An old friend died recently on the
other side of the planet. It was both
predictable and shocking, as these things often are. He was a long-term abuser
of powders and pills; I had not expected him to live as long as he did.
Still, we had been children together, neighbors, brothers almost, at that
crucial period in modern male friendship: early adolescence. So I was shaken when I got the call from another friend and ex-neighbor. It was as if a few bricks fell away from the walls of my house, but it wasn't a house I live in anymore.
Over the next few days, the grapevines of social media (through which old acquaintances had tried to reimagine
themselves as old friends) yielded slippery details and problems. He had
died in his sleep in a hotel in Paharganj, the seedy Delhi neighborhood
frequented by white tourists in dirty pyjamas. A bottle of sleeping pills was
found in his bag. His mother
was with him. They had been traveling together from Moscow to Durgapur, the industrial city
where we had lived as children; she had spent the night in the same bed unaware
that he was dead. She had dementia and a tendency to wander off. There was
a brother in Canada; he was on his way but, we were informed, reluctant to take his
mother back with him. The mutual friend and I
tried to find an old-age home in our old hometown where she could be safely
abandoned, among people who might visit her once or twice.
I also tried to remember the dead man, or boy. I dreamed of him several nights in a row even though we had not spoken in nearly thirty years. This
lag was not due to a quarrel, but because we had drifted so far apart that
nothing was mutually comprehensible or relevant. So it was
startling to find photographs of a big-eared twelve-year-old slouching in
his room circa 1982. It regenerated a face, which allowed other images and
sounds to creep back: the grinning face in my window on weekend mornings, the
stuttering shout of my name, his presence in my house on the day of the year when
sisters give their brothers a protective fingerprint (having no sister of his
own, he would borrow mine), the telephone ringing just when my mother was taking
her cherished siesta on her day off from teaching. I remembered endless hours of batting
practice, and the sight of him airborne before his delivery stride, head
cocked, arm and wrist coiled, lanky. He revered Michael Holding. I remembered a
small crime we had conspired to commit (inspired by James Hadley Chase) and the unraveling of the conspiracy,
the embarrassed-indulgent rage of parents. I was able to recall an even older image, from before we became friends: a boy of five or six throwing a tearful tantrum on the bus because he didn't want to go to school. It’s not that I had never thought of
these things in three decades. But it had been knowledge rather than remembrance,
cut off from life.
It was, among other things,
knowledge of waste and luck, which is why it had been
pushed to the margins of memory. One more boy wasted by a system of education,
examinations and professional bottlenecks that gave no quarter to those who
could not, or did not want to, stay in the fast lane, which was also the only
lane. Healthy competition, the schools called it, as if there was something
laudable about brutal hours of cramming and 'private tuition,' fetishizing
‘coming first’ in examinations, being ‘ranked’ in your class beginning when you
were five years old, the smugness and alarm of parents who shared the hierarchy
of their children, and the fear of falling out of the middle class altogether.
The perversity of that education was inseparable from our teachers' proclivity for creative physical violence. I don't look back at my
Indian schooling with any pleasure or nostalgia; the memory of those grey walls
is enough to fill my stomach with a dull anxiety. I lived with the nausea –
the longing to be anywhere else instead – for nearly ten years. (The feeling
came back to me when I began dropping my daughter off at school,
and I had to force myself to see that her school was not what mine had been.) My
dead friend, who had been an intelligent boy with eclectic interests and bookshelves, was also an average student in a system that chewed up
such children. I got out just in time; he did not and became a ‘failure.’ When
I met him again at the age of nineteen, he was injecting heroin into his
scrotum and stealing cough syrup. He had nothing to say that was not recycled tripe.
He was not the only one. There but for the grace of God went I.
The Jesuit jailhouse of our childhood dissolved into the city itself, turning it grey: grey school-buses, grey shorts, grey
mornings, dirty white sky. As with the school, I can’t go back there without a
sense of dread. I know this contradicts the conventions of NRI nostalgia. (But
then, bin Ich nicht ein bloede NRI.) We are supposed to look back with
affection and pride, and there is undeniably something romantic about Durgapur
and other ‘steel towns’ that came up in India in the 1950s. This was the
frontier of Nehru and Bidhan Roy: instant cities in the wilderness that had secreted legendary bandits like Bhabani Pathak and Ichhai Ghosh, marked by receding forests, smoke-stacks, geometric housing developments, no extremes of wealth and poverty, no crime to
speak of (polite scientists and their well-bred wives had replaced the bandits),
no filth on the streets (but nasty chemicals in the air and the
river), sheltered and sheltering, a modern Indian Eden where everybody knew
their neighbors and spoke three languages, and nobody talked about
religion or caste. In the evening, the horizon would turn an attractive orange as the blast furnaces roared and released their slag.
As a new city where even the old
residents were first-generation migrants from elsewhere, Durgapur was a
place constituted by arrivals and departures. Men and women came, recognizing
their roles as pioneers, but expecting to leave at the end of their working lives.
Parts of the town retained that touch of the makeshift: Steel Market, where we
bought Tintins and textbooks, cricket balls and orange squash, was a double row
of Quonset huts – corrugated-iron barracks – on a dirt road. For children, home was
always encroached upon by departure, because the same schools that consumed
their lives in the city would spit them out of the city, towards ‘real’
cities where there were colleges, careers and airports. (Durgapur had only a
railway station.) To remain in this place was a sign of failure.
Into this place that was also no
place at all, at some point in the mid-1960s, my friend’s mother had come, a
Russian scientist who had married an Indian engineer given to spells of
withdrawal and melancholy, and what was probably schizophrenia. The
few friends she made in Durgapur included my mother. Birokto korbena (“Don’t bother me”), she
told my mother, was her husband’s frequent response to her desire
for his company. She had hung on for a long time. As a foreigner, she was even
more afflicted by the limbo between arrival and eventual departure; the
sense of isolation must have been acute. I remember her – and her husband – as
being simultaneously present and absent, inseparable from the failure that
swallowed my friend. In attractively
modern company housing, husbands turned cold and wives seethed with rage at being stranded in the jungle with their various disappointments, while children lingered on the cricket field after dark or wandered the
streets in the burning heat of May afternoons because it was better than
going home. Anyone could turn feral. The town wasted the Russian woman just as it wasted her son, and there’s a morbid irony in the
likelihood that she will live out her final years there, in this wilderness of unreliable memory. There but for the grace of God; but quite a
few of us did go there.
I had left. I escaped miraculously,
due to the mad initiative of parents who recognized the importance of getting
out, even though their own education and aspiration had been focused on
reaching places like Durgapur. Leaving destroyed them professionally, socially
and personally, turning them into slightly shocking shadows of their confident and
accomplished selves; immigration is not for the middle-aged. But it got the kids off the conveyor belt to nowhere. My
friend who died understood that. He once sent me an email in which the only
coherent thing was his resentment that I had flown the coop while I was still
alive.
So perhaps it’s understandable that I
associate the place with death: arrivals culminating in necessary departures. I
first arrived in Durgapur when my parents stepped off the Coal Field Express
on to the platform, my father carrying me in a bassinet. Quite by coincidence,
I last saw my father at the same railway station, when he put me on a train
bound for Indore. It may very well have been the same platform. The Coal Field passed through before my train
pulled in and we said goodbye. Four months later he was dead, alone. I used to take the Coal Field sometimes when I
accompanied my father on his trips to Calcutta. Fish and chips in the dining
car, the thrill of the big city and what must be the real world. Lunch at
Kwality or cake at Flury’s to bribe me into visiting relatives. Temporary getaways.
A lot of this is the neurosis of the
emigrant, of course. For most of my friends from Durgapur, the place is mundane. Some have laid to rest the ghosts of engineers’ colonies and borrowed
time, bought homes and started businesses, made it a hometown like any other. There is
even an airport now, although not many flights. But on the two or three
occasions that I’ve gone back, I’ve been haunted both by the fact that the
place has changed, and by the suspicion that it hasn’t. Is it even sadder now,
or was it always sad? Were the roads always narrow and the buildings a little
drab? Had the open spaces that I remembered vanished, or never been there at
all? And I went back to Ohio / But my
city was gone. But the school is still there, with the grimy boys in grey
shorts, living in homes that shade into the jungle, studying feverishly to get out. When I had tried to explain to my
friend, during our failed attempt to reconnect by email, that I found Durgapur
depressing, he had again become enraged: he claimed the place,
and I was the condescending NRI. He was too wasted for me to convey that ‘going
to Durgapur’ was like visiting my own grave, charged with the fear of discovering things best forgotten, like dead boys and the holes we come from.
December 4, 2015
