Dipanjan was a small, slender man with glasses. He wore a short-sleeved beige-coloured shirt and trousers. We went to a tall, cupboard-like room just off a central doorway. A desk and two chairs and some tall metal cupboards took up most of the space. The little bit of wall that could be seen between the cupboards was stained: something brown and oily had dripped down from the window.
I asked Dipanjan, after we had talked for a while, ‘Do you see what I see here?’
He said in his soft, steady, precise voice, ‘It’s like other colleges. It’s India.’
But he didn’t see all that I saw. He said he could see the equipment on the lab tables: he could ignore what surrounded it. What he did see in a special way, what upset him and worked on his nerves far more than it did on mine, was the unswept dust on the floor.
The college was for drop-outs, he said, ‘defeated soldiers’ (though they looked active enough and healthy enough in the small college yard). They were people who couldn’t get into other colleges. Their chances of getting a job were small – a B.Sc. degree didn’t get you a job anyway – and they were not motivated. The girls at the college were better motivated. They didn’t have the great need to achieve that the boys had; they didn’t have that pressure; and, paradoxically, they made better students. The college wanted more girls. The fees were 30 rupees a month, £1.20, which even in India wasn’t a great deal.
In that cramped space off the lecture room we talked that afternoon of his background. In physique and voice, and features and manner, he was a gentle man, a mild man. He would not have stood out in any Calcutta gathering. It wasn’t easy to see in him the revolutionary who, 20 years or so before (he was now forty-five), had gone out into the countryside to live among the peasants, preaching the idea of revolution and then, in accordance with the party directive, calling for the annihilation of certain people, class enemies.
His mother had been from a well-to-do family. Her father had been high up in government service, a member of the IES, the Indian Educational Service. Before that, he had been ‘a minor scientist’, Dipanjan said. He had devised one of the early instruments for measuring radioactive particles, and had made a name for himself.
I said, ‘I don’t see how you can call him a minor figure.’
Dipanjan, not losing his evenness of manner, said, ‘In Calcutta minor scientists are quite common. This is the city of M. N. Saha, S. N. Bose, J. C. Bose, and P. C. Ray. The first three were Fellows of the Royal Society. It is only recently that Calcutta has become a backwater. Even in the 1960s, Presidency College of Calcutta had a congregation of physics teachers which could hardly have been excelled anywhere else in the world at that time. So you must understand why I cannot look upon my maternal grandfather as anything but a minor scientist.’
In the South, science had grown over two or three generations out of the brahminical tradition of abstract learning. In Bengal, in the British-built city of Calcutta, science had come with the New Learning; scientific achievement had come out of colonial competitiveness and the wish of Indians to prove themselves.
On his father’s side, Dipanjan came from the Bengali gentry. It was only on this trip that I had heard this word in India. I had thought of ‘gentry’ as an English word, suggesting people rooted and attached to ancestral land, and protective towards it. And the word here in Bengal was in fact an English word, from the early 19th century. Dipanjan said, ‘The British made the gentry hereditary. From their point of view, they were creating a class of hereditary farmers of revenue.’
Dipanjan’s father’s family came from the Faridpur district. In 1947 this became part of East Pakistan. The gentry of Faridpur were in the main upper-caste Hindus. They rented out their land; the cultivators were Muslims and Hindus of the scheduled castes. During the Hindu-Muslim massacres in Bengal in 1946–47, the Hindus of Faridpur had to flee: not only the upper-caste landowners, but also the scheduled-caste cultivators. But long before that flight from Faridpur, Dipanjan’s father’s family had become impoverished. The ancestral land of the family had been so divided that all that had come to Dipanjan’s grandfather (and his dependents) was one room in the big ancestral family house.
This grandfather, when he was twenty, joined the government service, in the Accountant-General’s Office of Bengal. He was helped by the joint-family system. His son, Dipanjan’s father, went to live in an apartment owned by a relation in Calcutta. It was in this apartment that Dipanjan was born.
In 1940 or thereabouts, while he was studying in college, and when he was seventeen or eighteen, Dipanjan’s father became a communist. Dipanjan never thought to ask his father later why he had become a communist: he took it as normal. Membership of the party was a serious affair. When, in 1943, Dipanjan’s father wanted to get married, he had to get the permission of the party, because his prospective bride came from a family that was in government service. The party gave its permission on condition that Dipanjan’s prospective father-in-law (the minor scientist, the IES officer) made out a cheque – for any sum – payable to the Communist Party of India.
After the war, in 1946, when Dipanjan was two and half years old, the party advised Dipanjan’s father and mother to go to Hungary for their higher studies. Dipanjan was left behind with his grandparents. Dipanjan’s father and mother returned in 1950 – after all the upheavals of partition and independence. Dipanjan’s mother had done a teacher-training course in Hungary; she was able to get a job soon after she came back to Calcutta. But Dipanjan’s father, who had become a Ph.D. in biochemistry, couldn’t get a proper job. He moved from one unsatisfactory position to another until 1955, when he found something in his own field; and then he left the Communist Party. And just as Dipanjan had never asked his father why he had become a communist, so he never thought later to ask his father why he had left the party: it wasn’t in the Hindu or Indian tradition, this questioning of elders by young people. There was an odd relic of that Hungarian interlude of his parents: they had both learned Hungarian, and in Calcutta it became their private language, when they wanted to keep things from Dipanjan.
Dipanjan developed asthma when he was seven, in 1951. His mother became protective; the boy lived a retired life, drawing sustenance from books. There were many books in the apartment. There were his father’s communist books. There were also the books of the father’s uncle, to whom the apartment belonged. This uncle was a nationalist; he had books that took the nationalist side. But Dipanjan at that time was not too interested in politics.
He was getting, though, some ideas about the world. In 1952 he had gone with his mother to a slum, where she was teaching children the alphabet: this was party work. He had also gone sometimes to see some of his grandfather’s relatives who had fled from Faridpur in East Bengal. These relatives were living in one of the refugee colonies around Calcutta. Dipanjan didn’t understand at the time; but later, when he began to read about the events of 1947, he remembered the refugee colonies he had gone to as a child, and the events had more meaning for him. But he didn’t think that his generation had been influenced politically by partition.
He was good at his studies. ‘My mother slowly became ambitious for me. And now, with hindsight, I think that must have taken up a lot of my mental space. In 1960, when I was sixteen and about to leave school, my major preoccupations were shining academically and writing poetry. I had become interested in literature, and was writing in Bengali and English.’
He was romantic, but in that setting there was no opportunity for him to meet girls. What was open to him, though, was the city of Calcutta. ‘I was fond of the city even then, and even now I am fond of it. My roots are only in Calcutta. I have no village in Bengal to which I can lay claim. I felt Calcutta as a very living city, because Bengali poetry had become really modern in Calcutta, after Rabindranath and after the revolt against him.’
What about the crowds and dirt of Calcutta? Did he see that, or react to it?
‘Calcutta has always been like this. It was even worse in Bri
tish times. To a Calcuttan it is the perennial challenge – to rise above the all-absorbing task of just keeping yourself clean, which is time-consuming, energy-consuming. The challenge is how to do that and find time for other more significant things. That is the challenge faced by the ivory-tower intellectual and the rickshaw-puller.
‘In J. C. Bose’s time there were not many underground drains in the Indian areas of Calcutta. The drains would have been ditches.
‘We are cursed with a corrupt corporate life. Cleaning the streets is a corporate act, and they will never be cleaned. Corruption here is a way of life, and it has existed here from the time of the East India Company.’
It was now the end of the working day. The motor-car horns and hooters were shrieking a little more exuberantly or impatiently in the streets outside. The college attendant who had brought tea and sodas – adding wet rings to the little stained table at which we sat – now came to close up, and to padlock doors.
Dipanjan took me down to the staff room on the lower floor. No one was there. The room had an enclosed, damp, musty smell, which not even the ceiling fan could blow away. In one corner there was a small, rough, chalk-faded blackboard, crookedly hung. No piece of woodwork or joinery was elegant or finished. What would have been the effect on the teachers? And on the students, the defeated soldiers?
High up on the wall, just below the ceiling, was a large framed photograph. It was a photograph of J. C. Bose, the scientist whose name Dipanjan spoke with reverence. There was an intention of honour; but, in that setting, whatever work the great man might have done seemed to have led to nothing.
The next day was Dipanjan’s day off from the college, and he thought I should come to where he lived. This was in South Calcutta, in a lane so hard to find he drew a detailed map for me to give to the car-driver. Someone whom I consulted thought the journey might take up to an hour, depending on the traffic. So I started early.
The traffic was easy that morning, but after some time the city thoroughfare appeared to shrink, to collapse in on itself from its increased human density. The roadway narrowed; roadside huts and lean-tos, without pronounced colour, just a mish-mash of brown and black and grey, appearing to encroach on space meant for vehicles, hid the solider concrete buildings behind them, and gave the impression of a very long village road set in dirt, such freshness as had come with the morning already burnt up here by brown traffic fumes and sun-shot traffic dust. What seemed to threaten in many places in central Calcutta appeared to have happened here: it was like witnessing the creation of a ruin: a large inhabited city was reverting to earth.
In spite of all the instructions, we overshot the meeting place that Dipanjan had decided on, and we had to go back through the hectic little road and look for it. Dipanjan’s map was so detailed that both the driver and I had exaggerated its scale. Dipanjan had said that at one corner of the lane where we were to meet there was the playing field of a sports club. I had been looking for something the size of a football field: the playing field in question turned out to be the size of a small building plot, about a third of an acre, a square of concrete in a field of dust. He had said that there was a furniture shop on the other side of the lane. I had been looking for an emporium of fair size; but the Nufurnico shop was a small one-storey concrete shed. In this part of Calcutta – where needs and activities had contracted – there was a compensating inflation of nomenclature. In the ‘playing field’, which had a few basketball boards, there was also a sign for Sunny Green Creche, Green Park. Nufurnico described itself as ‘Dealers of Foam Matters, U-Foam Matters and Pillow’. Foam matters: it made sense, in a way.
I had time to think about these things – and also to note the very dusty palm trees, which for some time I had failed to see – because I had arrived about half an hour too early. Out of the crooked lane between the furniture shop and the playing field (Dipanjan had thought I might have lost my way if I had gone into that lane on my own) reasonably well dressed people began to appear, walking briskly, some even with briefcases, Calcutta folk somehow with a day’s work to do. And then Dipanjan appeared, with the deliberate tread of the other walkers in the lane, but he was sandalled now and in a dhoti: home clothes, for his day of rest.
Forty years before, he said, all this area was rice land. This was one of the areas outside Calcutta where refugees from East Pakistan had settled after 1947; everything here had been built in the last 40 years by people trying to remake their lives. And, indeed, away from that main road, the atmosphere of the little lane (perhaps by contrast) appeared pleasant. There was drainage, and electricity. But here too the numbers of people had grown and grown; even in the last 10 years many of the open spaces Dipanjan had known had been filled in.
Dipanjan’s apartment was the lower floor of a small two-storey house. His landlord lived upstairs. Dipanjan made me take my shoes off in the little verandah, which was just a few feet away from the lane. The front room was a combined bedroom and sitting room. It was 10 feet by 10 feet. ‘And, what is worse,’ Dipanjan said, ‘by 10 feet.’ He meant that the room was 10 feet high as well: an absolute little cube.
There was a big bed in one corner. There was also a cane-bottomed settee; bookcases full of books and papers in apparent disorder; and some red box files in another corner. The apartment had another room, for the children; and there was also a space – it was the word Dipanjan used: he didn’t say ‘room’ – with the kitchen at one end and the bathroom and W.C. at the other end.
The two children had been waiting to see their father’s guest. The elder was a girl of nineteen, who was studying to be an engineer at the university of Jadavpur, not far away. She was smiling, open, handsome, with glasses; there was an outgoing quality about her which I had not seen so far in her father. She said mischievously of her plump brother, who was thirteen and was clearly going to be physically bigger than his father: ‘He wants to go to America.’ It must have been partly true, partly teasing; but the brother took it well. And then they were both off, into the little verandah, and then a few steps down into the lane.
Dipanjan had moved into the apartment in 1980. They were quite cramped there now; but they didn’t think so in 1980. The children felt cramped, though. The little apartment cost 600 rupees a month, £24. There were some neatly kept houses around. There was a nice small house next door, with a hibiscus shrub against the ochre-coloured wall, really quite close to the windows of the room in which we were. That house belonged to an ayurvedic doctor, someone practising traditional Hindu medicine.
They had nice neighbours in the lane; they couldn’t complain about that; but the house was terribly dusty. That was why Dipanjan was so particular about getting me to take off my shoes: to keep out the dust which my shoes might have brought in. Trucks often went down the narrow lane; when they did, dust blew straight into the house. And there were mosquitoes.
Dipanjan said, ‘That reminds me. I should put on a coil.’
He went to the inner ‘space’ – his long dhoti was brown or beige, with a plaid or check pattern – and he came out after a while not with the green mosquito coil I was expecting, but with a plastic blue Japanese ‘gadget’ – Dipanjan’s word – that had to be plugged into a power point. The chemical in the plastic container was released by heat.
A sweeping woman, speaking no word, looking at no one, bending down low from the waist, her legs quite straight, passed through the front room, flicking her little broom at those small areas of the terrazzo floor that were not covered by furniture or the red box files.
Dipanjan’s wife came in. Her name was Arati. She was of Dipanjan’s age. She wore a dark-coloured sari with a small pattern, and a black bodice. She, too, was a teacher: her classes started very early in the morning, and finished at 10.
She wanted to know about lunch. She said that Dipanjan couldn’t eat wheat. ‘Rice, rice, rice – that’s what he wants, three times a day, as often as I give him. He can’t digest wheat.’ That was an aspect of Dipanjan’s ‘post-political’ l
ife. It had been brought about by Dipanjan’s illnesses during his life underground in the villages, and by the badness of water in the delta.
‘Amoebiasis,’ Arati said. ‘It’s a chronic condition. Does it occur in your place? It’s in most of the third world.’
It was the first time, since I had been talking to Dipanjan, that reference had been made to his life as a guerrilla. And it was unexpected that it should have come in this direct, unheroic way, with this emphasis on his personal frailty – the tormenting things he had known before the dust and mosquitoes of the lane.
Dipanjan sat on the bed. The three small windows of the room, with iron bars and green shutters, lit him from different angles. There were three old photographs on the blue walls, and one small portrait in colour. The photographs were of Dipanjan’s father and mother, his father’s father, and his father’s maternal uncle, in whose rent-controlled apartment Dipanjan’s father and then Dipanjan had lived until 1969. This relative had been a nationalist and a journalist; he had edited a proscribed Gandhian journal and had gone to jail in 1942. He was a man of culture, a Brahmo, a man of the Bengal Renaissance. But Dipanjan’s greatest admiration was for his father’s father, who was an orthodox Hindu. He had gone into the Accountant-General’s Department because there had been no money for his higher education, and he had devoted nearly all his working life to looking after his brothers and sisters – which wasn’t easy, especially after the calamities of 1947.
The photograph of this grandfather was big. Dipanjan had had it made from a damaged original. Other prints of lesser intensity had been made, but he liked the one he had on the wall.
‘He had penetrating and dazzling eyes. I prefer this print because of the eyes. We have all inherited our preoccupation with ethics from him. He was a man of principle. People say he never did a wrong thing in his life.’
The other photograph, in colour, quite small, was of the young Mao.