Footloose in New York

[On my recent trip in 2008, I found New York a safe place. The crime rate was quite low for a city of its size. But in 1995, when I visited NY for the first time, it had the reputation of being infested with cheats, muggers and other sundry criminals. On the evening of my arrival there, I had a few tense moments. This is what I wrote then.]

If you were about to visit New York for the first time and came across someone who had lived there, you’d be given a few tips so that you aren't raped or killed unnecessarily. Before I left India, a friend who had been in the US of A gave me a list of dos and don’ts, mostly don’ts: Don’t take your eyes off the luggage at airports, don’t become too friendly with strangers, don’t hang around at tube stations after the crowd has moved, don’t carry much cash on your person, don’t take a taxi alone, don’t enter a lonely loo …

I arrived at the Newark airport in a cloudy autumn evening. The flight was delayed by an hour, a matter of little consequence to a regular client of the famously unpunctual Indian Airlines. All the bad press that the city of New York has been getting didn’t bother me. My task was simple: I only had to take a twenty-mile ride to the Hotel Hilton at Manhattan, where someone would receive me and take me to my temporary abode at Queens.

The city of New York and all other big cities of our time make me think that the children of the twentieth century have limited imagination. No two mountains rise the same way, no two rivers follow similar courses, no two children smile the same smile; but most of the sky-scrapers in our cities look so soullessly alike! The Hudson showed up and vanished in a flash. Soon we were driving under water through the faceless Lincoln Tunnel that seemed to say, “OK, folks, here you are, but I couldn’t care less.” When we reached Manhattan, the clouds hanging around the upper floors of the buildings broke into a torrential rain.

The burly driver of the shuttle coach delivered me and my luggage at the gate of Hilton. The person who was to meet me there had left a note at the reception saying he was leaving after waiting for half-an-hour beyond the scheduled time! Fortunately, I had a friend, Murali Bagade, who had been posted to New York just a week before. I phoned Bagade at his office, but he had left for home. Called his home; no reply.

It was pouring and nothing much could be seen outside the chandeliered foyer of the hotel. The reputation of the NY cabbies being what it is, I didn’t want to take a cab towards an unknown destination, if I could help it. And my baggage precluded taking the metro. So there I was, a stranger in a supposedly dangerous city with an uncertain night looming through a deluge.

For a moment, I toyed with the idea of checking into Hilton, but rejected it quickly as I recalled that Fiedel Castro was staying there for a UN conference on that day. Both Mr. Castro and me were in New York on official work, and both of us are from the third world, but I reckoned he enjoyed a better daily allowance. A night at Hilton or an encounter with a mugger would make similar impacts on my wallet.

My colleague, JPN Thampi has a sticker on his table: “When in doubt, don’t!” That evening, I followed the dictum with slight modification: “When in doubt, drink!” I went to the bar on the ground floor of the hotel. It was a wonderful place teeming with people and TVs of various sizes, and a number of those ubiquitous vending machines that sell things like candies and condoms. The crowd was jovial, noisy, and smoking. No one noticed as I walked in, pulling two suitcases. The beer was awfully affordable and the food (succulent sausages) was on the house. I felt at home. Barring the vending machines, the place looked no different from an upmarket pub in Colaba Causeway in Bombay or Brigade Road in Bangalore.

After about an hour, I called Bagade again, and this time, he answered. One more hour and another beer later, it was a huge relief to see my friend walking in with a broad smile and a long umbrella, but thoroughly drenched, all the same.

The queue for taxis in front of the hotel was long and serpentine, and by the time our taxi was on one of the several bridges across the East River, it was quite late. Suddenly, the driver declared that he was not sure of the way to Queens. Bagade, having lived in the city for just a week, didn't know the way either. It was still raining and there was not a soul on the sidewalk. Our taxi was whizzing past at fifty miles an hour along with hundreds of other cars; there was no question of stopping and asking for direction from anyone. A strange situation: the vehicle was moving fast, but we were in a jam. My friend and I looked at each other.

Thanks to the efficiency of the American system, a photograph of the taxi driver along with his name in bold letters was prominently displayed in the passenger compartment. The name, Hidayat Ullah, and a South Asian physiognomy gave us hope. Maybe, the fellow was an Indian or Pakistani, which should make it easier to tackle him.

Actually, Hidayat Ullah was from Bangladesh. He and I speak the same language and his home in Noakhali is less than 400 kilometres from mine on a planet with a circumference of 40,000 kilometres! He was hardly dangerous. On the contrary, he was a scared, insecure young man, terrorised equally by police and the underworld. A brush with the law might mean loss of his driving licence and livelihood. And like all NY cabbies, he lived in the perpetual fear of the cold metal on his nape. He had had the experience twice and had lost whatever he had on him. Only an undying faith on Allah helps him carry on in this hazardous city, where he trades his personal safety for earning a level of comfort that is unimaginable back home in Bangladesh.

The Bengali language worked like magic for Hidayat Ullah’s memory. We were home and dry in fifteen minutes.

Calcutta / 11 December 1995

Moni

I don’t remember how I met Subhendu Sekhar Mukhopadhyay, but I recall that I became one of his numerous fans in no time.

Subhendu-da was a research officer at Rabindra Bhaban, an institute under Visva-Bharati, when I was an undergraduate student there. A bachelor then, he lived in a sparsely furnished ground-floor room in a university guest house at Santiniketan. Even now, I can see it if I close my eyes. … An approximately ten by fourteen room divided into two parts by a rudimentary cot in the middle. On one side was a desk and a bookshelf, and on the other, a kerosene stove on which he prepared his frugal meals, and often, tea for us. From his room, we could see a wide expanse of the sky and the gravelled road lined by acacia and palaash leading to the guest house. Through two large windows that were always open, sunlight and breeze streamed in. The door too was usually open. Subhendu-da’s dwelling was as open and inviting as his mind was.

He wrote brilliant Bengali, both prose and poetry. (He also wrote brilliant English, but that I came to know much later.) It is unfortunate that he has written so little, but even that little, if compiled and published, will be a significant tome. And Subhendu-da could speak with authority on lots of subjects. His knowledge, particularly of Rabindranath Tagore’s life and works, was deep and wide. But if anyone seemed awestruck by his erudition, he would try to inverse the impression with a disarming smile and a caustic comment, ‘I don’t read books, I read only book covers and jackets. Only illiterates like you believe I'm well-read.’

We went through university during a turbulent time, the late 1960s and early 70s. The Naxalbadi movement began, spread and died during the period, and along with it died thousands of young men, as the genteel Indian democracy bared its fascist fangs. It was a time when protests swept like bushfire through campuses from Berkeley to Sorbonne to Kolkata. Students’ protests even lead to the fall of the De Gaulle government in 1968. Shortly thereafter, Bangladesh fought for and achieved independence at tremendous human cost. Through it all, in Viet Nam, the underdog decisively won the most asymmetric war in human history. It was a time when hope was pandemic. It was also a time when all young people in West Bengal, except the jelly fish, believed in a cause. And most were rebels.

Subhendu-da too was a rebel, in a very personal way. He lived like a hermit, was staunchly anti-establishment, but wasn’t part of any organized political group (as far as I know). It is possible that he had foreseen the future of the Left movement in West Bengal. And he was remarkably free from prejudice. Once he said, ‘Despite 200 years of colonial exploitation, I forgive the British for three reasons.’

Surprised, we asked, ‘What three reasons?’

‘Cakes, chocolates, and ice-creams.’

I lost touch with him after graduation. In 1983, after returning to Kolkata, I picked up the threads. By then, he had married Hena-di, a wonderful person herself, and they had a lovely daughter, Tinni. Subhendu-da was the Head of Sahitya Akademi for Eastern India and had an office at a quaint corner of the city, in the stadium complex beside the Dhakuria Lake. My office was nearby and after office, I would meet him and walk long distances with him, followed by coffee and upma at a South Indian eatery. He would never allow me to pay for the snacks. And on every single occasion, I came home with a feeling that he had thrown light on some dark corner of my mind.

Subhendu-da had a brilliant sense of humour and would regale his audience with witty anecdotes, optimally garnished for effect. He also had the rare gift of repartee.

Hena-di is from the district of Srihatta, which was an early bird in spreading education, particularly women’s education, in undivided Bengal. People from the district were known for their clannishness and intellectual snobbery. Srihatta or Sylet as it was known earlier, is also a place not far from Myanmar and many people from there have features like stub nose and slanting eyes. A country cousin of Hena-di once said, ‘Subhendu babu, you must give it to us; no fool has ever been born in Sylet.’

The reply was instantaneous: ‘Neither a beautiful woman!’

Subhendu-da was always in a sparkling white khadi dhoti and kurta. Their two-storey house at Park Circus was large and sparsely furnished. They ate sitting on floor and slept on hard beds. Subhendu-da had an impressive personal library, but had no fancy bookcases, only straight open unpainted wooden racks that went up to the ceiling. The walls were white and largely bare, save for a few paintings by Hena-di, and a framed postcard written long back by his father's grandfather. Among other things, the postcard written in Bangla ordained, “Sell your land, sell your house if you have to, but do study.”

Their house was impeccably clean, always. Tinni doted on our two children, who were slightly younger, and together with her big black gentlemanly Labrador Prama, they were a happy foursome. For my wife and me, Subhendu-da and Hena-di’s simple, no-frills lifestyle was a model.

Subhendu-da’s austerity also involved walking long distances and travelling by notoriously crowded Kolkata buses. He would never take a taxi even in scorching heat. Once, Tinni, who was in college then, was on a cycle-rickshaw when she saw him on the road. She stopped and asked him to get on board. But her baba refused, ‘Your dad might be rich, mine wasn’t’, and kept walking.

According to an apocryphal story, Subhendu-da was asked by his boss, who was in Kolkata on an official visit, to carry his bag at the airport. Instead, Subhendu-da came home and sent his resignation letter. At that time he was in mid-fifties, with no sign of another job on the horizon. I asked him, ‘How will you manage, Shubhendu-da?’

He smiled, ‘Don’t you worry! I am not going to touch you for a loan.’

During that time, the West Bengal government was planning to bring out the complete works of Rabindranath Tagore. Subhendu-da was given the task of editing the volumes. He was given an office, an assistant, and two typewriters, but he refused to accept any remuneration, despite not having a steady source of income. I asked him why he wouldn’t accept a fair compensation for his efforts. His logic was simple: ‘The day I accepted government money, the bureaucrats would start kicking me around. I would much rather hold my head high and do the work for free.’

Towards the end, when his health was failing, he accepted a government vehicle, but still no money!

Subhendu-da died on his saddle at the age of 61. He was possibly one of the last specimens of a breed that cares little for filling their pockets, but would die, if it comes to that, to hold their head high. He was called Moni by his family, including his wife and daughter. Moni in Bengali means gem. Rarely does a name fit a man more aptly. He was one of the most pristine, pure, and coruscating gems I have come across in fifty-seven years.

26 January 2009

The valley of fear

As the local train chugged out of Asansol station, the soft light of the winter afternoon flooded in. We were in a chair-car, with rows of seats facing each other, and an aisle running through the middle of the coach. The train was crowded, four people had squeezed in rows meant for three. We, Bengalis, love adda more than Omar Khayyam loved wine and women. Our group of eight perfect strangers soon started chatting, with the people standing on the aisle chipping in from time to time.

The amiable young man in a checked jacket sitting by the window was a school teacher. He enquired about connecting trains, ‘Do you think I can catch the 9.30 local to Canning from Sealdah? If I miss it, the last train is at 11.20.’

We didn’t miss the touch of nervousness in his voice. A student sitting in front of us said, ‘Going to Canning at such an hour?’

‘No, actually, to the previous station, Taldi. From there, I have to walk half an hour to reach my home.’

‘Wouldn’t it be risky? I mean’, the boy said, ‘going by what one reads about Canning and the places around it, don’t you run the risk of being robbed at that hour?’

The son of Canning smiled, ‘I know, it’s rather dicey. If I am lucky, I’ll come across a vigilante group before I meet the friends; in that case, the vigilante fellows will take me home.’

The strange use of the word “friends” confused me; he used the exact synonym in Bengali. But the other passengers got the drift. The student asked, ‘And if you meet the friends earlier?’

‘Well, if I happen to meet them first, I’ll reach home in my underpants.’

‘And you’d catch a cold in this weather’, quipped a man, who, we had found out, worked in a steel plant.

‘But should you take a chance in that case?’ enquired a senior citizen, sitting between the teacher and me.

The teacher responded philosophically, ‘Well, sooner of later, your turn comes. It doesn’t matter if it’s today or tomorrow.’ Then, as if to demonstrate the practical side of his mind, he added, ‘It’s twenty-third today, so there isn’t much risk. But if it were the first, when people go home with pay-packets, I could bet my shirt on being robbed on the way.’

The student: ‘Can’t you stay back and catch the first train tomorrow morning? It would be good if your name is on newspapers, but what’s the point if you can’t read it?’

‘No they don’t kill, usually. After all, they know us. Take for example Rahamat’s gang. Rahamat was my classmate. He was the centre forward and I was the outside-left in the school team. He scored many goals off my centres. Would he kill me just like that?’

We couldn’t refute such an irrefutable argument. But you would find Doubting Thomases everywhere. One such asked from the aisle, ‘Aren’t they scared that you might recognize them?'

‘Oh! You have to follow certain basic rules. You are not supposed to look at them. If you recognize them and try to exchange pleasantries, you are dead. So, you turn your head and pretend that you didn’t see them. After all, it’s your money they are after.’

After a brief pause, the teacher continued, ‘If you have a gun in your house, you run an unnecessary risk. Guns are in big demand. Our neighbour had a licensed gun. One day, some friends came in, faces covered. They called the eldest son of the house by his name. That family runs a business of poultry at their house. Salamat was playing cards; he opened the door expecting a customer. They put a shutter on his head and beat him black and blue. They took the gun away, and whatever gold and cash they could lay their hands on.

‘After some time, one of the friends walked in, his face uncovered now, and innocently inquired about the stolen goods. He was doing an audit; he came in to check if a part of the booty had been pilfered by a deviant gang member.’

The discerning reader wouldn’t have missed the peculiar use of the word shutter here. It is amazing how a respectable English word becomes part of the slang in another language. The shutter, meaning pistol or handgun, an instrument of death. My Oxford dictionary says it’s “a device that opens to allow light to pass through the lens of a camera”. The recent adaptation of the word in South Bengal stands for a device that opens to allow darkness to pass through its nozzle. But semantics apart, what surprised us most was the cool with which the teacher narrated the incident! It was as if he was talking of some real friends who had come in for dinner.

‘What was your vigilante group doing?’

‘The vigilante group operates from nine in the evening. This took place at seven.’ Then he lowered the voice, although he didn’t run the risk of being overheard by the thugs, ‘Some of the friends are members of the vigilante party too!’

‘You mean to say, everyone knows them?’

‘Of course, we do, most of them. The last time I went home, some of them dropped in for a cup of tea. I offered them sweets for good measure … You have to be polite with them. … One of them told me that he was in the business, but insisted that he operated only outside our village. The friends are invariably invited for wedding feasts.’

‘Do they take away the bride's ornaments while leaving?’ enquired the steel plant employee innocently.

‘No, never on the wedding night!’

‘But tell me’, the elderly man asked, ‘why nobody reports to the police?’

At this point, the train entered Bardhaman, my destination. Apparently simple things sometimes have complex causes. Like the falling apple. The teacher answered with a silent smile.

But we know the answer, don’t we? The answer was hidden not in what he had said, but in the air of resignation with which he had narrated the situation ... and the euphemism used for thugs. Over the years, our sensitivity has been blunted, we accept any report of crime with a sense of déjà vu. But this helpless acceptance of crime that so completely dominates an area turned my blood into ice. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Valley of Fear is being relived at a place two hours away from my home. The paddy fields of Canning would be totally unlike the coal mines in Doyle’s Vermissa Valley. But there are chilling similarities between the two. In both places fear dominates life. Places ruled not by law, but by illicit guns. Places with two classes of people, the organized thugs and the common people, the latter being victims and accomplices at the same time.

*

This happened on 23rd December, 2000. But for two fictitious names and minor garnishing, I have reported the conversation verbatim. On 3rd January, 2001, newspapers reported that in another place in the same district, 40 houses were looted by a gang of 35 hoods, who happened to be local people. One newspaper (The Times of India) even stated that the dacoits had put the villagers on notice a few months earlier. It was also reported that nobody dared to lodge complaints with the police.

Eight years have passed since then. Is the situation better or worse in rural West Bengal? I request my readers from the state to share their experience.

A courtier and his king

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety …

Like Cleopatra and Elizabeth Taylor, Rahim Ansari too hasn’t been withered by age. He is a young man of seventy-five. Tall, lean, and muscular, Rahim has a weather-beaten face and a shock of salt-and-pepper hair combed back, down to the nape. Once he told me that he hadn’t taken a medicine in thirty years, by the grace of Almighty.

As regards variety, he is an electrician who doubles as a plumber. If required, he wears a carpenter’s hat too. In these underprivileged parts of the third world far away from cities, we don’t have the luxury of many specialists. In the few hospitals that we have in the district, one doctor often works as a physician, surgeon and pathologist, all rolled into one. Machines are rare here, and men who handle them are rarer. If one has to make a living wielding tools, one had better be an all-round handyman.

Rahim Ansari is also a retired dacoit. Long ago, he was provided free food and lodging for seven years by the government for his alleged role in a train robbery.

Rahim’s approach to his present profession conforms to the limited demands of his clients. He puts functionality ahead of style; his electrical wirings are perfunctory webs of criss-crossing wires with dangling electric bulbs. But the lights, fans, and water pumps work just as well, when there is power.

We were waiting in front of the railway station for a bus that would take us to our distant hamlet. As we sat down on a narrow wooden bench of a tea-stall, I asked Rahim Ansari about his family. A father of three sons and a daughter, he was rather embarrassed to mention his oldest son's name: Golden, an incongruous moniker that has stuck because of his fair complexion. Golden assists his father in electrical works. Rahim's second son runs a small grocery in their mohalla. In a poor neighbourhood, a small business cannot thrive, but he has been doing okay. I don’t remember what his third son does, but I recall that Rahim’s brow furrowed as he talked about his daughter: ‘I had fixed her marriage with a boy in Sahibgunj, but …’

‘What went wrong?’

‘Nothing … I just changed my mind at the last moment. I didn't want to send her so far away. I am now negotiating with a party from Giridih.’

Parental affection is a dangerous thing. Even former outlaws are not free from the affliction.

It was two in the afternoon. We had spent almost an hour waiting for the bus, listening to film songs blaring from paan shops and observing jostling crowds and sleeping dogs; but there was no sign of our bus. (We learnt later that the bus was delayed because its driver was getting his beard dyed.) I was hungry. It was during Ramadan, the ninth month of the Muslim calendar, and Rahim was on roza. I asked him if he found it difficult to go without food, particularly at his age.

‘Please drink your tea, I don’t feel like having anything. Actually, fasting doesn't make any difference. We can rinse our mouth, but water cannot be allowed to pass this’, he said, touching his Adam’s apple.

Such a response is common from the Muslims that I know here. All of them are poor, and almost all of them observe roza.

Less than a hundred years ago, an unremarkable hamlet called Madhupur grew in to a small town thanks to the patronage of absentee landlords from Kolkata, who used this place as their winter resort. The babus who had once added a touch of glamour to this place have faded into oblivion. Their successors have fallen into hard times and are selling off family silver and landed property. Some of the grand old mansions here are lived in by their new owners, but most of the buildings are tragic caricatures of their glorious past. And if you walk a few miles to the villages around, you’ll find that many bungalows have been dismantled, brick by brick, by thieves. The town and its surrounding villages stand as a crumbling signpost of a brief history of borrowed glory.

I asked Rahim how those babus were. Were they snooty? Did they treat the local people badly?

‘Oh, no! They were good. Bahut accha aadmi the. They treated us well and bought our chickens at twice the normal price.’

‘Were they rich?’

‘Most of them were. I’ve even seen a King’, he said with some pride.

‘King? A real one? I’ve seen kings only in theatres.’

‘No saab, a real king. Raja P.N. Tagore; he lived not far from here. His palace has been converted into what is now the Raj Hotel.’

The Toofan Express to Kolkata had been standing on the far side of the station, on what is known as the down-line in railway argot. As we talked, it started moving with a clang.

‘The Toofan Express was called the Toofan Mail those days, but it was the same train. The down Toofan Mail used to cross this station about the same time in the afternoon. The over-bridge too was there’, he added, pointing at the railway foot-bridge across the tracks. ‘The day the King was to return to Kolkata, his valets would swarm all over the station in the afternoon. When Toofan Mail arrived, messengers would run to the palace to report to Raja Sahib. And he would say “Gaadi roko!” … Then he would start walking, with a retinue of ministers and servants.’

At this point, a slightly abashed Rahim Ansari shared with me a secret pride, ‘And I used to walk behind him, holding his big umbrella. … The king would walk slowly, he was very old, almost fifty. He would cross the foot-bridge and get onto the train. The guard of the train would follow him, hands folded. Then Raja sahib would instruct the guard, “Bill banao, late fee kitna?”'

As a law abiding subject of the British Crown, the king would dutifully pay the penalty for detaining the train. He would pay hefty tips to the guard and the engine driver too. And the train would recommence its journey.

This happened during the lifetime of the narrator. This is young, first generation history. Yet, the story seems so absurdly far away and impossible today. Toofan Mail still runs, although with a slightly different name. The coal engine has been replaced with an electric locomotive. The wooden panels of the passenger coaches have given way to steel. The stout saal slippers under the rails have been replaced with pre-stressed concrete. The train is much more crowded than what it used to be in Rahim Ansari’s childhood, and obviously, it doesn’t have room for kings any more.

26 December 2000