Jukti takes place exclusively on the streets. Its characters are defined by a literal and an existential homelessness. The film follows a middle-aged alcoholic, played by Ritwik himself, who wanders the countryside with a collection of social castaways: a refugee of the Bangladesh War, an educated unemployed youth, and an elderly teacher abandoned by his family. In the climax of the movie, the wandering drunk and his crew find themselves captured by Naxalites in the jungle. The Naxalites are young city boys with guns who are awaiting a police ambush. They decide to let the group go. Ritwik determines that he and his group will stay, because, he says, ‘You are the future, you are all we have.’
The Naxalites want to know if he is ideologically on their side. Has he read Deshodrohi and Lal Jhanda, Che Guevara and Mao Tse Tung? Is he up on Naxalite praxis? When Ritwik demurs, a rebel leader says that it is because of ‘worn-out, rotten, washed up, petit-bourgeois intellectuals’ like him and their failures, that the Naxalites are in such a situation.
‘Yes, indeed!’ Ritwik replies. ‘Then let’s drink.’
And he does.
We are ‘confused, utterly confused’, Ritwik mumbles, like King Lear on the heath, ‘dishahara hoe hatrey hatrey beracchi’, searching for something to grab on to. The film betrays no vision, no way forward, beyond the ramblings of a drunk. Jukti is a film about failure – political failure, moral failure, a failure of imagination. The film itself is a failure, for it does not hang together as a coherent work, but rather remains like tattered fragments of inspiration. Yet even the drunk saw clearly the world around him for what it was, and his people for who they were.
‘My sons, he says, ‘this country of ours, these thousands of years of history, and no matter how much we abuse it, this land has given birth to some of the most luminous philosophical ideas known to man. These are the weapons of villains and scoundrels, but they have to be understood to be ripped up from the earth. They won’t vanish just because you say they are not there.’
Ora nei bollei chole jabe na.
Life was not as simple as wiping the slate clean and starting anew in a pristine future. There is no easy way out.
They won’t vanish just because you say they are not there. If you fail to heed them, they will haunt every world you live in. The phantoms of the past roamed freely in the breeze, their echoes haunted those who walked away. We heard it louder and louder the further we went, until we could hear nothing else. I had been haunted by those voices each time I had walked away. When the daily distractions of the present disappeared, all that remained in us were the voices that haunted our souls. You had to listen to them, give them their due. Then, you had to master those voices, and move forward to make another world.
***
When I saw those architects’ drawings for luxury highrises in ads in the newspaper, of towers arising skyward upon a moonscape, I wondered, What would the children of those flats be like, who belonged to no street, no para, heard no loudspeakers and spoke no dialect? What kind of jokes does a child raised on the fifteenth floor, in a stratosphere so far from the pavement, learn to make?
It was Sunday bikel, or late afternoon, and Bijoygarh was in bloom. At the central green, the old-timers in white were perched all along the boundary wall. Teenagers were playing cricket and football on the same field with imaginary divisions. Several games were simultaneously in progress. I saw boys running up to bowl like Kapil Dev, and a part of me, as always, wanted to play.
My boyhood city was forever frozen in memories of cricket matches. We used to rush home from school, change out of our school uniforms, slurp down rice and dal, and be off by 4.30, bat and ball in hand. One by one the boys would be called down, their names screamed into the houses: ‘Jho-ru! Pi-ku! Pi-aaal!’
‘Have you no sense of time?’ Pial’s drowsy grandmother would scowl at us from their balcony. We knew this: for the next two hours, we were our own masters. Bikel was our time.
All those cricket matches, all the pleasures of my childhood were taken away from me on 15 August 1990, the day we moved to America. That time was gone forever. When I lost the city as a child, I lost the capacity to be fully myself. But by coming back, I had not recovered the self that I had left behind. The self, it turns out, is not an inert object, to be lost and found. My childhood is an unreachable city down memory lane, just like yours. But that was never really why I came back, anyway.
Everywhere in Bijoygarh, there were signs of the old yielding to the new. As South Calcutta pressed southward and butted up against Ritwikland, ‘PG Accommodation’ signs cluttered lamp posts, promising affordable housing to the next generation of newcomers to the city. Few of the hogla and bamboo shacks remained. They had become brick houses. Tiled roofs turned into terraces, second floors had been added one room at a time. The houses had been built in pieces, expanded with each wave of need and as funds allowed. Their parts did not always fit seamlessly together. The joints were often still exposed, to reveal an edifice fashioned over time. Those colony houses stood as metaphors for the lives that had been rebuilt in this city. And in that building there was resurgence.
The city had let these people live, as it had millions of those who still came from the countryside, pushed by hunger and hatred onto its streets, its squatter camps and its slums. All that violence was still there, waiting to be triggered. And yet, in spite of the daily struggles, in Calcutta we remade a new peace each day. A tight social order arose from the para clubs and the tea shops and the pujo pandals. This city did not happen by accident. The miracle of what we had achieved together as a people was that those countless little pieces made this present city and let people live together again.
In Delhi, Durba had grown up knowing she always had to be on guard. Travelling after 8 p.m. required a male escort. The capital’s empty avenues and deserted traffic circles became prowling grounds for sexual predators. Until she lived in Calcutta, Durba confessed to me one day, she had never imagined that it would be possible for a woman to travel freely in an Indian city after dark. She had thought that such freedom was a privilege, reserved for women in Europe and America. In Calcutta, she said, she felt safe on her own. In a para, on a street corner or in a crowd, there were a thousand little unspoken rituals and codes that made up what can only be called the street-level culture of the city, which was both so extraordinary and so banal that one barely noticed it until it was gone.
The stage was being set at the Niranjan Sadan in Bijoygarh. Ranjan had invited me to an evening’s cultural programme organised by a local community service group dedicated to the principles of Swami Vivekananda. A harmonium and a tabla had been set up on the low stage, with mikes craning down. A sound engineer in track pants leaned into them: ‘Testing, testing, one, two, three.’ The neighbourhood women sat with powdered faces and beautiful Baluchari saris. The colony boys sat with neatly combed, glistening hair and crisp, oversized panjabis. They wore their enforced gentility like overcoats, waiting to take it off to reveal their natural boy selves at any moment. I took a seat behind them, and remembered my own self and could not help but smile. The evening’s programme was about to begin.
***
It rained all morning. We stayed under the covers till almost lunch time, pleasantly cocooned as torrents washed the world away.
By afternoon the rains ended. The city had become cool.
‘It’s such a beautiful day,’ Durba said. ‘Let’s make the most of it.’
She had been reading a novel by Alka Saraogi about the Marwaris, who came from dry, dusty villages in Rajasthan centuries ago to trade. In those days, the streets were washed with the holy waters of the Ganga every day. Such an abundance of water! Calcutta, to them, felt like a city paved with gold.
‘I want to see the Ganga,’ Durba said.
We hopped from auto to auto to Bagbazar. There were a few afternoon bathers, lovers sitting in twos, idle men staring at the lovers, the typical pastoral scene along the riverbank. The river was, as always, the colour of milky tea.
On Chitpur Road, a tram rushed at us, fresh out of the Bagbazar depot, invitingly empty. The conductor was reclined across three ladies’ seats while all Calcutta slept its bhaat ghoom. We latched on. We tung-tunged past the unfinished idols of Kumortuli, past the brass pot sellers of Sovabazar, past the strong-box sellers and the silver shops of Garanhata, past Vivekananda Road, which led to Dida’s house. The light of late afternoon streamed in from each lane that arrived from the river to Chitpur and covered the street with gold. The city spooled past like a film strip, each frame illuminating many layers of lives. We crossed Muktaram Babu Street and the Marble Palace, and the worlds upon worlds of Chitpur accumulated rapidly as we entered Barabazar.
The tram stopped at Lalbazar police headquarters. We got off, bound for Esplanade. Near the Telegraph office, where Sumitro now worked as an illustrator, is the best tea shop in Esplanade. The tea is served by a man perched in front of a life-sized copper boiler that looks like a potentate with a parasol.
I fired off an SMS and Sumitro materialised for a cup of tea.
‘O bhai, teen-tho chai,’ I said to the tea seller. ‘Special.’
‘I have come back to the old para, to all the old places where I used to eat, and all the old places where I always meant to eat,’ Sumitro said. ‘For instance, there’s a fellow here who fries excellent jillipis.’
With barely a word, Durba ran to where Sumitro had pointed, and returned with a paper bag full of sticky hot jillipis.
You can never get this sweet and tangy taste in Delhi, Durba said, relishing each bite and badmouthing her hometown. It got later and later as we talked. The sun dipped over the Ganga. Soon the sex-potion salesmen would pick up foot traffic from the office crowd in front of Chowringhee Square. I kept looking past Sumitro to the marquee of Paradise Cinema, scanning the sea of faces along the Chinese shoe shops. Somewhere under that marquee, Suku’da would appear, whistling past the parrots on his way home, followed by Mike.
The traffic was dense as Durba and I crossed Central Avenue in front of Statesman House.
‘Your old home,’ Durba said.
‘Yes,’ I said, as I looked through the revolving doors into the dark foyer. I was nineteen years old when I first entered there. And so had started the tugging back and forth between here and there, this oscillating existence.
I realised that my whole adulthood should have been another life really: a job in an American city, a house in the suburbs. Yoga. Thoughtful considerations of vegetarianism. Organic squash by the bushel every summer. That life would have meant living almost entirely in English, with Bengali worn at home like a high-school T-shirt until it faded and fell apart. Once every four years or so, when vacation time permitted, I would have taken a trip to India for a family wedding or a funeral. With each visit, I would find the country more unrecognisable from the one I had left. My India, which had ended on 15 August 1990, would seem ever more diluted from its original pristine self, changed from the world of my childhood into something impure, something hideous, until I would one day recognise it no more. Then I would fall back quietly into one place, one time zone, one language.
Once you fall into the great abyss of assimilation, you become an individual. You have yourself, to love and to loathe, to buy and to sell, just like everyone else, alone. No new society, no ready-made collective life awaits you to replace what has been lost. Instead, you cling to your spouse, your progeny, your pets, like lifebuoys in a fearsome sea of strangers.
But how do we make a good life? Two thousand years ago, Aristotle had asked that question. We human beings are not meant to live exclusively indoors. We need to hear the symphony of the street, feel the pavement at our feet. The life outside our door beckons us to a destiny larger than the lonesome murmurs of our souls. To live the good life, Aristotle had said, you have to make a world in public, with strangers.
Standing at Chowringhee at dusk, I felt gratitude at that moment for the life that I had made. In coming back and accepting this present for all that it contained, I opened myself to the possibility of being made anew. If migration truncates the self, then marriage expands it. That joining together teaches you, slowly, painfully, that you are no longer the self that you were, that you are not a full self any more, that your self is not whole without the one you love.
As we walked past Chowringhee Square, I showed Durba the evening beef-roll sellers, Islam saab’s samosa stand, and the greasy joints where I had eaten countless mutton chaaps.
‘So this is your para!’ she said.
‘Have we never come here together before?’ I asked her. In all the time that we had been in Calcutta, we had never walked together through these streets at the navel of the city.
‘Where’s Chota Bristol?’ Durba asked.
We crossed the tramline on Lenin Sarani as it entered Esplanade. I led her across the street and into a lane, half dug up. We walked single file past the clothing stores and I showed her the bar where we used to go, where women were still banned.
‘What would they do if I tried to go inside?’
‘Durba! Keep walking.’
‘Down that way,’ I said as we made our way to Metro Gully, ‘is the Punjabi hotel where I used to eat fish curry and rice lunches with Mike and JB, and that’s Anarkali where Imran and I ate after late shifts, and through there is the shop where our office folk would order kochuris when there was something to celebrate. We never came: a peon would be sent, and the kochuris were excellent. And just across from it is Nizam’s, whose mutton rolls, Durba, as you know, no words can do justice.’
I was flooded with memories of experiences I could not digest. I let them all wash over me, joyous and true, as I narrated the life I had made. I had walked through those revolving doors to enter countless portals of the city, following streets upon streets, pavements upon pavements, to another life.
Durba and I were swirling in the evening crush of taxi-rickshaw-human traffic of Esplanade. For all these years, I had kept circling back, pulled by forces beyond my conscious control, returning repeatedly to my past. Now, for the first time, I felt the whirl propelling me outward, hurtling me from this orbit to other worlds. I was beginning, I realised only now. Just beginning.
Acknowledgements
At the Statesman, my friends and colleagues were like an extended family. Even today, I feel happy and nostalgic when I meet any of them. They were: Michael Flannery, Arunava Das, Esha Nag, Chandidas Bhattacharya, Ajoy John, Sukomal Basak, Ratan Pradhan, Debabrata Chakraborty, Gautam Bhaumick, Kunal Bhaumick, Dipankar Ghose, Arindam Biswas, Santanu Mallick, J. B. Lama, O. P. Rana, Mita Ghose, Nessa Bose, Rina Chunder, Chitralekha Basu, Imran Siddiqui, Paromita Kar, Rajib De, Piyal Bhattacharya, Dwaipayan Ghoshdastidar, Gautam Basu. The list could go on and on and I am sorry if I have excluded anyone. From 2009–10, I had an ACLS Early-Career Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which enabled me to return to Calcutta to spend a year doing research for the book. During that time, Rajesh Deb and Tridib Chakraborty helped organise interviews and accompanied me during a part of my work. Otherwise, most of the writing and reporting was done alone. I spent more than four years sitting alone in little rooms in Philadelphia and New Delhi, writing this book. I don’t think anyone can help you through that process, which is lonely and long. Susan Roth, Lisandro Kahan, Ajay Gandhi, Jacob Dlamini and Durba Chattaraj all read parts or all of the manuscript and gave me excellent feedback. Often they simply offered me the encouragement to keep going. My parents always had faith that I was doing something worthwhile, even if they could not always see the path that I was taking.
Alice Martell, my agent, has always believed in the book. I like to think that reading about Calcutta made her yearn for her childhood in Philadelphia. Faiza Sultan Khan, my editor, has championed the book from the time I sent it to Bloomsbury, unsolicited. Her faith in the work far surpasses my own and I am grateful to them both for their hard work on its behalf. John McPhee, my teacher at Princeton, first suggested I write a book about Calcutta mor
e than a decade ago. He gave me the courage to pursue the writing life. Without him I wouldn't still be writing. I think about the people who I loved who died in these years that I spent writing: Anna Tverskoy, Shefali Kerr, Chhaya Chattaraj, Ashoke Kerr, Rajat Kumar Neogy, and Sumitro Basak. I don't know what Calcutta means to me now that Sumitro is gone. We who loved him did not deserve to lose him so young.
A Note on the Author
Kushanava Choudhury grew up in Calcutta and New Jersey. After graduating from Princeton University he worked as a reporter at the Statesman in Calcutta. He went on to receive a PhD in Political Theory from Yale University before returning to Calcutta to write a book about the city. The Epic City is his first book.
First published in Great Britain 2017
This electronic edition published in 2017 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
© Kushanava Choudhury, 2017
Kushanava Choudhury has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
The poem here, ‘The City’ is taken from C. P. Cavafy’s Selected Poems, by C. P. Cavafy. Published by Princeton University Press, 1975. Copyright © C. P. Cavafy. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of C. P. Cavafy c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White, 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN.
Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.
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