The Epic City by Kushanava Choudhury

Author:Kushanava Choudhury
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408888902
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-09-06T09:21:36+00:00

PART III

Crossing the Canal

‘Work hard, play hard.’ That had been the mantra when I was at Princeton, which really meant ‘work work work’ until you forget what ‘play’ even means.

When I first came back to write for the Statesman, no one was working hard or playing hard. I used to wonder how a daily newspaper could be produced in this climate. After decades, telephones finally worked, but no one wanted to do an interview over the phone. ‘Come over,’ they always said, and then, when you arrived, they would be ‘not in their seat’. Waiting in the corridors of government offices soon became my favourite pastime, at Medical College, in Lal Bazar, at the Writers’ Building, waiting and drinking tea.

For one of my first assignments, I had to speak with an official in the health department. After a week and a half of postponed interviews, the official finally granted me a hearing on a monsoon afternoon. I arrived drenched, with a photographer in tow, only to hear that the big babus at the Writers’ Building had not given him authorisation to comment on the story. ‘I’m very sorry. If there’s anything I can do. Perhaps you would like some tea?’

Sit, have tea, and roll with the punches. There is no place you have to go that you are not late to anyway. So drink up.

The Statesman employed an army of men to serve tea at regular intervals. There were the liveried waiters in all-white uniforms, like Moulvi and Ashraf, who served tea in cups and saucers to the editorial department – the newspaper’s bourgeoisie – at our desks four times a day. The office handed out little coupon books for two rupees, which contained seventeen coupons. In exchange for a coupon, Moulvi would serve you your morning cup of tea.

By late afternoon when the proletariat who operated the presses arrived for duty, a second battalion of tea-servers appeared, dressed in shorts. The ‘half-pant’ tea was intended to fortify the muscle power of the workers. It was strong and syrupy-sweet, and served in chipped cups without saucers. Officially, there was to be no fraternising between half-pant and full-pant tea; each class was to remain confined to its own cuppa. A press man would never dream of ascending to the cup-and-saucer elysium of editorial, just as a subeditor from the newsroom could be reprimanded for rubbing shoulders with the proles below. Yet every evening, the shorts-clad servers of half-pant tea did a surreptitious round of the newsroom. For half a rupee, I soon learned, you could score a cup of the contraband.

The Statesman House contained a whole society frozen in a time warp. Inside that stately edifice were hallways with hillocks of discarded files, patrolled by cats. They led to labyrinthine narrow corridors and secret stairs and mezzanine floors, to departments carved out by partitions and sub-partitions. In those back alleys of the building worked hundreds of peons, liftmen, waiters, cooks, typists, chauffeurs and clerks, and only about a dozen reporters.

I had just started working there when I met the bard of the peons, Nanhe Singh.

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