Amit Chaudhuri: Real Time: Stories and a Reminiscence

One morning, mastermoshai arrived at my uncle’s house. He seemed to be in possession of a secret. He told me to hurry up, for he was taking me to meet the editor of Living City. It was a magazine locally published in Calcutta, and I recalled that I had once picked up a copy from a pavement stall in Park Street. I had found it interesting in a strange way, because its contributors were Bengalis I had never heard of, with the kind of common reassuring name you think must belong to learned people — Sukumar Mukherjee, Shibnarain Sen — all writing articles in quaint, textbookish English about Bengali literature and culture. It confirmed my suspicions that the most important work in literature was being done in the regional languages. In Bombay, for instance, I had sensed with some awe that Marathi poets had a highly developed network of meeting places and discussion groups organised around a series of roadside cafés and Irani restaurants. Here, in Calcutta, the contributors to Living City seemed more middle class and academic, and yet oddly impressive, inhabitants of a world apart. The editor himself, R. D. Banerjee, had written an article on the Baishnab Padabali, the poets Chandidas and Bidyapati and their influence on Tagore, and the emotions associated with biraha, or separation from the loved one or God. In neat boxes by the side of certain pages, there were small poems written in a language that somehow seemed to fit in naturally with the style in which the essays had been written. It was a language that all the contributors to Living City had in common, so that one man, almost, might have composed the contents of the entire magazine. There were some pages that had the simplest form of advertisement — a message, or the name of a firm that could not possibly have any interest in literature — personal gestures of goodwill, old friendships, that sustained such a project.

That morning, Binoy and I were relaxing in the house, Binoy in kurta and pyjamas, and I in pyjamas and full-sleeved shirt. Dressed like this, both of us accompanied mastermoshai, in a taxi, to a house in one of the lanes near Southern Avenue, Binoy sitting in the back with mastermoshai, who was singing a Rabindrasangeet, and I, in the front, next to the taxi driver, with one elbow in the open window. In those days, when I came to Calcutta, Binoy took a personal interest in my literary career, and visited, with mastermoshai and me, the houses of several editors, a spectator who silently listened to our discussions and reported them later to my mother and his parents. He had been my closest companion in childhood; we had played and fought with each other. Now, at sixteen and seventeen, he and I were as tall as each other; we had reached our full adult height, though we were still boys. The taxi entered a lane with two- and three-storeyed houses, trees and flowers in their tiny courtyards, their façades in stages of disrepair. It was the time of day when children go to school, and men to their offices, and a domestic calm in which these houses belonged entirely to women and servants was evident as we passed through the lane. To be part of this pre-midday hour was rare for a man. The taxi driver, on mastermoshai’s command, stopped at a small yellow building. Stone stairs of no particular colour, which we climbed up slowly because of the darkness, mastermoshai our leader, took us past the identical bottle-green doors of the two flats on every floor, till we reached the door which had R. D. BANERJEE in white letters upon a black plastic nameplate. Mastermoshai pressed a buzzer. The three of us stood in the small space that formed the landing at each flight of stairs and the common area outside the flats, a dark square box from which stairs radiated upward and downward. A balding man in spectacles, dressed in a cotton shirt, black trousers, and sandals, opened the door for us. It was Mr. Banerjee himself; politely but tacitly he led us inside. The door, once opened, led to a long corridor that was also a verandah which formed a border to the flat; to its right, there were three rooms with their doors open, and a curtain hanging from each doorway. The verandah ended in a wall, and to its left, there was a rectangular space, and then, the verandah of the opposite flat, with the same three doors. The building thus seemed to enclose an empty rectangle, with the flats on its margins.

Mr. Banerjee took us into the first room through a white curtain with printed flowers. It had a centre table, a small sofa against the wall, two armchairs facing each other, all in a faded green cloth upholstery, wooden shelves with glass panels on the left, with a few hardcovers upon them. Mr. Banerjee switched on the fan. There was a window at the other end, with curtains that were smaller versions of the one at the doorway. Mr. Banerjee sat on the chair at that end, Binoy on the sofa, mastermoshai next to him, and I on the other armchair. Mr. Banerjee nodded at Binoy and said to mastermoshai:

“Is he the poet?” Binoy shifted uncomfortably, possibly wondering, suddenly, what he was doing here. But, dark-complexioned, almost black, in kurta and pyjamas, large-eyed, he did look poetic.

“No, no,” said mastermoshai. “He is his uncle’s son. This is the boy whose poems I showed you.” Mr. Banerjee turned to look at me.

“I see,” he said. Unsmilingly, he told me, “I liked your poems.”

Magically, tea and biscuits on a plate arrived from nowhere. Our presence had set off a small domestic machinery in the flat. Conversation opened up, and mastermoshai told Mr. Banerjee more about me, while Binoy sipped his tea and listened.

“I noticed a mood of biraha in your poems,” Mr. Banerjee told me. “Have you ever read the Baishnab Padabali?”

“No, I haven’t,” I said a little hesitantly. “But I am interested. Could you tell me where I can buy a copy?”

“He has trouble reading Bengali,” explained mastermoshai, “because he grew up in Bombay. As for the Padabali,” he said to me, “you should find it in College Street.”

“I will publish your poems next month,” said Mr. Banerjee.

Delight made us all silent. We finished our tea, got up to leave, and mastermoshai thanked him profusely, while Binoy and I, as before, merged into the background and assumed the status of bystanders. Mr. Banerjee closed the door, and that was the last I saw of him.

On my next visit to Calcutta, I found that mastermoshai had widened his interests; he was thinking of freelancing as a copywriter and relinquishing his job as a private tutor. He had inserted a small message in the classifieds column of The Statesman, advertising his skills and availability, but the message showed such a command of the idiomatic resources of English that it would have been unintelligible to most Bengali readers. One day he came to me and gave me a piece of paper. It was for my father, who worked in a firm that had dealings with Britannia Biscuits. “Ask him to show it to them,” he said with great pride and self-assurance. The piece of paper, which seemed blank at first glance, had its entire space filled with three large words written with a ballpoint:

BRITANNIA

IS

BISCUIT

A few days later, he came up with another slogan for one of Britannia’s new creations, the orange-flavoured “Delite,” and this I liked very much for it spoke to me of his whole personality: “Your taste is our Delite.” I handed it to my father, who liked it as well. But once it reached the offices of Britannia Biscuits in Bombay, it was, I think, forgotten.

On my last visit before I left for England, I found that mastermoshai had already left his copywriting days behind and moved on to new things. He had set up a shop with his servant, from which they sold cooking oil to customers. “I’ve instructed Ganesh,” he told my aunt, “to make his hand tremble a little while measuring out the oil.” He added, in explanation, “These are hard times.” On this occasion, I did not stay in my uncle’s house, but in the flat my father had bought many years ago, which now, at last, was furnished. It was the flat to which my parents would move after my father’s retirement. My mother told me not to waste my holidays and to make use of my time by taking Bengali lessons from mastermoshai. “After all, he is a learned man,” she said. Thus, for the first time, mastermoshai came to our flat. It was a different world inside the flat, but he regarded our affluence and difference without envy; he was not embarrassed or diminished by it. He reminisced to me about a man he had once known, the son of a maharajah, who could no longer step out of his great mansion because he could not understand the world. We sat, in an air-conditioned room, at a study table by a great window that looked out on trees and old, aristocratic houses. The book we began to read together was the slender Chhelebela, or Boyhood, by Tagore.