Vol. II. Issue. III September 2011 - The Criterion: An International ...

www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165
A City of Dust:
Chaudhuri views the city of Calcutta, in this novel, as “a city of dust”
(Chaudhuri, 11). He reflects in his text how the dirty granular particles of dust
which are present in the air of the city gradually engulf the whole of the
metropolis:
If one walks down street, one sees mounds of dusts like sanddunes
on the pavements, on which children and dogs sit doing
nothing, while sweating labourers dig into the macadam with
spades and drills (Chaudhuri, 11).
Chaudhuri further writes of how the power of dust slowly transforms the city:
Trenches and mounds of dust everywhere give the city a
strange bombed-out look. The old houses, with their reposeful
walls, are crumbling to slow dust, their once-gleaming gates
are rusting. Dust flakes off the ceilings in offices; the
buildings are becoming dust, the roads are becoming dust. At
the same time, dust is constantly raised into startling new
shapes and unexpected forms by the arbitrary workings of the
wind, forms on which dogs and children sit doing nothing
(Chaudhuri, 11).
There is a strange poetry in the movement of the dust, and Chaudhuri himself
waxes eloquent when he speaks about the city ‘disintegrating into’ and ‘rising
from’ dust like that mythological bird, the Phoenix:
Daily, Calcutta disintegrates, unwhispering, into dust, and
daily it rises from dust again (Chaudhuri, 11).
To get rid of all this dust daily, a household in Calcutta needs floors to be
swept and household goods cleaned at least twice in a day __ once in the
morning and again in the evening. It is because of this that the family of
Sandeep’s Chhotomama in the novel employs two maidservants, Saraswati
who polishes the floor with a moist rag in the morning, and Chhaya who
cleans the house for the second time in the evening. Besides, Sandeep’s
Chhotomamima (maternal aunt) “religiously” (Chaudhuri, 11) dusts the
furniture of their household daily. The author’s description of the dust in the
houses of the city sometimes seems almost fabulous to the reader:
She [Chhaya] would sweep the floor __ unending expenses,
acres and acres of floor __ with a short broom called the
jhadu, swiping away the dust in an arc with its long tail,
which reminded one of the drooping tail of some nameless,
exotic bird (Chaudhuri, 12).
Chaudhuri’s repetitive use of the image of ‘dust’ in the text is in one way
indicative of the atmospheric dirtiness present in the city of Calcutta. The term
‘atmospheric dirtiness’ means “the overall soiling capacity of the air: it
indicates the total degree of pollution,” as Dipankar Chakraborty in his essay
“Calcutta Environment” has defined it. The dirty granular particles of dust,
nevertheless, cause many heinous diseases including respiratory diseases. The
Vol. II. Issue. III 193 September 2011