“The Green of Bengal” (HarperCollins India) is artist, film-maker and writer Gautam Benegal’s second collection of short stories, and his second literary visit to the Calcutta of memories. Short, lyrical vignettes that summon images of a lost way of life, Benegal’s stories are made of memory, recollection, nostalgia and a mastery of craft.
Excerpts from an interview:
Both your previous collection, “1/7 Bondel Street” and “The Green of Bengal” are about Calcutta. Could you talk about this Calcutta of your stories?
The first collection I wrote was published by Wisdom Tree –– “1/7 Bondel Road”. That was for young adults, 17 to 18 years of age. In this collection I have gone ahead of that, to the next age group. The content here is little different, a little more sombre, darker. I have set it in the Calcutta of late 80s and early 90s. I had come away from Calcutta to Bombay in 1989, after I graduated in 1987, and I started working in Bombay. Now over the years Calcutta has changed a lot. It is become Kolkata and there are many of the changes I cannot connect with when I go back. When I go back, it is always as if the old memories keep flooding. It is like when you pass a building you knew once and it is no longer there, and there is a new structure in its place. Then you go ten feet ahead and you try to remember what you just saw, but what you remember instead is still what you saw ten years ago. There is a German term called ‘heimat’, which means a longing for a home no longer there. It is when the geography, the alleys, roads, shops, places which are like mnemonics and markers, are gone. The Calcutta that we know still exists but it stays in our minds. The people we know have become Diaspora.
It is one thing to revisit the geography of a place, and quite another to revisit the people of the past...
It is basically the same thing. The way I write is that I flesh out this collective memory that we all have of Calcutta, of people, faces, incidents. It is like a collage. You see, I am a painter in mixed media, I very often use the collage medium, where you borrow from different places and you get a composite. So very often the people, the names, the half remembered things come together and create stories for me. And I try to make them into the quintessential Calcutta of the 80s and 90s.
Calcutta has played muse to several writers over the centuries. How did these voices play into your work?
When I was in school, I started illustrating for Satyajit Ray. At age of 16, I illustrated my first book, and then I just took it to him. I just plucked up courage and I walked up his wooden stairs and he opened the door himself. I showed him the book and he said why do not you illustrate for Sandesh . I started doing that at a very early age, and then I also started illustrating for Anandabazar Patrika . At that time, we also knew writers and poets like Sunil Gangopadhyay, Alokeranjan Dasgupta and Subhash Mukhopadhyay, who actually used to stay in the ground floor of my sister-in-law’s house. They were not like famous people in courts. My father’s friends were artists too, and their presence was a part and parcel of my life. And then, one by one they all died, and I feel a terrible sense of loss.
In a way I try to bring all that back, make it come it alive, sometimes through different voices and faces. There is one story in my book, about an artist. This artist could be one of my father’s friends or he could be my father or he could my Pishamoshai (uncle), I have combined two three different people to express ethos of times through that particular person. That is how I build up characters, from people I have known, without naming them since each person is amalgamation of several people.
Away from the Kolkata of today, do you physically visit the city often or do you do it with your words?
This is how I revisit, through my stories. I do not physically revisit that often. Last time I went there I was called by the Swedish Embassy to speak on Tagore, and they put me up in The Grand. I stepped out of there and I walked to the New Empire Cinema. I had been so familiar with it, with the red carpet leading up and the posters on the wall. My father had done the interiors. And suddenly find that the place is now a mall. I looked at it aghast and then I turned around and scooted back into the hotel. I couldn't take it. I have been trying to reconcile the images and politics of today, the peculiar way Bengali is spoken with that sibilant s to the ethics that we have lost.
To write about a place, you need a certain distance, which lets you have some amount of verisimilitude. It is not possible when you are there; you cannot summon up those images easily then. The distance lends a certain objectivity.
Will your future books visit the Calcutta of the past too?
I am writing a novel right now that is set in the Calcutta of the early 90s. It is a diaspora novel but its reverse Diaspora novel. We always write about people who are going out, but here I'm writing about a non-resident Indian who has come back for a little time with his family and the chemistry and the interaction, that happens when he visits.
