Prose | Tarapada Roy translated by Bhaswati Ghosh

Parama Park Street
(An Excerpt From Jalanjali)

Behind the back (acrylic on canvas) - Reshma Thomas

Dada Thakur or the famous Sarat Chandra Chakravarty of Jangipur had once written a song based on the faults of Calcutta...The list ran long. Goldighi wasn’t round, the water of Laldighi wasn’t red, and no brides were available in Bou Bazaar. Had he been alive today, Dada Thakur, in his characteristic jest, would have added another entry to that list of flaws. That would be “No parking” in today’s Park Street, a place where the police doesn’t allow cars to stop. Two signs face each other -- Park Street and “No Parking.”

Americans call the centre of a city the downtown. In that sense, Calcutta’s downtown is in the south, beginning from Park Street and ending at BBD Bagh.

My personal connection with Park Street goes back to a long time. In 1951 -- another lifetime -- I had come to Calcutta to study after clearing my matriculation examination. I had put up at my aunt’s, in the government accommodation my uncle had in Esplanade. That’s where I spent a good six years, until 1957.

I enrolled in Central Calcutta College, located on Wellesley Street; the names of both the street and college have since been changed to Rafi Ahmed Kidwai Road and Maulana Azad College, respectively.

Park Street was close enough to my place of stay and Sealdah. Even after I left Esplanade, I stayed for more than a year in Gokhale Road, which, too, was close to Park Street.

Later in my mid-youth in the 1980s, I lived close to Park Street again.

I was in Little Russell Street -- an alley -- though quite wide -- of Park Street. Russell Street begins on the opposite side of Park Hotel, and Little Russell Street is its sub-branch. The names of both these streets have since changed. I think Little Russell Street has become Nandalal Basu Sarani.

The name change happened a while ago, while I was still there. But I never wrote Nandalal Basu Sarani; for me, it has always been Little Russell Street.

This name-changing business is loathsome -- a result of a lack of historical appreciation; an uneducated, cheap political ploy to change the names of roads and institutions. In Calcutta, almost all British street names have been changed, except, who knows why, that of Park Street. That name could have easily been changed to Pradeep Kundalia Street or Kanoria-Bajoria Sarani -- it wouldn’t be too hilarious. After all, Russell Street has now become Anondolal Poddar Sarani.

I do have a proposal for the practice of name change. So far, the issue of minorities has been more or less addressed (for instance, changing Wellesley into Rafi Ahmed Kidwai). However, no attention has been paid to scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. Now, we also have OBCs, then there’s the matter of one-third reservation for women. In the distant future, legislation might come through for that. If that happens, I propose changing the name of Park Street to Kananbala Sarani.

In today’s Park Street, amid the concrete jungle of high rises, my christening might appear absurd. But even until recently, there were quite a few gardens (kanan as in forest) in the Park Street area. Even in the beginning of the 1980s when we moved to Little Russell Street, neighbourhoods had quite a few two- and three-story houses surrounded by gardens spread across a bigha or two bighas of land. In the absence of any caretakers to tend to them, wild grass and creeping weeds ruled the gardens. Still, flowers would bloom through those vines to rise up to windows. With the first spell of rain, the scent of kamini flowers would envelop the entire neighbourhood. At the end of winter, blossoms would appear on mango trees, bringing a bunch of koyel and other birds. Spring fest would begin.

But for Park Street, the surrounding areas don’t have much traffic or crowd after sundown. By 10 p.m., the roads become deserted.

First, an AC market came up in Theatre Road and Camac Street had a multistoried building. Now AC markets and skyscrapers abound Park Street.

Interestingly, there’s no theatre or stage in Park Street, which is otherwise the entertainment district of Calcutta. There’s only one movie theatre, that too not on main Park Street, but on the tram line of Park Circus.

All of Park Street’s fame is because of its up-class and dazzling hotels and bars. Old fixtures like Olympia, Blue Fox, Mocambo, and Sky Room.

In our first rush of youth, we used to have our adda in Olympia whenever our pockets allowed. Plates full of sausages and omelettes alongside drinks whetted our appetite. The addas in Olympia were of a high standard. Stiff-nosed intellectuals visited the place. I have seen Samar Sen, Niranjan Majumdar, Amalendu Dasgupta and Hamdi Be there.

Sunil and I have been to Olympia quite a few times. Amitava Mukherjee, a refined and well-educated big-shot of the coal mines, used to welcome us with open arms. Long before the fictional world of Satyajit Ray’s Feluda, Amitava Mukherjee’s pet name was Felu -- we called him Feluda.

On one occasion, Shakti created a ruckus in Olympia. Later, the bar’s authorities issued a notice prohibiting Shakti’s entry.

The ground floor of Olympia used to be, and probably still is, closed to women, although Niranjan Majumdar’s wife would sometimes appear late at night to take her husband home.

The upper floor had provisions for family dining. I have memories of many an enjoyable evening there, spent in the company of my wife, son and friends.

After returning from abroad, my good friend, the humourist Himanish Goswami, settled down in the suburbs of north Calcutta. I myself was in the south at the time. After visiting the city’s southern part, he remarked, “South is open.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Himanish said, “The south is more open, and thus its women don’t wrap themselves with too many clothes -- they are more open, too.”

In this context, it bears mentioning that at that time, sleeveless blouses and tucking the sari below the navel had just come into fashion.

Some twenty years after Himanish made that observation, I came across a girl in Park Street one evening, wearing, what can only be called inappropriately scanty clothing. She had just stepped into her youth.

I knew the girl well and her parents, even better. When we were close enough to each other, I said to her with parental authority, “What kind of clothes are you wearing? What would your mother say if she learned about it?”

The girl was mortified. Bending her head, she said, “Uncle, I have a small request. Please don’t tell Ma. This is actually her dress; she isn’t home so I stole it. She would be furious if she came to know about it.”

In Calcutta, such conversations are only possible in Park Street.

A Calcutta Story | Deborah Baker

In a moving tribute to Calcutta and Ginsberg, Deborah Baker writes about her early days in the city, having married one of the best writers of Indian English literature, who belonged to the place. The lack of a sense of belonging informs her early days while she accompanies her husband on his evening visits to the house of a Calcutta poet who knew Ginsberg. Here she writes about feeling a sense of affinity with Ginsberg whom she imagines to have undergone the same set of suspicions that she had faced and like him,she also ended up disarming her local interlocutors.This is followed up with a description of meeting Allen in New York city where she felt like an outsider once again.She tells us how even the young and irreverent who thought nothing of mocking other senior writers were respectful towards Ginsberg. Read the original English version of Baker's piece first published exclusively by The Sunflower Collective.

Allen Ginsberg in Calcutta circa 1960
Source: https://artcritique.files.wordpress.com/

In February 1990 I married my husband before a crowd of strangers on the rooftop of his parents house in Calcutta.  That first year I worked on a book in the back room of a borrowed apartment in Ballygunge while he worked on his book a few kilometers away in his childhood bedroom in Jodhpur Park. Every month or so we would go to the home of a popular and prolific Bengali writer named Tarapada Ray. He lived with his wife on the second floor of a big house near the Astor Hotel closer to the city center.

It seemed we always arrived at Tarapada babu’s in the midst of  loadshedding. We would creep up the large stairway that wound round the inner walls of the house in complete darkness, my husband carrying a bottle of Old Monk while I tried not to trip on my sari. Fluorescent tubes lit up the flat while ceiling fans rotated weakly, both powered by a contraption referred to as an inverter. Unlike a generator that makes a loud roar and can operate as long as it has petrol, the inverter is made from an assemblage of car batteries, wired to switch on when the current failed. If load shedding lasted long enough or returned often enough, the batteries would run down completely.  Every household had one. There was nothing more dispiriting during loadshedding than the sound of a ceiling fan over your bed stopping in the middle of the night.The mosquito net would heave a final sigh before settling on you like a collapsed lung. When the swish of the fan returned, an hour or two or more later, it felt like the wings of angels.

Tarapada babu cut a striking figure. His bloodshot eyes were banded in a darker pigment of skin lending him a distinct raccoon-like appearance. Most prominent was his belly. This preceded him by some distance, particularly when his dhoti’s knot rested atop it, giving his figure a senatorial fullness. He had a bullet head set upon prominent jowls and no discernable neck. Unexpectedly, he vibrated with energy and would periodically explode in barrel chested laughter. In his wild younger days the American poet Allen Ginsberg had christened him Torpedo.

Evenings at Tarapada babu’s were spent smoking Gold Flake cigarettes, and throwing back large tumblers of rum. Both fueled an uninterrupted flow of Bengali stories. From the evidence of my husband’s good humor, these stories were very funny. Tarapada’s wife spoke no English, and Tarapada wasn’t terribly keen on it. My husband would occasionally try to translate for me but it was like trying to describe an orchestra to a deaf person. When Tarapada spoke English, it came out in short, hoarse bursts of glottal noise, not unlike gunfire. The last words were nearly always unintelligible and I would have to ask him to repeat himself which naturally exasperated him. Similarly, if I risked a question I could never tell if Tarapada understood a word of what I was saying. His glare signaled blank incomprehension, if not actual hostility. I really couldn’t tell.  Mostly I just sat there counting my mosquito bites and making minute adjustments to the folds in my sari. At about 11 or 12 at night, Tarapada would send out for kathi rolls from the Astor Hotel. The cylindrical rolls, filled with spiced chicken and tiny green rings of hot peppers, arrived warm, with grease lightly flecking the waxy paper they were wrapped in. Their arrival signaled the close of Tarapada’s evening and the highlight of mine.  

Young Indian students had only recently begun to apply for undergraduate admission to American colleges and universities in significant numbers. Where once upon a time an aspiring Bengali academic might choose to pursue advanced studies in the Soviet Union or even Oxford or Cambridge, if they chose an America university they would have to answer for it. In Calcutta there was still something vaguely disloyal about anyone who chose to go to America instead.

A year before the first Gulf war, I felt that the pro Soviet/anti Americanism of the Bengalis was more of a salutary practice than a firm conviction, not unlike choosing low fat milk over whole. To someone’s proposition that the CIA had orchestrated the rise of Solidarity and the more recent fall of the Berlin wall, I once replied “you can’t be serious.” This was a mistake. On occasion some inane remark of mine at what I imagined was a friendly dinner party would end up in the society pages accompanied by a snarky comment. This happened more than once. It took me awhile to catch on that I was a subject of suspicion.

During one of these evenings at Tarapada’s house, he suddenly turned and spoke directly to me. He told me that he had known the American poet Allen Ginsberg, that he and his fellow poets had met him in the famed College Street coffeehouse in North Calcutta. Again, the tail end of the thought was lost in an explosion of incomprehensible and fearful sounds finishing in a deadly quiet. I smiled and Tarapada glared.   

           

I had met Allen Ginsberg just once, several years before. He was smaller than I had imagined; his stature further undermined by the folds and cushions of an off white sectional sofa at an upper west side cocktail party. The once rabbinical beard was then trim and graying and there were suede patches on the elbows of his jacket befitting his new position as a professor at Brooklyn College.  He carried the weight of his legend lightly, with none of the affectations the young are so quick to discover and disparage. He had kind eyes--one slightly drooping from an illness we had all heard about--behind thick spectacles.

Nearly everyone at the party had a claim on him but any direct approach was made somewhat awkward by the arrangement of furniture. The party took place in one of those storied pre-war classic six apartments, with a book lined hallway running its length, the kitchen at one end and a living room and its sofa at the other. Just being in an owner occupied apartment back then gave me an outsider’s sense of belonging, a sense of having cracked New York City in some essential way.

I came with several friends, all in our mid twenties, freelancers and journeyman editors with inchoate aspirations. One, the son of a much married father who had edited a prominent literary magazine, was a beautiful and haunted young poet, with a voice so fast and low you were obliged to lean closer to hear him. As a sulky adolescent he had known writers and intellectuals I had admired for years and he took pleasure in disabusing me of their immortal stature. Yet, even for him, Allen Ginsberg commanded attention. He approached the couch with the same confidence, I recall thinking, a pretty young woman displays in the presence of an older but moneyed man.

Yet what I remember most about that evening was noting that Ginsberg only had eyes for a young man from India who had accompanied us. Unlike my other friends, the man was a relative newcomer to the city and a stranger to the literary lions in the room. Ginsberg’s eyes and voice found him trapped in the doorway and, patting the sofa, drew him in. Knowing from his name that he was a Bengali, he wanted to know which writers he knew in Calcutta.

Three years later, newly married to this young writer, and settled in a city I never once imagined I would even visit, I realized that it was comforting to be reminded by Tarapada that Allen Ginsberg had been here before me. That he had braved the worst suspicions of an entire cadre of skeptical, wary, and fierce Bengali poets and had disarmed them and learned from them. That he was able to prove he was not, as they first imagined, a CIA agent out to destabilize their young country. In the end they decided he was one of them: a poet in a city full of poets. Tarapada babu wouldn’t have said so, but I could tell that even after thirty years, he still considered Allen Ginsberg his friend.  It occurred to me that perhaps he was telling me of this friendship as a way of declaring a truce with me, a suspect American married to a Bengali writer. Perhaps, resigning himself to the fact that I wasn’t scared off, this was his way of being hospitable.

That, at least, was how I chose to see it. It wasn’t exactly a warm welcome, but it was the start of something. Years later, still married and outfitted with two children, seven years after the death of Allen Ginsberg, I was fired from my job as a book editor. Rather than look for another job I decided I wanted to write a book about the place of India in the American imagination. I began my research with the Transcendentalists, proceeding through Walt Whitman’s “A Passage to India” and Martin Luther King’s embrace of Gandhi’s thought, and Hollywood’s discovery of yoga. When it finally occurred to me that Allen Ginsberg 1962 and 1963 travels would be the perfect vehicle to explore this subject, I couldn’t believe it had taken me so long to think of it. Tarapada’s mention of Ginsberg on that long ago evening I now decided had granted me permission to write about Allen and the Bengali poets he had come to love.  It was only then, in the course of researching the book, that I heard all the stories of Allen’s stay in Calcutta.

Five days before he died Allen wrote a poem entitled “Things I’ll Not Do (Nostalgia)” which included memories of his days in Calcutta and Benares and his travels in India with his lover, Peter Orlovsky.

Nor ever return to Kashi "oldest continuously habited city in the world"

bathe in Ganges & sit again at Manikarnika ghat with Peter,

visit Lord Jagganath again in Puri, never back to Birbhum take

notes tales of Khaki B Baba

Or enter to have Chai with older Sunil & Young coffeehouse poets,

Tie my head on a block in the Chinatown opium den, pass by Moslem

Hotel, its rooftop Tinsmith Street Choudui Chowh Nimtallah

Burning ground nor smoke ganja on the Hooghly.

He meant the poem as a goodbye but for the poets he left behind, like Tarapada, it was more than that. Calcutta is Kolkata now and there are fancy malls and a lot less loadshedding.  But Tarapada is gone and the city is emptier without him.