Bribery, Corruption Also

by H. R. F. Keating

  Oh, will I ever be able to live in this place?

  Now they were brought to a standstill once again.

  'What is that trouble along there?' Protima said, breaking in on his shrouded state of sullen ill-humour. 'Are you able to see?'

  Coming to, he realized they had reached the broad stretch of Chowringhee running beside the huge green extent of the Maidan. The Maidan he knew about. Any Calcuttan you ever met was sure to tell you it was the largest public park in the world, a vast area cleared two centuries or more ago to provide a field of fire for the cannons of Fort William after the Battle of Plassey. Somehow, he told himself with satisfying bitterness, most Bengalis would gather up this battle as adding to the glories of their city, making it India's capital before that was shifted to New Delhi. Even though the battle had been won by the British when Governor Clive bribed the all-India notorious Mir Jafar to turn traitor.

  Looking along the road now in the direction Protima had indicated, he made out a long stationary line of open trucks. So far as he could see - the air was hazy with floating dust - each was full of protesters of some sort, packed upright together beneath long white slogan-bearing banners. No doubt this was why the traffic was delaying so infuriatingly their progress towards Protima's inheritance.

  But what was the protest about? Impossible to make out what the banners were saying.

  He rolled the smeary window beside him further down and thrust his head out. But the haze was still too thick to be able to make out any of the writing, even if it turned out to be in English and not that different, damn Bengali script. .

  'Sirdarji,' he asked the driver, 'are you knowing what-all this morcha is for?'

  The Sikh turned back, grinning a wide, whitetoothed smile through his curling and twirling beard.

  'Oh, sahib, always protestings in Calcutta. How else would we be getting some fun?'

  For a moment he wanted to question that attitude. Fun? A protest meeting should not be fun. If a wrong was worth demonstrating against, it should be demonstrated against with resolution. But to get fun out of a demonstration? A very, very Calcutta attitude surely.

  However, this was not the time to state his criticism aloud. Instead he asked simply, 'But do you know what this protest is?'

  The driver in his turn peered into the distance, craning his turbaned head.

  'Wetlands,' he said at last.

  'Wetlands? Wetlands? What is that?' Ghote asked.

  'Oh, duffer,' Protima snapped in. 'Don't you even know Calcutta is built on silt? Did you never hear those lines from Rudyard Kipling, Chance-directed, chance-erected, laid and built on the silt? Everything in the city was once wetlands. And did you never read, even in the Bombay papers, that Calcutta has been twice invaded by millions of refugees, once from East Bengal when it was part of Pakistan and then from the same place when it became Bangladesh? Did you never realize that to accommodate all those millions living and eating and sleeping on the pavements, or beside the railway lines, or at night on the tram tracks - more, many, many more than you ever were having in Delhi, Bombay or anywhere else - it would be necessary to extend the boundaries? But where could they be extended? Only on the wetlands stretching away from the Hooghly River.'

  More Calcutta pride, Ghote jetted out in his head. The city is made into one gigantic refugee camp, and they take pride in the world-record misery. Then that British Kipling has only to call the city as coming up by chance only, and all these Bengalis take it as one first-class compliment. My wife adding more now to these praises and applaudings.

  But it seemed Protima's song of praise was, at least for the moment, at an end.

  ‘But why there should be some protest over that I cannot think,' she said, puzzled.

  'Oh, memsahib,' the taxi driver broke in. 'Now I am knowing all about. It is for what they are calling U-traffic lakes.'

  U-traffic, Ghote thought in a new burst of rage, rattling in fury the extraordinary word round in his head. What in God's name did U-traffic mean? And, surely, only in high-and-mighty Calcutta would a taxiwalla produce such a word. And this fellow is a Sikh, not even a full Bengali.

  'What are you talking?' he snapped at him.

  But it was Protima who answered. 'Ah, yes, now I remember hearing about this. Water from the Hooghly River, with all the foulness of the city drained into it, is pumped back into these shallow lakes, called eutrophic lakes - eutrophic - and there fish digest all the contamination without doing any harm whatsoever to their flesh. So we in Bengal can eat the dishes we are so much loving in perfect safety.' .

  'Yes, yes,' the driver joined in with enthusiasm. 'Behind the city, which as you must be knowing is running north to south beside the Hooghly, those U-traffic lakes are being fed with water that is dirtiest in whole world.'

  Oh, yes, Ghote thought. If it is Calcutta water it must be the dirtiest in the world. Or the cleanest. Or the brownest. Or the greenest. The maximum of anything, whatever it is. But haven't we got plenty of dirty water in Bombay itself? Isn't our slum at Dharavi acknowledged by one and all to be the biggest in the world, except only one in Mexico. Let this fellow drink some water from a gutter in Dharavi. Then he would have a stomach ache worth having.

  But myself, he added with a sudden downward swoop. For the rest of my life am I to be a fish-loving Bengali? He felt depression welling up and up in him as if he, too, was being pumped full of filthy Hooghly water.

  'Yes, yes, memsahib,' the driver said, as at last he was able to get them on the move again, 'you are one hundred per cent right. That is what our U-traffic lakes are doing. But, you see, those people up there, those Corporation and State Government burra sahibs, are wanting now to fill up even more of the lakes than they were doing before. So they can build houses, houses, houses and make money, money, money. Number-two money, black money, under-table money, with just only some tax-declare white money. But not too much, yes?'

  And, Ghote added to himself, thick with misery, today is no longer Laxmi Poornima. No one has licence to steal now. Yet they are doing it in full swing. Here in this city Protima was telling is so hundred per cent corruption-free.

  Into his mind there came another phrase from Kipling about Calcutta, one his schoolmaster father had delighted to repeat. City of Dreadful Night.

  Slowly they ground and jerked their way past the long lines of trucks and their jam-packed demonstrators, the men almost all in neat white shirts and the girls in bright saris. From time to time a chant broke out, and fell silent. After a little Ghote was able to make it out. Wetlands Minister, out, out, out Wetlands Minister, out, out, out. At one point a whole squad of girls, students most likely, was being marched along the roadway from one truck to another, causing yet more delay to the traffic. Shepherding the bright dazzle of the young there was a single grey-haired lady in a less colourful sari, fierce, motherly, stick-upright, proud.

  Another thing Calcutta is famous for, Ghote registered. Its immense demonstrations. Well-ordered, until the car and bus burnings begin.

  At last they got clear of the traffic tangle and began to move with some speed, their driver at the least gap in oncoming traffic happily ignoring any notion of keeping to his proper side of the road.

  Worse driving than any in Bombay, Ghote registered sternly. No discipline. No discipline whatsoever.

  Soon Protima, as if freed of complexities, began talking about the house they were on their way to see, the unexpected inheritance brought her by a dozen deaths of relatives she had scarcely heard of. Her huge Diwali present waiting for her to tear off its wrappings.

  'I don't suppose it will be just exactly as it was when I visited there,' she admitted eventually. 'I must have been only seven or eight then. It would be just before Father was posted to Bombay. Long ago. But I remember a tall gateway, with two darwans who came running out to open the gates when we stopped outside. In those days the place must have been almost beyond the city. And there were little houses belonging to the darwans on either side and out of them came, it see
med to me, dozens of children. I hoped I might play with them, but we swept on and came to rest under the big porte-cochere, as they called it. But I did - I remember this now - get to play with some other children. I don't know who they were. They can't have been related to us or, I suppose, one of them would have inherited now. But we played Snatch Hanky out on a big green, green lawn, I remember that. There must have been so many malis, you know, to walk over that grass day by day in the heat of summer squirting their goatskins of water to keep up that wonderful green. In winter, of course, everything would stay green. In one visit there - it must have been some time after the monsoons - we went up the big, big sweeping round staircase on to the roof. I think I believed I was going to swarga above. And from there you could see far, far into the distance. Everything green, green. A beautiful, bright green.'

  Before long she recalled something more about this last visit she had paid to the distant - no longer quite so distant - house.

  'Oh, and we had lunch that time. Or perhaps it was some visit there before. A proper Bengali meal. Suddenly it comes back to me. I can see myself sitting at the big polished table. The only child there. So those children I played Snatch Hanky with, if that was the same time, must have been neighbours' children. And we ate . .. We ate . . . Yes, we began with karela with a little rice - very Bengali - and at that time I didn't much like karela, too bitter for a little girl. But my father told me, if I ate it up, at the end of the meal I could have lots and lots of misti-doi, our delicious Bengali sweet, pale brown and so chewy, and, of course, sandesh, the best of all. Every little Bengali girl has a sweet tooth, you know. Boys also. And grown men and women.'

  She turned eagerly to Ghote, who had begun faintly to wonder if it was right for a father to bribe a child in that way. Was it the beginning of a whole slow slide-away from doing the right thing?

  "To think,' she said, 'I have been in Calcutta more than twelve hours now and not so much as one single sandesh has passed my lips. Sirdarji, do you think there is a shop round here? Could you stop?'

  'Oh, memsahib, there would not be any such here. Look how far we have come. This is a bad area. Look only.'

  True enough, the road had narrowed. It was lined now with occasional tall dirty blocks with between them lines of makeshift huts, grey and dusty. At a point where it divided they saw, hanging from the branches of a pipal tree, a cluster of glittering chandeliers, evidently taken for sale from houses pulled down to make way for apartment blocks. The people on the street, or rather all over it, were as numerous as they had been in crowded Sudder Street. But they did not look like buyers of fancy sweetmeats.

  Ghote began to wonder what this house of his wife's would really be like. The contrast between her memories and their present surroundings could hardly be greater.

  At last they came to a turning the driver had been anxiously looking out for. A large, very battered sign in English stretching right across a single-storey, slabby, monsoon-stained concrete building, Nufumico - Dealers in All Pillow and Foam Matters.

  'Not far now,' he said, cheerful again. 'What number you saying, memsahib?'

  ‘My letter says thirty-four,' Protima answered, her voice beginning to show some uncertainty. ‘But I don't remember us looking for any number when I came here as a child, though there were other houses not far away, big places behind walls. But— But, yes, there was a little shrine just opposite, blue-painted. Yes, and my mother said it was a Durga temple. You should be able to see the goddess. If it is still there.'

  'Oh,' the driver answered, 'that will be there. Nobody is knocking down temples to put up petrol pumps.'

  They drove on again in silence. Through the rolled-down windows there penetrated a strong smell of fish, pungent and hinting at rottenness. And it was dustier even than it had been beside the Maidan.

  Ghote felt suddenly sharply sorry for Protima. What if things went wrong for this dream of hers? Where is it Mr A. K. Dutt-Dastar is sending us? Could it be that his letter and the phone calls after it were some sort of hoax?

  And it seemed their driver's optimism about how near they were to their destination was unfounded. They drove steadily on, unable on this pot-holed, bare tarmac road to go at all fast. Seeing no sign of a big house or a Durga shrine. The minutes went by. No one said anything.

  Ghote fought down the flicker of joy that had come to him with the thought that the house and all Protima's inheritance might be no more than some inexplicable confidence trick. No, that would be too much of a blow for her. All right, he himself would be delighted to know that the Calcutta life she had offered him was not going to happen. But Protima, who as soon as she had read that letter had seen the promised idleness of Calcutta as a reward for him, the idleness and the pleasures she remembered of that old, rich life: she would be hit by the vanishing of her hopes, hit as if she had been struck in full Maidan by a bolt of lightning.

  ‘Here. It is here,' the driver suddenly exclaimed, his delight proclaiming the fears he had kept hidden. ‘Look, look, memsahib. Look, sahib. There is blue-painted shrine, and on other side one high, high house wall.'

  He put his foot hard down and the ancient taxi, rattling and shaking, leapt forward. And came to a brake-shrieking, juddering halt.

  Yes, there was a long tall white wall, dotted for all its length with glinting pieces of embedded glass, and in it there was a pair of high iron gates with behind to either side the darwans' houses Protima had spoken of. But the gates, leaning crazily half-open, were red with rust and entwined with tendrils of scabby growth. Beyond, Ghote saw now the house itself.

  It was a battered, eaten-away ruin.

  Chapter Three

  Eaten away, crumbling, a ruinous shadow of its former self, the once beautiful house may have been. But, Ghote realized, it was by no means deserted. From where they sat in the taxi, stunned into silence, he saw beyond the rusted, leaning gates, not a flock of smiling children emerging from the gatehouses to greet the bhadrolok sahibs coming to visit. Instead, naked, scabby-looking babies crawled in the dust of what once must have been a fine lawn. Bigger urchins were busy teasing a goat tethered to one of the patchily brick-exposed pillars of the porte-cochere under which in days gone by Protima's father's car would have come to a halt. And on what had been the smooth gravel of the entrance drive cooking fires smoked sulkily, women in almost colourless saris crouching over them.

  'Squattered,' their taxi driver pronounced. ‘Madam, your house has been squattered.'

  Protima looked round at Ghote.

  'What— What are we to do?'

  He wished he could produce an answer that would bring her some comfort. But he could think of none. If only, he said to himself, on the way out here or in the plane as we flew from Bombay, I had said something to calm down those wild-flying hopes and plans she had.

  But he had not dared say a word. Whatever he had ventured would have seemed to be rejecting the gift she had been offering him, the days and years of the rich life that had so unexpectedly been bequeathed to her. The life that, in her mind, had seemed to be the best life of all, Bengali life at its most civilized. The Calcutta life.

  The life that, in his mind, foreshadowed aimless idleness cut off from all he had known, all that was familiar to him. Even if that familiarity was often black enough.

  All he could do was to scrabble back in his mind through the details of the first letter that had come from A. K. Dutt-Dastar, through everything Protima had passed on to him of his telephone calls. But, no, there had been nothing anywhere to indicate that the house she had inherited was subject to any complications of the sort in front of them.

  But it was. It was a house squattered. Squattered and eaten away.

  'I suppose all we can do just now,' he said, 'is to wait for— '

  He had been about to say Mr Dutt-Dastar. But in deference to Protima's recent Bengali sentiments he changed that.

  'No, we must simply wait till Dutt-Dastar Babu is coming.'

  Protima looked at him.

&n
bsp; 'Yes. Yes, I am supposing that is all we can do,' she said, small voiced. 'I— I hope he would not be as late as I was believing,'

  'Shall we sit in the taxi?' Ghote asked. 'We can drive to some shady patch,'

  'No, no. When Mr Dutt-Dastar is coming, he will take us back in whatever car he has. I am not wanting to see more of— Of— Of that ruin until I am hearing why it is in such a state. But there is some shade under the wall further along. Why not just stroll there? We must not be all the time spending out and spending out in taxi fares,'

  So she, too, has thought what I have been thinking, Ghote said to himself, hearing the tang of bitterness in her voice. That if Mr Dutt-Dastar - and it said a lot she was calling him Mister now - had left them under the impression they were to take over a fine house in a wide compound, had his equal promise of enough money to be able to keep up the house been as much of a mirage?

  The taxi with its cheerful Sikh gone, racketing and bouncing, emitting a cloud of blue-black, foul-smelling exhaust, they crossed the road and walked up and down in the shade of the long, high, glass-encrusted, graffiti-defying wall of the house. They spoke little. There was little enough to talk about.

  'I hope Mr Dutt-Dastar is on his way already,' Protima said at last.

  'Perhaps, even with his so Bengali name,' Ghote joked lugubriously, 'he will defy prophecy and be here even ten minutes earlier than we must expect,'

  Protima could produce no response. They walked back as near to the house gates as they dared, turned and walked in the other direction.

  ‘There must be another house not much further along,' Protima tried as they repeated the up-and-down stroll for the third time. ‘We cannot see it round the bend, and it would not be worth going into the sun to look, but I remember it was there.'

  ‘It would have been where your playmates at your last visit here were coming from?'

  ‘Yes. Yes, I suppose so. Or perhaps not.'