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.

The Garden of Ease

The first thing I saw, after we’d crossed the culvert strewn with brickbats and concrete chunks, was half a human brain lying in the dust.

.. to meet the faces that you meet

Charukesi muses on portrait photography.

Which is serendipitous. On my recent travels, a friend told me I don’t take enough pictures of people. So I tried. And now, in the wake of Charukesi’s post, I have questions.

Is it portrait photography if it’s not just the face?

Or if the face is incidental to the context?

What if the person is too far away to see the face?

Or not looking at the camera?

Turned away from the camera, even?

How about a portrait without faces?

I suppose the basic question is whether the subject is more important than the story.

Your views, please (pun intended).

With THIS one below, there’s no confusion. I’m rather proud of it

Midnight shakes the memory

I was goofing off, replying to comments on Facebook, when I realized that most of the answers that come to mind are lines from songs. So then I got to thinking (and then I got to weeping / I really had a flash this time / Gonna set my watch back to it / ‘cause you know I’ve been through it …) about lines that resonate in the memory (as a madman shakes a dead geranium, and yes, I KNOW that’s not from a song).

What fun. Let’s play at lists. Lines – lines from songs - that you think are great. Or maybe almost great. Or maybe just lines that stick in the mind. (Nothing from Robindro Shongeet, that needs a whole separate volume.) And while we’re at it, cokernuts all round if you get the sources for all of mine.

· How terribly strange to be seventy

· And the flowers bloom like madness in the spring

· Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose

· In sooney andherey aankhon mein / aansoo ke jagah aata hai dhuan

· Jee mein aata hai tere daman mein sar chhupa kar hum rote rahein

· I sit by the window and I watch the cars roll by / I fear I’ll do some damage one fine day

· Jo aankh se naa tapka woh lahoo kya hai

· Forsaken, almost human, he sank beneath his wisdom like a stone

· Ko jon aar hridoy diye gaaitey jaane

· And the Indian said, Nothing at all

· Wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave. No-one was saved.

· Just the way it changes, like the shoreline and the sea

· Ei aaNdhaarey, megher-o chhaya-e, akasho paarey

· The arc of a love affair / His hands rolling down her hair / Love like lightning shaking till it moans

· Hum thahar jaayen jahan, usko shahar kahte hain

· To dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free / silhouetted by the sea

· Bhuley jaao phike chNapa rong ti tomaye manaye bhari

· It’s the dirty story of a dirty man, and his clinging wife doesn’t understand

· I was lying in a burned out basement with the full moon in my eyes

· And how many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn’t see

· Borney gondhey chhondey geeti-te, hridoye diyechho dola

· But she breaks like a little girl

· And so it goes, and so will you too I suppose

More to come, I’m sure.

Idea from KM - This Can Be A Meme.

Meh, Mame, May We?

Living in the past

Saturday night at the Calcutta Club. I associate the members there with soulful swaying to Robindroshongeet with their eyes shut (or even worse, half-shut to indicate a kaalchaaraal intoxication), but this was an evening with Amit Kumar. He would have preferred to be known as Amit Ganguly, son of the far more famous Abhas Kumar Ganguly aka Kishore Kumar, but he had to accede to the demands of the Hindi film circuit.

He started with the same musical salutation his father used to start HIS stage performances. Then went on to belt out song after song from his father’s oeuvre. His voice was full, chest-deep, melodious. His pleasure in music-making was obvious. He looked at least 10 years younger than his 57. And he dished out nuggets between the songs, anecdotes about how “amader Ponchu” (Pancham) lifted a mukhda here, an antara there, from sources as diverse as Frank Sinatra and Rajasthani folk tunes. Yes, even within the same song (Raju chal Raju, now which film was that? Dharmendra in a travois behind a white horse - Azaad, I think). He brought down the house with his account of how Sapan Chakraborty had composed a soulful tune for Amitabh Bachchan in “Zameer” – mimicking him, eyes half-closed, teeth protruding slightly – and Kishore Kumar had trashed it right away. “THIS song? For Amitabh Bachchan? Won’t do! What? YOU are the composer, and you have to ask ME what to do? STEAL a tune! Lift it!” And then proceeded to modify a Nat King Cole song (something about falling leaves) to produce Tum bhi chalo, hum bhi chalein.

Right through the evening it was evident how Amit Kumar idolized his father, but what was touching was the way he referred to him as a friend, someone whom he could fight and disagree with but a person who never lost his respect. He sang his own songs too – Bade acchey lagtey hain, Yaad aa rahi hai and on my request, Mayabini from the 1996 album – but his heart seemed to be in his father’s memories. Sumit Kumar, his brother, younger by 30 years, came on afterwards, but sadly his voice just doesn’t make the grade. I left at that point, wondering why for a man who can sing like Amit Kumar does, the biggest hit in recent years is ­Dil mein baji guitar.

Clear and present danger

They were like weathered cliffs. With eyes like cave-mouths, I never could make out what was happening inside.

Two men. Different countries, different years. But the two men that I recall, in all my life, who inspired fear when one looked upon their faces.

* * *

Moscow, 2003. A* had taken it upon himself to take me around, show me the sights, keep me from starving to death every two hours. He was interesting. School drop-out, self-made millionaire, natty, vain, disarmingly charming at times, two roving eyes, and an evident streak of ruthlessness. He’d made Moscow his bailiwick. Not bad for a Bangali boy from the alleys of North Calcutta. He showed me a side of Moscow I’d never have imagined on my own, let alone seen. Cocky, cool, self-assured, nothing he couldn’t handle.

Till the evening he took me back to his place. And found a man waiting in his den. Sitting on a chair with a half-glass of neat amber. I noted the guy hadn’t chosen either of the very comfortable armchairs. He was astride the chair from the writing table, one arm laid on the back holding the glass of whisky, the other in his lap. A* stopped in his tracks at the sight. Then he smiled a slow careful smile, said a few words in Russian and stepped back to hang up his coat. I nodded at the chap, stood my ground and decided against smiling. This guy looked like he didn’t DO smiling.

We were introduced. He stood up to shake my hand. Which was educative. He put down his drink instead of just transferring it to his other hand. One hand free at all times? Probably. His palm enveloped my hand, it felt like an industrial gauntlet, his knuckles were the size of pigeon eggs. He wore a full-sleeved plaid shirt buttoned right up, jeans with a broad belt, very elegant boots of supple leather. Which meant only his hands and his face were visible. About 5’10”, built lean, but his movements showed the animal in him, flat muscles moving smoothly over each other like sheets of armour. Hard, that was the overall impression. Hard and elemental, something primal about him, feral.

He said something to A*, his voice surprisingly smooth, quiet. A* glanced at me almost involuntarily, looked back, shook his head slightly, spoke in Russian. I took the hint and went into the other room. About 15 minutes later A* came through, said the guy was leaving, would I like to say Bye to him? I did. He didn’t smile this time either, he kept one hand on my shoulder as he shook the other. (Did I look like I could use any kind of shake-hand grip on this walking pile of rock?!) Then he vanished through the service door.

I didn’t ask any questions. A* told me of his own as we sipped his Talisker (smoke on the palate, fire in the throat). There are (were?) 5 major gangs in Moscow. One of them was Chechen. The others didn’t mess with them. They were crazy. Reckless. Killed for the slightest transgression. Ruled through fear, not favour. And the Mayor of Moscow, Luzhkov, had come to power through their support. This man was one of the commanders of the Chechen mafia, near the top if not at the very top. Beslan had not yet happened, but the Chechnyan conflict had been in the news for nearly 4 years. I said nothing, listened.

And thought of the man’s face. Hard, seamed, expressionless, with eyes that revealed nothing. More than the impression of physical capability, the man seemed resolute. Unflappable. If he had to take down a railway locomotive or a T-Rex with his bare hands, he’d give it a cool-headed try. If he had to kill his brother, he’d weigh the benefit-cost ratio, not the emotional damage.

This man was fear.

* * *

19--, Kashmir. The insurgency had just flared up. Fifteen of us had volunteered for a “study tour” dreamt up by the Director of the LBSNAA, a scenario that drove our Course Director round the bend. “You bloody bandicoots, any of you so much as stubs his toe out there and you’ve HAD it for the rest of your training, you hear me? I don’t want the national press going to town about young officers injured in a crossfire!” On our first full day in Srinagar, we saw the tiny crater in the road where a man had died 48 hours earlier. We knew belly-tightening fear as we accompanied a patrol through the close-leaning, blank-eyed, shuttered-window alleys of Batmaloo. But those are other stories for other days.

We spent a fair amount of time with the National Security Guard group. They gave us a run-down on their organization, training, weaponry, ops. I was young enough to drool over their Heckler & Kosch carbines, but they didn’t offer us a chance to try them out. (We were bloody civilians, below contempt. They weren’t very complimentary about the SPG either. The NSG are the ops wing - apparently now called the SAG - while the Special Protection Group are deployed exclusively for VIP security.) One of the things we learnt was that the NSG operate in groups of three called “hits”, each group trained for a specific part of an operation. For example, in a storming operation, one hit of three men would just effect entry – the first to open the door with a suitable explosive charge, the second to move in and provide cover, the third to enter and clear the immediate area. Each operative is issued a specialised weapon – anything from a recoil-less rifle to a needle gun – and carries another side-arm of choice.

So I was looking around to see what side-arms they chose to carry, the overwhelming favourite was the Heckler & Kosch 9 mm. pistol (clip of 14) though at least two carried machine-pistols, when I notice one man who didn’t carry any side-arm that I could see. Big guy, at least 3 inches over 6 feet, I couldn’t see his face because the bandanna was flapping over it in the wind over the Dal Lake. I turned to Captain R (a show-boater if ever there was one, but he could put 4 bullets in a man’s head at 12 ms. In 5 seconds. Starting blind) and asked him about it.

He called to the guy, a name from the hills of Kumaon. The man turned around. And I was looking in the face of a killer. I didn’t know his back story, he hadn’t said a word. But one look at him, the broad immobile face, the narrowed eyes, and I just felt in my gut that this man could not only kill a man if he had to, he’d do it without a tremor. He might even look forward to it.

R* said “Hathiyaar dikhao”, show us your weapon. The man bent his knees slightly, his left hand went near his ankle-high boots, and suddenly he was holding a knife. A gutting knife, blade at least 10 inches with a serrated edge, handle bound with a leather strip. Then he flipped it over and caught it by the blade. The throwing grip. He looked at me, no expression at all, and swung it, the handle moving less than an inch each way. And I knew that if I pushed him, expressed the slightest doubt of his ability, he might just prove it then and there. I froze.
He still didn’t say a word.

I knew fear.

* * *

Snippet

I think I was about 6 years old. They’d come down the road a little before 7 in the morning, when I was just about awake, and from the bedroom where I lurked under the covers for those oh-so-sweet ten extra minutes of sleep on a schoolday morning I’d hear them coming. They always sang the same song – Bhojo Gourango, koho Gourango, loho Gourango’r naam re”. “Sing of Gouranga, speak of Gouranga, take Gouranga’s name.” The tune that has been used by Chandrabindoo for the satire “Aaji ei Boshonto diney”.

An old man and a boy. The man seemed infinitely old to my 6-year-old eyes; when I review my memory, I realise he must have been about 50. The boy would have been a year or two older than me, or perhaps short rations made him look younger. But his clothes were always clean, unlike the draggled rags of his bearded companion. His voice was very sweet, soaring above the man’s tenor in a tracery of song. I’d run out to the balcony, lean over the railing to hear them. They always walked from the Raja Basanta Roy road crossing towards Lake Market, perhaps to sing for a cup of tea and biscuit before the tea stalls on Janak Road. The first few times, they’d look up at me, the boy would put out his hand with the palm upwards without interrupting his song. I went and asked my mother for a coin. She gave me 25P, a denomination that I don’t see these days and yet a fair amount for alms back then. The boy caught it deftly as I tossed it from the balcony, raised the hand to his forehead in salute and walked on, still singing.

It became a habit. Twice or thrice a week I’d hear their voices raised in song and run out to the balcony with a 25P coin, then watch them wander off towards the market. In the year or so before we moved to Delhi, I never spoke to them, never asked them any questions. They never broke off their song to speak to me. But it lingers in my memory like a grainy shot from an old film. Complete with slightly scratchy soundtrack.

Aftermath

So Democracy has Spoken.

I’m sorry, I missed some of her early lines because I was busy chivvying a supply chain. Of EVMs. May Cthulhu bless the Election Commission and their tech progress, 13 rounds of counting were completed between 8 a.m. and a quarter to 12. Unimaginable back in the day, I remember the counting in the Simultaneous Elections in May 1996 took THREE DAYS and most of us went into rehab afterwards. By the afternoon of the second day my voice was gone and I was giving orders in sign language; one of my major achievements was fitting an air circulator to the ass of just about every counting supervisor and assistant – not a luxury when the temperature was above 45 Celsius with over 90% humidity. Three of our counting staff ended up in hospital, in a neighbouring district one died.

And this time, although the first two rounds took nearly an hour in one Assembly segment, 10 more rounds and a bit were over in less than 3 hours after that. Yay for chivvying.

**** ****

Sometimes this gorment job is particklerly irritating because it would be against my service rules to discuss the election results on a public forum. Which leads to major restraint.

But I can discuss 'em with friends. Which I did in Delhi, from 3 in the morning on Sunday till it was time for my flight home. Other issues came up (along with coffee, cigarillos and a rather good toasted ham sandwich), and I place them here for comment.

1 – Tom Friedman is an ass. Not only because distances are actually greater in a flat world, but because every book of his goes beyond incoherent to inchoate.

2 – Women in the Punjab, or at least a specific part thereof, were observed to carry themselves very well. “Trod the ling like a buck in spring” and all that (or should that be “doe in spring”? Too many options). The men tend to slouch. (Subsidiary point – is there a real difference in ... ummm …tandrusti, or have ALL the women discovered the Wonderbra?)

3 – Every single country in the continent of Africa is FUBAR, governance as we know it is non-existent and only Alexander McCall Smith’s locale has a modicum of peace.

4 – Anthony McAuliffe totally rocked, and Panther Soup works well both as war memoir and travelogue. I’m reading it now and I agree. Sample quote – “To live a la Bourguignonne is to enjoy a life of red wine and cream, and to die at the age of 42 under somebody else’s wife.”

5 – When you have a possessive cat who hates it when you go away, and also pees on your luggage to show her disapproval, getting past sniffer dogs at airports is hellish. I mean, try out that explanation on any random copper

6 – Being arrested can be a surprisingly civilised interaction. This was a student demonstration in the aftermath of the Bhopal tragedy, the police had orders from on high to round up the demonstrators and hated it far more than the arrested people because they (the police) had to pull out records from the previous 30 years to charge these boys and girls (few of them over 25) with unsolved crimes. They kept apologizing to the detainees. The traumatic part was taking a dump while handcuffed to another person.

6a – “Well, if you count East and West Germany as different countries – which they were at that time – I’ve been arrested in 13 of them. Not counting India.”

7 - "I stand by what I said, that woman WAS naked when I walked in and he DID leave me to calm her down. Incidentally, she was Puerto Rican, not Cuban, and her name was Pagol. Just goes to show."

I do have interesting friends.

Pumpin'

In my armchair, feet up on the table, morning sunlight through the lace curtains. And the hoarse drone of a pump.

A morning sound that reaches back through the years. A squat aggressive Kirloskar in its grooved casing, under the stairs in the first house I knew. A seemingly effete Tullu in its own barred alcove behind the kitchen in Salt Lake, the object of my father’s anxiety. A mysterious and temperamental machine in an outhouse in Purulia. And now this one that used to choke and hiccup like an asthmatic, till Mr. Handyman came round and transformed it into a boringly predictable monotone. Continuity made audible.

Those rooms

His face gleamed with a thin sheen of sweat. Behind him was a wall, green-painted, with a crack running diagonally up to one corner. I remember that wall, that room. Or its twin. The camera did not move from the BDO’s face, but I know that just outside the camera frame there is a warped wooden window with bars across it, and somewhere above that window there lurks a fat gecko. A foot from the ceiling is a concrete shelf piled with old registers, receipt-books, booklets on seed-kits and polio eradication, a small trunk once used for cash, two mysterious polythene bags slick with some kind of grease, and a set of tubes and iron thingies that were apparently part of a tube-well assembly.

I know those rooms. I used to hate them. The smell of damp would mingle with the smell of sweat and the smell of hopelessness as I fought to stay awake through one futile meeting after another. That was when I started smoking, each carefully-spaced cigarette a milestone, something to alleviate the stupefying monotony of the working day. The setting sun would bring fat Murmu with his jeep, a promise of deliverance that speeded up my ‘disposal of files’. Sometimes the lights would go off as evening fell. Then ego would battle with irritation – should I clear the whole damn bunch while mosquitoes pinged in my ears and sweat trickled uneasily inside my shirt? Or should I ride off in the jeep with one foot out on the running-board to catch the breeze, leaving the files to moulder till the next day?

For the first few kilometres of the homeward journey we would rush down the tunnel of the jeep’s headlights. Far out beyond the silent dark of the fields there would be scattered lights, marking houses and huts where unknown families blew conch-shells for the evening prayer or gathered round a flickering television. But the road itself would be dark until we reached the highway. Once across the highway, the station road was crowded and lit almost to the point of brightness. At the station I would lounge in the jump-seat or potter around buying fruit, perhaps smoke my last cigarette of the day while I waited for the Better Half to appear, one of the hundred-odd dark shapes streaming off the 7:10 from the city.

Years later, there would be other rooms, other drives, other days meandering into tired sticky evenings that itched under the skin. There would be others in the BDO's chair, some young and earnest, some old and secure in the knowledge of their own limited options. I like to think that the memories of my three months as BDO shaped my interactions with them. I hope the pity did not show.