Calcutta

by Amit Chaudhuri

  In the Forum, you could forget all about Calcutta, and spectate—the main occupation of the visitors, surpassing even shopping—on the new breed of people walking past. This new breed (to which you yourself belong) may or may not be the citizens of a contemporary India, or even of a new Calcutta, but it’s here you see it in its full, surprising sweep and heterogeneity, ranging from members of the upper class, to the odd European, to college students, middle- and working-class people, and provincial families of different religions, some women fully enclosed in burqas, others flaunting bright saris, these families—especially the women and children—frequently creating an obstreperous distraction before the escalator, akin to inexperienced swimmers by a poolside, wanting, but hesitant, to take the plunge, pleased and shy at once at making an exhibition of themselves, cheered and scolded by the more daring members of the family, averted with an inured sigh by the veteran escalator-users, who dart past them straight into the moving staircase. Years have gone by since the Forum, and then the City Centre at Salt Lake, and then South City Mall near Jodhpur Park (at a million square feet, once the largest mall in Asia; then India; then East India—malls shrink constantly) were opened to the public, but this brief disruption and sundering—the awkward woman and child gazing with an air of judgement at the escalator, the husband and infant in his arms rapidly moving upwards and away from them—continues to recur. This is the new breed, and nowhere does it feel more at home than in the mall.

  And it’s always possible to get a sighting of the famous. In the slightly quieter, halcyon days of the Forum, I often spotted June Maliah, reputed for her roles in Bengali cinema and especially soap operas, as she suddenly appeared from the edge of an escalator, or floated easefully a level below with her children. More than once, I’ve noticed the ebullient Bickram Ghosh somewhere in the distance, mast or happily preoccupied like the rest of us. Recently, I saw Srikanto Acharya, the dapper singer of Tagore songs, waiting expectantly before the lift with his family.

  What takes place in the malls seems unconnected to what’s happening in Calcutta, or West Bengal, or even to markets globally—I say this as one who’s visited them when things looked optimistic for the Left Front; when the future became murky for them; after they were jettisoned; before the recession; after the Indian markets limped back to life. The new breed has found its own rhythm here, a rhythm that might be hard to decipher, but difficult to deny. This is also where—besides exploring their options and assessing each other—they appear to find themselves. Never have I seen, in malls in other countries, the number of people I’ve noticed at South City or the Forum leaning against balconies, studying the lower levels, or the people ascending, apparition-like, on the escalator. It might be a mood that’s an offshoot of our weather (with its warmth and torpor) which gives us, childhood onward, a lonely, godlike vantage point on life. I know that to spectate thus on the movements of other people is a deep comfort to the purposeless and the homesick. I had a friend in Bombay, a classmate from school who couldn’t kick his drug habit, who, every twenty minutes into our conversation, would go out into the balcony, to involuntarily lean upon the banister and regain his inner calm. I’ve also noticed, often by chance, the silhouettes of maids who’ve worked and lived in our apartment, leaning and looking out into the compound while the world grows dark. What do they see?

  In the South City Mall, especially, with its bewildering turnover, I’ve almost felt emboldened to stop passers-by and ask them where they’re going—what they’re doing here; what they want to buy; where they come from. I haven’t done so. The only time I approached someone out of the blue within the mall’s special shell, unintroduced, was when, ascending to level two, I was startled to see five or six large African men ranged gracefully across the balcony. They turned out to be Nigerian soccer players in the employ of Mohammedan Sporting Club; celebrities with a tentative air, desiring, impossibly, not to be noticed, and somehow achieving this desire. From maybe the beginning of the twentieth century, football had been the prime passion in sport in Bengal, and, in the late seventies, the game was commercialised unbelievably, with star players departing for rival teams for the lure of a big reward, in the manner of their better-known European counterparts. Team coaches emerged as indefatigable personalities in their own right—the balding P. K. Banerjee, referred to as “Peekay,” once a star footballer himself, became the immensely successful brain behind East Bengal and, later, its rival, Mohun Bagan. Of course, Bengali football (synonymous, then, with Indian football) was played on a planet distinct from the one international football thrived in; football persisted in Calcutta as many obsessions did, as a miniaturist’s art, undertaken ferociously but microscopically, for its own delight.

  In the eighties, the three main clubs—East Bengal, Mohun Bagan, and Mohammedan—began to acquire foreign—mainly African—players, who were admired by crowds for their skills, and for being strange trophies in a culture that possessed few of these. The most famous of them remains the striker Chima Okorie, who played for all the big teams. In the meanwhile, cricket was in the ascendancy, and, although Bengal produced no cricketer of charisma until Sourav Ganguly’s debut in 1996, football was gradually removed from the sphere of middle-class enthusiasm, and became—along with gutka and betel leaves—largely a proletarian addiction.

  So it was an education to run into the Nigerians in the mall, and to be reminded of just how out of place they were—not because of their race, but their casual urbaneness. They let down their guard a bit when I said I was a writer; we even talked about Nigerian writing (who knows when national literatures will come in useful?), and Achebe came up immediately, and then, to my surprise, even his near namesake, Adichie—Chimamanda Adichie—whom one of them had heard of (“She’s a young writer,” the tall man said to the other, for whom Achebe encompassed all Nigerian writing) and whom I claimed to know slightly. I then asked them the unavoidable banality—What do you think of Calcutta?—and though they weren’t forthcoming or eloquent, they admitted, in a non-committal way, to loving the mall, and said they returned a few times weekly.

  * * *

  The Italian problem was suddenly brought home to me again, in the monsoons of 2011, when a team from the New York Times style magazine came down to Calcutta to produce a feature. The core of the team was a father and son—Max Vadukul, the photographer, whom I’d met fourteen years earlier in London for an infamous New Yorker photo shoot of Indian writers, and fresh-faced young Alex, who’d just begun his career as a journalist. The two had been thrown together by the editor, and concluded that, so far, in the last twenty-four hours, working with each other had been fine. The editor, who apparently had an unerring instinct in such matters, had told them she had a powerful feeling that Calcutta was the new “happening city.” “It’s where you have to go,” she’d advised Max and Alex. They’d come armed with the knowledge that this was the place that had given birth to “all the writers, intellectuals, artists, and film-makers,” that it was a city of culture, and they radiated outward in various directions from the Grand Hotel, where they were located, looking at the city before them in this pre-ordained light. It was a bit like visiting modern Athens and believing you were in ancient Greece; and, certainly, there are enough surviving ruins and monuments in Athens to sustain, if you so choose to, that make-believe. In Calcutta, though the time lag, in comparison, is much smaller, it’s more difficult to confuse this city with that other one, from whence came “all the writers, intellectuals, artists, and film-makers.” But maybe it seems that way to me because I’m both an outsider, out of sympathy, and not as much one as Alex and Max are.

  On their last evening here, Max generously offered to take R and me out to dinner. “No, not Bengali food,” he said. “We’ve eaten enough Bengali food.” R, opportunely, suggested a place we’d only lately heard of—an Italian restaurant with an Italian chef that had sprung up near Menaka Cinema and the lakes: for me, the domain of childhood, a short walk from Bhowanipore and my uncle’s house—t
he short stretch of world I’d reimagined for the purposes of A Strange and Sublime Address. How could there possibly be a new Italian restaurant here, in a place that stood, for me, in the interstices of the literature of neighbourhood, my own writing, and my first intimation of what a city was? “Casa Toscana,” said my wife; it had been preying on her mind. “Casa Toscana it is!” said Max; and Alex, who was still taking things at face value, and is half-Italian, added, “I like Tuscan food.”

  The restaurant was crowded; there was no table to be had. Often, a restaurant—especially if it’s an old one, or a European eatery, or akin to a cafe—will transport you to a foreign city; it’ll fill you with a fleeting conviction that the street outside the glass window is strange. In Casa Toscana, I experienced another kind of déjà vu and confusion; that I was in Bombay—not in the city in which I’d grown up, but today’s lit-up Bombay, where people of all kinds, rich and poor, Indian and Western, arrive to fulfil some need. Casa Toscana was bathed in that pink light. For the first time, I sensed that globalisation was here, in Calcutta. Two tall, anorexic European women, one blonde, the other’s hair dyed jet black, were coldly receiving customers and checking if they had bookings. I tried my charm on them, and even mentioned the New York Times; Alex was disarming, leaning past me to say, “Italiano?” What better topping could this new eating place come with than to have Italian hostesses escort Calcuttans to an Italian supper? “No, I’m Croatian,” she said, in a precise accent I’ve frequently overheard in London, and with the preliminary iciness that East European women have before they become loquacious. Both Alex and I felt humbled, provincial, as people from Calcutta or London or New York often do in Bombay. There’s something about the unprecedented, blasé mix of globalised India that’s nervous-making, and threatens to make you forget your education, and feel diminished and small. Nevertheless, we were given a table, largely because of the slightly inscrutable but obliging proprietor, Saket, who, Pilate-like, sized us up in a glance and, for whatever reason, thought we were a worthwhile investment. We were guided past the clink of the cutlery and the din of customers by the dark-haired woman, who informed me cheerfully she was Russian. (I had a premonition, then, of some story involving restiveness and deprivation, accentuated to me by her thinness, and knew that moment that I wanted to interview her and the blonde woman, but was tardy on the draw; when I phoned the restaurant two months later, their contracts had ended and they’d left Calcutta, for either fresh pastures or old.)

  I spent most of that evening in Casa Toscana recovering from the impact of Casa Toscana. The main subject—maybe the only subject—of conversation, comparison, and analysis at our table was the restaurant itself. Both from the point of view of Alex and Max, visitors, and my wife and myself, natives, it represented an evolution impossible to anticipate. Archaeologists might discuss and describe the site they’re visiting, but that kind of behaviour isn’t common to diners. Writers, yes, will sometimes feel they’ve found a subject, and begin to talk about it nonchalantly in its very presence. Alex scribbled notes about the music (“well-known over-the-top dramatic opera track”); Max pointed out the light bulbs overhead had been displayed to echo MOMA—all our knowledge and half-baked memories were summoned to consciousness and brought to bear upon our observations. Of course, we commented on the food the moment we ate it—not as food critics would, but as those who, with a faraway look, were condemned to deciphering a national and local mood. “Yes, the spicy arrabiata is good”—conceded Alex. In fact—disappointingly, on one level; thankfully, on another—the food was mostly good. The famous, reclusive Italian chef—where was he? It was a melodramatic, sordid story. The chef—a genuine Michelin-star cook—was well departed; he’d lasted four days. I knew marriages, in a strange bid for immortality, could be perilously terminated in this way; but employment? Saket found a few minutes in his hurried, breathless round to tell us a story that was becoming trite—that this chef’s patience had been worn thin by customers. A source later told me that Saket’s financial terms had caused the breakdown in relations and the sudden exit from Casa Toscana; but why not have those terms clearly agreed to before arriving in Calcutta? It sounded mysterious, but exemplary. Alex and I turned subtly to observe the other diners—not critically, but gripped by the spirit of discovery. “Look,” we nudged one another, glancing unobtrusively but comprehensively, “they’re sharing the pasta.” I saw a waiter portion out a plate of pasta to a small family. There was an unshakeable and overriding Indian-ness to the operation; I thought again of the Italian chef who’d waited, and waited, and, on the fourth day, made his escape.

  East European women may well have been introduced to Calcutta by Shah Rukh Khan and the Indian Premiere League. For those who are still unaware of the Indian Premiere League or IPL, it was the “brainchild” (the Indian media’s favoured word) of the youthful, dubious, but until then unproven and little-known tycoon Lalit Modi: a cricketing extravaganza in twenty-over cricket in which celebrated and up-and-coming and even unheard-of players were auctioned to newly created cricketing enterprises. These enterprises—or “teams,” as they’re popularly known—are each named after an Indian city or state, but not yet—as with the Harlem Globetrotters—a neighbourhood. Modi has now lost the franchise he created, equally for his shady dealings and his brashness; but he did persuade some of India’s most ubiquitous and well-worn industrialists and film stars to invest in the teams.

  Calcutta’s team—which, at the moment, has no one from Calcutta in it—is called, in the allusive, comic-book style of most of the team names, Kolkata Knight Riders. Its chief owner is the solitary figure atop Bollywood’s pinnacle, the actor Shah Rukh Khan, who has no history of involvement with Calcutta. One of Modi’s many innovations was creating teams that would give voice to the voluble partisanship of a place without necessarily having anything to do with the place itself; another was to import cheerleaders, shaking their hips, fluttering, peacock-like, their pom-poms, fitfully electrified, and electrifying others, each time a run was scored. The cheerleaders were met with grave reproach by both cricket purists and common-or-garden puritans, and then—as is the case with so much in Indian public life—lazily accepted and secretly looked forward to. This was how East European women began to reach, in small contingents, the cities—and Calcutta, in the wake of the Kolkata Knight Riders. There was a time when fans lurked in hotel lobbies in wait of players; now there was a strange transcontinental entourage to stare at.

  Shah Rukh Khan became famous for the post-match parties he threw at the ITC Sonar Bangla for the team, cheerleaders, and a handful of unspecified others: models, businessmen, actors, motley KKR well-wishers. These parties, it was told, went on into the morning’s small hours; reportedly, Khan was at them himself. By the accounts of astonished hotel staff, he bounced back early the next day, or went off to catch a flight to Bombay, without any perceived need or desire for sleep. It soon became clear to me that Khan’s mysterious staying powers in Hindi cinema had less to do with his talents than with his youthfulness and inability to become fatigued. On the Eden Gardens ground, during a match, he was almost always on edge, like a coiled spring, pumping the air to cheer his team, deflated very briefly when the innings reached a bad end, then running down and spryly annexing the field. Hearing of the Sonar Bangla parties, I thought for some reason of Gatsby, and the questions that character raised. Not that Khan’s origins—unlike Fitzgerald’s character’s—were an invention; although he’d once issued a Fitzgeraldian caveat, implying that he was, in some sense, unknown to himself: “I am an agent for an actor called Shah Rukh Khan.” No, what brought Gatsby to mind were Khan’s parties, and his freedom from ordinary bodily demands before he took the early morning flight out. This is exactly what startles Nick Carraway when, exhausted, he thanks his host before leaving his party at dawn: “ ‘Don’t give it another thought, old sport.’ The familiar expression held no more familiarity than the hand which reassuringly brushed my shoulder. ‘And don’t forget we’re going
up in the hydroplane tomorrow morning, at nine o’clock.’ ” Where the terrific energy of the free market and its players comes from has long troubled those who’ve viewed it from the sidelines.

  * * *

  Two months after Casa Toscana, I sought out David Canazi, whom I’d never entirely forgotten since chef Sujan Mukherjee mentioned him as the man who’d set up the Italian restaurant in the Hyatt, then married and settled in Calcutta. It was years since the Hyatt had come up on the EM Bypass; and Canazi was now, after the decade closed, evidently introducing Italian food to diners at the coffee shop in Hotel Hindustan International—once, long ago, Calcutta’s best-known hotel after the Grand (albeit a very distant number two), and today well known for having once been Calcutta’s best-known hotel after the Grand. The bourgeoisie and the rich in Calcutta—unlike their counterparts in, say, New Delhi—don’t socialise in five-star hotels; which might be why it was after three decades that I stepped into HHI, asking for directions to the coffee shop.