Amit Chaudhuri: Real Time: Stories and a Reminiscence

THE HOUSE WASin a lane in a middle-middle-class area that curved at a right angle at one end and, at the other, led to the main road. During the Durga Puja, the balconies of the neighbouring houses would be lit with green and blue neon lights, and families would walk towards the end of the lane that curved to the right, and join the crowd that was either coming from or walking towards the goddess. Bank clerks, schoolteachers, small-business men, with their wives and children, the boys in shorts and the girls in frocks, looking like the pictures of children on the covers of exercise books, formed that tireless crowd. On the other side of the lane, after one had crossed the main road, one came to a lake with spacious adjoining walks where couples strolled in the evening and children, accompanied by maidservants, came to play. Binoy and I would walk past the lake in the afternoon, when women washed saris or scoured utensils with ash on its steps, and the heat had just ebbed into a cloudy, dream-like vacancy.

It was in my uncle’s house that, during one of my visits, I met my cousin’s English tutor, whom they never referred to by name but called “mastermoshai.” He was once a manager in an English firm, but had apparently left it after his wife and children had died in a motor accident. After that, he had roamed the streets of Calcutta for a year, seldom returning home, and only lately had he reached, once more, a kind of settled state. He now lived in his house with his servant, Ganesh, and gave English tuition for a small fee to children like my cousins. How he had materialised into my cousins’ lives I never really found out, but I gathered that he had been recommended to them by a relative on their mother’s side.

When I met mastermoshai I was sixteen years old, and had had a poem published in the Youth Times, a magazine now defunct. Prior to the meeting, while I was still in Bombay, my cousins had shown it to him, so that when I arrived, Binoy smiled and said to me, “Mastermoshai was very impressed by your poem.” On Saturday morning, I saw a bespectacled man in his early fifties, dressed in a shirt and lungi, enter the small room where Binoy and Robi studied. Approaching the room later, I saw an unlikely lesson in progress, for Binoy and Robi, and even little Mou, were sitting, heads bent, each staring at a book, while the bespectacled man seemed to be reading the exercise books in which they had written their answers. It was a time of particular significance, for Binoy, at fifteen, would be writing his matriculation finals at the end of the year, as would Robi two years later. After the finals, Binoy would have to decide whether he would take Science or Commerce; he would have to be readmitted to his school, or to another school, depending on how well he did, for his upper matriculation exams; and his life would receive an abrupt push towards a certain direction. Even so, he would not be free of the English language and its literature for at least the next two years, although it would be increasingly marginalised from his life.

So they sat in that room, reading poems by Longfellow or Tennyson, or short stories by Saki, Binoy the least interested among them, for his favourite subjects were arithmetic and art, and his favourite pastime, football. But it said something about their affection for this man, who sat studying their answers, that even Binoy had begun to show signs of interest in the English lesson. Interrupting the tuition at one point, my aunt took me into the room and introduced me to the tutor. He had a very Bengali face, with short, slightly wavy hair, a forehead of medium breadth, spectacles that belonged to his face as much as his eyes did, deep lines around his mouth, and teeth that jutted out from under his lip, making his face belong to the pre-orthodontal days. His teeth were tobacco-stained; I was to find that he, like most Bengali men, smoked constantly. Having now lived in England for several years, where not many men smoke, my memory of him taking a long puff on a cigarette is associated with the anachronistic, old-world atmosphere of Calcutta, with its small dreams and ambitions. I don’t know why I recall his face in such detail, except that there are some faces, especially those of men belonging to his generation, that have stayed in my mind, perhaps because the world that produced them is now inconceivable. He was not at all handsome, but I see that he might have been attractive to his wife when he was a young man. It would have been an attractiveness that is different from that of the young men of my generation; one has only to see old Bengali films to realise that men were slighter and smaller in those days, but with a proportionate elegance and agility.

Robi got up from his chair, and I sat down next to mastermoshai. Robi, sitting on the bed, and Binoy and Mou, looking up from their books, had formed a small, expectant audience. Mastermoshai was shy; he was expected to say something about my poem. When two literary men meet in Bengal, they do not ask each other personal questions, but straightaway enter realms of the abstract and articulate. Mastermoshai’s first question to me was, in an English accent tempered by the modulations of Bengali speech: “Are you profoundly influenced by Eliot?” Though I was taken aback, I countered this with a few names I had recently discovered in the Penguin Modern European Poets series — Mandelstam, Montale, Brodsky. Mastermoshai was impressed. The next time he came to the house, he brought me a novel, a Penguin Modern Classic. It was Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett; the copy, he said, belonged to one of his “disciples.” The cover had a grim but beautiful picture, a pencil sketch, of a human skull. On the pages inside, difficult words had been occasionally underlined and their meanings noted. A strange world had been described there, one that I could not make sense of. I took the book with me back to Bombay.

It was mastermoshai who first spoke to me of Baudelaire. He knew the names of the French existentialists and the titles of their books — Sartre, Camus, Being and Nothingness, The Fall —but his highest praise was reserved for Heidegger’s Being and Time. The words “being,” “subject,” “object,” frequently entered our conversations, especially when he was discussing my poetry, of which I had begun to produce sizeable quantities. “Every writer needs his Pound,” he said to me. “ Il miglior fabbro —Eliot’s better craftsman.” He was my first impresario, showing my poem in the Youth Times to his friends and “disciples.” On another occasion, he compared himself to Leopold Bloom and me to Stephen Dedalus, adding, “Every writer needs a guide, a father figure.” On one level, he was a father to me, and on another level, a friend. For, behind the big talk about literature, a fondness had grown between us, based on the ardent exchange of ideas that belonged to a foreign language and continent, ideas probably already obsolete over there, but which here, in the comforting presence of relatives and friends, took on a unique intensity, a freshness; a friendship that could have formed only in a country with a colonial past. Even more provincial, and marginal to Europe, than Dublin was in the early twentieth century, was Calcutta at the century’s close. Trams, rickshaws, markets, office buildings with wide, creaking stairs, bookshops, little magazines, literary critics, uncles, aunts, created this Dublinesque metropolis of which mastermoshai was a part.

By the time I visited Calcutta again, another one of my poems had appeared in the large, loose-leaf pages of The Illustrated Weekly of India. This magazine, easy to roll, generous to the touch, had circulated among members of my mother’s family and even reached mastermoshai. He had tucked it under his arm, emerged from my uncle’s house, and walked off to show it to his friends — for, in South Calcutta, many literary critics and poets lived within walking distance of one another. “Extraordinarily mature for seventeen years old,” Binoy reported him to have said. He was now ready to introduce me to his “contacts,” clerks and accountants who led a shadow life as editors, poets, and intellectuals. They were a small, stubborn band of people struggling to keep alive a sense of the urgency of modern poetry and its many movements in the midst of an enervating climate and a society with other preoccupations.