On the Ganges

by George Black

  “What do you do all day?” I asked.

  “Any kind of puja people ask for,” he said. “When a child first has solid food, weddings, the sacred thread ceremony, funeral rites, the blessing of a house.”

  “He’s a one-stop puja shop,” Dodo said.

  With a little imagination, you might have thought you were in Varanasi. There, heritage was about Hindu temples and palaces and gardens of remembrance; here, it was neoclassical columns and ice cream carts. A walk along the ghats couldn’t have been more different in the two cities, but the underlying message seemed the same: bring people closer to the river, and honor its heritage, even if you couldn’t agree exactly what that was.

  GOING NATIVE

  Park Street was originally called Burial Ground Road, and in the old colonial cemetery, there were more Ionic, Doric, and Corinthian columns than you could count. I took a circuitous route to get there, looking for somewhere to grab an early lunch first. I skipped Domino’s Pizza and Pizza Hut (“Cheesiest Pizza in India”) and McDonald’s, which was offering a special on its McSpicy Paneer. Finally, I spotted a restaurant called Kwality, which served something that approximated Indian food.

  A loud party of English tourists with a South London twang had already settled in around a long table near the entrance and were reviewing the options on the menu.

  “You know you can get cornflakes and porridge here for breakfast?”

  “Dosa. That’s the long one, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, I’m not all that hungry. I think I might just have pudding.”

  “Let’s get some Kingfishers, though.”

  You could never entirely escape the English in Calcutta, and I was already planning to spend the afternoon among English people who had been dead for two hundred years. I wasn’t in the mood for the tourists’ chatter, so I got up and walked on a little farther down Park Street to the Au Bon Pain at the corner of Sir William Jones Sarani. It had all manner of muffins—blueberry, carrot and chocolate chunk, and raisin bran—as well as Greek yogurt with granola, pain au chocolat, cheese danish, and various kinds of croissants. I opted for an everything bagel with cream cheese and a cappuccino. I might have been in New York, although all the other customers seemed to be upwardly mobile Bengalis.

  Sir William Jones was the most celebrated of the Orientalists, the founder of the Asiatic Society, which held its meetings and kept its library at 1 Park Street. “Asiatic Jones” was a judge, a philologist, and something of an archaeologist, a man of scholarship and tolerance, especially in matters of religion. “I hold the doctrines of the Hindoos concerning a future state to be incomparably more rational, more pious, and more likely to deter men from vice than the horrid opinions inculcated by the Christians on punishment without end,” he wrote. He mastered thirteen languages and had a working knowledge of another twenty-eight. The joke was that he knew every language in the world except his own; like Fanny Parkes, he was Welsh. Jones died in 1794, at the age of forty-seven, of “a common complaint in Bengal, an inflammation of the liver.” He was buried in the South Park Street Cemetery.

  * * *

  At the gatehouse, I signed the visitors’ book and paid the caretaker a few rupees for a skinny booklet printed by the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia and the Association for the Preservation of Historic Cemeteries in India. The caretaker was a small, trim man in his sixties with a toothbrush mustache and a bald head, dapper in slacks and a polo shirt. He was obviously European, but he was burned as dark as any Bengali. He took a piece of paper and wrote down his name for me: Kenneth Fernandes. I wondered if he might be a descendant of one of the Portuguese traders who had been among the earliest settlers on the Hooghly, and he smiled.

  “No,” he said, “nothing like that. My father came here from Portugal in 1939 to join the police.”

  “And your mother?”

  “She was English, from London.”

  “What brought her to Calcutta?”

  “Believe it or not, she came out originally to play for a hockey team, in 1943.”

  He told me that there was no obligation, but if I wished I could also make a donation to the “adopt-a-tomb” scheme to sponsor the repair and upkeep of a particular grave. It was obvious why this was necessary. The marble and stonework had been savaged by 250 years of monsoon rains, and for decades the cemetery had been left to decay, degenerating into a small, walled jungle that was home to refugees from East Bengal, drug addicts, feral dogs, and poisonous snakes. Now its restoration was half-complete, which created an odd effect, like a head of hair left shaggy on one side and shaved bald on the other. The restored section was crisscrossed by neat, grassy pathways and shaded by mango trees; the other was still an overgrown House of Usher where the inscriptions were obscured by moss and lichen.

  With the help of the booklet, I quickly found the grave of Asiatic Jones. It was a towering Cleopatra’s Needle, flanked by four urns in high relief and the symbol of two crossed spades in tribute to his archaeological talents. His epitaph, self-composed, said, “Here was deposited the mortal part of a man who feared God, but not Death, who thought none below him but the base and unjust, none above him but the wise and virtuous.”

  In summertime especially, the stonecutters and chiselers had had more work than they could handle. In the decades before the first grave was dug at South Park Street, in 1767, more than half the employees of the East India Company died of disease, and most of them died young. “A man can be talking to you at breakfast and be dead in the afternoon,” said one Anglo-Indian. In Calcutta, there was no end to the things that could put you in a coffin: cholera (which originated in the Ganges Delta and killed with terrifying speed), malaria (the cause of which was eventually discovered in Calcutta in the 1890s by Sir Ronald Ross), typhoid, dysentery, tick fever, blackwater fever, “jungle fever,” smallpox, snakebite, sunstroke, drowning, polo and riding accidents, rabies, venereal disease, an infected cut. Alcoholism was usually camouflaged beneath euphemisms, but it was also a killer; in the glory days of the Hon’ble Company, a man thought nothing of putting away three bottles of claret over lunch.

  For the “Fishing Fleet,” the women who made the six-month voyage to Calcutta on an East Indiaman to find a husband, childbirth was often lethal.

  ELIZA, THE AFFECTIONATE WIFE OF W. G. GRIELEY. DIED IN CHILD-BED

  1ST AUGUST 1827 AGED 22 YEARS 7 MONTHS & 26 DAYS.

  SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF ISABEL MATILDA, WIFE OF MR. WM. J. SHULDHAM,

  WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE ON THE 23RD APRIL 1854

  AT THE EARLY AGE OF 15 YEARS 5 MONTHS

  DAYS AFTER GIVING BIRTH TO A BOY WHO SURVIVED ONLY 11 HOURS

  Many of the gravestones had poetic epitaphs, in the sentimental language of the period.

  IN MEMORY OF HENRY PATRICK WILSON ESQ.

  WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE ON 11TH OF MAY 1793 AGED 42 YEARS

  IN MANNERS GENTLE AND IN TEMPER MILD

  IN WIT A MAN, SIMPLICITY A CHILD

  ROSE AYLMER, WHOM THESE WAKEFUL EYES

  MAY WEEP, BUT NEVER SEE,

  A NIGHT OF MEMORIES AND OF SIGHS

  I CONSECRATE TO THEE

  Rose had gone to meet her maker in 1820, as the consequence of “a most severe bowel complaint brought on entirely by indulging too much in that mischievous and dangerous fruit, the pineapple.”

  I finally found one or two people who had survived into old age. A dark, ponderous mausoleum housed Maj. Gen. William Hopper of the Bengal Artillery:

  (SERVED EAST INDIA COMPANY FOR 60 YEARS, DIED AGED 77,

  SINCERELY LAMENTED, AND HIS WIFE MARGARET, HIS RELICT, AGED 74)

  Nearby was the tomb of another high-ranking military officer.

  MAJOR GENERAL CHARLES STUART

  (KNOWN AS HINDOO STUART)

  1758—1.4.1828

  QUARTER MASTER OF THE 1ST BENGAL

  EUROPEAN REGIMENT & LATER COMMANDED

  THE 10TH ANDIS REGIMENT

  This was the one I’d been looking for.

&
nbsp; * * *

  “I see you found him, then,” said a voice behind me. I turned around. It was Mr. Fernandes.

  “Well, it wasn’t exactly difficult,” I said. After all, among the dozens of classical plinths and pedestals, columns and cupolas, Grecian urns, pyramids, and obelisks, it was the only tomb that looked like a Hindu temple, complete with carvings of gods or holy men—it was hard to tell which, because the features had been eroded by time, weather, and pollution.

  Hindoo Stuart, who was born in Ireland and came to India in his teens, had the same inquisitive and enlightened spirit as Sir William Jones. “The chief purpose of travelling into foreign countries [is] to study the manners, customs, policy etc. of their inhabitants,” he wrote. But he was more pamphleteer than scholar. In a paper called “A Vindication of the Hindoos,” he railed against “obnoxious” Christian missionaries. “As far as I can rely on my judgment,” he declared, “[Hinduism] appears the most complete and ample system of Moral Allegory that the world has ever produced.”

  This was more than an expression of respect; it was a statement of personal allegiance. Stuart considered himself a convert, although formal conversion to Hinduism wasn’t technically possible. He wore pointed slippers and furnished his home with spittoons for paan juice and a priceless collection of statues of the gods, some of which ended up in the British Museum. He refused to eat beef, which must have drastically limited his options at regimental dinners. He went to Allahabad to take part in the Kumbh Mela. Eventually he took up residence on Wood Street in Calcutta, half a mile from the cemetery, and strolled down to the Hooghly every morning to take his holy dip.

  * * *

  His preference was for bathing at a ghat where women gathered. “He has the Itch beyond any man I ever knew,” a friend said.

  British women had been coming out to Calcutta since the 1670s, but until the arrival of the Fishing Fleet, which began in earnest around 1820, the numbers were tiny. If they failed to find a husband within a year, the Hon’ble Company shipped them back home as “returned empties.” Since there were four thousand British men in the city in 1790, and only two hundred and fifty women, this was the worst ignominy a woman could bear. If he couldn’t find someone to his taste, an unmarried man always had the option of his bibi, who had the additional virtue of acting as a “sleeping dictionary” to help a chap master the tricky native language. In return for her services, she could expect a couple of servants of her own and a modest allowance for clothes, shoes, paan, tobacco, and jewelry.

  Job Charnock, founder of the city and administrator of the East India Company, had three children by a beautiful Hindu woman after snatching her from her husband’s funeral pyre on the banks of the Ganges in Bihar. She was fifteen at the time. Her name was Rani, although he preferred to call her Maria. The attorney William Hickey buried his wife, Charlotte, at South Park Street. After her death, at the age of twenty-one, he had a servant procure him a bibi named Jemdanee, “as gentle and affectionately attached a girl as ever man was blessed with.”

  Some felt more of an itch for Muslim women. General Sir David Ochterlony, also known as Loony Akhtar, who is honored by a column that stands across from the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta, had a harem of thirteen and once shocked Bishop Heber by receiving him dressed in a Muslim gown and a green turban. One eighteenth-century Calcutta Resident had himself circumcised to add to his appeal.

  Stuart stuck to Hindus and shared his feelings with the readers of the Calcutta Telegraph. “The new-mown hay is not sweeter than their breath.… so exquisitely formed, with limbs so divinely turned, and such expression in their eyes, that you must acknowledge them not inferior to the most celebrated beauties of Europe … the dazzling brightness of a copper-colored face, infinitely preferable to the pallid and sickly hue of the European fair.” He urged Englishwomen to wear the sari, whose virtues became apparent to him whenever he took his holy dip. Since a Hindu woman bathes fully clothed, he wrote, she “necessarily rises with wet drapery from the stream. Had I despotic power, our British fair ones should soon follow the example; being fully persuaded that it would eminently contribute to keep the bridal torch for ever in a blaze.”

  His pet hate was the corset, and Fanny Parkes, who at times comes across as something of a protofeminist, felt the same way. “In Europe, how very rarely does a woman walk gracefully!” she wrote in Wanderings of a Pilgrim. “Bound up in stays, the body is as stiff as a lobster in a shell.”

  Stuart inveighed against unflattering underwear in an anonymous series of publications called A Ladies’ Monitor. It had the impressive subtitle, Being a series of letters first published in Bengal on the subject of FEMALE APPAREL Tending to favour a regulated adoption of Indian Costume; and a rejection of SUPERFLUOUS VESTURE By the ladies of this country: with Incidental remarks on Hindoo beauty; whale-bone stays; iron busks; Indian corsets; man-milliners; idle bachelors, hair powder, side saddles, waiting maids, and footmen.

  It was not just a matter of sensuality and aesthetics, he pointed out. There were also practical considerations. All those iron stays in an Englishwoman’s corsets could be better used to help poor farmers by strengthening the wheels of their bullock carts. Worse yet, they posed the constant risk of attracting lightning strikes.

  The army seems never quite to have known what to make of Hindoo Stuart’s eccentricities, but they allowed him to climb the ladder of promotions until he eventually retired as a major general. They denied him only one thing: his wish, as a good Hindu, to be cremated. It was another half century before polite society agreed that was the proper end for an Englishman.

  LAST JEWEL IN THE CROWN

  A sadar was a local court of appeal in Calcutta, and over time, sadar morphed under British influence into sudder, and on a Sunday morning of blistering sun and paralyzing humidity, Sudder Street was as dense as always with human activity. Calcutta is the last bastion of the hand-pulled rickshaw, and half a dozen skeletal men were offering their services to tourists while others were napping. Backpackers were checking out the ten-dollar-a-night guesthouses to see if the price included bedbugs. Young men whispered, “You want hash?” as I passed. A homeless family was bedded down on the sidewalk outside the Indian Museum, cooking up a pot of dal over a kerosene stove, while one of Calcutta’s ubiquitous blue-headed crows tugged with its beak at a roll of rusted baling wire as if it were intent on dragging it across the street. A sign said, “Mass Feeding of the Poor, Every Sunday at 9:00 a.m.,” and the sound of hymn-singing drifted from the open door of the Wesleyan Church.

  * * *

  Down the block at the Fairlawn Hotel, I ordered the full English breakfast. Fried eggs, bacon, fried mushrooms, fried tomatoes, and baked beans. The toast came with imported marmalade. The teapot was kept warm with an embroidered cozy. Glass-fronted cabinets held a collection of chinoiserie and matchboxes and ornamental teaspoons from around the world. On the wall by the reception desk there was a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II on her Golden Jubilee, a photograph of Kate Middleton and Prince William kissing on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, and a sticker that said, “I GAVE UP DRINKING, SMOKING, AND SEX. WORST 15 MINUTES OF MY LIFE.”

  Outside on the patio, Violet Smith, the Duchess of Sudder Street, was holding court, surrounded by tropical greenery. She was short and wide, with thick-lensed, tinted glasses in heavy black frames and pancake makeup and hair so massively lacquered that its weight seemed to be pressing her down deeper into the chair. She was ninety-three years old. She patted the seat next to her and said, “Come and sit here. I need a new toy boy.”

  She told me her maiden name had been Sarkies, which was Armenian. “After the 1915 genocide by the Turks, my grandmother carried my mother, Rosie, on her back all the way from the Khyber Pass to Dhaka. But my parents never spoke about it. We Armenians always mind our own business. My family went into the jute business in Dhaka. I was born there. But if you’re born in a stable, it doesn’t make you a horse. If they ask me where I was born, I say I come from the Planet o
f the Apes.”

  In the 1930s, Vi’s father lost his job in Dhaka, and the family fell on hard times. “One rupee meant a lot to them,” she said. They came to Calcutta and blended in with the local Armenian community, which had been here for more than three hundred years.

  “There are hardly any Armenians left today,” said Jennifer Fowler, Vi’s daughter, who was sitting on the other side of the table, going over the accounts. “They all sold up in the late fifties and sixties. They still bring poor children here from Armenia to be educated, but then they send them back. There’s one old lady who lives down the road in absolute squalor. There’s still the Armenian Home, but she refuses to go and live there.”

  * * *

  The Fairlawn was built in 1783, at the height of the Orientalist era, by an Englishman named William Ford. The deeds defined it as a pukka building, meaning that it was built of brick, a right to which only Europeans were entitled. For Bengalis, construction materials were restricted to coconut palm and mud. It passed through various sets of English hands, including a pair of nineteenth-century naval officers who were rumored to be opium smugglers and two spinster ladies, a Miss Clarke and a Miss Barrett, who owned it from 1900 to 1936, when they sold it to Rosie Sarkies, who turned it into a hotel. During the Second World War, the Fairlawn was requisitioned by the Canadian Air Force. That was also when Vi met her husband, Ted Smith. He was British, an officer in the Northamptonshire Regiment. “So I feel English, I feel Armenian, I feel cosmopolitan,” she said.

  Another guest strolled over from the breakfast room to say good morning, an English expatriate. “How are you today?” Vi asked him as he bent over for a powdery kiss. “Have you been a good boy or a naughty boy?”