KOLKATA MELANCHOLY

I arrived in Kolkata on a Sunday night in September.

 Is it the rain from a bloated grey sky, the early darkness in this eastern city, or the mildewy humidity of the air that reminds me of the melancholy of Sunday evenings of my childhood? Is it the oppressive architecture of the neglected Raj buildings – do the somber grey entrances to ruinous and subdivided merchants’ palaces recall the looming bulk of empty Byzantine chapels and soulless Gothic churches of the town where I grew up? Or does the brooding sadness of Victorian British Sundays cling to the neglected monuments of its long dead exiles?

The rain is different from home: the drizzle that silvered the trees and hung in tremulous drops from black branches is not the same element as the torrents that stream from the late monsoon, gouging craters in the fragile road surface, collecting in sagging pools in the canopy of cycle-rickshaws and blurring the reflection in the wet road of the scarlet rear lights of stalled traffic.

The streets, too, are nothing like those of the provincial town of my childhood: then, on Sunday evening, the roads were deserted, steps of the rare passers-by echoed against closed Holland blinds and curtained windows closed against the somber crepuscular monochrome; Kolkata seethes with people shopping just before Durgapuja; gorged stores spill promiscuously onto the sidewalk; bolts of damp cloth are spread in a lavish splash of crimson and gold, fake brands of perfume, wristwatches, shoes, handbags, pirated DVDs, iPods, TVs call out to crowds with voices louder than the cries of hucksters and salespeople.

A warm damp air envelops everything, spreading its fungal fingers like a kleptomaniac on the stained concrete, penetrating the secure blue-washed interiors where white strip-lighting throws its harsh radiance on frugal utilitarian furniture – a wooden table, a metal almirah, a bench with a damp bedroll behind rusty windowbars. The wet has blistered walls and peeled varnish, stripped paint and rusted ornamental stars on balconies whose cracked concrete threatens to subside at any moment into the crowds beneath.

Although it is only eight o’clock, the homeless are already sleeping on the ledges outside shops, the noiseless slumber of total exhaustion of a city which uses up its people and depletes their energies in their effort – sometimes abandoned – to subsist. Men play cards by the light of kerosene lamp, while women try to kindle faint orange flames on damp firewood. Vegetable stalls take the earnings of labourers whose families live only a day’s work away from hunger. The dim streets are peopled with wraiths, sharp-eyed children, lean pickpockets and flashy hustlers, the go-betweens and middlemen of quick sex and fast money, the supplicatory murmur of accomplished beggars, women with a rented baby, or a hired amputee; a population of grim thinness, from whom something is always being taken away, as it has been over two and a half centuries.

The austere crumbling metropolis seems made for the punishment of those who must live in it, its inhabitants guilty of being the inheritors of an extractive imperial project, which continues to rob the dispossessed of the little that remains. If hope is inscribed for many in an archaic Leftism rather than in the bright lights of privatized promises of global capital, this is a measure of the archaism that Kolkata has become. Hospitals with names like Apollo and Gleaneagles, advertised on illuminated panels, shine in the shimmer of the muddy water of the Hoogly, while the music of gaudy glass bangles and cheap jewellery follows the groups of young women who slide like serpents through the tightly packed bodies on the streets.

The taxis, Ambassadors, yellow and black as giant wasps, smell faintly of the drivers who spend twenty four hours a day in them, sleeping at night with their feet dangling from a half-closed front window – skid on the tram-tracks and bump on the exposed cobbles of an ancient infrastructure; while the elevation of a flyover rises like a weal on the face of the wounded city, speeding the traffic jam a further 300 metres down the road.

Rot and mildew have eaten into the city’s heart, and the decayed splendour of the Raj is now a crumbling façade, with shrubs and flowers growing out of the cracked masonry, while within, the derelict and deskilled of the city take shelter, the non-labouring poor chase the dragon with a matchlight beneath the square of silver paper, in places where, only the day before yesterday Muslim cooks dressed in the white livery of their craft produced imperial dainties held high on the flat of their hand, distributing caramel cream to the assembled functionaries of empire. The Great Eastern Hotel has finally closed its doors, the grubby decorative costume of imperial sepoys set aside, the fly-blown splendour fallen into a decrepitude beyond rescue.

The shops spread a pre-festival glare onto the streets, gashes of orange and lemon light in the rising haze from the evaporating rainwater. Shopkeepers sweep out the ochre-coloured water, thick as sweet tea, that has flooded the dark interiors, while in the slums along the polluted glassy canals, whole families crowd onto a huge wooden bedstead, waiting for the water to subside. The electricity, taken illegally from the looped cables, has been extinguished by the rain; wet clothes stick to skin and bone; and sleep is the only refuge before another day’s desperate search for livelihood, collecting broken glass, dealing in the clothes or the hair of the dead, or renting a portion of gutter adjacent to the jeweller’s shop to prospect for tiny particles of gold. The garbage has been saturated, a fetid and fermenting mass of coconut shells, vegetable parings, rotten oranges mixed with rusty metal, indestructible plastic bags and other waste that can no longer be recycled.

Everyone is expendable in this metropolis of melancholy, especially humanity, struggling in its majestic indifference; Gracie, 76, still working as a telephonist, to keep herself and her 84-year-old husband, with her meticulous English and harrowing cough; her grandfather had come from Germany to help build the Tata steel plant in Jamshedpur. She says ‘We eat a good meal in the middle of the day, and for dinner we have sandwiches’; here is genteel poverty, Indian-style, the descendants of Europeans long vanished; like the Anglo-Indian women who came to Britain in the 1950s, so shocked by the immorality and rudeness that they could not wait to get back to Calcutta. Kolkata has the bone-scoured look of a city through which much wealth has passed – leaving little residue: only the bitterness where money has been, but never remained long enough to benefit those through whose skinny hands it has flowed..

The great toxic dump of the slums are labour-camps, informal, unrecognized: settlements beside rivers of sewage and the poisonous crimson and silver effluent of tanning factories, dense lines of chetai huts on rocky banks that lead to discoloured streams, on which the bloated carcase of a dead dog floats. People live amid piles of recycled rags, metal, glass and bone, cutting strips of leather or plastic, making tainted sweetmeats, sorting out fragments of unburned coal from burnt ash and clinker to sell as domestic fuel, pushing their cycle-rickshaws over the rough ground, to earn less than enough to replace the energy used up each day: the consumed and the consumptive of the city. The endless labour gives these places the air of vast penal settlements, where the convicted must expiate the social crime of their poverty without hope of remission or release.

Even the middle class is affected by melancholy of departed glories: the two-room set in a mouldering stone building of 19^th century Calcutta, with its rusty ironwork and cracks in the stone. From these places of genteel indigence, young men set out each morning in shabby, unfashionable dress, their trouser-bottoms frayed and splashed with mud, shoes defiantly clean if scuffed, neatly-pressed shirt of acidic chemical colour, a worn wallet with the voter’s card or university enrolment number. They make their way on low-roofed buses to ancient counting houses, where flimsy invoices flutter on rusty spikes, as the squeaky ceiling-fan, whiskery with old cobwebs, and lamps dim with dust shed their pale light on greasy desks in rooms into which daylight never penetrates. In the gloomy offices ancient hierarchies linger, where clerks receive their tea in clay vessels from servants in half-pant, while the staff are served in fluted tea-cups by those in the full-pant uniform of servitude.

Even the young are elderly here, inheritors of a filched patrimony and a past culture, in which they steep themselves like old men in the afterglow of a setting sun; inhabited by the same mournful fatalism in the watery city with its mouldy black umbrellas, and the green algae spreading its slippery bone-breaking slime in treacherous puddles. Kolkata is the site of perpetual crimes against its people: impoverished by the predations of the East India Company, straitened and repressed by Victorian Puritanism, fed false hopes by the exaltations of austere freedom-fighters and, for the past three decades, dominated by the joyless culture of an austere and bureaucratic Left. Traces of all these remain - the elderly servants of the Raj deploring the discipline of vanished colonial administrators, the embittered dreamers of a freedom, fought for with such self-sacrifice and yielding so few satisfactions, the officials monitoring the most trivial infringements of a labyrinthine code of regulations, while extortioners and big-time criminals ride freely in their Mercedes in plush colonies which are located in a new Kolkata of fantasy, detached from its decaying core.

This – the motheaten but still warm heart, not the suburbs and the retreats of the new rich – is for me the essence of Kolkata, the closed shutters and the rusty window-frames, the penumbra on the staircase, the dawn chorus of crows and pigeons a croaking ill-omen of witches foretelling the misfortune to which each day too many will fall victim. It is also a city of ghosts – imperious memsahibs live on in the querulous old women deploring the dishonesty of servants who, they fear, will cut their throats in the night and decamp with their jewellery to a village of dacoits in some rocky fortress of Bihar; elderly babus with their dhoti held between thumb and forefinger and the silvery stubble on their cheeks, pick their way through the puddles, home to the unwelcoming daughter-in-law and the indifferent grandchildren – it was all to have been so different, and they had pictured themselves surrounded by loving grandchildren who listened eagerly to their stories of heroism against the imperialists, the bomb at the racecourse and the burning of British goods; but their heads are turned away, towards the eerie light of the TV screen and its urgent promises of tomorrow that have so easily eclipsed memories of yesterday; ghosts, too, of rickshaw pullers, running through the choked streets with the shafts of the vehicle in their hands, imperious passengers urging them on, ghosts because their work has officially been banished as an affront to humanity. The city itself is a ghost of an imperial capital, punished by the British for the agitation against the attempt to partition Bengal in 1905, as a consequence of which the imperial masters decamped for a doomed fresh start in the spacious thoroughfares of Lutyens’ Delhi.

City of students, too, apprentices in privation, from West Bengal, Orissa and the North-East, young men creating frail family substitutes, four to a frugal room, hard beds and battered metal cupboards, waiting for the arranged marriage and the employment unarranged, running between rumours of work, carrying their tattered biodata and growing frustration; the cybercafe and the porn video their only road to participation in a global entertainment industry. City of security guards, summoned into existence by a class of people rendered insecure by their possessions – the taken for granted, half-educated country boys in uniforms midway between servitude and officialdom; what do they dream in the twelve-hour vigil patrolling the wide stone corridor, or at the gate of the compound, or opening and closing the glass door to the jewel- house with its ugly clusters of gold nestling on the imitation velvet necks of privilege? Do they dream of turning the tables son those who look through them as if they were disembodied hands, or are they simply dreaming of home, wife, children, elderly parents whose hearts would be gladdened by the mere sight of those their superiors look through as though they were transparent?

Kolkata, site of vanished riches and used-up energies, living off the dwindling capital of a leisurely culture that has been displaced by the urgent asperities of globalism. I love it for its fathomless sadness, for its poor, haunted victims of development, and the rain-drenched, unappeasable melancholy at its mildewed heart.