-brand sewing machines and ceiling fans – looked nothing like those rooms. It had desktop computers and conference tables like a research institute, and was fully air conditioned. It looked more luxurious, for that matter, than CITU’s spartan headquarters in Sealdah. The only thing missing was workers.
Manoj had been retired for seventeen years; the factory had been closed for eleven. Most of the men in the office were about Manoj’s age. As we spoke, they periodically looked up from their newspapers to peer through their big plastic glasses and eye me with suspicion. The union office was their social club, a gathering of retirees like you might find among the morning walkers at nearby Dhakuria Lake. It was hard to imagine that these men reading the newspaper were once militants on the front lines of the epic war between labour and capital.
In his lifetime, Manoj has seen the rise and fall of Calcutta’s industries, and its organised labour power. Manoj started working at Usha in the 1950s. Over the next decade, the factory grew, hiring hundreds more workers. The British were gone, but Calcutta was still India’s industrial powerhouse. The structure of the economy, though, was colonial, the wealth it produced undistributed. And so Calcutta also became the base of the Communist labour movement.
In 1977, a Left Front coalition headed by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM, was elected to power in the state. When the protesters became the rulers, CITU, its umbrella union, went from being the warriors for the revolution to the foot soldiers of the state. The techniques of agitprop, which had brought them to power, remained but without the rationale.
In the 1960s there were 5,000 people working in the factory, Manoj told me, and 2,000 more in another Usha factory nearby in Bansdroni. The Bansdroni unit still had about sixty union members. ‘The workers at Bansdroni are like terminal cancer patients,’ Manoj said. ‘They are still taking their medicine, but they know there are going to die.’
Soon, he predicted, that factory, too, would be closed, and the land sold to developers and turned into flats. Then the air conditioners at the union office would be turned on each morning for the benefit of exactly zero members of the working class.
The factory where Manoj and his comrades worked and agitated and struck has long ceased to exist. In the lanes nearby was the new working class, made up of security guards and sales reps from the mall that had replaced the factory, eating chow mein at the roadside stalls while standing, always in a hurry, their ID cards proudly dangling from their necks. Manoj’s union had as little to do with them as his parents’ village world had to do with him now.
As he walked me out, Manoj suggested I go to Taratala, the area around the Calcutta Port. ‘Here, some places are closed. There, the whole area is a crematorium.’
***
During the colonial era, Taratala was a hub of engineering companies, mostly British-owned. Many of them made heavy machinery for defence or railways, as well as machines that were used in other industries. Pranab Ray Gupta operated at the Kidderpur and Taratala branch of CITU. Pranab looked like your typical Party man, bush shirt partly unbuttoned, cloth bag on shoulder, white oiled hair. He once worked in a factory called MMC, owned by Mahindra and Mahindra, the jeep manufacturers, in Taratala. The factory made diesel engines and machines to manufacture textiles. This sort of high-end industrial production was fairly typical in Taratala. There were once 3,200 workers in his factory, Pranab told me. The factory declared ‘work suspension’ in 1988, because factory ‘closures’ require that a company follow numerous government regulations, like paying workers their outstanding dues. So factories delay the official ‘closure’ and merely maintain an existential limbo under terms like ‘work suspension’ when wages and production cease but the firm still exists on the books.
We were in a taxi on Garden Reach Road, driving south along the Ganga. Walled off on both sides are rail properties, port properties, places with names like Hastings, Napier and Belvedere. For over a century, the wealth of Asia passed through here en route to London.
Kidderpur dock. The Ganga to the right, docked ships on the left, an inlet of broad, still water with gleaming ships and godowns. Giant cranes loaded and unloaded goods. Mercedes-Benzes with rolled-up windows glided by, carrying foreigners. Containers were stacked like Lego blocks in a yard, to be plunked onto tractor-trailers and driven away. The dock was an impressive sight. The scale was imperial. Gigantism reigned.
Up to the 1970s, a generation after the British left, Bengal was the wealthiest and most industrialised state in India. Calcutta was the nation’s manufacturing hub, the largest city in India and the fourth largest in the world. In the next four decades, the city de-industrialised, leaving a rust belt on the Ganga.
During the colonial period, waves of men migrated from northern India and settled in Kidderpur to work in the docks. There were once over 200,000 workers in the Kidderpur area, Pranab said, 60,000 in the port and dock alone. Now there are 18,000, and most of them are temporary or contract workers. Thousands had once worked on the docks, loading and unloading ships. What remained of that work was done by machines. Besides, there was so little that Calcutta made any more that needed to be shipped around the world.
There are now almost no factories left. The hundreds of thousands of men and women who laboured there had lost their livelihoods. How had it happened? The story was that the dock was dead, killed by the recalcitrant river with silt piles so high that few ships can pass, killed by other ports elsewhere in India that are easier and cheaper to ply to, killed by the death of manufacturing, killed by the unions.
When the docks died, the next generation lost the opportunity to find jobs there, as their fathers and grandfathers had before them. Some moved away, to other neighbourhoods, other occupations. Those who could not, stayed. The leavers were mostly Hindus, the stayers Muslims. It was not unlike what I knew from going to graduate school in New Haven, where the skeletons of factories that gave the world Winchester Rifles and other armaments stood surrounded by neighbourhoods that were predominantly black and poor, and where drug dealing was a profession that let a young man feel he was doing a man’s job. The profession that opened up in Kidderpur was smuggling. Somewhere down those alleys, in my reporting days, Imran and I had met Qutubuddin, a scholarship boy with a masters degree from the University of Calcutta and no job. His father had been a dock worker. Qutubuddin made his money as a mule. Each year he travelled to Hong Kong to carry smuggled goods back to Calcutta to be sold in the Fancy and Five Star Markets in Kidderpur.
Of the over 45,000 acres of closed factory lands in and around Calcutta, a great deal of it is along the banks of the Ganga. Vast swathes of urban space were strewn with the skeletons of its machine-age past. Lush tropical creepers had colonised the sheds inside these compounds. For a while, CITU agitated for reopening factories. Reopening factories was also a populist battle cry for many politicians. It made them seem like heroes, made for good photos in the newspapers. But even when a few factories reopened, often with much government fanfare and ribbon-cutting and press reports, they would close a few months later, far from the public gaze, because they owed money to various banks, lenders and utilities. Typically, the gas company or the electric company would shut the lines, demanding payment for outstanding bills, and the charade would be over.
The conversion of factories to riverfront luxury condominiums is now well underway, but it happens in stages. First, a company buys out the property with promises of reopening the factory. Then the factory temporarily reopens or remains shut. The machinery is moved out and sold off. Then the land is sold off to developers.
By the 1990s, CITU’s role changed from agitating to reopen factories, to negotiating the real-estate transactions. CITU had great nuisance power, and of course the ear of the state. It could prove to be obnoxious and obstruc
tive to developers, with its marches, rallies and worse. But as with all Calcutta street theatre that dabbles in the instruments of violence, it could be paid off. In practice, this meant the union would negotiate the payment of outstanding dues to ex-workers, primarily making sure the workers received their retirement savings. Unofficially, it has meant that money sometimes moved into Party and personal coffers. In 1999 police arrested a CITU leader for accepting a 100,000-rupee – or $2,200 – cash bribe from a factory owner at a Calcutta restaurant. The factory, which had been closed for ten years, was being converted into real-estate land to be resold. It was reported that police were tipped off by leaders within the CPM, the work of one faction trying to undermine another.
Our taxi crossed the brace bridge on Garden Reach Road, which is famous because it rotates to let ships pass between the river and the inlet. The bridge rarely rotates any more, said the taxi driver, bemused. After the inlet, the area became an industrial belt. Compounds belonging to ITC, Brooke Bond and MMC, where Pranab worked, lined the road. Some factories had quaint English names like Braithwaite, Balmer Lawrie or Stewarts & Lloyds, but most of them were gone. The factories had been built on land leased from the Port Trust. When the factories closed, unlike everywhere else in the city, the land could not be turned over to a developer to build a mall and luxury condominiums. Some of the spaces had been leased out as warehouses. Most stayed vacant. Taratala was a memorial to the city’s industrial past.
We passed the port workers’ quarters. The quarters were two storeys high, with long corridor balconies that led to individual apartments. The building was intact. It did not look like the crumbling ruins that dotted the city, with signs that said Biporjonok Bari – dangerous dwelling – and were places that had become so uninhabitable that they had to be gradually abandoned. But no one lived in the quarters any more. The doors to the apartments were all thrown open, the insides dark at noon. It looked like a place that had been hit by sudden natural disaster, a place that people had fled.
The Epic City Page 16