Free Afternoon Raag by Amit Chaudhuri Page B

sweeper-woman—that the cook (who, before she found love, was a slow-moving, turtle-like woman with luxuriant hips) had made a friendship with a Nepali watchman, a matter of waves, smiles, and glimpses, but then a serious affair of meetings when she would disappear from the house for what she thought were unnoticeable intervals. Returning, she would say she had been to the toilet. Romance was deadamong the middle classes, but among domestic servants it was still a disruptive force, giving them a secret life that had the fraught emotions, the atmosphere and the singing beauty of old Hindi films. When a servant fell in love, the implications were felt all over the house, and became a subject of conversation; my guru would interrupt his tuition to speak about these matters of the heart, glancing sideways when the servant being discussed entered the room.
    Meanwhile, the new houses were completed. Each family, in those matchbox-like flats, put up paintings, placed decorations on the window-sills, hung up lamp-shades, as if life, taken out of the bundle of cloth in which it had been hurriedly wrapped, had settled down and resumed its ordinariness. As the cottages fell, and buildings came up, Hindus moved into the area to live alongside the Christians—Sindhis, a tall, migratory business people, who brought with them a passion for cars and noisy weddings, extended families consisting of grandsons and cousins, and women-folk who sang an unimpassioned, strangelytranquil, version of devotionals in the evening; hovering wistfully somewhere on the border of tunefulness, it brought the quality of a faraway time and place to the area. By the time my parents decided they could no longer live in Bombay, and in those months of waiting for the flat to be sold, until at last when they packed up everything, leaving every room with crates full of possessions, the character of the lane had changed perceptibly.

20
    T hat year, full of those odd coincidences that brought Shehnaz and Mandira and me together, my parents moved from Bombay to Calcutta.
    Calcutta is my birthplace. It is the only city I know that is timeless, where change is naturalized by the old flowing patterns, and the anxiety caused by the passing of time is replaced by fatigue and surrender. It is where my father, having left Sylhet, came as a student fifty years ago. Those were the last years before independence; and my father lived in a hostel in North Calcutta. He ate great quantities of rice in the canteen, and never left a fishhead uneaten. He was an only child, parentless, in thiscity where people spoke Bengali differently and more coldly than he did. North Calcutta was then classical and beautiful, with Central Avenue and the colleges of Tropical Medicine and other sciences, the imposing colonial buildings, the institutions of learning and the roads matching the nobility of their names. And my father saw that nobility with his own eyes. In all the world then he had nobody. It was before history was born, and he himself became who he was, studying in a city that is always prenatal, pre-nascent. The tiny village in East Bengal he was born in, with its village school he went to in early childhood, seems to have never existed. It is now on the other side of the border, in Bangladesh. It is as if my father came into being from fantasy, like an image, in 1923. Yet it is an image full of truth, to think of him studying in Calcutta, or taking a tram-ride, one of the marginal, anonymous people who were neighbours with history, one of the millions, studying, discussing politics, listening to songs, living in hostel rooms, eating in the ‘cabins’ of North Calcutta, who were bypassed and yet changed, without their names or the quality of thosemoments ever being known, by independence and partition. So India took on a new shape, and another story began, with homelands becoming fantasies, never to be returned to or remembered. What did it mean to him, then, without