An image from the USA

You will find this painting (Gas, 1940, oil on canvass, 26” x 40”) by Edward Hopper in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. What you see here is a photograph of the original taken with a digital camera. Of the many paintings and other images that I have seen in the US, this one seems to catch the essence of the country with rare insight.

There is only one man in the wide open space … A vast country where very few people live. (The cities are exceptions.) Another implicit message is Americans’ love for cars and roads. This country has a fantastic network of highways and every individual, from 16 to 86, drives. A person under 21 cannot buy alcohol here, but one is eligible for a driving license at the age of 16.

The contrast between natural and artificial lights adds an element of drama to the picture. But as I looked at the painting for a long moment, what overwhelmed me was the loneliness of the filling station attendant. The partly hidden and apparently unimportant character is a typical American elderly man: lonely and unsupported, he has to fend for himself. Many in the US cannot afford to retire even when they are 70, because the cost of living, particularly the cost of medical care, is prohibitive. And adult offspring almost never live with their parents.

Consequently, many people go through a long and forlorn evening in their lives. You will often find these men on the roads of New York, talking to themselves. You will find them sitting at railway station food courts with an empty coffee cup in front, reading an old newspaper, solving a crossword puzzle, or busily noting down nothing on a jotting pad.

The man in the picture must be tired and listless after a long day. Perhaps no one is waiting for him at home. A few hours later, when night descends, if he is still alone, he might recall this Bob Dylan song:

Though I know that evenin’s empire has returned into sand,
Vanished from my hand,
Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping.
My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet,
I have no one to meet
And the ancient empty street's too dead for dreaming.

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
I'm not sleepy and there ain't no place I'm going to.

Edward Hopper (1882 – 1967) was a prominent American realist painter who is famous for his personal vision of modern American life. He brought out the stark realities of human suffering during the great depression like no one else has possibly done. Like all great painters and writers, what he leaves unsaid is more important than what he says explicitly.

Radha Ballabh Gope, a postscript

Some of you will recall that I posted a tribute to Late Radhaballabh Gope, a revolutionary freedom fighter, whom I knew when I was a child. If you haven't read it, I request you to read the post The first rebel now.

This photograph and the following information has been found on the website of Andaman Cellular Jail.

Radha Ballabh Gope

Arms and Explosives Act

Born 1897, Domeshpur, Faridpur, Bangladesh , s/o Late Madanmohan Gope businessman. Read upto intermediate. At the age of 13 joined the Anusheelan Samity. Arrested in 01.09.1933 with arms. Sentenced to 7 years prison term under Arms Act & Explosives Act. Deported to Andamans.. Joined second hunger strike. Repatriated in January 1938. Participated in the hunger strike in Dum Dum Central jail in 1939 July duration 36 days. After the expiry of the sentence arrested under Defense of India rules. Released after the termination of the Second World War in 1945. Total jail period 12 years.

Please come to Boston

Please come to Boston for the springtime
I'm staying here with some friends
And they've got lots of room
You can sell your paintings on the sidewalk
By a cafe where I hope to be workin soon
Please come to Boston
She said No, Boy you come home to me
And she said, Rambling boy why don't you settle down
Boston ain't your kind of town
There ain't no gold, and there ain't nobody like me
I'm the number one fan of the man from Tennessee

Country music should say something about the country. This song by Kenny Chesney tells us a few things about Boston: a none-too-cramped city where there were art aficionados and unemployment, although it is difficult to imagine a bustling US city where there “ain’t no gold.” Chesney was alluding to the absence of goldmines here, like the ones in Tennessee, literally. That is just one of the problems with poets: they don’t use metaphors when one expects them to.

But he was quite categorical about one point, one should wait till the springtime to visit the place, a sane advice that my son ignored when he drove us northward to Boston on the frosty 30th December of 2008.

Boston is not one city, but two – Boston and Cambridge, divided by the Charles River. Cambridge here is similar to its namesake across the puddle: a university town, with two hallowed portals to learning standing close by, almost rubbing shoulders, Harvard University (set up in 1636) and MIT (much younger, born in 1861). The twin cities have four more universities, Boston, Brandies, Northeastern and Suffolk, not to mention the famed Harvard Business School. And the place is littered with colleges that teach almost everything, from architecture to theology. With so much enlightenment around, it’s no wonder that Massachusetts is a liberal place. It was the first US state (and the sixth jurisdiction in the world) to legalise same-sex marriage in 2004.

We crossed the river towards our hotel in Cambridge as the sun was going down and the gorgeous city was switching on the lights in its hundreds of skyscrapers.


The first stop was Harvard Square, an area near the university teeming with bookshops and eateries, a favourite hangout for students and others. Any world class centre of learning is bound to be a cosmopolitan place. Boston is a city where white Americans are a minority: we came across humans of all descriptions. According to a tourism brochure, here, one can play chess with an expert for as little as two dollars. But we didn’t find one of them.

I had heard about the bookshops in Boston. The only one that we could go in was Harvard Book Store (“Since 1932”), which, like all the book stores that I have seen in the US, is large and open stack. The unique thing about it is its three sections, new books, used books and remainder stocks. (Remainder stocks are copies of books that publishers are no longer interested in, and would give to booksellers at throwaway prices. Remainder stocks of British and American books are a source of easy profit for many book traders in India. They buy them dirt cheap and sell them as new to gullible buyers.)

In this store, remainder stocks are sold as remainder stocks, at around a third of the jacket price. There were quite a few buyers at the store, all of them browsing.

The next morning, we went to see the famous New England Aquarium in a blinding snowstorm. In the evening, we braved icy winds to visit the Museum of Fine Arts, which has the largest collection of Claude Monet, the first impressionist painter, outside Paris. But the museum had been closed early on the New Year Eve.

We were not totally disappointed though. Travelling by Boston metro was an experience. This city of just 600,000 people is served by a metro system where five major lines crisscross each other. You buy a ticket and can change trains any number of times to reach your destination at another corner of the city. The trains ply both underground and on the surface. Some of them have just two coaches and look like the trams back home in Kolkata. The trains and the stations are scrupulously clean. Boston subway system is one of the finest in the country, and also the oldest, set up in 1897.

I am sure I would have something to learn every day even if I lived a thousand years. The lesson that I learnt in the first morning of 2009 is that you cannot operate the microscopic buttons of digital pocket cameras if you are wearing leather gloves. I had to put on a pair as the temperature was 14 degrees Fahrenheit, which translates to a cool minus ten in centigrade.

We had a few hours in the morning before leaving, and I had taken an underground train to the Harvard station, much to the dismay of my overprotective wife. As I walked out of the deserted station to an equally deserted road, there was only another man walking, an intrepid Japanese with a long camera.

I walked around, watched the baroque architecture of the university buildings, and took a few pictures after removing the gloves. The landscape was full of white, and many shades of it. The 1st of January being a holiday, and maybe because it was so cold, the place looked more like a fairytale town where everyone had been put to sleep by a wicked magician. Soon, my right hand too went to sleep. I decided to switch off the camera and return. But try as I might, I couldn’t switch it off; my fingers were numb. I pressed the button against a corner of a railing to shut it down.

It was comfortably warm inside the metro station. The platform was absolutely empty save for myself and an old man (should I say another old man?). He was, rather incongruously, playing chess with himself on a magnetic chessboard.

As I wondered if he would agree to play chess with me for a fee, I rubbed my right hand to get some blood flow into the veins. But my right hand, cold and unresponsive, sulked. Said he, ‘Who cares for your stupid photographs? Look what you’ve done to me. Me, thanks to whom you earn a living.’

Me: ‘Ah! You and your despicable vanity! I earn a living thanks to my brain.’

My hand: ‘Pen pushers and keyboard punchers think they have brains. But the rest of the world thinks otherwise.’

‘Let them. You have no business to be so frail. After all, you are a poor man’s hand. But you’re behaving like the spoilt brat of a filthy rich father.’

‘That is the problem with you Marxists. Can’t think of anything without bringing in the class. Minus ten is minus ten; doesn’t matter if one is a rich man’s hand or a poor man’s.’

I snapped, ‘I am not a Marxist. I am only a disillusioned Marxist.’

‘That doesn’t refute my point.’

‘Okay, forget it. Think of Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush. He went through much worse. Did he complain like you?’

‘Woh gora log to have been living like that for centuries. But I am new to this climate.’

The stupid hybrid language that my hand used invariably gets my goats, not to mention racist statements. But I decided to be patient. Said I, ‘Relax, as soon as we reach the hotel, you can have a warm-water bath and wrap yourself around a hot mug of coffee.’

But my hand continued to sulk. Said he, ‘I am not your wife, you can’t kiss and make up so easily.’

06 January 2009

An Indian traveller in a Connecticut snowstorm

The forecast was categorical. A snowstorm will begin at 9 AM; likely to continue for eight hours; eight to ten inches of snow. Having lived in the tropics all my life, I found the prospect appealing. But like many people born long before the age of satellite imagery and supercomputers, I have an emotional problem about relying on weather forecasts. A wonderful Bengali author, Syed Mujtaba Ali once wrote: “The problem with weather forecasts is that it’s risky to ignore them; and the question of trusting them doesn’t arise!”

The weather forecast is amazingly accurate in the US of A in the twenty-first century. I have been here for over three months now, and I find that the weathermen hit the bull’s eye with metronomic monotony. There are even hourly forecasts for big cities. You can plan your day with precision and can almost set your watch looking at the sky.

So, when there was no sign of snow at nine in the morning, I felt a little cheated. The sky was overcast, but that was about all. Warning about the storm – they call it advisory here – was repeatedly broadcast over radio and TV and schools were given a day off. But otherwise, the day began normally that morning. Not surprising: people here don’t bunk office even for much weightier reasons like the election of Barack Obama.

One of our neighbours, an elderly woman, leaves for office at seven in the morning and returns home by three. As I went out to pick up the newspaper, I saw her going out. Instead of taking the car, she left on foot.

The sky turned dirty grey and snow arrived one hour later than scheduled. Specks of white started coming down from the sky at ten. Soon, rooftops, roads, porches, and patios were covered under a sheet of white. Visibility was low, cars and trucks switched on their fog lamps. Within an hour or so, the tiny specs of snow became heavy white blobs and the white sheet turned into a thick quilt. Snow collected on the leaves of coniferous trees and the denuded branches of other trees. Smaller trees and bushes bore the brunt of the aggression, just as poor people suffer most in times of calamities. The hedges that serve as boundaries between individual compounds were all under inches of snow and were bent down to the ground.

When my wife and I went out to a nearby eatery to have a coffee, we found the place doing business as usual. People drove in, bought their breakfast and left. After exchanging customary pleasantries with us, the girl at the counter said, ‘The roads are treacherous! Take care.’

I told her that the chips they serve is great. She asked me if they make potato chips in India.

We couldn’t but take care. The cold wind was cutting and the ground beneath our feet was treacherous indeed. No one was on the road, but scores of cars went past as usual.

Street lights were turned on as darkness descended by afternoon. The roads were slushy, almost undrivable. Soon, some trucks with snow ploughs arrived like knights in shining armour. They strutted about, pushing snow to the shoulders of the road, even as other vehicles crawled gingerly. Men and women of all ages came out with shovels to clear snow from their driveways.

Our elderly neighbour returned home plodding through knee-deep snow. It was just another day in office for her.

Salman Rushdie wrote, possibly in The Satanic Verses, it is difficult to be an American outside America and be loved. How true. From Hiroshima to Vietnam to Iraq, so many stupid and vicious US governments tried so hard to make Americans unpopular around the world.

But when one is in America, one cannot but respect Americans for some of their qualities. In India, hardworking people are exceptions. Here, they are the rule. And everyone does their work without fuss. Back home in Kolkata, I consider myself lucky if the newspaper is delivered by eight, although the paper is printed ten kilometres away from my house. The place where I stay now is eighty kilometres from New York, but New York Times is delivered at our doorsteps invariably by six thirty in pitch darkness, wrapped in a blue plastic packet. (Two packets when it rains.) On the night after the snowstorm, plough trucks worked through the night to clear the roads completely. No one was stuck in the morning.

Many things about the American society are different from ours. One of them is the respect for physical labour. A plumber or a postman or the men/women who cleared the roads that night enjoy a level of respect that is unthinkable for their counterparts in India. The mammoth that the USA is today did not become a mammoth for nothing. Much sacrifice and persistent hard work over centuries have gone into building this gigantic edifice.

Hard work … that is one trick we have missed.

Wednesday, 24 December 2008