Nothing beyond remains

Science tells us that our perceptions of beauty are not hard-wired into the psyche. That we accept as beautiful those faces and forms that most closely resemble the faces we grew up with. This is a disturbing thought, since neither Catherine Deneuve nor Penelope Cruz bears the slightest resemblance to my grandmothers, my great-aunt, my mother or any of the 157 aunts and cousins in my extended family (nor, indeed - more’s the pity - to any of the women I know). Conclusion – my perception of feminine beauty is not shaped by my memories

Ah, but show me a floor of red cement and I’m lost. Growing up in Calcutta (well before flight attendants tried their hot-potato pronunciation of “Kawl-cat-tah”), the long afternoons of summer vacations were spent sprawled on the cool smooth shiny red cement floor of my great-aunts room. That floor was my antediluvian air-conditioner; somehow it never heated up, even when the tar melted on the roads under the sun of June. Red cement floors. How I mourn their passing.

And louvred windows. Doric columns. Corbelled arches. Curlicued railings. Courtyards. Balustrades. Lime and mortar walls, thick as a grown man’s arm-span. Unkempt little lawns with patchy grass, in the shade of old fruit trees. Part of the fabric of my childhood, the setting for lyrical pieces of nostalgia like Amit Chaudhuri’s A Strange and Sublime Address. And all fading, crumbling. Torn down to build apartment blocks, where little plants in little pots wither on window-ledges hemmed in with ugly iron grilles. Or glass and concrete malls, like bad dreams out of Philip K. Dick.

Of course the problem is not Calcutta’s alone, nor even India’s. Travel to business districts around the world, and on first sight you will be hard pressed to decide whether you’re in Sao Paulo or Sydney. Even the iconic Manhattan skyline has been reproduced in Frankfurt and in Singapore. But most of these cities have made conscious efforts to preserve a heritage district, a piece of the past that not only preserves an emotional continuity but also makes good business sense through tourism. Where is Calcutta’s heritage district? Where, indeed, are Calcutta’s heritage buildings? What are the parameters whereby a building is classified as part of our heritage?

I turned to TGGG (The Great God Google) for enlightenment and found this - https://www.kmcgov.in/KMCPortal/jsp/HeritageBuildingHome.jsp. Five pages of earnest effort that do not answer basic questions. Where is the list of declared heritage buildings? The tab redirects to the same page. Are there any objective criteria for identification? None that I could find. Buildings are expensive to maintain. Is there any model for funding this? None on this web-site, though there is a laudable initiative to waive municipal taxes on buildings where the owners have made preservation efforts.

First, what is a heritage building? One which “requires preservation and conservation for historical, architectural, environmental or ecological purpose”, such purpose not elaborated. Is age alone sufficient ground? Historical association? Jorasanko and 38/2 Elgin Road are shrines for Bengalis, but can any of us say offhand where Michael Madhusudan Dutt or Raja RamMohan lived and worked? How about a building’s iconic status? I can imagine a universal gasp of horror at the suggestion that the Victoria Memorial is not a heritage building, but I find it ugly beyond tolerance, a clumsy attempt to emulate an original that is beyond compare. Then should we allow its demolition just because it looks like Jabba the Hutt in marble? Probably not, because something infinitely uglier could take its place. I found a number of articles deploring the de-listing of heritage buildings or criticizing the reconstruction plans approved by the Corporation. Criticism is expected. The authorities cannot please everybody. But do we have guidelines for preserving heritage areas or reconstruction on heritage sites? Templates, photographs, models? Again, none that I could find.

How has this issue been handled in other cities? One of the best examples I have encountered is in India – INTACH’s project for preserving heritage districts, both Tamizh and French colonial, in Pondicherry. I was charmed by the recreations in the old French quarter and the teak-columned courtyards in the old Tamizh houses. When I visited their web-site I realized that most of the houses I had admired were in fact almost entirely new, rebuilt through the joint efforts of the Pondicherry Planning Authority (PPA), the Town & Country Planning Department (TCPD) and INTACH. Can this partnership not be replicated in Calcutta?

How does one fund the process? In Mumbai, apartment blocks have been built around old bungalows, preserving the facades. On the London waterfront and in Buenos Aires’ Puerto Madeira, crumbling warehouses have been restored, beautified and transformed into economically viable retail and entertainment districts. The Alfama in Lisbon and the recreation of colonial Williamsburg in Virginia have proved the tourism potential of history recreated or preserved. Palaces in Rajasthan and villas in Goa have been reborn as hotels.

The past can pay for itself. Can we in Calcutta give it the chance? Perhaps more to the point, do we even want to?

Published today in a paper that does not have a Net edition.

Between the covers - College Street

Adults are biased towards stories that have a beginning, a middle and an end. In that order. Children don’t really care, they just want to know “what happens next”. From this perspective, there should be more children on College Street. Although the maps will tell you College Street runs from Bowbazar to Mahatma Gandhi Road (Harrison Road as was), this is a part of Calcutta that has no discernible beginning nor an end. Every time you think you’ve reached one end of it, three more book-stalls appear under yet another tarpaulin-rigged awning. Side lanes, porticos, lobbies of peeling old houses, in this part of town they breed books like buildings elsewhere grow mold. On a late Saturday morning when the colleges give over early and the book-loving Bengali babu is starting his weekend, this para buzzes with activity like an ant’s nest that’s just sighted an aardvark. Our car inched through the little lane that runs from Harrison Road to the gate of Presidency College. We stopped for strollers, honked at carters, dodged tiny buzzing three-wheeled carry-alls loaded with (what else?) books, then finally gave up and walked the last hundred yards to the door of the Indian Coffee House.

Our story had its beginning in a conversation a week before our visit. An uncle of mine had dismissed the College Street boi para (roughly, “neighbourhood of books”) as a flea-market for crammers’ texts and second-hand potboilers. “Can you find anything in any language that is RARE, let alone interesting?” Out of nowhere, we fixed on Jadunath Sarkar, doyen of Bengal’s historians, as the touchstone. Could we find anything by him on College Street? So it came to pass that 11 o’clock on a cloudy humid Saturday saw us stepping gingerly through puddles, wiping our faces repeatedly under the combined onslaught of humidity and a faint drizzle, glancing with unconcealed disgust at stall after stall that advertised “CBSE-ICSE-ISC text” or “Medical – JEE – CAT”. Was THIS what College Street had been reduced to? Where were the bonanzas that our parents’ generation gloated over, the pamphlet autographed by Toru Dutt or the 1898 edition of the Materia Medica?

The Coffee House lane (Bankim Chatterjee Street) is entirely devoted to textbooks. (What a waste - even during our student days some decades ago, textbooks never figured on our list of priorities.) Yet it makes historical sense. Hindu College in 1817, Sanskrit College, the Calcutta Medical College in 1835, Calcutta University and later Presidency College – these were all started on College Street or just off it in the Potoldanga area. Small wonder that the College Street boi para took root, almost 200 years ago, from the textbook trade. For more esoteric books and for the latest rage, the gentry ordered in from the booksellers in the Chowringhee area. It was only at the turn of the (previous) century that College Street’s booksellers increased the ambit of their trade. And the stories of lost treasures glimpsed in dusty piles on the pavement took root, grew, gave rise to myths and tall tales.

These tales were most often told in the Coffee House, the adopted home of generations of self-proclaimed Bengali intelligentsia. Housed in the Albert Hall (yes, of course there had to be one in the “second city of the Raj”! This one was built in 1876), this was the place to enjoy the best adda, the slowest service and the most tolerant waiters in the world. Poets, economists, politicians, charlatans, they all spent hours and days over carefully nursed cups of coffee and shared cigarettes under the slow revolving fans strung on beams between the upper floor balconies. Every Bengali of note, from Rabindranath Tagore to Amartya Sen, has been a patron. One of the most enduringly popular Bangla songs is Manna Dey’s anthem to nostalgia, Coffee House-er shei adda. Yet like most things Bengalis hold dear, it has been on the brink of oblivion for years. It took a petition from the faculty of Calcutta University and the Presidency College to keep it from being shut down in 1958. Eventually, in 1995, Mudar Patherya led an initiative for essential renovation and again in 2007, Bengal Shelter cleaned and renovated it. Today it is almost chic in its ambience. Of course there are old-timers who miss the smoke-blackened walls and the chipped Coffee Board saucers. But they still serve the most soul-satisfying greasy “mutton Afghani”. I can vouch for this because, of course, we ended our College Street expedition there.

But again the time-line jinks. The book search, yes. We pushed through the crowds on the sidewalk in our search for old books, yet all we found within that tunnel of blue polythene rain-sheets was text-books. And children’s books. And self-help books. We crossed to the other side of the road and found a different world. Piles upon piles of pulp fiction, literary criticism, photography, yearbooks. Obviously this side, along the wall of Presidency College, is more fun. Subol Moitra from Medinipur peeped shyly from his book-walled alcove and edified us about the complicated system of rental and sub-rental that governed the economy of these six by four “locations”. But where oh where, among this rubble of Harold Robbins and Fashion Photography, were we to find anything by the great Jadunath Sarkar? Back to the other side we went, picking our way between reddish-chocolate mini-buses, bright yellow taxis and rickshaws with schoolchildren peeking out from behind the inevitable blue polythene sheet.

From an article by Amit Roy I found that six bookshops opened between 54 College Street and 70 College Street in the 1870s. One of these was Gurudas Chatterjee’s Bengal Medical Library, which is now the venerable institution of Chatterjee & Sons, right opposite the gate of Presidency College. But alas, the harried gentleman behind the counter was positive that they had nothing by Jadunath Sarkar. He could try and get it for us if we left an order, but that was not within the rules of the game. On we went, past an open shop-front that revealed no counter within, just piles of books in the semi-dark, like the Xiqian terracotta army waiting to be brought back to life. Craning my neck to check the shop-signs farther down, I saw “Dasgupta & Co. (P) Ltd.” Why had I not thought of this earlier? For many years Arabinda Dasgupta has been my go-to man when I want a book that’s not available over the counter, but we had never met in person, we had always been voices on the phone. We ventured in and asked for him. Within minutes we were sipping coffee at a small table in a room that seemed to be built with books. If one looked closely one could see an occasional patch of wall or a piece of furniture, but the foreground, background and middle ground consisted entirely of books and nothing else. The bonus lay in overhearing the impassioned conversations on the telephone. “Drugs and Cosmetics, have you sent that to Bombay yet? You should have it by Tuesday morning, call me if it hasn’t reached you.” “Where did you put that Swift on Grammar? Somebody from Raj Bhavan will be here in an hour to collect it.” “Hanif on Accountancy? Yes, we have a couple of copies, but it’ll take some time to get it to you in London.” The total experience, the combination of focussed business and casual erudition, was somewhere between a library and a stock exchange.

Coffee done with, we got down to the serious business of Finding Sir Jadunath. “But of course, I’m sure I saw something by him.” And Mr. Dasgupta shot off to hunt among the shelves, returning for a moment to hand me, as a sort of appetizer or amuse bouche, a collection of essays by F. Max Mueller (I point to India). Within minutes he returned triumphant, bearing a book in a slightly battered yellow cover – Introducing India, edited by K.N. Bagchi and W.G. Griffiths (yes, THAT Griffiths), first published in 1947 and reprinted in 1990 by Dr. Ashin DasGupta, Administrator, Asiatic Society, 1 Park Street, Calcutta. Seeing our brows furrowed, he opened it and pointed to an article on Indian history by, yes yes YES, Jadunath Sarkar! Our quest was over!

But not our expedition. We were led on a tour of the three floors of the shop. Up a spiral staircase of wrought-iron, through old doors under raftered ceilings, and in every room, books and more books. If there is a heaven on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this! Books the way they can be savoured best, with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Encyclopaedia of Body Building lying atop a history of football on the Calcutta maidan and next to an anthology of travelogues from Central Asia, with In search of an equation sharing floor space with an illustrated history of Central Indian tribes. A balcony shaded by a gnarled old neem tree, with a view of College Street on one side, and on the other a wire-mesh window behind which a dignified old gent tapped away at a word-processor but with a trusty typewriter beside him as a back-up. It took an effort of will to leave, but deadlines beckoned. We took our leave and hied ourselves to the Coffee House to celebrate, where Javed Khan, in cummerbund and turban, posed for us after he brought us (as expected) the best mutton afghani and the worst cold coffee possible.

College Street had not done with us yet. As we descended the uneven stairs, we noticed a series of posters on the wall – “Mohamichhil (Great Procession) on –th July”. But that’s today! We’ll be stuck here for hours! Our well-fed saunter changed to a sprint. Sure enough, traffic was halted outside, a posse of policemen in white uniforms were massed along the tram-tracks and the head of a procession complete with banners was visible 50 metres to the south, opposite the University gate. Fortunately our car was parked farther north, our ungainly canter was just fast enough to get to it before the procession started moving and we were able to speed away before the road was closed off. This was one time we didn’t stop to find out “what happened next”. But true to form, College Street had started another story before we had quite finished the one before.

(Stodgy, yes, but I am reliably informed that some version of this has appeared in an on-flight magazine)

Bhairavi for my balcony

It’s still too early for the glow I’m looking for. But in the coolness before full sunrise, the air itself is green, cloaked with the washed-clean fragrance of our trees. I place the jar of biscuits on the balcony table, arrange the book and the phone and the ashtray, draw back the chair and freeze in sudden realisation.
I am becoming my father.
This is exactly what he does when he’s here. The deliberate arrangement of things on the table, placing the chair at a precise angle, one ankle hooked over the opposite knee as he waits for his tea. I’m even drinking tea these days instead of my usual dark fresh-brew. But my father drinks Darjeeling, just so. Not thick milky pau patti.
And he has never in his life worn psychedelic parachute-silk boxers.

On one branch of my krishnachura, the bark has acquired a metallic sheen, more bronze than gold. The sun is breaking free of the horizon’s haze. Seven shades of green come to life over the balcony railing. A tiny bird flutters out of the champa tree, confused by a falling leaf. The sunlight is papery, wrapping itself round the first wisps of smoke from the laundryman’s earthen stove in the next lane. The morning smells fresher, yet more languid than the soggy bouquet of the monsoons. Autumn in Calcutta.
The climbing sun glints into my eyes, batters on the morning coolness, warms my neck until a slow trickle of sweat signals the end of dawn. A bicycle bell drops into the pool of birdsong, I can almost see its ripples in slow motion. Then a rolled-up cylinder of newspapers arcs onto the balcony and lands with a satisfying thwack. My tea arrives.
The day holds promise.

Hack wok

(Just an example of what I do for pelf. Published under the imaginative title "Wok our way")

In the 1970s, a Calcutta lad moved to Bombay and ended up performing as a limbo dancer. He moved on to work as a chef in Geoffrey’s and eventually set up his own restaurant. Which became, to put it mildly, very popular. Because it took Indian Chinese upmarket. This, boys and girls, was long before you could add a handful of chopped coriander and a dash of turmeric to chicken broth and pass it off as fusion cuisine. The man in question was (of course) Nelson Wang, but his contribution to the culinary map goes beyond China Garden. Nelson Wang gave the world Chicken Manchurian.

Now Chicken Manchurian has nothing to do with Manchuria (and in some versions, sadly enough, precious little to do with chicken). Wang himself has said that he named this mongrel dish after the region of Manchao which is traditionally viewed as barbaric. But the simple expedient of soaking batter-fried chicken dumplings in a spicy chilli soy sauce opened the flood-gates for the million “Chinese” restaurants that now serve “Hakka noodles”, “golden fried prawns”, “sweet and sour chicken” and “four treasure vegetables”. And, of course, everything from chicken to cauliflower “Manchurian”.

This is the essence of what we proudly call “Calcutta Chinese” food – any faintly Chinese ingredients spiced up with large amounts of fresh garlic, ginger, and hot chillies, “like ramped-up curries minus the ground spices”, as New York’s Village Voice put it. It may not be Chinese, but boy, does it sell! And it originated in an eastern corner of Calcutta called Tangra, which is special because it is possibly India’s only Chinatown At least three Chinese eateries in New York named “Tangra” attest to the universal popularity of Tangra style food.

Purists like the formidable Ram Ray, one of Calcutta’s premier foodies, tend to look askance at this version. For them, authentic Chinese cuisine in Calcutta means either the Bengal Club, where the signature dish is the sesame prawn toast, or the Chinoiserie at the Taj. The Pan Asian at the ITC Sonar Bangla, as its name suggests, is not limited to China alone. Chefs Pramod and Harpavan recommend the sautéed jumbo prawns and pine seeds in hot garlic chilli sauce (xiang shong ren xia ren. What, you didn’t want to know?!) and the chien tzu, wok fried vegetables with rice wine and pepper.

The Chinoiserie prides itself on its authenticity – even the chillies for the chilli paste are flown in from China. Kim pao is the Shanghai style duck at the Chinoiserie, spicy and flavourful. They also serve an aromatic crispy duck, but the piece de resistance is the Beijing duck with Mandarin pancakes, served usually with sweet bean sauce but with goy sin sauce available on demand. If you can’t make it to Quan Ju De in Beijing itself, this comes pretty close. (Having tried both, I can vouch for it.) Chefs Lian and Srinivas wax lyrical about their dim sums. Having tasted these, I can see their point. Served wrapped in reed leaves in traditional Chinese fashion, these include the authentic glutinous rice with pork, the yang bao or rasin bread with mildly spiced lamb (which stays fresh and succulent inside the dough) and a real work of art, the hargao or Cantonese dumpling with a shell so thin it’s translucent and one can see the pink fresh shrimps inside.

A number of Taj personnel have struck out on their own, the best known being the Red Hot Chilli Pepper chain. Their fried rice was superb, mainly because they cooked the rice in stock and not water. Nowadays, however, they have had to adapt to the Indian palate rather than stick with authenticity. Perhaps authenticity is affordable at the Chinoiserie alone, where a meal for two would set you back by at least 3500 rupees.

Mainland China on Gurusaday Road also serves dim sums including hargao, but they are closer to the Bengali heart and palate (and pocket!). Their crackling spinach – ideally eaten with honey ginger sauce – is quite wonderful, but they pride themselves on the steamed fish in lemon soya sauce and the jumbo prawns in chilli bean sauce, both innovations by chef Rajesh Dubey. In other words, variations on a Chinese air, to suit the Bangali babus.

The premier fish dish, however, is served by Josephine Huang of Eu Chu. Tucked away on the first floor behind a petrol pump on Ganesh Chandra Avenue, this eatery, started in the 1910s by Mr. Huang’s grandmother, is a cult among Calcutta foodies. Josephine’s steamed soya fish is different from the usual Calcutta Chinese. A whole young bhetki is grilled in a sauce of rice wine and ginger with black beans, then served with scallions, chives and Chinese parsley. Her signature dish, Josephine noodles, is a mixed platter of pan-fried, slightly crisp noodles and mixed meat in an egg-based sauce with a hint of soya. Not found in China, perhaps, but very good indeed. Eu Chu (meaning Europe) is also one of the last bastions of a Calcutta favourite, chimney soup. This was most famously associated with How Hua on Mirza Ghalib Street (Free School Street as was), but that venerable institution, alas, has given up the ghost. So now Josephine Huang will serve your chimney soup made to order, with the unique flavour imparted by the charcoal grill in the centre.

The standard Tangra fare these days is more Shyambazar than Shanghai, more Patiala than Peking. The more popular eateries – Kafulok, Beijing, Golden Joy - are full of Bengali clans clamouring for what is essentially Bangali food with noodles added, spiced with cumin, coriander, and turmeric. Some dishes even feature yoghurt! Dishes are by default served with generous helpings of gravy, although they can also be ordered "dry" or "without gravy".

There’s a short-hand to interpreting the menus here. Chilli means hot and batter-fried, Manchurian dishes (even cabbage Manchurian!) come in a sweet and salty brown sauce, and Szechwan dishes come covered in a spicy red sauce. Large portions, strong on the palate, but not the taste of China. If you want that in Tangra, you have to seek out Kim Fa (The Old Man’s Place or Old Man Kim’s, though the ancient proprietor’s real name is Hsien). This little eatery serves beef belly in fermented lime with vegetables, or fried and served with rice wine – hot favourite with the local Chinese population. You can also get whole roast suckling pig, Chinese style, but this requires an order to be placed two days in advance. One day to marinate it, one day to cook it slow. I must make special mention of Auntie Chung and her husband, who don’t run a restaurant but cater a fabulous ten-course spread at Chinese weddings. Starting with roast pork, this gastronomical orgy also includes steamed chicken, authentic four treasure vegetables or chow ka tan, fried fish in a hot and sour sauce, seafood and meat dumplings with fried bread, sui mai, mushrooms with shark’s fin, and kwang, which is scallops with egg and carrots. Possibly a test of the newly-wed couple’s powers of endurance!

Calcutta’s Chinatown was earlier centred round Tiretti Bazaar in the heart of the trading district, and the Chinese breakfast there used to be the stuff of legend. These days it is a pale shadow, with a few straggling stalls set up in the early morning on the sidewalk behind Poddar Court. Most of them sell greasy fried abominations that are neither Chinese nor appetizing, but some still offer good sui mai (though I’d steer clear of the prawn), noodle soup, moon cakes or nyat biang, and variations of the Chinese fried bread, bao, best eaten with kongee or “rice soup”. Not haute cuisine, but substantial and very cheap – you can eat your fill for fifty rupees.

There used to be some family-run restaurants in this area too. I still remember the foo yung rice and kup tai mei foon (rice noodles with what I thought was pork liver, turned out to have kidneys and heart as well!) in Tai Wah on Synagogue Street, but it’s closed down now. Chin Wah in the next lane is still open, but it’s just a more wholesome version of the sidewalk stalls outside Writers’ Building that peddle “chow mein” during the lunch hour. In fact most of the Chinese eateries of the 70s and 80s are now closed or made over. Peiping on Park Street was the place to go to once upon a time. They served a wonderful breaded pork chop that, for strange reasons, was labeled “French” on the menu. Gone with the wind, alas, as is the quality food at Jimmy’s Kitchen near the Theatre Road corner which once claimed to have invented sweet and sour chicken. (The essential ingredient, of course, is pineapple chunks). Over on Central Avenue – sorry, C.R. Avenue now – the venerable Chung Wah still retains its unhurried charm and the same staff who served my father. Their Mandarin crab and chicken rice in oyster sauce are not only flavours of the past, they are also delectable examples of Calcutta Chinese cuisine.

Which only proves my basic point. Chinese food as she is ate in Calcutta may taste more of the Indian karhai than the classic wok, but it is still a unique culinary experience and well worth trying.