Old Houses

In the past month I've traveled through four different Indian cities, contracted a computer virus, shivered through three days without any Internet altogether, and secured my livelihood (at least for the next few months). But I haven't written a word on this blog, or anywhere else. At first I thought I'd keep up by posting photos, only to realize that I'm an even greater failure as a photoblogger than a writer. For me, a word is worth a thousand pictures.

But absent an apology, let's continue with the story where we left off. Early last June I left Mumbai for the other side of the country, for Kolkata, formerly Calcutta (and to many residents, the name change is as much a fantasy as the characters invented by the near demigodly Tagore, author of the Indian national anthem and a former Kolkata resident.) The people of Kolkata are historically Bengalis. The legend goes that every Bengali family boasts a painter, a singer and a poet. The modern myth, espoused perhaps by the envious, is that Bengalis are snobs. I can't speak to this latter, since my family is Marvadi for generations back, transplants from the more arid and less welcoming "Marwar" a term that loosely translated means "region of death." This curious fact explains why Marwaris cling to life despite the most adverse circumstances, and also why they don't seem to be welcome anywhere. (Why is it that survivors never get any glory?)

My Kolkata family lives in a massive landscaped house in a suburb about to explode into suburban chaos. According to them, Kolkata is the "next big thing." The first big thing was Mumbai, and it will always be the biggest thing, a sort of apocalyptic mushroom city representative of greed and loose morals, of India's vast desire to mimic the West and its utter inability to do so. After that came Bangalore (now Bengaluru), a city so famous for its personal reinvention that it recently drew the ire of no less a person than Obama (who reserves his ire, as we all know, only for the things that matter most). Bangalore made call centers famous, and call centers in turn created an entire strata of Indian society, fluent in English and flush with cash, young and nocturnal. Bangalore is "high-tech city," with all the implications thereof, representative of India's growing ability to subvert the ideology of the West. Hyderabad and Chennai (once called Madras, but renamed in the ongoing fervor over who, exactly, owns what turf and what history) are the other two big things, the cities of the South. And of course Delhi, the national capital. Oddly enough you can't forget Delhi, but I always forget it. Delhi, like DC, attracts all the foreigners and the politicos.

Where does Kolkata fit in all this?

For now the human inlets and breath-takingly narrow alleys of my family's small suburb represent the landscape Indians are most familiar with. They live in gullies, narrow trenches lined with mom-and-pop soda stalls, cyber cafes that boast a single 10-year-old computer and a prehistoric dialup connection, tailor's shops for tailors who still consider themselves arbiters of public decency. In my family's house, passed down my great-grandfather's time, a hunting rifle hangs on the wall. It belonged to my Baoji, now it serves as an earthing instrument for the sound system next to it. This is how we appropriate the past. I have never before lived or even visited a home that had such a sense of history. All of my family's houses are new, or at least new to us. All of them have been purchased by their current residents, perhaps another sign of the constant restlessness of Marwaris is that our homes don't last for generations. (Despite our rumored wealth, Marwaris more consistenly bequeath entrepreneurial spirit than entrepreneurial gains.) And even this house merely feels older than it is, perhaps because it is simultaneously occupied by four generations of people. After all, my great-grandmother is still alive. She is 97. In another three years she will have achieved what many young men in this cricket-mad country despair of ever accomplishing: a century.

If you listen to anyone discuss their relatives far enough back, you will come upon the point of disassociation: a moment before which they were somebodies and after which everything changed. (I realize that for some families this dialogue hits its key points in reverse, but that's not true for most of us. I recall the fervor with which a former supervisor of my mother's once insisted she was descended from an illegitimate French prince) For my mother this was my great grandfather's life. He was a successful businessman, one whose life during his time was no doubt extraordinary (he kept pet peacocks and once met Gandhi) and whose character has given rise to the type of extreme legends that speak of aspiration rather than memory (I repeat, peacocks. Gandhi!) But I digress. He was a fair man, an honest one, a brilliant one, an open-minded one...the odds are that he wasn't perfect, but if he had any failings these traitorous whispers have been banished to the closet where we keep the furniture too antique to have any real value.

On this trip we went to the home where my mother had grown up. As a girl I was fed tales of her adventures in the mango groves and shallow lakes that spot this property. For most people, returning to a childhood home is a disappointment. Nothing is as grand in reality as in memory.

In the case of borrowed memories this does not hold true. The facade of the house had an excessive grandeur, the vast inner rooms held all the memories that had been related to me and more. We stopped to photograph my great-uncle in the room in which he was born. The decorations had changed, but the floor plan remained the same. (A few weeks later my mom would visit, alone, the house that once belonged to her other set of grandparents. Of this visit I've heard fewer tales, but I know that she was surprised to find that her memory was so accurate, that so little had changed.)

When we went through this home I felt as if I had long known it, and was only now returning to it after a long absence. This is what oral history does, it makes the past into a living and familiar landscape. Our families' stories are a necessary part of life, both for those who tell and those who listen.