When in Culcutta - Jhilam Roy

WHEN IN CALCUTTA - Jhilam Roy

What was her fate? Long, long before her hour,

Death called her tender soul, by break of bliss,

From the first blossoms, to the buds of joy:

Those few our noxious fate unblasted leaves

In this inclement clime of human life.

(The inscription on Rose Aylmer’s cenotaph)

Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes

May weep but never see,

A night of memories and of sighs

I consecrate to thee.

(Rose Aylmer, Walter Savage Landor)

At an INTACH workshop, when asked about the favourite historical spot in my native city, I had replied with absolutism my preference for the twilight-bathing courtyard of Shobhabazar Boro Rajbari in a place called Calcutta.

Especially during the un-festive seasons. If you sit in one of the many benches lined along the sprawling internal perimeter and provide company to the lonely faux gaslights, you will feel it. Time frozen in a framed memorabilia from the past. The majestically empty vaults of the paanch khilan thakurdalan speak for themselves; an enticing but tacit darkness lurking behind the multi-foliated arches and the Tuscan columns of royal grandeur peers sheepishly from underneath the worn blinds, inducing you to think of a greater and grander cosmos. Of days shattering and sober, warm and withering. The ten-armed warrior goddess whose equally belligerent progeny has resembled an equestrian Clive for more than two-hundred years. The babus, the bibis, and their whims. The cold chandeliers that whisper to the wind the secrets of a bygone era. The colonnade that mumbles to the welcomed voyeurist the claim of seeing better days, more power, and unpared prominence. Of the age when everything was alive. Of the age when everything was dead. The dying hasn’t stopped since.

I always have had an uneasy tryst with Kolkata. I never came to terms with the change in the name, the essence, and the sentiment attached to the dying city. I am a self-proclaimed Anglophile (and I have my reasons) and the shifting nomenclature from out-dated ‘Calcutta’ to updated ‘Kolkata’ in 2001 appeared to be an extreme nationalist masterstroke for erasing what’s colonial and highlighting what’s indigenous and above all, homogenously Bengali. Kolkata is by the Bengali, of the Bengali, and for the Bengali. Kolkata should not stop at being a mere pride; it should rightfully be the Bengali arrogance. Over the next few years, the sahibs – Dalhousie, Cornwallis, Lovelock, Hastings, Harrison, Wellington, Minto – saw themselves re-baptized in the likes of Mahatma Gandhi and Uttam Kumar. But there’s a thing about unwritten laws; they are followed more than their written counterparts. People still took the bus to Dalhousie to shop for electronics at Great Eastern, Bow Barracks reigned supreme in the bus conductors’ vocabularies, kids still planned their evenings at Blaquiere’s Square, and young lovers whispered the name of the dead British Duke every time they

craved clandestine intimacy. The pretentious spree of Indianization provided not a scratch to the unshakable colonial superstructure on which the city is built. The second city of the British Empire for over a century, Calcutta has tenaciously preserved its architects, foreign and Indian, in its vivacious memory. The feat is more than what could be carelessly accommodated in the dismissive label of the ‘Raj hangover’. Each stumble at every hairpin turn in this cultural chameleon of oli-goli-choli elegantly reminds you of its unabashedly chequered past and its equally heterogeneous present and future. It is Calcutta in all its faded glory!

From time immemorial, Calcutta has been deemed an emotion rather than a city. A celebrated élan which is itself an amalgamation of such millions. From the conquistadors who defended it, the aristocrats who ornamented it, the bards who adorned it with supreme creativity, the deities who graced it, the plebeians who frequented it, to the nocturnal crawlers who satiated the lusts of its Dickensian soul, the city has been flamboyant in treasuring every footstep, every memory that has been so lovingly left to it. I remember, in a psychiatric examination of my mind’s pattern-recognition ability, I cited some ‘reflex’ déjà vu parallels. One of them was Ray’s Prodosh Mitter and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Another was Calcutta and London. True, the formers are heavily drawn to resemble the latters, and this should be justification enough for the familiar vibes imparted. Some may even defend innovation and reject plagiarism, holding that each of the four aforementioned entities is singular in its attribution. Instilled in the Indian ‘duplicates’ are the foreign ‘naturals’, and I can vouch for it as a Bengali growing up in a dying city that remains trammeled, nonchalant, in one of the last chains of the British Empire. Take, for example, the Bengali approach towards religion. The major festivity involving Mahishasur Mardini is a celebration of culture rather than religion. Even politics is lacking the religious overtone so palpable in Northern and Western India. We don’t need religion to throw democracy out of the window for us. We can do it with our own hands and passiveness!

My introduction to Calcutta has been very Edwardian and remotely Victorian, thanks to two names. The first one is a controversial ancestress of mine who lived during the Mutiny; the latter a neighbor to my maternal aunt who resided at Moulali. Emily Llewellyn Fernsby’s presence has been familial, relished within the confines of a pie-like recipe, some heirlooms, and a ghost story. Every time we stayed over at my father’s paternal house in North Calcutta, my mother and aunts would take full advantage of an otherwise ‘best unremembered’ Fernsby. The story goes that in the early 1800s, this English woman eloped with a black sheep of the family. As punishment, the scandalous new weds were shamefully burdened with the task of manning the whorehouse of the local zamindar. The marriage, nonetheless, was a happy one and the disgraced bloodline soon inherited the house. Emily outlived her husband, living to a ripe age; yet, her spectre couldn’t rest in peace. It is said, she still strolls through her beloved mansion. In white Victorian apparel, she glides through the slumberous corridors in the early hours of dawn, searching for a ring that she brought from England but was somehow left bereft of it in her earthly life. Kids usually go to bed with the tunes of their mothers’ homespun lullabies, Wee Willie Winki, or Borgi Elo Deshe playing in their heads. I got: ‘Mem buri ashbe! Ghumiye poro taratari!’ I remember, I used to shut my eyes tightly, listening for the slightest sound, and my hand used to clutch more tenaciously at the blanket over me. Moments like this turned Ramnaam into a tuneless – yet passionate – self-sung, non-aeonian lullaby.

Every scene in Brooklyn that sees Eilis Lacey visit her sister’s grave and hold earnest conversations is very relatable to me. Reason? The second name. Gertrude Annette Lobo.  

She was eighty, still unmarried in 2001, and straight out of Anjan Dutta’s Mary Ann. Above all, the bent and wrinkled metif of another era had stories to tell in a dingy parlour where time stood still. Weekend after weekend, I would sit with a conceited penchant for historical fairy tales, my ears pricking at the sound of an ancient voice crackling and coughing away about ball dances, tea parties, Vice-regal processions, and the perilous times of ‘when Gandhi stirred up trouble’. My eyes would dreamily eye the dusty, shabby, and cracked teacups and crevassed soup bowls nestled in the semi-dark of a rickety wooden closet with a cracked glass façade. Lobo was not Jewish, but like all proud Calcuttans, she was fond of Nahoum’s cakes and pastries, and occasionally when she was in a mood to be benevolent to her little audience or when she could afford it, she would treat me to a slice of a cake, some chocolate cookies, and a cup of Earl Grey (which strangely gave me hiccups every time I drank it). Lobo’s stories had everything: elaborateness, pomp, ceremony, and even a mother who seemed to have been drawn from the archetypical Bollywood femme fatale. What they lacked was the personal. The stories were about people, their thoughts, feelings, and actions – never about Lobo herself. Young as I was, I got the overview and never the layers underneath. If I remember right, a particular Geoffrey Myrltown recurred religiously in the narratives, and Lobo liked to shove in small details about him like the brown streaks in his blond hair, the nearly invisible mole on his neck, how he overdressed himself on a day called ‘Hanukkah’, how he sang, out of tune, a song called ‘Look at me now’, and that he loved ‘Darling Anne’s’ pea soup. There must have been, in between the lines, faraway gazes of glazed cataractous eyes, wistful heaves, elevated tones of recital, and baleful intervals of silence. I wish I was equipped enough to catch and understand them! She died the year I turned eight. Since then, I have visited her barren grave. I say this because the tombstone is silently shaming as if hesitantly mentioning someone who should, at best, remain disgraceful and oblivious. I bring flowers when I can. Other times, I just go over to talk.

Then, of course, there are the books. A ‘roots-calling’ impulsive research project in college delivered to me, on a silver platter, the likes of Geoffrey Moorehouse, J.M, Kathleen Blechynden, Amitav Ghosh, Sunil Gangopadhaya, Shankar, and Joanne Taylor. They provided the scholarly legitimacy to my treasured encounters with the whimsical spinster, physically and mentally scarred, trapped in lime-washed pink walls embellished with broken ceramic plates, rusty crucifixes, and stale Union Jacks. Expressions to the imagination in an absolute foreign tongue. The untroubled vignettes are unfailingly foreign, the awkward sentiments the failing foreign. The jurisprudence, however, is exotically hinged between the Colonial, the Post-Colonial, and the Neo-Colonial.

Evidently, this closeted metier of British-ness proved to be a popular butt of jokes and caricature for me. In my twenty-two years of life, there has never been a time when I haven’t heard the ‘compliment’ ‘Aangrez piche chorke chale gaye’. My mother tells me dejectedly (and I quote): Ingrejra elo, thaklo, morlo, o choleo gelo. Tui akii thakli. My father comments smugly: Desi murgir bilati daak. This relating to a bilati culture was stamped as ‘child’s play’ when I was a kid; with time, the people around me and I realized that this colonial steak in my constitution was a tad-bit more deep-seated. A complete isotropy. Coffee or criticism wouldn’t be enough to stir it away. This isn’t the product of globalization and Millennialism. I chef off unconventional cookbooks such as The Raj on the Move: Story Of The Dak Bungalow, The Landour Cookbook: Over Hundred Years of Hillside Cooking, and Culinary Jottings: A Treatise In Thirty Chapters On Reformed Cookery For Anglo-Indian Exiles. I find churches peaceful and pious. Colonial ruins and stories appear serene to me. I have developed an obsessive penchant for British Medieval and Early Modern History, and on the Indian

front, for letters and memoirs penned during the Raj. I still start my Sundays with the quintessential English Breakfast, replete with Earl Grey. Call it madness. Call it hunger. Call it nothing.

The arrogant poet had said, ‘All good Calcutta has gone to bed, the last tram has passed, and the peace of the night is upon the world. Would it be wise and rational to climb the spire of that kirk and shout: O true believers, decency is a fraud and a sham. There is nothing clean or pure or wholesome under the stars, and we are all going to perdition together. Amen!’ - Shankar, Chowringhee

This doesn’t mean I am disrespectful and dismissiveness of my Indian-ness, or in this case, Bengali-ness. I love aloo-posto as much as I love chocolate pudding. And this is where living in Calcutta helps. It provides an unapologetic and inclusive license to be the ‘Dual’ in sophisticated modernity. Terminal cultural adoption prevails over temporary cultural appropriation. It is not solely the people; it is as if the paras, the dialects, the cultures, and the gregarious atmosphere voluntarily give themselves up to be melted and stirred in the cauldron called ‘Calcutta’. Maybe I am biased. I hear all metropolises work this way these days. But there is inherently something offering about this shabby-genteel. Old Calcutta charm, goes the saying. Probably, I am the trapped Jorinda here. I have been oriented in the Calcutta of the yore, and there can be no unmaking of that première vue. Moreover, I admit I have gulped down too much of the romanticized city in movies like Saptapadi, Barfi, Meri Pyari Bindu, or Chowringhee and there exists a gargantuan disparity between my cultural-historical imagination and reality when it comes to it. I love the interpretations more than their source. I have had the privilege of viewing Calcutta as an insider and an outsider, and I hadn’t the heart to suffocate it in over-analyzed terms like ‘marginalized communities’, ‘malicious rape culture’, ‘miserly economy’, etcetera. I may be confirming the infamous opinion that Bengalis are aggressive and nostalgic about their ‘hollow’ culture and this habit has been an abused card in political manipulation. Calcutta, their capital, is dead in everything except its culture. Others are more charitable, calling it the eternally dying vampire. True that! One can never escape the rusty frames that encase the forgotten friends and family. The silent grandfather clock in the corner and the tattered books on the shelf by the window. The hanging verandas, the roaks, street ‘art’, the koltalas, the confectionaries and food hubs, the nacher-ganer-aankar classes, the names on plaques, and the sacred chambers of the local clubs that have, for generations, harvested the native salon culture of carom, chai, telebhaja, and adda. Sinister as it may sound, I fancy comparing the city to Rose Aylmer, a belle in 19th century Calcutta.

Both died before their time.

Jhilam Roy