A Tale of Two Cities

In Calcutta, the Indian Museum is my favourite colonial-era building. As a child, I would be fascinated by it, but not only because of the Egyptian sarcophagus or the Gandhara Buddhas in its collection. This grand European building – neoclassical layout, lofted arches, Ionic pillars, sparkling white walls and tall wooden doors and windows the colour of dark chocolate – not only dominated the landscape of the Chowringhee area, it also had a characteristic way of slipping and growing into view every time one approached it. This is what caught my fancy.

If you moved towards the Chowringhee – Park Street crossing from Dalhousie Square, the museum would glide into view from between the trees; it would then grow bigger and bigger (the view, better and better) as you came closer and closer. And because the road curved and curled in a certain fashion, this majestic specimen of colonial architecture would also twist and turn to keep up with you. This was my first brush with magic realism, long before Jorge Luis Borges happened to me. And each time I approached it thus, I felt I knew exactly why we Bengalis call the museum jadughar – literally, the House of Wonder.

Last month when I was in Calcutta, I happened to travel down that much travelled path toward the Indian Museum after many years. As my cab approached Chowringhee I looked out, hoping to see the building do what it had so many times during my years in that city.

I saw nothing. Actually, I saw a gigantic slab of concrete suspended in mid-air. A flyover had grown in between my museum and me.

This is the new Calcutta, one that has dropped magic realism for hard-nosed naturalism. The Communist city is busy telling the world it is reforming; progress has arrived here, cast in concrete and reinforced steel.

As the city reforms, its landscape – and its mindscape – are also being re-formed. For flyovers do more than just add that extra layer to a city’s roads. They alter a city quite fundamentally – the way it looks, the way it feels – and most crucially – the way those living and moving through, relate to it. For instance, generations of Calcuttans will now never experience the Indian Museum doing the shimmy when they come down towards Chowringhee. That visual, and decidedly spatial, experience is lost forever. It’s a relationship (between the city and its user) that could have been, but now will never be. Flyovers are building distances between the city and its people.


The most persuasive exemplar of Calcutta’s progress, however, is a mammoth flyover linking the city’s airport bypass road to one of the bridges across the Ganges. This elevated road, that straddles much of South Calcutta, also happens to pass by the first floor window of Seagull Books, a publishing house run by my friend Sue. Earlier, Sue would look out to a giant neem tree, whose shady branches – apart from strong, black, bitter coffee – helped calm her fraying nerves at the time of desperate deadlines. Nowadays, she relies only on coffee.

Her tree has been felled to make way for the flyover; looking out entails a strange visual communion with stranger commuters in varying stages of animated suspension. Flyovers are engendering new (and perhaps more dramatic) ways of seeing in the city.


I don’t hate flyovers. This lofty concept in urban planning has its uses, especially if you need a quick-fix solution to traffic congestion. But then, not all cities lend themselves to flyovers with effortless ease. Delhi thrives on flyovers, adding a new one every six months or so. Strangely enough, I never seem to mind those flyovers. In fact, I quite like the perspective I get of Humayun’s Tomb while travelling up (and down) the Mathura Road – Nizamuddin one to and from my workplace.

I have often wondered about this peculiar paradox of mine. Why do I loathe flyovers in one city and love them in another? I am now beginning to think it’s not about flyovers as much as it is about Calcutta and I.

Calcutta is my city of memory; the city of my memories – of a group of people and a clutch of places. Like me, most of these people have moved out of the city in search of pastures new. What have been left behind are hazy memories of random conversations in sunlit rooms and porticos; the scent of smoke-filled laughter among cafes and eateries. The places remain, etched in the map of my mind.

Every time I return, the city allows me the comfort of a familiarity that almost never breeds contempt. Calcutta, the physical city, for me is the joy of familiar expectation: of seeing the known, of knowing what one will see and how.

Flyovers do not have a place in that cognitive map of mine. They may be helping Calcuttans drive that bit faster but for me they hinder the unfurling of the remembrance of times past. They disrupt the way I have grown to see and know my city unfold before me. The new flyovers sprouting in Calcutta violate my known ways of seeing the city and therefore my relationship with it. Perhaps I am being selfish, but then I cannot help my desire to cling on to my city of memory; the city of my imagination.

In Delhi I began life as an outsider, mostly in the company of other outsiders. This accorded me the luxury of detached observation. So the city which I thought an overgrown village at first, I now acknowledge mine. And I have grown to love it: its brashness, the rude and abusive residents, the cafes, bars and bookstores, and above all its ability to coexist in history and in the present with an inimitable ease.

But Delhi does not come with this (sometimes oppressive) baggage of nostalgia that I feel for Calcutta. Delhi for me is a city of new beginnings, a city that I am only now beginning to see. The flyovers of this city are little more than the warts and pimples on an acquaintance, an acquaintance who has all the makings of becoming a good friend.

Images: (c) Bibek Bhattacharya - All Rights Reserved

In Memoriam: Naughty Boy

Those who knew my ground floor apartment (D 735) in New Delhi were well acquainted with Naughty Boy.

Naughty Boy was, well, neither naughty nor a boy. He was the world's coolest tom cat who had allowed my landlord and landlady to take care of him. And he had condescended to let me live in the ground floor apartment. He would of course make sure you knew who was master: during the day, he was often found taking a nap on the bed in the spare bedroom of my flat.

Naughty Boy once had a fling with the road-side tabby. Two incredible kittens came off his exertions. Named Tom and Jerry by my landlord's grand-daughter, they found two extremely caring homes in the ground and first floors of D 735. And after my friend Rudraneil moved in two storeys above, the second floor also became an extension of their home.

This summer in Delhi I learnt that Naughty Boy had left the house one day and not come back. That is how cats behave when they are about to die, Rudraneil explained to me. One of course could expect nothing less from the cat who embodied a wonderful nobility of spirit.

So here's to Naughty Boy: something he inspired me to write a while ago. He made my two years at D 735 very special.

Naughty Boy. RIP.
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A RANDOM CAT MORNING

There are three friendly cats in and around my house.

One is called Naughty Boy.

This is my landlord's tom cat and the most adorable cat in the universe. Naughty boy is big, red, usually scared-shit and not naughty at all. He sleeps at my place sometimes, never behaves badly and from time to time decides he is a decorative piece. At those moments he can be found sitting very still at strange places. Like on top of the bookshelves and such.

Naughty Boy was horny once. The consequence was the other two friendly cats of the neighbourhood.

One of them is a tom, the other a tabby. The tom looks like the mother (black and white) and is everything Naughty Boy isn't. The tabby looks and behaves like naughty boy. She is also incredibly shy. They have been evocatively named Tom and Jerry by my landlord's granddaughter. I do not like these names so I usually call them things like Jagabondhu, Byomkesh, Harinarayan, etc. For those who don't have the context - these are the more extended and extensive names of Hindu divinities. This is in part my Hindu upbringing that teaches me to see the divinity in all things (as also in the beef steak).

Anyway, I digress.

This morning I was woken up by a howling cat. My landlord's granddaughter's Tom aka - depending on my mood - Jagabondhu, Byomkesh or Harinarayan was howling his guts out. Because the little thing was on my neighbour's fourth floor terrace. Head sticking out, it was crying madly. So I roused my landlady Mrs Mitra, who in turn roused roused Mr Mitra - the neighbour, not the husband - and then Mrs Mitra and I set off on our cat expedition.

The terrace door was opened and we found the object of our undying affection on the terrace of the room on the terrace. Hearing us, Byomkesh came and checked us out, still howling away. So I fixed a makeshift ladder and began climbing up on to the terrace of the terrace. And then the cat did what one can expect of all cats. It came up to me. Then went away. And then jumped from the top of the room on to the terrace and ran for its life down the steps. Mrs Mitra and I (standing midway up the frigging ladder) looked on.

A little later I heard from the first floor of my house the voice of admonishment of Mrs Mitra. "Keno gechili? Keno? Kotobar baron korechi na jetey." (Why, why do you not listen to me and keep going outside?). A wonderful communion. Wonderful. Puts the Wordsworthian daffodils to shame, if you ask me.

Then, there was more.

A little later - about half and hour later - I heard two babies crying. I came out to look. It was Naughty Boy and his father. The mews had taken on a cataclysmic pitch as they prepared to launch into combat.

A historiographical digression that may sound straight out of Robert Graves's Greek Myths: Naughty Boy was adopted into the Mitra family as a child because his father had tried to kill him. Naughty Boy has since adopted the best that the civilizing ethic of Bengal has to offer. For instance, when he met his lone male son and heir (Tom for some, Byomkesh, Harinarayan or Jagabondhu among others - depending on my mood - for me) he did what you would least expect a Tom cat (and what you would most expect a Bengali, according to some learned authorities on this subject) to do.

He stuck his snout out.
Smelt him.
And then sprang back twenty paces, either ashamed or frightened (both?) at the outcome of his passionate time out with the neighbourhood tabby.

Rudraneil (some of you know him: my e-mail editor's spellcheck insists he be called Quadrangles. I suppose he should have an opinion on this) and I concurred a couple of days back - over cream and bacon pasta and strange Mediterranean fantasies - that Naughty Boy could not fight. If he were called to fight, he wouldn't and it would be Harinarayan who would do the fighting. This came up as we had spotted a fat grey cat (It must have been Eliot's Mungojerrie) and Naught Boy's dad - terrible, ugly, red and white son of a bitch (I'm being metaphorical here) hovering around our house.

But Naughty Boy proved us wrong.

So where were we? yes, mewing and such like. By the time I figured out what was happening, the two had got into the act. On my cornice, father and son battled it out. Actually, bit and scratched it out. And then they were in a bloody embrace, dad's teeth in son's front paw and son's teeth in dad's left ear. Naughty Boy had entered - with this one act - into the Bagha Jatin Memorial (aka We-Bengalis-despite-being-labeled-non-martial-by-the-Brits-can-also-fight) Hall of Fame.

I am unfortunately a Bong - body, heart and soul. I do not like bloody insurrections. I suspect I would have been a clerk in Calcutta's Writers' Building if I were born under Pax Britannica. So I decided to put an end to this. And like a good Bengali, I wielded the broom screaming "hoosh, hoosh" in my incantatory best.

Hoosh, hoosh be damned.

The bloody balls of fur rolled on. Naughty Boy and Naughtier Boy in bloody embrace still. Then the ball(s) became still. The embrace (and respective sets of teeth) in place. I have seen a trailer of Anaconda on Star Movies (or was it HBO?) and these two looked incredibly like an anaconda swallowing a..a...whatever. Extremely disconcerting to see Naughty Boy - teeth still sunk in dad's left ear - looking me in the eye while lying dead still on the ground.

I then decided to continue the Bong routine. I ran into the kitchen. Filled a jug with water. And ran back and chucked it at them.

Water be damned too.
The rolling continued.

Then, disengagement. But only for a wee while.

They went up the metallic spiral staircase, braving the cold water that lunged at them.

Re-engagement. And how. It was a complete dulce et decorum est pro patria mori moment.

They jumped at each other (just as in the 70s Bollywood films the hero and the villain lunge at each other, including that completely ludicrous jump-lunge just two seconds before engagement).

I go, I go.
Look how I go.
Faster than an arrow,
From a Tartar's bow.

Into my landlord's house they went. Through the back door. And then into my landlord's loo. (For some inexplicable reason, the metallic spiral staircase led to the first floor loo. This mystery I have not been able to unravel.)

Synchronised fighting had now given way to synchronised playing decorative piece. The sets of teeth intact, and inside each other's furs.

As I manoeuvered the broom and jug, I was, even then, struck by my act. A tad matronly, I dare admit. Seeing none of my anythings had any impact on the happenings I called my landlord. He is a sweet and somewhat senile man nudging the eighties.

He came.
He saw.
With Caesarean imperiousness, he entered the fray.
And conquered.

A rap with a clothes beater on the back of daddy cat sufficed. Daddy cat went off, roaring, into the unknown.

It was now time for Communion II.

There was an air of haughtiness, coupled with hurt, disbelief and disgust as my landlord - the sweet, somewhat senile man nudging the eighties said: "Amaar baritey dhukey, amaar beral-key kamracchey!!" (Entering MY house and biting MY cat!!)

We were quite clearly a surreal tableau.

The sweet, somewhat senile man nudging the eighties with a hearing aid in one ear, a beret on his head and a clothes beater in one hand standing on the first floor landing of the metallic spiral staircase. Naughty boy, bloodied, shaken, stirred, his marbles (olives, to keep the metaphor going) intact, his voice quavering at a point in-between a violent miaow and purr. Me, below, green jug in right hand and broom in left. Ready to take on the universe and its second cousin.

Then, Communion III

" Aajkey kom jol esheche. Shamley" (We have got less water than usual today. Be careful)

It was absolutely stupendous...

... to be back among friends.

In Delhi. Summer of 2009.

Images: (c) Sandeep Banerjee, Arijit Sen, Bibek Bhattacharya - All Rights Reserved

THE LEFT PARADOX

Sandeep Banerjee

For generations of Calcuttans, the Blue Fox at 55, Park Street was the last word in continental fine dining. Fashioned out of blue neon lights, the restaurant’s logo — a giant fox, its snout nearly touching the tail — has, for decades, marked time over one of Calcutta’s most fashionable streets. Over the years, the Blue Fox has seen much change; it too has changed much. It had shut down for a while owing to labour union-management troubles. It revived and there were plans to turn it into a chaat shop. In March this year, came the final transformation — on the thirtieth year of uninterrupted Communist rule in West Bengal, Blue Fox became Calcutta’s first McDonald’s outlet.

The arrival of Maharaja Mac in the city is more than just another gastronomic option before the average Calcuttan — it’s perhaps the most telling signal that Bengal’s Communists have made peace with American capitalism.

Key to this truce is the Bengal Left’s reassessment in recent years of the role of private capital in the state’s economic development. The state government wants Bengal to industrialise rapidly, arguing that this is the only way to generate jobs and lift the population out of poverty. The West Bengal government is keen to turn the state into a manufacturing hub as that sector generates both skilled and unskilled jobs. The latter is crucial for absorbing the surplus labour the agriculture sector jettisons every year. Setting up factories, however, needs money and that’s not something the state government has in abundant supply. This leaves it with little option but to woo private investors, both domestic and foreign.

So, the Bengal chief minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, once the Left’s Cultural Commissar, has now metamorphosed into the poster boy of economic reforms. Having candidly acknowledged at various fora that his party — the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) — has erred on the issue of private capital, he is now asking industrialists to set up shop in Bengal to help him rectify those mistakes from the past.

These efforts have met with more than moderate success with a number of companies jumping on to the Bengal bandwagon. Tata Motors is in the process of setting up its small car factory; Jindal Steel has proposed a Rs100 billion investment to build a steel plant while both Videocon and Indonesia-based Salim Group are keen to set up Special Economic Zones in the state. Even Reliance has plans: taking a leaf out of the Walmart-China relationship, it wants to turn Bengal into the sourcing hub for its agri-retail business.

But the Bengal Left’s active soliciting of private capital puts it at ideological loggerheads with the Left of the Centre. In New Delhi, where their help is crucial for the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) to remain in power, the Left is usually making sure the UPA refrains from pursuing ‘neo-liberal’ and ‘anti-people’ economic reforms. While the Buddha line of wooing industrialists may well presuppose the primacy of private investment in the process of industrialisation, the CPI-M’s central leadership still remains keen to convince the UPA that the path to true economic salvation is paved with public investments.

The contradiction between the Bengal Left and its counterpart at the centre stretches well beyond just this. The central leadership has been frowning on the state government’s eagerness to acquire land for the companies that were keen to invest in the state. For them, this meant a decisive shift away from the ideology that inspired the CPI-M’s land reforms programme in the state in the late seventies. Those reforms, which consolidated the CPI-M’s grip on rural Bengal, were two-fold: it provided security to sharecropping tenants through a process of registration popularly known as Operation Barga while ceiling-surplus and other vested lands were acquired and distributed among the landless labourers and farmers. The state government, however, contends it’s crucial for them to step in and acquire land as neighbouring states like Orissa were dangling the land acquisition carrot to lure away potential investors.

Of course, the land question across India has now reached a stalemate since the tragic events at Nandigram, much to the relief of key members of the party’s politburo.

Bengal is also trying to woo Information Technology (IT) majors such as Infosys and Wipro to set up Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) centres in Calcutta. At the same time, the CPI-M’s trade union wing has been harping on — much to the horror of the chief minister and the IT industry — the fundamental right of these BPO workers to form unions and strike work.

In New Delhi, it’s this stark contrast between the Bengal line and the one taken by the CPI-M at the centre that is cited by the UPA to silence its Left critics. In fact, speaking to McKinsey a couple of years ago, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh took an uncharacteristic dig at his Left allies. On being asked about the progress of economic reforms in India, the man behind India’s economic reforms quipped, “Our role is to convince their national leadership that what is good for West Bengal can also be good for the rest of the country. I haven’t given up hope.”

Dr Singh’s persuasive skills perhaps haven’t quite worked their intended magic on India’s Left Front. Even today, this schizophrenia remains the hallmark of the relationship between the CPI-M’s central leadership and the West Bengal government the party heads.

Recently, I asked one of my acquaintances at the CPI-M headquarters in New Delhi about this abiding paradox of his party. I got a rather illuminating reply: There was no contradiction — The West Bengal chief minister was doing his job of running his government; the politburo doing its job of pushing for a greater role of the state.

The West Bengal government, I was told, could not ask its citizens to wait for the people’s democratic revolution before proceeding with industrialisation. They were hamstrung because all states had to work within the capitalist framework provided by the centre. This, of course, wasn’t the best way forward and things would change if the CPI-M came to power in Delhi.

The Left Front currently has fifty-nine MPs in the 545-member Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian Parliament. This is also their best electoral showing since independence. So, it will be a while before the party can paint the capital red.
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This is the final part of a three-part series published in Daily Times, Lahore on May 4, 2007. The original article can be found here.