Among the many stories that appea-red in the press following the death of former West Bengal chief minister, Jyoti Basu, at the age of 95, there was one about how fond he was of London, and where he spent a month every year, even when he was chief minister. Jyoti Basu and swinging London? The mind boggles. I had to make an effort to imagine Basu, the austere Marxist in his evening dress doing the foxtrot with the heavy-jowled ladies from Battersea and Camden Town, and escorting them home after the dance through the backstreets of Leicester Square and Piccadilly, where other temptations lurked in the shadows.
But apparently that is what he did, though that is not what Marxists do even in London, where good old Karl Marx had spent a few gloomy years, wiping off heavy dust from old tomes in the British Museum to write his magnum opus, Das Kapital, which is supposed to have provided fodder for thought for the Basus of this world.
Whatever else Jyoti Basu learnt from the British, he certainly knew how to keep a tight upper lip, like those colonels on the parade ground. I saw him twice, once when he was a trade union leader presiding over a meeting of his underlings, and later, when he had gone up in the world and had become chief minister. He said very little and never smiled. In fact, he became known as a man who never smiled, and always looked grim, even when he was addressing friendly meetings of his noisy supporters on the esplanade.
I called on him a few weeks after he had taken over as chief minister, the first democratically elected chief minister of a state. Although he must have been past sixty at the time, he looked not a day older than forty, with no lines on his face and hair as black as a schoolgirl's. We were sitting not in his office, which was being done up, but in a small back room, where, I believe, he rested when he got too tired with meetings with all those comrades.
The room was more Gandhi than Kremlin, with a small camp bed, a couple of chairs picked up presumably from a second-hand furniture shop in Dharamtalla, and a table with a tumbler and glass on it. Basu sat on the bed and offered us chairs. I don't now remember what exactly we asked and what he replied, but his replies were unusually monosyllabic for a politician, and that too a communist, like a boy answering questions, yes or no, in his paper.
Did he have a plan to remove poverty? A shrug of the shoulders.
What would he do about jobs? We shall see.
Would he visit Russia in the near future? No reply.
I decided to perk up the proceedings by asking one question which everybody was keen on. Is it true that he never smiled?
We expected to be thrown out of the little room, but Basu was not without a sense of humour. He removed his glasses and placed them on the table. Then he pressed his lips still tightly and narrowed his eyes. I thought he would laugh his head off, just to show us that he had accepted our challenge and could smile with the best of us. Then suddenly a thin line of teeth appeared below his upper lip, and as we sat there, mesmerised at the spectacle before us, the line disappeared, the tight upper lip was back in place, and things went back to normal. The great Jyoti Basu had smiled at last, though only for a second.
For some reason, the smile seemed to have changed the mood all round. Basu was courtesy personified. He asked for tea and biscuits, though it was lunch time, and he poured it for us, an unusual treat. The split-second smile had obviously mellowed the man, and Basu stopped addressing us as if he was at one of his public meetings at the Esplanade, and we were his audience.
See what a little smile does to a man, even a communist!
(The writer is a well-known columnist and economist.)
This article was originally published on May 08, 2010.
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