Mukherjee had informed me that Canazi was a pioneer, one of the first to propagate “authentic” Italian food in these parts; but he’d escaped my attention. I wanted to confront this pioneer face to face; I was also interested in his metamorphosis into a bona fide resident. The others had moved, vanished, or fled; Canazi had not only married, set up shop, but, as it turned out, engendered a family. Meeting him was probably the closest I’d come to interacting with a “white Mughal,” eighteenth-century Europeans who arrived on these shores and were eventually assimilated—“assimilated but unconverted,” perhaps, as Isabel Archer was in her brief, adoptive English life in Portrait of a Lady, but nevertheless taking on family, manners, customs, language, and dress. What would it have been like to make their acquaintance, before the whole business of being Indian, or European, or Bengali, or English, became watertight? Even the Orientalist William Jones, hardly a white Mughal, was known to wear local clothes made of muslin in the heat. Canazi, however, when he emerged from the kitchen after fifteen minutes, was shielded by his apron.
I was promised black coffee while waiting at Mythh, the coffee shop. Canazi was a small, slight, focused man (his squint intensifying his look of concentration), who hadn’t lost his accent, and was quite masterful as he instructed the deferential suited manager to supply my coffee, which had not appeared. He took me to a table in the corner of what was like a gallery or balcony at the edge of the coffee shop, which looked large and lit from where we were, like the stalls or orchestra in a theatre, and our location and observation point adventitious, remote, à la the theatre box in La Loge. This balcony was Canazi’s privileged Italian promontory inside Mythh, an extension of the coffee shop, but gently separated from the hoi polloi milling towards the buffet by an elegant railing, a change of floor tiling, and a lakshman rekha or invisible boundary. The diners in the balcony (which was a balcony partly of the imagination, since it was on the same level as the coffee shop) may as well have been invisible to those in the stalls.
One of the first things I learnt from Mr. Canazi was that his name was actually Davide Cananzi—he handed me his calling card—and that he’d joined the Hyatt in 2004 and worked there for one and a half years. “Canazi” was chef Mukherjee’s well-intentioned misnomer; Cananzi was the man before me. “I would have left in three months,” he admitted, with the air of one reminiscing about an episode whose immediacy diminishes as the days pass, “but I met Suparna and I got married.” “Where did you meet her?” “In the Hyatt,” he said. “She was in customer relations.” They’d married in 2004—an almost instantaneous development, then, which points to an auspicious momentum in Cananzi’s beginnings here.
He was Sardinia-born, bred in Toscana. When he left Italy for Berlin and Paris he was only sixteen, but already, precociously, had a diploma in hotel management. He worked in Dubai and Barbados before he found himself, in 2004, at the Calcutta Hyatt.
“I would have left in three months,” he said again. “Calcutta wasn’t ready for innovation.”
He spoke, in his long, retrospective assessment, of 2004 as if it were another age—by “innovation” he meant the uncompromising taste of Italian food, and a deep resolve to ignore local demands and tantrums.
“In the first two months, I had fifteen to twenty covers,” he said, still scarred by that experience of adversity. By “covers” he meant daily customers at the restaurant. Then, self-belief—and the hotel’s willingness to go out on a limb and back him—led to triumph. “By the third month, we had fifty covers.” He had not diluted his menu. “It was a challenge to educate people to eat as I eat.”
William Jones’s late-eighteenth-century mission, in the end, was to educate Western scholarship about Indian antiquity and the Sanskritic inheritance; he pieced these together painstakingly through his researches here, in between appearances at the court and fulfilling his duties as a judge. His precursor, Nathaniel Halhed, a “writer” for the East India Company, and a translator, had, besides composing English poetry, clarified to the local populace the rules of their own language, compiling, with the collaboration of Brahmins, the first Bengali grammar in 1774. Cananzi, two hundred years later, was neither intent on giving Bengal to Bengalis, or India to the world; he was engaged in a more resistant task, in an environment that was, in this regard, oddly unprepared—the unnoticed business of bringing Italy to Bengal.
“Local basil is fantastic,” he said, with a characteristic generosity towards conditions on the ground. “But it has an aftertaste of mint.” The taste of “real” basil was unknown to the people around us. Such hurdles were conquered and made irrelevant; and there was his already-stated adherence to the principles of Italian food, his inability to relax the rules, unlike, say, Alex Bignotti—a chef he adored and whose culinary skills he admired. “For instance, if you make penne arrabiata with mushrooms, do not call it penne arrabiata. By all means make it, but call it something else.” This was only a hypothetical recipe; but it symbolised the fact that the Italian character and its quiddity tended to disintegrate and vaporise in the Bengali context.
What was it, after all, to be Italian—especially here? Cananzi confessed that the “name tag” of “Italian chef” had “become a burden.” Other chefs of his rank were simply called “executive chefs”; but the moment people heard he was Italian, he became, inescapably, “Italian chef,” as if he couldn’t possibly rustle up tandoori or Japanese—which he said he enjoyed doing. This was a surprising turn: that Cananzi, at least on some level, felt pinned down to Italian cuisine. “What kind of food do you have at home?” I asked. “Mostly Indian food,” he shrugged, “Bengali food.” I had a vague, provisional vision of him with his family, in home clothes, busily partaking of daal and rice. “Do you speak Bengali?” I asked him. Half my mind, as I put the question to him, was already ferreting away, unearthing similarities between Bengali and Italian. This habit of mine, belonged, of course, to a line opened by William Jones, who, late in the eighteenth century in this city, had hit upon his theory of “Indo-European languages,” a family of tongues including Bengali, Hindi, English, French, Persian, Italian, Greek, Latin, whose words derived their roots, he claimed, from Sanskrit. I knew very little Italian, except what I’d memorised from the menu, words such as “carbonara” and “penne,” but had noted, once, that certain everyday words spoken in Spanish and French, like, say, “que” or “pourquoi” for “what” or “why,” were near identical to “ki” or “kya” and “kyon” in Bengali and Hindi respectively. Also “basta,” or “enough!,” frequently heard in Almodóvar films, seemed like a close neighbour to the North Indian “bas,” meaning the same thing. But these exclamations or imperatives were the language of daily parlance, of the community, and I didn’t know whether “basta” or “bas” had a Latinate or Sanskritic pedigree—but there were any number of grander words where that lineage seemed irrefutable, and rang out repeatedly and gravely like a bell tolling, as in the Latin “morte” for death (the ugly Anglo-Saxon “murder” in all likelihood a descendant of the same family) and the Sanskrit “mrityu.” Where would all my amateur speculations have been if not for that Welshman, who, with other British people, and the great Bengalis to follow, had turned Calcutta into a crucible of world history? “Yes, I know Bengali,” said Cananzi. “I know it quite well.” I didn’t care to test him. “It was tough learning Bengali,” he confessed. “Also, I had little English at the time—I had to leap straight into Bengali.” Then he added something at which I pricked up my ears. “There are lots of words in common between Italian and Bengali—also between Italian and Arabic, you know?” This latter insight must have come to him during his stint in Dubai—and, anyway, the Ottoman Empire’s reach had been immense since the fifteenth century onward—but I was more interested in the overlaps with Bengal, with which Italy had had no significant historic interchange since Tagore’s visit there at the beginning of the Duce’s reign. “For instance?” I asked him. “Like forno, for instance—it is the word for oven in Italian. I
t is also the same word in Bengali.” “Excuse me?” Cananzi had been misled; the Bengali word for “oven” is surely unun. “I haven’t heard that word,” I said, puzzled. “But you know—the English ‘furnace’ is very close to it.” I pointed this out in a conciliatory way. “Are you sure?” said Cananzi. “I was told by a Bangladeshi that you have forno in Bengali.” We placed the debate in abeyance. I began to gossip with him about other Italian chefs in the city, a part of me still wondering if he’d noticed the proximity of al dente—the ideal chewiness of slightly undercooked pasta—to the Bengali daant, whose ancestor is the Sanskrit danta. “Danta,” “dental,” “dente”: all variations of “teeth.” At some point down millennia, the coordinates that governed and linked certain languages to others were lost. Then along came Jones, who, in his imperious way, suggested that once there used to be a bit of the European in the Oriental, and vice versa. This notion was embraced with alacrity by the new Indian, especially the Bengali, eager to join the freemasonry of the modern, and eventually forgotten by all but a handful of Europeans. For Cananzi, whatever his recent affections, Calcutta certainly was no Rome.
This much I deduced from my little gossip about the chef who’d made a run for it from Casa Toscana. It had taken half an hour for me to notice that Cananzi was well informed about, and a fair judge of, his Italian rivals in Calcutta. “Is it true that the man wasn’t Italian at all, but an Italian-American from New York City?” “No, no,” said Cananzi. “He was from Ravenna. He had spent many years in America.” According to Cananzi, the absconder’s name was Rimini. “He was a Michelin-star chef,” nodded Cananzi, as if there were no getting around this intractable fact. “But Calcutta is not a Michelin-star city,” noted Cananzi. I felt chastened. Yes, seen from that perspective, the match was indeed ill-fitting. “Calcutta doesn’t have a conception of fine dining,” he continued. “What I give to diners here is ‘Calcutta fine dining.’ ” I could clearly see the scare quotes around the term. Instead of interrogating him on the meaning of “Calcutta fine dining,” I got to the basics and asked him what “fine dining” was. “Firstly, the time you give to eating. In Italy and France, a ‘fine dining’ experience can take up to three or four hours. But Indians are not willing to spend so much time on food.” He added, opening himself up to a broader sweep of truth-telling and stocktaking: “Delhi has no fine dining. Is an old-fashioned city. Bangalore”—his eyes lit up peremptorily—“is a fine dining city. There, they know how to invest. To make money you have to know how to lose money,” he concluded—a little aphoristically.
There was nothing supercilious about Cananzi; but, despite his readiness to talk, there was a resistance about him—not to me; it was more an inward physical tension, as if his responsiveness and intelligence had been translated into bodily alertness. He was not a busy or fussy person, but I didn’t have the impression that he was ever quite still. He was a low bristly shrub that had been transplanted; he was getting used to his environment, which, every few years, was a variation on the previous one, and for the moment was this coffee shop.
It was three months after the elections, and I was interested in whether he’d reacted to them in any way.
“I’m not a lot into politics,” he said, unsurprisingly: reportedly, aesthetes seldom are. “But good that change has happened,” he confessed, echoing the Trinamool’s much-advertised mantra of paribartan. “Calcutta was growing slowly because previous party didn’t want investment from foreigner companies,” he observed, as others before him have. Now he had a sense that the state would be more swift on the uptake.
“Calcutta has changed a lot,” he told me, pursuing the theme of paribartan but widening it from its Trinamool-specific definition, speaking again in the reflective tone in which he’d described his first ambiguous months at the Hyatt, purveying genuine Italian food. “India is changing. India is the new China. And Calcutta is opening its eyes.” He assured me, “It’s more cosmopolitan. Less ‘racist’ than it was.” He’d chosen the word deliberately, and I was on tenterhooks as to his possible meaning. “Earlier, when foreigner walked down New Market, people would stare as if the person was an alien, and the boys would cheat him. Of course,” he conceded, “it’s a little bit like that in every city in the world.”
Then, quickly reviewing his seven years here, his thoughts converged upon a deeply felt analogy: “Bengalis are amazing people of the heart—like Italians.” There was a time—the early twentieth century, in fact, when Bengalis had just come into their own—when Italians were not quite embraced by the new genteel arbiters of culture in Europe and America, but were seen as untrustworthy and different, if the stories of Henry James or Mann are anything to go by; or, from the point of view of the restless, working-class Lawrence’s letters, were thought to be strangely, comfortingly elemental. “But when it comes to language, Bengalis are like Germans. That’s why I quickly learned the language. Bengalis, like Germans, won’t talk to you unless you speak their language.” East Germans, perhaps; almost all the educated West German people I know make a fetish of speaking perfect English.
There was traction, for him, between his former home and his present one. His brother had visited him; last Christmas, his parents came to Calcutta. “I had heard of Calcutta many years ago because of Mother Teresa, but I had no interest in it. But I always wanted to visit India.” Still adorning his Italian-Bengali comparison, he told me that the two were “eighty per cent the same”: a remarkably high proportion of any national or social character. “Family oriented, cost oriented—they are not into spending too much.” Giving the lie to Elizabeth Bishop’s speculation, “Is it lack of imagination that makes us come/to imagined places, not just stay at home?,” he seemed to feel, at certain moments, that the memory and presence of home were never that far away: “There are places in the south of Italy that are even dirtier than Calcutta.”
Europeans who visited Calcutta on the eve and in the wake of the British Empire each handled the experience differently. In Hartly House, the first English-language novel about the city, it’s as if we’ve been placed in a time machine and transported to a hazy future, and not back to the Calcutta of the late eighteenth century when the book is actually set—to a place where there are no Indians, Bengalis, or Hindus, only an odd Morlock-like tribe known as the “Gentoos.” In this city, the English had their weird recreational parties late into the night, until dawn approached, because it was too hot to move during the day. Summer, and the heat, in particular, had to be survived; Thomas Babington Macaulay grumbled with abrasive dignity in a letter to a friend, “We are annually baked for four months, boiled four more, and allowed the remaining four to become cool if we can.” The Bengali historian R. K. Dasgupta tells us with relish that Macaulay confided in his correspondent that the “local fruits were ‘wretched.’ ”
“The best of them is inferior to our apricot or gooseberry … A plantain is very like a rotten pear … A yam is better. It is like an indifferent potato.” He must have been all the more thankful for his expert cook, whom Lord Dalhousie pronounced “decidedly the first artist in Bengal.” … In brief, Macaulay could not find “words to tell you how I pine for England, or how intensely bitter exile has been to me.”
All this had to be overcome and outlasted, not to mention the diseases brought on by humidity. The obscure author of Hartly House, Phebe Gibbes, writes in the opening of her novel that “the Eastern world is, as you pronounce it, the grave of thousands.” William Jones himself died at the end of April, with the onset of another summer, in 1794, of, according to his friend Lord Teignmouth, “a complaint common in Bengal, an inflammation of the liver … He was lying on his bed in a posture of meditation …”
To these deaths and others must be added the millions who perished in the man-made famine of 1943, when local traders were hoarding grain while supplies were being diverted to British Tommies, a reminder that colonialism didn’t necessarily make life in Bengal any easier, or longer.
In comparison—and unrela
ted to the fact that Calcutta is hardly the historic centre it then was—Cananzi has weathered well. He points out to me the glass-paned, conservatory-like space at the end of the faux balcony we’re sitting on, where you can dine in greater, deeper isolation if you wish. Or, of course, you could remain in these imaginary outdoors. Before I leave, he introduces me to his latest contribution to “Calcutta fine dining”: an elegant, economically stated menu, as well as a charming “interactive” one, something between an iPad and one of those books of fairy tales with 3D illuminations shimmering as in a pool, that one got sometimes as a birthday present; you may not only choose from the menu, but design your own if you wish, by touching the icons, the small bright signifiers of pasta and risotto and antipasti. Immediately, predictably, I feel the lure of the seafood risotto. “You must come and dine here,” he says, this being the most logical and civilized progression from our peculiar acquaintanceship. “And you should surely let me know when you’re coming.” I already see there are advantages to knowing him.
EIGHT
Study Leave
I didn’t go to Norwich this autumn. I invoked “study leave.” And so it was that I got to be here during the season of sharath, which begins in mid-September. It occurs to me that, in other years too, I’m in Calcutta when sharath is barely beginning because I don’t fly to England before the end of September; but I must be too full of foreboding—at the thought of the flight—to heed it. By now, the rains are as good as ended—the showers are begrudged when they happen—and there’s a new stillness to be sensed, even in a city as busy as Calcutta. This ebbing of one season into another is near unnoticeable (and, as I said, hardly registered by me on the eve of departure), but must have been quite an event in small towns and villages. Tagore, in one of his songs, alludes to it as a time of valediction—but then, every month and a half brings on the mood of valediction to the Bengalis, a hiatus, in which the last intimacies of saying goodbye are performed: for, by mid-October, they’ll be bidding farewell to the mother-goddess.
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