Calcutta Read online

  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.

  A few of his fellows will doubtless mature into goondas. The goonda, when fully fledged and at the height of his powers, is almost the nastiest customer in Calcutta. A straightforward definition in the dictionary will call him a ruffian, but in Bengal he is a ruffian who is prepared to kill and rob as well as to brawl in back alleys. The police detectives, who study goondas as closely as anyone, are apt to place their origins far away in the time of the East India Company and toss up a quotation from Macaulay to emphasize their point. And, indeed, his Lordship did once write that ‘The servants of the Company obtained, not for their emp
loyers but for themselves, a monopoly of almost the whole internal trade. They forced the natives to buy dear and sell cheap … Every servant of a British factor was armed with all the power of his master, and his master was armed with all the power of the Company. Enormous fortunes were thus rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while thirty million of human beings were reduced to the last extremity of wretchedness. They had been accustomed to live under tyranny, but never tyranny like this.’ Having fed you Macaulay, the detectives will remind you that these wealthy British Moguls employed armed servants, called paiks or lathials, to attend to their defensive and offensive interests. When the Indian Mutiny was over and the Company was disbanded, the Queen Empress ordered the dissolution of these small private commandos and the dismissed paiks and lathials promptly began to use on their own account their highly cultivated skills of bullying, blackmail and robbery.

  These, say the detectives with assurance, were the spiritual ancestors of the goondas; and though that isn’t faultless history – for the dacoit was somewhat in the same line of business even before Job Charnock came to Bengal – it isn’t entirely beside the point. The Goonda Act of 1923 was directed against political hotheads as much as barefaced brigands and the true goonda’s most immediate model was the mobster who appeared in numbers during the Second World War, when Calcutta was a strategic centre of South-east Asia Command and there was a vast and illicit traffic in military equipment, military rations and military luxuries; when some highly respectable members of local society needed good men and true to help them seize this main chance and no questions asked. And shortly after, there were two years of almost continuous communal riots, in which the strong-arm men were able to consolidate a distinctive position in the city and an unhealthy respect.

  The goonda will generally have taken to his trade in the middle of his teens and he will be at the peak of his unpleasant performance between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-five. More likely than not he will live in a bustee or, if not there, in a building of some sort; he is very rarely homeless. He probably lives in Central Calcutta, though he is almost as likely to come from somewhere north of Chowringhee and is scarcely ever based in Alipore or any of the richer southern suburbs. If he has a comparatively regular income it will not often amount to Rs 250 a month, and more frequently it will be less than Rs 100. And while the city’s prisons at any time will accommodate goondas who have come from all India, even from China and from Burma, the vast majority are born and bred in Calcutta; but very few refugees find their way there, and those that do tend to be novices. Very rarely do goondas have much in the way of education, though when the police made a close investigation of those in their custody some years ago they discovered that two were good painters, twelve were decent singers, three could play the tabla (the drum that accompanies the sitar) and one wrote tolerable poetry. There was also an international footballer among them.

  The goonda is not always a splendid physical specimen. He tends to be more efficient with a medium build and he is very often handicapped in some way, minus an eye or a hand, or totally deaf. But always he has an excellent pair of legs. His choice of weapon depends upon his state of health. A dagger or a knife is commonplace, a pistol belongs to the most successful and to those with the greatest reputation in the hierarchy of goondas. Then there is the bomb, which is frequently just a bottle of soda water used as a formidable missile; you shake it vigorously until the gas is almost on the point of bursting the glass, whereupon you hurl it and generally achieve a most spectacular effect. Policemen in Calcutta long ago discovered that a well-trained goonda with only one hand was capable of throwing ten soda-water bottles a minute, which is quite enough to keep a crowd at bay twenty-five yards away. And this is what a comparatively weak goonda uses for his getaways, though the majority will mix their bombing of strong opposition with their knifing of feeble adversaries. This desperate talent is sometimes employed in the course of direct robbery and looting, and it is frequently placed at the disposal of the shiftier gentlemen of Calcutta’s commerce, who deem it prudent to equip themselves with protectors against rivals in trade and amorality, and sometimes against the police; they, at any rate, are in a direct line of descent from those old Nabobs and their henchmen. But for twenty-five years, at least, the goondas have made profitable alliances with the party politicians of Bengal, who have found them extraordinarily effective in resolving any uncertainties that might linger in the mind of a peasant voter as polling day approaches. No one party has had a monopoly of their services on these occasions, or even for sustained campaigning in between. The goondas have found themselves in the role of highly-esteemed party workers on behalf of at least ten different varieties of Communism, within the merely tepid ranks of Indian socialism and, as much as anywhere, among the political descendants of Mr Gandhi, who now manipulate Congress in all its internecine manifestations.

  The goonda’s prey can thus be almost anyone at all, and it is possible that those who suffer most from his terrorism are the very poorest people in Calcutta, who must be bludgeoned or bribed into a political allegiance they will not otherwise follow, or those hundreds of thousands in the city who live in genteel poverty and who offer some source of plunder without the means to defend it. Many of these last are refugee families from East Bengal. Their ancestors will have been zamindars and not so very long ago they themselves will have had great land holdings on the other side of the delta, with mansions of substance much patrolled by servants. But because they are Hindu and not Muslim they will have found, one agonizing day after the 1947 Partition, that the balance of local power was no longer to be endured and they will have assembled what possessions they could move and what money they could promptly convert to cash and carry on their persons, and they will have bumped and lurched across the border in a bullock cart or a rattletrap car or a collapsing lorry, leaving the bulk of their wealth behind them. And so you discover them one day in Calcutta.

  They are dwelling now – Papa, Mamma, three children and perhaps a grandparent as well – in three rooms high above a street, though they also make use of the roof to hang out their washing and to get out of each other’s way from time to time. Papa will have secured a job as an insurance clerk and Mamma, being literate too, will have contemplated looking for work but after a dozen years will still be undecided, for such a thing is not quite seemly for a lady of gentle birth. A mutual friend will take you to them. You will remove your shoes on their threshold after climbing two flights up a dingy and communal staircase (for there are other families in this building, so many that your hosts have quite lost count) which is exposed to the street through high and barred openings on each landing. You will be received in a room decorated with calendars, with an antique radio, with a shelf full of books, with a plant in a pot; for these have been cultivated people. Mamma and Papa will insist that you be seated in the one easy chair, while they sit cross-legged upon the large bed which fills a third of the room and which is where four people sleep every night, Mamma and Papa at one end, their two daughters at the other. They will offer you refreshment from a silver cakestand, savoury biscuits sprinkled with salt and poppy seed, and sweetmeats of almond paste, and small dishes of those tiny silver balls which are too sweet for words and which the children of the West love to have scattered across their birthday cakes. There will be a cup of tea with curdles of milk floating on the top, but before everything there will be a glass of water which it would be discourteous to refuse but which, as the mutual friend is making clear with sidelong gestures and frowns, is at the very most to be acknowledged with a token sip, for almost certainly it has been drawn from an unfiltered tap and will be teeming with every sickening bacteria in Calcutta.

  Your hosts will pretend, with exquisite manners, not to notice your aversion to a cold drink on this parching afternoon, and they will talk with composure, without any emotion at all, of the opulent life they once led. They will discuss the dreadful state of Calcutta today and then, for old habits die hard even in so destruct
ive a place as this, they will invite you to come and look at their landscape. They will take you to their roof, where two saris and a sheet are hanging limply in the fug, and there you can inspect the street below. It will reek with a refuse of rotting green coconut shells and other garbage, with crows hopping on top and pariah dogs poking below. Rickshaws will be swaying past that sacred cow which is sitting with confidence in the middle of the road. A beggar woman will be creeping up the pavement, bent more than double with infirmity or deception. She will be totally ignored by everyone passing her, except a couple of Sikhs almost as ragged as she, who surreptitiously slip a something into the tin which is held towards passers-by in a tentative gesture containing only half a hope of any return. Your hosts will contemplate this without a trace of sadness, without a suggestion that it marks a painful fall in their fortunes. Their bearing implies that it is as completely within the order of things as that sun which is sliding like a scarlet gong below the level of the roofline and beyond the waters of the Hooghly at the end of the disreputable street. They see you to the top of the slatternly staircase, which is the threshold of their home, and bid you to return at any time and be welcome. And when you come back the following year you discover that the miniature car which your mutual friend presented to their son has been carefully preserved, its paintwork still immaculate, in a glass-fronted cabinet alongside six china cups and saucers and the silver cakestand; not a toy from Woolworth’s any more, to be gradually broken by a small boy, but a treasure from England to be marvelled at by all.