Amit Chaudhuri - Real Time - Stories and a Reminiscence

We were put up at the Taj. This hotel’s appearance

is the outcome of its architect’s mistake. Commissioned

to create a facsimile of the Taj, he made

its front entrance face the city, its rear the sea.

It should have been the other way round; the entrance

we use is actually the rear; the Taj,

turned inside out, faces the city, which turns

its back to it, and the sea, looking upon

its back, won’t recognise it. The architect’s long dead — only

in the afterlife of his fancy do replica and original

become one, and city and building, reality, conception,

readjust themselves, to become as they’re not.

There are many Bombays; this is one of them.

We spent two nights at the Taj; the fried pomfret

gave me a bad stomach (I was one and a half);

my mother panicked. I can imagine her, combative,

cradling a sick infant inside that hotel room.

For many years, she’d think of that fried pomfret

with dismayed wonder. She was glad to leave

for the company’s furnished flat. For a while, in her new home,

she couldn’t find a cook who would suit her, so

interviewed impostor after impostor, a few of whom

she still remembers, as if they press upon her,

and bother her with their lies and evasions. My father

had come to Bombay after spending twelve years

in England, six of them with my mother. He had

overcome a fallow period, and, with her help,

now swotting at home, now drinking tea at Lyons,

passed the exams that would give him the grand letters

next to his name. He’s a chartered accountant,

and a member of the Institute of Taxation, and a Company

Secretary. These laurels gave him a job

as Assistant Company Secretary of Britannia Biscuits

Company, or BBC. This firm,

whose jobs were among the best in the “private sector,”

was still largely British-owned, a subsidiary

of Huntley & Palmer’s, and Peak Freens. My father started

as a student of English; he had an Honours degree

in English Literature from Calcutta University. He changed

direction later, and went on to study

accountancy; came back from England and took

this job as an expert on taxation law.

Once or twice, I’ve heard him quote, “Heard melodies are sweet,

but those unheard are sweeter,” a little self-consciously.

When I decided to study English, he was pleased. It was a choice

that might have bewildered other parents, but he

had ample warning. Meanwhile, biscuits

dominated our shelves. I never ate them.

Bourbon, Cream-cracker, Nice, I was familiar

with them all, but rarely touched them. I suspected,

during teatimes, that this was not the kind of food

our country needed. I rather wished

my father made bridges, or engines, or ingots,

anything instead of the round things with jam centres—

the only biscuits I liked. (Such are the whims

of fate, or whatever force binds destinies

together, that the woman who is my wife

is, as my mother puts it, a “biscuit junky.”

She dips her Marie in tea; the dipped bit tans,

and, moistened, the biscuit droops like a Dalí clock.

Thus biscuits recur in my life, long after

my father’s retirement, as if they were

reminding me of something.) Both my parents come from Sylhet,

which went to East Pakistan in 1947,

after a referendum; Sylhetis still blame Bordoloi,

then Chief Minister of Assam, for agreeing to the demand

for one. Sixteen years later, they found

— they, who’d known each other since childhood — themselves

in Khar, then in Cumballa Hill, and,

in 1971, in a flat — three bedrooms—

on the twelfth floor of a new building called

Il Palazzo (“the palace”) on Malabar Hill.

This building transcended the others, so that our flat

hung midway over the Arabian Sea

and watched the Queen’s Necklace from a vantage point

it would not have been possible to cheaply occupy.

For many days, the smell of new paint

hung like a benison on the flat, while shelves

and tables still not arrived at their final shape

had their naked wood whittled away by workmen.

That first night we came to the flat, those unfinished

chairs and tables and that first coat of paint

on the walls greeted us. To write about it in verse

is to make palpable to myself the experience

of living in that apartment, the pauses

and caesuras between the furniture, the dining

room, the overhanging balcony, the sea outside;

my father, recently made Finance Director, my mother,

like children gazing into a doll’s house. Sylhet,

no longer memory, nor country, but just themselves.

(Sylhet, from where it’s claimed, Sri Chaitanya’s

parents came to Nabadweep. There, the holy child

played in the dust on all fours in the courtyard

of their home, watched by his mother. Old songs

call him the “fair moon”; this was before he grew up

and became a wanderer.) Outside our balcony,

too, a fair moon hovered that night. Sylhet—

aeons of migration; even now, most of the

Indian restaurants in England are run by Sylheti

Muslims: the menu’s a delirious poem

on which the names of Moghlai and Punjabi and Parsi

dishes — chicken korma, bhuna meat, dhansak—

are placed in a proximity they’ll never be in elsewhere.

Relocated twice; the first time, when Bengal

was broken up in 1905, and Sylhet annexed

to Assam. When my father was a student in Calcutta,

a man from Chittagong said to him in his hostel:

“Sylhet? So you’re from Assam! Don’t you eat humans there?”

My father said: “Yes, we do. Do drop in for lunch.”

In Il Palazzo, the transition was made

from humans to biscuits. There were cut-glass ashtrays

collected from Denmark, placed strategically

in a non-smoking house (my father’s one or two

attempts at a social cigar have left him ill),

guarded on all sides by a regiment of curios.

Those ashtrays populated my childhood like unusable toys.

Of course, we knew this life, refracted

through cut glass, reflected on brass, was, in part,

make-believe — even I, as a child, knew it — that

the furniture, the flat, weren’t ours. Yet that view,

morning and evening, of the Arabian Sea

and the Queen’s Necklace, and the dome of the Taj,

was all mine. At that time, I was more

interested in prying into windows of the buildings

not too far away — I had a pair of binoculars

given me by a friend of my father’s from England

that took me near those rooms, and, looked into from

the wrong lenses, gave me the strange satisfaction

of feeling farther away than I really was.

I knew our country was poor, but mainly as a

sombre abstraction. Having said that, our wealth

was make-believe — perquisites (perks) made up

for the ceiling on high income under Indira Gandhi.

My father had no savings — he’d lost everything

with partition; the take-home pay, after tax,

was small. The only way to get rich was not to pay

taxes, almost impossible to do when you had

one of the best jobs available in a British-owned company.

But the perquisites gave us the trappings of affluence

if not affluence itself. A chauffeur-driven car,

first an Ambassador, then a “foreign” car,

a poor relation of the Managing Director’s Pontiac—

an Austin that tried to keep us happy, and often

stopped for no reason on Marine Drive. It was

often pushed into motion by passersby. Domiciled