CALCUTTA [from the diaries]

ONE:

What she remembered of Calcutta were hot summers and pinafores. The kind of pinafores that one had to cross the mighty seas for, catch a flight from another country, catch a train from another city and finally arrive at cool houses with cement floors and loud indulgent voices.

From there the pinafores weren’t far away. A tram or a taxicab, sometimes even a rickshaw would take you to them. For her, Gariahat was not a market. It was the triumphant sound of what to Ma was a secret treasury. The coffers of all that could not be found anywhere else, even if one were to scour the entire universe. Gariahat. Home to the magical pinafores, which could not be found anywhere else in the world.

She preferred it when the pinafores got a bit old and wash worn. True they did not quite remain as crisp and as white as they first were, billowing off hangers strung high on the shopkeeper’s shack. As Ma and the shopkeeper haggled good-naturedly, the pinafores would proudly fill themselves up with the Calcutta air and swing and sway and swing and sway…

But Ma never got those pinafores down from the hangers. What a waste it seemed to her, that after pointing to them and haggling over them and making them altogether the focus of the entire transaction, Ma would make the shopkeeper pull out fresh flouncy pieces from a large cardboard box.

That’s the only time she would be consulted. Which ones did she want? The ones with the leaves and flowers? Or the ones with the carrots and apples? The ones with the orange and red threads; or the ones with the blue and green patterns? She never knew, she could never say. Choosing pinafores seemed a matter of grave and serious deliberation. After all, one had travelled the seven seas in search of these exotic things. How could she possibly decide?

Finally the purchase was made. She was the proud owner of four new ‘pennys’ as grandma would curiously call them. And Calcutta was the only place where she was allowed to play with only the pinafores on. In Delhi one had to wear a frock over them. In the other country, which you had to catch a flight to after the summer vacations were over, somehow the pinafores lost their seat of pride and glory. That’s where you needed gum boots and fur coats. That’s where it snowed. Pinafores got snowed under other clothes.

But here? Here it was different. Prickly heat powder and cousins who were always in the twilight zone of friend and stranger. Load shedding and hand fans. And the chatter over her head that never seemed to end. Pishis floated effortlessly into Mashis who got enmeshed with Nau Daa-s and Mejo daa-s and then found themselves entangled in Didis and Mamas and Kakamonis. An assortment of nicknames followed and a string of addresses chased them. She never knew very clearly who was who at the end of it all when she met them. For her, they were conversation: carried from one land to another, from telephones and dining tables to four poster beds and string chairs, and it seemed a bit strange to her that they should become real people one had to say ‘hello’ to.

Calcutta. What else did she remember of it? Bathrooms she did not like and too many sweets she had to eat. High ceilings and creaky fans and oh yes! Bars at the window. Curtains at the window. She somehow loved both the bars and the curtains. They seemed to make the windows come to life. Give them the respect that sleek sheets of glass and Venetian blinds did not offer them. The windows in Calcutta, she was sure, were happier off, with their creaky wooden doors – imagine windows with their own little doors! Blue or green painted doors, two per window, opening out onto the street, with little wooden blocks at the corners that prevented them from banging shut if the wind got into them. And to cap it all, every window had a sill low enough and wide enough for her to sit on. Yes, she liked the Calcutta windows.

From there the world seemed altogether a friendly place. Everyone spoke the language that was greeted as a strange tongue anywhere else. What was a secret cipher in the rest of the world was the common code here. And so, subliminally, without knowing when or why, the brief and sporadic trips to Calcutta notwithstanding, inside her head, Calcutta was home.

TWO:

The Mumbai sky is clouding over again. Perhaps it will rain. I hope it does. A short piece of blue sky framed by some fluttering clothes on a clothesline suddenly reminds me of Calcutta. Perhaps it’s the time of the evening. I’ve never been very fond of the dusk. Ever since I was a child, the dusk has made my heart heavy. She always seems astray, like she’s lost her way between the day and the night. And her forlorn silence makes me sad.

Or maybe it’s just the grills at the window that remind me of Calcutta. Or, the sound of children shouting, as the play in the compound 4 floors below. Some sound, sight, texture of childhood returns. I am almost scared. And it still hasn’t begun to rain.

As a child I used to be mostly silent. Mostly bewildered. Mostly absorbing. Sometimes, I think, one never outgrows one’s childhood. I am still mostly all that inside.

Yesterday Mumbai came to a grinding halt. A bus explosion at Ghatkopar, two killed, 28 injured, 4 critically. Frantic calls from home. Yes Ma I’m ok, no Ma I was nowhere near Ghatkopar, yes yes, I never travel by bus anyway.

And then Balasaheb swung into action. And Mumbai stopped. Stopped without question, to question. Stopped without protest, to protest. The pictures in today’s papers are ludicrous. Grinning women in Shiv Sena uniform, stopping trains like it’s a festival. Rail Roko at Thane Station could well vie with Ganesh chaturthi in terms of exultation. Not to be outdone, the Muslim community quickly takes out a protest march condemning the blast. Or maybe they’re just plain simple scared. Nobody wants to give Mani Ratnam a chance to make a sequel.

It’s a scarred world that we live in. But the square blue patch of sky I can see from the bed reveals none of that. Where would you be right now? Now that you have told her about me, our 3-day fantasy has begun to grow roots inside my head. Too much beer, too much Maugham and three heady, sense-sloshed nights. Nights that were meant to fly away in the wind like a careless ribbon. Nights that are now growing tentacles and acquiring a geography.

Somehow your being in Calcutta has sent me into a time spin. That city is not meant to be the present. It’s supposed to be the past. Soft, shadowy patterns under ceiling fans. Calcutta is a fathered world, and the first few days of my first adult romance. Now that neither Baba is alive nor that romance, your bringing Calcutta to life seems silly.

The sun sets completely. I heave a sigh of relief. This is good old uncomplicated night. Always in black, always the same, no matter which window you look at it from. This is not the bewildered, identity-crisis-ridden half pink, sometimes mauve, suddenly purple occasionally orange, streaked with red flushed with vermilion splashed with amber stroked with azure, sheeted with grey riot that the dusk can be. Now I feel safe.

The Kumbh Mela at Nashik started yesterday. Like most everything reported in the papers, controversy surrounded it. Much was made of Akharas and boycotts, central legislations and temple trusts. But today, the Times of India reported “Splendour, shlokas and sniffer dogs kicked off the Kumbh Mela here on Wednesday with prayers for world peace.” And in the meanwhile, J M Lyngdoh won the Magsaysay for his “convincing validation of free and fair elections as the foundation and best hope of secular democracy in India”.

Ours is a robust country for sure. Validated by the square piece of blue sky that has turned an obedient black now. I wonder if you will call tonight. There’s the bud of terror growing right there… yes, I can feel it, in the centre of my chest. I know it so well. I know I will water and nurture it till that all-too-familiar fear grips me again… how many times, just how many times have I grown this plant. A fear that blinds and binds me, makes me alternately cling and run… you’ll hear too much of me, you won’t hear from me at all, there will be deluge and drought, agony and ecstasy, pain and exuberance… you don’t know the pattern perhaps, but I do. The next few months will be an emotional roller coaster for us, before this ubiquitous ‘us’ rises and rises high, high in the air in a stream of glorious flame, spins and turns and showers multi coloured stars and finally explodes in a rain of glowing streaks. Oh I know this one so well. And finally when we drop to the ground, spent and burnt, our fireworks but a shimmer of a memory, that square patch of blue sky will still be square, and still be blue.


THREE:

She never knew quite when she fell in love with Durga Puja. Everything was wrong with it. It was noise and it was crowds and it was sweat and it was new clothes that were always uncomfortable because they were always the wrong fabric for the wrong season because they were always made keeping the winters in mind.

But when it came to Durga Puja, there simply was no choice. One simply had to be excited. One simply had to look forward to it. At the end of four days skin rash, shoe bite and upset stomach, you just nursed yourself back to the rest of the year and regretted that Pujo was over.

Amidst the sodden banana leaves and swollen conch shells, the golden goddess shone down. It was her favourite pastime to establish a secret-connect with the idol, even as the multitudes prayed and the cymbals crashed and the drums beat. She was sure that when she looked into those deep black lustrous eyes, they shone and sparkled just for her.

The smell of Sheuli flowers always told her that Pujo is near. It was heady, the anticipation. A four-day sabbatical from life as she knew it. A heightening of senses, a loosening, dislodging of pain.

Crisp cotton saris and blouses with plunging backs. Dark kohl to line the eyes. The excitement was akin to a wedding and yet different. And even now, after all these years, the first glimpse of the goddess was still heart stilling. Overwhelming. Pain rattling. Something about unfinished chapters and completion of circles. That idol was the centre and the reference point and a quick scan of the year gone by. When She arrived, she felt old.


FOUR:

I light a cigarette. The entire flame of the matchstick gets absorbed by the nicotine tip. I love it when that happens. Flame absorption. How did Ayn Rand describe a cigarette? ‘Controlled fire at the fingertips’. I loved that.

I must return to Delhi soon. It’s most truant; this weeklong leave, soaking in the music and the poetry, humming to the guitar and watching patches of square blue skies. Very wasted.

There was another blast after the Ghatkopar one. This time at a pyrotechnic technician’s residence in a slum cluster in Jogeshwari. Alternately dubbed as an accident and as sabotage by the media and the politicians. Apparently Mumbai is on the edge; not that I can tell.

I am on the edge for sure. I stare at my phone and allow the smoke to curl in vague patterns around my fingers. The centre of my heart is lead. Dark grey and heavy. I’m sure if I fell into the sea right now I’d drown quicker. The waves we saw breaking at the Gateway of India – I could have honestly drowned in them. It would have been very Daphne Du Maurier-esque.

You’re not with me today. Across the miles I feel you peeling off like Velcro. Something is tearing at the fragile fabric of an ephemeral world. Something is reclaiming you like sea land.

The terror is growing. Its gnawing at my insides and the sky is a sheet of grey metal. A crow is beating its wings against it. I’m sure it’ll break something. The sky is unyielding today.