Afternoon Raag (8 page)

My parents lived here for three years. During my first summer visit, walking down the parallel lanes, I found by-lanes connecting one lane to another. On either side of these by-lanes, which were like shrunken versions of the bigger ones, miniature portraits of them, there were old cottages, and, around them, a distinct island of life that had formed by itself, consisting of cats, shrubs, birds, and an absence of people. I was always grateful for, without knowing precisely why, the detour of passing through these by-lanes.

It was Chitrakaki, my mother's friend, who, having lived in the suburbs for thirty years, introduced my parents to a new family doctor in the area, someone who would make house calls. He was a short Marathi gentleman called Dr Deshpande, long threads of black hair combed across his disproportionately visible scalp, squarejawed,
stout, bespectacled, with, disconcertingly, dimples appearing on his cheeks when he smiled. Like all general practitioners who are slaves to their patients and available at their beck and call at all hours of the day, he had no degree but his MBBS; he was more a Samaritan than a doctor; his arrival was met with relief rather than apprehension. He was not consulted for serious illnesses, but for headaches, stomach-upsets, and indigestion, and for his company he charged fifty rupees less than the doctors in the city. This part of the suburbs was his natural terrain; he was linked by phone to a wide variety of sufferers, and was in demand everywhere. He usually made only one diagnosis, ‘There's a virus in the air this time of the year,' but if one disagreed with him, he had no objection to changing it.

Chitrakaki lived not far away in a rented flat on the ground floor of a two-storeyed house with her husband, son, daughter-in-law, two dogs, and a cat. Once she owned a rooster which, strange plant, was convinced it was human and insisted upon being introduced to her friends. The dogs—a fox terrier that died, a dachshund that met its end in
a road-accident, two hairy pekinese—Chitrakaki and her husband loved and cared for like their own children. And they forever remained children, even when they had become old, scuffling underneath the dining-table and barking their hearts out at the wall-lizard. In other ways they were shockingly dog-like; for the mother pekinese and her son, Chitrakaki once related lovingly, had become husband and wife, and then had had puppies. Each time, during those thirty years, when a bitch had puppies, Chitrakaki witnessed their blind, recumbent birth, and then gave them away.

She loved my mother's cooking. Whistling (she had learnt how to whistle in England, where both she and her husband had met my father as a penniless student), she would loiter carelessly in the kitchen, looking askance as my mother gave the cook instructions, vainly, and stealthily, trying to sniff out the recipe. When she tried it at home, however, it was never, never right. She was convinced my mother had cruelly held back something, a seemingly unimportant but crucial ingredient she had quite premeditatedly forgotten
to tell her. My mother made things from peelings, fish-heads, dried fish. It was East Bengali cuisine, with its origins in villages on drought- and flood-hit riversides, a poor man's diet, perfected by people who could not afford to throw away even the skin of a white-gourd or the head of a fish, transformed into food by adding oil and garlic and chilli paste and poppy seed and common salt.

The people who really belonged to our lane were those who were on its margins—servants, sweepers, watchmen, hawkers of vegetable and fish who sent their cries out to the balconies and went with their baskets from door to door, even the beggars who, like the tradesmen, worked on a repeated route within a definite area. There was a Christian woman who, wearing the same tattered white dress, stood outside the building gates every week and sang a tuneless song in disjointed English. English was spoken quite naturally here by the poor, many of whom were Christians, and said their prayers in the language.

Gradually, the area changed. New buildings, like ours, came up where the oldest cottages used
to be, concrete structures with sequences of black holes that would become flats in which people and children would live, the rooms, kitchens, and bathrooms still unrecognizable, each building looking at this stage like a huge bird-house. The labourers sat and chipped away at the large rocks with their chisels, while their women-folk, with saris tucked around their knees, bent down and scooped tiny black stones into a metal plate; some of them sat apart, nursing babies, the breast hidden by the child's head, one end of the sari pulled forward, held aloft, and used as a kind of curtain to an imaginary room. The stray dogs of the lane were friendly with the children, who would pummel them fearlessly with tiny fists, or race them down the lane, while the dogs took such pestering wisely and accommodatingly. This floating community, infants and all, disappeared every year, and then they, or another very like them, reappeared on another site. Often, they would live in improvised shelters they had built themselves. From the rear-balcony of our flat, one could see a building coming up in an adjoining space, where our compound
had ended with a wall. On this side of our house, clothes were left to dry on the balcony, and there were garages downstairs in which tenants' cars were kept. The atmosphere here was in contrast to that of the front side, where cars and people kept coming in.

At different points of time in those three years, a maidservant and a cook who worked in our flat began to visit the rear-balcony in the afternoons with an aimless look in their eyes. Both had made a long-distance, incommunicado relationship of looks and gestures with someone on the building site. There was some doubt about this at first, but on one definitive occasion, my parents were told by an informer—perhaps the sweeper-woman—that the cook (who, before she found love, was a slow-moving, turtle-like woman with luxuriant hips) had made a friendship with a Nepali watchman, a matter of waves, smiles, and glimpses, but then a serious affair of meetings when she would disappear from the house for what she thought were unnoticeable intervals. Returning, she would say she had been to the toilet. Romance was dead
among the middle classes, but among domestic servants it was still a disruptive force, giving them a secret life that had the fraught emotions, the atmosphere and the singing beauty of old Hindi films. When a servant fell in love, the implications were felt all over the house, and became a subject of conversation; my guru would interrupt his tuition to speak about these matters of the heart, glancing sideways when the servant being discussed entered the room.

Meanwhile, the new houses were completed. Each family, in those matchbox-like flats, put up paintings, placed decorations on the window-sills, hung up lamp-shades, as if life, taken out of the bundle of cloth in which it had been hurriedly wrapped, had settled down and resumed its ordinariness. As the cottages fell, and buildings came up, Hindus moved into the area to live alongside the Christians—Sindhis, a tall, migratory business people, who brought with them a passion for cars and noisy weddings, extended families consisting of grandsons and cousins, and women-folk who sang an unimpassioned, strangely
tranquil, version of devotionals in the evening; hovering wistfully somewhere on the border of tunefulness, it brought the quality of a faraway time and place to the area. By the time my parents decided they could no longer live in Bombay, and in those months of waiting for the flat to be sold, until at last when they packed up everything, leaving every room with crates full of possessions, the character of the lane had changed perceptibly.

T
hat year, full of those odd coincidences that brought Shehnaz and Mandira and me together, my parents moved from Bombay to Calcutta.

Calcutta is my birthplace. It is the only city I know that is timeless, where change is naturalized by the old flowing patterns, and the anxiety caused by the passing of time is replaced by fatigue and surrender. It is where my father, having left Sylhet, came as a student fifty years ago. Those were the last years before independence; and my father lived in a hostel in North Calcutta. He ate great quantities of rice in the canteen, and never left a fishhead uneaten. He was an only child, parentless, in this
city where people spoke Bengali differently and more coldly than he did. North Calcutta was then classical and beautiful, with Central Avenue and the colleges of Tropical Medicine and other sciences, the imposing colonial buildings, the institutions of learning and the roads matching the nobility of their names. And my father saw that nobility with his own eyes. In all the world then he had nobody. It was before history was born, and he himself became who he was, studying in a city that is always prenatal, pre-nascent. The tiny village in East Bengal he was born in, with its village school he went to in early childhood, seems to have never existed. It is now on the other side of the border, in Bangladesh. It is as if my father came into being from fantasy, like an image, in 1923. Yet it is an image full of truth, to think of him studying in Calcutta, or taking a tram-ride, one of the marginal, anonymous people who were neighbours with history, one of the millions, studying, discussing politics, listening to songs, living in hostel rooms, eating in the ‘cabins' of North Calcutta, who were bypassed and yet changed, without their names or the quality of those
moments ever being known, by independence and partition. So India took on a new shape, and another story began, with homelands becoming fantasies, never to be returned to or remembered. What did it mean to him, then, without brother and sister, alone, to be part of so many? He loved that life. When Tagore died, millions flowed through the streets, some taking turns to be pall-bearers, some surging forward to touch his feet or his body and then being left behind while others took their place, my father one of those who had momentary proximity to the dead poet, touching him before he disappeared from view, so that, whenever Ray's documentary on Tagore is shown on television, my mother leans forward towards the end of the film and peers at the screen to catch a glimpse of my father. Thousands, without name or face, but known perhaps to one other person somewhere else, appeared and disappeared around the body of the dead poet held aloft, indistinguishable from each other, weaving in and out of that moment.

Strange to think that a poet should have suddenly brought to the world's brief attention a
small corner of the earth, where a rounded, musical tongue was spoken, where freshwater fish was eaten daily and its bones sorted nimbly with the fingers, where small, earnest men walked in white dhotis with tender, overlapping folds in the heat. An unknown tongue, unknown emotions, strange, impoverished Bengal! From the dense forests and swamps of the Sundarbans, to the magical place, Kalighat, a port and a people grew, a poet and singer in each family, ideals and romance and the love of art nurtured among these frail quick-tempered people, and the wide Hooghly flowing in the midst of all this. Wide rivers, the Hooghly and the Padma, with indistinct horizons on either side, a constant thoroughfare for river-transport and civilization, with lonely passages of water and horizon where ferrymen journeyed from one side to the other.

For many years, my father's family was hardly known to me. Two portraits, of my grandfather and grandmother, hung upon the wall above the doorway to my parents' bedroom in the houses we lived in. The family had once been landowners, and then they scattered and gradually became
poor, settling down in towns on this side of the border, while the great house became a memory in Bangladesh, with a few relatives still living in it. I remember in childhood travelling with my parents to a town in Assam, and being taken in a car to the outskirts, and entering a place without electricity, where people lived in a small house among other houses; we were greeted by a family: a father, his daughter, her husband, and a child, and the old man had the same surname as I. My father addressed him with the Bengali word for ‘paternal uncle', and they spoke in the Sylheti dialect, and fragments of that world in which the remnants of my father's family lived came alive in the light of a hurricane lamp.

My father's ancestral village was on the banks of a tributary of the Surma. To leave that village and approach the outside world one must use the waterway and the canoe, and emerge eventually into another world. Heat, mud, water, the flight of water-insects, roots holding the earth, women washing clothes, their heads covered by saris, ponds made green by water-hyacinth, the flat, wide sails of
the lotus—such images come to me of journeying down that river. It is a Bengal that missed the changes taking place elsewhere, the middle class reforms of Brahmoism, the intellectual movements in Hinduism. More important, there, than the secular nationalist figures, Rammohun Roy and Tagore, initiators of modern Bengali culture, was a native strain of Vaishnavism, the worship of Krishna, Ganesh, Parvati, an ecstatic love of their images, sung out in unwritten songs and poems.

To that strain of worship my father's family belongs. Dispersed though they were over Eastern and Northern India, from Cachhar to Brindaban, rarely in contact with each other, second cousins and third cousins and uncles, some dead, uprooted from tradition, a refugee people, I would hear of singers and painters in every branch of the family, and once, on a visit to a remote part of India when I was a child, I received blessings and a book of poems from my father's aunt; it was a book she had written herself. That family, perhaps because once so rich, was little in touch with education; my father's aunt had never been to school; her Bengali was self-taught.
Their love of poetry was not created by the new secular reverence for culture and literature that came with Tagore, but was an indigenous offshoot of a long line of ecstatic worship and craftsmanship. Not very long ago, in the summer, after my parents had moved to Calcutta, we made a trip to where my father's aunt's son now lived, with his sister and her daughter, in a barely recognizable lane off a small road beyond the highway at Dum Dum. They were overjoyed to see us; on the veranda to the small house, canvases rested, portraits of saints and holy men and women. My cousin was an artist, and all his paintings were devotional. On the veranda there was a table on which there were lumps of clay that looked like turds but became, on closer inspection, little animals, bulls, cows, and images of Krishna. These my cousin took me by my hand to show me proudly. Knowing my love of music, he had taken out harmonium and tablas, and urged me and my mother to sing. Then they themselves sang with little prompting, from a vast repertoire of songs in both Hindi and Bengali, some of which they had composed themselves. An anxious, child-like
joy in their own creations lived in that house. In a room at the back, my cousin was working upon a commissioned sculpture of a living saint; made from clay, to life-like measurements, sitting crosslegged upon newspapers spread out on a table, it was an ecstatic moulding for worship. Creation was worship; that family was excited and full of love for that image; they had made it together, my cousin doing the sculptor's work while his sister and her child helped him to hold it still and achieve its proportions. It was still unpainted, its colour the colour of clay, but the eyes of the saint and the expression of his face and body no longer belonged to earth and mud but to the realm of the imagination. For the first time I could see where my own private joys came from—the love of songs, of music, of pride and delight in creation. That delight is my family's gift.