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.