Calcutta by Amit Chaudhuri Page A

traffic becoming real. Related tothese student’s journeys was my birth as a writer—or perhaps, again, rebirth, as I’d been writing for more than a decade, trying to be, at different times, Enid Blyton, Rudyard Kipling, one of the anonymous poets of the Bhagavad Gita, T. S. Eliot, Tagore, Samuel Beckett. Then, in London and later in Oxford, I had a deep desire to revisit home, to escape everything dead and still around me—by home I mean India, perhaps even Calcutta (though it wasn’t my home), and by India and Calcutta I mean “life.” I was possessed by a desire, especially when I was reading, to revisit life, and, in Oxford, I found it was possible to do so in R. K. Narayan’s stories—a writer I’d earlier dismissed, as D. H. Lawrence said the English once dismissed classic American writing as “children’s literature.” But, in those years, I found it possible to discover Calcutta in the oddest of places—in the mining town in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers ; Katherine Mansfield’s New Zealand, which she said she wanted to explore to the last detail, including the “creak of the laundry basket”; the across-the-balcony exchanges in Naipaul’s Trinidad; the economically conjured-up neighbourhoods and streets in the stories in Dubliners . Calcutta, for me, was a particular idea of the modern city, and I found it in many forms, works, and genres. Why, in 1999, did I move to it? Because I’d been rehearsing that journey for years: as a child, in trips from Bombay in the summer and the winter; and later—in my continual search for a certain kind of city—in my reading. And Calcutta would make its way back to me, unexpectedly, through Irish literature and Mansfield and Eudora Welty and the writing of the American South. There was movement on both sides, or from many sides. Even later, when I finally became a published writer, that city would be given back to me by my readers, from their strange identifications and instants of recognition. My friend Aamer Hussein, the British-Pakistani short-story writer, told me how Mai Ghoussoub, the publisher of London’sSaqi Books, had, on reading the section on Chhotomama shaving in the balcony in A Strange and Sublime Address , phoned him and laughed: “It reminds me of Beirut!” I was delighted, like a child, but not surprised. Was this a “contrapuntal reading,” in Said’s manner? Or was it evidence of how, even in modernity—perhaps particularly in modernity—we have shared, primal memories of the spaces we’ve inherited and which came to exist in the world in the last two hundred years? When we speak of shared memories, we hint at some uninvestigated, autochthonic past. But what of the world, the cities, that arose in the nineteenth century? Are we the exiles and travellers of the last two centuries, or our ideas and visions?
    What do I mean by “modernity,” in the special sense I discovered through the Calcutta I knew as a child? Not electric lights, telephones, cars, certainly, though it might encompass these—we had plenty of those in Bombay. I’ll keep it brief: by “modernity” I have in mind something that was never new. True modernity was born with the aura of inherited decay and life. My first impressions of Calcutta from the mid-sixties are of a Chowringhee whose advertisements shone through the smog; and of my uncle’s house in Pratapaditya Road in Bhowanipore, which, with its slatted windows, seemed to have stood in that place forever. It was built, in fact, roughly forty years before my first becoming conscious of it. Similarly, the city itself—which is by no means old by the standards of Rome, Patna, Agra, or even London—is, actually, fairly new, its origins traceable to three hundred and twenty years back in time, the groundwork for the Calcutta we now know probably laid no more than two centuries ago. Yet if you look at paintings and photographs, and see old films of the city, you notice that these walls and buildings were