Calcutta Page 19

  At the Kwality the tinned music is so perfectly muted when it is there at all that you cannot identify the tunes, the management would not dream of exposing their laundry before the customers, and their own professional aspirations were perhaps accomplished by the beginning of 1970 when they finally achieved wall to wall carpeting throughout their establishment. Before that, the long aisle between the tables was bare, and all day a humble man in khaki would move up and down crabwise on his haunches, swabbing the floor with a damp cloth around each chair leg and between each dining foot, without ever raising his eyes from his task. Nobody seemed to notice his presence; in fact, nobody was obliged to, for the slightest movement in his direction from customers, waiters or anyone else, was enough to make him deftly swivel his body out of the way, to avoid all possibility of contact.

  India sometimes seems to be the intruder here; it becomes the great amorphous power which the British used to feel claustrophobically surrounding them and threatening them. It is still there, waiting to be harnessed and bidden and used for the pleasure and necessity of alien values. There is no getting away from it. At almost every intersection along Park Street there are rickshaws waiting for passengers. There are small boys waiting to clean shoes. There are men of no apparent vocation gossiping around the tobacco stalls, smoking beedies which they have lit From a smouldering length of rope that someone has thoughtfully tied to a lamp-post. There are people coming and going perpetually, bearing burdens of indiscriminate size and composition, heaving and sweating until late at night behind bullock carts that are not rumbling and lurching fast enough, their storm lanterns swinging and jerking at the back. They are all in some way at the disposal of the other people moving in and out of the shops, the restaurants and the clubs, whose colour may be identical, whose dress (particularly in the case of women) may often derive from the same tradition, but whose mannerisms suggest both ownership and alienation.

  In the Kwality at lunchtime some ascending young entrepreneur, who has had his two girl friends round-eyed and giggling at his story of a dashing drive up the Grand Trunk Road to Durgapur, will suddenly shoot his elegant cuffs and bellow ‘Bearah’ across the room; what he really wants is the waiter with the bill, but the jargon of command was settled long ago in this city by men infinitely paler than he, and he can even imitate to perfection their intonation as well as their vocabulary. At night he and his blood brothers will emerge from a similar restaurant or club, together with their women, and they may pause for a moment before collecting their cars or hailing a taxi to purchase a balloon from a man who is almost hidden beneath a bobbing mass of them; or to buy a garland of those small, white, bell-shaped and stickily sweet-smelling flowers whose name is mogra. Then they will stroll, more easily, more indolently, much more slowly than any Westerner would dare to, past every beggar on Park Street without even a glance in their direction. And if a beggar should persist in his entreaties while these rich people are chattering and laughing at the kerb before getting into a car, he will be dismissed without anyone actually looking at him, with a gesture which is at once one of the most delicate and one of the most appalling that a human being ever contrived. It is a movement of the hand and wrist at the end of an arm which is not quite outstretched. Ladies of the British royal family are inclined to render their own stunted version of one element in it, to signify gracious condescension as they pass their subjects by in a car. But here the hand is upturned, the wrist rotates freely and the fingers flow one after the other away from the body. The gesture is delivered with the suspicion of a shrug in the shoulder and it means, at one and the same time, ‘I don’t even recognize your existence’ and ‘Don’t you dare to pollute me with your presence’ and quite simply ‘Fuck off’. In it you detect a dismal truth about the gap which separates the people who frequent Park Street. For it is not India which threatens and encompasses on the outside, but the poor. And it is not the merely Westernized who are surrounded and besieged but the rich, who were in this land when all its people were Hindu, whose original alienation is vanished in antiquity, being simply fortified by the Moguls and buttressed by the British, being grafted into both these strains, the mannerisms being those of the last who happened to lead along this way.

  And because the British were the last rulers, because the ambitions of the nation are rising towards an economy and a form of civilization that has been instrumentalized in the West, the executive rich of Calcutta are to be found casting themselves as carefully as they can in the same mould. The home revolves around the drawing room and if there is a concession to Mother India it is not very often taken farther than the food or the row of dolls or masks or brightly-painted clay animals or other native craft symbols ranged along the mantelpiece or upon the shelf over the pelmet. There will be a radiogram, possibly a tape recorder, and even here there will be a refrigerator, for that is a symbol as well as an important piece of equipment. There will be a bottle or two of whisky, for that lubricates business friendships as splendidly in Calcutta as it does in Cape Cod. The adolescent and mature women of the household will wear the sari or other forms of Indian dress, for nothing the West has yet devised is more graceful or engaging than such local garments; but the men, the boys and the little girls will have imported clothes in their wardrobes and little else. The children will be encouraged to call their parents Daddy and Mummy with, as nearly as they can manage it, both the accents and the sentiments of Surbiton. Daddy will play golf if he can pass muster with the very particular membership committee of exclusive Tollygunge, and both he and Mummy will go to regular parties at which the pattern is invariably one of ball-room dancing with dinner following around midnight, because the Indian habit is to go home after you have dined with your host; which may or may not be one reason why the executives of Calcutta, faithfully following the precedents of the West, are notoriously subject to chronic gastric troubles. The dancing will be strictly ‘ball-room’, with nothing nearly as vulgar as the Twist or its subsequent variations. The music will come off the radiogram and its general tempo is suggested by the list of best-selling long-playing records issued by the Gramophone Company of India Ltd (part of the EMI empire) for 1969; which included, among the top eight discs, Nat King Cole, Danny Kaye, Mantovani, Joe Loss, Enoch Light, The Ventures, The Seekers and ‘All Star Discotheque Dance Album’.

  This is a confused culture, then. It can have an executive arriving in the office at the start of Durga Puja, which is Bengal’s major Hindu festival, and greeting his staff with ‘Happy Puja’ – which precisely identifies the man for the hybrid he is. For although he himself will be nominally Hindu, he will have been curiously claimed by his position, his wealth and his ambitions, for a variety of Christian British rituals. There will be no great family reunions at Christmas or New Year because, more likely than not, sisters and brothers will still be firmly settled in Hindu traditions, but there will be heavy drinking and there will be all-night parties; it is even known for a family like this to consume hot-cross buns for breakfast on Good Friday. An advertisement recently offering refrigerators for sale, did so with the picture of a lady in a sari regarding the latest model, under the inviting heading ‘Wilt thou take this Leonard …’ And just as the relationships between parents and children, generally prized in India as in few Western societies, can be seen crumbling under the pressures of extreme poverty in the bustees, so they can be noticed splintering under the blandishments of wealth and alien custom in the executive suburbs. The children tend to be left with grandparents when there is a foreign business trip to be awarded and increasingly when there are annual holidays to be taken up in Kashmir or down at Gopalpur-on-sea.

  At the apex of this society are the clubs of Calcutta. There are two kinds of commercial traveller regularly making their way into the city from some other part of India, or even farther afield. One is the man in small business who is hoping to improve an uncertainly secure position by some careful barter around the side streets of Dalhousie Square or along the calculating length of Br
abourne Road. He will probably spend his few days in town lodged in some entirely Indian hotel like the Minerva, where foreigners are looked upon as curiosities, where the rooms glare with neon strip-lights and the shutters are always firmly shut, where the bathrooms en suite are walled in undecorated concrete, where food is taken in a slightly jazzy restaurant next door, where the servants sleep on the staircase at night because the hotel is home as well as work to them, and where the lad who carried your bags briskly demands a second rupee on top of the tip you have already given him. The traveller lodging in such a place will probably be entertained one evening by his most benevolent or most anxious contact to the high life of the Blue Fox or some other resort in Park Street. He will proceed no higher than this up the social scale of Calcutta.

  But let some captain or rising subaltern of industry fly into Dum Dum, and one of the first things he will pass after his transit through the arrival lounge is a notice board with gilt lettering upon a gravy-coloured varnish. This is a roll of the eighteen clubs in Calcutta available to anyone who might be welcome and at ease in White’s or Boodle’s or the Athenaeum or some other equivalent in St James’s, London. Here is the Automobile Association of Eastern India Club, the Ordnance Club, the Calcutta South Club and others of a second rank. Above them rise the Royal Calcutta Turf Club, the Bengal Club, the Tollygunge Club and the Calcutta Club itself. The man who has an entrée here would never dream of staying at a purely Indian hotel, but will instead book himself into the Great Eastern Hotel or the very Grand Hotel, whose clientele is cosmopolitan, whose lobbies have their own shops, whose bedrooms are as ample and highly equipped as almost anything that Europe and the Americas have to offer, and whose commissionaires, rigged in turbans and cummerbunds like princes on one of the old durbar days, are employed to spend a proportion of their time shooing the beggars away from the immediate vicinity of the entrance; and, when they are not doing that, to open and shut the door before any guest can even contemplate the risk of fatiguing himself, while they offer him a smart salute and a great clumping together of heavily-booted heels in the process.

  At the Tollygunge, which is said to be the most select of these establishments nowadays, they have acres of parkland, quite apart from other possessions up to and including stables, a golf course and a swimming pool, and here people can sit and toy with their drinks upon easy cane chairs beneath trees, while they perhaps imagine themselves on an uncommonly stifling day at home in or on a visit to the suburban woodlands of England; and half of them are probably quite unaware that in the lee of the wall that encircles this oasis, lies yet another of Calcutta’s bustees. At the Royal Calcutta, apart from the usual club amenities, there is of course the racing, which can be observed from the grand enclosure for Rs 15 (please note that no cheques or IOUs can be accepted at the ticket boxes). At the Bengal Club, which was once the supreme unofficial headquarters of the Raj and which would never permit an Indian to pollute its membership, they sadly have had to auction their impressive Chowringhee frontage and retreat into reduced circumstances at the back. At the Calcutta Club they were always more civil to the natives of the country, and the main staircase is hung with the photographs of club presidents whose faces have from the start very carefully been alternately white and brown; and in this amiable atmosphere, two thousand gentlemen who have each subscribed Rs 1,500 to belong, can further enjoy the sensation that goes with the knowledge of four thousand other gentlemen anxiously waiting to get in.

  There is a common form to all the clubs, whatever their distinctive caste marks might be. These are places where you can sit out on a lawn as trim and almost as close shaven as a bowling green while the rest of Calcutta, at the very worst, merely roars at you from somewhere beyond the high and mighty wall. You can probably take your good lady along for a drink before dinner and if the servants, who are uniformed in the same style ordained for those commissionaires at the Grand and the Great Eastern, do not attend to your needs smartly enough, you can punch the highly-polished brass bell provided on each open-air table to bring two or three of them scurrying at once. But in spite of the heterosexual lawns and lounges and dining rooms, the focal point of all this clubmanship remains the purely masculine smoking room and bar.

  Here you may encounter the Maharajadhiraja of Burdwan, spruced up in his brocade smoking jacket, or the vigorous Commissioner of Police, Mr Ranjit Gupta, who when not engaged in his constabulary duties can be discovered playing polo or reviewing books for The Statesman or delivering witty lectures on the Battle of the Jhelum, in which Alexander the Great is supposed to have crushed the Indian Prince Porus in 326 BC. Here are doctors who, like the majority of men in their profession, have at the earliest opportunity rushed out of the State medical service, where the emoluments are so low that a teaching professor will collect no more than Rs 2,500 a month; they are said to make quite Rs 20,000 a month in Calcutta out of private practices which exact Rs 128 (or about £7) for a house visit. Here are barristers who, in this litiginous place, are reputed to amass Rs 50,000 a month, which puts them more or less on the same financial footing that Sir Elijah Impey and Thomas Fairer enjoyed when they were here. Here are men who help to keep the immaculately white premises of Hamilton’s, the jewellers, in very fine fettle in Old Court House Street, and whose weekly shopping generally includes its ration of St Emilion at the equivalent of £10 a bottle and Dry Monopol at £14. There are gentlemen around these mahogany tables who still seal their correspondence with red wax and who complain about their laundry bills, which must indeed be taxing when a chap who wishes to clothe himself in white drills and ducks all the time – as many in Calcutta do – reckons that he needs fourteen pairs of trousers and shirts to keep himself going, with another ten of each in reserve, just to be on the safe and presentable side. Then they poke each other in the ribs, and take a rise out of old Shanti there, who is keeping himself very much to himself because he either won or lost Rs 600 at gin rummy here last night.

  There is another manner of clubman in Calcutta and he is the most judiciously rich fellow in the whole city. He has positively insisted on entertaining you in his house, which lies in one of the thoroughfares beyond Park Street. It has not been an excessively opulent home, judging by appearances, but it has been distinctly well-appointed, with a skinned tiger lounging over the back of the sofa, and a terrace beyond the dining room on which the family are wont to sit with their guests in the evening, while the fans whirl and click overhead and the crickets jingle in dozens among the bushes beneath, and the occasional cries of people in poverty are heard from the alleys beyond the trees. There have been subsequent visits, for it has been difficult to refuse such great warmth and hospitality pressing you almost daily to return. There has even been an excursion with your host’s wife (tactfully chaperoned by your host’s daughter) who has very badly wanted to show you the latest exhibition of the arts centre that she patronizes; and joy has completely though a little nervously been unconfined when on the threshold of the club premises Lady Mookerjee, the grand patroness of Calcutta’s arts and crafts, has descended from her chauffeur-driven car and graciously exchanged pleasantries.

  Your host, in these few days, has meanwhile been dragging the conversation over his whisky away from arts and crafts and people and his business and yours, and towards the verge of politics. On discovering that you are a moderately radical soul yourself he has confessed that, by Jove, he is of much the same mind. He has then told a quite remarkable story, in the circumstances of these surroundings. He has mentioned once before that he owns an hereditary piece of land and bungalow near a village several miles south of the city, which he and his family use for weekends and holidays. The story is that one weekend he went down and found that someone had daubed his gateposts with the hammer and sickle. Your host summoned the village headman and asked him, with great sternness, who had done this thing. On tracking the fellows down he put on a great display of anger until he had them trembling before him. And then (he begins to chuckle at this point) he po
inted out to them that he was very angry indeed; but not because his gateposts had been daubed. His anger proceeded from the dishonour thus done to the hammer and sickle. He made them an offer on the spot and it was that if ever again they felt like proclaiming their politics on his premises, they should bring a proper flag, that he would then provide the rope and the flagpost to fly it from.

  Your host has been watching you very carefully while he has been telling this tale and when you have smiled rather feebly he has let it be known that he has some contact with the Communist world in Calcutta. And indeed he has. Before you know where you are, he has taken you to meet the ancient Muzaffar Ahmad, one of the founding fathers of Indian Communism, by whom he has been received (somewhat distantly) as a kind of disciple. A few nights later he has taken you to a great rally on the Maidan, conducted by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), where all the party bosses have been speaking, led by the former Deputy Prime Minister of West Bengal and the most powerful Communist in India, Jyoti Basu. The highly disciplined young party militiamen on the makeshift gate have refused you both entrance, whereupon your host has written a note to Mr Basu and within minutes the pair of you have been escorted to a couple of the best seats beneath the platform. Your host has very kindly translated the speeches, when he has not been applauding them, for they have almost all been in Bengali. When the rally has finished, he has suggested a nightcap in his club, and just before he has driven you both into the car park he has asked that you will … er … of course … er … not mention where we have been in front of his other friends and colleagues upstairs. In that smokeroom, a little later, your host has been sitting in a circle of cronies, jesting about the richness of life in Calcutta, poking hearty fun at the card losers, complaining with the best of them about the local breakdown in law and order since these damned Communists were first allowed to get away with it. And no casual observer could possibly tell that he was not as distant from Jyoti Basu as the Maharajadhiraja of Burdwan himself.