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CONVERSATIONS AT COFFEE HOUSE

written and photographed by PINAKI CHAKRAVARTY

Maybe that’s what’s great about the city:
the sheer vitality of life.
Even if it’s a life that would shock a lot of the world

CHARACTER
What exactly is it about this city?

Chandidas Kumar has been sitting in Kolkata’s (formerly Calcutta’s) revered Coffee House almost every evening for the past 42 years. Not much has changed. The walls look like they haven’t been cleaned since Rabindranath Tagore wrote literature here. The uniforms of the waiters, once imperial British Raj white, are as stained and tattered as the streets outside. And the coffee itself? Absolutely, unbearably awful.
But Coffee House, like its parent city, is soaked in so much
character you could drown in it �a personality and depth that can, perhaps, only be created by generations of people living in the same place, doing the same things, learning and teaching and talking about ideas and sitting down at the same cheap, chipped table an entire lifetime �and then doing it all over again. It isn’t pretty �only the most die-hard of Bengalis would describe the city as beautiful �but it’s got something that perhaps no other Indian city has. I’m just not quite sure what it is.

TIME MACHINE
Sadness and joy

If Delhi (it hasn’t been renamed yet) is the political capital of India and Mumbai (Bombay) the commercial centre, Bengalis across the subcontinent will rally behind their mother city’s claim as the intellectual capital of a people and a country. Whether this is right or wrong is beside the point. What you need to know is that no other Indian city can ever hope to evoke such passion, such absolute blind faith and loyalty. Indeed, it would almost seem, as you walk through this great and poor place, that if it wasn’t for Bengali pride and ego, the entire metropolis �all the stray dogs and homeless rickshaw pullers and Durga puja festival grounds, the dinosaur-like Ambassador taxis and traffic policemen in off-white who no one listens to, and trams that look like time-machines �all of this life, teetering on the brink of failure, would sink into the grey Hooghly that laps against its shore and forever be lost.

But perhaps it is because of this inherent sadness that Kolkata has attracted people, or seemed to burn brighter with a humanity that you wouldn’t find in many places. It is the city in the City of Joy. Chandidas Kumar felt this draw soon after he graduated in 1967. “I married early in a family-arranged affair, and was desperately in need of a job,�he says, sitting down in 2008 at the same table he frequented in the Sixties, with many of the familiar faces still around. “And then, I got the opportunity of going to either England or America. So I collected papers from both High Commissions, and, before submitting them, sat down here for a coffee.�

And that’s when things took a very Kolkata-esque turn, something at once noble and yet tragic. For Chandidas never did reach out, or leave. Instead, he tore the papers and left them with the coffee dregs. “I found the idea of going to another country very disgraceful.�br>
There might always have been a bit of self-destructive streak about the Bengalis. “We were always conscious of status. When Calcutta was the capital of India and the British were developing its industries, they had to bring in labour from the Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, while the Bengali intelligentsia soaked up the language and customs of the educated classes. When I joined the State Bank of India in the late Sixties, only one per cent of peons �Class Four workers �were Bengalis. But that ratio changed dramatically by the time I retired in 2001. It has taken us a lot of time, but Bengalis have realised that one needs to work to survive in today’s world. They would rather have died hungry in the Fifties and Sixties. They have paid dearly.

RICKSHAW
100 rupees a day

Is it the city? Looking at the heart-breaking poverty, you’d have to be cruel to see happiness here. And yet even at the heart of this burden is a story that makes the world come to Kolkata, rather than shun it. It is the reason why National Geographic magazine did a story on its cycle rickshaws in April this year. It is the marvel of things so unbearable and yet so inherently a part of daily life. Author Calvin Trillin described the sight of one: ‘�What came into view was a rickshaw. Instead of being pulled by a horse, it was being pulled by a man �usually a skinny, bedraggled, barefoot man who didn’t look quite up to the task.�

The debate over whether to ban the rickshaws on humanitarian grounds has been raging for decades, but there has never really been much progress because of a lack of alternative employment for the pullers. Most are from Bihar, one of the most underdeveloped states in India, and all of them are desperately poor. Ramprasad Yadav has been coming to Kolkata from his native Bihar for the past ten years, going back home to work in the fields when the rains arrive. He earns around Rs.100 (RO1) a day in the city, ferrying everything from schoolchildren to housewives to goods, from 10am�pm, sleeping on the street after work. Such pullers are so poor they don’t even own their rickshaws, but pay rent on them, sometimes Rs.140 (RO1.400) a week to the owners, plus the occasional fine when caught pulling into the main streets or taking too many customers at one go, in addition to payment for sleeping space on the roads or in crowded rooms.

But by local standards this isn’t a particularly alarming story, just a conversation with one among the 6,000 rickshaw pullers in a city of as many as 15mn people �many much worse off. But in India, and Kolkata in particular, everything exists with everything else, and you could be ten feet away from Yadav and immerse yourself in a completely different world.

PARAMOUNT
20 rupees of happiness

Make that five feet. Paramount is another of those institutions that Kolkata residents will wax eloquent about. For Rs.20 (200bz), you can drink its fantastically sweet daab serbet, a potent drink that revolves around coconut and sugar. This is also where you will find Mrigendra Mazumdar, presiding over his business with perfectly coiffed hair and the conviction that the city swears by his drinks.

Of course, being Kolkata, even this little hole-in-the-wall sliver of a cold drink shop comes with a larger-than-life story. “My father, the late Niharanjan Mazumdar, started it in 1918,�says Mrigendra, sitting under antlers his father bought from the Nizam of Hyderabad 85 years ago. “In the early days �it was called Paradise then �it served as a front for freedom fighters, who pretended to be workers here while they planned covert operations.�br>
The pride and joy �daab �was “Dr B C Roy’s idea, because coconut is of great nutritive value. In those days students didn’t have enough money, so this drink was made with everything they needed. That’s why you will still find a piece of coconut flesh in your glass today. I have travelled across the country and studied its serbets. We know that the advantage of our creations over the usual cold drinks is its health value. This is our speciality.�br>
Mrigendra used to be an industrialist, but came to Paramount after his father expired. He has no regrets, because, as he says, “This business has given me everything. The goodwill generated by customers is something that cannot be reproduced by money. There are thousands of industrialists but only one Paramount.�

LIFE
Pride in the alleys

Maybe that is what great about Kolkata: the sheer vitality of life. Even if it’s a life that would shock a lot of the world. There are lessons to be learnt here.

You will find such pride even in the little alleyways of Kumhartulli, where hundreds of idols stand in various stages of completion, spilling out into the open sunlight from the dingy recesses of innumerable little ramshackle workshops. Indrajeet and Bholanath Das are two brothers who continue their father’s work, making statues and keeping Dhirendra Studio alive.

While most surrounding shops cater to a more religious customer base, the Das brothers are tapping into the Bengal’s love for Suchitra Sen, a legendary film actress of the Fifties and Sixties. After two months of making her likeness (from her glory days, of course �she was born in 1931) in plaster, they will sell it for Rs.30,000 (RO300), as much as they make in a usual month.

REASON
Time and location

Meanwhile, at Coffee House �once Albert Hall under the British �we have drunk much too much, each cup six rupees. “When I first started sitting here, it was 35 paisa a cup. And they’d give you milk in a separate little pot, whether you asked for it or not. The charge was the same. But the biggest advantage of Coffee House has always been time. There is no restriction on it. We could sit for hours with our cups and no one would pester us.�

Time and location. Here, we are at the heart of absolute blue-blooded Bengali intellectual existence. These walls once hosted Asia’s first Nobel Prize winning writer, a recent Nobel Prize winning economist, an Academy Award winner and a thick mass of artists, freedom fighters and intellectuals who have given Kolkata its identity, and borrowed theirs from it. Around it stand such institutions as Kolkata University, Presidency College, the bookshops of College Street, the Hare School and, of course, Paramount, with its fantastically coloured stories and juices.

There are more stories, several million of them spread thickly over generations of telling and re-telling, that will make you forget first impressions of Kolkata and somehow be a part of it. They are the reason you must visit the city.

RESOURCES
Accommodation and guide

Mandira Dasgupta has a string of guesthouses that are affordable, clean and serve the most fantastic homely Bengali food you will ever get to experience. She will also be your best guide to a complex world of a city. Call her on +91 9831105544 or email her at guestaccommodation@yahoo.co.in. Give her our reference.