Blades Of Grass

THIS January, Kalyani Karlekar, the 89-year-old Calcutta-based social worker who presides over the Calcutta Social Project, a non-governmental institution looking after slum children for the past 27 years, received a letter from Berlin. A cheque of Rs 2.97 lakh was enclosed with a cryptic note from Gunter Grass. The 1999 Nobel Laureate has clearly not forgotten the city he last visited 13 years ago and whipped up a storm with his rather acerbic comments.

The gesture coupled with what Grass had said about Calcutta underscores the contradictions which, in the true tradition of Central European men of letters, have always and invariably been the centre of his artistic and moral universe. For a writer who claims to have been inspired by German expressionist Thomas Mann, Grass is now retrospectively described as an exponent of a German form of magic realism. And, for Indians, nothing could capture this complexity better than the writer's association with 'The City of Joy'.

Says Netai Chandra Bera of Calcutta Social Project: "He sends us money regularly, silently, without making a fuss about it." Bera had taken the celebrated writer-poet to the city's slums. "He was always deeply interested in the underbelly of Calcutta. We are so happy for him here." Darkness, however, has always attracted this scourer of black humour in history. That may precisely be the reason why Bera's enthusiasm may not be shared by Calcutta's throng of hidebound intellectuals and tired writers. He sparked off a controversy when he wrote his novel The Flounder after his first visit to the city in 1975. He stayed at Raj Bhawan as a government guest and went around the city meeting writers, painters and leaders.

The Flounder came as quite a shock to even the libertine Calcuttans: he saw pretty girls reading poetry at a hip poetry reading session and wanted to make love to some of them; he was bemused that people died on the streets in a Communist-run place. Most devastating was his morbid description of the city: "Calcutta is a pile of shit that God dropped...How it swarms, stinks, lives and gets bigger and bigger...Delete Calcutta from all guide books." He found the whole city "a slum", and then proceeded to write that the city should be made the headquarters of the United Nations. But in the same vein he had called Frankfurt a "pile of concrete shit." Calcuttans predictably took umbrage to Grass' brutal candour. So when he returned to the city to live, write and paint for six months in 1986, people cried that the "drain inspector" had returned.

The time Grass spent in the city then changed his life quite a bit: he got involved with slum children, co-directed a Bengali adaptation of his play, lived in the suburbs, took the filthy and crowded suburban trains to the city, attended baboo literary workshops and lazy addas, sketched, took copious notes on his journeys and chatted with students and teachers. Two years later, his much-awaited book on this sojourn Zunge Zeiggen (Show Your Tongue), on the city, came out. A gritty description of the city's buildings, people, mores and poverty. It was vintage Grass, stark and ferocious.

The writer, who once said that Calcutta was straight out of Dante's Inferno, also told a friend in the city that it was "very vibrant, full of life". He told the friend: "I'd like the somnolent people of Calcutta to be woken up. That is why I say these things." To another, he said: "I find the old people in Calcutta very idealistic and the young cynical." A fact not very distant from Grass' own experience of German history. And for Calcuttans who know Grass well, his trashing of the city had to do with an acidic love affair with it. "He has a corrosive sympathy and love for Calcutta," says Subhoranjan Dasgupta, the first Indian journalist to interview the great postwar German writer.

 In the winter of '84, the journalist rang up Grass' office in Berlin for an interview with the writer. When the secretary hemmed and hawed, Dasgu-pta told him he was from Calcutta, and wanted to find out why Grass had written what he had on the city. The call came, and the scheduled hour-long interview stretched to an involved three-hour-long conversation where he returned again and again to speak on Calcutta. He felt Calcuttans were very angry with what he had written in The Flounder, says Dasgupta. So, he decided to make up when he returned to the city two years later.

He and wife Ute lived in a garden house in the southern suburbs of Baruipur, and then for some time with artist Shuvaprasanna and his wife at their Salt Lake home. He also travelled in the sweaty packed local trains. At one of those derelict stations that dot the Bengal countryside, a traveller stopped Grass and asked him: "Are you Graham Greene or Gunter Grass? I'm slightly confused." The writer-in-residence attended several literary workshops, where he read his poems and talked about impending apocalypse. "A new fascist movement is rising in the world," he told a gathering at the city's Seagull Bookshop. "Not in Germany, but very possibly in the United States. It will be fascism, not as we know it in Europe, but in (things like) racism...in the black-and-white world." Grass also opened Arts Acre, an artists' village that would "never become an ivory tower".

That, however, was not the end of his intellectual engagement with Calcutta. It extended to his much-talked about tryst with Bengali theatre. Amitava Roy, professor of English and drama at the city's Rabindra Bharati University, who runs the 25-year-old Theatre Arts Workshop, remembers meeting him "accidentally." He had just translated The Plebians by Grass and had decided to stage it. The writer happily agreed to be the co-director, sitting through the rehearsals, and quite incredibly, detecting a missed line or a scene, even though the play was in Bengali. "It was really miraculous," says Ray.

RAY, who loved the experience, reminisces: "Grass said he had stopped writing plays because of the high-handedness of western directors. 'Playwrights are zero in the West,' he used to tell me. He also confided that he wanted to go back and start writing plays again and stage them only in Calcutta and Berlin!" He kept his word, but Grass' next play is still not complete.

Back in Germany, he began writing a play on Sub-has Bose, and asked Ray to collaborate. He left Calcutta with books and notes on him. He only got as far as the first scene: it opens on Netaji's birthday celebration in a Calcutta slum. The politicians pay a callow tribute to the leader; when they've left, the slum-dwellers celebrate on their own. They pick the rags around them and build a Netaji image in the detritus. "When I read the scene, I balked. I told him we'd get shot if we staged the play in Calcutta," says Ray. "'Why are you so afraid?' he asked. 'I'd stand beside you and die with you'." Till three years ago, Grass was hell-bent on completing and staging the play in India. "But they won't allow us to stage it here. It is too controversial," says Ray.

Grass developed a Bose fixation. In novel Call Of The Toad, he deals with such esoteric themes as fig-ures in European cemetries. A protagonist is Subhas Chandra Chatterjee, who goes to Danzig (Grass' town, now in Poland and called Gdnask), imports cycle rickshaws from Bangladesh and wins over the First World by making it pollution-free! "He is incorruptible and, sometimes harsh, but deeply human as well," says Ray.

These days, Grass, 71, keeps in touch with friends in Calcutta via e-mail. The city never really leaves his consciousness, especially in his morbid fables. "Calcutta is a product of a division," he told Dasgupta once. "It carries the agony of the past...It demands its own Joyce, Alfred Doblin and Dos Passos." He found its charm in the city's old houses and bemoaned that nothing was being done to maintain them. "If this process of decay persists," he had said, "Calcutta will lose its face in 10 years." In the ruins of Calcutta today, Grass' prophecy rings true.