It was the wrong time, the wrong place for Boro Mama to die. When we were in Calcutta together, Boro Mama made it a point to visit old school friends, and places he knew as a child. He jotted down memories in his pocket diary. He had stopped painting years ago. Now, he was planning to write short stories, he told me. He was collecting material. He remembered being a boy trapped in St Paul’s School, unable to go home, when the riots started on Amherst Street in ’46. He remembered the Maniktala Market being closed during the riots. He remembered the Rani Bhabani School across the street from their house becoming a refugee camp. There used to be a small parking garage on their street. He remembered how Dida had hid a Muslim chauffeur who worked in that garage in a secret crawl space underneath her prayer room and saved him when Hindu mobs came. Ashoke was going to write it all down.
I never called Boro Mama after he left, never spoke with him or exchanged emails after our last dinner together. I assumed I would see him again. There seemed plenty of time. Surely, I always thought, we would share a roll at Nizam’s, kochuris from Ganguram or a peg of whisky at Chota Bristol. What I did not know, had not anticipated, was that the narrative of every human life does not follow a three-act structure. The hero doesn’t always exit in the third act, after his triumphal return to the place from which he had set out years before. No, many die the death of extras, blown to smithereens in some inconsequential montage battle scene which does not even hold our attention, three-quarters of the way in.
Nothing felt right. I couldn’t work.
Would you feel better, Durba asked, if you went to pray at a temple?
I could think of nothing worse. The frenetic crowds of Kalighat temple or the rows of penitents along roadside shrines made me uneasy. They were entranced by forces which I could not fathom.
Instead, I walked, alone. I went for long meanders along the Ganga. I wandered the lanes of College Street. I got lost down unknown alleys in Chitpur and Sovabazar. In this way, one afternoon, while sleepwalking through the city, I ended up at the Pareshnath Temples off Raja Dinenda Street. I had not been there in years. When I was a kid we used to go there to see the pools of fish.
In the late nineteenth century, traders who came from the parched Marwar region of Rajasthan and got rich in Calcutta had built the Pareshnath Temple, or rather temples, for there were four in all, each of a unique architecture. The Marwaris, as they came to be called, became a dominant, and much maligned, business community in Calcutta. Many of them were Jains. The Jains believe in ahimsa, doing no harm to any living being, meaning not only to humans, but to animals and even insects and microbes. It was their ethic of nonviolence that Gandhi had mobilised against British rule. The temples at Pareshnath were Jain temples. At Pareshnath, no one hassles you to buy flowers and incense and chadors as at the temples and dargahs. There is no mad rush of fervent devotees. Three of the temples at Pareshnath are beautiful but spare, spaces of contemplation. But the one with the pools of fish looks like a funhouse. In the late nineteenth century, Muslim craftsmen from Rajasthan were brought to build a temple of mosaics and mirrors like a child’s lush fantasy world.
It was late afternoon, and families congregated there as at any popular para park. There were old men gathered in clusters doing adda. Housewives walked the grounds in groups, and children were left alone to wander from pool to pool in search of golden fish. I remembered coming as a boy with my parents to marvel at those fish, just like my uncle Ashoke had come with Dida when he was a boy. A trail of memories linked that moment to something larger and eternal. I sat there a long while, watching the fish and the children and felt, for the first time, a sense of peace.
I have been back to Pareshnath many times since. Once I asked the priest there why those Marwari Jain traders had built such a place of amusement when their philosophy was so austere. They wanted to draw people to the temple, he said simply. Just like it brought you here.
***
Camouflaged earmuffs and faux babushka hats were the rage at our sidewalk sales that season, producing Calcuttans attired for the Arctic. From New Jersey, my parents’ calls included more and more weather reports of snow storms, the climate to match Calcutta’s couture.
At Maniktala Market, Salauddin is Mejo Mama’s fixed man for chicken. ‘When you enter the Maniktala Market, go left,’ Mejo Mama advised me, ‘past all the fishmongers and the egg sellers to the very end. The guy you hit is Salauddin. He has the best chickens.’
But don’t ask for him, he warned. All the butchers call out to woo you as you pass, just as the booksellers do on College Street. ‘They’ll all say they are Salauddin. I’m telling you, go left then straight down. Buy only from him.’
Mejo Mama had been buying chicken for close to half a century. I took his advice. The front half of Maniktala Market is dedicated to meat, eggs and the real centrepiece of Maniktala, fish. Outside, on the street, the vendors laid out their merchandise on a tarp on the footpath and squatted alongside their potatoes and onions, just like in our local bazaar. But inside Maniktala Bazar, each vendor sat on a plinth raised about three feet from the ground, like a minor lord. Salauddin sat atop his throne at the far end of the first row of butchers. Behind him, like a backdrop, were several storeys of chicken coops.
Salauddin kept poultry and deshi, or country chickens, and equally good counsel. He could advise on how to cook a chicken curry, as well as on the appropriate age to father children. I was to bread the chicken pieces ever so slightly, he suggested, before dipping them into the pan. And I was wise to wait a few years – what’s the hurry? – before the kids came. They don’t let you enjoy life, he said.
The Hindu butcher in my para places each chicken on a small chopping block – the stump of a tree made smooth by blood – and cleaves off the head, guillotine-style. It falls to the floor and rolls a little way away. The body keeps convulsing, a mass of feather and muscle in the butcher’s hand as it thrashes about. The butcher throws the decapitated bird into a wooden crate as if it were a feathery football and attends to other business, talks politics – will the bandh come off tomorrow, where did the opposition burn buses today – while the fight slowly leaves the bird’s body.
Salauddin killed chickens the Abrahamic way. He slit their necks quickly and let the blood rush out. There is less drama, less agony in the show. Durba is ecumenical in her horror at fowl slaughter, and so it is my job to buy chicken. I don’t mind. If I’m going to eat it, then the least I can do is witness its slaughter. If I am to be a beneficiary, then I feel I should at least carry the suffering that is caused for my well-being on my conscience. You can kill an animal by letting it thrash about headless in a box or you can slit its throat and hold it down in a bucket of water. Either way, it is what must be done so that you can have a pleasurable dinner. Vegetarianism to me is no solution to the problems of ethical living, but rather the fantasy of purity. This life is messy, bloody and cruel. There are only dirty hands, I believe, only complicity and compromise. Now that you know, how will you choose to live?
Winter had set in. Not real winter in the way my parents’ phone calls brought news of hailstorms, ice and snow. Calcutta winter meant sixty-degree nights. Salauddin was sitting at his usual perch. ‘Come, come brother,’ he said. He was wearing a wool hat and scarf. ‘Ay, this cold, no one can even wake up in the morning.’
At night he slept on his plinth, his piece of real estate in the market. He was just one man, he said, what was the point of renting a house? Besides, ‘The chickens are here and someone has to take care of them. Sometimes they get sick, they need constant care.’
But business was hurting, he said. It was too cold to come to the morning bazaar. ‘Curry pieces?’ he asked, and I nodded. He fished one of his birds from the coops and slit its throat. As the blood rushed out, he kept chatting away, as if the sheer quantity of words would keep him warm.
***
In New Jersey, Baba had read my descriptions of College Street, and called me: ‘This was the world in which I grew up, e
xcept I never saw it like you.’
It caught me by surprise, for my father had grown up in Sealdah. I had thought College Street was mine. Musulman Para Lane in Sealdah was the street where my father spent his childhood. Musulman Para Lane – literally Muslim Neighbourhood Lane – was not called that any more, for the Musulmans are gone. The names of all the lanes around there were quietly changed into Hindu ones when my father was a boy. In the heart of Sealdah, his street became Monmotha Mukherjee Row. But the city is a palimpsest. The stories rubbed out and written over still seep through, if you know how to look. Like the political exhortations on city walls that defy a simple whitewash, whose messages are legible between the letters of the newer slogans written with fresh paint, so too my father – Hindu, Brahmin, Bangal – always spoke of home as Musulman Para Lane, not Monmotha Mukherjee Row.
I had been there only once, when I was maybe ten years old, with Baba. How small the road was, he had said then, compared to how large it had seemed when he had played cricket there as a boy. He had pointed out the house, a depressing, ancient-looking building in a depressing, ancient-looking neighbourhood.
It had none of the decadent charm of my mother’s childhood home, of genteel, storied decline. The para seemed more like a ghetto, a place anyone would be happy to leave as soon as their station allowed. My overwhelming impression had been of the meanness of its poverty. Perhaps it was the stories my father had fed me, too, of his barren childhood, homework by candlelight, one pair of pants each year, a dozen siblings living in two rooms. I remember seeing that house as a child of ten, American-born, and thinking: This place has nothing to do with me.
After our phone call, one day I walked from College Street down Mirzapur Street, and picked an alley by intuition. Twenty years after that first visit, I remembered exactly how to find Musulman Para Lane. The neighbourhood housed more paper merchants, box makers and printing presses than I remembered, the world of College Street pressing south. I walked past the boarding houses and the egg wholesalers, the shawl repairers and a shop of political paraphernalia that carried the flags of all parties, except for the Naxalites. But I could not find my father’s house.
I walked farther south, past Surendranath School, where my grandfather had been a math teacher, and where my father and his brothers had gone to school. I took a lane choked by bamboo scaffolding, which had been erected like an arch of triumph stretching across its breadth. A huddle of young men stood playing carrom beneath the scaffolding. I followed a loaded cycle-van and a mother and son as they gingerly squeezed past the carrom players, and found myself out in the familiarity of Amherst Street. I woke up. My mind recovered control over my body. From Mirzapur Street, my subconscious had done all the leading, from lane to lane, through a para I had visited only once when I was a boy. I came home perplexed at having sleepwalked those lanes. What was I hoping to find?
A few days later, I called my father in New Jersey, and without to planning to, I mentioned that I had been in his old neighbourhood but had not been able to find the house. My father is a man of dotted ‘i’s and crossed ‘t’s. From two continents away, he immediately began giving detailed directions: the boarding houses and cheap restaurants, or ‘pice hotels’, that I was to use as landmarks, the eastern approach from the Flyover, the southern route from Lebutala Park. Baba was still talking distances and coordinates, when his voice changed. ‘I have a funny story about Lebutala Park,’ he said. ‘Once we went to play cricket there. I was batting. I was using a homemade bat made by one of the para boys, marking the crease, digging the bat hard. “It’s not going to break, is it?” I asked the boy who had made the bat. “I made it out of guava wood,” he bragged. Then, of course, the bat broke. Oh, how we ran and ran through those gullies, with those boys chasing us. We ran all the way to Bowbazar!’
Then, quickly, his voice changed back to the familiar matter-of-fact tone. ‘OK, talk to you later,’ he said, and hung up.
***
My father was the tenth of thirteen children, the first born after Partition. In that vast brood cramped into those two rooms in Sealdah, Baba became the boy who made good, finishing college, then graduate school, to become a scientist. In 1976, when he first went to America on a post-doctoral research fellowship, fifty of our relatives came to see him off at Dumdum Airport. In our family saga of collective ascent, his migration was a crowning achievement.
My parents went to Buffalo, New York as newlyweds. Two years later, they returned to Calcutta with a three-month-old baby and moved into the smaller bedroom of our family flat in Bagmari. The world to which we returned was my grandmother’s world. Dida lived in the larger bedroom with her two unmarried children. The Bagmari flat abutted a cowshed and a lumberyard. Farts and factory sirens sounded throughout the day. It was the first house my grandparents could call their own since they migrated. In 1947, their home, their village in East Bengal became part of Pakistan, a nation-state for Muslims. For twenty years, my grandparents raised their ever bigger family in rented rooms in Sealdah, in Jadavpur, in Dumdum. In the late 1960s, my grandfather was finally able to buy a small flat in a teachers’ cooperative in Bagmari.
By the time I arrived, my grandfather had died, and his children were keen to efface that past. In our family, only Dida went on speaking in the Bangal dialect with its sizzling ‘zzz’ sounds and confounding turns of phrase, a phonetic pizzazz that my uncles and aunts had flattened into oblivion. It made Dida anachronistic, this harping on the past, this persistence with the dialect of a land lost. But Dida harped. She strictly followed a Hindu widow’s restrictions: she wore only white saris, gave up meat, fish, eggs, garlic and onions and cooked all her meals herself. Her mornings were taken up in prayer to her beloved Krishna, the reigning deity in the altar in her room. Each morning she would put on a fresh sari and lay out an elaborate offering of flowers, Ganga water and fruits as prasad to her deities as she sat down to prayer. Murmured incantations, bell-ringing and incense-lighting followed as her idols were worshipped and ‘fed’ the prasad. I looked upon these daily events as an elaborate form of make-believe. How could she seriously think that those photographs and figurines of Hindu gods and saints would actually eat her food? At prayer’s end, she distributed the prasad among us. I was my grandmother’s twenty-fifth grandchild. She called me Gopal, the nickname for baby Krishna, a diminutive moulded with love. But I steadfastly refused the morning prasad.
The flat had two rooms, a dining space, a balcony – 650 square feet of caged modern living. Dida’s room was like the Sealdah railway station. Pots and pans were stashed below the raised bed. Rolled bedding sat in the corner to be unfurled for the constant parade of visiting relatives. Aside from praying, Dida also cooked, ate and hosted countless visitors in her bedroom. The shutters were perpetually flung open. Stray cats were forever coming through my grandmother’s room and seemed as welcome as Dida’s endless supply of close relatives. To me the improvised arrangements seemed to belong to some anarchic past that was utterly different from our world.
In our room, I remember the shutters always closed, the room cool on muggy Calcutta afternoons. No one murmured incantations or prayed. In the evenings, we listened to the All-India Radio news on my parents’ Panasonic ‘three-in-one’ system from America, after which my mother played LPs of Indian classical music and songs by Rabindranath Tagore. We stored our valuables in a steel wardrobe under lock and key. When guests arrived, they sat on a little wicker love-seat my parents had managed to squeeze into the room. No one ever sat on the floor, much less slept there.
Between those two rooms were the familiar tussles of a thousand joint families everywhere. On weekends, my grandmother went to the neighbours’ to watch Bollywood blockbusters on television, which I was forbidden to see. In those days, when such positions were still possible, my parents refused to buy a TV, fearing that once an idiot box arrived, my grandmother would enthusiastically feed me a steady diet of jungle yelps, gyrating chanteuses and dhishum-dhishum fight scenes.
&
nbsp; Dida had initially objected to my parents’ marriage, since she hadn’t arranged the match, and because my parents were of different castes. Even after relenting, as a Brahmin she had never fully accepted my mother’s lower status. There were never any screaming matches or arguments between my parents and my grandmother. But we lived on two sides of an unbridgeable chasm. My grandmother had never been to school. She was taught to read and write at home and married off when she became a teenager. My mother did research as a biochemist at the Unversity of Calcutta. My parents’ dinner table conversations were about autoclaves and northern blots. My grandmother did not believe in using a refrigerator. Dida’s room represented religion, tradition and the anarchic confusion that was the past. In ours was science, modernity and a clear path to the future. The perennial tension between our rooms felt like a clash of civilisations.
When I was a child, sometimes the relatives of cancer patients came to our house in Bagmari to speak with my father, the cancer scientist. Many of them believed that cancer was contagious or the result of having been cursed. In the taxonomy of our two-room universe, I always slotted those people into Dida’s room, with her pujos and fasting days and irrational beliefs untouched by the light of reason. To me, they represented a past that would soon disappear. The future belonged to the moderns, to us.
***
‘Bagmari, Maniktala, Rammohan, Rajabazar, Sealdah, Sealdah, Sealdah!’ The bus crawled along slowly, picking up passengers at a leisurely pace. It was midday and most people were at work or in bed enjoying a rice-belly nap. Even though the bus was not full, I stood close to my father, covering his right side so no one could pick his pocket. My parents had escaped New Jersey’s January frost to come and see us. Baba and I were going to Sealdah.
The Epic City Page 19