We had just finished our walk by the lakes near Southern Avenue; seen an unbroken line of Biharis circling the lakes with fruit and lamps as part of the culmination of some festival; seen the sun going down at five o’clock (as it always does when it approached winter, so that you know you are in Calcutta and not any other part of the world); and noticed young men from the Calcutta Rowing Club glide past in canoes, preparing for a regatta.
It was light even though the sun had set. As we walked down the long path past the lake towards the sports ground, we reflected on how we had seen two Indias at once – the old, thin Bihari women with their lamps and clusters of plantains semi-immersed in water near the bank, the young women briefly prostrate on the path before us in obeisance to the sun, and the young men preparing for the regatta in the middle of the lake – each oblivious to the other.
As we came near the stadium, we notice boys dressed immaculately in white, practising cricket on a ground where football used to be played; in nets I don’t think had been there before, boys of ten or twelve leaned forward as they responded to a ball with a forward defensive stroke, ‘All you need,’ I said to her, ‘is a Saurav Ganguly and some inspiration.’ We often talk about Saurav Ganguly.
We entered a path to the stadium through a broken gate. All around its circle were little rooms – offices of sports clubs and endless renewable sporting enthusiasms. There were always people inside, writing in books or ledgers, always there were thin boys, and more magnificently, girls who’d just finished running or practising, talking loudly and perspiring, the absorbment still on their faces. They have always been there, from my childhood. These aren’t the privileged sporting set, the ones from comfortable backgrounds, but those who wake up daily in the morning, and again return in the afternoon for their ritual stint. A few might make good (whatever that means in this country), but most seem to put in this work and silent dedication for themselves or some local team. One cannot help thinking, walking through here, how many sportsmen and sportswomen there are in India; at this time, quarter past five, they begin to fade and darken in their track suits, their socks having slipped to the bottom, while the perspiration dries on their foreheads.
The lake is full of memories. Not that we come here often – this was only the second time in the five-and-a-half-years of our married life. But I used to once come here for walks frequently, because my cousin lived nearby; she too has been here a few times in the past. We don’t always have the time, and when we do, it doesn’t occur to us to come here, but we like the lakes. Neither of us really completely belongs to this city, though she went to school here; but both our memories are intertwined with it, and, though outsiders, we feel at home here in the lakes.
The lakes are an interval of natural habitat in South Calcutta, composed of water and greenery; maybe that is why there is such a variety of sporting activity – mostly amateur – around them. People, poor or rich, still love, at least in Calcutta, light and air; it makes them want to feel healthy and active. Here they are, crooking their elbows, touching their toes, bending and unbending with the regularity of insects.
Lovers come here as well; not well-to-do ones, they wouldn’t take the risk; but couples from the lower middle class and that outdated category, the working class. Once, genteel people used to come to the lakes, until, about fifteen years ago, the place developed a bad reputation of being frequented by thieves and hooligans. But these couples still come here, not knowing any better, and it is safe as long as it’s light. For them, romantic love is both taboo and romantic. They sit upon the old stone benches surrounding the lake; now and then they are distracted by vendors or crows. Some of them must be married and come to continue their early courtship here. The couples all sit alarmingly close to each other, against tree trunks, or facing the water, undisturbed by this proximity, and while some of them do more than talk, others have been brought close in small embraces of great tenderness. A patch of sky above them, and the leave of a tree, then another patch of sky and more leaves; below, a woman rests her head against a man’s shoulder and her arm circles his waist. When we were boys, we used to come to the lakes to look at the lovers. Now the two of us look at them with a different curiosity, and they don’t feel threatened, because we are a couple as well.
It is strange to see the poor in love, making physical contact in their lonely, shy, erotic foreplay all huddled so seriously under the branches; that is what is slightly shocking, not the physical contact – for love and its pleasure are supposed to be, in our imaginations, the domain of the rich.
We left them behind. There were other groups. One of them we called, affectionately and rudely, ‘old people’s gossip’. We encountered them on our walk away from Southern Avenue and towards Menoka Cinema. They were sitting on benches, some of them already wearing slip-overs and sweaters. When was it that someone designated himself ‘old’, and decided to join this group? The group, though to all intents and purposes immemorial, must be reforming every few years, as new people become old and new introductions are made. I saw a man walking alone on the long path that led through the middle of the grounds by the lake; in a bush-shirt and black trousers. I could see that he had decided he was old, though he would have been no more than in his late fifties; it seemed to mean something to him. The old people sat on benches with dead leaves around them as they do in November. What do they gossip about? A dignified looking old lady ran into an old man; they recognised each other; they enquired after each other. An old lady among the old men; there was something magnificent about her; ineluctable. What would the lakes be without these women sitting close to their lovers or husbands, or grown old, wandering alone, or doing exercises around the stadium.
A pair of rails on the ground, too narrow to be a tram or railway line, curved round the lakes, made for the starting point, and seemed to be tracing a journey parallel to ours; it was meant for a toy-train for children, now no longer in use. Now and then a horizontal iron rod barred our path, and we had to duck beneath it or skirt it; they had been put there to keep out car and cycles. Little seemed to have changed in the lakes, and yet, we could not help, walking through this interruption from real life, noticing and commenting to each other how even here, in the midst of light and air, one could sense the change that had come over Calcutta. There were no rich people visible, no brash children to feel irritated with. Here, among people walking and exploring, sitting and resting, was an air of brief contentment and missed opportunity, of constricted horizons. Children were playing but the better-off among them would not be here long; their future depended upon their departures to other places. The old had seen better times; they did not mind so much. Meanwhile the poorer parents, walking their brightly-clothed toddlers, seemed excited by everything they saw.
Our walk had brought us to another entrance to the lakes. We came out to the pavement opposite Menoka Cinema. We needed a taxi. ‘Let’s take that one,’ she said. There was a taxi with its flag saying ‘For Hire’ in the lane next to the cinema, overlooked by a huge film hoarding. If the car had not broken down, we might never have taken this diversion. We felt strangely revived and rootless; we walked towards the taxi.
‘Ballygunge,’ I said, once we were inside. This road that we were on now, and Southern Avenue itself, is full of memories as well. There are two-storeyed houses along it, and a mansion, which must, no doubt belong to a Marwari, whose exterior denotes great comfort and opulence. She said she wondered about the family that lived in it. This was not the first time she had wondered this way. Years of speculation had almost brought about a kinship in her for this family she’d never actually seen, she spoke of them affectionately, knowingly, as people do of landmarks they’ve grown up with.
As the taxi turned into Southern Avenue, I wondered if I would spot the house possibly owned by another Marwari, that looked like a ship with portholes and ventilator. She had seen it many times as well and found it, as I did, striking and funny. All sorts of strange houses came up in the ‘60s, humorous, ridiculous specious, symbolising both domestic stability and voyages, and the incongruous adventurousness of the time. Some middle-class houses had strangely shaped grilles with metal wrought nakedly around lacunae, echoing the odd hairstyles and printed silk saris that women then wore. ‘Where is it? Maybe it’s gone? Torn down? ‘But I just saw it the other day,’ she said.
At the petrol pump, we turned down Landsdowne Road. She made an exclamation, because this is not our usual route – we prefer to advance to Deshapriya Park, and take the short cut into Rashbehari Avenue – and because she distrusts taxi drivers, ‘Why has he turned here?’ However there was not much traffic as it was Saturday.
The first stretch of Lansdowne road, going past Raja Basant Roy Road, where my cousin’s cousin used to live, once, past the Mandarin Chinese Restaurant, the Dakkhinee Bookshop, which is really no more than a pavement bookstall…
I love this early stretch before the road becomes a congested thoroughfare as it finally approaches Lower Circular Road. Small things that are difficult to account for can open a vista onto your childhood – the absence of traffic, a house, a slight chill in the breeze. Heavy traffic in Calcutta is contemporaneous; that is why Saturday afternoons and Sundays, when there are fewer cars and buses to be seen, are images of a different time; they nudge you backward. This early phase of Landsdowne Road has this aura, with houses in the by-lanes. We passed the skeleton of a pandal that seemed to belong to ages ago, it was a roofed stage that had temporarily housed a goddess, now stripped of its cloth-covering; a remnant of the recent Kali festival. There is something both seductive and sad about going back in time, about that bygone period of our childhood, because it is a way of life that has exhausted its possibilities and nothing has come about to replace it. It is like a mirage, a fantasy we have projected from within, this stretch of Landsdowne Road.
‘I think Landsdowne Road will be the first to change,’ she said, as we moved forward.
‘You mean?...’
She gestured towards a shiny new clothes-shop by the pavement.
I mean those. Though I admit that one wasn’t very impressive. But when change comes to Calcutta – and its already here – Landsdowne Road will be ideal, it is broad, and they’ve already begun to convert the other side – all those cosy food shops and restaurants and granite buildings. Then the … you know … sleepy residential character of this stretch will change as well.’
It was still light, although it was more than half an hour after sunset. There was both hope and regret in her voice – for we long for prosperity to come to Calcutta and also want it, impossibly, to remain what it is.
We now came down to the middle of Landsdowne Road, and here, before we turned right to take a short cut into one of those lanes that serve as connecting roads in Calcutta, and which seem undifferentiable and unfamiliar, she glanced towards her left, as if she had recognised something, into a lane that had become a dead end.
‘Oh! Ajitesh Uncle used to live there,’ she said.
‘There?’ I caught a glimpse of the lane before it disappeared. A few houses were squeezed together in it.
‘Yes, one of those houses.’
I had met Ajitesh Uncle two or three times after getting married, but never given him, in my thoughts, a habitation. He died two years ago, whether of cirrhosis of the liver or a cardiac arrest I can’t now remember. He was a friend of my father-in-law’s; he’d land up at inconvenient times at their house for a drink and a conversation. He’d been an expansive man and on the few occasions I’d met him, he’d exhibited a range of interests to me, from classical music to literature.
‘Did I tell you about the two stories he used to tell me?’ she asked. She sounded amused. We were now in Hazra Road.
She is sometimes hesitant when talking to me about her family, for why should people who were remote from my existence five years ago, and are often tangential to it now, interest me? She believes, too, that I have had a more privileged upbringing than she has, and this makes her defensive, especially about people like Ajitesh Uncle, who, to her, is a sort of clown-figure. And yet, in spite of her hesitancy, she unfailingly submits to a compulsion to tell me of people I know little about; and these careless and habitual revelations are fragments that constitute, for me, the puzzle of her past.
‘Then I didn’t tell you about his stories?’
‘Not that I can remember.’
I used to chide her for calling her parents’ friends So-and-So Uncle or So-and-So Aunty, in the Westernised North Indian way, rather than Ajitesh Mama or Ajitesh Kaka as a Bengali would. Ajitesh, of course is not his real name. In disguising it, I had to search for a similar three-syllabled one to match the poetic, noble-sounding original. Not that I needed to have changed it, for who will recognise him now? He was not very close to his brothers, and he left behind a son and wife who were both supposed to be ‘mad’. (One grows up in Calcutta hearing of neighbours and family members who are ‘mad’, but quite often these people aren’t sent to the asylum. They stay at home contributing, in their way, to domesticity and society, and one’s understanding of the normal. I have a picture Ajitesh’s wife and son wandering about at home, singing, brooding, doing nothing, and at the same time getting through the normal chores of life – having lunch, making tea.) Undeterred by, or perhaps because of, his son’s and wife’s mental health, Ajitesh Uncle had a full social life. He was singular in his way, wearing long kurtas in summer and cravats in winter; but there have been many others like him.
‘What are these stories?’
She thought for a moment.
‘Well, according to him, girls in America weren’t shy or tongue-tied like the girls here. The first thing they say is, ‘Hi!’’ This still made her laugh. That was the first story. It had probably been the earliest first-hand information she’d had about America.
‘He used to think that American girls were – what was the word?’ she asked.
‘Loose?’
‘Yes, loose – fast.’
I thought of a pretty and shameless young American surprising Ajitesh Uncle.
‘What was the second story?’
‘The second story was,’ said my wife, with satisfaction, ‘that everyone has a calculator in America. Once, after Ajitesh Uncle had paid for something in a shop somewhere in America, he waited as the woman at the till punched the buttons of a calculator, and then gave him back the change. Do you know what he said?’
‘What?’
‘‘Wrong change.’’ She started laughing again. ‘While she’d been using the calculator, he’d already done the arithmetic in his head and come up with the answer. The point was, human beings can do sums better than computers. His stories,’ she recalled, ‘were told to illuminate a moral.’
We passed a garage, and a tree – a banyan, I think – with a shrine in front of it.
‘Did he repeat these stories?’
‘Repeat?’
‘Did he tell them more than once?’
‘Yes, he did.’
It’s a mystery why people repeat stories to the same audience, and forget that they’ve told them before, until the story ceases to be a story, and becomes a mannerism you come to identify with a person.
‘He spent the last years of his life sozzled, though,’ she said. ‘He was always drinking.’
And I remembered that, on the few occasions I’d seen him in my father-in-law’s house, he’d had a glass in one hand and peanuts in another.
‘But what was he doing in America?’
‘Oh he was always going to America on some business. I think he was rich, though he lived in that poky flat.’ Then, ‘Not that he was very generous. He gave me a plastic watch for my wedding, and he gave the same watch to my cousin for her wedding. He must have had a whole stock of those watches.’
‘What kind of business?’
‘He used to make a silicon cleaning fluid which was really very good. Whenever something needed cleaning – some dirty surface – we’d take out a bottle of his milky cleaning fluid: there were several of them in our house. It was supposed to revolutionise things, but it never really took off.’
The failure of the cleaning fluid, like the stories, still seemed to surprise her. And there was a hint of an apology in her voice; as if she had momentarily, identified with his lack of success; some feeling she could not really communicate to me. Just what he meant to her, at that point in her childhood, must have come back to her; for when does a harmless old clown become a figure of sadness? We had turned now into the main road at Ballygunge; the rays from the sun that had set about three quarters of an hour ago still brought a dying light to the city. We can never know in what shape the dead will come back to us, or when, even the most unimportant of them have in some way enlarged, or diminished, our lives. In their world, though they have vanished, moved from one sort of insignificance to another, we are still children.
*
Reprinted, with permission from the author, from Mosaic: New Writings from Award-winning British and Indian Writers, ed Monisha Mukundan, Penguin, 1998.
*
Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, and winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Sahitya Akademi award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction; a critic who won the inaugural Infosys Prize for the Humanities in Literary Studies; a writer of non-fiction whose Finding the Raga, Penguin Hamish Hamilton, 2021, received the James Tait Black Prize; a poet whose Sweet Shop: New and Selected Poems is published in the USA, the UK, and India in October in the NYRB Poets series; and a musician and composer who received the Sangeet Samman from the West Bengal government for his contribution to classical music, performed at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, on BBC television’s Review Show, and whose version of ‘Summertime’ is included in BBC 4’s documentary Gershwin’s Summertime: The Song that Conquered the World.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and is editor of literaryactivism.com.