Free Calcutta by Amit Chaudhuri Page B

Its inside was white, and hollow like a bell. As with such objects, they become hand-me-downs to the less privileged, and a maid took it for her daughter after I reluctantly consented to part with it.
    Flurys was full of afternoon revellers. We would need to wait for fifteen minutes to enter; I had a sudden urge—not so sudden, the thought was at the back of my mind—to check out Ramayan Shah’s. “Could I … you could come with me”—but my wifeshook her head and indicated she’d wait for my return here , in the small queue keeping vigil outside Flurys, “OK—back in ten minutes—we should have a table by then”—and I went down the steps and past the magazine vendors and across the road, having loosened my tie, folded my jacket (the last sign of the Bengal Club luncheon) on the crook of my arm. There was activity at the petrol station and in front of Mocambo, of course, but, coming to Ramayan Shah’s, I found an odd solitude, a release of purpose. A strange cessation reigned here. This wasn’t only because Ramayan Shah was missing again (did it really matter if he was there or not?—more and more he seemed a symbol of elusiveness, like Godot), but that the inner rhythm here was different—from the rest of the neighbourhood and from its own incarnation on normal days. Right next to Nagendra’s ironing stand were two figures asleep on string beds, covered from toe to head in sheets keeping out, in the shroud-like form of rural Indian sleepers, what this country has in such abundance and what makes it so attractive: sound and daylight. They were still, but crawling with flies; Christmas, possibly, had given them justification to withdraw into this cocoon. “Where’s Nagendra?” I asked; thinking, too (Fitzgerald once defined the writer as one who can harbour two incompatible thoughts in the head simultaneously), that our table at Flurys might now be available. A man dicing vegetables gestured towards one of the motionless figures on which dozens of Christmas flies had alighted—alighted, it became clear in a second, with no long-term commitment to the venue. A little further off, Ramayan Shah’s son Hridayanand was scouring a pot with a dreamlike containment, neither happy nor unhappy. I think he was probably incapable of being unhappy, or, like most children, was unhappy about immediate rather than overarching matters. Right now he was more bored than unhappy. Since sociological rigour is essential when you’re writing of a city, Iasked the man dicing vegetables who he was and, intrusively, what his earnings were like. He said he was Gupta, proprietor of the Chandan Hotel (I’d noticed the unostentatious handwritten sign long ago and had been cautioned that it was not the name of Ramayan Shah’s outfit). This neglected space, this bit of nothing, left for future use between Nagendra’s stall and Ramayan Shah’s stove, I’d always presumed “belonged” to the latter, that it served a function in his two-decade-old enterprise; but on meeting Gupta the Chandan Hotel acquired, for me, a tenuous territorial shape. Gupta, in reply to my socio-economic query, said he earned a hundred and fifty rupees a day (this was odd, because I’d never seen him plying his trade; but it was clearly either the average on the pavement near Mocambo, or a number that tripped easily off the Bihari tongue). On Christmas Day, he admitted he made less. I would’ve questioned him further about this disappointing dip in his income, but wanted to get back to Flurys while I still stood a chance of getting a table.
    At the traffic lights, I saw a deeply familiar figure on the opposite side, sitting, amidst the concourse of motley people any festive day in Calcutta comprises, on the white parapet outside the large window of Flurys, studying me with a mixture of distant empathy and interest. It was my wife, R. She’d abandoned the queue and opted, as she often does, to sit down. She looked at me as if she’d never expected to