Sen hadn’t forgotten me; he was his usual undemonstrative, unpretentious self. I was nervous that I was encroaching; a few days remained until the elections, which would cover Bengal in phases. Burdwan constituency, of which Sen was the representative, would vote before Calcutta. Yet Sen wasn’t hurried or impatient, and our conversation lasted two hours—probably because nothing of great importance emerged from it. Mainly, it was a familiar—but no less painful for being familiar—account of how Bengal had been deliberately marginalised after Independence by the central government, first of all by the Freight Equalisation Policy of 1948, which involved subsidising the transportation of minerals to any part of India by the central government, so that a factory dependent on those minerals wouldn’t suffer in terms of costs even if it were set up in a place far from their source. The greatest beneficiaries were states like Maharashtra and Gujarat in the West; and Delhi and its environs. The mineral-rich states, like Bengal and Bihar, lost their natural advantage, and their economies were badly damaged. All this was as well known as Sita’s abduction by Ravana in the Ramayana; but Sen spoke of it and other bygone discriminatory policies as if the wound were fresh, just as devotees can get worked up each time they hear the abduction episode.
He also told me—upon my asking—a little bit of his personal history; how, born in 1946 in Burdwan, one of a family of seven siblings, he grew up in poverty, presumably as the family profession by caste—kobiraji, or traditional medicine—became irrelevant. His father, he said, had in fact started out on the path of being an allopathic doctor, been admitted to medical college, and then had to give it up on the death of his father. So Sen’s father became a schoolteacher, and then joined the Communist Party in the early forties, involving himself in famine relief during that infamous man-made famine in 1943, caused by a combination of food supplies being diverted to Tommies and local wholesalers hoarding grain, in the last years of British rule. Sen, with his dark, long, bespectacled face, his expression in turn attentive and earnest, looks like a schoolteacher himself, but, by his own admission, was never interested in academics—probably because of his involvement in politics from 1961. And he may never have got married (he’d decided no woman in her right mind could possibly entertain the thought of such a husband) had not his wife, whom he met in college, taken the initiative and as good as proposed to him. Although Sen isn’t the sort of man you’d associate with excitement, you realise from throwaway remarks—for instance, about the “debate” about various things in the sixties—that he’s part of a culture that’s quickened by political disagreement and oppositionality. When he refers to the various criticisms now directed at the CPI(M), he refers to this culture in a general, axiomatic way: “Everyone in Bengal talks about politics,” he says, “just as everyone here is a doctor.” By this he means that everyone has a ready diagnosis for a problem, or an ailment, in Bengal. He attributes this to Bengal’s history of “social consciousness.” He doesn’t add that only in a society in which everyone is a patient—a society of hypochondriacs—would everyone be a doctor; that one must feel constantly victimised and arraigned by politics to be a society of potential politicians. As I listen, I see overlaps with my father and my uncles (Sen’s father, too, went to Scottish Church College); but, just as Socrates claimed he was not a citizen of Athens or Greece, but of the world, I can imagine my father and uncles and their friends as people who belong to the world, and not just Sylhet. In Sen, I see the Bengal of the last thirty years more clearly—its smouldering pain; its ordinariness: I can’t think of him belonging elsewhere.
Sen, during our meanderings through recent history, could have woven in his swan song, but didn’t. In fact, at the end of it we resolved to meet again—as if the more complex issues needed to be addressed later. “I’m sorry to ask you this,” I said, “but what do you think the outcome will be?” He’d been tolerant so far, and there was no sign that he’d be less so now. “You mean the elections?” he asked, regarding me steadily. “Yes.” “It’ll be tight,” he said. “Fifty-fifty.” “Really?” I was surprised: nothing about Sen suggested he was a bluffer or delusional, and all predictions—and the feeling in my gut—said the Left was headed for a crashing defeat. “What makes you say that?” “Well, two years ago it was different,” said Sen, referring to the Trinamool’s wipe-out of the Left in the general elections. “But now people have had a taste of their MPs and councillors, and know them for what they are. It won’t be the same this time around.” The trouble was, the electorate had tasted and drunk the Left for three decades; and, though Bengalis prefer an impressive degree of predictability in their diet, they seemed to have reached the limit of their love of the familiar. “What do you think?” he asked. “If you don’t mind my saying so, people are fed up with the Left Front,” I replied. A look of hurt flickered momentarily on his face. “They’d even prefer a nuclear disaster, and in the Trinamool Congress they may have found one.” We both laughed aloud at the joke. “One day, when we have more time, you must tell me why people are so fed up with the Left.” He was genuinely concerned and even tantalised. Over our two hours together, he’d conceded failures of foresight and governance. He’d also pointed out that not unless you were in government could you appreciate the exigencies of the scramble towards industrialisation: that neither globalisation nor the big corporations, like Tata, left you with a great deal of leeway for manoeuvre. But he asserted the Left’s successes, especially when I raised the question of its policies towards education: more and more children from remote villages were going on to finish school, and perform exceptionally in their higher studies. Why, then, were people fed up? “We probably need another conversation for that,” I said; and this prompted us to duly exchange cell-phone numbers.
I wasn’t certain, though, when I’d be seeing him again.
There had been two personal exchanges in our conversation, in the midst of our back and forth about the days of the Left Front in Bengal, bygone and present. The first was to do with my maternal cousin, Subho. When Sen’s constituency, Burdwan, came up at the beginning, I thought I should ask him if he knew Subho, who’d taught mathematics at Burdwan University, and now held a senior administrative office there; and, besides, was a long-time member of the Communist Party. Sen’s face softened into a smile and he said: “He sings beautifully”—my cousin is a singer of Tagore songs, East Bengali folk songs, and political songs. There was an echo, a concordance, in their lives too, that extended beyond the Party: just as my cousin has two children, an older daughter, and a younger son who’s mentally challenged, so too does Sen. The term he used, naturally and without self-consciousness, as if news of political correctness had still not arrived wherever he was, was “mentally retarded.”
The second, very brief exchange had to do with the allegorically named ministry of industrial reconstruction, conjured up in Jyoti Basu’s time, inherited by Sen: now particularly Kafkaesque (by which I mean not bizarre, but belonging to a parallel world that possesses its own veracity) since, to ordinary eyes at least, none of that “industrial reconstruction” had taken place. Yet it was this ministry, I told Sen, that had invited my father, soon after he moved to Calcutta in 1989, to become an advisor to Lily Biscuit. Advice from experts is much sought after in India, and readily proffered; as a result, the post of the advisor is among the easiest to create in a company. My father had reached the zenith of his career selling biscuits, becoming the first Indian chief executive of Britannia Industries in 1979. Britannia was an offshoot of the British conglomerate United Biscuits, under whose umbrella flourished Jacob’s, Huntley and Palmer’s, and Peek Freen’s, whose products had been integral to the English teatime. In consonance with the flight of capital from Calcutta in the sixties, Britannia had re-established its head office in Bombay in 1964. After almost twenty-five years, my father was back in Calcutta. That intervening history—of Britannia, my father’s job, and Calcutta—felt as compressed as a fable. In some quarters at least, my father’s reputation as biscuit guru m
ust have preceded him (being an unusually modest man, he’d made no overtures himself) and reached Jyoti Basu’s ears (the chief minister had met him a couple of times). Lily Biscuit was a respectable indigenous phenomenon—Bengal-specific; a regional quality biscuit brand. Its lore originated aeons ago; my mother claims, correctly, that Britannia was absent from her youth, and unmissed, largely because the excellent Lily was then consumed with tea. Introduced into the world of the Bengali bhadralok by a Bengali bhadralok family, it finally ran out of steam, as bhadralok enterprise appears to. Will someone in the social sciences write a dissertation on how the rise of individualism in Bengal (in contrast to the West) destroyed rather than energised entrepreneurship, at least on home ground; how, in India, caste and community drive capital and the free market? Every morning in the early nineties, an Ambassador, a state government car, would pick up my father to take him to the Lily Biscuit offices in Ultadanga. By then, he was well into post-post-retirement, and I think he took this excursion—after having recently annexed the heights of the private sector in what was still largely a socialist economy—as a posthumous visit to a hidden underworld: the public sector, whose existence, all these years, he’d had nothing to do with. The daily journey was a journey into the dead. But he brought back tales of life: tea-drinking, laughter, and gossip in limbo. His reports were not unlike the accounts emerging now, in June 2011, of the sort of routines that governed the staff at Writers’ Building, the seat of government in Calcutta, in the last two decades. Lily Biscuit was a “sick” company, bought over by the West Bengal government to ensure there were no job losses—an ingenious form of anti–venture capitalism. Bengali industry was afloat with such vessels: proud barges and liners that were now, not run aground, but mildly stationary upon shallow water. Much the same thing had happened to the actual barges on the Hooghly, which had once made Calcutta a great port: they were sitting there for years.
I told Sen just a little bit about my father’s background: enough to hint we were in opposite camps in the class war. Sen looked unruffled. The old enmities have lost some of their edge in the bewildering world we inhabit. Besides, I only meant to register my own amusement that my relationship with the ministry of industrial reconstruction went further back than Sen’s.
My father had missed being one of the beneficiaries of globalisation. A student of English literature at Scottish Church College, Calcutta, then briefly a well-wisher of the Marxists while in London, then a nominal follower of M. N. Roy, the “radical humanist,” whose spell on him had never quite worn off, he found his calling at last on the narrow ledge of capitalism in socialist India. By the time India “opened up” and liberalised its economy in 1991, my father was acquainting himself with “industrial reconstruction” and the remnant of Lily Biscuit. He was not going to dip into the booty of the new economy; he draws a monthly pension of Rs 6000 from Britannia, less than what a retired government schoolteacher gets, because the new capitalists feel no philanthropic pang towards the private sector’s old guard.
In a way, I’m almost relieved he was born fifteen years too late to be where the big money is today. Only recently, I heard of how a biscuit company (unnamed, probably because of a legal injunction) was pressuring the central government to replace the free lunches it gives to poor schoolchildren with biscuit packets. The government would have happily given in had there not been an outcry. I shudder to think of my father involved in such a scheme today, although everything I’ve known about him makes it seem unlikely. Is it not better that he lived in an age when he could be at once optimistic and righteously angry about the need to deregulate the market? The leisurely progress of his vascular dementia means that he’s aware of his family, of Calcutta, of India, and of his Britannia pension, but at several removes. Vascular dementia precludes the absolute blankness of Alzheimer’s; it’s a gentle slope descending into oblivion.
FIVE
Universal Suffrage
I arrived in Dubai after midnight, nervous about missing my connecting flight. It would depart at 2 a.m. Passing through security for the second time in nine hours, rehearsing the whole belt-discarding, shoe-and-wallet-jettisoning routine with a bunch of Indians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and Europeans, I plunged into the capitalist wakefulness that’s Dubai airport. What was I doing here? Going back to Calcutta, of course. Ever since British Airways terminated its meagre ration of thrice-weekly flights in 2009, travelling back from the United Kingdom necessarily involves a stopover in some part of the ancient world—in some resplendent metropolis in the middle of a desert. I’d been in London, in the South Bank, for a few days of an unusually warm spring; on the third day, I’d just about begun to find my feet in British time, and now, on the fourth, was struggling to rediscover Calcutta time in Dubai. As I tried to follow the clock’s forward leap, walking very quickly on the concourse, I made sure to buy some chocolate, and pick up a box of dates.
Assembly elections had been taking place in India during my absence, phase by phase, over April and May, and one of the consequences was going to be new governments in at least some states. Most states changed governments every five or ten years. The non-ideological alliances of compromise and mutual opportunity have proved, since the nineties, to be surprisingly resilient. There has been, famously, a democratisation of politics, an embrace of not only grandiloquent low-caste anarchists like Lalu Prasad Yadav and Dalit dictator manqués like Mayawati, but of an array of disquieting hustlers who are reportedly no less depraved than the polite Nehru-jacketed secular sorts from the Congress. In West Bengal, of course, there had been no alteration for thirty-four years; the electorate, steadfast at first, then increasingly hapless, had voted the Left Front into power seven times. The old bhadralok Marxists had been going in and out of Writers’ Building in their white dhutis and panjabis like Roman senators in their togas, casually unmindful of the barbarians sizing up the gates. Although the Front had incurred heavy losses a couple of years ago in the general elections, and Mamata Banerjee’s great vision—the vision of decisively booting the Front out—was not just a possibility but the most credible outcome, the CPI(M) was no longer persuaded of the barbarians’ success. Even Nirupam Sen, never a toga-wearing type, had, as I pointed out earlier, sounded sceptical about an easy majority for the Trinamool—as the Roman in 476 C.E. might have been narrow-eyedly dismissive of Odoacer’s prospects. It was to this Bengal I flew back on 22nd April.
The London-to-Dubai flight had been uncomfortably full, despite the aircraft being the gigantic A380. Next to me was an Asian couple of Muslim origin (I could tell from the names by which they affectionately addressed each other, and the repeated use of “inshallah” in their London English), but British in identity, excited by their journey towards India, where they’d never been, and their imminent vacation in Kerala—a green, water-drenched idyll, but also, coincidentally, a CPI(M) bastion. The woman watched Hindi films, now with indulgent familiarity, as if she were surprised to be reprising her life in her Wembley drawing room, now with proprietary boredom (I had a sense she was viewing some of them a second time), and, whenever she was distracted from the storyline, matter-of-factly consulted the pages of Hello! magazine. She nudged her partner and invited his response frequently; he replied with the colloquial immediacy of a man who has an opinion on everything. “Look, it’s him,” she said, upon seeing Hrithik Roshan, or “That’s her,” on viewing Bipasha Basu, with the intimacy reserved for things one has only ever encountered in books and pictures; while he shared these sightings avidly. She wanted confirmation as to whether Kate Middleton was really that beautiful; on the other hand, she was genuinely astonished at how slim she was. I eavesdropped, read, spied on my neighbours, watched a film, slept a little.
The Dubai to Calcutta flight, in comparison, possessed a dimly lit provincialism you encounter all the time in Dhakuria, Jodhpur Park, Lake Town, and Salt Lake. It was a smaller aircraft, three quarters full. My neighbour was a twenty-eight-year-old man. He worked in Leeds for Tata Consultancy Serv
ices, which was doing cheap software programming for the British government. He’d got on to a flight from Manchester, reached Dubai half an hour late at 1 a.m., worried, as I had, about making it to this plane, and now leaned back. Adults, like children, will forget trauma with ease, and live gratefully for the most part in the present. This, at least, is how people who have anything to do with Bengal approach existence: frontally, with a narrow focus. This man’s father had had a second cerebral stroke at the age of sixty-four, which is why he was on his way to visit him at this odd time of the year—neither summer nor Christmas—for ten days. It was a relatively early age to have had two strokes, and I quizzed him about it, given my own father’s tendency to have “mini strokes.” But my father is eighty-nine. It turned out that his, among other things, was a schoolteacher. Arriving into Calcutta’s heat, he’d take a train to Kalyani, the small town in which his parents lived, on the day, 23rd April, that Kalyani voted. “What do you think will happen?” I asked him. “There seems little doubt that there will be a ‘paribartan,’ ” he said, giggling—there was something elusively feminine about him—guiltily delighting in the word that had been put into currency in the last two years.
He not only represented the Bengal of the last three decades, he was it. Intelligence and marginality marked him equally—the moderate privileges he’d grown up with in Kalyani, and the most he’d made of them—as well as that delicate, androgynous fussiness. I recalled the Left Front’s scrapping of English from state-funded primary schools in 1983, a decision reversed only two years ago. Nirupam Sen and I had discussed this: why the dropping of English at that stage should diminish excellence. After all, Sen himself was clearly from an English-as-second-language background; so was my father and the great memoirist and English prose stylist Nirad C. Chaudhuri—they’d both grown up in East Bengal before Independence, and my father, who would startle me by quoting Eliot’s “Prufrock” and Shelley’s “Ode to a Skylark,” began his education in a paathshala, an immemorial village school. Class, then, was not a reason for once choosing Bengali over English primary education; nationalism might have been. Tagore too belonged to this extraordinary English-as-a-second-language set, and was always diffident about his command of the language, hated English lessons, and confessed how he found it difficult to distinguish between the pronunciation of “worm” and “warm”—a not uncommon Bengali problem. Was it today’s state education itself, then, rather than the early absence of English, that was to blame for the working class’s sense of deprivation; or was it the encroaching tide of globalisation, which recognised no other language, and to which Bengal had capitulated later than almost anywhere else but Cuba? Anyway, the legacy of that twenty-seven-year-old policy was audible in my neighbour’s inflected English speech, which we continued to have recourse to until we gave up the pretence of being generalised, pan-Indian individuals, and confessed to each other we were Bengali. We continued talking of Calcutta, how it made flying hard work. Part agitated yokel, I narrated stories of flights out of Bombay and Delhi, how two British Airways planes depart each day from these cities, not to mention competitors like Jet Airways, Virgin, and Air India—and yet the flights to London are always bustling, the business class section not only chock-a-block with the Indian rich and their children but (I’ve noticed on occasion) their children’s nannies, self-conscious and reticent once the infants have gone to sleep. Exhausted, like hitch-hikers on an interminable highway, we fell asleep, dazed by memories of parents and intimations of better places.
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