The Epic City

by Kushanava Choudhury

  The discussion was about the recent annihilations by the Maoists, and whether an equivalence could be made between state terror and guerrilla violence. They were talking of the Pathan uprising in 1930 in Peshawar, the Jewish rebellion in Minsk, Enver Hoxha’s war against the Nazis in Tirana. I struggled to follow the references of their arguments. I felt as if they spoke another language altogether, as if I was listening to a debate between sects whose feuds went back to the Naxalite days. The disputes and refutations had been buried for thirty years and were being rehashed anew. It was as if there was no other way forward but the road that was not taken, the dead end.

  For those of us who were born after the Naxalite violence, our lives were structured by a void. We grew up around adults who were shell-shocked for reasons we could never see nor fathom, who rushed home by 10 p.m. Taxis refused to go to this or that para because it was rumoured to be ‘notorious’, meaning a place where bombs went off, where innocents were stabbed. But there were no more bombs, no more stabbings. When the Left Front government came to power in 1977, it released thousands of political prisoners and expunged their police records so they could find jobs. It called an informal truce to the war in the paras. We were living in the graveyard peace of Communist rule. Yet, like a reaction that remained long after the action had stopped, we still felt the phantom pain of Naxalism.

  As a graduate student, I had gone to Spain during one winter break. When I came back to Yale, I met a student from Barcelona, and we got to talking of my visit to her city. I mentioned a church near Las Ramblas when she began giving me directions: if I had walked past that church and into the square and turned right, I would have noticed bullet holes in the wall where the fascists had killed her grandfather in the Spanish Civil War. That had been her society’s bargain: they chose not to memorialise, to publicly not remember, as the price of ending fascism. And yet that amnesia meant that you confronted the void everywhere.

  ***

  When the Naxalite vision of the future went bust, it was as if the future itself had imploded. It was as if no collective vision of our society could be imagined any longer. Their failure had doomed all other ways of imagining an alternate future. In my generation, in household after household, there emerged a self-imposed one-child policy. Our cohort was as much a product of that Naxalite terror as the birth-control pill, as much the reactions of mothers seeing boyfriends and brothers put to death, a generation of our boys gunned down in gullies. To achieve what? What did all those slogans and actions, all that machismo and vanguardism accomplish, but parents burning teenage corpses at Nimtala?

  Don’t look. Don’t talk to strangers. We were a generation taught to turn away from the world that unfolded at our door. To us, politics meant ceaseless protest marches chanting ‘No Way, No Way’, ‘Cholbe Na, Cholbe Na’, which held up traffic and made us late for school. Politics was the property of the dada who ruled the street. We were to keep away from that world, and focus on our homework. To value the lives of their young, mothers had to hunker down, have only one child each and coddle it with cottage cheese for breakfast, fish curry for lunch and warm milk during tuitions, in the hope that they would clear one of the competitive exams to enter an engineering college and then land a job behind a big desk in Bangalore or Boston. Those who were raised successfully, who got into the right schools and passed the right exams, were packed off far from Calcutta. The city became a graveyard of dreams.

  I finally understood their sentiment when I went to Mexico City years later. We were in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, as part of a guided tour, to see the Aztec, colonial Spanish and nationalist monuments on each side of the square. In 1968, 10,000 students had gathered at that plaza to protest the government’s actions and demand revolution. Soldiers surrounded the square and, in the ensuing chaos, they fired into the crowd and surrounding buildings. Then they cut off power and went house to house through the night. Between thirty and 300 people were killed that night as part of Mexico’s ‘dirty war’. The truth of what happened is still not known. Our tour guide was a bookish middle-aged man. After we had seen the ruins and the church, we got to talking and it turned out that he had been one of the protesting students at the Plaza in ’68.

  What did they accomplish, all those careers destroyed, those lives vanquished? he asked. He had raised his children to stay away from politics.

  All revolutions eat their children, whether they succeed or fail. And so, just as it was depicted in the family portrait along the riverbank in Kumortuli, the phantoms of our parents’ generation devoured our tender heads.

  ***

  At twenty-two, when I had first moved back to Calcutta after graduating from Princeton, I had bought a one-way ticket. I had come to stay. Two monsoons washed all that idealism away. The Statesman was sinking. The paper had nothing new on offer. Worse, there was nothing old that it chose to defend.

  A few months after I left the Statesman, a colleague sent word that the squatters along the Beleghata canal had been removed. The papers played their part and reported the demolition of the homes by bulldozers, and then those lives were forgotten. When I had written about the squatters, I had seen the people only as poor. Their misery was heightened in my telling, in the hope of drawing outrage. But there was no outrage. That way of seeing, of telling, only rehashed a familiar narrative, of people who were ‘other’, not like us, perhaps not people at all. It was the white way of seeing Africans that Lessing had written about in The Grass is Singing. The lived experience of the city told us that that way of seeing was wrong. We instinctively knew that the fabric of our society was woven in a different way. But that truth never found expression on the written page.

  When I had returned to America, at first campus life seemed idyllic. There were no deadlines, and attending four seminars a week felt like a vacation. Soon, all I wanted to do was go back to Calcutta. I had walked away and the city followed me. I could not start over.

  ***

  My year in the city was nearing its end. Now I felt as if I was hopping from one political meeting to another, trying to reconstruct a past that was not there. At a rally of former factory workers at the Maidan, speaker after speaker arose on stage to assert that they were neither the ruling party nor the opposition. They were independent voices, they said, though we all knew they were another breed of Naxalites. It was as if, after thirty years of Communist rule, there was no other alternative, no other way to move forward, but to look back at what had spectacularly failed. Charu Majumdar had announced the formation of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) at this same Maidan four decades before. This was the same Maidan where Uttam Kumar, the matinee idol, and quite possibly the only Bengali ever to have gone jogging, saw the police shoot Saroj Dutta, the Naxalite intellectual, in the early morning while the actor had gone for his morning run. In ’59 – before the joint family split up into the CPI, CPM, Naxalites and then a thousand little pieces – the united Communists had organised their first mass protest right here in the Maidan. At the rally, thousands of people came from the countryside demanding food, in what came to be known simply, poignantly, as the Food Movement. Eighty of them were killed by police, many beaten to death with batons. It was in this Maidan in 1946 that Suhrawardy, then chief minister of Bengal, had spoken during Direct Action Day, and unleashed killing across the city unlike anything Calcutta had witnessed before or since.

  Every year on May Day, I still came to this Maidan and listened to the speeches where CITU leaders mouthed the same slogans about workers and imperialism and globalisation, even now, while their own government was selling off their people’s farmland to multinational corporations. Someday soon, I thought, these pageants would go the way of the ribbon-cutting and bridge-inauguration photo-ops that dominated TV news in my childhood – another piece of political theatre consigned to the B-roll of history.

  I was sitting at Relax with Mike, JB and Suku’da, eating popcorn and drinking, when the bank manager at our table arose from his rum-fuelled
reverie. Can you tell me what they have done in thirty years? Can you tell me one thing?

  Did they build roads, did they build schools, did they build hospitals? He went on like this for quite some time. What have they done in thirty years? Can you tell me one thing?

  Nobody did. Everyone just kept quiet and let it pass.

  Later, as we walked through Abdul Hamid Lane, Suku’da said the bank manager wasn’t married. He had joined the opposition party, Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamul Congress. There are days when he cries, ‘Nobody loves me,’ Suku’da said. That was worse.

  Can you tell me one thing? Those were cries you heard more and more vociferously on buses and at tea shops around the city. For decades, anyone who had dared to voice such challenges in front of Party loyalists would be cowed down and shut up. Now, faced with such a challenge, Communists quickly mouthed platitudes about land reforms and village democracy, policies enacted in the countryside and learned by city people second hand, as Party pap. To tell the truth, even they could not tell you what they had wrought.

  ***

  In West Bengal, there are no events to note in thirty years of Left Front rule. Between the Naxalites’ bullets and until they shot and killed those unarmed peasants in Nandigram, the history of Bengal that we told ourselves was of a place where nothing happened. At Budh-Bikel adda, writers told me that was the reason why no great literature was being produced any more: because there were no great traumas, no great events. Nothing had happened. If Calcutta felt like a place where time had stood still, it is because discursively it had. In a city still traumatised by the violence of the Naxalite era, the Party had come to power to keep the peace. It covered its society like the patina of dust that settled over the furniture in Mihir’s shop. Meanwhile, we lived on like an unhappy extended family, in ever smaller rooms, partitioned and sub-partitioned, fated to suffer a timeless present.

  Calcutta was an impossible place, as Durba had said, full of the sorts of people who fought over strands of Communism while sipping tea served by a ten-year-old boy. There was no life for us to build here. How could we stay here? How could I go? I was left only with memories, which I could never disavow.

  When I was a boy, there were giant open drains along the sidewalks in Bagmari. One day on the way to nursery school, my water bottle fell into the drain. I watched it sink into a dark, thick sludge. It was gone. That was the first time I experienced the feeling of irrevocable loss, and I remember it filled me with a deep sorrow, which then turned into fear. Any of us, at any time, could fall into the black river that bubbled below the sidewalks of our city and be sucked into oblivion.

  From time to time, the image of being trapped in sludge seeped into my mind like the whisper of a demon. Now I saw the sludge, slow as molasses, dark as tar. My feet were caught and I was slowly sinking. I was trapped.

  This swamp city was all there was, all there had ever been. Like so many others, I had believed that I could escape the lanes of my memories by leaping onto another continent, another future, a new dream. All that running, when there was no way to escape. We were all trapped.

  The Greek poet Cavafy, citizen of Alexandria and bard of exile, had understood our fate better than most:

  You said, ‘I will go to another land, I will go to another sea.

  Another city will be found, a better one than this.

  Every effort of mine is a condemnation of fate;

  and my heart is – like a corpse – buried.

  How long will my mind remain in this wasteland.

  Wherever I turn my eyes, wherever I may look

  I see black ruins of my life here,

  where I spent so many years destroying and wasting.

  You will find no new lands, you will find no other seas.

  The city will follow you. You will roam the same

  streets. And you will age in the same neighbourhoods;

  and you will grow grey in these same houses.

  Always you will arrive in this city. Do not hope for any other –

  There is no ship for you, there is no road.

  As you have destroyed your life here

  In this little corner, you have ruined it in the entire world.’

  PART IV

  The Fortress of Triumph

  It was only the beginning of April and already the midday heat had become unbearable. Nitai Pal was sucking on a popsicle when I met him in the lane leading to his house in Bijoygarh. He recognised me from the earlier times when I had come to see his brother, Gosto Pal.

  ‘Hey!’ Nitai yelled up at the sky as he reached the gate of the joint family home. A girl came to the balcony and lowered a key on a string. Nitai let me in. The house had been built in such a way as to maximise the number of bedrooms. We walked down the unlit hallway that ran between the bedrooms like a spine.

  ‘My mother is ninety-nine,’ said Nitai as he led me up the stairs. ‘She is still alive. You will see her.’

  Sure enough, upstairs in one of the many rooms, squatted a woman with short hair and a caved-in mouth. She stared at me wide-eyed and wordless. I could not make out if she was still all there. Nitai showed her to me as if she were a statue of Victoria or a pet pelican, as you might find at the Marble Palace. In her own family, she had become an object of curiosity.

  The corridor ended in what looked like a sunroom, bright, airy and open on two sides. Walking through those long dark corridors into the light felt like being born. The women of the house, mothers and daughters, sat chatting and singing, all dressed in bright, colourful housecoats. The floor was covered with hundreds of clay models of the Hindu gods Laxmi and Ganesh. Some were pocket-sized, others a foot high. It looked like a workshop from Kumortuli had been transplanted into their house. The women were Gosto’s daughters, his sisters-in-law and nieces. Each was performing a specific task. Together they formed an assembly line, just as they would in a factory. They were producing gods and goddesses.

  In idol-making, the hardest part of the job is chokh dewa, literally ‘giving eyes’. The eyes are drawn last. It is believed that a clay model only becomes divine upon the drawing of the eyes. One of the girls knew how to ‘give eyes’, she told me proudly. She was the youngest of Gosto’s seven children, all daughters. The one above her is Sarbani, a schoolteacher, who was at work. The other elder sisters were all married.

  ‘Baba is upstairs,’ the eye-giver said.

  I scaled the steps to the terrace. Set off from the assembly line, Gosto had the terrace all to himself. Beyond it were mango trees and sky. Gosto was squatting on the floor under the shaded part of the terrace, surrounded by unpainted clay models. He saw me and said: ‘So, am I any worse off with the closing of the factory?’

  With eighteen people living under one roof, the Pal house always feels as if it is preparing for a wedding. Everything happening within those three floors that day was at his command. He was in charge of his own production unit. How could he be worse off than during his days as a factory worker at Bengal Lamp?

  ‘I am far better off,’ he said.

  The white-hot sun was searing the cement on the terrace. Even under the shed it was hot. Gosto had an ancient table fan going. He angled it away from himself and pointed it at me.

  ‘I don’t need it,’ he said. Gosto had a hammer in hand. Next to him was a set of pint-sized Ganeshs, the sort merchants put above their cash registers to auspiciously bring in the Bengali New Year. Gosto took each statue and tamped down the nails on its back. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap, done, then another Ganesh, another five taps, rapid and repetitive.

  Then he said it again: ‘Ami onek bhalo achi.’ I am far better off.

  For Saraswati Pujo, the last big festival, he had made 750 Saraswati deities, but now, for the New Year, he was making far more. He had lost count of how many Laxmis and Ganeshs he was manufacturing. As he did every year, on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day he would set up shop on the pavement by Jadavpur University and sell the deities for twenty-five rupees apiece.

  T
alking and tapping, in a series of swift, economical movements, he began telling me about his sons-in-law. His middle son-in-law had a clothing business. His third son-in-law was an elevator operator at the Chittaranjan Hospital in Park Circus, where his wife had been admitted for twenty-six days, and where she died.

  This was his first New Year as a widower. His wife had died, but his paternal duty was not done. He still had two daughters left to marry off.

  Every time his wife had a daughter, the guys at the factory would egg him on, saying, ‘Gosto, next time you’ll have a son.’

  ‘That’s how I ended up with seven daughters,’ he said, laughing. ‘But now I feel I’m better off without sons. Is my daughter any less than any son?’

  He was talking specifically about Sarbani, the schoolteacher, whom I had met before. She would be back in the evening to help him paint the deities. Sarbani had a bachelor’s degree in Commerce, he told me, as did his youngest daughter, the one whom I met downstairs.

  In Vikrampur, in East Bengal, Gosto had only studied till class four. He came over with his family when he was around ten, after Partition but ‘before the visa-passport business’. His father and three uncles each settled in the refugee colony in Bijoygarh. The Pals were kumors, or clay sculptors by caste, just like the sculptors of Kumortuli. When they came over, his father forged a living making clay pots as per his caste profession. Gosto wanted nothing do to with the family trade. Instead, he took a job at the Bengal Lamp factory nearby in Jadavpur. In 1961, when Gosto started as a helper in the cutting department, Bengal Lamp was one of the largest bulb manufacturers in India. Once the glass for each bulb was blown, his job was to slice off the blown glass as it emerged from the furnace. As he talked, he tapped the Ganesh in his hand with the hammer and it cracked open. He inspected it and said, ‘Some crack. Even with light bulbs, we didn’t always get a perfect batch.’