Amaar Neru-da
Many people don’t realise that Il Postino, that wonderful film about a friendship between Pablo Neruda and a village postman, is just a figment of fiction. One could, however, make a real-life film about Neruda and a small-time Calcutta tailor with whom the poet made friends in the 1920s. I discovered this story from Nandita mashi, an old friend of Neruda’s.
Nandita mashi tells me that Neruda lived in Calcutta for a while in the late 1920s and had a knack for making friends with the man-in-the-street, one of his friends being a local tailor, whose family he kept in touch with over the years. (The friendship with the postman in Il Postino may be fictitious, she says, but it was typical of Neruda.) Neruda’s memoirs don’t mention his living in Calcutta, but Nandita mashi says he probably spent time here in connection with commercial matters while he was posted in Rangoon as the Chilean consul. Nandita mashi herself had a long correspondence with Neruda over the years and once showed me an anthology of his poems, affectionately inscribed to her family in the green ink he habitually used (he apparently called it “the colour of hope”).
So who was this tailor? Not some highfalutin tailor, just a little man who ran a darzi ki dukaan, probably somewhere in Alipore, says Nandita mashi. In fact, when Neruda returned to Calcutta 30 years later, he made it a point to visit the tailor’s family, the tailor himself having died by then. So if the film about the postman was titled Il Postino, this one could probably be called ‘El Sastre’ (‘The Tailor’, in Spanish).
Line Drawings
Neruda had apparently fallen in love with Tagore’s poetry as a youth and, as Octavio Paz noted, his earlier works are “deeply impregnated by its essence”. In fact, there was a minor literary scandal when a Chilean magazine once accused Neruda of plagiarising Tagore, printing a poem from his Twenty Love Poems and a Desperate Song alongside Tagore’s Tumi sandhyar meghamala, with embarrassing effect. Ah well, as T.S. Eliot wrote, “Mediocre poets imitate; good poets steal.”
The Circumnavigatory Chicken
About a year ago Vir Sanghvi researched the provenance of one of Calcutta’s old favourite dishes, Chicken a la Kiev—the decadent chicken bomb that explodes with melted butter at the touch of a knife. It’s a fascinating story: apparently the dish was invented in Paris circa 1920. It then made its way to New York, where some enterprising restaurateur gave it a bogus Russian name to attract the aristocratic Russian emigre crowd, obviously the trend-setters of the time. From New York it travelled all over the world (including to Kiev itself, where it has become popular despite its phony heritage). But, asks Sanghvi, how exactly did it arrive in Park Street?
I believe I have the answer. The person who introduced Chicken a la Kiev to Calcutta was Boris Lissanevitch, that flamboyant white Russian ballet dancer, cavalry officer, tiger hunter, bon vivant and entrepreneur. When he opened his legendary ‘300 Club’ in 1936, this was one of the exotic novelties he put on the menu. And from there it spread down Park Street, to places like Sky Room (although the rival Blue Fox resolutely eschewed it). Today, you find it mainly at old-world eateries like Mocambo, because today’s generation of cooks hasn’t been able to master the art of making it; one restaurant recently had to take it off their menu because their old cook went on leave to his village and never came back.
Wedding Warning
And here, by popular request from my (male) Bengali friends, is a list of ‘Yet Another 10 Reasons Not To Marry a Bengali Girl’: 1) She considers you a philistine because you can’t tell the difference between sea fish and river fish. 2) She has a family who still insist that Stanislaw Rodziewiczowna should have won the 1954 Nobel Prize instead of that Hemingway fellow. 3) When seeing a Mughal monument, she will always point out and exclaim, “Oh, Bangladhar roof!” 4) She has cousins who yelled ‘Amaar bari, tomaar bari, Naxalbari, Naxalbari!’ in the 1970s but now work for hedge funds in New York. 5) She has another set of cousins who studied at mit and Stanford, but have since spent their lives translating Tagore into Rumanian and vice versa. 6) She will have at least one uncle who insists on referring to the Hooghly as “the mighty Ganga”. 7) She will always point out the many unknown similarities between Bengali and French culture. 8) She will usurp your bookshelf for the complete works of Dostoevsky, presented by her parents for topping her Std V exams. 9) She will request all visitors from Calcutta to please bring her a pile of back issues of The Telegraph. 10) She will remind you at every opportunity that “What Bengal thinks today, the rest of India will think tomorrow”.
