Calcutta (17 page)

There are 441 families in the bustee and for most of them income can be almost anything up to Rs 150 a month. In many, the wife is out earning money in the morning and evening and it is the man who is cooking, cleaning and caring for the
children
. A newly-married couple may go to the cinema two or three times in the first few months, but after that recreation together generally stops. When the wife is at home the man takes himself to a tea shop or plays cards near a street lamp with his friends. The women do not often have friends, only acquaintances. The wives living in the same hut often cooperate in family matters, but it is usually for what each can get out of the other later on; they quarrel and fight a great deal. So do the husbands and wives. The women, with the self-esteem of earning power,
sometimes
call their husbands ‘Dokno’ or she-man and say ‘I am not afraid of him; I do not depend on him.’ And sometimes men say ‘I have not allowed my wife to work in spite of the hardship I have to endure, because then she will no longer obey me.’

Where the man is the only bread-winner, the wife is
subservient
and gets no help at all in domestic affairs. The children of both sexes are taught to cook and do other chores from an early age; the local primary schoolteacher is frequently asked by a parent to let a small boy go home early so that he can prepare rice for the family. From the age of eight the boys begin to stay away from home. By the time they are twelve they have usually started a job and they spend most of the money on themselves; the girls usually get jobs as servants a little later. The parents complain that their children are not respectful once they have ceased to be infants, but what they really mean is that they are disobedient. Children frequently abuse their parents in sexual terms; they are not very old when they start to beat their parents, and this frequently continues for the rest of their lives together. Abuse and beating is common among brothers and sisters as well, and the relationships between them soon become as impersonal as those between people without blood ties. A young man is
known to borrow money from his elder brother at five per cent interest.

A striking thing about the people of the bustee, in a land where kinship is highly esteemed, is how little contact they have with relations outside the immediate family. It is usually only the husbands who maintain any contact at all with adult brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and cousins. Some people have difficulty in recalling the name of their grandparents. And when there is a marriage in the bustee, only the very closest relatives attend. Yet somehow, marriages seem to stand the strain of this life surprisingly well. The rate of husbands deserting their wives is under five per cent, though there are fifty unmarried couples who, on one side or the other, abandoned earlier unions. There is a certain unspecified amount of illicit sex by both men and women who are married.

There are obvious reasons why relatives should lose contact with each other. One is the expense of travel and another is the difficulty as well as the expense of accommodating someone who might have come to Calcutta from a home village in Bihar to see a son or a niece. But the moral obligations of family hospitality also break down because one side has become wealthier than the other. A man living in the bustee will not visit his aunt and her husband who reside in the adjacent kothabari because he feels they are above his station, and the residents of the kothabari will certainly never descend to the bustee. A small trader who lived in the bustee for three years eventually moved out to Jadavpore, because he thought it would improve his wider family
relationships
. Moreover, a middle-class Indian can be shocked (you can smell it coming off the pages of the anthropologist’s report) by some of the relationships that do occur in the bustee. ‘I had,’ he writes, ‘opportunity to observe the behavioural pattern between “vasur” (husband’s elder brother) and younger brother’s wife, between daughter-in-law and mother-in-law, son-in-law and mother and father-in-law, between maternal nephew and uncle, etc. In all cases the element of respect seems to be lacking and the social distance has been shortened considerably. Smoking biri or cutting joke with elderly persons has become common. Normally a brother’s wife when talking with “vasur” must veil herself and
use a gentle tone and should show no petulance. The “vasur” on the other hand, should be reserved in his behaviour.. Though this is the ideal norm, none of these conventions are observed in the bustee. I have at least one case to show that sexual relations exist between “vasur” and his younger brother’s wife.’ And sadly, he notes two cases of incest five years previously, the families having since left the bustee.

Fifty yards away is the towering kothabari, but it is a world apart from the bustee, inhabited by the babus of the bhadralok class who are separated from these slum dwellers by education, wealth and general demeanour. Not by caste; twenty-eight of the bustee families were born at the Brahmin level of Hinduism, which is as high as a mortal can be in this order of things.
Practically
every other caste is represented there in descending steps of precedence. And none of them deal with the lowest babu except in the relationship of master and servant, tradesman and customer. Yet the bustee dwellers have no strong feeling of community among themselves, in spite of their shared squalor and poverty. A man who has lived there as long as anyone knows everybody inhabiting the same hut and almost everybody living along the same lane; but what he knows is simply their name, which hut they live in and what job they do. A common saying there is ‘People will be good to you as long as you please them’, and mutual help doesn’t often get beyond one family siding with another for a specific purpose. Even when there is a marriage or a death here, where people are living tightly on top of each other, the majority are merely sympathetic watchers. A few years ago the Calcutta Rotary Club decided to try and improve conditions in the bustee, with the help of the inhabitants. The plan
collapsed
because the inhabitants wouldn’t stir themselves, they wouldn’t even find a few paise each month to keep the paths and drains clean. When they had grievances or wanted anything done, they preferred to argue it out with their thika tenants rather than turn to any well-meaning group of outsiders.

The poverty-stricken of Calcutta are not always as apathetic as that suggests. You can find colonies of refugees who have hauled themselves a little way out of the gutter, which is where most of them begin life in the city. They will have arrived, as
their kinsmen are still arriving from East Pakistan, with nothing but their rags, a bundle of cooking things and other small
possessions
. They will have found a length of pavement which has not yet been tenanted, they will immediately have gone a-scavenging round the backsides of warehouses and shops, for packing cases, decrepit dustbins, tattered tarpaulin and pieces of rope; and, soon, yet another shanty of refuse will be obstructing the pedestrians in the shadow of Howrah Bridge or the evening strollers along the willowy fringes of the Dhakuria. Lake. But then the men of the colony will discover a piece of ground with greater possibilities and the entire shanty collection will be moved onto it with speed, lest other incomers stake their claim first. They will stick together, these people, bound by ties of distant blood and communal flight and equal dispossession, and some of them will get jobs in this overpoweringly awful but still bountiful city, and money will be saved and used with the finest calculation.

One day, the visitor will encounter Mr Chatterjee, lately of Dacca, now of Gariahat, who will invite him to come and inspect the marvel that has been wrought in twenty laborious years. The marvel will be four hundred families inhabiting pucca dwellings, brick or cemented sheds but very pucca nonetheless, built by the refugees themselves. There will be tolerable space between these dwellings, maybe two arm spans or a little more. There will be fans and electric lights inside each home. There will be three long sheds and these, Mr Chatterjee will proudly explain, are schoolrooms which they have constructed themselves and which they have staffed out of their own resources. And then he will ask you kindly to notice the lamp posts dotted here and there throughout the colony. They represent the largest triumph of all; for in the face of all this self-help over two decades, the Corporation’s heart has lately been melted and only last week the visitor would have been able to watch municipal employees
erecting
the last concrete post and installing the final sodium light fitting.

There is a much harsher self-help than that, and it is
represented
at its nimblest by the kangali. The kangalis have an equivalent in almost every great city of the world, and the
scugnizzi of Naples are probably the closest to them in the West. For the kangali, too, is the child of the streets. If he ever knew his parentage, he probably left it behind in a bustee. He is more likely to have been born on a pavement and to have been
abandoned
there; in which case he will have been lucky, some say, not to have been picked up by the lackey of some frightful creature who might have bound up his soft limbs, or even worse, so that he would grow misshapen and maimed, the more effectively and profitably to function thereafter as the most pitiable of beggars. A kangali will say, with more unblinking nonchalance than
anyone
ought to have between the ages of six and twelve, that he is an orphan, or that his father is a drunk, or a gaolbird who has been wrongfully imprisoned, or even – in a flight of not
improbable
fancy – a murderer. But now he, the kangali, has freed himself from the dragging burden of this domestic presence, or the lack of it. He has become one of a small band of little brothers and they have a total freedom of the streets.

The kangali is not a begger. He offers service for money. You meet him when you have parked your car on your way to the cinemas of Chowringhee, or when you are bent on one of the brassy night clubs of Park Street. He is going through the motions of windscreen-cleaning before you have even turned off the engine and, sahib, he will guard your property while you are gone in exchange for a rupee. He guards it well, in company with his brothers. And if you think that, in the prevailing
economy
of Calcutta, his rates are rather on the high side, you will do well to remember that if you turn him down, the evening will be much more expensive in the long run, when you have
returned
to a vehicle which has lost three door-handles, two
windscreen
wipers and one petrol cap at least. So keen is the kangali to be of assistance to allcomers that when a friend drops you from his car in Strand Road, so that you can dawdle over a Hooghly sunset, a kangali will be asking you, burra sahib, whether you now require a taxi before your foot has even touched the pavement.

Thus he acquires his small competence in life. He does not acquire enough capital to set himself up as a shoeshine boy very often, and even where he did and began to collect his
paraphernalia 
of polishes and brushes and shoe-box, he would face the vicious jungle law of Calcutta commerce and be trounced from his stand by many larger shoeshine boys than he, with wives and children to support out of their small foothold among the smart set. Something more than a beggar, then, something less than a tradesman, the kangali spends his rupees on the cinema. Or he purchases cigarettes; not those raw tobacco leaves tied with
cotton
, an inch and a half of perfumery which will only burn as long as you suck, which are sold in Kensington Market in London as ‘real Indian cigars’ but which in Calcutta are called beedies and known as the poor man’s gasper; not beedies, but genuine babu cigarettes, like Gold Flake and Capstan and other products of the Imperial Tobacco Company.

He does not spend his money on quarters or food. He sleeps with his fellows on the pavement or in a park. He eats what the restaurants or others have thrown away. At night you can see these small boys rummaging among the great stinking middens that are dumped on Bentinck Street or at the start of Lower Chitpore Road. They are collecting bones with fragments of meat still sticking to them, scraps of green vegetable that have been discarded as refuse, spoonsful of rice that have been scraped from the half-finished plates of wealthy diners. And twice a day they repair to their particular piece of pavement, or their corner in the park, to cook up this pottage and consume it with relish; for they are growing boys, and they are always hungry.

They are also firm in their adherence to a gang. They stick together in half dozens under a leader who is slightly older and tougher than the rest, who maintains a form of discipline among them, who determines what their next communal strategy shall be. This is very rarely a form of crime; these are not chhentai, which is the Bengali label attached to a pickpocket or a thief who snatches and runs. They will affront the law half a dozen times a day and it is useless to tell them that something is illegal or frowned upon even by this all-embracing society, for they will just giggle in your face. It is pointless to throw religious precepts at them, for they are irreligious and a Hindu temple is merely another place where they can scrounge food or money. But
before 
the kangali bands turn to theft, they will assiduously scavenge for rags, for paper, for empty bottles, for anything at all that can be sold in a city where absolutely everything has a place and a price on the market. They will take care of each other, going without food to provide more for one who is sick. They will sometimes play like children, though their games will probably be with incomplete packs of cards discovered in some dustbin and their stakes will be cigarette butts and occasionally cash. The one thing they will not do, as long as they remain kangalis, is surrender their urchin freedom to any more beholden way of life. Only as a kangali reaches his teens does he begin to find substitute allegiances and excitements for those provided by his gang. He is finally seduced by sex, like many a boyo before him, and presently discovers that the need to mind the burra sahib’s car, to nail the flimsiest sort of income, is even more imperative than it was when he was simply an orphan of the streets.