Kunal Basu’s fifth novel Kalkatta is an intriguing tale, penned with as much passion and keen engagement as befits a successful author writing about the city where his roots lie. Basu hails from what he calls the “mainstream of Kolkata society”, and here he embarks upon the arduous task of mapping the journey of “an outsider (who) wants to belong”, the typical figure, living at the periphery of a bustling metropolis. Basu is acclaimed for a collection of short stories titled The Japanese Wife and novels such as The Opium Clerk, Racists, The Yellow Emperor’s Cure etc.
The short prologue plunges the reader straight into a tumultuous night in Gigolo king Jamshed Alam or Jami’s life, and what a life lies rudely slit open with just the right ingredients of a masala blockbuster: Blood mixed with dirt, menacing shadows, the gang-war, a helpless family, the man Jami himself, “going down like a goat to slaughter, repaying in full debts from a previous life”, etc. Moving back and forth at a steady pace, the novel is neatly divided into three parts.
The first part sets out the premise of the refugee: The Bihari Muslim family of Alams living in a squalid Dhaka camp fancily called “Geneva”, comprising the perpetually ill cloth-cutter father, a slavishly hard-working mother nurturing high ambitions for her children, the mature-beyond-her-years Miriam with a polio affected foot, and Jami himself, the prodigal son, considered luckiest in the lineage who would carry on the line through to legitimate Kalkatta-wallahs. The family manages to illegally migrate into Kolkata from Bangladesh thanks to the seemingly wondrous generosity of Uncle Mushtak, a leader of the ruling Communist party. He gives them refuge in one of the cramped rooms of Number 14, Zakaria street, already teeming with many viz the scheming Dadi who is the owner of the zari factory, the highly intuitive Samina who had withstood the ravages of partition at the hands of the Mukti Bahini, the over-sexed local temptress of young boys, Jahanara, Jamal and Jamil the carpenter brothers rumoured to be brothers only in name, and so on. Once he secures a fake Indian birth certificate, Jami manages to achieve the distinction of being a ‘twice-born Muslim’.
What follows is a clinical exploration of the outsider-refugee’s childhood, or its absence, as Jamshed befriends the local gang leader Rakib becoming his right hand man, his pastime of inventing the dirtiest of curses, revelling in the ganda (dirty) books lent by “Hing Mastan” Ashraf, stealing in order to prove loyalty, et al.
Basu chooses the names of the key characters carefully: Jamshed means king, glorious sun’s rays/lights in Urdu-Arabic, Rakib means a competitor, or a rival in the context of love, while Miriam means a sea of bitterness. Rakib is repeatedly referred to as Jami’s “Satan friend”. Jami is unable to further his education and lands a desk job at a passport forger’s, where he befriends a typical bong, Anirban Mitra who shares with him the four thumb rules for becoming a Kalkatta-wallah, including believing that one knows everything, accepting that rumours are more important than facts — signify the rites of passage that Jami must undergo in order to “belong” to Kalkatta. A chance meeting with a certain Mrs Monica Goswami and the “friendship” that a naïve Jami cultivates with her, leads him into the strange alleys of human relationships: Trust, affection, a “kind of comfort I’d missed as a child...”, and in fact coming to love his Ammi through Monica; when he discovers that she was simply looking for paid sex all along. Resurrection ends with Jami at the tomb of Calcutta’s founder Englishman Job Charnock and in a rush of confused thoughts, offering himself as a medium for Charnock’s resurrection: “Take me, I offer you Jamshed Alam”.
The second part, Invisible Fire, traces complications in Jami’s life as he becomes a masseur-gigolo at Champaka, a parlour specialising in “plus plus services” to high-end clients. The reader races through encounters with various clients and Jami’s gradual involvement with the lives of his customers/parties and colleagues. While he is able to fend for himself and his family comfortably as a gigolo, past comes knocking as Rakib asks him to join his business.
Paradise, the third part, follows Jami’s growth as a person as he begins to care for an ex-colleague and single-mother Mandira’s leukaemia-battling son Pablo. Jami’s twin lives collide, and he seems to portray the role of the Brechtian Good Woman of Szechwan, the prostitute with a golden heart, sacrificing his earnings to support Pablo’s blood transfusions. When Pablo calls him Baba, it’s a word which feels most beautiful to him in his entire life. life comes full circle for Jami when all his contrary roles pounce upon him and the multiple face-offs threaten to turn fatal.
The striking cover designed by Pinaki De captures the flavour of the novel succinctly — that of a half-dog half-man, crouching on a hazy, grimy street, with nowhere to go and nowhere to belong. With a massive range of characters from all strata of society, and themes ranging from corrupt policemen, hawala and kidney rackets, terrorism, to virulent political and gang wars, Kalkatta is a labyrinth of several ambiguous compassions and numerous forlorn loves, with a towering victory of naked and ruthless nature of lived reality of the unnamed masses inhabiting the fantastical city pregnant with numerous futureless dreams. Jump, swim through and enjoy.
The reviewer is an Assistant Professor, English, at Delhi University