limited duration only, to realise it was possible to revisit some of the first experiences of your life as if they were new. Those student years consisted of a series of such rebirths, because of the end-of-term breaks in British universities, and thecheap flights (when my parents moved to Calcutta, I began to fly Bangladesh Biman and Royal Jordanian) out of London. But there were the flights back. If I got to know birth, I also got to know death. There’s no rationality to this—to why I’m possessed by posthumousness, uselessness, torpor—all symptoms and traits of dying—before I leave. But who ever said that clinging to life could be explained rationally? I suppose what I mean is—India, for whatever reason, is synonymous to me with life; and you don’t love life by weighing its advantages.
The Bengali poet Joy Goswami saw me in the doldrums, in my Calcutta flat, on the eve of yet another departure to England in 2002. A meeting had been arranged by a journalist from the Statesman ; Joy and I were to be in conversation, covering, randomly, a range of interests. The Statesman would transcribe and publish this conversation. The only available time in our calendar was this afternoon prior to the flight early the next morning.
Generally, on the day before I leave—sometimes, even two or three days before departure—I stop doing anything; I stop moving. I don’t like engagements on the day. I’m giving myself completely to the time left me—in the process, becoming a bore. I go through the motions, inwardly disengaged; I’m convinced I have no right any more to be here. Dusk is the worst time—the closing of the day, which is as beautiful a time as the day’s beginning, because it has its own signals of continuity, gesturing towards return and the day that follows. This is what is most insulting; that none of those multifarious signals—the stripe on a shaalik’s wing, a schoolboy’s shout on coming home from school—are addressed to me. I am alone in the universe in knowing that this orchestration of the day’s close, leading to the new day’s arrival, is absorbing everyone else in its rhythm, but that I’m irrelevant to it. Joy is shrewd enough to notice (as he and Chitralekha ofthe Statesman are served tea) my isolation, my disguised posthumousness. He calls it bishonnota —“deep sadness.”
“It’s peculiar to musicians,” he says. “I have a friend who is a musician who’s exactly the same way before he travels.”
None of the reasons for my return had to do with Calcutta being what it’s still often stubbornly called—a “capital of culture.” When my parents moved here in 1989, I realised slowly that it had ceased being any kind of centre. Of course, over it (already stunned as it was by power cuts) still hung, like a presence that wouldn’t go away, the shadow of the Bengal Renaissance—that is, the great changes that had taken place from the late eighteenth century onward to produce figures like Rammohun Roy and Debendranath Tagore, who created the Brahmo Samaj, the reformist sect that decisively turned away from an “incorrigibly plural and various” Hinduism towards a unitarian, Upanishadic world view. And this unitarianism, through which, in effect, man discovers he’s suddenly alone in the universe (despite a putative God), would have deep philosophical implications for the appearance of liberal modernity in Bengal, with men like Madhusudan Dutt, Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore, and others feeling compelled, as it were, to take upon themselves the hard task of creating a new literature and culture: a new image of man himself. I had no illusions about the present-day inhabitants of the city having any real interest in this history.
* * *
The eighties was, as I said, a time of rebirth. There was the actual feeling of being born another time as I stepped off the cheap flight from Heathrow and experienced, in the hour after arrival, the onrush of life and
The Bengali poet Joy Goswami saw me in the doldrums, in my Calcutta flat, on the eve of yet another departure to England in 2002. A meeting had been arranged by a journalist from the Statesman ; Joy and I were to be in conversation, covering, randomly, a range of interests. The Statesman would transcribe and publish this conversation. The only available time in our calendar was this afternoon prior to the flight early the next morning.
Generally, on the day before I leave—sometimes, even two or three days before departure—I stop doing anything; I stop moving. I don’t like engagements on the day. I’m giving myself completely to the time left me—in the process, becoming a bore. I go through the motions, inwardly disengaged; I’m convinced I have no right any more to be here. Dusk is the worst time—the closing of the day, which is as beautiful a time as the day’s beginning, because it has its own signals of continuity, gesturing towards return and the day that follows. This is what is most insulting; that none of those multifarious signals—the stripe on a shaalik’s wing, a schoolboy’s shout on coming home from school—are addressed to me. I am alone in the universe in knowing that this orchestration of the day’s close, leading to the new day’s arrival, is absorbing everyone else in its rhythm, but that I’m irrelevant to it. Joy is shrewd enough to notice (as he and Chitralekha ofthe Statesman are served tea) my isolation, my disguised posthumousness. He calls it bishonnota —“deep sadness.”
“It’s peculiar to musicians,” he says. “I have a friend who is a musician who’s exactly the same way before he travels.”
None of the reasons for my return had to do with Calcutta being what it’s still often stubbornly called—a “capital of culture.” When my parents moved here in 1989, I realised slowly that it had ceased being any kind of centre. Of course, over it (already stunned as it was by power cuts) still hung, like a presence that wouldn’t go away, the shadow of the Bengal Renaissance—that is, the great changes that had taken place from the late eighteenth century onward to produce figures like Rammohun Roy and Debendranath Tagore, who created the Brahmo Samaj, the reformist sect that decisively turned away from an “incorrigibly plural and various” Hinduism towards a unitarian, Upanishadic world view. And this unitarianism, through which, in effect, man discovers he’s suddenly alone in the universe (despite a putative God), would have deep philosophical implications for the appearance of liberal modernity in Bengal, with men like Madhusudan Dutt, Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore, and others feeling compelled, as it were, to take upon themselves the hard task of creating a new literature and culture: a new image of man himself. I had no illusions about the present-day inhabitants of the city having any real interest in this history.
* * *
The eighties was, as I said, a time of rebirth. There was the actual feeling of being born another time as I stepped off the cheap flight from Heathrow and experienced, in the hour after arrival, the onrush of life and
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