Amit Chaudhuri - Calcutta - Two Years in the City

Not everyone in Calcutta had viewed me with hostility, though a few people had. There were, for instance, readers who were effusive about my first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address , saying it had noticed the minutiae of their lives, details that lay perpetually before them, and which, as a result, they didn’t look at. I was grateful for this generosity when it came my way, but I was also — for what reason I didn’t know — suspicious, as if I couldn’t accept the praise at face value. Among the people who sought me out was a couple called the Mukherjees. Their via media was a journalist who’d interviewed me for Desh , the leading Bengali-language weekly, who said, “Would you mind if I passed on your address to this couple? The gentleman wants to write to you. They love literature, and entertain writers sometimes. Of course, they might be a bit insistent.” I reflected on this and enquired, “Are they all right, though?” as if to preclude the possibility of their having a violent streak. The journalist (who, I’d soon find out, wasn’t entirely “all right” himself, and who’d take against me after my second novel, Afternoon Raag ) thought about this briefly, and said, “Yes, they’re fine.”

So it was that Anita Mukherjee invited my wife and me to afternoon tea.

The Mukherjees lived on the ground floor of a two-storeyed building on Lower Circular Road. A narrow driveway led to the parking space by the entrance. A collapsible gate barred the doorway to the flat; behind it was the actual door, which was generally opened by the beaming Mrs. Mukherjee.

Once we were inside this gently peeling, charming apartment, we’d turn left into the sitting room, where Mr. Mukherjee would be seated on a chair in a newly ironed shirt and trousers, barely containing his excitement. He would then proffer his hand in a strange way, for us to hold and shake. He would be terribly apologetic, but mutedly euphoric.

Samir Mukherjee’s reason for being apologetic was his inability to stand up to greet us, or come to receive us at the door. This was because he’d contracted polio long ago, in 1959. Polio, in Calcutta, was a disease that had disfigured the lives of the upper classes besides affecting the poor; I knew of at least two other people from Mr. Mukherjee’s generation who belonged to that same vanishing, near-extinct corporate world in the city, who’d got polio at some point and dealt with it in their own manner.

The disease had reached a stage — when I first met the couple in 1992 or 1993—where Mr. Mukherjee stepped out of the house infrequently. The Mukherjees’ teatime, as a result, was less about the guests than about Samirda (as we’d begun to call him), although Samirda himself didn’t so much hold forth as urgently — but solicitously — question his guests, almost interviewing them, as if they were famous. He asked me, for instance, about books, about writing, about my parents, about Calcutta, and listened agog to my replies. I, on my part, felt I had to perform: felt that this self-deprecating man on the chair had the best seat in the house, that I was on a makeshift proscenium, that he was obscurely important and mustn’t, at the end, be left unhappy. But I quickly began to feel at ease with this couple, not least because they laughed with what seemed like genuine delight at my jokes and occasionally rude observations about people — of which, obligingly, I delivered a constant stream over tea. There was something about the Mukherjees that invited this nonchalance; I’d take refuge in my careful, invented social persona when there were other guests around. This didn’t mean that I had completely let go of the innate suspiciousness I felt in relation to people who claim to like my work. Samirda had made his thoughts known to me in a letter written on lined paper; it went on to a page and half, and informed me, eloquently, of how he’d been moved by my enshrining of the everyday objects of which a middle-class Bengali’s life is composed. (Later, I’d find out that the polio had also affected Samirda’s arm; that he’d dictate his letters — and the various missives he’d send to the editor of the Statesman at the time — directly to his wife, in whose neat handwriting Samirda’s sometimes ornate sentences were transcribed. This explained, too, the odd, oblique, almost ambivalent way the hand was extended towards you for a handshake.) I was touched when I received this letter; then I began to wonder if there was more to it than met the eye. When Anita Mukherjee first called us to tea in her melodious, measured English, I had a — as it turned out, unnecessary — sense of foreboding.

After two or three visits, I noticed that the Mukherjees didn’t join us for tea. A bowing and diffident servant in a short dhuti would bring in tea on an enormous tray about twenty minutes after we arrived, along with food on plates and, what seemed most important of all, spotless napkins. Then Anita would wait for seven minutes for the tea to brew, before pouring it, with an erect swan-like sureness, into our cups.

At some point, I asked them if they wouldn’t join us. And this led, on Samirda’s part, to a fumbling for words — an upper-class Bengali version of harrumphing. No, he explained, both he and his wife managing to become conspirators, they’d already had their tea. This was a sort of public ritual, at which they were purely spectators. For this reason — and not just because of the unexpectedly heavenly sandwiches Anitadi made — they appeared to their guests as transcendent, at a slight remove, belonging to a different sphere from the partakers of the tea, who had a more routine access to the world. I also began to realise that, having had their own tea at four, they’d begin to prepare for their guests’ arrival; that, by six o’clock, they’d be in the sitting room, patiently waiting for the sound of the car coming up the driveway, which would be a signal — sometimes a false one — that the second teatime, the much-anticipated one, was under way. Possibly because there was such an undercurrent of excitement to this period of waiting, Anita Mukherjee, when she received us at the door, was warm, serene, even a little distant. True excitement is contained, and doesn’t overstep its own measure.

There was another presence in the room, whom we encountered the moment we entered it, and then, as the tea unfolded, forgot. This was Samirda’s mother, by then in her mid-eighties. She was seated right next to the door of the sitting room; at first, I found this odd — it was as if she was being kept apart from the inner circle of the tea: almost like a chowkidar whom no one notices. Then I realised she was positioned in a way that would facilitate an early exit, when she became tired. Her vantage point added a dimension to the room: just as Samirda and Anitadi spectated, with a sort of visible pleasure, upon their guests having tea and offering up opinions, Mrs. Mukherjee looked upon this small spectacle — of her son and daughter-in-law entertaining their friends — with an enjoyment imprinted on her face as a small smile of contentment. She was a bit deaf; so her pleasure must have been largely visual and — though she sat separate from us — participatory. Her presence also clarified for me what I’d just had an intuition of during this elaborate ritual: that Samirda, like most Bengali men, myself included perhaps, had never entirely grown up — that there was a continuity, for much of his life (possibly enchanted, possibly oppressive at times), with his childhood.

Mrs. Mukherjee Senior was birdlike, but she was still beautiful, her straight hair parted in the middle and tied back severely, with a puritanical simplicity. She had a Roman nose. She also had a squint; what in Bengali is called “lokkhi tera ,” or a squint that gives an auspicious femininity and softness to a woman’s face. Quite a few years after her death, when I saw de Sica’s film version of Giorgio Bassani’s novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis , the matriarch of the doomed Jewish family — who is only ever glimpsed in passing, in the drawing room, or taking a walk in the estates with her husband — reminded me fleetingly of Samirda’s mother. Both women seemed — the real and the fictional one — to have been situated in a bygone aristocracy, and to know their precise place in it, while their children may have realised that the world they presided over had really disappeared.