City Travel – Calcutta Memoirs, Bengal
Like a painting.
[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]
If French novelist Marcel Proust had lived in India, he would have lived in Calcutta.
The city is like a faded watercolor painting. The Delhi Walla visited it for a week.
Unlike Delhi, the old houses in Calcutta still survive. The green shuttered windows of crumbling yellow mansions preserve a genteel elegance of literary conversations and afternoon naps.
I visited a retired woman in Charu Market whose modern-day flat was steeped in the same ambiance. Hardbound works of Rabindranath Tagore were stacked under her bed. DVDs of Satyajit Ray’s films were stored in a drawer – next to her plasma screen TV. A tanpura was kept beside her dressing table. The woman made fish fry for me.
One evening I made a pilgrimage to the city’s Jewish cemetery — Calcutta has less than 30 Jews. The graveyard has hundreds of tombs.
One morning I boarded the Tollygunge-bound tram; the continuous rattle of its creaky wooden floor added a comforting rhythm to the city’s traffic sounds.
The same day I had club sandwich in Park Street’s famous tearoom Flurys. The toilet was filthy and the waiters huddled together and cracked jokes to each other.
Calcutta cabs are yellow.
Each day I passed the hot and humid afternoon hours inside the cold lobby of The Grand, where I would sit under a chandelier and read.
The walls in Kalighat and in many other neighborhoods are painted with hammer-and-sickle signs under which sleep the city’s homeless.
The rice-eating men in Calcutta have huge paunches, which they display in public by rolling up their shirts.
One late morning I bought several back issues of National Geographic magazine from a pavement stall in Esplanade. When I was leaving Calcutta, the coolie carried them as I headed towards my train at Howrah railway station.
Satyajit Ray’s city
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aww.(at the last sentence)
– someone who is caught in a limbo between Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata
Great work, Delhiwalla. You have made the city appear much more interesting than it is these days to its long-time inhabitants.
waaaah soofi sahab,maza aa gaya 🙂
Beautiful entry! We love Kolkata and your photos bring back happy memories.
Wonderful post
For someone who has never visited the city, it is a wonderful vicarious view.
Nice. But couple of things. Proust would not have lived in Calcutta. He was, as you had said, not the coffee house type. After which you moved on to more refined places to fit in the itch-tee VS-type mould once you realised nobody in Delhi gave a hoot to CH and your jaywalker persona.
Second, featuring Calcutta in TDW site will earn you some love from people in the Delhi media circle, other than from your itch-tee & minty friends.
Last, don’t taint the Calcutta narrative with your pretentious brush. Although anybody can have a say on Calcutta, the city deserves only the most learned, humble, honest and authentic mind to show what it truly is. As your brand name suggest, you are the perfect embodiment of the ingredients that make Delhi what it is for good or bad, richest in history or hopelessly vain. Try reading what Manu Joseph said about Delhi to balance you out.
I think you have never read Proust, Calcutta is the perfect reflexion of Proust’s world; a crumbling world, an old established society that has lost touch with time, values and culture and an etiquette that have become meaningless to most of the people outside, all that is left to this lost esthete are the fading facades and dilapidated houses of the good old days. Proust published the first volume of La Recherche in 1913 just a year before Europe, the old Europe, committed suicide. The world he describes, the Paris of the leisure class, the values and culture of the Aristocracy were surely but slowly becoming anachronistic, and were definitively replaced after 1918 by the New, efficient, radical (for good and for bad) modern World. It is exactly what Calcutta is,except that the entry in Modernity has been less brutal and that decomposition takes maybe longer in a humid climate.
And Mayank’s brush is in my opinion perfect for any city really, the necessary mix of sharpness, sensitivity, understanding and humor. Cal is special only to people who make it special, and no subject is to delicate for being transformed by the eye of a writer. What you don’t understand is that it s not about Cal or Delhi, it s about capturing and transforming the beautiful banality of people’s lives and world. The rest is decorum or contrast, try to discover literature Natasha.
Ps. The mask, or “persona” if you want, is completely unimportant, what counts is the art! The cult of authenticity is totalitarian and fascist in nature. You should really read more than Manu Joseph!
Pps Life is so fragile. No one should ever try to shut up artists! If only people listened a little more to these tenuous voices I think life would be much more beautiful, and the realization of this fragility, the artists’ voice, leads to a good world.
I am mesmerized and love already this most melancholic city.
Look at that beautiful old woman in photo 3d, carrying her plastic bag like it was a Hermes bag. Look at the houses and dream about the ghosts of the past, “literary conversations and afternoon naps”. Of course, romanticism is in the minds of beholders located on the aristocratic side of humanity, where Proust belonged and while we, modern romantics, don’t earn his family fortunes, we are fortunate enough to have time to read.
Such tender beauty