From Bihar to Bengal

 DEMOCRACY HAS introduced an extra season to the Indian year, an unsteady season which skips across the calendar. The steady five are familiar: charming winter, exuberant spring, punishing summer, audacious monsoon. The fifth is festivals, between the last rains and the first smell of cool air, a month of delight in October-November when we set aside the fraught tensions of daily existence to honour the hope that defines every faith.

We must thank our idealistic Constitution for the sixth: election season. It began as a semi-decade ritual, and voters dressed in their finery to celebrate freedom of choice. Naturally, being good Indians, we wanted more of the best. Elections now come around every year in some Assembly or the other. Their objective is local, but their subject is national. If fury is concentrated on the battleground, the sound travels across the land into cafés and get-togethers. We enjoy being partisan, which keeps our democracy in good health. Indifference is the death of democracy. Assembly elections hop across the country like an untethered goat among crags, rife with the heat inherent in any struggle for power. This heat becomes a chill on the fortunes of the defeated, while the winner savours its pleasures for a day and then starts to ponder the many meanings of a pyrrhic victory till the next election comes round.

IS IT ALREADY five years since the last election in Bihar? Why does 2025 seem like a desultory revival of so many past Bihar elections: similar if not the same names, a parrot rhetoric spiced up by the demands of hyper-ventilating social media? There is of course some new flash in the pan, armed with ambition and supplied with funds; the moniker might change but not the syndrome.

Since no challenger has anything very new to offer, the advantage must be with the status quo. So far in the Bihar campaign the only discussable difference is the opposition’s offer to remove prohibition, but I imagine that is a bit of a non-sequitur since prohibition has never kept anyone from his favoured tipple. If it can’t come from a shop it will come from a bootlegger. The more stringent the law, the bigger the leg of the boot, and the happier the face of law enforcement.

Bihar’s race will be settled, if not known, by the time another issue of Open reaches the newsstand. About twelve issues later, in March, with winter gone but summer still hesitant, electoral volatility will strike Bengal. The sixth season is relentless.

SOMEONE WILL WIN in Bengal too, but the state seems lost: lost in a Morass, hapless, helpless, perhaps even hopeless, which depresses me for I was born in Bengal and spent the happiest years of my life in Calcutta. I belong to Calcutta. There is a touch of magic in Calcutta’s history and its heart that casts a special spell from the onset of the Pujas at the end of monsoon to the dusk of winter in February.

All the lights strung over the main streets to celebrate the Pujas cannot hide the shadows that now darken the lost urban circles in a city that commanded an empire but is now crumbling brick by brick like the mansion of yesterday’s zamindar. The sheen of Calcutta was once the cynosure of movie screens, the theme of high literature and enchanting music: the late Ustad Amir Khan said that you could not be considered a great classicist until the Calcutta audience had recognised your talent. Calcutta had a high society that knew how to get high with decorum. Its thoroughfares were synonymous with fabulous entertainment and extraordinary cuisine; its bylanes served a multiplicity of tastes, interspersed with semi-safe havens for ingenious crime. Ingenuity was important to self-esteem; even the criminal could not be mundane.

Enveloped within the arteries of Calcutta lies a series of large mohallas, residential clusters with defined demographics. I visited my sister in one of them, and emerged deeply depressed. The area is stuck at some mid-point in the 20th century, with the urban amenities we take for granted elsewhere a fluctuating reality. In the last fifty years Mumbai has reinvented itself, Madras has become the mother lode of a new economy, Bangalore has turned into a traffic jam that no one wants to leave, Hyderabad has gestated into a skyscraper melee, and Delhi has become so fat as to need surgery. Calcutta sits still where it has not deteriorated, saved a little on its fringe by new townships but wrapped in hectic, haphazard, crowded gloom within. The people who live astride the narrow lanes have become jaded. They smile and chatter for life must go on, but they know that elections will change nothing.

Calcutta may be at the extreme end of fatigue, but there is a great danger looming over the east of our country as it stagnates below national levels of growth. Every road is an escape route for the young who cannot find jobs, or dream of a better future, which is a fundamental right of the young.

Time has a different connotation for the young. For elders, five years take a decade to pass; for those on the brink of expectation they fly by too quickly. By the end of this decade, nearly 60 per cent of our electorate will be less than 35; and 90 per cent of them will be 21st-century children.

In the 1960s, less than two decades after freedom, the first generation of free Indians lost their patience with the establishment. A volatile mix of Naxalite murders and communal violence turned Calcutta and half of Bengal into anarchy.

The tinder is trembling again. Which spark will set off a flame? Which flame will light a fire? Which fire will ignite a conflagration?

AN ANECDOTE whose meaning might need further discussion, for those who seek power through the sixth season: A grandson of the famed Sultan of Baghdad Harun al-Rashid became a sufi. The angry monarch told his grandson: “You have ruined my reputation among kings.” The grandson replied: “You have ruined my reputation among sufis.”

THERE IS NOTHING much left to see once you have seen your dearest friend smile broadly over a shared reminiscence one moment, convulse over a spasm of pain in the next, and die in the third. Three sudden moments, in quick sequence, at a pace which the eye could barely witness and the mind refused to understand. Three moments that swept together more than four decades of laughter, love, exuberance, travel, the adventure of decisions, some beneficial and a few reckless; and then dispersed them into the patched spread of that uncertain space called memory. The Third Moment changes everything. It changes you as well.

Life then may be much more than matter, or perhaps not even what matters, but remembrance of things past whittled away by the amnesia of things forgotten. Is memory, always a diminishing asset, the only substantive reality as we move from past to future since time never recognises the present? A clock does not pause to register the present. It ticks from past to future.

Memory is an inflection mirror, a chameleon. It can recall joy with as much abandon as pain from the atonal and inconstant rhythm of existence. The memory of a lifelong friend sits on a bed of dull pain. It is personal. To share it is to diminish it in some way for it cannot mean to the other what it means to you.

Au revoir, Sunil. There is some hope in au revoir; goodbye is too final. Surely the divine comedy of our world cannot end with a definitive curtain; that would make life a divine tragedy. Or, so meaningless as to be hysterical. Every lifespan is temporal, and temporary. We must heed the wisdom of the ancient sages; they told us to invest in maya, the illusion of normalcy, as we continue to navigate through the shards and fragments of time until that Third Moment arrives for all of us.