Subir Roy: Time hangs lightly

Arun Babu is father-in-law to my niece. I have come to pay him a courtesy call, to utter an unspoken thank you for having visited us after my mother died. These reciprocities have to be maintained, because he is kutumba, that is, in-laws with whom one must be particular about social etiquette. It is not that Arun Babu is the nit-picking type. He is in fact the opposite, an amiable soft spoken old man of slight stature who is visibly pleased that I should have found the time to call on him.

Getting to his house, however, is a bit of a problem. The lanes from the main road eventually get so narrow that they can take cars only single file with inches to spar by the sides. In the minute or so that it takes to pay off the taxi, two cars have piled up behind and in the inimitable Indian road user’s tradition keep honking despite the fact that all can see I have no option but to do as I am doing.

Once I settle down I casually remark that the neighbourhood must have come up before cars came to India as the roads are just wide enough to take in a horse-drawn carriage. Arun Babu remarks equally casually that it must be so as this house itself is over a hundred years old. I sit up and look closely at the immaculately preserved interiors that do not give their age away. The house looks no older than ours which is a relatively young 70.

As for the nieghbourhood, I am told, it is named after a Muslim woman who, locals believe, was a pioneer in her time, hold your breath, several hundred years ago, hold your breath again, fighting for the rights of Muslim women. I am bemused by the way time hangs lightly. The contrast is even greater as on another sofa in the sitting room a boy well under ten is expertly operating a laptop on which he is alternately watching cartoon comics and drawing casual shapes with a painting software.

Then, as we keep chatting the boy switches to a home video clip featuring a little girl. I sit up as I know her. It is my niece’s four year-old daughter, that is Arun Babu’s grand-daughter, who was born in the US and has recently come to India as her scientist parents have decided to relocate. Her gig is also faintly familiar. Yes, I am told, it is a key dance number, Jai Ho, from the film Slumdog Millionaire. It is amazing how quickly the child who was ‘all-American’ till less than a year ago has traversed cultures and is performing with vivre what is essentially a Hindi film song and dance number.

I take the boy to be another grandchild of Arun Babu and he is. It is apparent that his mother who asks him to tone down the music with the dance is a daughter in the household. Then in between conversation, when the hosts go to fetch something or answer a phone, my brother-in-law, that is my niece’s father who has come along with me, tells me the story of the young woman.

One of the peons at the bank branch in which Arun Babu used to work had died suddenly, leaving behind a widow and two little girls. One bank employee had adopted one of the girls and Arun Babu and Nanda Didi, his wife, had adopted the other. That girl had grown up and married in due course and her son was now growing up with all the loving indulgence that grandparent shower upon a grandchild.

Slowly we get to discussing a visit I plan to make to meet and get to know Shivdas Chaudhuri, a relation of Arun Babu, who in his time was a famous bibliographer and librarian of the Asiatic Society in Kolkata. Nanda Didi brings out a yellowed tabloid opened at a page where the iconic onetime head of the National Library, BS Keshavan, has done a highly laudatory review of a book by Chaudhuri which is part of a bibliographic series cataloguing articles that have appeared in scholarly journals all over the world on diverse topics coming under the umbrella of Indology.

The book was published by another iconic name, Firma K L Mukhopadhyay, which, I remember, had the appropriate telegraphic address ‘indology’. And the tabloid in which the review was published in 1992 is The Statesman’s Literary Miscellany. I casually glance through some of the other pieces. They are all extremely well written and carefully edited.

Today’s Statesman is not even a shadow of its former self; it is an altogether different entity. As I come onto the main street on my way back home, my senses are assaulted by the honking of every kind of vehicle and recklessly driven shabby mini buses and tinpot buses. The contrast between Kolkata’s distinctive past and fallen present is a well worn theme but does not fail to make you stop in your way every time you come across it.

subir.roy@bsmail.in