[Reader-list] Posting 2. “The Purloined Letter: Quotidian Family Functions and the Mess-Houses”

[Bodhisattva Kar]

Till today, the most popular vernacular commentary on the everyday lives in the Calcutta mess-houses is the Uttam-Suchitra hit Sare Chuattar ("Deeply Personal"). The movie is set in an all-male Calcutta boarding house where a distressed bhadralok family of three comes to stay for a few days. In spite of initial disagreements among the boarders, the family is allowed to temporarily reside in one room in the mess-house. The appearance of the beautiful young woman of the family (played by Suchitra Sen) creates some ripples in the all-male atmosphere, and all male residents secretly try to win her attention. Suchitra, however, falls in love with Uttam, a young resident whom she in the beginning has found to be most difficult. Secret meetings and emotional letters followed, with a little help from the servant in the mess. Jealous fellow-residents manage to steal one such letter, read it and agonize over Uttam's success. The angry crowd boisterously voices its concerns over the "moral
 decay" in the mess-house, and even threatens the aged owner-cum-manager with boycotting such non-bhadralok places. The old man is already quite disturbed about his dried-up married life and in the hurry of going home tries to calm the mess-residents by saying that he would look into the matter after coming back from home. Of course, en route he forgets about the stolen love letter - enveloped as "Deeply Personal" and given to him as an irrefutable proof of the moral turpitude - and his middle-aged wife secretly discovers it in his pocket and becomes sure that her husband is madly in love with another woman. While the old man goes back to Calcutta after spending the weekend at village home, he tries to mend the situation by arranging the unsurpassable moral fix: marriage of the offenders. The marriage, interestingly, is scheduled to take place in the mess-house, and as the chief organizer, the manager becomes increasingly entangled in these matters, which severely restricts his
 visits to village home. This only has the effect of making his wife more firmly believe that he is no more interested in her. Having tried anger, seduction, and even prescriptions of witchdoctors, the frustrated wife finally decides to travel to Calcutta with her children to disrupt - what she presumed to be - her husband's second marriage. The funny end of the movie - where along with the newly married couple the old man and his wife rediscover their love for each other through hilarious misunderstandings - distinctly shores up "the family values". At one stroke, the jealous contenders of love suddenly become younger brothers. The peeping elders of the mess-houses instantly become respectable hosts of the marriage party. The till-now invisible neighborhood families participate enthusiastically in the ceremony.  The mess-house community saves its bhadralok reputation by showing itself to lie well within the familial folds. It is this family function of the mess-houses - the
 hierarchies, the legalities and the publicly encircled privacies - that makes the institution acceptable and even popular in the dominant theater of cultural production. Family, as the film clearly tells us, must be the model of the ways in which a bunch of unrelated people should form a new community in the anonymous urban space. This everyday family function of the mess-houses, which Sare Chuattar so vividly captures, is indeed Poe's Purloined Letter: it is the "unperceived", as Blanchot says, "in the sense that one has always looked past it 
 the everyday is what we never see for a first time, but only see again, having always already seen it by an illusion that is, as it happens, constitutive of the everyday." The whole idea of "home away from home", as we found written on the dusty board of a Calcutta mess-house during the course of research, was based on a firm conviction of the necessary reproducibility of the family form on these quotidian plateaus. Age, caste and money
 mattered, and mattered violently. But we are going to come back to this issue in the posting no. 4.

		
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