Where home is: Even in the Frank School Atlas, it was difficult to find Siliguri, the tiny town in north Bengal.
That places should have names still fills me with a sense of wonder. I am writing this from a car that is passing through Bengal’s Dinajpur districts. Sonamoti, Rasokhowa — names filled with poetry, with a sense of beauty and delight, more imagined and desired than real: sona, gold; moti, pearl; rasa, sweet syrup in Bangla; khowa, dessicated milk, or possibly, a corruption of khawa, to eat. Dalkhola, Kishanganj, Bottleganj — all these names pass through the speeding tyres of the car. Every once in a while, my father calls. “Where are you?” he asks. I look for a written sign, a shop with a name or a signpost, but there are hardly any. Only long miles of wavy agricultural fields. I don’t know, I say, unsure whether these places actually have names. Do all places in the world, every inch of the earth, have names?
I’m never sure about this, my relationship with names of portions of the earth, all decided arbitrarily. I am confused because one of my earliest memories of writing came from the need to write about the place I lived in — as if writing about it would conjure it into existence. That belief was almost religious, though I can say that only now — like a priest chanting the mantras and imagining that the drops of water he was sprinkling over fruits and flowers have a synecdochal relationship with the Ganga, I imagined that the name of Siliguri, the small sub-Himalayan town where I’ve lived for most of my life, would truly come to exist if its name appeared in books. Books had that kind of magical power before the internet took it away — anything that was in it was true, was real.
Siliguri, this tiny town in north Bengal, had never found a home in any book I’d read. Even in the Frank School Atlas, where every place in the world had been given some space, we struggled to find the latitudinal and longitudinal measurements of our town. It is difficult to explain this to those who have lived in places in the spotlight. There’s the sense of neglect, but of whom? A relative, a third parent as it were, for places nourish as much as our families. With time I’ve discovered how our hometown is often the invisible surname in our character — perhaps that explains why some communities include the name of their village in their surname?
In university, I encountered this instinct for place as an aesthetic. We’d study William Faulkner for the way his novels would transport us to Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, but before that, at 18, I’d read Thomas Hardy. The questions asked would move between the role of chance and coincidence in Hardy’s vision of the world (and, by extension, the novel, though I didn’t understand it then), his use of similes, and those that marked them out to me: the Wessex novels, about the “rustic characters” in them, Wessex, “a merely realistic dream country”. Adulthood and the morality of an Eng Lit education would spoil my pleasure in Hardy temporarily — why was Bathsheba so idealised? for instance — but what would seep into my consciousness, after the novelist’s investment in the poetic possibilities of narrative prose, was the world he’d created: how lacking in ambition these “rustic characters” were, and so, how much at peace, compared to those whose centrifugality of desire, particularly in their journeys, real and metaphorical, to the city, brought them unhappiness. The literary criticism that I read seemed to stress this point time and again, and I, unsure of myself like most late adolescents, imported this worldview into my understanding of Siliguri.
These were the last years of the last millennium. The hormonal transfusion of the internet and globalisation had still not happened. Siliguri was still mainly a town of one-storeyed houses. The skyline still allowed the Himalayas to move in and out of our range of vision. Alubokhra still appeared in vegetable markets sometimes — its tangy juice still dripped off our elbows faster than we could lick and suck its restless flesh. Around seven in the morning, before we’d even brushed our teeth, a male voice would call out “mihidana” — we knew them, thin faceless men with gigantic aluminium dekchis on their heads, Hercules carrying the world, filled with warm mihidana, and, sometimes, homemade sandesh. Without telling each other, or needing to, we knew this as life, as something that wouldn’t change — our parents would remain young and nagging, the sun would rise every morning, we’d have to eat dal for lunch every day of our lives, there would be exams to pass every few months, and the rickshaw-pullers in Siliguri would always say no to wherever I would want them to take me.
But life changed, without debate or our permission. In my head it seems as sudden as my father emerging out of the bathroom one Monday morning, smiling, without his moustache, suddenly unrecognisable, but still my father. A surprise to his family and friends, who teased him about his resemblance to Kapil Dev. Kapil Dev retired, my father shaved his moustache, Siliguri changed.
My urge to see the name of my little town — not so little anymore, fed as it was by the hormones of globalisation and confused capital — in a book hadn’t changed. I’d bought books on the history of the town, but felt short-changed. The Pandavas must have stopped here en route to Manipur, they told me. My imagination drew a blank. It was as difficult as imagining a great-grandfather — someone with the surname “Roy” — as an ape. I wanted to read about the town I lived in now.
I’d tried to write about Siliguri several times. I hadn’t succeeded. It was the difficulty of writing about someone I loved. When the riots in lower Assam began to affect Siliguri in 2012, I began to notice it in two ways — in newspapers, on television and social media; and in conversations with those who came to work in our house. The difference in language, discourse, if you will, was self-evident. It was then that it struck me that in a world where globalisation had flattened the textures of language into a kind of sameness, and where places were increasingly indistinguishable from another, one of the last remaining habitats of uniqueness — and identifiability — might be in the language of the domestic space.
There was nothing distinguishable in the language of news, no matter where its locale of broadcast. In offices and educational institutions, where friends and family worked, they used the language of machines — non-compliance or disobedience to this language would be considered a lapse, a kind of lack or inefficiency. That language, like the news, could never be a home. It wasn’t the language of life, of breathing, it wasn’t the language of the senses. Had it disappeared from our lives completely?
After I’d begun writing Missing — and left it midway for How I Became a Tree, what would be my first published book — I discovered Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay’s novella, Phoolchor. It was set in Siliguri — I wasn’t interested in the romantic possibilities, what for me was a common phenomenon, a man from Calcutta falling in love with a girl from Siliguri. Mukhopadhyay, who’d spent time in north Bengal as a young man, had succeeded in capturing something peculiar to places in the region — of phoolchor, people, particularly women, who woke up around daybreak and moved around in neighbourhoods with a long stick, a lawga, to pull and pluck flowers from other people’s gardens. Yes, flower thieves.
The flower thieves in Phoolchor, indifferent to political correctness and the new world. Like the people in my life and in Missing – their language, playful, sensuous, suffused with the history of the moment, of blisters and calluses, of the useless, full of digressions, a language as wide-mouthed as a pond, unlike the tap-controlled language of formality and Facebook. Hardy’s “rustic characters”, it has been said, performed the role of the Greek chorus in his novels — like DH Lawrence’s Brangwens in The Rainbow, most of them made a living from the land. Surnames like Oak and Poorgrass remind us of their rootedness to place, of the perimeter of their desire. The novel of place is, perhaps, actually only a novel of people, those whom literature and art have chosen to imagine as “background”, people outside the spotlight, not worth the energy of authorial puppetry. To be able to bring the sonic of everyday conversation seemed to me a possibility of sharing the life of my town with the world. The world? I’m hesitant about using the word. Hardy’s “rustic” characters were untouched by the world, by ambition; the people in Missing are untouched by a different world, by globalisation. Their language is old, it still comes to us barefoot — it was this language I wanted to record in my novel before it, too, like handwriting, went missing.