Samirda knows that it’s not just what you say but how you say it that makes you intrinsically interesting. His mimic’s knack is evidence that he doesn’t view his invitees without amusement; that he isn’t entirely at their mercy. He annihilates himself while attending to them as they finish their éclair from Kookie Jar; then, at some point, he annihilates them by becoming them in a little spontaneous display before another set of guests.
Someone I know, also a well-to-do victim of polio and frequenter of the Bengal Club, but one who continues to walk with crutches with a staccato, oppositional ferocity, once told me that Samirda hadn’t tried hard enough; that he could have been more mobile if he had. I’m not qualified to judge this statement. But with Samirda I’ve felt that he saw movement as he did his place in history—metaphorically: as something which he didn’t wish to struggle to attain, and which he was content to let slip and go its own way while he quietly went his. For this reason, his drawing room was where everything happened for him.
Mrs. Mukherjee Senior was becoming more frail; by the end of the nineties, she couldn’t observe the teas in their entirety. At a certain point in the evening, she’d go inside. She’d also grown more hard of hearing; but her curiosity was strong. She might want to know what had suddenly caused excitement or laughter; then Samirda would interrupt the flow of things in a loud dignified voice, shouting at her patiently in his perfect English—“NO MA, WHAT AMIT SAID IS …” because, invariably, the assumption was she’d misunderstood. And she would look startled and chastened, and remind her son with a pained, Victorian firmness, “There’s no need to shout, baba, I was only asking …” (“Baba” was a term this family of three used of each other—in fact, of anyone in their company—to express affection. They made it particularly forgiving and emollient.) Once these exchanges were done, conversation was resumed.
Samirda once told me that his mother’s finances had run out when she’d been forced to sell the one hundred thousand shares—“a decent number, giving her decent dividends”—in Martin Burn in the eighties. He’d left the company in 1986, ten years after its future had been sealed by nationalisation, and as the new Calcutta under the Left became a location inimical to private enterprise; since then, he’d had no reliable, regular income, except the “measly,” ever-decreasing (in real terms) Rs 600 he got as a pension.
Towards the end of the millennium, Samirda also sounded more anxious than I’d known him to be. The property he lived in, the two-storeyed building, was tangled in some obscure but fatiguing litigation with a charitable and spiritual organisation. The organisation was behaving in this matter with less empathy and greater aggressiveness than it likes to be known for. Of course, Ramakrishna, sage and idiosyncratic figurehead of the organisation, had once astutely advised his fellow seekers: “You can’t be shy and retiring all the time. You need to know when to bare your fangs.” Those words had a powerful subterranean message in an age of colonialism. But the mystic may not have wanted his followers to bare their fangs at this Cambridge-educated bhadralok with polio. The problem had arisen from some reckless action by a loopy relative and his wife, who had involved the organisation in a transaction that had been interrupted upon their deaths. The organisation, as a result, had turned its attention to these surviving Mukherjees. In a state of panic, Samirda had begun disguising his voice when taking telephone calls, croaking “Hello” in an anomalous, dislocating manner to ward off bogus litigants. His relief was audible when he realised it was a harmless acquaintance at the other end; “Sorry, baba!” he’d say, sometimes adding “Dash it all!” before explaining the situation, and then finally let the conversation embrace the usual constellation of subjects—Sandipan Samajpati, the young classical vocalist; beautiful society ladies (Samirda, with his wife’s blessings and abetment, was a passive aesthete of feminine beauty); the present Marxist government (he and Anitadi had, at some point, resolved that they were fellow travellers).
* * *
Samirda was all praise for a certain Mayank Shah, whose virtues he began to enumerate to me in the mid-nineties. Shah was a Gujarati financial advisor through whom Samirda had discovered the infinite promise of equity. He’d put Samirda’s savings into the market; “He’s doing wonders with my money, baba,” I was told in a tone of grateful disbelief. “I hope he’s being careful with it,” I said at one point, sounding elderly, fussy, and superstitious about unforeseen material gain, and feeling a little envious of Samirda’s triumphant entry into the new financial order of risk and growth.
Then, in a few years, he was groaning and complaining bitterly. “Awful fellow—he doesn’t pick up the phone any more.” Mayank Shah, who’d come every week in the mornings bearing good tidings, had vanished temporarily. “I’ve lost lakhs, baba.” The reason for Shah’s new elusiveness was that he’d played with his clients’ money; he had, lately, become his clients’ debtor. “ ‘Give me one month, Mr. Mukherjee. I will return every paisa,’ he’s saying now,” said Samirda, unable to resist derisively replicating Mr. Shah’s Gujarati inflections. All this happened well before the crash of 2008, at a time when the market, like the unfathomable gods of Hindu mythology, was appearing fully incarnate to its devotees, and offering them boons and wishes of their choosing. People were reaping the most absurd and undeserved rewards: new cars, new houses, new lives that the market had the power to create, for its followers, out of a little bit of capital. As a result, a new faith in fate and destiny—bhagya—was in the air: I heard the word mentioned deferentially, with wonder, by speculators, Bollywood singers, even book distributors—anyone who had anything to do with success. I recall a conversation I overheard when my second novel, Afternoon Raag, was about to be published in 1993. I was visiting my distributor, the savvy and expansively affectionate Lal Hiranandani of India Book House, at his well-lit office in a dingy building on Lyndsay Street. I’d groped my way up the dark staircase, and spotted Lal: he was speaking to a man (to whom he smartly introduced me) who looked like he’d never read a book in his life—probably a link in what was then a still fairly untested chain of Anglophone book distribution. They were staring, with a shared consternation and air of surrender, at the cover of the British trade magazine, the Bookseller, which announced news of Vikram Seth’s imminent A Suitable Boy. Lal’s interlocutor mentioned (in a dreamlike, rehearsed way, as if they’d had this exchange many times before, and would be compelled to have it again) the size of the near-imaginary advance the book had got—and, in a tic that Indian traders have, quickly translated the sum from pounds to rupees: “One and a half crores.” There was no more than a moment’s silence; then he touched his forehead and said, “Bhagya.” I’d never heard that word—immemorial, belonging to an arcane, resilient universe—used in such a context before, though I’ve heard it employed with that meaning since. It was as if the author, and his book’s merits, were irrelevant to the money it had earned: some ineffable element, which he called bhagya, but which was a bhagya that played upon, and through, the market, had produced this result—and confirmed the significance of his profession and calling, where he was an anonymous link.
Destiny, assuming Mayank Shah’s misleading persona, had, however, badly let down Samirda, and he was understandably bitter. About the matter of money, he was possibly a bit of a “duffer”; as we’ve all been proved to be.
The late nineties was a bad time for Samirda and Anitadi, coping with the charitable organisation and Mayank Shah. Apparently Anitadi would go to the court in the morning because of the litigation to do with the property, and come back dispirited and bewildered, not having followed a word of the legal gibberish.
And yet, at teatime, she was contained as ever; you relaxed as you were taken out of the uncertain realm of your own decisions, your own volition, into a place where she was the one in control. She knew just how long she had to wait before she poured the tea; you didn’t have to get anxious about it, because she was obeying an invisible metronome. Even Samirda, despite his mild agitation, was calming and
reassuring. They represented the continuance of a wishful gentility; we, their guests, needed to see them in that way for about an hour, or an hour and a half. We had an idea that their lives were falling apart, but the tea was a rebuttal, for all concerned, of this melodramatic piece of knowledge—we wouldn’t be here if things were really bad.
Some sort of quick remedy was needed, though, for the mess Mr. Shah had made.
One afternoon, Anitadi, midway through the tea, said cheerfully that she wanted to sell two Chinese vases. Would we keep that in mind in case we knew any buyers? We were taken aback and shocked, but, at the same time, felt almost privileged we’d been asked. Anitadi’s eyes had a mischievous and confidential gleam—as if this, too, were somehow a “fun time,” like the Naxal period had been. There was a quiet effervescence about her.
A few months later, they told us they were thinking they’d sell the painting in the drawing room. Did we know anyone who’d be interested? The painting, as you entered the room, occupied the wall on the right; it was fairly large, dark, and, to my eye, unremarkable. I presumed it had no importance except as a halfhearted piece of family history, bought more to decently cover a space than to be looked at. I either sat with my back to it, or opposite it, depending on which side of the centre table I was seated. Now that Samirda mentioned they might want to sell it, he turned his head, as if to check if it was still the same painting, and I saw Anitadi regard it steadily with her calm, democratic gaze—a gaze that’s never either superior or obsequious—as if she were reassessing it, judging it in the light of something; as a result, I too felt encouraged—and obliged—to study it. I saw nothing in it that didn’t seem vague and phantasmagoric—the silvery glint of water, a solitary boat on a ghostly journey, and a kind of faint miasma at the back, which may have been foliage, rocks, or even cloud.
I didn’t care much for this kind of twilit pre-Raphaelite or Orientalist scene—I hadn’t decided which it was; whether the river was a tributary of the Ganges or a stream in Scotland or England—which is why I’d avoided looking at it carefully. It might have been done by a relative, or even a friend. But Samirda recently told me that the painting was a picture in the manner of van Ruisdaal, except that the signature was missing—which is why a benefactor called Amber Patra bought it for only 40,000 rupees. Who is van Ruisdaal? A seventeenth-century Dutch painter, he was well known for his wooded landscapes and his clouds. As I look at his paintings, while they appear, one by one, on the Net, restored to a strange newness and clarity, I think I like his work; it isn’t romantic, but worldly and precise—the clouds and woods and details are very real and still. A patina must have darkened the picture in Samirda’s drawing room, obscuring its colours and bringing to it that twilit, Orientalist mood—which eventually dampens my spirits, and which is maybe why I’d never acknowledged it.
There were other things the Mukherjees sold at the time that I had no idea of. For instance, a golden fob watch that he recounts to me suddenly in a conversation, when I’m asking him about the painting. “And, oh yes, there was a fob watch,” he says; and this is the last item in the inventory he’s made for me, before I hastily ask him to stop—I don’t want to know more.
They’d also sold a marble table to a lady I know slightly, a vivacious socialite. Samirda, inexplicably, begins to chortle; he can’t help finding the ups and downs of existence entertaining. I’d heard once that the socialite herself was now in straitened circumstances, but this may be no more than the pointless gossip that circulates among a very small set of people in the city.
However, I do know that Anitadi wanted to rid herself of a necklace. She brought it out into the drawing room, and showed it to R and me: I recall the moment, and seeing the ornament, but have absolutely no recollection of what it looks like. Anitadi describes it as a “Victorian necklace”; R thinks of it, for some reason, as an “Edwardian knot,” as a piece of jewellery belonging to and devised in the twenties or thirties. It was a long, long thing, strung with pearls, says R, ending in a knot, from which two short tassels hung. It wasn’t the sort of jewellery that she would wear—strange and impractical, despite being beautiful. Besides, it was probably too expensive. What sort of social gatherings would she have worn it to?
Whether Anitadi inherited this from her mother-in-law or from the Anglo-Indian side of her family I haven’t asked. It doesn’t require pointing out that it wasn’t a piece of traditional Indian jewellery. Firstly, the Indian woman prefers gold to any other precious metal or stone, except possibly the diamond. However, the Ingabanga had internalised, and paid homage to, the English ethos in a number of ways, including their taste in certain strains of jewellery. In the history of Indian jewellery—a history of longevity and continuity—the English ethos is a fleeting, almost momentary, interruption, and as good as a secret, since so few adhered to it. The Ingabanga, in that interim, went off the colour of high-carat gold, and even had it mixed with alloy for their ornaments, to dull their yellow gleam. What R calls “blue-blooded Bengalis” would find this dilution outrageous, and another symptom of the ridiculousness of the Ingabanga world.
Among the ornaments my wife was gifted by her family upon our wedding was a gold bangle inherited from her tennis-playing maternal grandmother, Anila. My mother offered to have the bangle “broken” and redesigned by a jeweller: a common enough practice, where the Bengali will take an old piece to their jeweller and, instead of selling or exchanging it, will have it rejuvenated or updated to another form. R was, naturally, sentimental about the bangle; but, newly married, she was too polite to say no to this helpful suggestion. The bangle itself was a curious mixture of East and West, of the Bengali and the English, and was a perfect material example of the notion of the Ingabanga. Its circular body was made according to the traditional style of the “lichukata bala,” the “litchi-cut bangle,” so that tiny bristles like the ones on a litchi peel appeared on the gold. At one place on the bangle there was an embossed carving—the head of a dog. It was a Labrador with drooping ears. Beneath my mother’s helpful offer perhaps lay a disguised animosity towards the Labrador. And it was the dog, which R found absurd, which she in retrospect grew attached to—as a symbol of a history that may have been embarrassing, but was precious because of its short-lived uniqueness. “Should I ask him to remove the dog?” asked my mother. “You’ll never wear a bangle with a dog’s face, will you?” R appeared to agree. The agreement was only an instance of confusion and letting go. The Labrador disintegrated, and was replaced by a peacock, but the rest of the bangle returned intact.
The Mukherjees sold the Victorian necklace or Edwardian knot or whatever it was for one lakh rupees. Anitadi, at the time, was detached and rational about it—as she is about many things. “What’ll I do with it? I’ll never wear it,” she’d said reasonably. “One lakh is a good price, baba,” says Samirda to me today. A moment later, he’s not so sure: “Or who knows? Maybe it’s not a good price. I never knew that much about money”—chortling again with pleasure. Ah, but he had his perfect spoken English, after all, his elocution. Where would he and his family have been without it? The conversation veers towards a subject seldom broached—his younger brother Prabir, who’s been living in Spain for decades. “He was much cleverer than me. Did better than I did at Cambridge.” As in? “He got a 2:2 in economics.” A 2:2—so not so much better, then. “I got a third—a matter of shame. It was because I never liked economics and never understood it.”
The apartment on the upper storey was Prabir’s. Yet Mrs. Mukherjee, in the late seventies, had asked her younger son to give her the flat so she could rent it out for a supplementary income. (The house, of course, was hers.) This had caused bad blood between her and the—if not estranged, then distant and distanced—younger son.
A Marwari family lived upstairs and paid a static, meagre rent. When I’d said to Samirda that selling the house would be a panacea to his problems—of all things that come to the rescue of the Bengali middle and upper classes, inherited property is
the most commonly invoked, and the most effective solution—he’d said, “But there’s a garden at the back, baba. I go for walks in the morning with Anita. There’s a mango tree there, and wonderful birdcall. I don’t know what I’d do without it.” Samirda’s letters to the editor and to his friends were always fulsome and often lyrical, and so was his endorsement of this back garden. He also cited, as an obstacle to the sale of the house, the litigation with the charitable organisation; and, of course, the troublesome Marwaris upstairs.
Nevertheless, the house was sold in 2006 to a property developer for a sizeable sum. This wasn’t surprising, given that property prices were going up and up in Calcutta in the new millennium, and given the house’s location on Lower Circular Road.
The Mukherjees—Anita and Samir—now live in a posh apartment building called Balaka on Ballygunge Circular Road. Mrs. Mukherjee Senior died only a few months after the move. She was ninety-five.
I’ve always liked these apartments. The building came up in the mid-seventies, almost opposite the erstwhile Tivoli Park (still, then, extant, with the Mukherjees occupying a “cottage”), a belated, elegant gesture towards corporate living in a city, by then, largely without corporations. One of my father’s colleagues lived in the building for a while; I remember visiting his son there in the early eighties, and taking in the magnificent view from the ninth-floor balcony—magnificent not because it was scenic, but marvelling at the city’s intricacy and difficulty, its distant humming and beeping, its various shades of brown and grey, its sudden stretches of green, its splendid, still, leaden sky, all revealed from left to right before darkness came. I loved Balaka for the smartness of its apartments and for its view; but I had no premonition that I’d one day enter it again.
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