The Epic City

by Kushanava Choudhury

  Later, he would say with pride to my mother: ‘I rode a bus today after many, many years.’

  At Sealdah, we alighted at the foot of the Flyover, and followed the tramline as it curved like a sickle into Mirzapur Street. We marched up Mirzapur, past a phalanx of paper merchants. Baba suddenly stopped. ‘This is where the old sweet shop was,’ he said, ‘and there the old tea shop. And that’ – he was now standing in front of a locked gate – ‘that was the gully that led straight to our house.’

  He stood staring intently at the gate. A woman was looking at us from a nearby threshold. ‘Wasn’t there a gully here?’ he asked her.

  ‘Yes, but that has been closed,’ she said, puzzled why these two strangers were so enamored of an alley in the middle of the bhaat-ghoom siesta hours.

  ‘That gully led straight to our house,’ Baba said again.

  Baba led me further up Mirzapur and then turned left. We passed a few houses with printing presses gurgling in their front rooms. Then the lane widened and forked. Baba veered left and kept walking. In a house made grey by faded paint, Baba pointed to a niche in the wall, hardly wider than a man’s waist, and said, ‘That’s where Alauddin would sit all day playing his tabla.’ Alauddin ran a laundry from that niche, he explained. ‘He would sit there in his laundry and play tabla all day.’

  ‘And there, that balcony,’ Baba said, pointing up at a little portico lunging from the second floor of the same house, ‘Bablu’da would drop his balloons from there. All the children used to crowd below the balcony to catch Bablu’da’s balloons.’ This was the house where in two rooms my grandparents had raised an ever-expanding family that eventually ballooned to thirteen children. We entered. The corner room had been subdivided. A part of it had been given over to a ‘DTP’ or desktop publishing shop, which was run by a man my age, who my father spoke with and identified as Bablu’s son. The house, too, was subdivided now, Bablu’s son informed us blandly, standing at the door of his shop. Inside, a couple of young men were seated in front of computers on Formica desks. For a moment, Baba’s natural caution, his pragmatism, seemed to have abandoned him. Without invitation, he brushed past Bablu’s son and marched into the room where he had spent most of his childhood and adolescence, the stares of the DTP employees be damned.

  In ‘Kabuliwala’, one of Tagore’s most iconic short stories, an itinerant Afghan hawker in Calcutta returns after many years to the home of one of his favorite customers, to visit a little girl named Mini. But of course Mini is not so mini any more. It is her wedding day. The Kabuliwala has been away for over a decade and time has not stood still. In the pathos of the Kabuliwala is that universal urge to slap time across the face and command it to turn backward, to cease and desist all mind tricks, to revert Mini to herself. Tagore expressed what my father felt right then in Bablu’s son’s DTP shop, what we have all felt at one point or another, where all the learned defences of adulthood are melted by the flame-torch of memory and we surge ahead, unsure of what propels us or how to stop. We demand that the past restore to us our order, our world, the place where we are not interlopers, but ourselves. Is that not the cruellest cut of nostalgia? To walk into your childhood home, and find that three guys have partitioned your sitting room and occupied it with their computer terminals? Now they are looking askance at you! How dare they dwell in the world you have protected so carefully over all those decades in New Jersey, while shovelling snow and creeping through rush-hour traffic, all that time dreaming of a land of tabla players and raining balloons?

  Baba went into the corridor, beckoning me to follow him into the dim courtyard that led to a dank bathroom. From the courtyard, he looked up at what was the landlord’s residence above.

  ‘When we were growing up there were fights upstairs all the time. People throwing buckets. Metal buckets,’ he said to me. ‘We have heard every insult.’

  The family still lived upstairs, though Baba evinced no interest in meeting them. When they were not battering each other with metal buckets, by Baba’s telling, they were trying to evict his family. They tried many times, but since all the boys in the para had been my grandfather’s students, they were unsuccessful. The public of the street was against them.

  The landlords were Ghotis, like my mother’s family, meaning they were from the western part of Bengal, the part that had stayed in India. My father’s family were Bangals, Hindus from East Bengal, who had arrived after Partition when East Bengal became East Pakistan, and eventually Bangladesh.

  Later my father said to my mother: ‘For us, Ghotis were people who fought with buckets.’

  To which Ma retorted that in her para the Bangals were the tenants who would wear towels in public. ‘For us, Bangal was synonymous with “uncultured”.’

  In the Ghoti-Bangal battles that were played like background music in my childhood, sometimes playfully and sometimes with taunts, it was always Bangalness that my father and his siblings held up as a source of pride. There was never any talk of being ‘refugees’. Refugees were other people, to be pointed at on the roadside with disdain, the squatters of history.

  We walked through the Baithakkhana Bazar that stretches all the way to Surendranath College. The adjoining Surendranath School, where my father and his brothers had been students, and where my grandfather had been a maths teacher, had closed down. Inside the college, everything was as my father remembered it. We wandered the halls, two misfits, as he showed me the union room, the canteen, the physics lecture halls.

  Baba wandered into a chemistry lab while it was in session. A room full of students worked at long wooden tables, using cloudy glassware. It was as if Baba had become suspended between the person he remembered being and the person he was now. He wandered from room to room propelled almost involuntarily through the labs and lecture halls of a past life, without reason or control. He was not all there.

  ‘It looks exactly the same,’ Baba said, as if speaking only to himself. Everything, even the dirty beakers in the chemistry lab, looked unchanged in forty years, he said. Only the students had changed.

  The kids were short and skinny. They wore jeans and one hundred-rupee T-shirts, had gelled hair and cell phones, like all denizens of today’s Bengali lower middle class.

  They look like Marwaris, he said.

  In Calcutta, Baba seemed to see Marwaris everywhere. Marwari shingara sellers, Marwari barbers, Marwari cobblers, Marwaris in vocations unheard of among their ilk. Like a soldier who carries a photo of his beloved in a secret flap in his flak jacket, an image he always feels is there, protecting him from the miseries of war, my father carried a mental image of his city. What ‘Marwari’ stood to mean, I soon realised, was anyone who did not fit my father’s image of the city, the image he had carefully nursed within him for decades in suburban New Jersey, dreaming of a balmy world full of faces that resembled his own former self. Perhaps it was no different from a generation ago, when the refugees had flooded the college. Then, too, men of an earlier generation must have wandered these halls in quiet outrage at the sight of my father and his brothers.

  Russian Dolls

  The Sealdah house in which my father grew up had no electricity until Baba was in class nine. Even in my childhood, in Bagmari, when the situation was not so dire, the struggles of daily existence were always palpable. Dida’s room was the headquarters of our federation, whose outposts were spread around suburban Calcutta, of families living in one or two rooms, where towels and lungis hung from bedposts, where meals were cooked and eaten on the floor, and where each night every room became a bedroom, every stretch of floor turned into a place to sleep. Every petty task, every small event, seemed fraught with the possibility of bringing forth disaster. In the future loomed the big worries: would there be enough money to get their daughters married? Would their sons find jobs? Those were houses where families struggled for years to save enough to convert an outhouse into an indoor bathroom. In those cramped spaces, there was so little margin for error or desire.

  When Indi
a became free, my father’s family became refugees; part of a deluge of bodies taking over empty spaces all over the city, turning the pristine metropolis into a slum. This could never have happened in the British time, people said. Then, laws were respected. There was such a thing as discipline, orderliness. The streets were washed every day and the footpaths hadn’t been taken over by hawkers and the homeless. What an idyll Calcutta must have been before the coming of the refugees!

  Before Partition, my grandparents had been Hindu Brahmin landlords. They lived off rents on land worked by low-caste Hindu and Muslim peasants in Faridpur district. My grandfather lived in Calcutta most of the year as a teacher and hostel warden at Surendranath School in Sealdah. My grandmother lived in the village with the children in their family home. In those days Dida would often visit Calcutta and stay in Dadu’s hostel quarters. During summer vacations and Durga Pujo holidays, Dadu would return to the village and distribute gifts from the metropolis: stockings and high-heeled shoes for his daughters, stylish backpacks for his sons. In the city Dadu was a schoolteacher, in the village a feudal lord. This nimble hopping from one place to another, the ability to inhabit the metropolis and the village, to be schoolteacher and landlord, to live with a foot in each world, was slashed by Partition. When Partition came, the monomania of the twentieth century caught up with my grandfather. He was made to choose.

  To understand what happened, we have to begin with the famine that Manoj had witnessed. The city was full of girls who had been sold to feed their families and meet the new war-fuelled demand in the whorehouses. Thousands of idle and well-fed Tommies and GIs lived the good life of the White Town, waiting for war. In the Black Town, well-fed Indians with steady government jobs went about their daily lives as if normality had not been breached. All the while, dead bodies piled up in the streets. In the 1940s, the sound of hunger and the sight of dead bodies had become somehow naturalised in the streets of Calcutta in a way that we cannot fathom, because we have no reference point, no way to make sense of the calamity that befell the city. For that perhaps we would have to compare it to Tokyo or Dresden, to the cities of the Allies’ enemies, which were firebombed or turned to rubble. What the British managed in Bengal, upon their own subjects, could only be understood in those extreme terms.

  At the time, Ian Stephens, the English editor of my paper, the Statesman, defied wartime censors to publish pages of photographs of people dying amid plenty. The Statesman printed numerous editorials to condemn the colonial government for what it had wilfully wrought. Scholarship has since confirmed what eyewitnesses knew: there was nothing natural about this disaster. The British made the famine, of that there is no dispute. But millions of Calcuttans went along, watching people arrive on the streets to die, and did almost nothing.

  An unprecedented inhumanity had descended upon the city in the years of the war. In Calcutta today we pass people cooking, sleeping and begging on the footpaths and ignore them as if their predicament is normal. So too, in that time, Calcuttans must have grown accustomed to strolling past people fighting for scraps with vultures and wheelbarrows full of human carcases. The moral order of society collapsed because of the famine. What followed can only be understood in that context.

  The war was ending. The two main political parties, the Muslim League and the Congress, were arguing over the future constitution. Both sides knew the British would soon leave India. But in what state? Would there be one India or two, a Hindustan and a Pakistan? What would be the fate of Calcutta, which was India’s largest city and the capital of Bengal, its largest Muslim-majority province? Everything was up for grabs.

  Initially, the League’s demand for Pakistan – a separate nation state for India’s Muslims – seemed more like a bargaining tool at the negotiating table. But when the discussions between Congress and the Muslim League fell through in the monsoon of 1946, the League’s leader, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, declared 16 August 1946 to be Direct Action Day.

  In Bengal, the Muslim League had formed a provincial government. Its leader Husain Suhrawardy declared Direct Action Day a holiday and called a bandh. The league organised a major rally at the Maidan. On 16 August thousands of Muslim men walked to Esplanade from all over the city and its industrial suburbs. Some of the first clashes of the morning happened in Maniktala as Muslim labourers were crossing the Beleghata Canal heading to the Maidan. In front of Maniktala Market, League supporters fought with Hindu shop owners who refused to close their shops. By afternoon those areas had become war zones. Guns had been plentiful during wartime. A bottle of whisky could get you a revolver from a GI. The strongmen on both sides were ready with arms. About three-quarters of the city’s residents were Hindu and one-quarter were Muslim, not very different from what it is today. But back then, the layout of the city was completely different. There were Muslim pockets in Hindu areas, Hindu pockets in Muslim areas, patchworked across the city.

  On Direct Action Day, Calcutta was going to be liberated para by para. After the Muslim League’s rally, mayhem broke loose. Bands of men went lane by lane, house by house, burning, looting and killing. Smoke them out, burn them down, take over land. Drive the other side out. The strategy was area control. In Maniktala, Hindus drove out Muslims. In Park Circus, Muslims were driving out Hindus. In Kidderpur, Pakistan was being made, in Bowbazar, Hindustan. Barricades went up between neighbourhoods, like international borders that could not be crossed. On Chitpur Road, the buses stopped near the Nakhoda Masjid and detoured for several blocks before continuing onward. That stretch of Calcutta’s oldest street had become Pakistan.

  In the first two days, the League had used its goons and guns to take the battle to Hindu paras. Worse, Suhrawardy used his power to hold the police back. Then the goondas of the Congress and the other Hindu parties had organised their war in Muslim paras. Even the full force of the state could not control the violence for several more days. The killings went on for a week. Hundreds of thousands were forced into refugee camps. Five to ten thousand people were killed; the actual figures will never be known. In the muggy August heat dead bodies began rotting on pavements as they had during the famine. There were so many bodies everywhere that the sanitation authorities could not figure out how to dispose of them. On the streets there were bodies being eaten by vultures. Bodies were thrown into the Ganga. Bodies were burned round the clock at Nimtala. Bodies were buried in mass graves at the cemetery in Bagmari. Bodies were chopped up into pieces and stuffed into drains. The water pressure of the city plummeted until, as the historian Janam Mukherjee wrote, Calcutta could finally ‘digest its dead’.

  Partition was born on the cannibal streets of Calcutta. After this, there could be no more coexistence. There would have to be two nation states: India and Pakistan.

  From August 1946 onwards the killings continued sporadically for months, first in Noakhali, then in Bihar, here and there across the land. It was a time when homemade bombs were going off in the Bengal countryside, when rumours of stabbings abounded. In their village, my uncles remembered Muslim schoolfriends suddenly brandishing knives and talking casually of murder. At that time, Dadu felt that it would be better to take the family with him to Calcutta. Not permanently – after all, his mother and brothers were still in the village, with families of their own – just until the ‘Hindustan-Pakistan’ troubles died down.

  On 15 August 1947, the British partitioned their empire and left. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, delivered the radio address on that day in his clipped English accent:

  ‘Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.’

  At the moment that Nehru celebrated India’s half-measure freedom, Gandhi, his mentor, wasn’t making sweeping Hegelian pronouncements. He was keeping vigil in a house abandoned by a Muslim family in Beleghata in Calcutta, meeting with Hindu and Muslim
leaders and pleading with them to hold back their goons. It was a year after Direct Action Day. Pakistan had come into being; Bengal’s Muslim League government was being disbanded. The Hindu thugs began the attack, dreaming of a redux of the previous year’s mass killing, only this time initiated by them and not the League. The violence had resumed in Calcutta.

  ‘A big city like Calcutta is bound to have many thieves and plunderers. God has not yet given me the power to win them over,’ Gandhi said to the city’s leaders. ‘[But] It is the gentlemen goondas who are the real creators of trouble.’ In Beleghata, he began a fast unto death until the rival party leaders signed a pledge that they would stop the killing by risking their lives if necessary. They signed his pledge and the killing ceased. Then goondas began arriving in Beleghata, bringing with them Sten guns, spears, rifles, knives, cartridges and bombs to deposit them at Gandhi’s feet as a true peace offering. Among those who surrendered arms was a local Congress dada in Beleghata named Jugal Chandra Ghosh. In 1946, he had organised the killings in the locality, raising funds from businessmen and doling out ten rupees for each murder, five rupees for a ‘half murder’, as he later put it. The encounter with Gandhi brought a remarkable conversion in Ghosh. Like Dasyu Ratnakar becoming Valmiki, for the rest of his life, Ghosh worked to maintain the peace that Gandhi had forged.

  But by then, the Great Calcutta Killings had spread to a whole subcontinent. Millions were fleeing from their homes, in Lahore, in Bombay, in Delhi, in Dhaka. The battle in Calcutta, first fought para by para, had turned into a war across the hurriedly made boundaries of new nation states.

  ***

  My grandmother never accepted Partition. Even in my childhood something of her feudal bearing shone through in the anarchic state of our flat – which was proof of her inability to do housework – and in the hospitality she offered in her one room, even when there was so little to be hospitable with. Some part of her was forever living that old life when she had never stepped out of the house except in a palanquin. As a child I used to help Dida spool thread through the needle of her gleaming Usha sewing machine. That well-oiled and carefully maintained machine had been given to our family on a state-run scheme for refugee families to earn extra income. That machine was one of the only valuable things she owned. Of all her other possessions, she only had stories, tales of what she had left behind. For years, well into my childhood, she wrote and received postcards to do with ‘the land’. The land was a running theme in our Bagmari flat, the lost land, the orchards and fields, the mangos and jackfruits, the ponds full of fish. Bangladesh must be the largest country in the world, the Ghotis used to say, because every refugee claims to have left a small kingdom behind.