An insightful account of great hopes and dashed dreams
Kushanava Choudhury’s The Epic City, an engaging and delightful portrait of Calcutta, is a literary attempt to understand the decaying modern metropolis through its everyday stories. An excerpt.
Pages: 272 Price: Rs 389
One of my first memories of Durba is of seeing her in a coffee shop in New Haven, curled up in a big armchair, reading a novel. We had met as PhD students at Yale and become friends. She was studying anthropology while I studied political theory. Among our closest friends were Colombians, South Africans, Turks and Spaniards. Durba had grown up in New Delhi. Her father was Bengali and his side of the family all lived in Calcutta. Yet when we eventually became a couple, in the cosmopolitan cocoon of graduate school, our common background seemed almost incidental.
In the fall of our fourth year of graduate school, Durba went to India to do a year of field research for her dissertation on how globalisation had changed the Bengal countryside. That winter, she was living with her grandparents in Calcutta, so I planned a visit to the city.
Her grandparents did N TIO FIC N NO not know of our relationship. So, after many months apart, we reunited in Calcutta on a street corner. She was wearing a fitted T-shirt and tight jeans. I watched her as she came up the sidewalk to where I was standing. Any public display of affection, or even holding hands, was socially taboo. We just stood there, looking at each other lustfully. In Calcutta, Durba and I felt like actors who had wandered off the set of an indie romantic comedy and onto an instructional video shoot for the Taliban. In the few zones where romance was allowed, guards were on the prowl to offset any hints of an excessive public display of affection.
“Sitting and touching are forbidden here!” a guard barked at us at a shopping arcade that seemed to exist precisely so that couples could sit in pairs and whisper sweet nothings to each other. In most places, a kiss or a caress could get you booked for indecency or, more commonly, could be used as a pretext to extort a bribe. Instead, in designated areas like Rabindra Sadan, you could sit two by two on benches with your arms around one another, feeling lustfully constipated.
One day, we were passing by what looked like an ordinary city park, except it had a ticket counter at the gate. “What’s inside the park?” I asked the ticket seller, wondering why he charged admission. “Inside,” he said with a meaningful smile, “is a park.”
We paid and strolled in. Sure enough, there were trees, shrubs, trails, a lake. It was a hot afternoon and initially we seemed to be the only ones there. Then, everywhere we looked, we The book provides an intellectual and emotional intelligence to help individuals make informed choices. The authors speak to the couple trying to become pregnant, the woman contemplating an abortion, and the student searching for sound information about human sex and reproduction. noticed umbrellas. They were resting against the boundary wall, among the shrubs, along the lakeside— all opened up like shields. Occasionally a man would stand up from behind one such shield, zipping up his pants, followed by a woman.
Durba l ooked at me, amazed: “My uncle comes here for his morning constitutional!” she said. In fact, by late afternoon we spotted a few old timers at the park benches; some were even pretending to read the newspaper. Probably their families were entirely unaware of their voyeuristic perambulations in what we took to calling “Umbrella Park”.
Umbrella Park typified what we felt was Calcutta’s conspiracy against romance. Sex outside marriage in any form still remains unseen and is unspeakable in the drawing rooms of the bhodrolok, i.e. the city’s dominant Bengali middle class. If you are an unmar- ried couple, no one will even rent you a house. Group sex, hooker sex and premarital sex are all more or less equivalent and all consigned to the netherworld of illicit activity. Just as most men smoke cigarettes, but not in front of their elders, lovers are free to do as they like, so long as they keep it out of sight. Prop open an umbrella in the middle of a public park, and well, anything goes. Or hire a boat on the Ganga, which comes with a bed and a boatman and can be booked by the hour. Or slip into one of the city’s old restaurants which still have “family cabins”— booths which can be closed off with a drawn curtain. Like lovers the world over who are desperate with longing, most couples in Calcutta seek recourse in hourly hotels.
There a young unmarried couple is on the same footing with a boss and his secretary or a prostitute and her john. When police raid such places, all are equally vulnerable, because none are married.
The great Indian family remains the organising principle of modern Ben- gali society. It stands on two pillars: get married, have a child. The “get married, have a child” formula is applied as widely as penicillin. Depressed, unemployed, gay? Get married, have a child. Once you have taken steps one and two, society will absorb you as a recognisable unit and extend its myriad protections.
No matter the situation, a marriage can always literally be arranged between strangers, with the express objective of making babies. Defy the social structure and you may find yourself with your pants down in Umbrella Park.
In New Haven, monogamy, not marriage, was the defining norm. For Durba and I, the lack of a marriage certificate had had little bearing on our shared life. In Calcutta it made all the difference.
One day, we were passing by what looked like an ordinary city park, except it had a ticket counter at the gate. “What’s inside the park?” I asked the ticket seller, wondering why he charged admission. “Inside,” he said with a meaningful smile, “is a park.”
Excerpted with permission from The Epic City, by Kushanava Choudhary, published by Bloomsbury Publishing India