The Bengali love for all kinds of sound and food

MY CHILDHOOD HAD the unique soundscape of clanking, crashing and clattering Metro railway machines. Our house was on the main road and a station was coming up right in front. As a result, we all became slightly deaf, and everybody’s vocal projection became quite strong. It was quite embarrassing, but as I grew older, I found that speaking loudly (and turning deaf while somebody else is speaking) is a common trait for Bengalis. It is a shame to be a Bengali and not believe that my speech is the most important one in the present sociocultural context.

Bengalis love criticising Bengalis and continuously label themselves as malicious, lazy and insipid, but they are up in arms as soon as a non-Bengali utters the same about them. There is a huge uproar the moment anybody calls Kolkata a dead or a dying city, or equates Bannerjee/Chatterjee to lethargy. But Bengalis don’t use their vocal cords only to argue and contradict, or to hurl slogans and slang, but also to sing, especially when the world is devoid of electricity. When I was growing up, load-shedding (our name for power outage) was a constant presence in our lives. The moment it descended in the evenings, all children thanked the divine (or governmental) intervention from the bottom of their hearts, because studying was immediately terminated. Within minutes, the whole family gathered with their hand fans and different degrees of sighs and lamentations, and that get-together soon transgressed to a delicious game of antakhshari, where film songs and Rabindrasangeet, Kishore Kumar and Kishori Amonkar were summoned with equal fervour.

Learning Rabindrasangeet was a must for girls, though many boys were also students of that near-holy music genre. But boys didn’t have to sing them in front of prospective in-laws during arranged marriage tribulations. Hindi film songs though were strictly banned for children. When the menace of load-shedding was suddenly erased from our lives and one could relax and revel in the treasure of TV in the evenings, any programme like ‘Chitrahaar’or ‘Superhit Muqabla’ was a signal for my elder sister and me to leave the room immediately. If we didn’t, our mother transformed herself into Amrish Puri in such record time that we ran harder than Carl Lewis. I was tempted to write Ben Johnson, but alas, he doped and tainted himself, putting an end to one item in our versus-infested arguments. The Satyajit Ray vs Ritwik Ghatak and East Bengal vs Mohun Bagan squabbles sometimes became really boring, and even the South Kolkata vs North Kolkata quarrel eroded to clichés. And, Amitabh Bachchan vs Vinod Khanna did not last because Vinod rushed to Osho, depriving us of another enticing argument. Of course, it paved the way for Bengali weekly magazines to publish ‘well-researched’, semi-pornographic articles about wild orgies in that ashram, which were hidden from us by parents who were perpetually shocked when the advertisement for nirodh (condom) flashed on TV.

Our home had a TV, and by common Bengali logic at that time, it belonged to the whole neighbourhood. If a hit film or a popular programme was scheduled to be shown, often members of our family had no place to sit, as all the seats were taken by neighbours who came early and sat tight with indisputable authority. Strangely, this sense of commune (communism?) was absent in the case of telephone. Members of the lone house having a telephone did their duty of course, by calling their neighbour loudly if a call came in, but people didn’t share a sense of ownership over that instrument.

But the real prestige came from owning shelves bending under the weight of books. Going to the book fair at least thrice a week was a ritual we followed religiously and boasted about endlessly.

But books were not the only draw; we loved fish fries sold at the book fair. There was no glistening packet of potato chips back then, but we witnessed the birth and reign of rolls (chicken, mutton, and even potato rolls) at every corner of the streets, and of course, there was puchka (panipuri), the queen of Kolkata street food. Though our stomachs could not keep up with our culinary adventure, we continued undeterred, because having an upset stomach almost daily was a badge of Bengaliness. Bengalis love their food and antacids equally.

The real euphoric festival was Rabindra Jayanti. The Tagore Puja on the 25th of Baishakh was as important as Durga Puja. Rabindranath’s dance-based plays were performed in pandals in various neighbourhoods, but the most enjoyable part was the rehearsals. They were held on rooftops and in drawing rooms, supervised by enthusiastic uncles and aunties, periodically invigilated by other guardians to check whether an affair or two were blooming in the culture-induced proximity. But Rabindra-Cupid was stronger than them―with the sublime grace of the songs and the bewitching appeal of the dances creating a fairytale scenario, it was impossible for at least two or four pairs of eyes to avoid the conspiracies of hormones. Of course, most of these liaisons ended in frustration because love was as great a taboo as sex, but generally, no great damage was incurred (except a flourish of stupid poetry on some unfortunate pages).

It was not only Tagore who fuelled our amorous ideas. Aamir Khan was also looking up from the posters of Qayamat se Qayamat Tak (1988) and making our hearts skip a beat. I placed his photo between the middle pages of my biology book and breathlessly prayed to God to make him mine. God has such a wacky sense of humour, Aamir Khan really came for a gala evening organised by Basushree Cinema, which was opposite our house. I was let in, and Aamir looked at me and autographed the copy I speechlessly held out to him. He even drew a cartoon of me! It is another story of how my elder sister went to her college the next day, taking the autograph copy (to prove that miracles happen to her family members) and it got stolen.

Aren’t all our childhoods stolen suddenly, in similar tragi-comic twists?

Sanchari Mookherjee is editor of the Bengali web magazine, Daakbangla