Citywalks with my Father

                                                                      Julie Banerjee Mehta

 

Thunder growled and sheets of water flash flooded the slippery ground as we sloshed through little sprats that had leapt out of the flooded fishermen’s stalls at Gariahat Market. It was the beginning of the monsoons in Calcutta. I was seven and he seemed ten feet tall. As he scooped me up in his velvet hands (so I would not skid on the mud) -- the hands of an exceptional surgeon, the hands of a remarkable chef -- I remember his whisper: “Monu, this is the city where you were born. And this is the market which feeds you. During your lifetime, you will live in many cities. But this will always be special. You are a Bengali. And this is your city." It was the mantra he repeated every time, for nearly two decades, when we made our weekly sojourn to a space that we could map in unison, with our eyes closed. It was our special time together, a de-stressing jaunt – where he could forget the complex Caesarean operation he would have to perform with a breach baby on Monday morning, and I could wave away the conjugations of the French verb ecrire, which I would have to face in my language exam. It was our shared love – the Gariahat Fish Market -- in the city where he had fallen in love with his medical college classmate, my mother, that drew us together.

 

My father and I. My earliest memories of this chaotic city that will always be my first love, are built on those Sunday moments at the fish market with my father. They weren’t just walks through the cacophony of the vendors’ choral al capella -- “Tatka Machh”,  “Ekebarey Makhon”, “Dada, ei ileesh aar paaben  na” -- but they were inspirational lessons about the rich and nuanced culture of Bengali cuisine and our abiding love affair with fish, as a community.

 

In those early years, as I trotted along with my hand in his, trying to keep pace with his long, slim strides, my father taught me about the pink pabda fish lying like pale princesses with fat bellies, that leant themselves to a thin stew of black sesame seeds, turmeric, green chillies and fresh coriander; blue lobsters that made friends rapidly with coconut milk, ginger-garlic-onion paste, and a hand ground powder of cardamom-cinnamon-cloves; caviar-filled black skinned tangra  that teamed up well with a touch of mustard seed paste, potato and onion medley; white fillets of beckti that could melt in the mouth when wrapped in banana leaves, smothered in mustard seed paste, red chilli paste and turmeric with a dash of mustard oil. I watched and learnt from my father as he chatted with the fish farmers Kanu, Netai and Gour, who came from their bheris, the fish tanks, in Canning and Amtala; and swallowed a few tips every weekend with a hunger that helped me store delectable little nuggets of information about fish, that served me an ace every time I shopped at a fish market, anywhere I lived.  I never forgot how my father had taught me to feel the belly of a fish, how to look for a bright redness – the sign of freshness – under the gills, how to look at the eyes. Twenty-two years of Sundays (minus the weeks our family would take a vacation in the summer and in the winter), of walking in sync with him at the Gariahat market made up for all the times I would miss him, soon after my twenty-second birthday, because I would live oceans away in over three continents, over three decades.

 

When I first went to Singapore’s Theka Market, I was in my twenties and a newly minted journalist with cheeks full of laughter and a pocketful of curiosity with a dream job as literary reviewer and features editor for a newspaper conglomerate. Theka still sold fresh catches at the time, in the eighties, and my father, on his flying visits to the island city, made a huge impression on both Mohammed the mutton seller and Keng Guan the fishmonger, who chatted with him for over half an hour at a time, over steaming cups of teh tarik, discussing the effectiveness of onion paste made with a mortar and pestle over blended onion as a base for a terrific mutton korma. My father taught me all about recognising, cleaning, cooking and serving many varieties of fish, and I won his admiration when I offered added observations about species I encountered at the many different markets I visited and shopped at, during my many sojourns as a newspaper correspondent and researcher of food history. The fishmongers at the Pike Place Market in Seattle, and those at St. Lawrence Market in Toronto, knew me well and they welcomed me to share my stories and recipes from my father’s kitchen.  I was so fascinated by the way the fishermen literally threw their mighty catches of salmon, from yards away to the fishmongers, with the buyers waiting in salivating anticipation, that I came back to Pike Place Market five times that week I was in Seattle. I wish so much that my father and I could have been there together as the catch came in and a whoosh of silence fell among us spectators waiting for the salmon throw to begin as the boats anchored in the bay. I made a video and shared it with him when I went to Calcutta after that trip, and my father’s delight bounced off the walls of the living room. My father,  in his eighties when we moved to Canada to pursue our doctoral degrees and teach at University, was chuffed to see the pictures on facebook that I posted on my timeline, with the young pisciculturists at the West Coast Universities in British Columbia welcoming me on their trips to see the salmon run in the fall.

 

During our ten years in Bangkok, when my husband Harish and I were researching and writing about Thailand and Cambodia, my father visited us many times. And of all the markets in Bangkok, the flower market Pak Klong Talard was our preferred destination every day he was there, for a week or a fortnight at a time. It was an unspoken schedule: every morning after breakfast, armed with notebook and camera I would rush to the car after giving my mother her newspapers for the morning and yelling the menu for lunch to our Nepalese lady cook, where my father would already be waiting patiently, the driver Khun Piya and he communicating in different languages, planning a tour of a new temple on the way to the Klong . Once, as we turned the corner from our home at Charoenkrung Road to the neighborhood of  Silom, my father asked Khun Piya to stop the car as soon as it was convenient. My father was 78 at the time and the alacrity with which he sprung out of the car surprised me, and forced me to move quickly to his side. He caught my hand with one hand and with the other, which held the cane, he pointed at the image of a Buddha that looked at least five times the height of a man. It took me a while to figure out that the Buddha had his back turned to us, or rather we were looking at him from an unusual angle. My father smiled at my consternation. “Don’t you think we need to go to the front of the temple,” I asked. “ Well, we could, if you insist. This might be a new way of looking at your favourite Yogi,” he retorted. As I looked at the back of the Buddha again, I noticed a man trying to apply something on the statue. We had been in Bangkok for over seven months, and I thought I had been trained quite thoroughly as a guide on Thai art and iconography by the Bangkok National Museum, where I was a board member on the Volunteers Committee. But here I was, a guide who was trying to show a visitor a city I was supposed to know fairly well with not a clue as to why my father had stopped to show me the back of a humongous Buddha. “That man is gilding the Buddha,”, my father said. He knew I had no idea about the discourse he had begun but he was too kind to show up my pride and ignorance. “The man is putting gold leaf on the Buddha, as an act of merit. Usually an act of merit like this is an act of atonement for a “sin” – usually a married man who spends the night with a lady of pleasure feels he can cancel his dodgy karma by purchasing the 24 karat gold leaf and applying it on the Buddha. It’s a little like people buying the caged black birds from the vendors who make a living out of peoples’ folly, all over Bangkok, and releasing them from their cages. They hope that the momentary freedom the purchase of souls buys them, will go down as brownie points for their  act of kindness. What’s ironic is that the purchaser knows that the very same bird will be trapped in the very same cage perhaps, in a matter of minutes.” My father was the greatest teacher because he could teach a lesson by telling a story in a way that you would never forget. After my father left for his home, Calcutta, I would go every Monday to that temple in Silom Road and often see a row of Mercedes Benzes parked on the narrow soi (the lane) that flanked the left wall of the Wat which housed the beautiful image. Several men in well-cut suits would be lining up to gild the Buddha. I would call my father on Mondays at 10am and we would have a long laugh together. The way I perceived and remembered Bangkok, the City of Angels, was yet another city which would have the indelible mark of my father.

 

I was thousands of miles away in a city which was my new home – Toronto – when my father died in Calcutta, the city where he loved and worked for most of his life. Barring five years in London, where he earned his membership and his fellowship at the Royal College of Surgery and the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, he was a staunch Bengali who respected and adored  Subhash Chandra Bose and Ileesh Maachh, and not necessarily in that order. During the long, cold winter afternoons, in a bed-sitter in Finchley, while my mother and he read eighteen hours a day, preparing for their fellowship exams, their dinners would sometimes be quite a royal feast according to any poor, overseas scholars’ standards, thanks to my father’s enterprise: rice and a one-dish ileesh machher jhol with eggplant and potatoes, thrown in. London in 1950 was still reeling from the bombings by Hitler’s Luftwaffe and it was a nervous city with little produce with the rationing of “luxury” items like eggs and sugar just being lifted. So horsemeat and rabbit was now being replaced by more regular lamb and beef and pork. But making a banquet from very few ingredients, culled from the markets of any city, was his special gift. His enthusiasm and curiosity, and his obsession with city markets would take my father to some undiscovered haunts in cavernous, sprawling London -- he would think nothing of walking for two hours to Billingsgate, skipping all the way through the blustery winds that typically punctuated a November day in London. “I got to know the city through my nose,” he maintained. “We lived and ate frugally for most of the week, and then I tried to give your mother a different taste on Sunday, with the money we had saved for six days. Our search for good fish and chips took us all the way to Richmond once, and we always went back there once a month. Then there were the Lahori Kebabs I loved so much at the East End, and we discovered an amazing array of Sikh tarka dal places while getting to know London.”  On Saturdays, my parents’ Bengali colleagues who were hungry for dimer dalna and kasha mangsho would flock to my parents’ apartment. The meat curry would drive their neighbours crazy. “It was the 1950s, and curry was certainly not the national dish of Britain. But we made many friends in the city because many young British students who were our cohorts were bowled over by the flavour and some have remained close friends till today,” he often reminded me.  There were gems embedded in holes in the wall that my father revealed to me since I was a child, curious to know all I could about that magical city. London. His stories about London came alive when I found the burger and chips stall at Whipsnade Zoo, twenty years later, where the novelty of eating burgers with the softest buns and chunky sautéed onions was a rare delight. Then there was Veerasamy’s where my parents went on special occasions as postgraduates, to celebrate an anniversary or a birthday; and my father insisted we never miss the curry and chips near the Docklands. I relieved the culinary delights he had savoured two decades later and was awed by going under the same skin he was in, years ago. I lived my father’s walks through London, and got to know him a little better, imagining every perception that must have accosted him, a twenty-eight-year-young medical student from Calcutta, who had taken the P &O boat to London. While walking from Oxford Circus through Bond Street and Tottenham Court Road, with packages from Harrods and Selfridges, that felt like they weighed a ton or so it seemed, I remembered how different my parents’ lives had been, compared to my luxurious one. As I brushed shoulders with the iconic British store  John Little, my father’s tales about only being able to window shop at Marks and Spencer’s and Selfridges, and always buying from C&A which they affectionately called the “Cheap and Awful” store, rang in my ears. On every trip we made to London, ever since I worked as a journalist at first and then an academic, my husband and I went searching for my father’s favourite places – stores that sold the most delectable stilton, a patisserie called Valerie’s at Knightsbridge, a shawarma stall at Leicester Square, a strawberry hub at Covent Garden – I found London irresistible, discovering this matchless city through my father’s stories. But he could never make London (or any other place) his “home”. He  constantly ached for the familiarity of Calcutta: chhanar gujias he had adored at Nabakrishna Guin, close to Medical College, double blooms of rajanigandhas from Lake Market, that he brought home for my mother through the monsoons, making the house smell like a royal garden; the beautiful, painted wooden chariots he bought us at the Rather Mela every year, even when we were embarrassed to pull them along on a string, the fat bellied ileesh at Gariahat, the chicken patties at Bengal Club, the vanilla ice cream from Kwality’s on Park Street. Calcutta was his city the way I had never felt it belong to anyone else. A die-hard Calcatian, who was loved and revered by his peers and patients, he was elected President of the Bengal and Calcutta Clubs in the 1980s. In my frequent visits to my birthplace, to pursue my research and publication on Postcolonial India, and to see him and my mother, from the motley band of cities I had lived in at various points of my life -- Bombay, Canberra, Singapore and Bangkok -- before sinking our roots into the multiculture that was Toronto, where he and my mother had been frequent visitors in our homes, he brought me up to speed with CPM and Trinamul political manoeuvres. Till the last day that we spoke, while he was in the ICU in Woodlands Nursing Home, his second home in Calcutta where he served as consultant and then Chairman of the Board, before he left on his onward journey into happier surgical grounds, we debated about old city wet markets and new city dry, sterilised supermarkets, where fish was manifest only in the form of sushi.  “As metropolises take on the mantle of more concrete and steel, technology will inevitably effect packaging and handling of food. We will inevitably move towards more hygienic processes. And really, that’s a good thing,” I would argue. Often he would remind me that many children in Toronto had never seen a fish other than frozen breaded cod fingers or a smattering of tuna flakes in a baked pasta, or a piece of sushi or sashimi. And chicken for many kids was really just a boneless, skinless, featherless cube that tasted more like soft rubbery muscle, dressed up with a red makhni or a masala sauce or an innocuous white sauce. His arguments for farm to table would leave me stumped: “The way cities are fashioning themselves, they are in danger of losing touch with the land. You can still be modern and embrace technology, and still be connected to where your produce is coming from. Wet markets like Gariahat may be chaotic and unhygienic according to Western standards, but these markets to where farmers bring their produce become the crucial intersection between two extremely important worlds of the rural and the urban. If we continue to sterilise our markets in the city, and pack everything in Gladwrap and Styrofoam, there will be no character left in our markets. We will lose the unique and inimitable identities of our cities,” my father would lament.

 

It was an ordinary September day when my best buddy’s soul took flight.  In Toronto, the leaves had begun to turn and the summer garden that my husband had planted over ten years was slowing down like my father had, as he reached 91 years. Ontario’s favourite import, the red mallow, a Hawaiian hibiscus, as big as dinner plates, yielded no more buds, the last straggle of poppies were now petal free, nodding off in anticipation of the frosty nights. Our maple leaves turned red and gold, and the squirrels were beginning to turn hoarders with half-eaten acorns piled into their unstable pods in the treetops, that were about to herald in the fall. I was making his mother’s “bagher bachha shorshe maachh” with the beautiful Canadian salmon when the phone rang with the stupefying news that my father had left without a trace.

Now, since our return to this city after three decades, to keep my 93-year-old mother company, I walk the walk I had walked for so many Sundays with my father: I stop by the stalls where my father’s admirers Netai, Kanu and Gour are  still flourishing. I grew up meeting Kanu’s son Bhanu, every Sunday for years of Sundays, so we greet each other warmly and exchange the state of political affairs in this city, which we both shared childhoods in. Inevitably, Gour chides me for trying to bargain with him everytime I go to buy galda chingris  (lobsters) from him – which my father used to coax my anaesthetist mother (who thought my father and I wasted far too much time and effort in the kitchen) to cook him her signature recipe of river lobsters with cauliflower, potatoes, ginger and a heady mix of cumin, coriander and tomatoes. 

I hear of my father’s legendary performance as a professor and principal in this city’s National Medical  College from my doctor, who was once his student, and  I realise how privileged I was to be his daughter. Never pushing me to pursue the pure sciences and appear and excel in the competitive exams required to enter medical school, he consistently encouraged me instead to feed my deep interest in the intersection of food, culture and literature, ever since I was a child. He once told me how he saw in me a free spirit who was gentle and giving, canny and sensitive, sometimes a maverick, but always passionate and honest. On one of our last walks in the maze of the Gariahat Market together, when he used my grandfather’s cane to negotiate the eddies of slippery steps and hordes of humanity, he once said to me that I was the person he had wanted to be. He nearly knocked my socks off that morning. It was the biggest compliment he could ever pay me. He often said to our relatives that I had meticulously imbibed the Banerjee family Bengali culinary strategies, and he appreciated how I had followed the history of the family through the recipes and stories from relatives who recalled the history of Calcutta through its cuisine. He only wished his mother might have spent some years with me. She died a month after I was born. Standing at the entrance of the century-old green-shuttered sweet store Jadab Chandra Das, on Rashbehari Avenue, which was his favourite haunt for Rabri, two years before he vanished, in his no-nonsense style he whispered: “Like my mother, my daughter is a true daughter of this city – you can have chai and a chat with a rickshaw puller and trade stories with a tycoon.” A true lover of Calcutta, he loved the skin I was in. My return to this city is an unexpected gift where I can walk in his footsteps and hear his laughter as I surf the Gariahat fish market for my mother’s lunch.