by George Black
The cantilever bridge, which is five hundred yards long, was a masterpiece of British engineering, built in 1943 as part of the war effort—the same war effort, and in the same year, that led to a famine that killed three million people, fully 5 percent of the population of Bengal. They were victims of the triage of wartime. Singapore had fallen to the Japanese in 1942, and now they were rampaging through Burma. London stockpiled a large percentage of Bengal’s rice crop and diverted potential relief supplies to feed the troops and compensate for shortages in Britain. Colonial police destroyed warehouses full of rice in the coastal areas to prevent them falling into the hands of the enemy. Only the speculators thrived. Churchill’s view was that the Bengalis had brought the catastrophe on themselves because “they breed like rabbits.” He had never concealed his feelings about where India belonged in the hierarchy of eugenics. “I hate Indians,” he once said, wishing that he could arrange for Gandhi to be trampled to death by a large elephant. “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”
Two million people cross the Rabindra Setu every day. This is said to be the heaviest volume of foot traffic carried by any bridge in the world. The crowd is almost entirely male, a crush of busy men with briefcases and cell phones, porters in lungis with impossible loads on their heads, schoolboys with satchels and book bags.
Close to the base of the bridge are the neoclassical pillars of the Armenian Ghat. One of the oldest on the Hooghly, it was built in 1734 by economic migrants from Persia. They thrived in Calcutta as the city’s first moneylenders, bent with the political winds, and served the interests of the East India Company as faithfully as they had previously served the Mughal nawabs. An Armenian merchant named Catchick Arrakiel put on a fireworks display to celebrate George III’s recovery from madness, though he was no doubt saddened when this proved to be only a temporary remission.
Near the Armenian Ghat is a small Shiva temple that Allen Ginsberg liked to visit. Drunks are usually sprawled on the steps outside the Country Spirit Shop (Opening Hours 11:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., Closed Thursdays). Other men soap themselves down at a tap where a poster gives a toll-free number for those who are interested in finding out more about how to prevent HIV-AIDS. Others pay a visit to the Pay and Toilet Complex, which is maintained by the White Welfare Society, whatever that might be. If you’re too poor to pay the admission charge, you can squat and do your morning business at the neighboring Ram Chandra Goenka Zenana Bathing Ghat. The building at the top of the steps has a Mughal-style dome and turrets overgrown with foliage; all over Calcutta, trees and shrubs and aerial roots shoulder their way out of windows, walls, and rotted rooftops. The interior is a maze of pillars and archways that suggest a Romanesque crypt. The ghat was designed for women to bathe in privacy, but that distinction was lost long ago, and nowadays people of both genders and all ages gather there to take their dip and shit on the steps. A sign would be useful at the Zenana Bathing Ghat: watch where you tread.
* * *
One morning, I had breakfast with my friend Damayanti, the one who had invited me to the Holi party. Her many friends called her Dodo.
We went to the Indian Coffee House, just off College Street, where students were eating fifty-cent mutton cutlets under a life-size painting of Tagore, arguing and flirting and chatting on cell phones and pickling themselves in caffeine and nicotine. Upstairs, in small rooms off scuffed and shabby hallways, men were clacking away at manual typewriters, writing letters that would end, “Kindly revert,” or “Please do the needful.” Hole-in-the-wall printing presses were cranking out literary newsletters and pamphlets analyzing the role of the Bengali proletariat in the coming world revolution.
Dodo, who called herself a “freelance dissident,” had grown up in the world of Apu and Tagore, with all its complexities. “My parent eloped and got married, simply because of caste,” she said. “My father was from a big family of landowners, zamindars, in East Bengal. He gave up his sacred thread when I was fifteen, and that was my proudest moment. My mother was from this side. My father’s family was always into music and the classical arts. The tabla player Zakir Hussain, the great sitarist Nikhil Banerjee, so many other musicians. They all used to stay in our home. On my mother’s side, they were writers and artists and painters and dancers. Majumdars, who are considered one of the foremost families of Calcutta. So it was a very privileged upbringing. I grew up watching Satyajit Ray films, hearing those stories. My eldest uncle designed many of the sets for his films.”
Her mother sounded like the most interesting of all of them. She had made her name as a painter by encouraging her students to create murals that would cover up the revolutionary graffiti that disfigured the walls of Calcutta in the 1960s and 1970s. “She thought it should be replaced with work that was easier on the eye for schoolchildren, since this is not a good thing to see when walking to school,” Dodo said. Many of her mother’s own paintings were reimaginings of Calcutta’s two great goddesses, Kali and Durga, in which she mixed classical iconography with elements drawn from Bengali folk art.
After we’d finished breakfast, Dodo wanted to show me more of the waterfront, and we ended up back at Howrah Bridge, where the monumental relics of the Raj rubbed shoulders with the clamor of the modern city. “I always remember something that was once said by an urban planner,” she said as we walked along Strand Bank Road, past the derelict shells of the old warehouses and godowns, which were now being bought up by developers. “Calcutta is like an aging prostitute. She’s covered in open sores, but she can still show you a trick or two.”
A train lumbered past on the local track that encircles the city. It was lined with crumbling shacks, built so close that the residents could have reached out and shaken hands with the passengers. We stopped at a stall that was selling a round, spiky fruit I didn’t recognize. Dodo said it was thorn apple, or jimsonweed, a member of the nightshade family. Poisonous, aphrodisiac, and hallucinogenic. “That’s why we use it for Shiva’s puja,” she said. “Because he was our first marijuana-smoking god.”
Next door was a bicycle and rickshaw repair shop with the usual posters of Shiva and Krishna and Ganesha and Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity, but also another of a mustachioed deity I’d never seen before. He was surrounded by an abstract design of wrenches, sickles, pincers, axes, and trowels. Dodo identified him as Vishwakarma, the god of tools and crafts, who gives his name to a caste that includes metalworkers, blacksmiths, carpenters, and stonemasons. One of the employees was using a hammer and a cold chisel to dislodge a heavy cast-iron grating, stamped with the name of its British manufacturer. I asked him what he was doing. “The authorities don’t clear the drains unless there’s an emergency,” he said. “So we have to take precautions before the monsoon starts.” The previous year, the river had risen so high that it flooded the railway tracks behind the shop, shutting down train service for the whole day. All it takes for Calcutta to flood, people say, is for a frog to pee.
* * *
At Mullick Ghat, a long line of trucks was unloading bundles for the flower market, which is reputed to be the biggest in the world. Porters prodded me and jostled me and barged me aside without an ounce of hostile intent, just going about their business.
It turned out that quite a few of the flower sellers were from Orissa state, to the south of Calcutta—or Odisha, as it is known now, another of those name changes that keep people off balance. “We are licensed by the port authority,” one of them said. “But people still consider us as outsiders. The locals start ganging up on us, and then life becomes difficult. We complain to the authorities, but they won’t listen.”
“Do you have to pay them bribes?” I asked.
“No, we would never do that.”
“Well, obviously that’s what he’s going to tell you,” Dodo muttered to me in English.
The man from Odisha had opened for business at three in the morning. He would close up shop at nine in the evening. He sat in the middle of a mountain range of flowers: prodigious
garlands of orange and yellow marigolds; white roses from Bangalore for funeral arrangements; chrysanthemums dyed in rainbow colors; small pink korobi; bright gerbera daisies; bluish-purple aparajita—Clitoria ternatea, so-named because of their resemblance to the female genitalia—sacred to Shiva and said to be good for urinary tract infections; hibiscus threaded so tightly together in strands that they looked like scarlet firecrackers; clusters of rajanighanda, “the fragrance of the night.” An old lady was squatting at the head of the steps, separating the waxy white rajanighanda flowers from their stems with her long arthritic fingers to make necklaces. Her bangles jingled. I asked her how long she’d been doing this, and she said sixty years.
The vendor was still expecting another shipment that day, but the truck was running late. “Maybe the driver had an accident,” he said.
“More likely he’s drunk,” said another man.
Since most of the business was in marigolds, I asked the man from Odisha how much they sold for. He said he charged two hundred rupees for twenty garlands, a little over three dollars, but people usually bargained him down. The problem was that nothing seemed to be selling, and though it was only midmorning, the temperature was already well into the nineties, and the sweat was dripping off me. He shrugged. “If they don’t sell by the end of the day, we’ll pack them up and ship them to Bihar or Bombay.” He pointed to a couple of young men who were filling bags of ice. “They will stay fine. I won’t let anything spoil.”
The economics of the flower market defeated me. Ten rupees, fifteen cents, for a garland four or five feet long. How much did the growers earn? The pickers? The truckers? The middlemen? The porters? The vendors? The shippers? The ice packers? The buyer in Bihar? The seller in Bombay? How did any of them make enough to stay alive? Dodo said these were questions to which she had no answer.
A WALK IN THE PARK
“We Bengalis are a lazy lot,” Dodo said one day as we sat in a sweltering Ambassador in stalled traffic on our way to Prinsep Ghat. “Unlike the immigrants who come here from Rajasthan, like the Birlas, who make these cars.” The Ambassador, modeled on a British workhorse called the Morris Oxford, had been manufactured continuously in the Birlas’ Hindustan Motors plant in Calcutta since the 1950s, resisting all design changes and shifting fashions.
“Same thing with the taxi drivers,” she went on. “Most of them are from Bihar; they’re very hardworking.” The driver was pounding his hand on the horn, which was doing nothing to relieve the gridlock, and she snapped at him to stop. The Biharis might be industrious, but they were also noisy.
“It’s psychological,” said Pradeep Kakkar, who was on his way to the river with us along with his wife, Bonani. Pradeep had earned his Ph.D. in management from UCLA and worked all over Asia as a consultant. “It’s their way of making social contact with other people. ‘Here I am, recognize me.’” He meant it sympathetically, but still, he said, “Noise is India’s number-one problem.” He and Bonani, who was an expert on public health, had organized anti-honking rallies with a small citizen’s group they’d founded on Earth Day in 1990. They called it People United for Better Living in Calcutta, which gave them a handy acronym: PUBLIC.
The Kakkars, who were in their late middle age, had a formal manner of speaking that was very English, beautifully modulated but slightly stilted. They would have made a good choice as readers of audiobooks on serious subjects. “PUBLIC started out of anger,” Pradeep said. “We were all a bit younger, at a stage of our careers where we were trying to make it to the next notch.” Calcutta had become synonymous with decay and dysfunction, and middle-class Calcuttans were abandoning the city in droves. “Voting by caste and religion had made a mockery of democracy,” he said. “We were going through power outages every day that might last six, seven, eight hours without any warning. So we organized a night march against power cuts. Everyone dressed in black. We carried lanterns and signs in black with luminous paint. We also started a campaign against noise near hospitals and schools. What kept us here was that we loved the city. We thought this was one of the greatest cities in the world, and it should continue to be so. We decided that what was needed was middle-class activism. Before us, the emphasis was always on social welfare, helping the needy and the poor. We were the first group to come together and say, we want a better city, with a certain minimum standard of living which other cities in India already have.”
* * *
We arrived at Prinsep Ghat. It was a Palladian arcade. It looked like one of those follies that you might find on a strategic hilltop at an English stately home, and it raised the familiar question: What was it exactly that made Calcutta one of the world’s great cities—its Bengali culture or its British heritage? The monument had been built in 1843 to honor James Prinsep, secretary of the Asiatic Society, an artist who created a beautiful series of sketches and lithographs of the waterfront at Varanasi. The ghat was still used at the time for the execution of pirates, who were not hanged but put to death by drowning. It was also the embarkation and disembarkation point for visiting royalty.
“We were doing a river cleanup one day,” Bonani said, “and I told people lunch would be served. There would be a van waiting with sandwiches at Prinsep Ghat. But there was scaffolding all around it, twenty feet high, and a circular fence covered with creepers. This magnificent monument! You couldn’t see the river. I couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘There is no ghat.’ So we convinced the government to restore it as a valuable relic of the Raj era.”
That was in 1993. Now Prinsep Ghat, with its Ionic columns, was the southernmost end of a new park that stretched as far as Babu Ghat, where the columns were Doric. That still left it some way short of Motilal Seal Ghat, where they were Corinthian, with handsome fluted pilasters.
The restoration of the waterfront was far from complete. There were still abandoned boats rusting away at the water’s edge, strangled in vegetation, like a slow-motion chemistry experiment to demonstrate the effects of water and sunlight on iron. “They look like Angkor Wat before it was cleaned up for the tourists,” Dodo said.
But the completed parts of the park were pleasant. There were garbage cans in the shape of kangaroos, alligators, and dolphins. Each of them had a sign that said, “Use Me,” which, to be honest, was not something you saw often in India. There were large topiary elephants behind blue-and-white railings. There were blue-and-white public toilets. Police patrolled the park in modified golf carts, also painted blue and white. Whoever had the contract to supply blue and white paint had to be making a fortune. “Oh, that’s Didi’s brother,” Dodo said, referring to the chief minister.
“This government is the first of a different color in thirty years,” Pradeep said. “Before that, it was a left government that was labeled ‘Communist’ but made no difference to life on the street. These new people have come into power because of the stupidity of the previous government. People like me were terribly upset, so we voted against it. But it was a case of frying pan into the fire. A lot of what they are doing is cosmetics. My personal psychological insight into this is that the leadership comes from a fairly deprived background, so having bright lights on the street and fresh paint on the sidewalks is in their view an expression of achievement. Although in some cases that’s not a bad thing, like this riverside improvement, because that has long been needed.”
To be fair, it was the previous government that had created Millennium Park in the first place—in the year 2000, as the name implied. But even then, under “Communist” rule, you couldn’t escape the fact that the British were embedded in the bone and sinew of Calcutta.
“George Nicholson of London Rivers was here for a conference,” Bonani said. “He took a walk along the Hooghly and told the authorities that Calcutta had come up in the first place because of the river, but now it had turned its back on it. You couldn’t even approach the river because of all the shanties. The view was blocked. All connection to the river was lost. The only time you were reminded that there even was a
river was when you drove across the bridge to the Howrah railway station. George was insistent, and so was the British deputy high commissioner. So government officials went to London to see the redevelopment of the Thames, how the river there had become alive with all sorts of art galleries and restaurants. Seeing that, the government started focusing on the river here and what it could become. That was in 1999.”
“Clearing the squatters was the toughest part,” Pradeep said.
“We went there one morning and saw fire engines and police and payloaders. They just came and smashed into everything,” Bonani said.
Her husband thought it was important to clarify. “But not the people who were living there, just the people who had started illegal businesses. There were even boats that were being used as brothels. We’ve always taken pride in the fact that Calcutta, unlike Delhi or Bombay, has never sent in bulldozers. Even in the 1970s, during the Emergency. We always say that people are living on the streets because we’ve failed. The fact that they’re in our face is a reminder that there are human beings who are living in such conditions, and we shouldn’t brush them under the carpet.”
“When we were kids, it used to be a Sunday treat to come down to the river,” Bonani said. “It was cool here. There were balloons, ice cream sellers.”
“All you need to do is give people unencumbered access,” Pradeep said. “We’ve seen riversides like that even in poorer countries, like Cambodia, so we should be able to do it here.”
* * *
Babu Ghat, with its Doric columns, was a confusion of priests and bathers. One of the priests was sitting quietly on a platform on a rush mat, reading from the scriptures. He lived on the platform, he said: worked there, ate there, slept there. It was about eight feet long and four feet wide; more than big enough. His name was Balaram Panda, and he’d been here for fifty-eight years. He was the fifth generation of his family to occupy the spot, the descendants of eleven Brahmins who came to Calcutta in 1830, the same year the ghat was built. Like the flower sellers I’d met at Mullick Ghat, they were natives of Odisha.