entirely understandable and slightly mad; given she wasn’t so well—and despite her deceptive air of reasonableness.
Her husband, Munna, was now far away; he’d gone back to his des, as labourers in Calcutta do frequently, to a place that sounded—on Baby Misra’s tongue—like “Raksaul.” Jitinder, who was five years old, was clearly on an outing; he carried a little stick, probably to entertain himself or, in his own made-up universe, to protect himself and his mother. Like him, I too was not immune to the charms of Free School Street in December—a poor, dirty, congested road, with an open gutter on either side, but busy with insignificant enterprise, and with residues, everywhere, of an earlier bohemian life. I crossed the street and soldiered on—the pharmacy was not where I’d expected it, and bystanders kept promising, “Just there—further on”—while, doggedly,Baby Misra followed, with her son, confidently brandishing the stick, unimpressed by the crows and stray dogs. I was thinking that there was something else I was supposed to be doing, which I was being kept from, and my stride became more urgent; and then realised that this—whatever it was I was doing now on Free School Street—was exactly what I’d set out to do. “What is it that’s troubling you?” I asked her; she said, quietly, that she had a shooting pain in her right leg, a pain like a “current.”
Bihar, Bengal’s neighbour, has one of the grandest histories of all Indian provinces; home to India’s first great empire, to two great and austere religions, Buddhism and Jainism, and to the ancient teeming city of Pataliputra. It’s a world that the Indian child knows from comic books—the kingdom of Magadha; the resplendent emperor Chandragupta Maurya on his horse; the tonsured sages gathered round a holy tree; the sensuous women that the artists of the Amar Chitra Katha comic book series drew with lascivious satisfaction. While you glimpse that dreamworld of eternal India, you don’t make the connection, either as a schoolboy or as an adult, with Bihar, byword for abhorrent ministers and bureaucrats and policemen, minor warlords and ignorant peasants, whose once-poetic tongues—Bhojpuri and Maithili—now, spoken by the likes of Ramayan Shah, make people laugh. There’s no reason to think that the Biharis, who constitute a substantial percentage of the floating population of Calcutta, like the pompous remnants of the Bengali bourgeoisie at all, flattened by decades of left rule, or that the Bengali thinks of the Bihari as anything other than a rickshawalla. It’s a testament to Bengali self-absorption that the city is still fundamentally thought to be a Bengali one—although grudging concessions are made to the fact that the economy, now, is almost entirely controlled by Marwaris. But what of the Bihari? On Park Street and Free School Street, and in other parts of the city, he is everywhere; leaning outof a taxi window, eyes glazed, buying gutka from a vendor (who’s also, possibly, Bihari) to keep himself going for the rest of the day; or selling chanachur masala in front of a mall; engaged in small trade or the perennial construction work; living apart from his family, then mysteriously withdrawing to his des for a month.
J. P. Medico.
Here was the pharmacy! But the corrugated shutter was down three-quarters of the way. I bent down and could sense there were people there; I was told from within that they’d reopen at five o’clock. Yes, I think it’s true that some pharmacies—and maybe pharmacies alone—take a long siesta in Calcutta. Do they do such bad business in the afternoon that even keeping the ceiling fan and tube light on makes little sense? “Open up please! We’ve come a long way!” I said, taking on the moral tone of my class, the educated class, impatient with the laxity of the poorly educated. Baby Misra seemed quietly relieved and respectful upon seeing me in this incarnation. To my surprise,
Her husband, Munna, was now far away; he’d gone back to his des, as labourers in Calcutta do frequently, to a place that sounded—on Baby Misra’s tongue—like “Raksaul.” Jitinder, who was five years old, was clearly on an outing; he carried a little stick, probably to entertain himself or, in his own made-up universe, to protect himself and his mother. Like him, I too was not immune to the charms of Free School Street in December—a poor, dirty, congested road, with an open gutter on either side, but busy with insignificant enterprise, and with residues, everywhere, of an earlier bohemian life. I crossed the street and soldiered on—the pharmacy was not where I’d expected it, and bystanders kept promising, “Just there—further on”—while, doggedly,Baby Misra followed, with her son, confidently brandishing the stick, unimpressed by the crows and stray dogs. I was thinking that there was something else I was supposed to be doing, which I was being kept from, and my stride became more urgent; and then realised that this—whatever it was I was doing now on Free School Street—was exactly what I’d set out to do. “What is it that’s troubling you?” I asked her; she said, quietly, that she had a shooting pain in her right leg, a pain like a “current.”
Bihar, Bengal’s neighbour, has one of the grandest histories of all Indian provinces; home to India’s first great empire, to two great and austere religions, Buddhism and Jainism, and to the ancient teeming city of Pataliputra. It’s a world that the Indian child knows from comic books—the kingdom of Magadha; the resplendent emperor Chandragupta Maurya on his horse; the tonsured sages gathered round a holy tree; the sensuous women that the artists of the Amar Chitra Katha comic book series drew with lascivious satisfaction. While you glimpse that dreamworld of eternal India, you don’t make the connection, either as a schoolboy or as an adult, with Bihar, byword for abhorrent ministers and bureaucrats and policemen, minor warlords and ignorant peasants, whose once-poetic tongues—Bhojpuri and Maithili—now, spoken by the likes of Ramayan Shah, make people laugh. There’s no reason to think that the Biharis, who constitute a substantial percentage of the floating population of Calcutta, like the pompous remnants of the Bengali bourgeoisie at all, flattened by decades of left rule, or that the Bengali thinks of the Bihari as anything other than a rickshawalla. It’s a testament to Bengali self-absorption that the city is still fundamentally thought to be a Bengali one—although grudging concessions are made to the fact that the economy, now, is almost entirely controlled by Marwaris. But what of the Bihari? On Park Street and Free School Street, and in other parts of the city, he is everywhere; leaning outof a taxi window, eyes glazed, buying gutka from a vendor (who’s also, possibly, Bihari) to keep himself going for the rest of the day; or selling chanachur masala in front of a mall; engaged in small trade or the perennial construction work; living apart from his family, then mysteriously withdrawing to his des for a month.
J. P. Medico.
Here was the pharmacy! But the corrugated shutter was down three-quarters of the way. I bent down and could sense there were people there; I was told from within that they’d reopen at five o’clock. Yes, I think it’s true that some pharmacies—and maybe pharmacies alone—take a long siesta in Calcutta. Do they do such bad business in the afternoon that even keeping the ceiling fan and tube light on makes little sense? “Open up please! We’ve come a long way!” I said, taking on the moral tone of my class, the educated class, impatient with the laxity of the poorly educated. Baby Misra seemed quietly relieved and respectful upon seeing me in this incarnation. To my surprise,
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