On the Ganges

by George Black

  Vi and Ted married at a fearsome time, when the only ones getting fat in Calcutta were the crows and the vultures and the black marketeers. It seemed wise not to raise the issue of Winston Churchill and the famine, so instead I asked how life in Calcutta had changed for them after Independence in 1947.

  “Not very much,” Jennifer answered. “They went to the clubs every night, dinner dances, their own little circle of friends. It took time for things to change, you know, apart from the skirmishes that were going on within the Indian community.”

  “As I said, we Armenians mind our business,” Vi said.

  Skirmishes. Well, that was one way of putting it. There was the constant stream of refugees from East Bengal after Partition, and another mass influx during Bangladesh’s war of independence in 1971. There were the communal riots of 1964, after a hair of the prophet disappeared from a shrine in Kashmir, and Hindus in some parts of Muslim-majority East Bengal were forbidden to wear shoes, carry an umbrella, or ride in a rickshaw. That was before several thousand of them were slaughtered, and a hundred Muslims in Calcutta were killed in reprisal. Then there was the Maoist-influenced Naxalite rebellion, which began in 1967 and still dragged on in various parts of northeast India half a century later.

  “After that, we had the Communists come in, and they ruled for thirty-five years, which completely ruined the whole of the historical story,” Vi said. “The second city of the British Empire, all the connections between Britain and India.” The Communists had dismantled the statues of heroes of the Raj, which seemed to make her especially indignant.

  “I think you were tempted a couple of times to go back to England, weren’t you, Mum?” Jennifer said.

  “Well, India has been very good to me. I’m very fond of Indian people. I’d be a nuisance without them. I can’t cook or clean or iron or do anything. ‘Madam, we’re going to cook and clean for you.’ I can’t cook or anything, oh dear.”

  “You’re a fugitive, aren’t you, Mum? You’re on the run.”

  * * *

  But the guests always made it worthwhile, even if these days they were reduced in numbers and celebrity. The first family of Fairlawn had been the Kendals, an English theatrical family who traveled around India performing Shakespeare and stayed at the hotel on and off for thirty years. One of them, Jennifer, had married the outrageously handsome Bollywood star Shashi Kapoor. They spent their honeymoon here, and room 17 still had a plaque on the door that said, “Shashi Kapoor’s Room.” Ismael Merchant and James Ivory had stayed here once, working with the couple on Bombay Talkie, in which they costarred. Then there was Patrick Swayze and the cast of City of Joy, a movie about a Calcutta rickshaw puller, an idealistic American doctor, and a disastrous monsoon flood. One scene had been filmed in the reception area at the Fairlawn. Vi and Jennifer agreed that the Indian hero, played by Om Puri, had a credibility problem, since he was nine inches taller and weighed twice as much as any of the real-life rickshaw wallahs waiting outside on Sudder Street.

  It was a more mixed crowd these days. “Japanese, Malayan, Thai,” Vi said. “It’s close by, you see, Bangkok.”

  “Lots of Australians,” Jennifer said. “Lots of French and Germans, people from Spain.”

  “Which is nice.”

  “Which is lovely. We don’t want it just to be for the English. That would be boring.”

  “Although we do get the odd British celebrity. Michael Palin, you know, from Monty Python. He was a nice man. The BBC were here. Tom Stoppard.”

  “Julie Christie.”

  “Sting.”

  “We did have one lord here, he was a Scotsman. Some politicians.”

  “Well, Prince Andrew was here, if you can call him a politician. And Princess Diana was here when she came to see Mother Teresa.”

  “And then there was that German, Günter Grass. He came here in 1971. I didn’t like him. Very hard man, very anti-Bengali. The Germans are very hard people. He played havoc here, ran the Bengalis down. They’re very sensitive, these Indians.”

  “Mum keeps well out of politics. She doesn’t see the bad side of Calcutta. She lives in her own little world here. That’s what’s kept her so young.”

  Jennifer looked up irritably when a hotel employee came over with the register to ask her a question about some guests who had just checked in. She rolled her eyes when the man went back to the front desk. “My husband tells me I’m a real bossy boots,” she said. “But someone’s got to keep them under control. They’re like children, really. They have to be told what to do and told off when they’re naughty.”

  “I love people,” Vi said, ignoring her daughter. “I want to enjoy the few years I have left; otherwise, you just sit here waiting to die. To be or not to be, that is the question.”

  I asked her what she did all day, other than sitting out here among the potted plants as the guests filed past to pay homage. “I just do bullshit all day,” she chortled. “Look at all the bullshit on the walls. I just sit here and wait for my toy boys like you to come along.”

  As it turned out, the Duchess of Sudder Street didn’t get to enjoy those extra few years. Six months after I left Calcutta, she died quietly in her private quarters at the Fairlawn Hotel.

  PACKED AND PESTILENTIAL

  Vi Smith might have preferred to close herself off from the dark side of Calcutta, but for others, it was everything you needed to know about the city. Calcutta was the dark side.

  One day, in the giant Barabazar market, I watched two blue-headed crows fighting over a dead rat. One would snatch it up in its beak, flap ten feet in the air, and drop it. The other would swoop down and repeat the performance. They would stop and circle the rat and peck at each other for a bit, then the first one would grab it again, and so it continued as the vendors went on selling their cheap T-shirts and underwear.

  It might have been a symbolic scene from the documentary that Louis Malle made about the city in 1969, a tour de force of poverty porn that helped cement the idea of Calcutta as a hell on earth, afflicted by problems that were beyond imagination and beyond redemption. Here are some children splashing around in raw sewage. Here are some people banging drums and chanting about something in an alien language we don’t understand. Here are some other people shouting slogans about Chairman Mao. Here are some crippled beggars lying in the street. Here are close-up shots of some lepers, who are even more repellent than the beggars. Here are some people at Nirmal Hriday, Mother Teresa’s hospice, too weak to shovel rice into their mouths. Here are some people dying. Apart from the Maoist protesters, you can still see all those things in Calcutta today, but they’re all that the filmmaker shows us, except for one brief passage that shows upper-class Indians in Western clothes absorbed in a horse race and blithely knocking balls around a well-watered golf course. Just in case we haven’t gotten the point about the obscene cruelty of life. Claude Lévi-Strauss and Günter Grass painted, if anything, an even darker picture. For the French anthropologist, Calcutta was emblematic of the sickness of India: “filth, chaos, promiscuity, congestion; ruins, huts, mud, dirt; dung, urine, pus, humors, secretions, and running sores.” Tristes Tropiques, indeed. For the German novelist, who showed up a couple of years after Malle to write Der Butt (The Flounder), the city was “a pile of shit that God dropped and called Calcutta.” He had some helpful advice for tourists: “Let’s not waste another word on Calcutta. Delete Calcutta from all guidebooks.” His alter ego, Vasco (for Vasco da Gama, the Great Explorer), goes to Kalighat and says, “Chop off your cock in Calcutta (in the temple of Kali, where young goats are sacrificed and a tree is hung with wishing stones that cry out for children, more and more children).” While he’s down at Kalighat, Grass also makes the obligatory stop at Mother Teresa’s place to see some people dying, but Mother Teresa isn’t home. He goes one step further than Malle by also turning his scorn on those genteel, sensitive, culturally confused Bengali writers who “read one another (in English) poems about flowers, monsoon clouds, and the elephant-headed god,
Ganesha.”

  Not to deny that Calcutta was in a dire condition in the early 1970s. But what city wouldn’t be after going through a quarter century of comparable horrors? Bengal had lost three million people to a famine part-engineered by its imperial overlords. It had suffered the aftershocks of Partition along religious lines, struggling to absorb millions of refugees from East Bengal who found nowhere to live but the pavements. And it was dealing with a historic crisis of identity that only deepened when fresh waves of migrants flooded in from the desperation of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and native Bengalis found themselves reduced to only 40 percent of the population.

  But all these European sophisticates also had more than two centuries of prejudice and cliché to build on. There was the foul climate and the terrible diseases it bred. The Black Hole, where a group of English prisoners, men, women, and children, died in 1756 (contemporary accounts put the number at 146, though later scholars estimated that it was probably closer to 43). The unspeakable Thugs, fanatics who strangled thousands of helpless travelers in the service of the goddess Kali. And darkest of all there was the goddess herself, black-skinned, fierce-faced, four-armed, with her blood-red protruding tongue, the piercing third eye in the middle of her forehead, and her necklace of human heads, an iconic image you still find painted on walls all through the back streets of the city.

  Long before Malle and Grass and Lévi-Strauss arrived to pick at Calcutta’s scabs, these dark notions of the place had been summed up for Westerners in the title of Rudyard Kipling’s book The City of the Dreadful Night. Kipling writes of his nocturnal wanderings with the local police and his encounters with Dainty Iniquity and Fat Vice—thieves, prostitutes, and opium addicts. Yes, Kipling does call the city “packed and pestilential,” but his contrary strand of respect for its deep complexities is usually forgotten. “Let us take our hats off to Calcutta,” the book begins, in fact, “the many-sided, the smoky, the magnificent,” with its “deep, full-throated boom of life and motion and humanity.” “How long does it take to know it then?” he asks his police guide at the end of their tour. “About a lifetime,” the man answers.

  MULTIPLE PERSONALITIES

  About a lifetime. Kipling’s policeman was right. Everything in Calcutta seemed to be a metaphor that took time and effort to decipher. Or maybe a synecdoche, the word that Apu had learned in school. Everything had layers you didn’t see on the surface, and sometimes they never became visible. In my wanderings in Calcutta I’d never felt more acutely the truth of what a friend had told me after my first three or four trips to India: that the more you go, the less you know.

  Nothing perplexed me more than Kali and Durga, the goddesses who are most closely identified with the city. To the degree they served as metaphors, those metaphors were inevitably subjective. It all depended on which of the goddesses’ attributes you chose to focus on. Calcuttans saw their multiple dimensions; the British, and later the European intellectuals, had an imaginative baseline that kept them focused on the darker ones.

  Both Kali and Durga were known for acts of extreme violence. Durga, with her ten arms, each holding a different weapon, had killed the terrifying, shape-shifting buffalo-demon Mahisha, beheading him and impaling him on Shiva’s trident. Kali, with her necklace of severed heads and her skirt of severed arms, led an army that vanquished the legion of demons. The Thugs invoked her as a patron; the Naxalites appropriated her as a symbol. But in killing demons, the goddesses were also protectors of virtue. Both of them represented the triumph of good over evil. They were creators as well as destroyers, and Durga’s violent side is not what Calcuttans celebrate at her puja, the biggest of the year.

  I asked Tapati Guha-Thakurta, an earnest and elegant academic expert on the Durga Puja, to tell me more about it. “You know, the myth is that she’s the warrior goddess,” she said. “But here she’s considered to be the married daughter who comes down from the mountains with her children each year, leaving her husband’s parental home, and then at the end of the puja she’s given her farewell as she returns. So the mother-daughter-wife thing is parallel to her role as the killer of the demon. This has a long history in Bengal.”

  It seemed reasonable that a loving family would want to give their daughter an annual break from her husband, given that he was prone to wild and unpredictable moods. That was because Durga’s husband was Shiva, a piece of information that left me deeply confused.

  * * *

  I often thought of Fanny Parkes sitting on the deck of her paddle steamer on the Ganges, trying to draw organizational charts that explained the hierarchy of the Hindu deities. In Calcutta, I kept genealogical notes of my own, trying to figure out where Kali and Durga fitted into this divine schema. My scribblings were evidence of a brain tied in knots.

  Parvati (“daughter of the mountains”) m. Shiva

  Kali (“black goddess”) and Gauri (“white goddess”)—both manifestations of Parvati

  Parvati = Gauri, but Gauri also = Durga (?)

  But Kali also turns into Gauri (??)

  Kali (aka Sati, aka Kalika, Chandika—too complicated, ignore) m. Shiva

  Durga m. Shiva (so all marry Shiva? at different times?)

  Durga’s sons (Ganesha and Kartikeya) are also Parvati’s sons. But not her daughters (Lakshmi, Saraswati)

  Kali (Sati) later returns as Parvati

  Kali born out of forehead of Ambika, who emerges from body of Parvati (so she’s Parvati’s granddaughter?)

  But other stories say Kali springs from the forehead of Durga

  So Durga = Gauri = Parvati = Kali (???)

  Maybe there was just no point in trying to confine these riddles in neat boxes. In the end, all of them—Kali/Durga/Parvati/Sati/Gauri—were manifestations of the Great Goddess and mother, Devi, and expressions of shakti—divine energy. Ma Ganga, flowing past Calcutta to the ocean, was that power in liquid form.

  * * *

  But what brought Durga and Kali to Calcutta in the first place, given that it was nothing but a riverside swamp in the hazy millennia before the British made it their capital? The story involved a king named Daksha, the father of Sati (or Kali, or Gauri, or whatever), and as usual there were multiple variants, depending on which of the scriptures you consulted.

  Sati/Kali was married to Shiva, but King Daksha despised his son-in-law as a wild-eyed, ash-smeared renegade and refused to invite him to a sacrificial ceremony at Kankhal, on the outskirts of Haridwar, where I’d seen my first body burning. Sati couldn’t take any more of her father’s insults and threw herself into the fire—as a result of which Kankhal is revered as one of the most sacred of all cremation grounds.

  Maddened with rage and grief, Shiva tore out a lock of his hair and fashioned two fearsome, vengeful creatures from it. They laid waste to Daksha’s celebration and left Kankhal strewn with corpses and body parts. Daksha was decapitated, though later, in an act of mercy, Shiva replaced his head with the head of a goat.

  Shiva rampaged across the universe with his wife’s incinerated body across his shoulders. Some versions say that his wild, whirling dance scattered pieces of Sati/Kali all over present-day South Asia. Others say that the gods were so alarmed by his rampage that they called in Vishnu to stop him, which he tried to do by hurling his discus at Shiva. But his aim was off, and the discus slashed the goddess’s body to pieces instead. The places where they fell to earth became shakti peethas, places of pilgrimage. Four of the peethas were considered the most important, and one of these was on the banks of the Hooghly. Scholars debate the original location, but the modern temple, which was built in 1809, is in a congested neighborhood in South Calcutta.

  * * *

  One cliché I’d learned to avoid in India was “since time immemorial.” As in, “Since time immemorial, Hindus have flocked to Kalighat to worship the goddess.” It turned out that you couldn’t get away from the British at Kalighat any more than you could in the rest of Calcutta. The reason there was a ghat here in the first place, and a temple beside it, w
as the entrepreneurial zeal of Major William Tolly of the East India Company, who expanded a small canal in 1775—thereafter known as Tolly’s Nullah—to clear a silted-up tributary called the Adi Ganga and speed the way to the interior of Bengal. He charged boats a toll for the privilege, and a thriving market grew up around the ghat. The busy market was still there, selling religious items and all manner of Kali-themed trinkets like key chains and postcards and fridge magnets. But Tolly’s Nullah was now a stinking ditch like countless others, though the government had been promising to clean it up.

  I went down into the claustrophobic inner sanctum of the temple and joined the crowd that was circumambulating the goddess. There were empty, smoke-blackened niches along the walls, and the iron roof girders had a thick shroud of spiderwebs. An ancient TV set with a blank screen was suspended on a little cantilevered platform high on one wall, the kind you might see in a cheap motel room. Ceiling fans churned the sticky air. There were signs warning of “pickpocket and imposter” and instructions that said, “Broke Coconut Only in the Specific Place” and “Don’t Touch Doubtful Article.”

  I bought my prasad and got my darshan. The effigy of Kali was fashioned out of black marble and enclosed in a metal-and-wire structure that looked like an old-fashioned elevator cage. There was definitely something unnerving about the Black One, with those three piercing eyes and the long tongue hanging out like a panting dog’s. But to the Bengali worshippers, the tongue had a second meaning that was quite different. After Kali had wiped out the demon armies, her bloodlust was out of control, and the gods called on her husband, Shiva, to calm her down. He threw himself in her path, and in her frenzy, she stepped on him. Speechless with embarrassment, she bit her lip and thrust out her tongue and then, overcome by remorse, plunged into the Yamuna and emerged again as the gentle, nurturing Gauri. Even in her dark and violent persona, Kali was also an exemplar of the power of women. In the nineteenth century, a school of painters flourished at Kalighat that satirized the vanity and self-indulgence of the babus, the Bengali nouveaux riches who had profited from the presence of the East India Company. The paintings sometimes showed their women, both wives and mistresses, empowered by Kali’s righteous energy, thrashing the babus or stomping them underfoot.