In the 2000s, another kind of Bengali has found a different sort of literary calling. The new litterateurs specialise in delicate prose that delineates the cultural ethos and the rootless dissociation of what is by now a very large immigrant community. The target audience is the enlightened Western reader who may want to know something about the home-life of the "Paki" running the local balti restaurant. Jhumpa Lahiri, Amit Chaudhuri and Monica Ali are three of the leading lights of this school.
Subrata breaks both moulds. He grew up in the Britain of the ’50s and he was certainly a Bengali of "good family". But he has no literary pretensions whatsoever. He has no angst about reconciling divergent cultural influences. And insofar as he’s writing this book with any particular audience in mind, it’s himself.
What emerges is a charming portrait of a child growing up in the provincial market town of Derbyshire, and developing a ‘home’ and ‘away’ life. At school, he spoke a dialect indistinguishable from his mates and taught them to chant the Bengali for shit: at home, he spoke the formal convent-English of his parents.
Baba was a surgeon which earned him respect as the "Doctor". Ma wore sarees, which made her an exotic vision since they were perhaps the only Bengalis in Derby at that time. His parents sent him to a convent because they had studied at the hallowed Calcutta institutions of St Xavier’s Collegiate School and Loreto House (Jyoti Basu is an alumnus of both, which makes him unusual).
The cultural meld came via football. Subrata ended up falling in love with the winter game with all the passion of a young, lonely boy. He supported Derby as it was his local club but he also supported Blackpool because it was graced by legendary maestro Stanley Matthews.
The great right-winger was in his 40s by the time the Dasguptas settled in England. Matthews won his one and only FA cup medal in a great match, which young Subrata followed on radio. He obsessively followed the fortunes of Matthews and Blackpool in the press and on TV. He only saw him live once in a match where Blackpool lost to the great Man U team that died en masse in the 1958 Munich crash. Matthews was smothered by Duncan Edwards to Subrata’s disappointment.
Football isn’t the focus of the book though. It’s not even about coming-of-age; the Dasguptas returned to Calcutta when Subrata was in his early teens. But the entire idea arose when he heard that the maestro had passed away in 2004. It’s an unsentimental portrait of life in a time and place that is no more and written much in the style of an elderly man penning captions to the sepia-tinted pictures in his mental album.
