On the first day of this month now coming to a close, I read the news and said to my wife, “There didn’t seem to be any April Fool jokes in the papers today.” It’s not unusual for the media to play practical jokes; and all good investigative reporting has an element of play-acting and invention about it. The informant called “Deep Throat”, who tipped off the reporters Woodward and Bernstein about the events that came to be known as the “Watergate affair”, was, it’s been suggested, a figment of Woodward’s fertile imagination. Here, in India, Aniruddha Bahl of tehelka.com wore a beard that looked as if it had been drawn with an eyebrow pencil, and played a practical joke that had rather serious consequences, though not as serious as one might have wished.
April Fool’s day gives the media sanction to invent news, always a temptation, but never, otherwise, openly succumbed to. In the early Eighties, I remember the Observer announced, on its front page, a new channel on British television that would be devoted to pornography and erotica. Not a few people spent the morning tuning their TV sets, adjusting their antennae, and pressing buttons and changing channels. It only occurred to them afterwards, as the television critic Ludovic Kennedy dourly confessed later in the week, that the news item, prominently displayed, had appeared on April Fool’s day.
My wife pondered my question, and replied, “Probably the report about cheese.” She meant the sizeable reports that occupied the centre of the front pages of both The Telegraph and The Statesman, informing readers that, incredibly, a treasure-hoard of tinned beans, sardines, packed cheese and ragu sauce would soon be available in the Indian market. By coincidence, this announcement had been made on April Fool’s day. We held our breath; could this be a heartless joke played on our growing middle classes? We breathed again; two rival newspapers, we concluded, wouldn’t deign to play the same prank.
The drought, for the middle classes, had been a long one; and cheese might serve conveniently as its signifier. An Area of Darkness, published in 1964, two years after I was born, opens with the following melancholy account of India approached and discovered: “As soon as our quarantine flag came down and the last of the barefoot, blue-uniformed policemen of the Bombay Port Health Authority had left the ship, Coelho the Goan came aboard and, luring me with a long beckoning finger into the saloon, whispered, ‘You have any cheej?’”
Naipaul, here, echoes the lovely, but mocking, prosody and structure of the sentence with which he opened Miguel Street, and, indeed, his oeuvre — “Every morning when he got up Hat would sit on the banister of his back verandah and shout across, ‘What happening there, Bogart?’” — reminding us, discreetly, of the peculiar double capacity for hope and disillusionment that opening sentences and post-colonial societies have in common. The narrator of An Area of Darkness duly proceeds: “Coelho had been sent by the travel agency to help me through the customs. He was tall and thin and shabby and slightly nervous, and I imagined he was speaking of some type of contraband. He was. He required cheese. It was a delicacy in India. Imports were restricted, and the Indians had not yet learned how to make cheese, just as they had not yet learned how to bleach newsprint.”
By the end of these sentences, we have forgotten it’s the ship, and not the country it’s heading toward, that has been quarantined. Any self-respecting Indian would bristle at the flagrant disregard for fact in the last sentence I’ve quoted, or at the supercilious and possibly invented detail about the “barefoot” policemen; but enough decades have passed since those observations were made for them to have lost their sting. In the interim, the middle classes have been nursing a secret hunger while publicly eating and proclaiming the virtues of Amul cheese. Now and then, it causes a breakdown in behaviour, and a lack of decorum unique to the full-fed, educated Indian middle classes. It’s as if their secret and imagined hunger has proved to be as real, and constitutionally debilitating, as the hunger their more impecunious fellow-countrymen feel.
I have in mind an august occasion that took place at the Grand Hotel about a month ago. The French government had decided to confer a particularly distinguished honour on the sculptor and artist, Chintamoni Kar. The French ambassador had flown down from New Delhi; a large crowd of artists, writers, newspapermen, businessmen, and members of the elite citizenry of Calcutta had been invited to participate in the event in the Cooch Behar Suite on the first floor. Free wine and various kinds of cheeses, as foreign to our shores as the ambassador, were on display. There was an importunate pushing and shoving towards the alcohol and cheese. People managed to exhibit, at once, the nonchalant curiosity about food that only the rich have, and also the worried haste that straitened communities are prey to as the food runs out; these bodily movements belong to the strange double life of the post-independent Indian upper middle class, who’ve had both too much and too little of a good thing.
When the respected ambassador made his speech, inflected with charming Gallicisms (more than once he referred to the recipient of the honour as “Shintanomy Car”), the crowd was as quiet as schoolchildren at morning prayer; but as soon as Mr Kar began to make his rather moving and brief acceptance speech, it, probably mistaking him for a minor Indian official, returned to conversation, reminiscence, networking, wine and, urgently, cheese.
An Englishman passed through Calcutta recently, travelling back to England from post-earthquake Bhuj, which he was reporting on for a programme for BBC Radio. At a get-together one evening, he complained to his friends in the city, among whom I include myself, of the European aid-workers who, more familiar with war-stricken zones like Kosovo, were rather at a loss in Bhuj (he pronounced the word in the BBC way, roughly like the first syllable in “bourgeoise”). These well-intentioned Europeans (mainly Scandinavians) were, our English friend told us in some bafflement, living in Bhuj on Swedish accessories, sleeping on Swedish mattresses, eating out of Swedish tins, Swedish sausages one day, probably Swedish caviar another.
I advised my friend to keep this information from members of the Calcutta Club, who, if they heard of the plenitude of tinned sausages in Bhuj, might make a silent exodus towards Gujarat; for I have seen how, on the Club’s international evening, people queue patiently at the German stall for boiled frankfurters. Anyway, that anecdote now belongs to a different era in our history. We can finally hope to eat brie and roulade and German sausages in the sociable, if over-familiar, spaces of our own, and each other’s, homes.
