Kolkata: Strategies Of Limbo
Every city is a stranger at first and needs a method to be explored. Here Edmund Hardy describes a walk in one of India's most intoxicating cities
The architecture of the human body is obviously wondrous but not infallible. A sudden and intense heat may cause discomfort or pleasure; an unexpected smell may be the source of delight, a short essay on the senses, or violent disgust, according to one’s temperament. Arriving in Kolkata (previously Calcutta) at the height of summer, I expected both of these, but I didn’t anticipate hitching a ride into town on a large floating haystack (it was being delivered down river). I was there to interview the Hindu icon-makers of the Kumartuli district but this didn’t mean I escaped the vicarious role of tourist in a city unfortunately famous for its poverty. As we live we have a culture, a way of acting, but we cannot see it: arriving in a city, like waking up, is always strategic. I checked into the Fairlawn Hotel, about which I had read, and retired to my room from which I could see the outdoor bunks of the hotel staff.
Soon I found myself squeezed into a cliché: I felt very hot and could smell all sorts of unfamiliar things. I took a look round this hotel famous from the pages of Paul Theroux and Joe Roberts. It was as kitsch and strange as it was reported to be. Ted, a retired colonel from Sussex and joint owner, was putting up balloons. I passed the time of day and he leant and whispered conspiratorially in my ear: “Don’t trust them myself. Balloons, I mean. Never trust anything that goes BANG. That’s one thing I learnt during the war.” I hurried out to find a translator and a room of my own. The hotel was on Sudder Street, the centre for backpackers, where the street-hawkers would always occasion a discussion on the vexed question of “what I was” which at least deflected the pleas and probable scams.
“Where you come from? Japan? You want a taxi?” I would shake my head. “You from Tibet? Taiwan?” Really, I tried to explain, I find the idea of identity redundant, ethnicity suspicious; I desire to live in flux and recognise my part in huge movements: I follow Whitman when he declared himself to be “a multitude”.
“Where? Korea?”
“Actually I’m from Essex. England.”
“No I don’t think so. Hong-Kong? China?” And so the issue of categorisation would delay those who prey on tourists and I would exit the scene. Quickly I found a spare room being let by a family, the Arvanis, who lived far away from the tourist enclave of Sudder Street. Mr Arvani came to pick me up on his motor-scooter. “Hang on and don’t fall off,” he greeted me cheerily. “And don’t stick your knees out when we pass trams. It’s so easy to lose your kneecaps on these streets.”
This advice proved to be good: not losing my kneecaps became a preoccupation of mine, and it remains so to this day. The apartment block had cool stone floors, potable water, and a lift that worked if you stamped your foot (I didn’t try out a dance routine to make it go faster). Mr Arvani was something in laser technology and the Arvani children, Anila and Shamsad, were students at the university. Seated in the living room I expressed my interest in Bengali poetry, the paintings of Rabindranath Tagore, the films of Satyajit Ray to Mrs Arvani. She asked me about “this singer called Shaggy and his new album, Lucky Day”. All five of us, however, did find a shared love of Indrani Sen, the great singer and interpreter of Tagore songs.
“Excellent!” said Mrs Arvani, who had moved on from Shaggy to ask about the economic status of the UK within the European Union. “You three can go to Gyar Manch tonight and see her sing.” Gyar Manch consists of an Imex cinema, a theatre, two art galleries, a bookshop, and a concert hall. Art is taken very seriously in Kolkata, a city which has always seen itself as the cultural centre of India, hence the phrase, ‘What Bengal thinks today, the rest of India thinks tomorrow.’ It was the heart of the movement against British rule; it is the home of the adda, a long debate, a casual dialectic between gatherings of people at the sweet-shops, tea shops, indoors or outdoors, in the below-street bars.
And so it was that we found ourselves sauntering down Shakespeare Sarani.
But do not imagine that because we sauntered we were idle strollers! My companions and I, in that limbo between setting out for an entertainment and arriving, were reconfiguring ourselves for the influx of cadences and emotion that is a Bengali classical concert. It is, at every moment, a struggle to draw wakefulness into one’s life. I communicated this thought.
“When we walk, when we look, we are always thinking,” said Anila. “But we are thinking with our eyes.”
Shamsad joined in: “It seems that I am not a person, but a rough sketch which a painter may work up into the full-bloodied thing at a later stage.” And so we engaged in our own adda, weaving inbetween the rickshaws, the holymen and the office-workers making their way home. We turned the corner, crossed the road before a hoard of yellow taxis, and made our way into the arts complex. “We must always admit change, and be able to intuit a change which is possible and know if it is sincere,” said Anila.
“If so it will survive.”
“No, no, that is not it,” countered Shamsad. “It is not that we must be open. We must never be inside.”
“What is it you two study again?”
“Philosophy. And Anila is immersed in Hindu history. But I tell her, you must, above all, know the sieve through which one life passes.”
Anila snapped: “Without history we are small children. As Cicero said of a nation which does not know its past: the pure philosopher is a lost child.”
We took our seats in the packed auditorium. The concert opened with ‘Amaro Parano Jaha Chay’, Indrani Sen’s voice like a cone encompassing her audience. The mathematical rhythms and yearning lyrics of Tagore’s songs are hard to resist. He’s best known in the West for his short stories and poetry: but he’s also a major figure in establishing an Indian modernist painting and his songs command an entire ‘Tagore’ genre in the music shops.
Afterwards my companions and I wandered out in the half-dark past the grandiose baroque of the Victoria Memorial and out across the Maidan, a large grass park which runs down to the River Hugli. I saw the silhouette of a tank between the trees and stopped.
“What’s that?” I asked my companions.
“It’s a tank,” said Shamsad. “It was left behind during the – difficulties – over Bangladesh. Now it’s a memorial of sorts.” Soon we joined the lovers, the washerwomen and the bathers at the ghats of the river banks. We took a little boat out and I demonstrated my inability to row for more than ten minutes as we passed the small shanty (or ‘bustee’) communities which line the waterways of the city. There is no longer the mass starvation there was after the influx of refugees from Bangladesh, neither are there the huge shanties of Mumbai, but to row past idly after a concert is still discomforting. Faced with rank injustice from which one is removed through accident of birth, one never wants to be excused from the privileged gaze, from mute anger: but what injuries do we do, by living in a particular style? “We are there,” said Shamsad, who had taken over the rowing. The boat bumped alongside the landing stage near Shalimar Station. “And as for the search for an ethical life, for the duration of this evening we must adopt a strategy of limbo.”
And so I and my indolent heart walked with my companions to the Botanical Gardens as each leaf in that sanctuary of wildlife darkened. Crouched men sold chai from large kettles. Among the rare trees, the grass and the winding footpaths, we began to talk only of the plants, the insects before us. To our left were the network of communities which feature in the film ‘City of Joy’. Up ahead was a tree which rather less famously appears in a poem by Tom Paulin: the largest Banyan tree in Asia, which, as it grows, sends down branches that root and sprout, the whole being a green and incremental explosion with a hollow centre.
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