“
Now as the train moved towards Calcutta, Malay felt as if his life was coming full circle. It had been a strange decision to visit the city at a time when post-Partition vomit and excreta was splattered on Calcutta streets. Marked by communal violence, anger and unemployment, the streets smelled of hunger and disillusionment. Riots were still going on. The wound of a land divided lingered, refugees from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) continued to arrive in droves. And since they did not know where to go, they occupied the pavements, laced the streets with their questions, frustrations and a deep need to be recognised as more than an inconvenient presence on tree-lined avenues.
The feeling of being uprooted was everywhere. Political leaders decided that the second phase of the five-year planning needed to see the growth of heavy industries. The land required for such industries necessitated the evacuation of farmers. Devoid of their ancestral land and in the absence of a proper rehabilitation plan, those evicted wandered aimlessly around the cities—refugees by another name.
Calcutta had assumed different dimensions in Malay’s mind. The smell of the Hooghly wafted across Victoria Memorial and settled like an unwanted cow on its lawns. Unsung symphonies spilled out of St Paul’s Cathedral on lonely nights; white gulls swooped in on grey afternoons and looked startling against the backdrop of the rain-swept edifice. In a few years, Naxalbari would become a reality, but not yet. Like an infant Kali with bohemian fantasies, Calcutta and its literature sprouted a new tongue – that of the Hungry Generation. Malay, like Samir and many others, found himself at the helm of this madness, and poetry seemed to lick his body and soul in strange colours. As a reassurance of such a huge leap of faith, Shakti had written to Samir:
Bondhu Samir,
We had begun by speaking of an undying love for literature, when we suddenly found ourselves in a dream. A dream that is bigger than us, and one that will exist in its capacity of right and wrong and beyond that of our small worlds.
Bhalobasha juriye
Shakti
”
”