This is a novel about the fin de siecle temper of Calcutta at the turn of the Raj. It is an elegy on the passage of an era and a way of life conceived allegorically as a domestic tale, a love story. Its writing is testimony to an emergent trend in contemporary Indian writing in English, a kind of middlebrow fiction that does well because it’s light, zippy, and so does not unduly tax readers’ time and understanding.
Robert Ryan, the protagonist of Bunny Suraiya’s debut novel, is an Anglo-Indian, a well-to-do senior-level employee of a British managing agency called Barton Ferne and Co, and the head of an apparently happy family comprising wife, Grace, whose beauty made Ryan the envy of his friends at his club; two grown daughters, Shirley and Paddy; and a live-in Muslim couple, Sohag Khatun “Ayah” and her husband, Apurru, who had picked up enough of the sahibs’ ways to be able to make sweet apple wine and coconut fudge for Christmas. Life is good and comfortable for the Ryan family in their sunny, airy, three-room apartment on Sharif Lane, a stone’s throw from the centre of Calcutta’s swinging night life on Park Street, except for one thing — Robert’s fixation on going “home” to England, a country he has never seen and has little real idea of. Robert’s idee fixe drives the novel, forming its central conflict, because it immediately pits him against his daughters, who can only see their lives and destinies in India.
Set “a good dozen years after India’s independence”, when the last of the British are leaving the country, the novel evokes and feeds into a nostalgia for the Calcutta of the fifties and sixties, the cosmopolitan metropolis “still lit with the last rays of the golden high summer of Empire”, despite having lost its political primacy to New Delhi some decades ago. Suraiya’s Calcutta is the city created and furbished for British genteel living, with its posh high streets on which stood a number of establishments that had either been set up by Westerners or intended to service Westerners: the two famous confectioners, Flury’s and Nahoum’s; A N John, the barber shop; Hall & Anderson, the furniture store, A La Mode, the tailors; The Good Companions, for pretty crocheted antimacassars and lace dollies; and New Market, for most things under the sun. And then there were the watering holes, eateries and nightclubs such as Magnolia, Prince, Waldorf, Sky Room and Blue Fox which offered a choice of quaintly named, British-Indian fare such as Knickerbocker Glories, Chicken Tetrazzini and Coffee Sprungli, besides a choice of live music by now-legendary crooners such as Pam Craine and Shirley Myers.
This is the Calcutta of clubs like the Dalhousie Institute, The Calcutta Cricket and Football Club – fashionably shortened to CC&FC – and The Saturday Club, or The Slap, as it was called by the merry crowd that descended on the Light Horse Bar in the evenings, as a reference to Slap and Tickle, the principal activities at the club on Saturday nights. Suraiya builds this sepia-toned ambience of a gracious past well, littering it with careful little details like the pack of Three Castle cigarettes that Robert’s boss Peter Wilson smokes or the Colma’s Mustard Powder that Grace included in her monthly grocery list. But this is a carefully sanitised view. Other, less agreeable parts of the city, for instance, find little mention here, except as the destination for long drives for the young lovers, Paddy and Karambir, and much less the hordes of refugees who were then pouring in from across the border of then East Pakistan and taking over the pavements of the city.
What the novel does especially well is dramatise the poignant historical position of the Anglo-Indians, a community of mixed Indian and English ancestry that aligned itself so firmly with the English in their manners, customs and lifestyle that they even took on their denigrating attitude towards Indians. Ironically, the Anglo-Indians were themselves looked down upon by the English — “a half-breed of unknown ancestry”, the cuttingly dismissive words Mrs Cunningham uses to reject Grace as a bride for her son Philip sum up British attitudes to Anglo-Indians. The end of the Raj, however, removed the Anglo-Indians from this association of advantage with the British and by the late 1950s their position had become precarious. A large number, like Robert’s sister Maud, had left India for good, scattered all over from Britain and the US to Canada and Australia. The ones who remained cut sorry figures, sticking out in the exuberance of newly independent India with their Anglicised ways and traditions, their flowery dresses and quaint diction. This is a stereotype that Suraiya dips into freely in building up Robert Ryan into a bluff, plodding, slightly ridiculous figure who peppers his speech with “men” and cracks jokes about the “Banerjees and Chatterjees and gunjees and chadees” who infest Calcutta. But aren’t all stereotypes steeped in some form of reality?
CALCUTTA EXILE: A NOVEL
Bunny Suraiya
HarperCollins
249 pages; Rs 299
