Calcutta: Two Years in the City by Chaudhuri Amit

Author:Chaudhuri, Amit [Chaudhuri, Amit]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307962171
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-09-10T00:00:00+00:00

Someone I know, also a well-to-do victim of polio and frequenter of the Bengal Club, but one who continues to walk with crutches with a staccato, oppositional ferocity, once told me that Samirda hadn’t tried hard enough; that he could have been more mobile if he had. I’m not qualified to judge this statement. But with Samirda I’ve felt that he saw movement as he did his place in history—metaphorically: as something which he didn’t wish to struggle to attain, and which he was content to let slip and go its own way while he quietly went his. For this reason, his drawing room was where everything happened for him.

Mrs. Mukherjee Senior was becoming more frail; by the end of the nineties, she couldn’t observe the teas in their entirety. At a certain point in the evening, she’d go inside. She’d also grown more hard of hearing; but her curiosity was strong. She might want to know what had suddenly caused excitement or laughter; then Samirda would interrupt the flow of things in a loud dignified voice, shouting at her patiently in his perfect English—“NO MA, WHAT AMIT SAID IS …” because, invariably, the assumption was she’d misunderstood. And she would look startled and chastened, and remind her son with a pained, Victorian firmness, “There’s no need to shout, baba, I was only asking …” (“Baba” was a term this family of three used of each other—in fact, of anyone in their company—to express affection. They made it particularly forgiving and emollient.) Once these exchanges were done, conversation was resumed.

Samirda once told me that his mother’s finances had run out when she’d been forced to sell the one hundred thousand shares—“a decent number, giving her decent dividends”—in Martin Burn in the eighties. He’d left the company in 1986, ten years after its future had been sealed by nationalisation, and as the new Calcutta under the Left became a location inimical to private enterprise; since then, he’d had no reliable, regular income, except the “measly,” ever-decreasing (in real terms) Rs 600 he got as a pension.

Towards the end of the millennium, Samirda also sounded more anxious than I’d known him to be. The property he lived in, the two-storeyed building, was tangled in some obscure but fatiguing litigation with a charitable and spiritual organisation. The organisation was behaving in this matter with less empathy and greater aggressiveness than it likes to be known for. Of course, Ramakrishna, sage and idiosyncratic figurehead of the organisation, had once astutely advised his fellow seekers: “You can’t be shy and retiring all the time. You need to know when to bare your fangs.” Those words had a powerful subterranean message in an age of colonialism. But the mystic may not have wanted his followers to bare their fangs at this Cambridge-educated bhadralok with polio. The problem had arisen from some reckless action by a loopy relative and his wife, who had involved the organisation in a transaction that had been interrupted upon their deaths. The organisation, as a result, had turned its attention to these surviving Mukherjees.

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