Matiyaburj

A fire burnt to ashes nearly 28 thatched hutments in the southern corner of Colony No. 5 on June 3. Inside a burning hutment, an eight-year-old boy got trapped and died. The district administration announced to give his mother and his father Rs 50,000 as ‘compensation’ (or sympathy). An administration is not designed to offer empathy.

When the UT officials came to ascertain the losses, men, who didn’t have anything anymore, spelt out the monetary losses: Rs 20,000 to Rs 25,000. That’s all. A house, a life’s savings and belongings, all burnt, but worth Rs 25,000 only, a lost future less than the price of a second-hand motorcycle, a Blackberry mobile or a month’s BPO salary. That’s all.

As they wrote down the amount and took the signatures, the officials seemed apprehensive. They found the amounts too high. They know what the administration will give. They were chuckling inside and said, “Let them write what they feel like. At least this will give them a peace of mind”. The others agreed.

The men and the women sat on the burnt black ashen floor of what was yesterday a home in the city. They were proud people; bring up a life with their own labour, without any government help, piece by piece building a future made of routine and payments and small comforts. Burnt. In five minutes, by the fire riding the wind. No one knows where it came from but they know where it has left behind.

A daily wager, who carries bricks and mortar on his head on construction sites, and now carrying his child, said what he was wearing was all he had now.

The incident has activated power politics. BSP workers are at the forefront and are working in tandem with the administrative officials. The ward’s BSP councillor, also a migrant, is in UP now.

Hence, councillor of ward no. 23 is here with tarpaulins and helpers. In times of calamity, political ambitions run on one basic premise: the victims will always remember who came to their help, who did not; workers of which party were active and which were not; who offered real help and who offered assurances.

(It is the unacknowledged cycle of democracy—making the exploiters accountable to the exploited. The exploiter and the exploited retain their respective positions. Democracy has only interlinked them in a post-colonial way.)

There are provisions for compensation due to fire in the law of the land: tragedy due to official negligence is made intrinsic to official compensation. It is as if the state preempts its own failures and also a way to hide it after showing it to everyone; in a way it’s failing twice and smiling over it.

There was a murmur that this payback will be somewhere between Rs 2,500 and Rs 5,000, after the officials ascertain the exact amount of the losses per household.

The officials know the exact losses; they had seen the ashes. But their rational thinking has been lost in the labyrinth of spiral rules, monotony and power. They have been enslaved to the point that they think of guarding the state’s money against its own citizens for the saved money to be used otherwise (in salary hikes maybe or in developmental projects).

Their thinking is not designed to ask for a uniform distribution of Rs 50,000 to each household irrespective of the losses since they will never believe what a man without a home says. But they can think of building a memorial costing Rs 2 crore in the memory of a leader who had never asked for it.

What is there in a retired Pakistani cricketer’s wife? Curiosity and glamour, and we could have been arrested for this! This is what Keshav said, shivering, mad with anger, waving his hands, adjusting the camera-bag hanging from his shoulder.

The fear was primal: 1947. Keshav and I did not understand this. We knew it to be only romance, or worse, bonhomie.

Now that the reporter’s spell has broken, I have even forgotten the name of Waqar Younis’s wife. A tricky pronunciation– I had practiced speaking it many times in the morning.

Some 300 kilometers from the India-Pakistan border, in Chandigarh, in a new Taj (hotel), the romance: Pakistan in India (!) Punjab in Punjab (!) guarded in layers—the CIDwallah sitting on the G Floor in front of the stylish lift whom Keshav smiled at and shook hands and chatted with briefly. In the warm elevator, watching oneself, comparing with the others, two more policewallahs, gaunt. In the carpeted smelly corridor, two ladies, policewomen, sitting on stools, smiling at us, exchanging greetings with Keshav, looking flushed: in the corridor a bald cricketer in a bathroom towel shouting. In reply, a lewd joke coming from the opposite room, adopted Western manners oppressing the sub-continent’s sensibilities. The romance getting dense. Me, feeling unbearable happiness for being in the heart of this sub-continental romance. Getting used to it, asking for her room, casually. Then terror.

A tall one-eyed elderly man suddenly overshadowing us, shouting at uniformed Indians for not properly guarding cricketer Pakistanis against common Indians, pushing us back into the lift, mad with an old grudge, the cricketers’ Pakistani DIG, the personal security officer, angry at himself for not being able to thrash us, mumbling the same words: “Who allowed them in?”, the armed escorts bewildered in their line of duty. Commotion on the G Floor; the DIG hitting all the security-men with pure, hard fear. Both of us pleading our case in the arrogance of journalists, being led to the lobby as trespassers, as more uniforms swarm us, as the DIG goes wild with rage, circling the lobby, for this breach searching for someone answerable, for us crossing over to the other side (the Hindu fundamentalist fear becoming intergovernmental paranoia as well as fun for the reporters.) Keshav jumping with his own form of rage, alleging insult.

I quietly go to the hard-to-find intercom and call her room. She answers, with sweetness agrees to descend to the hotel’s café “in a few minutes”. No fracas, just a retired cricketer’s wife, a mockery of this rage.

But “a few minutes” later we stand outside the hotel’s gate, pushed out by our own police, pleading to us not to create any more trouble, not to instigate the superiors. No going to the café. No photo. I say to Keshav. The woman (I see her photo in the evening—a pretty young pediatrician from Australia) is waiting.

After one-and-a half years, what I saw in Kolkata was an old city becoming new. I found a city reclaiming itself. It was a city in transit. I was not a traveler. I was once part of the city, but I went away and become part of another city. Now I was returning, but to go away again. It was safe. It was a beautiful feeling. I was part of two cities. This feeling of superiority would overpower me whenever I would try to be humble. I was outside the matrix.

A taste cartel

At five in the morning, under the Howrah Station’s concrete canopy, at the vast waiting lounge, the air filled with announcements, beside the plastic chairs set in a square, on the ground half-asleep pilgrims: middle-aged men and women, their expressions as crumpled as the mix of saffron and popular January clothes they were wearing, people in a holy transit, returning from the Ardh Kumbh after a “royal” bath, after having washed away their “sins”, people, with origins beyond Bengal, content lying on the ground.

At a tea-stall, the tea poured from a large steel thermos like water from a tap. No stove could be seen. The taste was distinct. Later I sipped tea from another stall, the same thermos and the same taste. I had a feeling that the whole individual tea-making process in the city had been centralised, sourced from one big point to numerous smaller points across the mammoth station: equal opportunities and a cartel that sells uniformity in taste, just like the pizza chains; just like the Nestea machines in the offices.

This idea could only have come up Kolkata, a city always longing for tea and, as a result, the beverage now available everywhere in the same taste as a cigarette, a Gold Flake maybe. Just the air Every time I was on the road, I expected the fragrance to go away. But there it was– jasmine-like, floating all over the city. Just above the head, the tiny particles, flowing like waves, entering the nostrils and flying up. It was unprecedented. How could one odour sweep over the billions and billions of distinct odours of a city as old and as new as this?