When the US Immigration and Naturalization services asks the pro forma question – Have you ever been or are you a member of the Communist Party – I always gulp.

I have not.

But I wonder, does it count that for almost all my growing up years the party in power in West Bengal was the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Surely some red must have seeped in growing up with symbols of sickles and stars graffitied on the neighborhood walls. The men who drank tea and smoked Wills Filter cigarettes on the tea shop across the street stood every morning reading Ganashakti – the Communist party mouthpiece – pasted on a billboard on the street.

Communists were not the red menace they were in the US. They were just another political party for us. Middle class Bengalis, in clean white dhotis, they looked like they could be your uncle. Except they talked about “the party” all the time. We didn’t say someone was a Communist. We would say “Oh he does the Party.”

The Communists also did things like name streets after Ho Chi Minh. Not just any street. Ho Chin Minh street in Calcutta houses the US Consulate.

And now the last Communist is dead.

Well not really, but Jyoti Basu was for over twenty years the Chief Minister of West Bengal, the longest serving Chief Minister in India. He was a dimunitive colossus who presided over a patchwork of Communist parties of various shades of red that had a stranglehold on West Bengal politics for most of the eighties and nineties. He was our version of the “great Leader.” But it was a particular kind of Bengali babu that gave Communism a sort of dal-fish-rice kind of everyday feel.

I remember as a kid we were plagued with power cuts all day. We would joke that Jyoti-babu (and his name ironically meant light) helped solve that problem by driving all industry out of West Bengal. No industry. No demand. No power cuts.

Jyoti-babu in his heyday was the one who became the face of labor strikes and industrial deadlocks. People said if there was a brain drain in West Bengal it was because of people like Jyoti babu. Bengal once used to boast that what Calcutta thinks today, Delhi thinks tomorrow. Under two decades of Communist rule, West Bengal fell behind the rest of India, Calcutta became a sleepy backwaters city compared to Mumbai and Delhi.

In a way that’s also allowed Calcutta to retain a certain nostalgic charm, while the rest of the metropolises turn into cookie cutter malls. There is a slowness of pace which has its own charm, at least for the visitor.

That was not Jyoti Basu’s intention. But in an era when Communism is disappearing all over the world, the red flag still flies over Calcutta. The party’s strength was in the countryside, in its policies of land reform. Of course today’s Communists are busy kowtowing to the industrialists, desperate to entice them to the state. Now the Communists in power in Calcutta can be found unleashing police on the peasantry, taking the side of industrialists. The Communists out of power in Delhi still happily oppose the very same industrialists that their comrades in Calcutta might be courting.

An editorial in the local newspaper The Telegraph sardonically commented that he gave the state a great gift by dying on a Sunday. Monday was declared a holiday. “What better gift could a chief minister whose politics destroyed the work culture of the state give to its people?” asked the writer.

Well, in death though it seems he spurred people into hyperactivity.

My friends in Calcutta had a party to organize the next day. They said they were desperately trying to stock up on alcohol in all the liquor shops were shut down for state mourning.

The party went off well, I hear. The fate of the Party is unclear.