The Epic City

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The Epic City Page 24

by Kushanava Choudhury


  Production was booming in the 1960s. He became permanent staff in ninety days. He worked for over a decade in the cutting department and then in the finishing department. Working in front of a furnace all day was hard work, ‘Much worse than this,’ he said, as we roasted on the hot roof. But it was a good union job.

  When the factory closed, he was fifty years old. He remembered the date precisely – 7 January 1989 – like he remembered the day his wife died.

  It wasn’t a strike that precipitated the closure, though there had been several CITU-led strikes at the factory when he worked there. The union had been skilful in strong-arm tactics and brinkmanship, producing bonuses and pay rises with regularity. For a while after the factory closed, he showed up at the gates to picket like the CITU leaders told him. He went to meetings. But he received no salary, no compensation, not even his retirement savings. When the jobs went, mighty CITU proved powerless. Beyond picketing and meetings, there was nothing further his union could do. Before the closure, he had taken a 7,000-rupee loan, or about six months’ salary, from Bengal Lamp. ‘The smart thing I did was borrow that money,’ he said laughing, ‘which I never paid back.’

  He said he used that money to finish expanding the family home, and to marry off five of his seven daughters. Gosto told the story of the loan as if he was the one who had hoodwinked Bengal Lamp, and not the other way round. In his telling, he was nobody’s fool.

  I had met Gosto Pal while searching for workers from the closed factories around Jadavpur. I wondered what happened to the thousands of men who had toiled in the factories that had been erased by the malls and high-rise towers. In the shadows of South City Mall, which had eviscerated all memory of that industrial past, I began to meet former workers. They were men no one kept track of any more but who were everywhere in plain sight. They were the roadside tea-shop owners, the pavement vegetable sellers, the security guards, the men on bicycles who went from shop to shop collecting savings deposits for the banks, or who went house to house giving schoolboys tuition. A cycle-rickshaw ride away from the former factory, through lanes reverberant with temple bells, I met a Brahmin priest who blessed the luxury flats at South City. He had worked for four decades making light bulbs at Bengal Lamp, just like Gosto. He had been lucky to retire a month before the factory closed. He got a wristwatch, a bouquet and a box of sweets, but he never saw a paisa from his retirement account.

  When the factory closed, many workers died of malnutrition or worse, he said. ‘There are so many “Bengal Lamp suicides”.’

  As a Brahmin’s son, he had kept going by falling back on his father’s caste profession, just like Gosto had fallen back on his father’s caste trade. The Pals are six brothers, four of whom lived with their families in that house. When the factory job ended, the bonds of caste and family had let Gosto survive. This avatar of Gosto, on the terrace commanding an assembly line of gods, emerged slowly. Between the proletarian and the kumor there was a large gap. For over a decade after the factory closed, Gosto worked as a gopher on construction sites, one of the lowest paid and most dangerous professions in the long line of such jobs available in Calcutta.

  ‘On a day like this,’ he said, looking up at the April sun overhead, ‘I would be out on a scaffold.’

  The nails on the Ganesh idols had all been tamped down. Gosto bathed each statue in bhela, a milky clay coating to protect the idols. At four, Sarbani would come home and the painting of this batch would begin. But not before lunch and a siesta. First he would have a bath.

  Gosto took a thin red towel, and wearing nothing but his blue lungi, nimbly walked out of the house and down the lane to the neighbouring pond for a dip. It was as if he were still a kumor’s son in Vikrampur and nothing in the world had changed.

  ***

  Ranjan Guha Thakurta’s house was near the main road in Bijoygarh. We were sitting in Ranjan’s living room, on sofas covered with lace doilies. Swami Vivekananda looked down from the wall. The built-in wall cabinet was full of books and his daughter’s childhood dolls. Ranjan was elegantly dressed like a thoroughly Calcutta bhodrolok. There was no sign in the room to reveal that we were in a refugee colony.

  Ranjan’s father Sambhu Guha Thakurta had been one of the founders of the colony. ‘You should see some of the pictures of us from those days,’ Ranjan said, ‘hair messed up, wearing shirts which barely cover our bodies. Just one look and you’ll know: These are refugees!’

  Ranjan took me out to their backyard to show me the latrine left by American GIs. The hole he showed me had been covered over with concrete, but you could still make out the sizable footholds of a squat toilet.

  ‘What big feet Americans have,’ he said.

  The sight of those footholds reminded me of a scene in Ritwik’s film Subarnarekha. The refugee children, who are the film’s protagonists, arrive in India and find themselves on an abandoned World War II military airfield. The remnants of a war machine are parked in the middle of a primeval emptiness. The airfield becomes their playground, the place they colonise to make a new life.

  The land that became Bijoygarh had been an American military camp during the Second World War. GIs were stationed there for the Japanese attack that never came. When the war ended, the military camp became a ghost town. Some Bangals in the area, like Ranjan’s father Sambhu, set up a relief camp in the abandoned sheds to provide food and temporary shelter for the refugees. But the refugees who came had nowhere else to go. Over time, the camp’s organisers decided that they had to take over the land. They drew up plans and allotted plots, planned for schools, playing fields, a colony bazaar, a maternity ward, a temple and neighbourhood clubs. Just as Bengal’s Chief Minister Bidhan Roy was building the planned suburb of Salt Lake with its Jetsons nomenclatures, water tanks and identical traffic circles, a different kind of planned community was being developed here, with its own organisation, its own order, its own logic. Except everything they were doing was against the law.

  Within months, hundreds of refugees came to the camp. Ranjan’s family had been living in a house abandoned by a Muslim family nearby. Their father was allotted a plot in the colony. There was no running water, no electricity. For a toilet they used the latrine left by the Americans, covered on three sides by grass. But even that was better than what most people used in the beginning, which was the colony’s communal trough. I thought about the squatters I had written about as a reporter, in makeshift huts, shitting in outdoor toilets along the Beleghata Canal. How different had they been from the refugee colonies that sprang up all around the city in the 1950s? The residents of Calcutta at the time had looked upon the Bangals living in shacks and assumed that these people were by nature squatters, as if their condition was not a function of historical tragedy but rather a way of life.

  Soon after the military camp was filled, the colony committee decided they had to occupy empty lands surrounding the camp, which belonged to a major businessman. The committee mapped the area and apportioned plots. Refugees began moving in and building their bamboo huts. Then one day, truckloads of the landlord’s armed guards descended upon the colony. The refugee women gave ululations and sounded their conches as they would at a wedding, to raise an alarm across the settlement. The boys of the colony’s sports clubs came with sticks and knives. The guards tore down many of the shacks. In the ensuing battle, several of the squatters received broken bones and busted heads and were sent to hospital. But the guards were defeated. Their trucks were burned. The colony had been defended successfully. It was after this fight that the Jadavpur Refugee Camp was named Bijoygarh, literally the Fortress of Triumph.

  ***

  A journalist who lives in Bijoygarh told me this story: a few years ago, a group of thugs chased after a man who lived in the colony. In broad daylight, they trailed the colony boy with a bomb. Inside the colony, hundreds of people filed out into the streets. The public began to chase the thugs. The thugs threw the bomb; the crowd threw the bomb back. It exploded and one of the boys in the group d
ied.

  There was a time when even other refugees who lived outside the colonies would not marry their daughters off to ‘colony boys’. That reputation for toughness comes from the fact that in the colony, everything had to be fought for, not once but continually. Without any legal papers, colony dwellers’ only strength was their physical power, the heft of bodies in the street, and men united with sticks and votes. In a new democracy, that power could be channelled into politics.

  Bijoygarh was the first refugee colony in Calcutta. Following Bijoygarh’s example, within five years over 140 such squatter settlements or ‘refugee colonies’ came up all over Calcutta and its surrounding districts. In Baranagar, past the northern edge of the city, Debjranjan Ghosh had seen the founding of Netaji Colony, his home, as a boy.

  ‘Do you remember the scene in Ritwik Ghatak’s film Subarnarekha, where a colony is being established?’ Ghosh asked me. ‘Everyone is very busy. People are being brought in lorries and allotted plots according to their home districts. Dhaka people in one zone, Barisal people in another. And in the middle of all that activity a man with a blackboard is setting up a primary school. That’s just as it happened here. I saw that scene with my own eyes.’

  In Netaji Colony, the colony committee had settled first on fifty acres of land and alloted about 200 plots. Refugees had to furnish ‘refugee cards’ to prove they were refugees and then pay fifty rupees for a plot. Eventually the colony would grow to 600 plots. The land had to be mapped and planned, and along with homes, plots were established for schools, playing fields, ponds, a bazaar, sports clubs and a temple. A surveyor was hired by the colony committee to draw up plans. They organised the layout on a grid, with roads of equal length, side lanes and drainage, and divided the colony into wards. Each ward had its own ward committee, and each school had its own school committee. The infrastructure of colonies followed a similar template everywhere. A half-century later it made colony spaces seem much more ordered than the areas surrounding them.

  From the first squat to getting schools, roads, electricity, sewer lines, running water and postal deliveries to ultimately receiving legal land titles, everything had to be fought for through a permanent politicisation. The Communists took on these battles against the ruling Congress in the legislature. In the colonies, the colony committees, school committees and ward committees came to be dominated by Communists. The colonies became solid voting blocs for the left. When the Left Front came to rule in 1977, they granted land titles in the colonies and turned squatters into owners.

  ***

  The yellow spire of the Bijoygarh temple could be seen from almost any spot along the main road that ran through the colony. Unlike in most paras of the city, all the colonies have a central temple. These temples were the product of politics as much as piety. The Bangals had an idea that if they built a temple, their colony would not be destroyed, not because the gods would offer protection for their community, but because the government always found it more difficult to destroy the houses of gods than to bulldoze the houses of the poor. People can be evicted, gods cannot. Slums, villages, entire regions can be demolished, lives ground to nothing. But if a house of worship is destroyed, a whole community will become inflamed. Better to leave it alone.

  Jagabandhu Pal was known in Bijoygarh for his patronage of the Bijoygarh temple. He was also one of the oldest people living in the colony.

  ‘When I first got the plot, my wife didn’t want to come because of the snakes and all. There was a big pit here. We filled up the hole and built two rooms with bricks and tin roofs.’

  We were sitting in one of the two original rooms of the house. From the walls hung pictures of gods and ancestors, including Jagabandhu’s father and stepmother and his Vaishnav guru. There was a gas stove with a handi on the floor, a bicycle parked in the corner, clothes hanging from hooks on the wall, children crying in the background – a scene of shabby Bangal living that was so familiar to me from my childhood.

  One of his sons came in and said, ‘Sorry it’s chaotic here. We are doing construction on the house.’

  ‘Take him upstairs,’ he told his father.

  ‘Let me have a bidi,’ Jagabandhu said.

  We went upstairs. Jagabandhu lit a bidi and puffed, relishing the taste and began:

  ‘I was born in a bad year, the year of the typhoon. Thousands of people died in that typhoon. When the typhoon happened I was in my mother’s belly. She had lost two children before me. When I was born, three priests from the Jagannath temple in Puri were passing through my village. They gave me the name, Jagabandhu, friend of Jagannath. My mother died within a year of my birth. A fakir came to the house after my mother died. He said to my grandmother: “The boy will live. He will drink your milk.” My grandmother was dry, but sure enough I drank my grandmother’s milk!’

  Jagabandhu was from a village near Dhaka. His family moved to India in 1950. Initially, Congress workers had settled them in a house abandoned by a Muslim family in Muraripukur. Eventually, they moved to Bijoygarh and started a grocery shop in the colony bazaar.

  Jagabandhu went on to have nine children: five sons and four daughters. ‘All of them are doing well. All of my children are honest,’ he said, puffing a bidi. ‘Right now I am ninety years old. My whole life I have stayed on the same path. I didn’t go on the second path.’

  ‘The path of honesty?’ I asked.

  ‘I did Congress all my life. I never joined the other party.’

  Three of his sons lived with him, another lived down the street, and his eldest son had just retired from the ordinance factory in Bombay. That son’s son was a computer programmer in Houston, Texas. He told me proudly: ‘He makes four thousand dollars a month.’

  Jagabandhu showed me around the second floor. His two shacks had grown into a bright and airy two-storey house with a dozen rooms. He expanded it slowly.

  ‘What have I not done, brother? I had a gas machine, a rod supplies business, I sold lanterns for pushcarts, made sweets. But what stayed with me was the grocery shop and the candles.’

  When he first moved to the colony, he lived with his wife, two children, father and stepmother. He had six mouths to feed. But the grocery shop was failing. The family had no food.

  ‘I couldn’t feed my children, what could I do?’ he said. He and his wife decided to sell her gold wedding necklace and bought sacks of rice and dal, enough for their children to eat for three months. Then they scouted a secluded spot on the rail line near Jadavpur station. They made a pact. That following Monday, they would jump on the railroad tracks together and commit suicide.

  Before he moved to Bijoygarh, Jagabandhu met a man who owned a match factory. Somehow, the factory owner learned of his plan and was moved to help. He took him to Howrah to buy a candle-making machine and three sacks of wax. In those days, every house in the colony used candles, since there was no electricity. His friend acquired a government permit for candle-making. By eight every evening the whole Pal family would be engaged in packing candles.

  ‘With that candle workshop,’ he said, ‘I rose up.’

  He took me to a small front room and unlocked the door. There were five machines in the room, two spools of thread for wicks and thirty-two candles in a packet. He pointed to an iron contraption with levers and cylindrical slots, and said, ‘This machine saved my life.’

  ***

  When I was a kid, I had thought that the world of my grandmother and her prasads would soon disappear. But when I returned to Calcutta, two decades after my grandmother had died, every idea, every artifact that I remembered of that agonistic upbringing was still present. After thirty years of Communist rule, no belief, no superstition, no prejudice, had been wiped out. A few years ago, an embarrassing story emerged about Subhas Chakraborty, the popular Communist leader and transport minister. Chakraborty had been caught by the news media offering prayers at a Kali temple. Confronted the next day, he said, ‘I am a Hindu first and a Brahmin later and then everything else.’

&nbs
p; The Party must have thrown him quite a coming-out party, because a week later he cleared up what he had meant by saying, ‘I see everything on the basis of dialectical materialism.’

  Looking back, I realise now that the clash between our two rooms was not about civilisations, not between reason versus faith, nor the traditional against the modern. The idea that our life was somehow modern and my grandmother’s was traditional was a fantasy. Our conflict was between two sets of beliefs: Dida had her gods and demons, while our side proclaimed blind faith in ideologies of nationalism, socialism, science and progress. We had our own prejudices, no less outlandish than Dida’s views on the dangers of using a refrigerator. ‘Modern’ and ‘traditional’ were just borrowed words with which we comforted ourselves that we would control the future. But our future never happened because our present had never happened. We had such a poor grasp on our reality, and hence all of the past from which it sprang. We attempted to disavow most of what we saw around us, to turn away from our own society in disgust. We believed in the power of our myths to deliver us to another future. Of the present, we considered only shards and fragments, forcing schisms within homes and within minds, because we had no way to order it into a coherent narrative. But the society in which we lived, of slums and palaces, of demons and demagogues, of autoclaves and fasting days, constituted one civilisation, one whole.

  In the last film Ritwik Ghatak made, art imitated life so closely that it could hardly be called a film at all. Jukti Tokko Goppo is the most didactic of his films, uneven in quality, with flashes of brilliance, tacked together by a man who knew time was running out. Started in 1971, when the streets were riddled with slogans and bullets, Jukti took him four years to make. Though he was only in his late forties, his life was almost over, tattered by alcoholism, much like the main character in Jukti, who is always found with a bottle of Bangla in his satchel. By the time it was released, he was dead.

 

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