The Epic City

by Kushanava Choudhury

  To read Mujtaba Ali is to always feel as if he is talking to you from across the table at Basanta Cabin. Whether he is drawing us into the world of Kabul’s markets, Berlin’s streets or Cairo’s cafés, he can make a reader feel as at home as we are at the local tea-shop adda. Mujtaba Ali was a peripatetic soul. He lived and taught all over the world, including for a year in Cairo.

  ‘From my rooftop you could see the pyramids clearly,’ he wrote. ‘A tram would whisk you there in minutes – on full-moon nights, they even ran a special service. And yet, six months passed in this café and in that café. For the pyramids, there never seemed enough time. When friends would enquire about this oversight, I would sigh, “All is fate. Ten years in Calcutta and I never managed a dip in the Ganga. Is seeing the pyramids really in my destiny?” (Let me confess: What ephemeral truth is gleaned from seeing a bunch of boulders I have never been able to ascertain, neither before seeing the pyramids, nor after.) I love Hedoa, Hatibagan, Shyambazar. In those places there are no Taj Mahals and no pyramids. And this fact fills me with no grief at all. I love my neighbourhood tea shop. Morning or evening, you will find me in attendance there, next to the neighbourhood’s Potla and Hablu, soaking in the pleasure of idle comradeship over cigarettes and banter.

  ‘When fate forced me to nest in Cairo, by the third day I began to suffer from adda withdrawal. I wandered like a vagabond across this strange city in search of Potla, Hablu and Basanta Cabin, the Sahara’s warm breath mixing with my sighs. And then, thank God, I noticed it: At my neighbourhood coffee shop, each day five fellows would arrive and rant and carry on Basanta Cabin-style over endless cups of coffee and countless cigarettes.’

  What follows is a delightful account of the café culture of Cairo, a whole society laid out before us via adda.

  Mujtaba Ali was Sir’s favourite writer. Sir now lived with his son’s family in Boston, too ill to live on his own in Calcutta. When I was a kid Sir had told me this story:

  Over fifty years ago, Sir took a ship from Europe to India. He was single, with lots of time to kill. He had befriended several other young men on board. An adda formed on the ship and soon they were in the middle of a raging card game. The ship travelled through the Suez Canal. The passage took a day, and passengers were allowed to get off and make a day trip to Cairo and the pyramids. Sir stayed put. ‘There will always be another chance to see the pyramids,’ they said to one another, and kept dealing.

  Sir never saw the pyramids. Like Mujtaba Ali, he preferred another kind of worldliness over the mute testimony of the Sphinx. In the best cosmopolitan Bengali tradition, he always maintained an ease with the world, an uncanny ability to make himself at home no matter how far he ventured.

  Some evenings as I left my Bengali tutorials, books unopened, I would feel a fleeting pang of guilt: ‘Sir, we didn’t do any work today.’

  ‘Shobyi kaaj,’ he would say. ‘Everything is work.’

  Everything is work in the end, if you know how to pay attention.

  Sometime after lunch, Imran said, ‘Ektu kaaj ache’ and went off for a half-day’s shift at the Telegraph. He was back before dinner time. At around 11 p.m. we packed him, Ayesha and their son into a taxi and sent them home. Imran was still talking as the cab sped away.

  ***

  Rajesh and I had become friends through Sumitro. Rajesh made large woodcuts like the nineteenth-century Bengali artists from Battala, full of mythical beasts, Bengal’s canonical heroes and characters from the streets, to create images of the phantasmagorical present. During lunch he had been telling us about his trips to Kumortuli when he was a student at the art college. Sometime after the fourth cup of tea, Rajesh asked, ‘Do you want to go see witches?’

  Apparently the nightlife in Kumortuli this time of year was worth seeing. It was the time when the dakinis, or witches, came out to play. A few days later, Sumitro, Rajesh and I met in front of Maniktala Market and took an auto up Beadon Street to Chitpur Road.

  Chitpur Road is the oldest street in Calcutta, older than the city itself. Chitpur starts in Dalhousie and leads northward and becomes a commercial strip that cuts through the whole Black Town. At the corner of Beadon Street and Chitpur Road are offices of the jatra theatre troupes that travel across Bengal. The buildings at the crossing were covered with billboards that displayed the familiar faces of Bengali TV stars. One billboard advertised a jatra called Return My Land Unto Me. In Bengali, the billboard read: ‘I don’t want industry. I don’t want development. Return my land unto me.’

  Just after the jatra district is Garanhata Lane, narrow, brightly lit, and full of silver shops. Sumitro led us in. In the Company days a British visitor to Chitpur found on sale ‘the jewels of Golkonda and Bundelkhand, the shawls of Cashmere, the broadcloths of England, silks of Murshidabad and Benaras, muslins of Dacca, calicoes, ginghams, chintzes and beads of Coromandel, (and) firs and fruits of Cabul’.

  In Garanhata Lane, the silversmiths still sat cross-legged on the floor, tapping metal sheets gently with hammers as they must have a century ago. In the shop windows were silver headdresses, silver plates and silver coins embossed with Queen Victoria’s head. We bought cigarettes from a stall among the silversmiths and started walking.

  We walked on, past the prostitutes of Sonagachi, garish like prostitutes everywhere but also always with vermilion sprinkled in their hair and conch bangles on their wrists like Bengali Hindu brides. It was from those courtyards, Rajesh said, that the first clay is still collected to make the Durga deities each year at pujo time.

  Just as we passed the cluster of strong-box sellers – bang! – a tubri erupted in a volcano of blazes, rushing high above the catenary of the tramline. Its fiery bouquet encompassed the whole width of Chitpur, before its embers rustled down through the trees and the awnings of the paan shops to silence.

  As we crossed Sovabazar Street, four men approached carrying a Kali deity as if she were riding a palanquin. It had started.

  Fifteen-foot statues of Kali were parked right on Chitpur Road. Men were hoisted up to the shoulders of the deities to give the finishing coat of paint. Lined up on the roadside were Kalis of straw, Kalis of clay, Kalis half painted, fully painted, in terrifying black, in sombre blue. The street became an assembly line. We had arrived in Kumortuli.

  Just before Durga Pujo, Durba and I had weaved through there during one our morning walks as the tableaus of Durga and the demon were being readied. Hindu deities were being made there at all times of the year. The para was perpetually muddy, like a village set in the heart of the city. I had been to Kumortuli many times, but this was my first visit there at night. The darkness made its activities more frenzied and surreal. Sumitro, Rajesh and I turned into a lane lined with warehouses-cum-workshops-cum-showrooms. Inside each windowless room, bright fluorescent bulbs revealed half-made Kalis. Interspersed were shops selling scimitars made of thin gleaming metal and human heads oozing macaroni brains made of clay. The finished Kali deity held up those heads as well as scimitars in her four hands. A man sat with a box of clay hands and massaged each onto her arms. The cycle-van drivers deftly dodged the half-made idols on both sides as they noisily squeaked through the busy lane. We went deeper. The lane clogged and led into another vein. Now we were in a gully only wide enough for walking. Everything in the gully had the bilious olive hue of wet clay. Even the sleeping dogs were camouflaged. The powerful smell of bidis emanated from a corner where loaders played cards. From inside each workshop came the hiss of spray paint. From under a bamboo scaffold on which Kali stood, a rat scurried out, dodging a pint-bottle of Bagpiper Whisky on the way. The light bounced off the walls to create the mood of a theatrical set.

  The story goes that Kali was called upon to vanquish a demon, and then, having destroyed it, she kept going, a jhor of unstoppable destruction doing her death dance. It was then that the mortals called on Shib, her husband, to intervene. Shib lay himself prostrate in Kali’s path, and when Kali stepped on her husband, realising her mistake, she stuck out her to
ngue, a gesture we still make to acknowledge a grave error. The tableaus are a freeze-frame of that moment of recognition: The deity is formed in the throes of her dance, naked in mid-leap, with one foot on Shib’s torso and the iconic tongue darting out.

  ‘Look,’ said a boy peering under a tarpaulin. ‘She’s eating a leg!’

  In fact they all seemed to be eating flesh, a phalanx of cannibals biting into whole bodies, gnawing at legs, arms and the fleshy bits in between. These were the witches, or dakinis and joginis, that Rajesh had brought us to see. They were fearsome creatures who were part of Kali’s battalion. There were witches with frighteningly disfigured mouths in bikini tops and sarongs who looked like contestants for a pageant from another planet. There were headless women, some with bodies emerging out of the bloody mess where heads should have been. There were European phantoms dressed in ties and topcoats, and bhodrolok ghosts dressed in dhuti-panjabis and monsters with golden Godzilla heads who disobeyed any known form.

  The witches and phantoms had once been Durga’s children, Laxmi, Saraswati, Ganesh and Kartik, part of the Durga Pujo tableaus. Recovered in various stages of dissolution, they were recycled. You could tell this from the sway of a witch’s hip that recalled Saraswati, or the size of a sahib phantom’s gut, which gave away its first avatar as Ganesh. Upon the basic structure of sticks and straw a whole new garb of clay was added, of skulls and rumps and bloody fangs. Some were sculpted devouring limbs, others in miniskirts with bared midriffs and fangs. Some were skeletons dressed for a party, in three-piece suits or a gentleman’s dhoti. Others looked like a cross between Marianne at the French Revolution and a she-male dominatrix. We saw hollowed-out eyes fitted with orange light bulbs that lit up like nuclear egg yolks. Others had miniature skulls in their eye sockets. In their arms they cradled cuts of corpses: a shank, a flank, a rump, dripping with blood. Then there were those who had the entrails of corpses hanging from their mouths, looking like pink bubblegum.

  The sculptor who had made those ravenous witches was putting the finishing touches on a set of skeletons bogarting cigarettes. ‘No one else has done this,’ he said with a smile.

  He told us he had made similar skeletons last year, brandishing bottles of booze until the sculptors’ trade association leaders told him to stop, saying it would give Kumortuli a bad name. Most of the phantom-makers are not ‘kumors’ by caste. They do not belong to the sculptors’ trade association, but they live in Kumortuli, para people who had other day jobs. The man who made smoking skeletons had been making phantoms for seven years. During the year he worked as a water-filter repairman, travelling the city, seeking inspiration for his fantastic creations amid the banal details of everyday life.

  Kumortuli is like any neighbourhood. There are stationery shops, tea shops, nursery schools, the typical architecture of a Calcutta para. A girl was finishing painting a few small phantoms in an unlit corner outside her house. It was a typical slum house. The bed was raised high with bricks so as to create the semblance of two floors, the upper tier for sleeping. A man in a lungi was lying on the bed, a woman was cooking on the floor. Samples of work were displayed on a shelf: an artist’s whole world in 10’ by 8’.

  It was clear that Rajesh had brought us to the city’s largest art gallery. At times Sumitro and Rajesh stopped to comment on what would happen if some of these figures were taken as art objects and put in a gallery. At others they mocked contemporary artists, their colleagues, whose work was inferior to the worst specimens in the alleys of Kumortuli.

  Sumitro wanted to buy something. Four children were playing carrom on the street. Next to them were sculptures that looked like dolls, each about a foot high. They were dressed not unlike Barbies, except the hair was wild, and the expressions mangled, the bodies splotched with blood.

  ‘The boy who made them will come soon,’ one of the boys explained. ‘He is a bit slow, that’s why this is all he can make.’

  Sumitro wanted me to buy one but I had already purchased a decapitated head. Then he bought it for himself and said, ‘I’ll give it to my wife: “Menstruating Barbie”.’

  ***

  How could I explain to the Freudian that the city was the problem between us?

  Calcutta was a place of darkness, Durba maintained, the city of Kali. Wasn’t that what all the outsiders ultimately said when they took the easy way out, representing the city as a horror show? Even Anita Desai and Günter Grass, who came to live here for a time and wrote books about the city, ultimately fell back upon the trope of an urban hellhole. Kali became emblematic of the dark forces they felt seething here. Shocked and fascinated by Kali, whose long red tongue, black body and garlands of skulls peer out from every sweet-shop calendar and taxi dashboard, they saw in her the embodiment of the soul-crushing force of the city.

  I have lived in Calcutta half my life, and only been to the iconic Kali temple in Kalighat twice, both times at the urging of visiting American friends who had read about it in their guidebooks. Just as there were no pyramids in Mujtaba Ali’s Cairo, in my Calcutta there is no Kalighat.

  My grandmother worshipped an image of Kali in her prayer room, as does my mother in New Jersey. So what? When I read the hackneyed descriptions of Calcutta as a city of Kali, I feel like a man who does not realise he has been speaking in prose his whole life. The city’s myriad enchantments and horrors resist such a neat and facile metaphor.

  A few days later, I took Durba to Kumortuli. Chitpur Road was already blocked off by police. Kali Pujo was only days away and lorries kept arriving with dozens of para boys, those whom we call ‘lumpen’ in Marxist Bengali. They had come to Kumortuli to pick up the Kali deities, and accompanying witches, for their para pujos. Young men sat on the roofs of the trucks, looking badass. ‘FD Block’ said the banner on one lorry, and a man sat on its head, legs splayed like he was a hero in a Bollywood number. FD Block was one of the alphabetised sections of bourgeois Salt Lake. The hero was wearing metal-framed glasses, his light complexion betraying limited exposure to harsh sunlight. Soon he would be back at his desk, studying for his computer science exams, or writing code at his cubicle in Sector Five. Here he played lumpen for a day.

  ‘Hey, follow me if you want to get drunk,’ said one to his posse.

  We followed the lumpen down Banamali Sarkar Street as it wound towards the river. The road was thick with people today, picking up orders, haggling over prices. From a third-floor window a yellow sari hung down to dry like a festoon all the way to the top of a doorway. A trio of devouring witches stood below. The sari looked like all that was left of their latest victim.

  On the street were crowds of witches, clusters of ten to match the posses of boys who had arrived. The witches had wild hair that went straight up, bared teeth, and eyes that popped out of their sockets. Some had enormous zipper mouths full of teeth from ear to ear. Others had worms coming out of one socket, blood running down their cleavage. They were eating body parts with the relish of someone gnawing at chicken wings. One was eating little bodies held upside down, a leg in each hand and some of the soft middle parts inside her mouth. The witches had breasts and hips and asses of the most preposterous proportions, to match every jangled fantasy. Some of the witches were accompanied by skeletons that looked like pimps. They throttled the witches with poses full of nonchalance: one hand on hip, the other at someone’s throat.

  Banamali Sarkar Street meanders all the way to the river. We crossed the train tracks and were along the Ganga. Inside a parked auto, a few guys were drinking hooch and playing cards in the darkness. Along the embankment, a man was making a tableau featuring two well-dressed children seated on the laps of their smiling parents – a Bengali family portrait in clay. Except the children had no heads. The parents were devouring their brains.

  Sealdah

  In California, my uncle Ashoke went to bed one night and failed to wake up. Boro Mama died, just like that, with no forewarning. Nine months before, I had seen him in Calcutta at Dida’s funeral. The night before he le
ft, Mejo Mama had sent me out to pick up Chinese takeout from a place on Beadon Street. My parents, my uncles and aunt, and Durba and I had had a final family gathering in Dida’s house. Mejo Mama presented Ashoke with a watch, ‘From us all,’ he said, to mark the timeliness of his arrival, because Ashoke had been able to spend time with Dida before she died. He had made it home at the right time.

  That night, Boro Mama had said he was only going to stay in America another two years, maybe three, till my aunt retired. And then they were coming back, to his city, his home. He called it ‘his refuge’. Nothing in his plans had anticipated the interruption caused by his death. It was not like Dida, whose end seemed well planned. Boro Mama was across the dalan when she died. I had no regrets about Dida’s death. She had died at ninety-four, at home, surrounded by her family. To regret her death seemed to me to expect that people should not die. No, her life had a storybook ending. Boro Mama’s death was like being on page 237 of a 300-page novel and having the rest of the pages ripped out.

  I had not ‘given shoulder’ to Boro Mama’s corpse, had not carried him to Nimtala and rolled him into the maws of the electric oven. By the time I arrived in California, there was no body, only absence.

  The absence clung to me when I returned to Calcutta, its pall spreading over our shared city. When I went to D. L. Roy Street, the house felt like a museum. Boro Mama was peering down from the walls, just like his parents and their parents. Phantoms seemed to fill up each empty room. For Mejo Mama, his brother’s promise of return was the thing which had sustained him these last few months since Dida died, the promise of the house being peopled again. With that return foiled, he knew now that no one would come back to live in our ancestral house, in our city. Mejo Mama had put up a framed photo of himself on the wall in the courtyard downstairs, just in case there was no one to do the job when his time came.