My Calcutta
In the late 1600s, an ancestor of my maternal grandmother called Vidyahar Roy Choudhury received a message from his friends in the Mughal court.
Apparently some Englishmen wanted to meet him. The firengi were asking for the rights to three villages in rural Bengal that Vidyahar’s family owned. They liked the villages’ proximity to water and hoped to build up the swampiest parts to set up their fledgling indigo industry. Vidyahar was not eager to sell, but there was significant pressure from the royal court to help the English. In the end, Vidyahar leased three villages to the East India Company for 1300 rupees per annum, although there are those in the family who believe he never received any money.
You know the rest, I think. East India Company’s chief officer, Job Chernock, built the hamlets into Calcutta, the jewel of the British Empire. Calcutta became world-famous, called everything from City of Palaces, the Black Hole (after an uprising), City of Joy and City of the Dead. And since 1990, it’s not Calcutta but Kolkata—a spelling that Bengal’s Communist government believes is truer to its roots, stemming from Kalikata, one of the original villages sold to the East India Company.
But for me, it’s always going to be Calcutta, the place where my father’s family moved in the late 1940s after years in the countryside—and where they still live, although far from the power and glamour of the old Roy-Choudhury days.
The first time I went to Calcutta, I was nine years old. Staying at the Ramakrishna Mission, I played in the gardens, borrowed books from the stern monk-librarian who thought I should stay in the children’s section, and ate cornflakes with hot milk for breakfast and minced vegetable chops for lunch. A lady without a nose begged just outside the compound wall; we gave her baksheesh each night as we passed her and a host of memorable characters on the way to see our grandparents, aunts and cousins living nearby in Boronagar. Click to read an excerpt from the diary I kept of that trip.
My next visit to Calcutta was many years later, just my father and me. I was twenty-five years old and working as a newspaper reporter thrilled to have two weeks’ leave. On this journey, I remember discovering the Ballygunge neighborhood and loving its calm quiet. We stayed in an old part of Central Calcutta in a Raj era hotel called the New Kenilworth, a place that I’ve returned again with pleasure.
Shortly after that trip, marriage and my life in Japan began. The next Calcutta interlude came a decade later, when I was involved adopting my infant daughter. After getting guardianship from the court in Kerala, the state where she was born, we flew to Calcutta and stayed with relatives while our immigration process was thrown into chaos by a suspicious officer in the INS. This was not a happy time, but I found peace on my daily stroller-walks past the grand old homes of filmmaker Satyajit Ray and other lumiaries, and walking along Chowringhee with its beautiful Raj era government and retail buildings, winding up at St. Paul’s Cathedral to pray. I reasoned that if my daughter never got her visa, we would live in India and I’d have to change the places I was writing about.
Fortunately, my baby was ultimately granted permission to come home with me to Baltimore. But I did not forget about India. As the Rei Shimura series continued, part of my mind was always adrift, wanting to write about the people and places that were in my blood.
It was frustrating: I kept hearing from relatives how dramatically Calcutta was changing: bungalows were being torn down to make room for dot-coms. Giant shopping malls were rising, including one between their apartment and the museum-home of the famous freedom fighter, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. And finally, in this crisis, I divined my way toward writing a suspense novel set in the old Calcutta I adored.
After so many years spent learning and writing about Japan, the switch to writing about India was enormous. It has involved language study and reading dozens of history books and memoirs and interviewing Bengalis including my father, who fortunately lives nearby.
After the first draft was finished, I traveled to Calcutta to walk through the scenes and learn more about the period of the 1920s through 1940s when the city was the epicenter of the freedom fighting movement. I went to interview old-timers, to eat chicken sandwiches in the India Coffee House in College Street, to walk through the corridors of Netaji’s quiet old house, to spend hours in the National Library Reading Room with original, crumbling editions of the Calcutta Statesman and Amrita Bazar Patrika. I wondered what it would have felt like to be a young, bright Bengali woman living in this late Raj milieu: paid by the British, yet in her heart longing for freedom. How would she have reacted to Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent movement and Netaji’s militant activism? Would the girl be brave enough to spy on the British for the independence movement—and braver still to deal with the treachery within her heart?
The true stories Calcutta offers are extraordinary. In my novel, it’s my hope to come close to touching some of them.
