‘My father became a stenographer when he was seventeen or eighteen. This would have been about 1909, and he would probably have worked in one of the British companies. He was a capable stenographer, and he told me he had twice won the 50-rupee government prize for speed in English shorthand and typing. He continued to live in Howrah, in my grandfather’s dwelling, which was a portion of a residential house. In Calcutta there were no such things as flats or apartments or tenements. There were just parts of houses – with the landlord occupying a part of the house, and renting out the rest with little adjustments here and there.
‘In a few years both my grandfather and grandmother passed away, not leaving much by way of money or property. But my father moved to better jobs over the years. A stage came, in the decade between 1915 and 1925, when he was quite well paid. He had enough money not only to look after his family more than comfortably, but also to acquire some status symbols, like horses and phaetons. He had a few Arab horses driven by Muslim coachmen. Why Muslim? In those days they were the most widely available for those jobs. In those days, for certain trusted jobs, Hindus wouldn’t mind having Muslims around them.
‘I myself don’t have any memory of this period of my father’s life. These are all versions narrated to me by my eldest sister, without me asking for it. And narrated also by people who used to know my father very closely. Some of them would come out with remarks like: “Rarely have South Indians lived in Calcutta in such status or style as your father did.” When I was a kid, when I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, when I was at school, I heard this when I ran into them at some social gathering. There would be talk then of someone doing well in life, or of someone having failed, and there would be talk of my father’s past glory. When I heard these stories I felt a mixture of both pride and sadness.
‘My father, during this time of well-being, took to the typical British style of dressing – complete with top hat, the suit, the waistcoat, double-toned shoes, the tie. And he also spent his leisure hours playing tennis. He started a tennis club close to his house. As a South Indian, his living expenses were meagre. All South Indian or Tamil brahmins were vegetarians without exception in those days, of course. So 200 rupees a month was quite a sizeable salary. An average family could make do with 30 or 40 rupees.
‘He was a deeply religious man, as most of the South Indian brahmins were. Apart from tennis, the only thing on which he would spend his time were his pujas and bhajans, devotional songs. He was quite recognized for his singing of bhajans. He became a leader of the community in the locality. With this result: he kept new migrants from the South, young men coming in search of a livelihood, in his house. He fed them and clothed them and trained them in shorthand and typing. There was almost a regular stenography class in our house. And he helped them into jobs with British firms.
‘My father used to respect the British. His ability to get along with the British people, and his love for the English language itself, probably did not make him look at them only as some kind of people to be hated. He never had a bent for politics of any kind.
‘My father got married three times. He lost his first wife, and then he married a second time, so that his second wife could look after his first two children. When his second wife died, leaving in turn two or three children, he was forced by his relations to marry a third time. In those days such marriages were not difficult. Despite their impecunious situation, the Tamil brahmins were invariably good breeders. They would be happy to give away their daughters to anyone who wanted to marry them, so long as they were sure of the basics – that the man belonged to the same Community, and the man was capable of supporting his wife and family.
‘In 1935, when my father married for the third time, he was forty-three. His third wife, my mother, was eighteen. There was a child in 1937, a boy, but he barely lived six months, largely because of my mother’s poor health. I was born in 1940.
‘By this time my father had married off his first two daughters, and he had one more daughter to marry off. He also had a son from his second marriage still going to school. These were the uncertain war years. My father at that time was a godown or warehouse keeper. It was a responsible job – most of the items in the godown were imported. The godown was owned by the Japanese firm of Mitsui. My father had taken this job with the Japanese in 1936, after he had married my mother. And he continued with it until, with the war, these Japanese operations in India were closed down. When this happened, my father moved to the newly created government department of the DGMP, the Directorate-General of Munitions and Production.
‘When the war ended, my father gave up this job. About this time Mahatma Gandhi’s independence movement was taking on more serious proportions, and the Muslims too were becoming agitated. In 1946 there were very bad Hindu-Muslim riots in Calcutta.
‘But before this, my mother had fallen seriously ill. When my mother was close to death, she asked my elder stepsister – who had married a former army man – to bring me up. So when my stepsister and her husband left Calcutta, I went with them. I was six. My mother died a month later.
‘Almost at the same time the big Hindu-Muslim riots took place in Calcutta. In the riots, the house in which we had been living was burned down. We had left Howrah long before and had moved to the city proper. When my father lost his job with the DGMP at the end of the war, we had moved to a single-room tenement in a large building. This was the building that was set on fire during the riots and burned down – with the room where my mother had died, and where we had stored almost everything that had belonged to us.
‘My father was forced during the riot to get into a jeep and leave everything behind, paying all that he had, several thousand rupees, to save himself, paying that to the people who transported him. They dumped him and others like him in Howrah railway station, leaving them to take trains to their chosen destinations away from the city.
‘I was with my sister and her husband far away, where my sister’s husband was working as a food supply inspector for the state government. He had been discharged from the army, Auchinleck’s army, in 1945. He had been one of the Viceroy’s Commissoned Officers, as they were called, and when he left the army he had the rank of jemadar. These people, the VCOs, had been drafted into the army before the war, at a time when the British felt they would soon be facing a war situation. As a kid I used to admire him. I used to look forward to seeing him. In my eyes he was some kind of a hero. He was always well turned out. He had a lot of gifts for us – chocolates, canteen supplies. The only thing I didn’t like about him was the smoking.
‘I realized what was happening to my father in Calcutta. I used to see the photographs in the papers, and people talked about the horrors. This sequence – of my having seen my mother dying slowly over many months in one room, with my aged father nursing her; and then my being handed over to my sister’s charge, and moving with her and husband to an altogether new place, on the other side of India, where people spoke another language, Marathi, which I couldn’t understand – this sequence put me into a spell of utter gloom and depression.
‘I look at it as depression now. At the time what I did was just sit outside the house, on the steps, just crouching, leaning my head on my arms, sitting all by myself on the steps outside my stepsister’s house. I spent hours like that, confused, not knowing what to think.
‘Suddenly one morning my father landed, and I suppose he restored me to a certain amount of life. Then he left again, promising to take me away, back with him, after things settled down. This was just before independence.
‘My brother-in-law started playing truant from his job. He would leave us, and go away for weeks on end, and not tell us where he was going. My sister wrote to my father for help. But my father was yet to settle down himself. He was almost fifty-five at this time. After various moves with my sister and her husband – who kept on changing jobs, and in every job kept going off, as he had been used to doing – my father came and took me and my sister away to Calcutta, whe
re he had at last found a place to stay. He had also found a job, in an import company. This was in January 1948, the month when Mahatma Gandhi died.
‘I spent some time with my father. Then my grandmother came and took me back to her village in the South, and put me in a school there. But this village life didn’t suit me, and in 1950 I returned to Calcutta, to my father. He began to educate me at home. It was only in 1952, when I was eleven, that I actually entered a school. My father couldn’t come with me. So I went to the school myself and got myself admitted after a test, in Class 8.
‘My father was teaching me mainly English. He didn’t attach much importance to the other subjects. Because of his love for the English language, and because he was now aged, he would get me to read out the editorials and leading articles from the Statesman, although often I didn’t follow what I was reading. He would ask me to underline the difficult words and phrases, and leave me to write down the meanings as my home work for the afternoon.
‘My father’s income had gone down, and the place where we were living was in a locality where the rents were low. The locality had a sprinkling of leftover Britishers in the mansions around us, a sizable number of Muslims, and an equally large number of Anglo-Indians and Christians. The whole family – there were six of us now: my father, my stepbrother, my stepsister and her two children, and myself – had one very large room. About 20 feet by 16 feet or 18 feet. We had to share the common tap and toilet.
‘There were few South Indians in that locality. The family didn’t quite fit in. So my father decided to shift over to a place where mixing would be more easy, and my school would be closer. I had joined a South Indian school.
‘I studied there for three years. I had problems every year at exam times with various minor ailments, and it was really only my general good performance that saw me through from one class to the other.
‘We had moved to a three-room flat. My brother had started earning by then.
‘I completed school in March 1955. My father passed away two months later, in a street accident very close to our house. My father was an early riser. He had gone to the market to buy flowers for the morning puja; and, as he was returning, a motorcycle on the wrong side of the road, with three people on it, dashed against him, and he fell unconscious. We found him in a pool of blood, with the vegetables and the flowers he had purchased strewn all over.
‘We took him to the hospital by taxi, together with one of the men from the motorbike, the other two having vanished. This man wasn’t injured. He was only pretending; and when he saw it was only my brother and me holding our father, he opened the taxi door at a street corner, and ran away. My father stayed in the hospital for three days. Three painful days. He never regained consciousness. He passed away.
‘The whole family now had to live on my brother’s 150-rupees income, £14 a month. He was working as a secretary to a British factory-manager, the factory being located in one of the suburbs. So we had to leave the three-roomed flat. We moved to a smaller place near to my brother’s factory.
‘I couldn’t think in terms of going on to a college. I didn’t want to be a burden on my brother. And I wanted to be on my own in any case. So I decided to learn the most obvious thing – typing, to begin with. There was a typing school not far off from our new place. The fees were four rupees a month. My brother paid in the beginning, but then I was able to earn some money to pay the fees myself. I did odd typing jobs at the institute. I was on the lookout then for any kind of employment, but things were not easy. Often I used to walk 10 or 12 miles to look up a friend, in the hope of finding a job through his help. I was about sixteen at this time.’
Rajan, though sturdy, was a short man. I wondered what his physical condition was like at the time he was talking about.
I asked him, ‘Did you feel strong or weak?’
‘I didn’t feel physically energetic enough all the time. But what kept me going was the determination to be on my own. I’ll tell you something I did one day. I even approached a Britisher in my brother’s factory. He said, “You’re too young. You should be at school.” Another person I approached said, “But you haven’t even grown a moush.” A moustache.
‘I suffered spells of gloom and melancholia. It was almost what I felt when I used to sit on the steps of my sister’s house. I often even thought of ending my life. There were the suburban trains. And there was always the Hooghly River. But the counsel of a close friend of mine changed my mind.
‘I had no adolescence. I stepped directly from childhood into adulthood. And I felt undernourished. Our food had gone down after my father’s death, because my brother had to feed so many mouths on his meagre income. An added dimension to my none too happy life at this time was my relationship with my stepbrother, who was supporting us all. We could never get along. He was almost nine years senior to me, and he would always beat me up badly. It was on one of those occasions, when he had beaten me up badly, that I was driven to thinking in terms of ending my life.
Things brightened up the next year, 1957, when I ran into a friend who said he could fix me up in a job in a Marwari concern. The Marwaris were taking over from the British in Calcutta, and were then the principal business people in the city – and they continue to be so. They were taking over the jute mills, the tea gardens, the coal mines, etc.
‘I took a job with one of those family concerns as a typist. The salary was to be 90 rupees a month, seven pounds. I was just about able to get myself a second pair of trousers and a shirt. It was a long journey to the office and a long journey back. In that month I spent no more than 10 rupees on myself, and I handed over the rest of what I earned to my brother as my contribution to the family expenses. I travelled on the second-class train. I didn’t go to a movie. I didn’t spend more than two annas, one-eighth of a rupee, a penny, on my lunch.
‘A month after I joined, I was summoned by one of the directors. I had put the carbon in the wrong way when I was typing out a statement. I was sacked. Luckily, within seven days, I ran into another friend – we were on the same tram – and he took me to another employer. This was also a Marwari. He interviewed me in his house. His company was a newspaper company, which is today India’s largest.
‘I was to work in their newly opened advertising department. I typed out advertising reports. I got 125 rupees. So I was doing slightly better. I contributed a full 100 rupees to the family, and spent 25 rupees on myself, including the tuition fees at an evening college I had just joined, doing Intermediate Commerce.
‘We could now afford to shift back to the old locality in South Calcutta. We lived in a flat shared between two families. My relations with my brother continued as before. But he had stopped beating me, after I had one day returned a slap he had given me.
‘I stayed for a year with the newspaper group. Then I left and went to Lipton’s for a salary of 10 rupees a day. The manager there recommended me to his own advertising agency, and for six years, from 1958 to 1964, I worked with that advertising agency. That was when I met you. It was a good time for me. I was a member of the British Council. My love for the English language drew me to people proficient in the English language – journalists, film-makers, copywriters, and advertising people generally.
‘I liked the advertising profession. It was different. It made me think. It was not drudgery. My other jobs had been drudgery. And I particularly liked the people in the profession – the artists, the account executives, the printers, the copywriters. I joined the advertising agency on 270 rupees. The senior director liked my English, and I worked for him. He liked the interest I showed in the work. He promoted me to assist him in various campaigns. Soon I was tipped to be an assistant account executive. I got on with other people in the firm as well, because I was the youngest of the lot, and could converse fluently in their language, Bengali. Bengalis appreciate that. I got an annual increment of 15 rupees. In 1964 I was getting 330 rupees. I was promised promotion, to be an assistant account executive. And finally, when it di
dn’t come, I resigned in a huff.
‘I became an assistant to an advertising and short-film producer who had taken a liking to me. I picked up the basics of film-making. He paid me 350 rupees. I even shot certain sequences on my own. But the Pakistani war of 1965 put an end to that kind of film-making company, and I had to find another job. During this time I met important people in the Calcutta creative world. That made me very happy. I always thought I had a creative urge in me, which hadn’t found expression because I hadn’t had a settled life and a proper foundation.
‘Somebody told me I should go to England. It was because of that I took a job with Air India, for the free flight to England. At the end of my first year I went to England for a visit. But I had to return, because of that recurring problem in the family about my stepsister and her husband. At the end of my second year with Air India I made a trip to the United States.
The Air India salary was 350 rupees. It was too low – the rupee had been devalued in 1967. I even had to do a part-time job in the evening. At last, I answered an advertisement from a manufacturing company. On the strength of my experience I was given a job in the management cadre, for thrice the Air India salary. The bosses soon promoted me and put me in charge of a purchasing department.
India: A Million Mutinies Now Page 17