Ferdinand Mount

Oh, Calcutta!

Now a byword for poverty, the former capital of British India makes for a fascinating study, says <em>Ferdinand Mount</em>

The Chandan Hotel is not a bit like the Exotic Marigold Hotel. It occupies, not a rambling rundown mansion, but a piece of pavement, about six feet by six feet, on Free School Street in downtown Calcutta. Here under the hotel sign, from time to time men doss down on string beds, shrouded from head to toe in sheets to keep out the sound and light of the Indian afternoon.

Next to the Chandan Hotel stands Nagendra with his heavy iron and ironing board, and on the same pavement there is Ramayan Shah’s restaurant where you can also sleep if no one is eating or chopping vegetables there. It’s the human equivalent of those buildings by modern architects where all the ventilation and plumbing pipes are on the outside.

Amit Chaudhuri discovers, as he awkwardly asks his questions, that these street entrepreneurs no more live there than he does. They have places to go, people to see, work to do, collecting parking tickets, cleaning cars. Even the beggars outside Flurys, his favourite tea shop, are all passing by like him, and when he asks if he can talk to them again, they say, ‘I won’t be here tomorrow’ and melt off into the crowd as he does.

Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta, but grew up mostly in Bombay where his father was the first Indian CEO of Britannia Biscuits, an offshoot of United Biscuits, and nowadays he spends part of the year teaching in Norwich. His five novels offer haunting glimpses of the everyday — in Hilary Mantel’s words, ‘he has perfected the art of the moment’. At times, they stray over into non-fiction; the characters sometimes carry the names and traits of his friends and relations, just as the narrative flickers through the parts of Calcutta which he knows best.  Conversely, Calcutta, his first work of non-fiction, now and then seems to dawdle back into a dreamy sort of novel.

This quizzical and beguiling book is not for those whose taste is for tales of the expected (If you need a straight historical guide, Geoffrey Moorhouse’s Calcutta is still gettable).

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