Hazaar Fucked
Hazaar Fucked: The comforts of Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August
By Shahriar Shaams
i. discovery
All my schools have been bureaucracies: the fat English instructors on tiny stools, yawningly delegating model-tests off their Advanced Learners’ English, the long lines to deposit one’s school fees to ladies with half-dead stares, the small bribes accepted in a clinically legal fashion when one fails to receive the necessary marks needed to be eligible for board examinations. I have often wondered whether this ubiquitous scenery contributed at all to my admiration for Upamanyu Chatterjee’s seminal 1988 novel English, August, whether the liking boiled down solely to the text, which for all its realism was a psychedelic romp, a novel destined to be one of a kind, destined, as we know, to confine its author in its shadow all his career.
Perhaps I loved it because it was funny in ways only stories of heartbreaking misery could be.
My discovery of English, August came at a time when I truly felt—to borrow the celebrated term from the book—hazaar fucked. Seated at the Principal’s office, the Transfer Certificate (a mythical monster in our lives suddenly come to life) slapped on my hand, I had my crimes announced: “Abusive language directed toward teachers, I’m sure you are aware, is not tolerated in this institution.”
I had, allegedly, called the Religious Studies teacher a motherfucker.
“By accident!” I said.
“How do you call someone that by accident?” Ma asked. The Principal, regretting letting a bright young fellow like me go, said, “But what can we do? We must maintain discipline.”
Ma, my very own state-appointed lawyer, tried vainly to negotiate on behalf of her criminal. “Surely, sir, it doesn’t have to come to this. He will apologize. He will fall to his feet and cry for forgiveness. I will personally make him!” And in the way many of our mothers dismantled their sons, she added, “…You can beat him.”
Ma was a beacon of peace. Out here trying to fix the thousand ways I had managed to bring war on her doorstep. I was the sort of kid who, if he was physically able to, would go Mr. Fantastic on his own penis and stretch it out long enough to fuck himself with it. Not by choice. There was no choice here! All I wanted to do was survive adolescence, survive innocence, survive Dhaka, without being needlessly slandered as a rabble-rousing kid who insulted those who brought him the light of knowledge! Of course, I never called the motherfucker anything, let alone that! I would never say that to his face. I was raised better than that. I had only addressed the kid sitting on the front benches as a “slimy motherfucker”. My only fault, if the powers that be could bring themselves to believe me, lay in misjudging my volume and the general direction I was looking at, in being a child whose natural inability to foresee the time to restrain himself and back off comes back to bite him.
Of course, seated at the Principal’s office, I heard him justify my banishment with the old “But it isn’t only this, you must understand, but a long line of past misbehavior that has all tallied up and has unfortunately brought us to this impasse.”
Ma’s silent reproach, delivered through a piercing stare, expressed a disappointment I was by then familiar with. I was disappointed with myself. My previous crimes were far more questionable than what I had stamped on me now. They had been worthy of being kicked out over. This in comparison was not even respectable.
Outside, we waited for the bus. I wondered whether any school would take me in in the middle of the year, whether Ma would even want me going to school anymore. It could very well be the end of my life, I imagined. I was only sixteen years old, the age one of my aunts had run off to marry a mechanic and have his kids at lightning speed. The thought depressed me. I was even too old for a child marriage now.
“Are we going straight home, Ma?” I asked.
“Do not even try to open your mouth or I’ll punch you,” Ma said.
A beacon of peace, this lady!
At home, my back on the beige living room carpet, I listened to her complain to my father on the phone. The TV blared sitcom laugh-tracks at me. The call, though reflecting its nature of an emergency conference, nevertheless followed their usual, recognizable tactics. I had the template memorized! My mother reminding my father of his status as a perennially broke, deadbeat loser. A womanizing ugly ass thieving sexual assaulter, running away from any responsibility like weak men do. Weak men! Ma often said in a rage that I had come from a long line of weak men (“Why do you tell me this?” I would scream back) petering out everywhere with their manipulating beggary of pity and sadness.
Relegated to my room, I spent the better part of the following two weeks going through my bookshelf, full of my father’s old paperbacks, to pass the time. With no computer at home, let alone the slow internet available at the time, I was often reduced to cumming on Harold Robbins novels. That day, however, I discovered an actual savior on the rack. A book whose events I would consider closer to my sensibilities than many of my own experiences. A protagonist who simultaneously felt like someone I wanted to be like and never wanted to be like or was me all along. In the course of that hurried discovery, English, August had forever stamped itself in my memory in the image of that orange paperback cover, sporting a close-up of Bollywood actor Rahul Bose looking fittingly like a cameraman in a porno, a badly photo-shopped frog on his right shoulder and the tagline: “Now a major film!” printed below.
ii. misery
That I overcame my well-documented superficiality to fall in love with a novel I read in its movie tie-in edition is testament to its power to mesmerize and charm. Humiliated at school, chastised at home, robbed of any prospect, and feeling repressed in myriad of ways, yet still shamefully only able to fret about my untouched cock, which by then had achieved a new world record of time spent free from my touch, I frittered the night away with the lights turned on and English, August in my hand. I read all night!
English, August follows Agastya Sen, a young man in the civil service who finds himself stationed at a remote, provincial town in the middle of nowhere. There, amidst mosquito bites, cholera scares, and the mind-numbing hilarity of government bureaucracy, Agastya manages to find true unhappiness. His friend Dhrubo had warned him beforehand, telling him he was “going to get hazaar fucked”, but Agastya just wants something to click.
His indifference to his new surroundings, his incompetence—“Agastya learned nothing. For a very short while he worried about his ignorance, and then decided to worry about it properly when others discovered it”—spoke of a new insincerity I felt was mine. I felt ahead of my time! A sensation akin to those initial several seconds I had feverishly listened to the Talking Heads for the first time. By early next morning, I had already dreamed up that I wanted “Funniest novel to hit stores since Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August!” stamped on whatever future novel I ever publish.
My enthusiasm however began to dwindle by lunchtime. Ma was exceptionally cruel.
“You don’t deserve food in this house!” she said.
“You come asking for support when you’re old, Ma!” I snapped back, “I won’t give you anything!”
“You won’t have anything, you can’t even hold on to a school, how would you ever hold a job?”
I was writing stories every day, yet it was a performance always tinged with a sense of shame. An activity that my mother likened with my father’s inability to hold respectable service. And service was what we dreamed of accomplishing, regardless of how miserable it made us. It promised a stability that ensured smooth survival in the city.
Agastya, a city boy, a product of the upper-mongrel-class, courses through English, August in a “jazzy run of marijuana, Marcus Aurelius, and masturbation”. His misery is everywhere but it never feels miserable. Rather, it is treated as a grandiosity, never a Bengali peculiarity, never a void couched in the passionate and optimistic servitude of the clerk striving to wear his idle Master’s shoes one day, although the likelihood of it ever happening is as slim as his ‘convincing’ work-ethic.
I barely did anything around the house during those two weeks. A free man, though temporarily, I was able to live the life my father envisioned he would after some success as a writer. But the tug of service, the jobs he never was able to keep for good, gnawed his time away. My mornings were slow. Unburdened with the rigors of the classroom, I found that I had no problem waking early. I never missed any of my friends at school, I barely knew them anyway. They were useful only as characters in the lewd and incoherent stories I wrote. Fodder for my countless revenge fantasies.
In English August too, a host of characters seem to exist in the small town only so that they could provide Agastya with a base to pit his loneliness against. Among them, Tamse, an executive-engineer working in the public sector, best epitomizes this feeling. A “government artist,” Tamse leaves his bad art, full of his loneliness, at the various government rest-houses he stops by for work. Earlier in the novel, looking at one of these paintings, Agastya grows amazed at the absence of imagination. “Had the painter been brushing his teeth or bending over trying to get his cock in his mouth, or what, when he painted this one?” he wonders.
Tamse with his pathetically deferential, formal bombast (the British Empire’s PR gift to our subcontinental civil servants) unknowingly mourns the same injustices that Agastya is so painfully aware we can never wrangle out of. On a later visit to his uncle in Delhi, Agastya even says, “I don’t want challenges or responsibility or anything, all I want is to be happy—,” realizing immediately what an awful thing it was to say. How hopeless it was, how unachievable!
Is it inevitable then for the civil service to stake a claim in the Bengali cycle of misery? Every day in Dhaka, you would see thousands stand in line in front of the public libraries not to turn the pages of any novel, biography, or poetry, stacked as they are for ages in packed, steel shelves, but to pore over the worn-out civil service admission guides, the perpetually in-demand mammoths of nationalist trivia. Why do they do it if not to escape into the ulterior dimension of administration, to become the select ones lucky enough to receive the Master’s ultimate reward: the ability to ape Him?
Of course, peddled on the surface are intentions of working for the good of society, for its sustainable development goals or some other such scams. Yet when Agastya helps a tribal community get their water, insisting on waiting on the ground until the work is actually carried out, I come away treating it not as a civil servant’s implementation of his professed duty, however little that might be, but as proof of the underlying goodness we must all possess. Though one must clearly point out that Agastya did it partly so he could ogle at a tribal woman’s strong physique. Years later, when I was discussing the novel with a friend, he told me, “Can the subaltern speak? His penis did!”
English, August felt, and feels, real. It took me a week to finish it the first time. Ma, on the other hand, had more on her plate, having had to bribe one of the local schools in our area to take me in. I did not expect my time in limbo to end so soon. The uneventful mornings, the endless reruns of daytime television, the half-finished novels, they all seemed an inevitable wait for a transfer to a worse outpost, a worse school.
●
The comedy of bureaucracy has often been a victim of shoddy attempts at Kafka’s nightmare. Overused tropes of dystopian upper-management abound in literature and film. The low-effort saturations wind up diluting the pain and comedy of it all into a circus, a spectacle. An exception to this is Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film Brazil, a movie that parodies the extremes of bureaucracy better than any other film I have watched. Steampunkish, greying, Gilliam imagines bureaucracy as a moving, breathing, almost organic being—so closely intertwined with the humans that the administrative pipes sprouting out of each home and office look like the internal veins of the characters: as much a part of their biology as their heart or intestine.
As contrasting as it is with English, August, Gilliam’s characters’ sense of being “hazaar fucked” is put on full display. Lowry, a civil servant working in the Ministry of Records, feels the same suffocating helplessness when a faulty pipe at his home leads to a vigilante heating engineer (played by Robert De Niro) coming to his rescue, miring him in a further flurry of paperwork blues. Lowry, though more accepting of his position than Agastya, is nevertheless cut from the same cloth. Confronted by a terrorist attack at the restaurant where he was eating with his mother and her friends, he answers, “What? Now? It’s my lunch hour.”
Yet Brazil ends like a successful psychological thriller: masterfully pulling in all its gimmicks to leave behind the peaceful end, even if it is not one you expect. English, August, on the other hand, bypasses any such shenanigans and gives you the sugar straight up. Chatterjee’s skill at writing (he jokes how his colleagues thought his being a writer meant he had good handwriting) and his own civil-service experience were enough to bring the book to an emotionally resonant conclusion without the aid of the sirens of fantasy and hyperbole.
iii. vaseline
Soon I was back in a new classroom. The new school, a small, family business renting three floors of a residential building, reeked exactly of the sort of joke Ma would play on my future. We had classes in the bedrooms and living rooms. The kitchens were turned into offices, some of the drawing rooms were teachers’ rooms. A thin strip of counter on the ground floor sold chips and butter buns for lunch. I was convinced the man who founded the school did it only to market his Spoken English manuals.
On the third day of class, one of the girls seated at the front passed out in the middle of the lesson. I was told she had health problems, that it had happened before. The teacher had her parents called from a nearby building, where they lived. Her head slumped down to her chest: she looked dead. But the teacher pretended not to notice, anxiously talking away about electron shells until the father arrived with another man.
It proved quite hard to wrest her out of the narrow school benches. She was a little overweight and wore a sprawling, black burqa. The father and his friend were big, hulking men themselves, and kept grunting and shouting and pulling at her arms and feet to get her out of the seat. At one point, the other guy asked if any of us had Vaseline so they could grease her out of there.
Seeing us perplexed, he made a face, suggesting he found us to be irresponsible and disappointing. Two of the students eagerly went up to help them edge her out of the benches and carry her out. They never came back. Having helped her into her home, the students decided to cut. Skip school altogether for the day. They saw a girl pass out and the first thing they thought was how to use it as an opportunity to get out of class. This was the circus you put me in, Ma? Their bags were still in class; they did not care.
Fresh from a better, real school, with a brief stint in an English-medium school back in childhood, I found I was treated with both the curiosity and disgust held toward Anglicization. I wanted to grab hold of my classmates and shake them straight: “I can barely talk in English! I’m not even rich!” Could they not see that if I were, I would not be here? That my primary-school credentials were not proof of opulence but rather a working-class perversity to let a child taste a world he would not be able to inhabit, to have him be forever disappointed with what he has, to have him teeter above the narrow fall between any two building in Dhaka city, unable to comfortably belong wholly in one.
Not long after, the English teacher at the new school, a man I never had a conversation with beyond “Good Morning, Sir,” thought it would be apt for me to join his after-school coaching center. An initiation rite common in Bengali schools now, where teachers essentially invites their students to pay them extra for the job they are supposed to accomplish at school. Slurring his words, he called me out to the corridor and invited me to take a trip to the Mall with him.
“I’m buying some lip gel. I could get your opinion on it too,” he said.
“What?” How did one say no to that? Lip gel? Was he nuts?
Yet, accustomed to the absurdities of Bengali teachers and the extent to which they would go to disconcert their pupils, I had no way of politely declining without asking for trouble. I felt fucked—a hazaar times over.
I had spent the previous week worrying day and night in my corner room, English, August in full view nearby. All I could think of was the plusses and minuses of getting back in service, of making it in school. Was it worth staying stuck in the discomfort of authenticity or being smoothed over, greased over to the side among the bobble-heads, safe and sound? Should I have never acted out in front of the Master? Of course, past English, August, I felt emboldened of my ability to not despair over these predicaments. To treat these absurdities with the casual comedy Chatterjee treats his characters with. Like the Americans John Irving and Philip Roth, Upamanyu Chatterjee exuded “effortlessness” in the way his characters stood alone in the discomfort. He wrote of misery in the only way a Bengali like me could understand—against the contours of bureaucratic pain. Yet coming away, laughing my head off, I wondered how he managed to pull it off, wishing there was some part of me that could break the code and steal it for myself, to edge it out with vaseline—if only I had it! Giving up, I told the English teacher that yes, yes, Sir, I will be there. Count me in!
I still keep English, August around me at all times, I read it whenever I feel enough time has passed for me to be able to enjoy it again, I recommend it to strangers online before I try to sext with them, I tell them how years ago, when I was only sixteen, when I felt like a weirdo with nothing but self-loathing going for him, a book with a cheap, embarrassing cover had me a little convinced that I could weather it and come out alive after. What more would you want from a book? If nothing else, Agastya has always been the much-needed and long-overdue sober individual, miserable and discomforting as he is, against the minstrelsy of everyone around him.
Shahriar Shaams lives in Dhaka, where he attends business school. His work has previously appeared in Six Seasons Review, Jamini, and the literary pages of The Daily Star and Dhaka Tribune.
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