AMERICA HAS GIVEN ME more than I ever wanted, more than I even thought I could want, and I will be forever grateful.
Thirty years ago I came to Stanford to gain engineering knowledge that I could put to practical use. Of course I was planning a comfortable life for my wife (whomever my father might choose) and children (should I be so blessed). Those things, the monetary things, have worked out beyond all accounting. None of that, on the scale I have enjoyed, would have been possible anywhere but America.
Coming from Kolkata, the old Calcutta — in my case, even from well-off circumstances — I’d been formed by life-and-death dangers that define survival in that city. In California, I appreciated personal security I could take for granted, the friendliness of landlords, neighbours, fellow students and professors, and the respect that was paid to me — even as a foreigner — by the business and investment community. I could go to a bank with good credit and a business plan and compete for a loan. In America, I could trust in contracts and know that they actually worked for mutual protection. I cannot imagine a more hospitable country than the United States of the early 1980s.
America gave me everything I ever wanted. But somehow, I, or America, could not deliver on what I really needed. In the spirit of honesty, I must say: it has become time for me to leave.
On the streets of my childhood, I also knew love and security. Back in those days, Sunny Park was green and serene, the bungalows widely spaced behind high walls. I knew the names of chowkidars who night and day sat on wooden stools in our neighbours’ driveways, and the danda-walas who walked the street by night, hour by hour, chiming their thick wooden dandas on the concrete, waking us to the reassurance that no miscreants had breached the security of our streets and walls.
We were trusting souls.
I was the little boy in a St. Xavier’s white shirt, gray shorts and a loosened tie who would sit at the feet of gnarly old chowkidars, absorbing the people’s history of Bengal. The old men’s memories and passions stretched back before Partition, to their youthful love for the leader of the Indian National Army, “Netaji” Subhas Chandra Bose. Netaji saw the mortal threats to Britain from Germany and Japan as the God-given opening for India’s immediate independence. Allying himself to Britain’s enemies — what could be more obvious? According to Bimal Nag, my toothless, chowkidar-informant, Netaji broke with those Congress Party traitors, Nehru and Gandhi. Nehru was even (“pardon me, young sir”) on intimate terms with Lady Mountbatten. What kind of Independence could such a twisted man negotiate?
“We know, don’t we? Bishwasghatak.” Treachery. “Mountbatten’s vengeance on Nehru was slicing us up in Partition. They robbed us of our homeland. Your people are from East, no?” Yes, they were. I was born in Kolkata, but both of my parents were born in Dhaka. At home we spoke the eastern dialect and in soccer we lived and died with East Bengal.
Those had been thrilling days in old Bengal, when the Japanese Army was raking through the jungles of Burma to the edge of “British” India. Soon, the Japanese Army would link up with Netaji’s INA, Calcutta would welcome them, and Delhi would automatically fall to our home grown liberators. The British and all the vermin who’d sided with them would be swept away to England or Australia. My grandmother remembered — with mixed pride and terror — the Japanese bombing of Kidderpore Docks. “They meant no harm to Indians,” her father had assured her. “Their fight is only with the Britishers.”
We hadn’t yet learned what the Japanese had done to their fellow Asians in China, the Philippines, Korea, Singapore and Indonesia. Indian nationalists like my grandfather would have called those pictures of bombings and beheadings “Churchill propaganda”. He trusted only his two heroes: Netaji and Adolf Hitler. My father remembered his first meeting with American airmen, running up to them in welcome, and being offered a few paise to shine their dead-cow shoes, an untouchable’s job. He was a proud man: he never forgot.
Today, Kolkata’s airport, (which used to be called Dum-Dum, after the village where the British made their bullets), is named Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport.
One morning, as I walked past him on the way to school, Nirmal Nag didn’t snap to attention and offer a fake-military salute, as he often did. He was slumped against the wall, head nearly in his lap. I walked over to him, asking, “Mr. Nag, are you keeping good health?”
A necklace of dried blood stretched across his throat from ear to ear. You would think that was enough to alienate me forever from my hometown.
At dinner, my father declared, “It seems our Maoist friends are sending a message.” But what “message” were the Naxals sending, murdering a patriotic old man and wiping out the only history book I could trust?
“Naxals!” my mother cried. “They’ll kill us in our beds. They’ll feel our soft hands and kill us on the spot!” The Naxalites were our local Maoists. They wanted to exterminate all educated, soft-handed capitalists like us.
“It must have been a garrote,” my father explained. He spelled the word. Nag’s death helped me learn a useful new word, never to forget it. “Fear not,” he said. “The police will protect us.” My father was very friendly with Mr. Ranjit Gupta, the Chief of Police.
“Army and police are all with the Naxals,” my mother persisted.
My father was an avid golfer, a member of two clubs with 18-hole courses; one of them designated “Royal.” His threesome was usually made up of “Slicer” Sinha, his personal banker, and Dr. “Peppy” Peppermintwala, his arthritis man. When I was twelve, I was allowed to carry my father’s bag, and then to scour the greens and roughs for old golf balls. I was present the day “Slicer” laughingly said, “Now I will demonstrate the rationale behind my nickname,” and proceeded to skewer a drive into a dense strip of scrub and trees. Just beyond the trees, on the other side of a high wall topped with barbed wire, we could make out the tin roofs and smoke from the cooking fires of a teeming bustee. That’s how it always is in Kolkata: splendor and squalor cheek-by-jowl.
Slicer Sinha went to assess his lie, and never emerged. A few months later, when my father thought I could absorb the news, he casually mentioned that two days after the unfortunate incident, Slicer’s head, wrapped in an old sari, had been deposited on the lap of his dozing chowkidar. The poor old man went mad.
And I was friendly with the dhobis carrying a family’s laundry on their heads, and the istiri-walas — the ironers — standing under broad trees, dropping hot coals into the belly of their heavy appliances to keep them steaming-hot. I knew the names of their children who would sit at their father’s feet with a notebook, keeping accounts. The children, somehow, had learned to read and write (as their fathers never had), and to add, and I don’t think those children ever missed charging for the ironing of a sheet, a school uniform, a sari, or was any item ever lost or over-charged. My mother doublechecked every expense. That’s the old Calcutta: double-check, then verify.
If I’d been able to put two-and-two together, I would have placed those dhobis and istiri-walas and their big-eyed children under the tin roofs of the bustee next to the golf course. I would imagine them drawing tea-water from a rivulet where thousands of people had dumped their night’s slop-buckets, where wives and mothers squatted for hours turning chapattis and stirring a pot of daal on an open fire fueled by cow-dung patties plucked by the delicate hands of diligent daughters from the dust of roadways. I can still smell the acrid smoke, augmented by millions more street-dwellers cooking the same items by the same cow-dung on the streets of Kolkata, which would turn our winter skies black with smog.
But I was a St. Xavier’s boy, skipping along the wide footpaths under a canopy of trees, without a care. It came to me much later, when I’d made my fortune, that I began thinking of the millions of such children in India: bright, curious, adaptive, and how we’d wasted their lives. Back in the days when I could walk without canes or assistance, I toured those bustees. I might not be able to alter the country’s fate, but a few million dollars entrusted to an honest contractor could provide clean water, trees and gardens and school rooms with computers and dedicated teachers.
My wife called it a pipedream.
Even today, especially today and the past few months, I can conjure the smell of coal-fired ironed sheets, my mother’s saris, and my school uniform. I knew our driver, Naseer Ahmad, and the names of his twelve children and three wives, and our Christian primary cook, Samuel, whose wife and children lived somewhere in Orissa, and Mohammed, our replacement cook, or sous-chef, as I learned to call him, who took over during Samuel’s month-long Christmas and Easter breaks.
The major Christian holidays made serious demands on Samuel’s time. At Christmas, and at Easter, many of Samuel’s children magically found their way hundreds of miles to Kolkata, to Sunny Park, and materialized on our verandah with their hands out. So did Naseer Ahmad’s and Mohammed’s at Id. With a domestic staff of Hindus, Christians and Muslims, we were always short a driver, a cook, a bearer or chowkidar. We were not a particularly religious family, but we were communally tolerant. We were Hindu and we knew our gotra and tried not to violate it by ill-considered marriage. My family had expended all their energies getting out of East Bengal, settling in Kolkata and educating their children.
My father earned his electrical engineering degree in Britain, in the uncertain years just after Independence. India dithered. Should we align ourselves to the East, West, or stay neutral? Socialist, Communist, Capitalist? We were a little of each. And so, four dreary, hopeless decades passed, with Five-Year plans, promises and no delivery. The energy of two generations was wasted, their aspirations thwarted. We fashioned a culture of bribery. We created the land of eternal legal stalemate. We became a stagnant pool of incredible talent, turning cynical and corrupt.
Before leaving for London, my father had married. When he returned he went to work at Calcutta Electric Supply Company. He created a family: my oldest sister, born nine months after marriage, then two more girls after his return, then two boys, and me, the baby. By then — we’re up to the early 60s — he was able to leave CESC and start his own company, Dasgupta Electric, which he merged with his father’s Dasgupta Construction. We built housing then furnished them with television sets and the transistor radios and recorders and later, microwave ovens. Eventually we eliminated the need for istri-walas, dhobis and door-to-door appliance repairers. Dasgupta C&E was the company that I was sent to IIT-Kharagpur, then to Stanford, to bring into the late-20th century. In my father’s incessant planning, my job would be to transform DE&C from retailers into manufacturers and salesmen into researchers.
How orderly and planned my life was to become! If I picked up all the bread crumbs scattered by my father — if I’d come back with the proper engineering degree, topped perhaps with an MBA, if I’d taken charge of Dasgupta Construction & Electric and hired my brothers and brothers-in-law to impressive-sounding positions, if I hadn’t fallen in love on my own — I would have led a comfortable and doubtless, rewarding life. I would have been one of Kolkata’s young shakers and movers.
I’d already discovered Smriti Roy, the girl I wanted to marry, but it never happened. I went to Stanford instead and she went to London and became a Muslim parliamentarian. Eventually, I married my father’s choice, Meena Mitter, and we have our son, and she divorced me and we got back together, for a while, and we now have a baby girl. And we have a second divorce.
Without a drop of rebelliousness in me, I systematically rejected every nugget of fatherly advice. I left Stanford before my degree. I didn’t go to business school. I went deep into debt to start my own company. Our son is a very different kind of genius. One night when he was sixteen, in the midst of the usual Indian immigrant “Harvard- Cal Tech or Stanford” debate, he announced: “I’m gay. The whole world will be my university.” He dropped out of high school and went on a bus-and-walking photographic safari of India. He took pictures — high quality, I must admit, and much honoured — of all the places boys from good families had been taught to avoid. All the kinds of men and boys we’d whispered about. I hated myself for thinking: thank God my parents are dead. They will never see those photos of men dressing as women and men-on-boys and police raids on rail-station toilet stalls.
My father used to say, “When Manik is turning a picture, all of Calcutta is working.” This was never truer than the years of my adolescence when Manik-da — or, as he was known outside Bengal, Satyajit Ray — was making movies based on the novels of other friends of my father, Sunil Gangopadhyay and Moni Shankar Mukherjee. “Shankar” was Bengal’s most popular novelist, but with him novels were only a hobby. By day, he was an executive with Dunlop’s. Manik-da’s films of the 70’s were contemporary, not historic, appealing to a middle-class audience and based on the daily compromises made by middle-class, commerce-based Calcuttans. In other words, movies were being made about people like us, like our clubs, our colleges and our class.
When Manik-da was making a movie, all the taxi drivers, caterers, carpenters and electricians, all the part-time and full-time actors, the musicians who’d put away their instruments or packed away their dreams, found work one more time. So did the streetcleaners, repairmen and technicians. Dasgupta Electric provided the appliances and the generators. Middle-class Bengali-speaking children found walk-on parts. Has any artist ever been so attached to his city? Maybe Samuel Johnson, as I learned at St. Xavier’s, but I doubt even Doctor Johnson knew such connection, or received such adulation. “When you are tired of Calcutta, you are tired of life,” he might have said, had he known our city. Even I found a small walk-on, in Simabhaddo. For a few months, I thought of myself as an actor-in-training, dazzled by Sharmila Tagore, not an apprentice electrical engineer. I have known many of the world’s “great men” but in my mind, Satyajit Ray was the greatest.
Now I want to be Manik-da. Not to make pictures, but to count in the same way to my city, to be once again connected. All my life I’ve been a hero-worshipper. I know I can’t put this in print, but what I want is to be beloved in Kolkata, like Ray, like Netaji, like others I have known. But I left Kolkata, and all I have is money, and money never makes you happy, or loved.
My editor says, be ruthlessly honest. Be so honest that you might have to change the names and locations and maybe even call it a novel and not an autobiography.
Kolkata, with all its dangers, brings peace to my soul. America, with all its protections, is the more dangerous place. It has deranged me. It has taken away my son and my wife. It has left me in a wheelchair, pushed by a girl of twenty. Security and danger are reversed for me. A gated community in California is the most dangerous place in the world.
After Meena divorced me, she lived with many men. In those years, I also made many missteps. I called it “growing.” When I was a so-called “free man”, and one of the Bay Area’s “most desirable bachelors”, I tried to live up to the billing. This time, Meena refused to go back to India with me. She’s the true American. She was able to shed her old Indian identity, which I couldn’t do. She fell in with American feminism. I could only redeem my error-prone life through the application of lavish charities.
I’ve been through Heathrow, that ghastly catacomb, hundreds of times. And during the hours I’ve been left alone, I’ve sat with the telephone on my lap, thinking of Smriti Roy, the woman I didn’t marry, the woman with a “spotless reputation” that I alone besmirched. In England she became Firoza Imran, MP. We haven’t spoken in twenty-two years, the day she left from Dum-Dum for a new life in London. For one year in Kolkata, we frolicked like Australopithecines just down from the trees.
She’s Muslim, headscarf and all, a junior cabinet minister on the left wing of Labour and a divorced mother of two. One son is half- African, Rashid Imran, “Rash the Flash”, a footballer, son of her Ugandan ex-husband. But who’s the father of the other?
I’ve always believed, when I saw her that last time at Dum-Dum and she said, “I guess I’ll wake up in Heathrow”, that she was pregnant. Now, I’m free. A bright young Parsi banker has locked my fortune into a Foundation. My wife and children are well looked-after. I’m Executive Director of my own Foundation, meaning I can spend my money but no one else’s.
This time I made the call. Her secretary put me on hold, then said, “Miss Imran wishes to know your name and business and residence address.” I said, “My name is Pronab Dasgupta. She will know.”
After a click, Smriti spoke, “So, you finally want to talk.” Her accent was perfectly English. Twenty-odd years in England, why wouldn’t it be?
“I’m very sorry for not having called,” I said.
“Why ever should you? I never thought of calling you.”
“I’m going back to India, permanently.”
“So, you’ve left your Meena? Poor thing, thrown out on the footpath without a penny? And I hear you have a much younger lady with you. What are they called these days, trophies?”
“She’s my secretary.” I’d been in England less than an hour. How could she know?
“Pronab, dear, try not to lie. If not to me, at least not to yourself.”
“She’s a friend of my son’s and she helped around the house. But she got homesick for India. There’s nothing between us.”
I waited for her response, but the air was dense and challenging. I counted her breaths, as she must have been counting mine. Finally I said, “I’m not lying.”
But I was lying. I heard it in my voice. Nothing had occurred between us, but the will was there. She flirted. And I keep thinking about it. A middle-aged man in a wheelchair, a pretty girl pushing him; I could read the faces and smirks of passersby.
“How ghastly for you,” she said. “So near, and yet so far. Twenty, is she? Go ahead, there’s no guilt, is there?”
“Smriti? May I call you that?” She didn’t object. “I’m going back to Kolkata. I’ve set up a Foundation and I’m going to distribute all the money I made in America to the places where we had factories. Bangladesh, Malaysia, Cambodia, Bihar, Orissa, Bengal. Yes, I’m a guilty immigrant. I’m a very lonely, very rich, very guilty immigrant. And if you ever find yourself tired of Britain or looking for new work, I’ll make you the managing director ...”
I couldn’t tell if she’d hung up. “Smriti?”
“Excuse me, my jaw keeps dropping. Your arrogance is truly staggering. First, Pronab, there is no Smriti. She’s gone, as though she never was. You think you’re so persuasive that all you have to do is ask and I’ll pack up my life here and go back with you, isn’t it? You want me to impersonate Smriti Roy, but she’s been dead for twenty years. Don’t you see how disturbed you are, how seriously fuckedup, to use your vernacular? I’ll be here till the voters throw me out, and then I’ll go back to my law practice.”
I carry an image, the two of us naked, our borrowed room slightly askew, and I am holding her breasts and she backs into me, and the music begins again and we’re at it, helplessly. What I want to ask, I can’t. Your other child, the older one, who is he, where is he? Is he ours?
“Firoza ... I’ll get used to it.”
“That’s one small step.”
“If I write, you’ll respond?”
“I always respond. I’m a politician.”
“I mean more than letters. I want to put my life in focus.”
“A book? Sounds enchanting. If you’re really serious, I’ll give you the name of an editor. She even lives in Goa.”
I can’t say it’s a tragedy, especially not a collective tragedy for all the Indian immigrants of my generation, but we had no American childhood, no Archie-and-Veronica high-school romances and no “adolescent” memories at all. We had one long childhood, more or less homogenized since we lived in the same city in the same kind of neighborhoods and went to the same schools, and our childhood ended abruptly with college, and college ended with marriage.
When we arrived in America we were newly minted, without the movies and songs and sports and television shows that form the very essence of American character. We could learn to imitate Americans, but we never understood “It”, the essence. Back in St. Xavier’s we thought we knew everything. We were taught to be upright men in a fallen universe. We were taught that nothing of importance in the world had escaped our notice. And that is true: nothing of value had escaped us. All that we missed was the trivia, the silliness — in other words, the essentials. I felt like a well-trained spy, convincing in every outward manifestation, but inwardly afraid of exposure.
We were cleared to begin our lives anew in America, free of inhibitions, guilt or family obligations. And (of course) we soared, but we were untethered to any earth. There is a time in one’s life when the skipped years come back to claim us. The house I bought had a wine cellar. And with a cellar you’re obliged to fill it. And when it’s filled, you have to drink it.
I came back to Kolkata, a city so radically changed, so expanded in its suburbs, so redeveloped in its core, so crammed with high-rises, so attractive in new ways with shopping malls, markets, parks, yet still respectful of the staid, quiet ways of my childhood — and, yes, still overcrowded, still filthy — that I had to rent a hotel room for two months just to reacquaint myself. Neighborhoods that had been deeply suspect, areas we would have avoided in my childhood had become the New Kolkata, home to high-rise luxury, garden paths, pools and nine-hole golf courses. Bursting, I might add, with money like mine, earned in the West, the returnees demanding Western amenities, Sub-Zero refrigerators, flat-screen televisions, dishwashers, and of course, blinkers against the myriad varieties of local misery.
I am walking again. On the street (given the perils of broken sidewalks), I still lean on a cane, but inside I walk unaided. My balance is a little shaky, but there’s no pain. It’s taken a year and many visits from an ancient homeopath, a “nerve doctor”, who mixes pastes and applies them to my feet for an hour or two, then washes them off with fragrant oils. I have never been so well attended. My brothers and sisters have risen to a certain metropolitan prominence; they fill in the gossip-gaps and information-underload from my twenty years’ absence. They also provide me with reliable drivers, cooks, and maids.
They ask: do I miss America? Their children, my nieces and nephews, are nearly all settled in the States: doctors, lawyers, researchers and economists. Half of Kolkata, half of all India, it seems, are States-settled. My oldest brother, now retired from Dasgupta Electronics, spends six months with his daughter and her family in Florida, comes home for Durga Pujah, then leaves for another six months to stay with his son and family in Ohio. They make such dual-track adjustments seem so natural, as though boys from the old Sunny Park and St. Xavier’s were raised on exotic expectations of travel and cross-continental settlement. In the old days, my oldest sister, widowed just short of her sixtieth birthday, would have worn nothing but white, would eat nothing but rice and yoghurt and live out her life in a poky little flat, maybe with the company of a widowed servant. Now she stays in Kolkata for the “autumn whirl”, the social season, then heads off to Italy and France on wine and art tours.
I have made my first targeted contributions. Three schools are nearing completion, one in Bangladesh, one in Orissa, the third in Bihar. Bricks and pipes are easy to procure; finding honest contractors and dedicated principals and teachers and politicians not seeking bribes — bribes on top of bribes, someone bribed on my end to push the project while others are bribed to stop impeding it — that’s the hard part. The impossible part, my brothers say.
So yes, there are many American things I miss, like accountability and an honest bureaucracy.
It’s beautiful in Goa. The editor that Firoza suggested, Ms. da Cunha, is a taskmaster. She is my age, but heavy and in a shapeless dress, shorthaired, with simple loop earrings. She met me at the airport and drove me to her seaside bungalow. The car smelled of cigarettes, but she did not smoke, at least in my presence.
Another woman, British I’d guess, welcomed us in, and I understood immediately their domestic situation. Out on the verandah, I saw the thick manuscript I’d sent her. We took our seats, her friend served us drinks, and then she began: “The world is not interested in another rags-to-riches autobiography, especially not from the Third World. The next World’s Richest Man will be Indian — so what?”
“I will change,” I said.
“I want the part of your life before you controlled it. I want the old Calcutta. I want the frustrated energies of old Calcutta, the paths that were blocked, the mindless pieties paid to Netaji and to the British. The luxuries and the Naxals, the reverence to Ray and Tagore, the privileged life led on the margins of danger, the falling into love and lust (but change the names!) those are the foundations of any story. The bad old neighborhoods were far more interesting before they got gentrified. How you built your fortune — leave that to the business pages. How you lost your marriage, let them go. Especially the problem you have with a gay son — cut it! What are the real things that gnaw at you, Pronab? — that’s what we never hear from immigrants, that’s what we want to know. There are men from India, from China, from all over the world just like you, brilliant men, accomplished men, still nursing grievances, nursing unrequited lust, bitterly going through the motions. They carry scars; they’re hollowed out. I know them. I’m one of them. We’ve bridged huge gaps, but parts are still missing. Few of us, and I include myself, have known peace.”
Half of my book, the easy part, had just been cut out.
Over another set of drinks, and another, she said, “I’m a friend of Firoza, as you know. I know all about you. Thanks to you, she said, ‘no vow is sacred’. We used to chat in the back taxis on the way to parties and devise tortures for you. ‘May his toes grow into a single sharp scimitar.’ But I’m also a friend of Smriti. I was a constant companion in London that first year. You might not believe this, but she and I were once the ‘It’ girls. We were young and cute and available. We were exotics. London wasn’t yet Londonstan. We were everywhere and we were seen with everyone.”
Every word a knife to my heart.
“Then as you know, it caught up with her.”
I nodded, as if I knew.
“He wanted her to abort it, but she refused. So, baby Willie. That was the turning point for her. But he’s a joy, isn’t he?”
“Willie,” I said, nodding sagely.
“That’s when we began our little affair. I loved Smriti more deeply than I’ve loved anyone in my life. It was sudden, and it took us both by surprise. I’ve stayed on that course, but she couldn’t. That’s why she married Abdul and changed her life completely.”
We discussed this over drinks, under a fan on a cool verandah, overlooking the glassy sea.