Walking Kolkata II

The billboard at a junction outside said 38 degrees, even the traffic policeman shielded himself with an umbrella. But there is little escape when the mercury rises above your body temperature.


If this country were inhabited by any other race, the people would most definitely lapse into a drunken siesta at this time of the day in the middle of high summer. The Bengalis, or rather Bihari labourers, on the contrary, seemed to thrive in the heat. The rickshaw pullers trawled barefooted through the coal hot streets, labourers hacked away at the construction sites, delivery men with heap of goods piled on their heads bobbed along, the energy was primal, trance like, everything seemed connected with an invisible rhythm that infuses the people with this zest. Or perhaps it was impossible to even stop for a breather in this crowded metropolis where everything is moving. The city's inhabitants thrive on its dysfunctional systems; where the roads become choked with rubbish and traffic, and floods threaten to cripple the city during monsoon season, delivery men and rickshaw wallahs offered their labour. A Muslim call for prayer sounded from a mosque, invisible from where I was standing. The frenzy had reached its climax.



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After taking a breather back in my room, I took the metro to the northern stretches of the city to look for this Marble Palace listed in Lonely Planet. The metro was rather dingy, the stations over-sized. The system seemed underutilized by Kolkata standards perhaps due to their limited coverage: there was only one line running north-south. But it was impossibly cheap with the most expensive ride being 16rps. The trains reminded me of the ones in Beijing with their old fashioned rectilinear industrial appearance, the loud exhaust fans blowing over your heads, and the same metallic, mechanical odour. Both were probably built with the same Soviet technology.

The neighbourhood around the subway exit was occupied by the usual rundown colonial era buildings, but here in the suburbs, urban poverty was unabashedly stark. The side lanes, relatively protected from the unruly vehicular traffic, were colonized by squatters who territorialized their spaces with architecture at its most elemental: a pilotis of four poles supporting a flimsy piece of fabric, providing the inhabitants with the bare minimum of a roof over their heads. The squatters carried out their daily chores oblivious of the public nature of their situation. It made me embarrassed even to look at them: this is Shigeru Ban's Curtain House and Mies' Farnsworth House pushed to the extremes.

I went on in search of the Marble Palace, but no one knew about it, not even the police stationed at the Metro. But the sketch map on Lonely Planet proved surprisingly accurate and I found it along this small road bustling with pedestrian activities as with any others. The Marble Palace, though, was unmistakable. It stood in the middle of a landscaped compound, a generous oasis of space fenced off from the outside world. The mansion, buffered from the decay that surrounds it, still stood resplendent as if oblivious of its decrepit environment. The security guard demanded the permit which was required from all visitors, but i produced a 100rp note instead. He gladly accepted my offer and I stepped into the lush, manicured front yard from the hot, noisy street strewn with cow dung and rubbish, an Alice in Wonderland experience.


I was again asked for the permit at the entrance to the mansion by a caretaker, and I hesitated, not wanting to pay another bribe. The man seemed to have understood that I had already paid the guard and motioned me to follow a young boy who was to guide me around the mansion. It was yet another world inside the building, owned by some wealthy Indian man during the British Raj. Every surface was adorned with opulent paintings, every room filled with treasures and sculptures of legends and gods and monarchs, every object covered with a fine coating of dust, an indication of the fact that they belonged to another era. The efforts to isolate the mansion from its environs could be seen even within the building: to prevent the huge, terrifying Indian crows from disrupting this bubble of peace, the central courtyard was netted over. But the birds retaliated by crapping all over it; this is an uphill battle.

Walking Kolkata

The maidan is a huge expanse of open space in the middle of Kolkata, cut up into smaller more usable plots by trees and hedges and derelict structures that serve as recreational clubs ("The Aryan Club"). As with elsewhere in India, rurality finds its place even in this metropolis of over 10 million. People graze their cattle, goats and horses on the open fields as Indian boys played soccer with the Victoria Memorial resplendent in white marble forming a kind of hazy romantic backdrop. It was a pleasant Saturday morning, there was none of the choking big city traffic, the people were mostly relaxed, and the searing summer heat was not due to hit the mercury until later in the day.


I took a long stroll towards the riverside. The Hooghly forms a kind of western boundary to the city proper, her peripheral situation affirmed by the railway track running parallel along the riverfront for a significant stretch. She offers no grandoise panorama of Kolkata's exceptional colonial architectural heritage. Instead, she is the underbelly of the city, stringing up a random collection of slums, factories, warehouses. But its uninspiring, even hideous appearance belies its importance.



The Hooghly is the enema this huge carcass of a city survives on, draining the deadly toxins emitted by the ever increasing inhabitants who swarm the body in this incessant feeding frenzy called life. The daily poisons that threaten to swell into a metropolitan scale infection: the excesses of modern consumption, the human excrement, the mounds of human hair from the riverside barbers (which gave a kind of morbid character to the place, as if hidden among the hair and rubbish one could expect a decapitated head to which the hair belongs, or even a detached limb, a severed pinkie), are all discharged through the river, a kind of life support system plugged to the carcass by the rubbish strewn ghats, the invisible network of sewage pipes. Her role in the city is very much characteristically Indian, an endless cycle of renewal and destruction, and thus she is celebrated not in the manner one would expect of any other image conscious modern waterfront city, but rather in the same Indian fashion: through the daily baths of the locals in its murky waters, the annual Durga Purja when the durga idol is immersed in it, which accord the Hooghly her symbolic importance.

It took me another long trek to get to the city center at BBD Bagh, or Dalhousie Square, now resembling more of a large monsoon stormwater pond ringed by squatters, in turn surrounded by well maintained colonial buildings, a cur ious contrast. Like the maidan, it seems like a sliver of rural India in an urban setting. I needed to get train tickets to Dhaka the next day, for the Maitree Express runs only twice a week. As with getting a room at a hostel, buying train tickets required form-filling. Indian bureaucracy demands a separate office to sell tickets to foreigners, but the Foreign Tourist Bureau was not exactly tourist friendly anyway. It took me some time to figure out the correct form to fill to get to purchase my tickets. But the air conditioned room was a welcome respite from the heat.

3 ang mohs walked in looking noob and clueless.

"You have to get the larger form at the counter and fill it up and wait for your number to get called", I informed.

They turned out to be English. I talked with Sarah, a pleasant lanky girl. They had just flew in from Hong Kong after some weeks in China. They liked China, but thought Hong Kong to be rather odd.

"I thought it would be what London would look like in the future, crammed with buildings and full of people. No, we didn't stay in Chungking Mansions, we heard horror stories about it", Sarah said.

I said that I rather liked Hong Kong for its energy, but did not reveal my take on a dystopian London (Kolkata).

Sarah had more surprising views, she thought that the guidebooks (Lonely Planet and such) gave lousy reviews of Victoria Memorial cos the writers were embarrassed to be reminded of the colonial legacy, that the crown jewel of the British Empire is now in apparent tatters. That was interesting coming from a Briton.

I finally got my ticket after an hour or so, and asked the Britons if they know of any decent place to eat in around there.

"Oh theres a pretty nice restaurant with that serve good chapatis around Sudder Street area but thats rather pricey if not you could try..."

I guess, after months of globe trotting your sense of place becomes such that your perception of "here" eventually expands to include the whole city, the region, or perhaps even a country.

The smell of death

Kolkata once boasted the greatest collection of splendorous colonial architecture in the world, the "City of Palaces", the gem of British India. Yet perhaps no other Indian metropolis had suffered as much when the center of power was permanently shifted to Delhi. Kolkata had since been mired in an almost century-long decline, with her Bengali hinterland ripped apart into two separate halves with much violence. Her people's penchant for maoist communism did not help. It was only with the recent IT led boom that the city brought herself to her feet again; however those lost decades scarred the Kolkata deeply. The decay was still apparent even in the heart of town; squatters eating away the base of ornate weather beaten buildings; rubbish overflowing unto the streets; the occasional human/animal waste littering the pavements; the ubiquitous child beggar with that septic patch on his limbs or scalp, almost as if the rot had crept into him from the city, tugging at your clothes with his crusty pleading eyes. Even the recent boom contributed to this dismal image, the extensive roadworks necessitated by decades of neglect and revived by the improving economy piled up mountains of debris on the streets as if it were a war-zone. It was somewhat like a dystopian London, "the Empire with a dark complexion"; it even has a metro which looks just as tired as its counterparts above grade, the city trams that still trawl certain parts of the city. When Theroux set foot here in the 70s, he smelled death; 30 years later the stench lingers.

But all that perhaps are merely empty physical manifestations of our transient existence. Like the emaciated Indian holy man, the Calcuttans seemed oblivious to their decrepit physical surroundings; they had survived those nasty years, and now they are finally thriving again.



Drowned in perspiration from the stifling evening heat of the high Indian summer, I checked into a dingy air-conditioned cell-like room in Sudder Street area, Kolkata's Khao San, with scores of baby roaches as my bed fellows. I somewhat regretted my decision since the nights turned out to be rather pleasant as Kolkata, flanked by the Hoogly and being close to the sea, enjoys a constant night breeze.

After my first Indian masala dinner, I set out to explore the Sudder St-New Market area. It was a bustling district with bazaars sprouting along stretches of pavements, carpark lots, where vendors would display their wares on their vehicles so they do not even need a mat. The darkness blanketed the unsightly, and where there was light, the people gathered and goods were laid out. The mood was festive, there were people shooting luminous catapults into the sky and peddlers playing with pipes that would shoot up several feet into the air when you blow into it. The Calcuttans dined by the roadside and strolled leisurely among the bazaars, relieved from the intense heat of the day. It was then that I understood the Indians' fascination for the sterile Singapore shopping experience which consists of malls strung up together by brightly lit pedestrian connections so you would never be exposed to the elements: there was little escape filth and dangers that plagued the streets, the only respite was nighttime when the ugly was hidden away, but darkness is also ominous for there is always the fear of the unknown dangers that lurk in every corner.




I finally retired to my room and made it a little more cheerful a little less lonesome by filling it with the images and sounds of the TV. There was an English news channel and on endless repeat were the news footages and updates of the Arushi murder, a suspect case of honour-killing. The odour of stale urine permeating from the bathroom made the room seem even more unsanitary. Being especially anal about the cleanliness of my sleeping conditions and still rather fresh from the sterile environment of Singapore, I felt a little uneasy about the suspicious looking bed. I bolted the bathroom door to keep out the unwelcome perfumes and laid my sleeping bag on the tired looking bedsheets, drifting in and out of sleep to the noise of buzzing door bells in adjoining rooms and the occasional Bengali chattering.

Flight to Kolkata

We nibbled on starchy cakes and tough spicy cookies as the plane cruised northwest along the coast of continental South East Asia. I stuck out like a sore thumb: I was probably the only non-ethnic Indian on board. The middle aged couple beside me turned out to be Singaporean Indians visiting Kolkata for some personal affairs. Like any other kindly Singaporean uncle, the man beside me got a little worried about a (not-so) young boy travelling alone in India for the first time, and lapsed into a series of warnings, of touts, weather, dirt, and diarrhoea.

Below us broad deltas appeared one after another, I was fascinated: was that Salween? Irrawaddy? The landscape culminated in a vast waterlogged delta made up of countless numbers of islets that stretched as far as the eye could see. We are overlooking the great Mouths of the Ganges straddling the apex of the Bay of Bengal. So much water flows out of this mighty delta that undersea river channels extended as far as 2,000 km away.

















Kolkata was near.