Oh Calcutta! Memories of bombs, gang warfare on streets, fish head dal and intellectual ferment
I will be going to Calcutta in a few weeks to speak about China in the time of coronavirus. The Communists may have renamed it Kolkata, but it will always be Calcutta to me. It brings to fore an mélange of memories.
The first one, and one I recall as vividly as something that happened just now, goes back to November 1969. I had just returned from England where I was training with a now many-times-gobbled-up company called Bakelite Xylonite Ltd, and was posted to Calcutta. Calcutta was in the midst of a huge turmoil then. Charu Mazumdar, Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal and a few others had put a little village called Naxalbari on the national, if not world, stage. The Vietnam war was raging and the relentless bombing of North Vietnam by American warplanes, and the spraying of the defoliant Agent Orange over the jungles of South Vietnam and Cambodia, inflamed the youth all over the world. The Left Front government in West Bengal defiantly renamed the road on which the US consulate-general was located as Ho Chi Minh Sarai. The walls of Calcutta all had the most imaginatively written graffiti and slogans like “amar bari, tomar bari, Naxalbari” and “amar nam, tomar nam, Vietnam” blared and glared at you from every wall.
From London I went home for a few weeks in Secunderabad. When I left home, my father had gifted me an old Fiat 1100 that once belonged to his dear friend, the renowned forensics specialist and doctor, Dr I. Bhushan Rao. The car had a very special number APU 5566. My father told me this was all he had to give me, and now I was on my own. I loaded my portable radiogram set and my collection of LP records, including all the Bob Dylan LPs till then, a small suitcase of clothes and set off for Calcutta by road. It was a leisurely drive with stops wherever I felt like and wherever I had friends. Everyone I met was aghast that I was headed off to Calcutta to work. The car worked beautifully and I did not even have to fix a flat tyre on the journey.
But Calcutta was a seething cauldron. The intellectual ferment was visible on the pavement bookstores selling Marxist-Leninist tracts along with the works of Rabindranath Tagore. I got myself my own private copy of Mao’s Little Red Book. The ferment was heady. And the flames of revolt, rebellion and lawlessness singed you everywhere. Selling plastics while so much was going on seemed to be the most useless thing in the world then. But I was broke. And my father had more or less hinted that I shouldn’t look to him for assistance since he had just retired as the first member of the AP Board of Revenue and the second topmost IAS officer in the state, by telling me more than once that his pension was going to be Rs 600 per month. My mother, who was a tightfisted rich lady, was as tightfisted as her mother and her mother’s mother. They were from a very rich, matriarchal family from Vellore, and three generations of single daughters had ensured the family wealth remained intact and the good-looking daughters found highly educated and handsome men as husbands. My mother had an equally good-looking sister who married my father’s younger brother, a handsome Gurkha officer who later joined the IPS.
The possibility of obtaining any cash from my formidable mother appeared remote, and so I stuck it out selling plastic materials to industries. The big item was an epoxy material that was sold to foundries to bind together sand for their casts. Since I didn’t know my way around Calcutta and didn’t speak the language, I hired a local lad who was my manservant and guide. Both of us would go visiting factories and foundries in the grimier and grim industrial areas of Calcutta. I would go in while he would watch the car — my sole wealth. I lived very frugally, didn’t have any friends and spent a good part of my time reading whatever I could lay my hands on. In about three months I had parleyed my salary and extra earnings into a goodly sum, mostly by charging cab fares (I was entitled to) and using my car for my sales calls. When my stash was enough to give some badly needed confidence, I decided I was ready to venture out into the world again, but couldn’t decide when to do it.
My mind was made up one afternoon, as I was driving on Colootolla Street and stopped at a crossing. On my opposite there was a car in which a scuffle seemed to be taking place, and as the car was not moving, traffic began to back up and horns started blaring. Wondering what was going on, the lone policeman on duty walked up to the car to find out for himself what was going on. No sooner had he taken a few steps, the car’s doors burst open and a bloodied man ran towards the cop, chased by two others. One was firing a pistol in the air and the other was waving a short stabbing sword. The man with the pistol then put his hands into a jhola he was also carrying and pulled out a country-made bomb, which he flung at their recent captive and the policeman.
Both were caught by the blast, and I saw one arm fly out. I was in the first car on the opposite side and all this unfolded in front of me as if in slow motion. For a brief moment the cacophony turned into a deathly silence. The two assailants then rushed back into their car and the car — it was a fawn-coloured and well-battered Ambassador — and the vehicle shot forward towards where I was in the front row of the grandstand. It hit my much-beloved Fiat 1100 (APU 5566), smashed its left headlight and a good bit of the fender, and raced off. The car was the most important thing in my life, as it was central to my future plans. Naturally my first reaction was to get out and assess the damage. But I couldn’t move. The badly dented fender jammed the front wheel. With the option of taking off closed, I then turned to see if my fellow humans needed any help. The policeman was badly injured but the man who was being chased had lost his arm and was clearly dying.
A police van soon turned up and I volunteered to tell them what I saw. The cops heard me and made some notes. I gathered it was Presidency College internecine warfare between a Naxal faction and the official CPI(M) group. The police inspector, who was a very nice and genial person, then took me aside and said thank you very much. We know who did it and we know what to do. You better get moving before the Statesman reporter arrives and he gets your name and picture. He added, quite ominously, that after that I wouldn’t be worth very much!
The cops helped me straighten the bent fender enough to make me mobile and I turned back with a dangling headlight to go to my company-provided apartment in Alipore. The first thing I did was to look for a garage to fix my car. By that time the insurance surveyor came and by the time the garage did its work a few more weeks had elapsed. In the meantime, I kept visiting foundries in a yellow beat-up Hindustan Landmaster. I was ready to hit the road in April, as summer was racing northwards.
It was during this car-less interregnum that I found a small Bengali eatery near my apartment, which I began to frequent. The food was always steaming hot and the fish curries delicious. The place, I forget its name, was functionally furnished and the walls had pictures of mystical looking Bengali gentlemen, and in my mind I referred to it as the Anushilan Samithy, It was great going till one day the owner recommended something special, which he assured me I would love. It was a dal with a fish head in it. The glazed look of the fish’s eye was too much for a person who only saw fish before as a white chunk of delicately flaked flesh. Suddenly the fish acquired a personality. I couldn’t handle it. Years later in Kabul, I was similarly offered a sheep’s head placed in a bed of rice pilaf. I still couldn’t handle a head on a plate.
My memories of those meals always make me crave for a Bengali thali meal, but as I moved up the ladder, my Calcutta visits had me ending up in the big hotels or state guesthouses. One Sunday I was at the Taj Bengal and went down with a friend to the trendy Sonar Bangla restaurant. I ordered the fixed course meal. But five-star fare is usually very disappointing. This one too was. I still miss my Anushilan Samithy. And one day I hope to find a place in Calcutta that serves simple and steaming hot khana with fish curry.
The writer, a policy analyst studying economic and security issues, held senior positions in government and industry. He also specialises in the Chinese economy.
