Calcutta (27 page)

THE
best place to start sampling the cosmopolitan mixture of Calcutta without undue menace or harrassment, without too much risk of injury from traffic or population, is at a junction a few yards beyond the square containing the offices of
The Statesman
newspaper and the Calcutta Electric Supply
Corporation
. This is where Chowringhee begins straight ahead, where the Maidan starts to roll away to the right, where grey and vastly overloaded trams go lurching and clanging across your path from their Esplanade terminus at the top of the Maidan and down Dharamtala Street to the left. High up on the
buildings
nearby and just round the corner are the neon signs
proclaiming
Chanda Paints, Britannia Biscuits, Bush Transistors and Philips; and there is a cinema a few yards away called Paradise. Separating the square from this crossing is a
comparatively
low building, with many domes, all blindingly
whitewashed
. It is the Tipu Sultan Mosque in which, at any time of the day, you may see men sitting in meditation or bending
themselves
double upon mats in profound acknowledgment of Allah. Rickshaws and taxis are parked among rotting vegetation outside one of its entrances and its surrounding pavements are full of people hawking anything from haberdashery to tobacco. Its railings by your left shoulder have been decorated for twenty yards or more by a man who is selling calendars and posters. He has garish reproductions in colour of the current Indian film stars and he has calendars topped off by pop-art beauties of indeterminate status who are fluttering their eyelids and their elegant fingers at the passers-by. And, dangling from the railings of these Muslim premises, he has any number of intimidating representations of the Hindu’s most powerful goddess, Kali.

When the policeman, standing on his little platform under his black umbrella in the middle of the crossroads, switches the
traffic in your favour and lets you plunge over to the arcades of Chowringhee, you may easily lose your bearings for a moment. For the next half mile or so you will be safe from the terrible sun but you will have to brush and sidestep your way, it seems, past half the people in India as well as a sprinkling from
beyond
. On the corner, a couple of Bengalis will be purchasing from the cubby-hole tobacconist something wrapped up in a green leaf which looks distinctly unsmokeable and is; for it is pan, the all-India digestive, aperitif and snack, a pinch of crushed araca nut and other spice to be chewed with betel for its stinging bitterness and then spat out, leaving the lips, the gums and the pavement an arterial bloody red. Two or three Chinese will be jostling them as they stand; for the corner is congested and the pavement just there is not wide, and there will be babus moving in every direction with briefcases clasped beside their large and swaggering bellies. You will fall into step behind a pair of Sikhs who are holding hands or who, if they are not doing that, are each for some unfathomably Sikh reason cradling their testicles in one careful palm as though they were afraid these might suddenly drop off and go rolling down Chowringhee. There will be beggars, of course, for very soon the Grand Hotel will appear and already a number of lobster-coloured Westerners like yourself will be nervously making their way up from its direction. Small boys will be trailing them like puppies,
prostrate
men will be imploring them from an emaciated inertia, and a woman with a sleeping baby over her shoulder will be gliding into their paths, one at a time, with her hand outstretched; she has a ring through her nose, her ankle is tattooed, she is very dark indeed and she may be a Birhor, one of the nomadic
tribes-people
of Bihar who live in huts made of leaves, who hunt hares, monkeys and porcupines with bows and arrows, but who occasionally find it necessary to exist in another kind of jungle in Calcutta.

There will be many turbans along this arcaded pavement, which is wide, because it was constructed chiefly for the
passage
and shelter of British masters in this country. There will be turbans, there will be dhotis, there will be quite a lot of half nakedness, there will be many men striding along in great white
flapping pyjamas. There will also be as many men neat and dapper in Western shirt and slacks and they will line the
pavement
edge until the arcade runs out, with benches or just sacking stacked with all manner of things they wish to sell. You can buy a gaudy tie in this next few hundred yards without stepping inside one of its many shops, or a ball-point pen complete with refill, or a set of compasses and dividers and rulers for a school desk, or a bucket and a basin for the kitchen; you can pick up a universal spanner cheap, or a hammer and chisel, you can try on a hat for size, or take a cotton frock home to your woman, or collect a plastic aeroplane for a small boy who has toys. The men offering you goods from their stalls will not lobby you as persistently as the beggars, for beggars are mobile as a man with possessions is not, but they will press themselves upon you as you pass them by with cries that cajole, promise, harangue and occasionally threaten implicit and awful deprivation if you do not buy. Presently you will observe, in a little space between these tradesmen, a man sitting at a desk with a typewriter on top. It means that you are approaching the street leading down to the Corporation offices, and you will see such men in Calcutta in the vicinity of any place where typewritten
applications
, petitions or other documents may be required of people who either don’t have their own machines or perhaps can’t even write. They frequently sit in rows, they sometimes do not have a desk, and there are usually two or three of them squatting and bent more than double on the pavement outside Park Street Post Office. Here, on Chowringhee, because prospective customers will almost certainly be bound for the municipal offices, the typist will knock off letters in Bengali script, but next to the High Court you will find typewriters with Hindi characters, and there is said to be a man in Burra Bazar whose machine will type Urdu. And alongside the freelance typists there are
generally
freelance handwriters, carefully plying their pens while ancient illiterates whisper messages in each scribe’s ear.

The Grand is engorging a coachload of tourists, who are
looking
slightly flustered as they cross five yards of shaded but nonetheless steamy arcade from one lot of air-conditioning to another, while the durwans at the hotel door bristle and defy
the beggars to shuffle a barefoot step nearer. Across the road, under a tree on the edge of the Maidan, stands a holy sadhu in a dirty sheet, with mud smeared on his arms and the white mark of Vishnu painted on his forehead, leaning on his quarter staff with his begging bowl in one hand; he is staring at the new arrivals to the Grand, almost without blinking, and he is always in the same spot whenever you pass, never known to move from that place from one day and night to the next. And though you may become accustomed to his watchful presence after a while, you can never pass the front of the hotel without feeling that you are crossing some electronic beam which may suddenly open the ground beneath your feet and send you packing where the sadhu may think you properly belong. But always you proceed past Firpo’s, where the very richest people eat, with another great husky fellow on the door, while the pavement tradesmen begin to thin out and the odd Brahmani bull occupies half the arcade so that it can munch and ruminate in the shade. It has probably salvaged a newly discarded coconut husk, green and still juicy, from the gutter where there is a long train of rotting brown ones. Adding to them at every street corner are men with piles of fresh coconuts, whose top they neatly open up with one chop of a machete so that some weary pedestrian can slake his thirst on the tepid and slightly sour water inside. Or the bull may have snatched a piece of sugar cane (and had his rump angrily belted for doing so) from the bundle beside a juice machine. There will be a couple of men doing business with this, one of them sitting on the ground stripping the canes while the other turns the handle of a great cast-iron wheel, like an old-fashioned mangle, which drives a collection of cumbersome cogs and crushers over each cane until the juice drips out into a tumbler, or into one of those tiny baked-clay cups which are to be used only once by devout Hindus and then cast away for the sake of cleanliness, to make even more refuse on the streets.

Just here, past the Westernized elegance of the Grand and Firpo’s, you can see how fastidiously clean the people of Calcutta are, for hereabouts the broken standpipes reappear after an absence of several hundred yards since the crossroads on the threshold of Chowringhee. Round every one of them, from all
ends of the city to the others, there are always people washing. There are women doing modest wonders to themselves beneath their solitary winding sheets, and there are men and boys clad only in skirts who are pouring and sloshing brown liquid over each other from brass bowls or simply cupped hands. They go on like this, from dawn to dusk, or they submerge themselves in the great tanks of water that are posted here and there around the city, or they rush down to the Hooghly if it is near at hand and splash about on the ghats. They are conceivably the cleanest people on earth in themselves and in their homes even if they may be the filthiest creatures in the world when it comes to public hygiene. And such is the incredible and endless public filth of Calcutta that even here, along elegant Chowringhee, the complex smells of the city, which are always based on some form of decay, steam into your nostrils until you can almost taste them; a compound of incense, and cooking spice, and industrial grime, and rotting vegetation, and gallons upon gallons of staling urine from both animal and human being. So accustomed to this impregnation do you become that after a while you even stop trying to distinguish one of the more agreeably tantalizing odours from its fellows, you forget to wonder whether the whiff that came at you from that alley belonged to turmeric or cumin, to marigolds or mogra. And you only wrinkle your nose from then on when you pass a particularly large and long dump of garbage on which, bereft as they almost entirely are of public lavatories, half a dozen men are at that very moment emptying their bowels or their bladders.

With the complex of smells you are also assailed by Calcutta’s complex of noises. There are few places here where silence is kept even in the middle of the night for there is always, at the very least, someone crying for something. In the daytime the minimum you can expect to hear is a muted rumble if you stand in the middle of the Maidan, where there is nothing but two or three hundred people between you and the nearest road half a mile away. Stroll over here, to Chowringhee, and you can break the rumble down into its clamouring elements. Much of it is traffic-based, and if one sound rises above the threshing noise of engines it is the sound of Calcutta’s taxi horns, which are very
old-fashioned and mounted outside the driver’s window as often as not, with a large black rubber bulb which he squeezes to
produce
a deep and bronchitic honk that would sound well from the belly of a sick cow. On the pavements there are other sounds. There are boys who want to polish your shoes and who, when they are not doing this, are banging their brushes on their boxes in order to attract a customer. There are disabled beggars who are banging their tins on the ground. Itinerant key-makers are scurrying along (curiously, they always seem to be in a hurry) with uncut keys, metal discs and various tools slung together on metal hoops which they shake at everyone as they go in a frenzied clash. Every ten yards or so, someone will be clearing his nose and throat and then spitting, in a cleansing operation which tears at the ears and nerves of more delicate acquaintances, which the refined may like to call hawking but which people from Lancashire have always identified more accurately, even in its gentler local form, as grolching. Usually within earshot there is the sound of some procession, religious or political. If it is the second, then cries of ‘Zindabad’ will be hurled into the air, which is the local vivat. If it is the first, then almost certainly it will be accompanied by a band and there will be drums plopping, pipes doodling and the clang of bells exactly like those that used to hang above the cow catchers of railway engines crossing the American prairies. But the most haunting sound in Calcutta, if it isn’t that of the taxi horns, is the one that the rickshaw men make. Every one of them has a small brass bell, shaped like an infant’s pram harness bell, which he fastens to his wrist or fingers with a length of cord. When he runs with a passenger swaying behind, it jingles like a sleigh bell. He also uses it when he is parked by a kerb and waiting for customers. He taps it on the metal of his shafts then, or against the nearest lamp post, to attract your attention, when it has a dull and hollow but almost anvil ring. And there is nothing more eerie or ominous than to go late at night down a street in Calcutta, where very poor people are settling to sleep almost under your feet and the scarcely less poor are standing in shadows, to walk from one inadequate pool of lamplight through a patch of darkness to the next pool of light, and to be pursued all the way by the wordless sound of one
rickshaw bell after another being tapped out to mark your
pasage
.

Above all, along Chowringhee during the day, if you have the ears to hear it, there is the sound of people speaking in
polyglot
tongues. At one end are those Bengalis taking pan and gossiping in their own language. At the other, where the arcade has finished and the Museum railings have begun, there is a very smart young Sikh who accosts you in English on behalf of some unmentioned cause or charity of his own, who pins to your chest a paper symbol with his very first movement in your
direction
, and who accuses you hotly of insulting the Indian flag if you try to step out of his way (which is almost impossible). In between these two extremes you hear people gossiping in Hindi, in Urdu, in Oriya, in Tamil, in Telegu or in half a dozen of the other languages that network the sub-continent. There may not be a man in the world who could understand what all of them are saying and to an average untutored Westerner it is merely a
confusion
of voices producing sentences which are quite
indistinguishable
, with the occasional English word or phrase popping out at right angles from a flow of completely foreign usage; for ‘social security’ and ‘gramophone’ and ‘piano practice’ and the like do not yet appear to have achieved translations. And
somewhere
along the arcade, between one group of gesticulating tradesmen and another, a fellow is briskly handing out leaflets which bear the indistinct photograph of a man wearing a
stethoscope
and which carry a message in three languages. ‘Salutation,’ says the English version, sandwiched between the Bengali and the Hindi scripts. ‘Death is in weakness, life is strength Patients suffering from impotence in every state of weakness that is
before
urine or after, morbid discharge of semen nocturnal
emission
any kind of illness concerning urine and burning are treated medically with guarantee. Before marriage or after. Dr Dogra has passed from England, USA, UK England health home with good-reputation X Meet Dr Dogra once. Address: –
Kalighat
near Basusree cinema 121B Monohar Pukur Rd Cal–26 Beside Raj Hotel Consult, 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. evening – 4 p.m. to 9 p. m.’ (
sic
)