Calcutta

by Amit Chaudhuri

  For a week later, our mood alternated between a marvelling at the green tea ice cream and a corroding guilt about the Mephistophelean pact we’d entered with Society and Pan Asia, in a country in which farmers frequently subsist on mango leaves and every other day kill themselves. Then, a year later, we set aside our scruples and revisited Pan Asia. We perched on almost the same bar stools. We stared, agog, at the performance. But something had changed. It was the food. The prawns were covered in a giant melt of thick, rich, creamy sauce. The green tea ice cream had become, mainly, home-made vanilla; you had to strain with fanatical, blind faith to believe you could taste green tea in it. I had one of those schizoid moments I’d had with cheesecake and ginger pudding: had I simply imagined, or invented, the earlier experience?

  “No,” said the chef, confirming I was still moderately sane, “Indians not liking those subtle flavours so much. They’re saying what is this ice cream, it’s not sweet. When American or Chinese visitor come, I making food more Chinese way.”

  “Then you should have made it more Chinese way for us,” I said, barely able to contain my frustration.

  “I’m not knowing, sir,” he responded wistfully. “Next time …”

  If, indeed, there is a next time. “Kormaisation” is what this process, integral to Indian cuisine, might well be termed: a suffocation of individual ingredients in the interests of the sauce poured over it, the result of a dozen impossibly unlike condiments brought to a simmer and then turned into this all-purpose national deluge. It’s what had happened to the prawns. That chic, suggestive, but eventually vulnerable taste had perished only a year after it had arrived here.

  There’s indeed a “new India” in Calcutta, although we place it generally in Bombay and New Delhi. It has risen stubbornly on the remains of the city as it was, and has even been extending it outward since the mid-nineties. The Taj Bengal, where I’m interviewing the restive chef (he must go to a staff birthday party), arose in a serene, historic location in Alipore a little before the “new India” came into being; the hotel was almost an afterthought on the ubiquitous Taj franchise’s part. You could view it as an early sign of investors’ faith in Jyoti Basu’s West Bengal; Basu, who, by 1989, when the Taj Bengal came up, had noted the changes sweeping the Eastern bloc and the world, and begun making terse noises about attracting “multinationals” to Bengal. A historic spot it occupies, the Taj, the half a square mile around it more or less as the British left it: early pastoral Calcutta, defined by a sort of rural calm, on the right, with a rivulet running through it towards Kidderpore; and, to the left, a five minutes’ walk away, the grand mansions and estates once occupied by the literature-loving Warren Hastings, governor general of India, who was tried and impeached when he finally left this city for his native country in 1784. Important intellectual work was achieved here, just outside the Taj, or within a two-mile radius from it; work we either take for granted or have forgotten. For instance, the fact that the Bhagavad Gita has long been a book known worldwide owes much to Hastings’ advocacy of that text, which he noticed when it was translated into English by Charles Wilkins of the East India Company. Hastings’ onetime mansions have, fittingly, been converted since Independence into the National Library. Even closer to the Taj Bengal than the National Library is Alipore Zoo, a mere two minutes’ stroll across the road, another great, and fatally damaged, colonial heirloom. Its vivaciousness, comprising caged animals and middle-class children, survived to the late sixties, from when I recall not only the Bengal tiger, but loping white albino tigers, a gruesome, vile-tempered, and evidently miserable hybrid of a tiger and lion called the “tigon,” a patient, reptile-long queue waiting to enter the House of Reptiles, and a cafe in which we ate sliced egg pakoras with ketchup—although an aunt tells me her son and I spent our excursion urgently keeping track of crows. The zoo, today, hardly has a middle-class visitor; what you see, instead, is an array of humanity, tourists from small towns, villages, and suburbs, casually strewing plastic bags in their wake, lower middle class, working class, or plain poor, come to admire and wonder at and heckle the animals, whose responses range from indifferent to bewildered to contemptuous. These visitors are themselves hardly better looked after by the nation than the inarticulate inmates of the zoo, but are full of energy and noise, exotic in their colours and behaviour, a reminder that, often, it seems in Calcutta that the bhadralok never existed, and we’re back in the extraordinary world of the early Kalighat paintings. Having “done” the zoo, this lot will then proceed desultorily to other significant colonial landmarks in and around here, throng the Victoria Memorial, laxly explore the maidan opposite the Race Course, and sit beneath the statues of British Tommies, Indian freedom fighters, and great Bengali visionaries and writers munching jhaalmuri and sucking ice lollies bought from the men positioned with carts. They may not muster up the courage, though, to invade the Horticultural Gardens, which is in the other direction, further up from the National Library, because it’s still the domain—with its prim, carefully nurtured plant life—of the shorts-wearing affluent. The other parts of colonial Calcutta in the immediate environs, however, they’ve annexed, and are at ease in. Inside the Taj, with chef Mukherjee, it’s hard to be aware of this ebb and flow; but, even if you’re ignorant of the existence of the zoo opposite, you’ll hear the tigers roaring, or surely the elephants trumpeting, at night—the cool nightfall of Bengal. The Taj is Janus-faced; one face looks towards, and is blind to, the historical city; the other face gazes welcomingly at the imminent (since 1989 at least) arrival of that “new India.”

  Globalisation first made its presence palpable in Calcutta in the nineties with gated clusters of buildings which had peculiar names like Hiland Park and South City and Merlin. Some of them rose rapidly; others, caught in some legal tangle or other, took years to complete. These gated buildings had, or were meant to have, their own gymnasiums, swimming pools, and recreational clubs—sometimes even their own schools, Jacuzzis, shops, and cinema multiplexes. In contrast to their near-nonsensical names, names at which you could neither laugh nor rage, but register as a mark of a puzzling shift of mood—in contrast to these names, their messages to the potential buyer were solemn and ingratiating. For example, Hiland Sapphire, an ongoing part of the Hiland Park project on Ballygunge Park Road, almost next door to where I live, gravely informs (mostly expatriate) customers: “A symbol of sophistication, a mark of dignity, Hiland Sapphire certainly is the residence of choice for the manor born.” By becoming a microcosm, by being self-sufficient, they fulfil a fantasy that many Calcuttans have secretly had for years: to live in the city without in any way depending on it, or being beholden to it, or subject to its vagaries.

  In the meanwhile, two new hotels came up near Salt Lake, a suburban development that, by now, was beginning to feel derelict—came up without too much explanation, the ITC Sonar Bangla and the Hyatt, on stretches of wilderness that had no past, overlooking the EM Bypass. Who would stay in them? Surely business was going to be disappointing? The answer was—they were coming up as part of a larger wave. Calcutta was changing, was going to change, and the hotels would be there, prepared to participate and contribute when the change came.

  On some such foresight was built New Town in Rajarhat, about twenty minutes away from the Hyatt, emerging on flat expanses of horizon and land on which the sun had been setting and rising without anyone taking note, except for straggly peasant families who could now be pushed aside with impunity, or appropriated as labour for the planned offices and residential tower blocks. The new IBM office compound was demarcated here. It appeared, for a while, that Rajarhat might spawn a Bangalore, a city geared towards the future. Then, one day, it felt like Rajarhat’s plans—like Calcutta-Kolkata’s—had been arrested midway, abandoned in a moment of despair and indecision. There’s a long highway cutting, in a series of right turns, through Rajarhat to the airport, and people take it as an alternative to the old route via VIP Road, to avoid the slow-motion bazaar-like stoppages on the
way, at outposts like Ultadanga and Baguihati. (I should add that this “old route” is itself a “new route,” and I remember well the older route to the airport through Manecktala in the early seventies, when, in the aftermath of the Naxal agitation, to be spotted in an Ambassador car was still a sign of bourgeois hubris, and a dangerous provocation to the crowd.) I probably first took the Rajarhat detour to the airport one dawn five years ago, and felt oppressed: because I’m always intimidated by silence and emptiness, and hadn’t realised there was so much of them to be found on this journey. That year, the buildings and offices began to rise in a spurt of brashness and colour, and with the swagger of liberalisation—a swagger that, like a card sharp’s bravado, promises it can pull off any trick, and does. It’s the swagger that produced the township of Gurgaon on the outskirts of Delhi. But from 2008 onward, I began to feel on my airport journeys that the project had been hastily set aside: that new buildings were coming up, but the card sharp had made an exit. Rajarhat was now a frozen city, nascent, like one of those unfortunate kingdoms in children’s stories where everything is pretty and spotless, but has a dread spell cast over it.

  I encountered this weird enchantment—the fairy-tale stillness of a globalisation that has no real resources—when my wife and I visited Pan Asia a third time, surreptitiously. It was afternoon; the glass doors were locked.

  Was it a public holiday? (Within, the shadowy outlines of waiters lurked aimlessly. We stood like Hansel and Gretel, with nothing to fear really, only having to cope with a vague bourgeois deflation, a feeling of thwarted entitlement, at the end of our trek.) From Pan Asia—still, then, maybe the city’s most discussed Oriental restaurant—we retreated in consternation, as from an illusion or a mirage, and were informed apologetically that all but two of the ITC Sonar Bangla’s dining places remained shut for lunch except on Saturdays and Sundays. There just weren’t enough customers to justify a daytime opening; so Pan Asia remained out of bounds, secret and semi-dark. Tellingly, the Sonar Bangla’s customers didn’t notice; they made robustly for the buffet at the coffee shop.

  This inactivity at Pan Asia wasn’t emblematic; it felt accidental. No matter that industry and investment were failing to arrive in the city as they’d once, in the early 2000s, been expected to; new luxury hotels were planned regardless (as I write this, a new Marriott and a second Taj, to be erected near the Ruby General Hospital, are rumoured), like a transformation compelled to march into existence to a faraway drumbeat. So it was with residential buildings in general, even well after the crash of 2008, a setback which signified neither one thing nor the other to Calcutta—the gated enclaves kept coming up and multiplying, as did tall clusters of apartment blocks, fancifully renamed condominiums or “condos” for the Bengali buyer from New Jersey. On the ragged highway of the EM Bypass, and sometimes in the centre of the city, hovering over, say, a resistant traffic snarl on Camac Street, billboards promising the bucolic spaciousness, birdcall, and organic delights of new property rivalled the ubiquitous and conventional advertisements for gold jewellery and fairness creams. Among the stellar faces addressing the crowd- and traffic-entangled sojourner from those hoardings was the gifted actress Konkona Sen Sharma, looking unlike her usual self, and the tabla maestro Bickram Ghosh, as adept at playing complex time-signatures on his cheeks as upon his instrument, and his wife, the beautiful Tollywood star Jaya Seal. Bickram Ghosh, in particular, bearded, with the alchemic air of a wizard (he is, not to forget, a genuine tabla wizard), proliferates everywhere, presiding over the city’s contradictions, its slightly inebriated, expanding property prices, and its ambiguous prospects, and, with his wife, smiles inclusively, without noticeable condescension, from a huge billboard near the Sonar Bangla, seeming to hold the key to the hope, the obduracy, and the curious fantasy of living in Calcutta.

  To be asked to promote a new building is a peculiar accolade. Soon after I’d moved to this city in 1999, I was approached by someone representing a builder who asked me if I’d act as a presenter for a video meant for prospective buyers of flats in an already well-publicised development. To help me overcome my resistance, this man told me that the last presenter for one of their new and coveted apartment blocks had been Victor Banerjee, familiar to international Anglophone audiences for playing Dr. Aziz in David Lean’s fervid interpretation of A Passage to India. Victor (who is a friend) was, by now, a Bengali icon and a mascot and badge of honour for anyone who had anything to do with him in Calcutta. Once I’d disguised my embarrassment (after receiving the vituperative review in the Statesman on arriving here, I was steeled for any kind of interaction), I didn’t have the gumption to say “Yes” to the man on the telephone. Instead of an outright “No,” I quoted a fee more appropriate to Shah Rukh Khan than one who writes my kind of fiction. “I’ll get back to you,” said the man; but didn’t.

  Globalisation may have come to Calcutta in relatively small doses, but it has nevertheless entered people’s bloodstreams; it makes them behave in certain ways. There was a time when bandh days—days of (usually) twelve-hour-long closure enforced by a political party or even the state government to protest one grievance or another—were total write-offs, neither working days nor holidays (since no one risked going out till 6 p.m.), but, instead, longueurs of monastic contemplation. In today’s Calcutta, this doesn’t hold. I noticed this more than a year ago on going to the Forum—wondering if our tickets for the 6:30 p.m. show of a movie were any good after a bandh (introduced whimsically, without much prior warning) whose cut-off hour, as usual, was six o’clock. Instead, I found the Forum as stiflingly crowded with shoppers, film-goers, idlers, and the curious—generally, people at once importunate and at a loose end—as a rave is full of, and pulses with, revellers. They’d clearly rushed out of their abodes in the last thirty minutes (as had we), as soon as the clock struck six, to congregate here. This is what globalisation, more potent than a booster injection, more tenable than an infection, is capable of doing; of being, even before it’s a reality, a symptom.

  Sunday, now, is the busiest day of the week. In the India I grew up in, Sunday reached its peak around midday with Ameen Sayani’s sonorities on the Bournvita Quiz Contest (which only had a following among proven devotees of radio), then declined into the ennui of afternoon and the Sunday Hindi film, all that happened later falling headlong towards the pointless human struggle that was Monday. In England (though things improved in the nineties), I was aware of Sunday being an abyss to the soul, a precipice that stealthily opened after Friday’s and Saturday’s crowded frenzy. Today, the fact that the Protestant work ethic (of which Monday is the prophet and beacon) has lost its reproachful edge in Calcutta is clear from how unbearably busy Sunday evenings are—with long traffic jams in front of South City Mall, and not a table free in restaurants on Park Street. All this—in a city without any demonstrable reasons for consumerist hope or activity. Shaped by student life in England, my wife and I are aghast at this frenetic sociability before the new week begins, this almost philistine uncaringness for the idea of Monday morning. “Indians have no thought for tomorrow,” she says with Olympian finality, as if commenting on a race she’s recently discovered.

  Malls, these days, are where you go in good times and bad, however variable or uncertain the future. When they first began to come up, they were looked upon by the last progeny of the bhadralok with a mix of suspicion, regret, and grudging pride, as standard bearers and omens of the city to come. Regret, because they often came up in what were, to the bhadralok, historic locations—as in the genteel calm (a calm that indicated, by the eighties, a condition close to extinction) of Elgin Road, from where the aristocracy had either departed, or closed ranks on the world. Here rose the Forum, a dazzling two hundred thousand square foot space on six levels, inclusive of a cinema multiplex and, later, a many-tiered car park. Almost next to it, on its right (if you’re facing the Forum from the Elgin Road entrance), is the art deco house which has always puzzled me, now in near-desuetude, wittily recalling
a ship, complete with portholes, alluding to some maritime fancy, its driveway and porch obscured by foliage. How can it, with its air of being afloat, not bring to mind the de Chirico painting Naipaul describes? Opposite, the Forum overlooks the Netaji Bhavan, the house where Subhas Chandra Bose lived, and then fled the British, and India, in disguise, finally resurfacing in Japan as the Commander in Chief of the Indian National Army, never after to be glimpsed again. Next to this mysterious building, which is still pervaded by a misplaced undercurrent of loss for the youthful, bespectacled Bose, is Brajen Seal’s mansion—not the philosopher Brajen Seal, but another—which resembles a book open at several pages, a house in which no one could possibly live, so quiet it is, its gate fronted by an improvised tea stall under a tree, and a phalanx of drivers biding their time while their employers shop in the Forum. I once trespassed into this place during the monsoons on the pretext of looking for someone, just after it had stopped raining at dusk, brazenly climbing up the stairs to the first floor, intuiting the presence of others, entering the hall that went past the closed doors of rooms, noting there was some medicine and a glass of water on a small table, and an easy chair, then shouting, “Hello! Anyone there? Keu achhe?” No one answered, but I now knew the house was inhabited. I was transfixed—both by my own transgression and by the potted plants on the terrace beyond the blurred window, quietly dripping water.

  On the left of the Forum are the Roy Mansions, half of which is now demolished, and half occupied by Simaaya, a resplendent retail outlet for kitschy, expensive saris. Soon after we were married, and before Roy Mansions was forever altered in this way, I went with R and my in-laws to have dinner with her grand-aunt, the late Potty Mami, who lived in slightly shabby many-roomed grandeur in the immense flat on the ground floor, which is today’s Simaaya. There, I was served cold consommé as the first course for dinner, but, before that, instructed in helpful terms of the distinguished maternal lineage of my father-in-law’s extended family, Potty Mami’s recently deceased husband being the grandson of P. K. Ray, the first Indian principal of Presidency College, and she herself the unlikely but friendly granddaughter of the historian R. C. Dutt, author of the Economic History of India among other landmark works. I was only a few months married, and was just being made aware, in this well-meant, intrusive way, of a Calcutta I’d never known, missed, or mourned.