Free Calcutta by Amit Chaudhuri

features that convey, and incite, animosity. But, as you grow older, experience tells you to distrust your first impression (this can be fatal when it comes to people who have an aura of villainy, and very useful in connection with those who have an air of “niceness”); so I thought I’d engage with Munna in spite of not wanting to.
    “That boy’s half-mad,” he said, as he scooped up rice from the dented plate. The boy he’d described smiled enigmatically. He was too busy to be bothered: splashing the utensils, dicing the aubergine. He turned out to be Ramayan Shah’s son; he said he was “fourteen or fifteen” years old, but looked younger—small, enigmatic, and spring-like. As I took in his features from differentangles, I did see that he looked a bit like his father; but lacked, naturally, his air of calm acceptance. Clearly, Munna and he didn’t like each other. The boy was cheery but homesick (he missed the “khelna kudna,” the abandon, of his village); and Munna was a bully.
    “He eats a kilo and a half of rice every day,” said Munna, rapidly consuming rice himself. “He doesn’t eat food: food eats him.”
    The boy’s name was (probably appropriately) Hridayanand—“joyful of heart.” His response to my queries was one of gobsmacked (this ugly English word is the only one that comes readily to mind) disbelief; he’d never encountered such a specimen before. Munna’s was supercilious distaste and suspicion. He wasn’t sure if I was a scam-artist who was going to exploit him, or whether I was an imbecile up for exploitation—the perpetual and urgent Indian dilemma. Nevertheless, as if he were reluctantly doing me a good turn, he volunteered a potted life history. He had been “here”—the word could have meant anything—since 1986. That was in one of the worse decades in Calcutta’s history, even worse in some ways than the Naxal years, when middle-class children, like the children in Victorian novels, read for their finals by candlelight, when the city seemed to implode and the interminable power cuts earned the chief minister Jyoti Basu—whose first name means “light”—the nickname Andhakar or Darkness Basu. Since such was at least the middle-class perspective on 1986, it made me wonder how much worse it would have been in Munna’s home town to make the move. Everyone around “here” was Bihari, he proclaimed: a generalisation, of course, but with a germ of truth in it.
    They—four of them—slept on these latticed string cots and narrow benches—the rudimentary furniture that occupied the pavement at various angles. He cleaned cars and earned one hundred and fifty rupees a day (almost double the minimum wage inthis country of starvation deaths and millionaires); and sent back two and a half thousand monthly. At home in Munger zilla, he had two daughters.
    “Police cause trouble,” he said, with the wariness of one whose domain depends upon offering small bribes to the law.
    No, I didn’t have a great deal to learn from Munna—nothing that, by now, I didn’t already know. But Munna was aware of the value of his time and information. “Arrey, at least give me something for a cup of tea!” he said as I got up to go—careless of the decorousness that had characterised the others I’d socialised with till now at Ramayan Shah’s. Nagendra was ironing away within earshot, and his expression could have meant anything: “I wish I was somewhere else,” or “Serves him right!”
*  *  *
    25 December 2009: the Bengal Club Christmas lunch menu had lobster bisque as usual. Then there were the other things—fish buried under almond sauce; roast ham with a sort of dark twinkling lacquer veneer; turkey, of course, most unexciting of meats. But how could you have a Christmas lunch without turkey? And Christmas pudding in brandy cream. It was the sort of weather in which a jacket and tie—the club’s dress code for men for the event—is just fine. Most people were into