Inside the skin of a city

The most interesting thing about this series of short biographies on cities that Aleph’s been publishing is that each one is different, depending upon the proclivities of the writer. While the book on Chennai is a nostalgia trip, the one on Mumbai focuses on what citizens are doing to the city. This one, Grand Delusions , is a lot like the city itself — sometimes all Kolkata, sometimes Oh! Calcutta, and sometimes colonial Calcutta. This multi-dimensional vision is laid out right at the beginning in a chapter entitled ‘North is north and south is south’: “There is no east or west in Kolkata. There is just north and south. Not Upper West side-Lower East side. Not Left Bank-Right Bank, or East End-West End. Just Uttor Kolkata and Dokkhin Kolkata. North. South. Old. New. Authentic. Ersatz. Culture. Chaos. Hic. Hep. Raw. Cooked.”

The self-deprecating yet superior tone threads its way through the book. Sometimes it flows clean and smooth and words sing. Take, for instance, this fragment where he talks about the Brigade Rally Ground: “…hell was empty, the poor devils were all there…” On other occasions, it seems as though the confusion in the writer’s mind bunches up in clumsy clumps, confounding the reader. This interweaving of lucid and dense is borne out in the title of the book, and the sense of entitlement it assumes also reveals vulnerability.

There’s a lot happening in the first 20-odd pages. Then you come to a vignette of small boys playing football. “I realize the purpose of the cage as soon as I spot a bunch of youngsters kicking a football around on the grassless park. Someone calls out to the long-haired goalkeeper: ‘Joydeep, ready!’ And as Joydeep puts on his gloves, readying himself in front of an imaginary goalpost, another boy ribs him, ‘Oh, totally Sergio Ramos!’ referring to his attempt to look like the Real Madrid central defender. I remember how I was once Anatoliy Demyanenko, left-winger for Dynamo Kyiv, as well as Xavier Pius, striker for Mohan Bagan, depending upon my mood.”

That “totally Sergio Ramos” is the moment you begin to get a handle on the book. It is like a breath of fresh air and you understand how Indrajit Hazra is inside the skin of the city he loves to hate or wants to love or misses when he’s away or couldn’t care about… we never know for sure. As he writes: “I feel like a Fyataru, one of the three flying narco-anarchic characters created in the writings of Nabarun Bhattacharya. The Fyatarus are a cross between angels and ‘rocker chhele’, the men-boys who sit about on a neighbourhood ‘rock’ (from rowak , a raised terrace in front of buildings), smoking, drinking tea from narrow glasses and commenting on everything and more.”

For those who are able to connect with all he’s connecting with — and there’s a lot, in this case football, small boys, childhood, madness, communism, para (locality, colony) culture, intellectualism, naxalites — it makes for a compelling look at Kolkata. The author’s own memories shed another kind of light. By now, though, the highbrow tone has gone under, for a while at least, and that’s a relief.

How much will this resonate with those unfamiliar with the city? It seems the author expects the reader to come to this book with information, experience and feelings. You won’t find, for instance, too much about the history of the city that was capital of British India until 1911. The narrative is so closely linked to the senses and sensibilities of the writer himself.

It’s not nostalgia, though. It’s introspection, it’s self-questioning. They give the narrative a philosophical turn, unlike the book on Chennai, for instance. Would you label it typical ‘Bengali intellectualism’? Maybe.

Hazra’s biography moves between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the simple and the complex, north and south. The politics of the 1960s-1970s brings to mind Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland .

Many visitors would have seen that boat-shaped house in Salt Lake and wondered about it, as Hazra does. Readers will not fail to be moved by his reference to Mahasweta Devi’s Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Ma . There’s a lot he says and plenty more he implies. There’s that thing again then: familiarity with the city.

He takes you to many places in Kolkata and you really feel the absence of a map. This is a major drawback of the series. How do you understand a city without a map?

In retrospect, therefore, Grand Delusions works best for those who ‘know’ the city, and even better for those who have a soft spot for it. If you’re looking for a tell-all about Kolkata, this is not that book, but it is certainly one you should read.

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