I finally came of political age, on a cruelly hot day this April, thanks to Mamata Banerjee's men. They came up the stairs, two polite and earnest young men, accompanied by a pavement hawker. Did I have my voter's ID card? they asked. No, I replied—I could no longer use my passport to vote, I complained to them; my e-mails to the CEO of West Bengal had gone unanswered, and Alipore was too far away to go and register.... They swung into action. The necessary paperwork was swiftly done, the hawker's son was dispatched to the neighbourhood park where the Municipal Corporation was collecting registration forms, then the young men came back to check that all was in order. I finally had a new identity as a bonafide constituent of Calcutta South constituency, with full voting rights. And that too in the constituency where Didi herself is the Trinamool Congress (TMC) candidate, pitted against the CPI(M)'s Robin Deb.
No wonder, then, that two 'N' words—Nano and Nandigram—are dominating the campaign here, splashed big and bold on hoardings, and bandied about in slogans, puns and bad jokes. The nerve centre of this constituency is Gariahat, a major crossroad which all of South Calcutta passes through. Gariahat gets a slice of everything that happens in this city—whether it's a rally, a parade, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya roaring Inquilab Zindabad, or Rahul Gandhi driving through on his way to see the TMC boss lady while giggling young girls cluster by the wayside hoping for a glimpse of the crown prince.
The rallies begin to snake out around 4 pm, leaving horrendous traffic snarls in their wake. Stuck in a jam recently, I found myself drowning in colour—the red flags of the CPI(M) flaring fire in the afternoon sun, fluttering from tramline posts and accenting the red and white Vodafone and Airtel signs; and the white, saffron and green TMC flags crisscrossing each other on lampposts. A red, black and white cartoon catches my eye—Mamata, jharu in hand, pounding down on bricks labelled Nandigram and Singur.
Supporters in specially designed Trinamool saris campaigning in Calcutta South
From the terrace of my house I see tricoloured Trinamool banners, as long as saris, draped prettily on washing lines, with the little flowers of grass speckling the fabric along the bold central stripe (the word trinamool means, literally, grassroot). Down in the street you can see the Left party workers in their specially designed saris, a demure white-and-red patterned with the hammer and sickle. The war between the politicos takes fiercer form in hoardings spattered with gory photographs of wounded bodies. 'See how violent the other side is', screams a TMC hoarding while the CPI(M) one shouts, 'Mamata lacks any mamata or kindness!' In some parts of the constituency it's a wall war—here, you can find CPI(M) graffiti buzzing like mosquitoes and being exterminated by a spray can labelled TMC, and Writers Building being toppled like Saddam Hussein's statue.
Someone in the Left, probably the sfi, had a good cartoonist at their disposal—a neat book of Bangla rhymes, inspired by Sukumar Ray's nonsense verse, is doing the rounds by hand and on e-mail, with Mamata as the lead, along with some of her Congress allies. At my office, Pintu the peon is a staunch and vocal Mamata supporter, and we have to hide those cartoons from him lest he go on a coffee strike. And someone else in the Left is obviously a Pink Floyd fan—there are banners with graphics from their Division Bell album strung up around Hazra crossing, drawing your eye away from the TMC's screaming banner about the rape of Tapasi Mallik.
On the evening of April 30, when much of West Bengal voted, I wandered down Gariahat Road, through the market with piles of T-shirts and crockery set out on tables, listening to snatches of conversation. They were talking about IPL, about rising prices, bargains to be had. Not one word about what had happened that day all over Bengal. The sky darkened with clouds. "Rain," someone muttered, peering up at the sky. "Hmm," someone else retorted, "soon there will be thunder!"
These days, the silence of the night is broken with the tick-tick-tick of picks at work, as South Calcutta's pitted roads are repaired, water pipes and electricity lines installed, in a frenzy of activity in the run-up to voting day, on May 13. Dawn breaks with sporadic bursts of Rabindrasangeet from a distant CPI(M) rally, and Aamar Jonmobhoomi being sung in a chorus of cracked and solemn voices from another political meeting. No one's singing Joy Ho! just yet.
