#Scurf159: kaleidoscopic kolkata
this time in the city of relationships and friendships
I’ve been wandering around unfamiliar bits of Kolkata lately. To attend a friend’s wedding, to buy a couple of knicknacks, to meet old relatives. There are really long, seemingly unending, tedious periods when I barely leave my house in Delhi— on occasions when I do it’s mostly after more than 4-5 days and I almost always have an out of body experience as soon as I step into the ether of the outdoors — then it’s almost as if the camera zooms out, pans and I find myself in another city in a separate geography altogether. Suddenly navigating a dense network of lanes in Kolkata’s Garia, I am sucked down into these narrow, dazzling, vibrant by-lanes and pop up at this house or that shop. It certainly feels like some kind of a magician’s trick.
I arrive in Cal, settle in at my in-law’s place and wake up in the morning bewildered, a strange unease as the Eastern sun hits hot and sizzling on my half-open eyes. I pull open the window curtains, step out of the room and into the tiny balcony — oh right, I remind myself, I arrived here last night — I’m in Garia, the sky is a different more natural shade here a blue that we’ve forgotten to know in Delhi. Immediately my mind rushes back to this time yesterday I was cosseted in my sofa at home in Delhi’s CR Park, trawling aimlessly through either LinkedIn or Twitter. Here I am now, in the city where M grew up, became an amalgam of his past and future, and where I’ve come to find a family of my own over these years.
One of the things I love about Cal is how perennially roaring it is here — the way the city is so boisterous, screeching from its insides, the horns blaring, the cars trundling, the buses gurgling, the dogs and cats taking turns to bark and cry, the cycle rickshaw pullers yelling, the city seems to have embraced it’s own giddiness and cacophony. Kolkata draping around it the smell of rohu-fry, the deep deliciousness of kosha mangsho, the metallurgy of the Howrah Bridge always hanging in the air like a ghost from an ancient time. The foulness of the bidi smoke catches you at the turn of the corner, almost every corner. Men gathered in little huddles in roadside shops, engaged in aimless but intense chatter at any time of the day or night in Addas, accentuate the languor the city is famed for.
The puchkas and momos, the shiulis and Rabindrosangeet, photographs of Uttam Kumar and Ray — not many cities wear their culture, their nature, their lives with such pride on their metaphorical sleeves. Then suddenly your yellow ambassador comes to a screeching halt, almost throwing you off from the non-cushioned seat, jerking you out of the taxi. You ask the driver how much for the ride form the airport to this side of the city. 789. You swallow a hard pill and move on.
I find it a consolation to know that for the next few days I am in a place where, at any given moment of the day, absolutely batshit crazy and rambunctiously gorgeous things are happening to someone or the other. I like the fact that, at any time, I could teleport myself to another part of Cal if I wanted to and start whatever part of my day or evening I was in. Cafés galore as do shady bars and old-fashioned high ceiling pubs and bakeries. It does help that I am fairly foreign to Cal’s textures and a near alien to its inner grammars. I know and speak Bangla but only very selectively, depending on the company I am in and the likeness that I take to the people around. In Cal, like in most other places, almost everyone is struggling with at least five different things at any given moment and yet for the most part no one cares or pretends to care about the long or short of other people’s problems.
I like the way strangers at a wedding go out of their way to make me comfortable even though I can be a bit of a petulant klutz. I love how Bengalis are so effusive and vivacious in their expressions of love, disgust, anger and joy, alike. Those eyes enlarge in their sockets, the brows scrunch or the lips part in a display of the emotion of the moment. I like that at any point an unsuspecting Bengali uncle will experience unimaginable, unbound glee and burst into a bloom if I simply say “aami bhalo aache, tumi kemo acho kaku?” when asked how’re you in Bangla. I love the sweaty places, grimy corners and muggy noons that I have come to find myself in Cal on purpose and otherwise.
This is my second or probably third December in Cal and I love that it never feels completely familiar. Never the same. Each time I’ve stepped out of that painfully arrivals area of the airport, the first two cabs have mandatorily cancelled on me. After finding myself in a cab, ensconced and on my way, I’ve always balked at the cab fare here. And yet there is a comfort in these tedious lanes and clumsy cabs. When you arrive somewhere over and over again, for long enough a period you start to notice the right turn of the roads, the lilt in people’s Bangla dictions and the right shop to buy shinghara from on a desperately famished evening after shopping. Walking around Cal this time around, I noticed everywhere signs of the city tired, trying to find some respite, gather in a corner in calm repose. Pujo, Diwali and Cricket World Cup festivities might’ve been heavy on her. But in another couple of weeks it’ll be time of Christmas celebrations, so she can’t really catch a beat.
Being here in this moment of transition, as the city transposes its tiredness of the last two months onto the landscape, gives me a much-needed pause. Its almost as if by osmosis. It’s like a long, unending walk after attending a wedding, taken with friends with slippers in hand. Cal in this state envelopes the literal and metaphorical power of what it is to take that walk alongside a friend. Quiet, sincere and predictable. Soon Park Street and rest of Cal will be heavy, laden with all the Christmasy things around. Being here at this point, I feel sufficient in this in-betweenness, like I’ve just finished a pilgrimage to feel the soul of a kaleidoscopic Kolkata.
