At The Edge Of The
Clouds
In this delicately evoked remembrance of Shillong,
AMIT CHAUDHURI captures the beauty
and plaintive far-awayness of small-town
India
THE WORDS ‘small town’, on first thought, don’t mean
a great deal to me. The resonance they possess is
primarily a literary one; they take me back to the
American books and songs in which I first
encountered them, where they were either a synonym
for straitened circumstances and provincialism, or a
defiant reference to a way of life. The English had
their ‘country’, their ‘village’, their ‘town’; but
it was the Americans, I think, who gave us the
‘small town’, and with it an entire literature of
constrictedness and mystery, of the comedy of the
grotesque, and its oblique relationship to religious
wonder.
But what do these words mean to me, personally,
beyond literature? It’s only when I invoke the word
‘city’, and sense again the agglomeration of fumes,
noises, and neighbourhoods both lost and living of
which my life has been generally composed, that I
also sense that there’s been an ‘outside’ to this
agglomeration; that my childhood and growing up were
made of repeated departures. It’s here, I guess,
that the idea of the ‘small town’ begins to take on
a personal significance. What were these places I
was visiting; and why? It wasn’t a romantic desire
to escape ‘routine’ that impelled my parents to make
those journeys. It was a compulsion to periodically
reconnect with family scattered in the Northeast, in
a country that had been divided (at the time) for
only twenty years, or a little more. Those reunions,
feet-touchings, and embraces, the abiding for a few
days in those houses, in the midst of quilts, the
choubachha in the bathroom swimming with water,
the long rickety verandah, the neighbouring kitchen
outside of which an intent maid seemed to be using
ash to scour the pans – I saw these as unfamiliar,
and yet, with a child’s eye, appropriate to that
place and time. It’s only with hindsight that I
realise that it was my life that wasn’t as ‘normal’
as I’d presumed; that this was the life I’d have
probably have had, in Silchar or Shillong, had my
father not left for
England in 1949, and returned, when he
eventually did, to a corporate job in Bombay. The
‘small town’, then, is, for me, an archaeology of my
relationship both to my family as well as to my past
– the real past and a possible one, represented by
my family – of an intermittent, gestural, now
increasingly rare journey made towards that
possibility; and then the bidding of farewells, of
waved goodbyes, of getting into the Ambassador with
the luggage, rolling down the window, and gradually
feeling that persona fading.
FOR INSTANCE, there are, for me, two Shillongs.
There is, firstly, the Shillong of my childhood and
early adolescence. This immediately conjures up for
me the strange magic of the provincial, which has
had such a powerful and disproportionate effect on
my imagination: the noisy, toy-like aeroplane,
probably a Fokker Friendship, to Guwahati, with its
shattering roar before take-off; and lunch at
Guwahati – a pool of daal in a porcelain bowl, and
chicken curry and rice. Finally, we would be in the
car with a taxi driver who was at once shy and
gentle and reckless, and who indifferently skirted
the extravagant bends and gorges, beside which
actual clouds seemed to be transiently drifting.
India, twenty years after Partition and
independence, was dew-fresh and ancient at once,
especially on these sunlit, elevated bypasses that
passed for highways, with their straggly shrubs,
milestones, and bent women with firewood on their
heads, being pursued inadvertently by unwashed but
radiant children. Shillong was then in the
relatively recently carved-out Assam; not yet the
strife-torn city that would, as a palliative, be
transformed into the capital of Meghalaya. And the
paternalist eye of the nation-state was still
watchful and omniscient even – perhaps especially –
in these drizzly places. In my mind was always the
exhortation that came to me during such protracted
drives in the Ambassador, “When will it end? How
much longer?” cohabiting, as usual, with its exact
opposite, the desire to move but not arrive. I
remember stops and detours; perhaps two or more
trips are compressed into what seems like one
journey. Everywhere, an astonishing natural beauty
is proximate with an innocent dereliction. A tea
shop, where I ate a soft and mysteriously sweet
‘milk’ bread with my omelette; then stood later at a
urinal, emptying my bladder, struck by the Khasia
boy next to me, who was, to all purposes, doing the
same; the furtive tucking in and zipping up, the
urge to return unscathed and intact, very much
myself, to my parents.
Then there was the family we stopped to see before
we reached Shillong. Although they were very much a
part of the present moment of that onward journey,
they were obviously also a continuation of a past
that I knew little of, but was always becoming
acquainted with piecemeal and without introduction;
as if I should know there must be some perceptible
long-standing reason for this detour. I remember
well the sparsely furnished drawing room, built on
governmental lines, reproduced endlessly, to this
day, in mofussil and suburb. Again, there is a
memory of lunch (the wayfarer’s existence seems to
be full of repasts) and a large dining table with
circles from tumblers imprinted on the wood.
Possibly my memory has invented that detail; but the
large Manipuri lady in her workday sari, with her
insistent, familiar manner and high cheekbones, whom
I was to see once again, strangely, in our Cumballa
Hill flat in Bombay, where she was visiting with her
sister-in-law and her nephew, in search of a cure
for her nephew’s psychological problems, is as real
to me as she was when I first saw her, as if I’d
been to that oasis of a drawing room a couple of
weeks ago.
Then, at last, Shillong itself, with its English
weather, its pine trees; a good place for
holiday-makers but, as it also turned out, for
emigrants or, less grandly, as my extended family
sometimes referred to itself, half-jokingly but with
a serene undertow of wistful conviction, of
‘refugees’. Here, I swiftly made my discovery of
dampness; of beds that froze when you turned on your
side at night. And of two maternal uncles; one a
curious sort of businessman- devotee, who wept
instantly and obligingly upon hearing kirtans
and bhajans, and sternly admonished us
cousins and children for our frivolous giggling
during the songs – a dandy and aesthete of feminine
beauty before he turned to the cosmic One, he had
once fancied himself to look not a little like
David Niven. And the other, younger uncle,
whom I called, oddly, “mum” my pure, paradisial
shorthand for “mama”. Not a devotee at all,
except of literature; a humanist whom I adored
greatly, and with whom I went for long walks. He was
an elegant and measured man who was at a crossroads;
he’d had his last epiphany when he was sixteen, or
so I’d heard from another uncle; it was around the
time he’d silenced the cacophonous and
easily-distracted world by having a poem published
in Desh. Then he’s gradually plateaued into
a measured, respectable ordinariness, or at least an
unquestioning, inadvertent lapsing from his ambition
and his prime. And still he remained a model of
excellence. He’d have certainly (being a star
student) been in the Indian civil service, had his
mind not gone mysteriously and fatefully blank,
while taking the exams that threaded small town to
large, hills to plains, at the question: ‘What are
the words of the Indian national anthem?’ Try as he
would to recall their shape and sound and metre,
they wouldn’t come. When I first met him, he was
already in the deadening bureaucrat’s position he
would, many years later, end his career in, a Deputy
Additional District Commissioner. Naturally, these
people came to me, as a child, with their full-blown
mythologies of promise and exile, and their Shillong
was to me more legitimate, more real, than any other
that might have existed. It didn’t occur to me then,
and I don’t think it occurred to them, that such
histories or stories are largely inconsequential;
we’re all probably sent to the world with that
hidden, exclusive, and in the end enervating,
Jamesian sense of destiny, of being at the centre,
as well being the creator, of our universe, with all
its visions and disappointments.
THE OTHER Shillong, of which the one I saw as a
child was at once an unfinished continuation and an
annihilation, was the Shillong of my mother’s youth.
The scene and even many of the characters are the
same, and yet it possesses an illusion of energy and
contemporariness. That was an epoch of transitions;
it was the town to which my mother and her family
moved, just before Sylhet, first part of Bengal,
then Assam, was lost to
Pakistan with the referendum. The Shillong I
encountered in the late Sixties was another phase:
my uncles had moved and settled there; their future
had congealed there. What seemed to the eye like an
idyll was to them a place of emigration, of a
smallness, transformation, and superficial
tranquillity they could not have foreseen twenty
years earlier: that this would be their lives. And,
twenty years before, my mother had decided — no, had
had a premonition — that it would not be hers. My
father had proposed to her and left for
England; and, while she lived, not altogether
happily, with the older uncle I’d met as a child,
the one who wept unprompted at kirtans, becoming
famous among the Bengalis in that circumscribed,
undulating town for her singing, becoming acquainted
once again with Jail Road (for she’d lived there
briefly as a child), Laban, the racecourse, the
waterfalls – while all this became her outer milieu,
her environment, there was no mention, in my
father’s letters, of marriage. Thus, the constant
apprehension and uncertainty; the threat, in the
midst of sari-wearing and gossip, of learning new
songs and going out to appointed meeting-places, of
the site of transit becoming the site of domicile;
of the country’s new freedom becoming her
imprisonment. And then, I believe, the letter
arrived, asking her to go to
London, and she flew out from nearby Silchar
with her younger brother from the rudimentary
airport to
Calcutta, and from there, two weeks later,
into that exceptional, oncein- a-lifetime distance.
Or else I would not have been making those journeys
in the late summer. So her premonition had been
accurate: she’d believed — even though she couldn’t
possibly believe (being a rational person, in her
own unmistakable way a product of Bengali humanism)
— that Shillong would not be her future. I venture
‘couldn’t believe’ because she said to me recently,
without assertiveness, but with cognisance, what she
used to once say more frequently: “My life has been
extraordinary.” You cannot make such a statement if
your future and present have gone according to plan,
as you’d envisioned it. For a premonition is not a
guarantee.
SO THERE it was, Shillong, like something that had
no real claim upon me, a place whose putative
gorgeousness was immediately undermined and made
insignificant by new allocations of power. Even as a
child, it was to me a little like a trinket or a
token, a shrunken, intricate city, slightly
anachronistic, inside a glass paperweight. The glass
would crack, of course; with the pressure of the
disconnect — between my uncles’ Shillong and the
Khasia’s, between shared but conflicting histories,
between the old Northeast and East and the new. As a
consequence of change, in my life’s and the town’s,
I have not been there for thirty years; as with my
memory of the Manipuri lady serving me lunch at some
point in the journey, time has passed without my
realising it. And when I think of my mother’s
Shillong, as I do, occasionally, as a result of some
conversation, or death, or some relative
rediscovered unexpectedly in a small town in America
— and all small towns are prone to having their
ongoing, unofficial histories of settlement — it’s a
place in which something is about to happen,
something far-reaching, although one can’t be
certain what. And when I go back to my childhood,
and see my uncles in their dhuti-panjabis, in their
different moods of self-absorption, pursuing God or
the high-minded, ethical remnants of their
adolescent dreams, while dealing, or not dealing,
with the reality of their wives and children, the
resolution has already taken place, the family has,
in part, divided, taken on a new shape, and will
continue to take newer and newer and more and more
difficult-to- recognise forms. As to possibility,
those hills were one possible existence. I too might
have been born and grown up there; but, as I hadn’t,
there was little point in speculating about what
that alternative might have entailed — except, now,
an implicit unravelling of the identity I take for
granted.
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From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 4, Issue 50, Dated
Dec 29 , 2007
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