A fool doesn’t like being called a fool. A mad man will call you mad if you call him mad. A villager will think you are insulting him if you call him a villager. A dog, a pig, or a donkey – surely they wouldn’t like being cursed by those names either?

But call the city by any other name and it won’t be as sweet; it will grumble and say, “City, I insist”.

§

My grandfather sent his son to the city to escape the war. He thought of cities as safe, perhaps also civilized, and a little like a safety vault. He was a jeweller and thought of the world in such shop-grown metaphors. Towns and villages, especially the kind of frontier town he lived in, were like glass show-cases, seducers of thieves and dacoits; cities, on the other hand, were like safety vaults and hidden bank lockers, resistant to invasions of the eye. He had never seen a city and, therefore, for him, his imagined city wasn’t very different from his wife’s imagined moon.

Those who left for the city never came back – this was his great fear, and also his great joy. Had his sense of geography not been so surreal (India had been carved out of the heart of Bangladesh; the Padma flowed northwards, from the sea to the Himalayas, for where else would a river get water from, if not the sea?), and had he been a little more tolerant of his grandchildren’s textbooks, he would perhaps have likened the city to a tinier version of the Bermuda Triangle.

In many ways, it was strange that he thought of the city as a vacuum cleaner (his metaphor, used when he came to stay with us a few months before he died). A city was like a magician’s hat – it could make everyone and everything disappear, at least temporarily. He considered that disappearance a measure of safety, like a mother hiding her child from the father’s cane. The city will keep them safe, he told his friends after sending his children to stay with relatives in Calcutta during the 1971 India-Pakistan war, and when one of them asked him how, he kept silent for a long time before saying, “Because the king lives in the city.” He was too lazy to understand the ways of the republic – the “raja” had, after independence, become “chief minister”, but he continued to remain “praja”. A palace falls last; his children would be safe in its neighbourhood – reasoning possible only against a backdrop of fighter planes and shelling.

But he also knew that even if death came last to a city, it visited twice, like a nostalgia tourist. He thought of the post-mortem (a term he mispronounced as “post-maran”) as the worst kind of violation of the human body, a double death.

And yet, he sent his son to the city.

§

My father, like many first time visitors, came to the city by train.

It was the only time, he tells me, that his dream had come true. He meant this literally – the long journey, squatting in the passage near the door, the smell of yawns and the sticky matted hair at the end of the journey, even the faces of his co-passengers and the ticket collector, he had seen them all in his dream, night after night. He hadn’t seen it in a film, not yet, only read about it in a few novels that had found their way into the village school library.

His first journey to the city was, he likes to romanticise, the opposite of Satyajit Ray’s journey to Nischindipur, the village where his film Pather Panchali is set. A stale joke about their common surname later, he tells us how, when he watched the film for the first time, he had repeatedly looked at the projector light in an old cinema hall to see whether that beam of light which contained in it the journey from the city to the village, could also hold its opposite – the story about a journey to the city.

§

My first visit to the city was through a film: Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar (“The Big City”). I was, I must emphasise, forced to watch this film. At that age, black and white films signified boredom to me: they made my mother weep and my father garrulous. It was my father, with his eccentric ideas about a child’s education (he had once made my brother and me stand outside in the dark, moonless night for four hours to overcome our fear of darkness!), who made us watch the film. He asked us, my brother and myself, to “swallow” the film. He used that word often in Bangla, especially when he made us memorise the names of all the plateaus in Asia, or eat bitter gourd on Sundays, or watch Ray and Ritwik Ghatak.

The lead actress in the film (the only word for actress in our vocabulary then was “heroine”) was Madhabi Mukherjee. An aquiline nose, perfect lips, loose half-formed ringlets of hair falling near her ears – she was an emblem of natural sophistication, the city woman-in-becoming. My father, while watching the film with his friends, discovered his love for the woman who would be my mother. He found a resemblance between the two women, which no one since then seems to have noticed. Madhabi Mukherjee, in his arriviste’s eyes, became the woman he needed to possess; only a woman like her would make the city, with its tortures of repetition and trials of entrance tests, bearable. And so he wooed the woman with the only thing he had: his imagination. He wooed her with things he thought would mark him less as an outsider, for when everyone slept at night, he pulled himself out of the hostel and saw it as one would see it from the sky. It looked like a jail to him when he first arrived, and then, with time, he began thinking of the building as a living thing, as a fish with its stomach full of eggs. Those eggs were young men like him, his hostel-mates, and just when he was on the verge of falling asleep, this half-imagined dream flew out of his mind and became independent. It gave him cold sweat and delayed his sleep further. In that dream he saw a very big fish, bigger than a whale, taken out of water; its stomach full of eggs, the fish was taken to a hospital and, there, declared dead on arrival, its body was sent for post-mortem to the morgue. There, with the stomach ripped open, the eggs, thousands of tiny round islands, start floating on a large tray. He could never see the end of the dream. He couldn’t exert his imagination enough to tell him what became of the eggs. He, a rationalist who showed his lately-found modernity by criticizing astrologers and palmists, was troubled by guilt, by the fact that he could give a dream such importance. And yet, he knew that he wanted to know what would become of people like him.

Some dreams travel to places only to disappear. When my father moved to the Chicken’s Neck, a fledgling small town in which to put up his tent, the dream about the city-fish just disappeared. He searched for it in vain. When he tells us to not allow our dreams to vanish, I sometimes wonder whether he means it literally.

He finds it strange that my mother, a sentimentalist on leash, does not remember a single dream about the city. Perhaps he doesn’t realize that the city was never an object for her. Though she grew up in Tagore’s Santiniketan, she travelled with her parents to the city almost every weekend. My grandmother, a British woman who grew up in London, would not have been able to survive in India otherwise. She followed my grandfather to India to experience the Gandhian ideal of “simple living, high thinking”, and strangely, like most fans of that cult, decided that such a life was possible only in a village. So, she became a villager with a vengeance: living in a clay house, keeping a tiny poultry farm, growing her vegetables and even keeping a horse and two cows. But after the long week that she and her husband spent in treating the unfamiliar diseases of the villagers of Bolpur (for Bolpur was then a village and not the pretentious university town it is today), she longed for the Englishness of Calcutta. It was all there in the words: Park Street, Grand Hotel, Flury’s, Nahoums, Trincas. They, with their music and lights and fresh-from-the-oven smells, made cityness available to her. They, and the secondhand booksellers on the pavements in Esplanade – from them she bought all that was available and, after two afternoons of reading them, following Miss Marple (whom she described, in her doctor’s idiom, as “libido-anaemic”) and Hercule Poirot (an example, she used to teach my mother, of the silent “t”) on their expeditions, all this while keeping an eye on Calcutta as it moved without questions outside her window in the Grand Hotel.

“A city must have a village in it to be a city,” was her oxymoronic prescription, and perhaps her daughter took it seriously when she fell in love with my father, a man who had, not too long ago, not known a proper bathroom.

In Mahanagar, the Majumdar family of the 1950’s Calcutta could have been from a village, followers of the first part of my grandmother’s favoured doctrine of “simple living”. They dress simply, talk in a language that was being fashioned by the middle-class, simultaneously in life and in art, but their problems are urban. To borrow an old Shavian dictum: No city, no conflict. Ray lets the city become a microcosm of the newly-independent nation coming to terms with the dissatisfaction of unemployment (whose climax his colleague and contemporary Mrinal Sen would show us in Calcutta 71, a decade later) and, yet, his city is a real city. I remember one scene in the film where I was tempted to get up and wipe the sweat off the black and white television.

It was the first time in my life that I saw so many people on a ‘real’ street. It would be the first impulse that would trigger my anthropological curiosity about crowds, and I can actually recall asking my father how different the men and women in the Republic Day Parade (till then my measure of multitude) were from the crowds in Ray’s city. Ray’s film ends with a shot of the crowd, and then a movement of the camera tugged gently upwards to show a streetlight. When I had first watched the film, my father, in trying to explain the world to his children, had told us that it was a symbol of hope for the citizens. Since then, every time I have watched the film, I have found myself in disagreement with him. For me, this is Ray’s Tagorean gaze into the distant and, at the same time, it is also a space where Ray will leave us with binaries but will not break them for us: man-machine, many-one, crowd-individual, sympathy-empathy.

Sometimes I am nostalgic for my first interpretation of the film – I had thought it was a story about lipstick. The man was angry with his wife because she had worn lipstick. If she wore no lipstick, they would live happily ever after. I didn’t like the film because, at seven, like most girls, all I wanted to do, if allowed, was to wear lipstick at all times of the day, even while bathing or sleeping. I was also a bit angry because it was a black and white film and I couldn’t make out the colour of the heroine’s lipstick.

Many years later, when I learnt that an “imported” maroon lipstick was the first gift my father had given my mother, a precious amount spent from his meagre university scholarship, I began to understand, even if only partly, how cleverly Ray had fused a semiotic of the ‘foreign’ woman with the awkward and adolescent consciousness of a growing city.

§

When my eldest uncle came to the city to become, in what was the parlance of the times, “a graduate”, he told himself that he would only study in a college that had an “English” name. He hadn’t done very well in his board exams and it was difficult for him to get admission to a college of his choice. The “English” catalogue ran thus: Presidency, St. Xavier’s, Lady Brabourne (he wasn’t aware that it was a women’s college), and so on. Of course, he didn’t make it to the merit lists of any of these colleges, and when his name appeared on the notice board of Vidyasagar College, he flatly refused to get admitted.

“If I have to join a college whose name begins with ‘V’”, said the already balding teenager, “then why Vidyasagar, why not Victoria?” There were no post-colonialists then, who could have reasoned with him. And, of course, it was an institution only for women.

So he went to Government Art College, all its three words in English, and promptly gave up his biri for cigarettes.

City and Cigarette: the rhyming first sounds of these nouns gave him great relief, he would tell us later. And another “Ci” word: Cinema.

When he would go back home to his village on his first vacation, and his mother would ask him whether he had brought her the three things he had liked best in Calcutta, he would keep quiet. It wasn’t because these “Ci” things could not be carried. Having left the city behind for a few days, its materiality, the smoke of its cigarettes in the hostel toilets, and the thrill of its dark cinema halls, he would feel that he had become two people, and that the two would never be able to exist simultaneously, like twins in old films.

§

“CT” – pull the “e” sounds of the two letters a bit and you have the Bengali word for whistle. It is both noun and verb, in that sense a bit like that English word “nail”, and for those who have a problem pronouncing their sibilants, also something in-between.

My maid uses the word about four times a week, whenever she has to complain about the pressure-cooker. It is, of course, completely another story that she thinks of that cooking utensil as semi-human. The complaint is this: the ill-behaved pressure-cooker does not obey the maid’s instructions and gives a “CT” whenever it wants to. She thinks of it as an insult. She is quite certain it is a city trick. In her tiny village in Bangladesh, the “CT” (the O-mouthed, shrill whistle – air pulled in like marrow from a bone) was a call for help, from a mango tree or a boat on the river, sometimes even to ask for a green chili to rub into the dal and rice. She now identifies that sound only with the city – young men, always in a group, let out this shrill sound when she, a young woman in her early twenties, passes by. It is not the solitary sound of an individual in a village; in the city, people whistle together, like jackals. Only the train and the pressure-cooker – man-machines in her eyes, something she associates with the city – whistle alone.

She thinks she doesn’t like the city. Most people who live in the city are like her – they like to lie. They don’t know what they don’t like about it. Sometimes it’s the weather (making it seem that all cities have the same weather), sometimes the traffic (and yet they buy cars for “city roads”), sometimes “city-people” (as if the complainants are not). But most often they blame everything on that four letter word itself. “City”. As if it was the proverbial mother-in-law. The rich abandon it on weekends, wishing they would never have to come back to it; the poor discover it on Sunday afternoons, playing cricket on the roads by which their employers would soon return to their homes.

Maya, my maid, learnt the word “city” from my young niece. For a long time, she mispronounced the word as the Bengali word for whistle, “sheetee”. No one corrected her – mispronunciation by the poor doesn’t matter, and certainly not if it offers comic relief to the dull dinner conversations of the rich. Then, one day, when I took it upon myself to correct her, she told me that she didn’t like English words.

I knew it was a lie, having heard her use the words “thank you”, “sorry”, “please”, and even “future”.

Before she left for the day, she came to me and confessed, “I have known for a long time that I mispronounce the word. I hear you using it with your husband quite often. But I didn’t want to change my pronunciation.”

“Why?” I asked her.

“Because that mispronunciation makes me feel that I don’t really belong to the city, and one day, when I have enough money, I will leave it for home and never return.”

This time, she said “city”, not “sheetee”.

§

Life… in a Metro (2007) could have been the title of a Bob Nanna album. It is a rare instance of an ellipsis in the title of a Hindi film. And, unsurprisingly, it says much about what the word “metro” signifies in the Indian subconscious. A Hindi film with an English title isn’t uncommon anymore, though it continues to be a bit like the popcorn machine selling “makai”. An Evening in Paris (1967) was a double scoop of exoticism, the French city and the English title. It wasn’t just globalization that changed the provincial cinema-watcher’s gaze.

The title of Anurag Basu’s film tells us that the corpse of exoticism has reached the multiplex gates. The common noun says it all – from the romance of “Evening” to the tantrums of “Life”; and then there’s, of course, the fall from the proper noun to the common – “Paris” to “Metro”. The return ticket slip is in evidence. “Once upon a time,” an evening in Paris or love in Tokyo or even a “piya” in Rangoon could excite a cosmopolitan’s curiosity, but in a world where Karan Johar’s cities are as characterless as the slow search-engine in makeyourtrip.com, the word “Metro” doesn’t sound like an ugly fit anymore. It’s just the bathroom slippers you need to keep your feet from getting dirty.

§

Ratan, our gardener, came to the city from a tiny hamlet in the Dooars. He is illiterate, but he can describe a thousand varieties of cloud formations and predict their histories. He can also make our “adulterated city soil” (his description, a part of the oral advertisement of his skills) “bleed with flowers” (again, his words).

He is illiterate. I say this again because I find it difficult to believe. We have all, in turns, tried to teach him to read. It might sound strange, but he picked up the English alphabet faster than he did Bengali. Of course, it is another matter that his memory is “Random Access”. He might say the English alphabet in the correct order (though I cannot explain to him why the letters in the alphabet need to be learned in a certain order!) one evening and, the next day, he might not even be able to say the first three letters. But he has a powerful visual memory – he even remembers the shadows of the flowers in the garden, or so he claims.

Once, when I was teaching him the “A for Apple…” course, he irritated me by getting stuck at “C”. Its shape was that of a sickle, he said, and started crying. His tears surprised me. Calling himself a betrayer, he slapped his hands on the floor, as if in penance. Much later, after many cups of tea and my mother’s patient probing, he confessed that he had let his forefathers down. They were farmers, men who had died with the sickle in their hands. Gardeners are like crows, which he called “false birds” and “city birds”; only farmers can grow things that are of use to man, for what use are the flowers that gardeners grow?

The next day, he stood outside my door with a sickle in his right hand, the sharpest end pointing towards his face so that it looked like a “C” to me. “See,” he said, smiling, as if he had stumbled upon a remarkable discovery. I smiled back; there was nothing I wanted to tell him.

“Didi, will you teach me all the words that begin with this?” he requested, pointing to the sickle in his hands. Like all sentimental people who cannot tolerate other people’s sentimentalism, I was irritated by his words.

“Yes,” I said, noncommittally.

“Teach me now, please.”

“C for cow, C for cycle, C for crow,” I began and, as if my psycho-geographical journey from the village to the city, from that kind, life-nurturing bovine to a scavenger bird, had been completed, I said, without being conscious of such a movement, “C for city.”

“C for city,” he repeated a few times, as if I’d said something miraculous, and then asked, “and C for …?”

I looked around my room and found nothing that began with the word “C”, nothing except the “Ceiling” and the “Computer”. He wasn’t interested in those things; abstraction was his mood for the day.

“C for city…” he went again, and just as I was about to tell him to go and water the plants, he looked at me like a child and said, as if my assent would make of his words an eternal truth, “C for CPM?”

My father, a great believer in the cult of explanation, later told us, like a scientist speaking to the press, that Ratan hadn’t known that CPM wasn’t an “English word”. His journey to the city – “C for city” – had brought upon him this miraculous discovery; my brother, typically Bengali in that he will never lose an opportunity to pun, added, “C for Cickle”. It was a poor pun, and my mother, never one to get the joke, asked, in all seriousness and innocence, “Why didn’t he say C for Congress?”

§

Dipu da, my brother-in-law, is from Birbhum, and like many in that rice district, he mispronounces “S” for “Sh” and, often, the opposite as well. He is a strange man – that is the consensus in the family. Only, of course, my cousin, the long-haired girl he wooed for thirteen years, does not agree. He will disappear for days and when he will return, he will give no explanation. He will pretend that he was in the toilet. That is not my metaphor, but his.

“How long can you live here without smelling the paddy fields?” he will ask, to which my brother, if he happens to be present during the conversation, will whisper in an aside, “Yes, how long can you live without smelling urea and pesticides?”

His father-in-law, my maternal uncle, will humour him with a question, “Where?”

And we, like an audience which is still greedy for the nineteenth viewing of a scene in a favourite film, will wait for the climax.

“Where? Where else but from this Shitty?” he will say, and we will all repeat that last word in a chorus. “Shitty.”

“City,” my maternal uncle will correct him, embarrassed at his daughter’s choice of husband.

Dipu da will take this as a cue and disappear once again – this time to the toilet.

§

Like many of his fellow countrymen, my driver’s first visit to the city was to see a doctor. His mother tongue is officially Nepali, but if he were to be perfectly honest with the Census surveyors, he could put “Silence” in that column. My mother, the most talkative person I know (her surname used to be Chatterjee), believes that he has a tiny tongue that impedes his speech. My father will convince you, if only you allow him a few minutes, that he is actually a Chinese spy posing as a native Nepali; his sister, the family historian, will have us believe that Phurba Daju is the latest among a long line of subalterns in the family who will not speak.

His English is meagre, his Bengali, the language he eavesdrops on while driving, is poor and almost make-believe. His Hindi is an extension of his Nepali. He loves to hate; dialogism is his great vice, one that we are often forced to indulge, to help him from falling asleep on long drives. He is a man who has internalised all the opposites in the world. He hates words with a vengeance. He corrupts them consciously with mispronunciation – that is his revenge and reward. He often pretends that he is invisible, as when he jumps a traffic signal; he will also pretend, especially when he is by himself, that he is extremely courageous. He will exaggerate his opponent’s strengths and then, in a tale of his triumph over such a rival, he will wait for his audience to pick the moral of his story: his invincibility.

After a series of minor accidents in which he was hit by the traffic sergeant, he began to have hallucinations about traffic signals. Our car was retired, hurt, to the garage. If he wanted to keep his job, he would have to see an optician first, we insisted. He had his excuses: although his driving license said that he was sixty-two, he was actually only thirty-seven years old; the water in his eyes was actually tears for the cause of Gorkhaland; the traffic police changed signals just after he had finished crossing because they hated all Nepali drivers, and so on. When everything failed, he asked for two things: an advance on his salary and indefinite leave. For some reason that is difficult to explain logically, we were liberal with both.

And off he went to the City to see a doctor.

He distrusted all the doctors in our town. In fact, he distrusted all the doctors in the world. And while this might be gossip, the chowkidar next door told us that Phurba Daju had told him that though he could drive even if he went blind, he wanted to see the city once, before he lost his eyesight. Also, if he had to lose his eyesight at all, he might as well lose it to a city doctor’s inefficiency. This must have been the longest conversation the man had had in his life, and it is difficult for us to imagine the short and thin man’s mouth full of so many words.

He called us from Calcutta. It seemed that the city had filled him with words. He couldn’t stop talking. While my mother can’t remember most of what he said, she does remember this – he called “Sheher” “Sher”.

The city had got him roaring.

§

For a very long time, there was only one city in Bengal.

This might sound like the first line of a fairytale, but it is more a fable about the state’s urban policy. So Calcutta was – and perhaps still remains – more than a city. I discovered the word “metropolis” at roughly the same time that I made my first visit to Calcutta. It was a train journey in winter, the smell of naphthalene in the warm clothes and the scent of oranges bursting out of the wooden crates in the long corridor – together, a smell of laziness. My brother and I stayed up all night counting the number of stations we would have to pass to reach the city. We arrived at different numbers each and our parents were ignorant judges.

A little while before the train reached Calcutta (and for that ultimate moment of arrival, we had been prepared by our parents who had met and lived and loved in the city) we crossed a river. My mother, like most of the passengers in our cabin, closed her eyes, folded her hands in the gesture of a pranam and then, opening her eyes again, as if to be sure, looked out of the window. A few years later I would learn that this was the river Ganga and that she had been praying to the Goddess Kali in Dakshineswar. But until that moment of knowledge, my brother and I would think of that pranam as a way of paying obeisance to a city. For when we would travel to Delhi for the first time, also our first plane journey, we would look out of the window, and noting the green and brown Ludo-board like cityscape, we would fold our hands and close our eyes for a moment.

Now we laugh – What might the words of our prayer to the city have been?