The Epic City

by Kushanava Choudhury

  We who were raised on such faith in the nation and progress and modernity, who viewed the future with such confidence, hid away in shame from the most obvious realities about our humiliating condition. How else could the bare fact that freedom had meant homelessness be hidden from plain view? And so we remain strangers to ourselves, our heads filled with notions that have nothing to do with the lives that we are living, and our eyes blind to the most basic truths of our existence.

  This Little Corner

  ‘Why did you come back?’ I asked the Freudian during one of our therapy sessions.

  ‘My PhD advisor in America had asked me the same question,’ she said. ‘Why are you going back to Calcutta, of all places?’

  ‘I said to him, “I can walk there at ten o’clock at night without fear of being raped, unlike in an American city.”’

  Then the Freudian looked at me and said, ‘Although I don’t think that’s true any more.’

  Each day the papers were full of advertisements for luxury high-rise apartments. In the architects’ drawings, the towers were always arising from an empty space that had no people, a terra nullius, like Antarctica or the moon. From these towers emanated a fantasy that seemed to have swept across urban India, from Gurgaon to Gujarat, and finally made its way to Calcutta. In those drawings that appeared in the newspapers, I wondered, where were the tea shops, the bus stands, the people sleeping on the sidewalks? Why did they never show the men who drove their share autos past the malls with the behemoth billboards of bra-and-panty models, which seemed to have been erected only to taunt them? Where were the people of the city, the people of the country, the millions of spitting, shitting human beings who did not figure in this fantasy world?

  The structure that had held us together for my lifetime was coming apart, releasing some to soar to new prosperity. But that unbinding also caused many to be cast out, rejected from any social order, like the former factory workers no one cared about any more. The city seethed with their humiliation, their shame and their alienation from the new dream worlds that were being beamed from those towers.

  Would we be like the Johannesburg I had once visited, with its miles of bungalows with swimming pools, a California in Africa where the rich went to bed each night next to panic buttons and machine guns, awaiting their executioners in the dark?

  For my whole lifetime, through the auto unions and para clubs and Party offices and in myriad other ways, the CPM exercised its tight social control. It patronised thugs and intellectuals, pujo committees and football clubs. No one escaped its embrace, regardless of caste, religion or party affiliation. There was no underworld in Calcutta because every world was subsumed in the Party. In this way, for more than a generation, it had kept the peace. Now, when the towers beamed their fantasies, I saw the contours of older, bloodier orders.

  On the emptied spaces along the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass arose five-star hotels and luxury high-rise apartments. From Park Circus, the Number Four Bridge whizzed motorists to the bypass, skipping over Topsia and Tiljala. You could live in Calcutta your whole life and never enter those paras, which were poor and predominantly Muslim, unseen and unheard by the Hindu city. The lines drawn on the map by the Great Calcutta Killings in ’46 were still there, of Muslims here and Hindus there, even though no one cared to remember how they had been drawn in the first place. If this order collapsed, what would take its place? Every time I crossed the Number Four Bridge, the sight of those invisible lines filled me with fear for the future.

  ***

  The bush-shirt and mud-coloured sari world to which I belonged was still waging an internal battle between schools of leftism. There seemed no memory of the hell this city could veer towards. It was as if they felt a false sense of luxury, of infinite time, which came from living in a society that was suspended for thirty years in formaldehyde.

  I was in Beleghata at the offices of a leftist organisation that has compiled report upon report on the fate of former factory workers. One of the group’s activists and I were drinking tea and smoking on the terrace in the waning light. I was saying how moved I had been by a documentary they had made that profiled former factory workers.

  ‘Doesn’t it bring tears to your eyes?’ he said, and began telling me about the backgrounds of some of the men in the movie. ‘Thinking of them makes me want to cry,’ he said.

  Then he said: ‘All this information-gathering, all these democratic movements are useless. Because no one cares. What you need to do is get some water bottles full of kerosene and get about ten guys and go through all the floors of each of these malls and take care of things. Then people will pay attention.’

  He laughed at the thought. Then he came closer to me, speaking softly so no one would hear: ‘We need a Nav Nirman Sena here, like the one in Bombay. It’s all Hindi speakers here buying the big houses, taking the jobs. Our boys can’t even get into the city to sell potatoes on the pavement.’

  He was talking about the right-wing party, which had been terrorising migrants to the city in Bombay, a leftist uttering out loud a fascist fantasy. He was narrating the dream that we have all had, when all else fails, that dream of tearing it all down and starting with a clean slate. In each generation it takes a different avatar, but the dream is the same and its causes are the same. Who of us has not felt that shame at our powerlessness, and that alienation from the world around us that we are unable to change? From that incapacity arises a fantasy, a fantasy born of weakness, to wipe everything clean.

  After having been so thoroughly colonised, what faith could we have in our own capacities? We see our society as a heap of failure upon failure, failure to organise our resources effectively, failure to be honest and not corrupt, failure to advance according to the dictates of science and reason, failure to have highways and skyscrapers, failure to not spit and piss everywhere, failure to hold our heads up high and not be pitied by the rich countries of the world, failure to cover our drains, to provide clean drinking water or clinics or schools or the basics of a dignified life. Failure upon sweeping failure. And, unable to cope with this mountain of failure, unable to see through the endless complexity and variety of the society in which we were made, we dreamed the child’s dream of purification, hoping for a messianic force to descend and wash all the shit and disease away like a giant monsoon deluge, or burn it down like a fire raging through a slum. When all else fails, let it all burn.

  ***

  From the street, the furniture shop on Rafi Ahmed Kidwai Avenue looked like a Sukumar Ray poem. Clothes horses, cane chairs, wooden desks, beds and armchairs were piled high to the ceiling in fantastic formations. In their midst sat Mihir Choudhury, dressed in a crisp pink shirt with red stripes. His wavy hair almost reached down to his collar and complemented his dapper French-cut beard.

  When we moved in to our flat, my neighbour Sugato had referred me to Mihir’s shop in central Calcutta. We had rented two desks, a cane sofa set, an armchair, two round side tables, and a dining room set, all for the equivalent of $12 a month. It would have been about $13, but Mihir gave us a discount, perhaps because I was Sugato’s friend. Who knew when a policeman would come in handy.

  Our flat had marble floors, glass bookshelves and recessed lighting. But it was Mihir’s furniture I coveted. Those cane armchairs reminded me of the chairs in Dida’s house. The wooden round side tables, which I pulled up when friends arrived for tea, had been ubiquitous in the homes of my childhood. The pieces were old without being antiques, appealing without being ostentatious. They were designed for my kind of people.

  ‘Do you know Amitabh Bachchan rented his bed from here?’ Mihir said, when I went to see him to pay my dues. He was referring to the biggest Hindi film star of all time. ‘That was back when he was a salesman in Calcutta, before he became “Amitabh Bachchan”.’

  A few years ago the Times of India ran a story about Mihir’s Bachchan connection. Fans started showing up, wanting to buy Amitabh’s bed. ‘One woman offered me twenty thousand rupees for
the bed. Twenty thousand!’ he said. ‘How am I to know which bed we rented out to him? If I wanted to do some “dishonesty” I could have given any bed and said, “This is the one: Sleep in Amitabh Bachchan’s bed.”’

  Mihir fished out the bound ledger for 1967–68. The signed entry revealed that the young Amitabh had rented a bed, a divan, chairs, end tables, over a dozen pieces in all. When Bachchan was hospitalised a few years back, TV cameras arrived to interview Mihir. ‘I said, “Oh yeah, a tall guy came once and took all this furniture. But we didn’t think anything of him.” What was I to think? He was nobody then. Then a while later when I went to see Parwana, I thought, “Arre, this man rented from our shop.”’

  Actually, Mihir confided, he had realised nothing of the sort. In fact, his uncle had rented the furniture to Amitabh, and later recognised him on screen. But Mihir was too much of a raconteur to let facts get in the way of a good story. ‘What I am good at is adda,’ he said. ‘That’s what saved me.’

  At the time when Amitabh had been their customer, Mihir had no intention of ever joining the family business. He was studying political science at Maulana Azad College, only a few blocks down Rafi Ahmed Kidwai Avenue but a world away.

  ‘People were being knifed in trams. I got mixed up in it,’ Mihir said. ‘I never knifed-fifed anyone or anything. I couldn’t manage that. But I had to “abscond”.’

  In those days, Mihir used to go to an uncle’s house from time to time for tea and adda. Mihir’s uncle had a friend who was a high-ranking police officer. The officer used to come to his uncle’s house for adda too. One day, his officer friend told him it would be best if he stayed home from college for a year.

  Mihir spent most of 1971 in self-imposed house arrest in Shyambazar. In return, the officer made sure that Mihir was saved from a knock on the door in the middle of the night, prison, torture and worse. Infiltrated by informers and sold out by defectors, the Naxalite movement was decimated within three years of its founding. Across the city there were countless stories of young men plucked from alleys by police, beaten up in custody, then released and shot in the back. There were killings in Jadavpur, in Diamond Harbour, in Beleghata, in Barasat. In that blur of violence, each massacre emerged for a moment and whizzed past into oblivion. Around 2,000 Naxalites were killed. The whole whirlwind of destruction laid waste not only to a movement, not only to a generation, but to a whole society.

  When Mihir returned to college, the war was over. He wanted to get a job, any kind of job. He took the entrance exams for the prestigious Indian Civil Service, but he could never conquer the maths section of the exam.

  ‘Numbers have always been my undoing,’ he said. ‘I had almost secured a bank job. Once I had the job I would marry.’ At that time he met an accountant who also studied astrology. The accountant predicted that he would not get a job, and that he would not marry.

  ‘I was determined to marry. And he said, “Produce a wife. Bring a wife for me to see, and I will believe you.”’

  In the end, he spent a lifetime much like his father and grandfather, sitting amid those columns of chairs and side tables, watching the trams go by. ‘All the next generation have jobs and are out of Calcutta,’ he said with a sense of satisfaction. ‘I’m the end of the line.

  ‘Are you an atheist?’ he asked me. ‘I was a double atheist. My father was an atheist. I never believed in anything. The things I would say to people who wanted to talk to me about religion! At around age thirty-five or thirty-six, I totally turned. You see, the game of your life has already happened. You are only watching the replay. My fate was that I would never have a job, never get married. So I have ended up here: a furniture-walla. What else can you say but fate?’

  Sugato had told me that he had had his palm read by Mihir several times. Many people came to Mihir’s furniture shop to have their fate revealed and left with prescriptions for various gemstone rings. Now you could get your astrological charts read over email, and daily predictions sent by text message. Multiple cable channels were devoted to such call-in shows for tele-astrologers, whose faces adorned billboards.

  Everyone I knew seemed to have red thread wrapped around their wrist and a few gemstone rings on their fingers. I always thought of astrology as a relic from my grandmother’s room, superstitious mumbo-jumbo that the future would sweep away.

  ‘Now everywhere you see people with rings on ten fingers. Do you know why? Because people have become more ambitious. In my generation we had no ambition. Get a degree, get some kind of job, then get married because that’s what everyone does. And live your life. We were believers in high thinking and low living. Our thoughts were up here,’ he said, raising his hand above his head, ‘but our lives were simple. Today it is the reverse. People’s thinking is about what TV to buy, but their ambitions are sky high.’

  When your wants increase, he explained, then life becomes much more uncertain. You fear that you won’t get what you desire.

  ‘But if everything is fated,’ I asked, ‘then why wear rings at all?’

  ‘Because, say, you’re supposed to be five foot six but you can’t get past five foot four. Something can be done if you are not reaching your fate. We can stretch you to five foot six. But we can’t make you five foot three like Amitabh Bachchan.’

  ***

  College Street was pitch black. There was a power cut. I followed in the footsteps of three men as they marched down Ramanath Mazumdar Lane. On both sides, old buildings rose above us, forming silhouettes of decay and bygone splendour against the moonlit sky. Dipankar Chakraborty, the editor of the little magazine Anik was striding briskly, reciting a poem by Subhas Mukhopadhay about floating in the darkness, as if he were a metaphor.

  I had first met Dipankar a few weeks earlier, at a street meeting on Bowbazar Street to protest the CPM’s new war against the Naxalites. In Lalgarh, on the frontier of Bengal and Bihar, a new generation of Naxalite guerrillas was waging war against the government. Communists were killing Communists, just like a generation ago. But this time, the war wasn’t in the neighbourhoods but in the jungles, and the prize was control of villages, of entire districts, of whole swathes of land. The street meeting had been organised by a human rights group to condemn the killing of innocents by soldiers in the name of fighting terrorism. Many of the men on stage belonged to organisations that were all part of the non-CPM left. Many were former Naxalites. For a generation they had splintered into factions and fronts like a dysfunctional joint family. Now the killings of unarmed peasants in Nandigram by the Left Front had brought them out of the woodwork, loosely united by an anti-CPM agenda, as leftists against the Left Front. Dipankar’s Anik published many of the recent anti-CPM critiques by the left. Dipankar was a retired college professor who had spent years in jail as a political prisoner in the 1970s, though he was never a Naxalite. He had belonged to the CPI, the CPM and then a more obscure faction of the Maoist left. I asked him why there had been almost no protest from these groups for thirty years, why the left had basically become mute during the three decades of Left Front rule.

  It was a desire to help the poor and the suffering all around that propelled many to Naxalism, a desire to serve the nation by serving the poor, he said. They saw suffering and poverty in society and they joined. But they had no logic in joining. When they failed, they went the way they came, like Mihir had done. Most of the people came from middle-class, or lower-middle-class backgrounds and when the period was over, they saw their friends and colleagues getting jobs, and many became careerists themselves. Some joined the private sector, others went abroad or joined the government and many joined the CPM when it came to rule. And then there were those whose turn was inward, who didn’t do any kind of work for society but who retained a feeling, an orientation, some kind of vision as they went about their banal lives.

  ‘There is no greater instance of such a high level of sacrifice by so many with so much to lose. The tribals fighting today have little to their name, they have little to lose. Those peop
le had middle-class futures and careers before them,’ Dipankar had said. ‘Nowhere else in Indian history do you see such a large degree of sacrifice. When they were smashed, it was a huge trauma. That is why subsequent people’s movements failed, because of the trauma of the failure of the Naxals.’

  On Amherst Street we entered an old house, crossed the courtyard and went up the stairs and down a long veranda leading to a row of rooms. Dipankar opened the door to one of the rooms. Just then, the lights came back on. Papers, books and bound volumes of magazines were stacked like a cityscape upon the floor of the publisher’s office. The room had high ceilings and even before the fan turned on, a breeze came in from the road and wafted through the veranda. Across the street I could see a butcher chopping mutton under bright lights. Through a window above the shop, a woman was combing her long hair in front of a dressing table. I looked at the street below, past that long veranda that was just like the one in Dida’s house, and thought of all the rooms like this one that still existed in Calcutta.

  I felt like Alexander Portnoy at that moment. There is a scene in Portnoy’s Complaint, the great novel of my native New Jersey, where the protagonist, Portnoy, who is all grown up and working in New York, is remembering a Sunday-afternoon ball game in his old neighbourhood in Newark. All the Jewish fathers are out on the field, trading jokes and fielding ground balls. And Portnoy has a fantasy: all he wants to do is stay in Newark forever and play softball every Sunday with those neighbourhood men, family men, Jewish men, to forever belong. At that moment, I wanted that room, that office, that life. I wanted to run a little magazine and to be part of the world of the fathers.