a city under water disintegrates slowly and magnificently.
you can only move against the heavy weight of history with difficulty. dust
gathers everywhere and trees grow over the exquisite corpses littering the
narrow streets. time gather in the folds of the city and softly lulls you into
torpor. tamal said it has managed to make beautiful its own defeat. a victim of
its own success in the 19th century it is now afraid of change and newness.
perhaps they bring danger in the form of the unknown. or maybe it is the sweet
water in the pukurs dotting the landscape or the long slow river delta. a
hopelessness creeps in over your bones as you allow time to accumulate. when
things fall apart you watch them fall apart in slow motion. the heroes of the
city are dead and buried yet their ghost lives on; there is blaring rabindra
sangeet over traffic signals- but his own house (now a museum) is a rundown
badly organised museum where computer prints of photographs are mounted badly
and askew on stained walls. further down the road in the old city another
version of bengali anglophilia, the marble palace and its faded rubens in
corpse like white neo classical splendour. the fatigue in the air is
overbearing although a little less oppressive in the markets throbbing with pre
diwali activity. even the swanky charles correa mall seemed more like a
shopping centre. the walls have begin to crack and the paint is peeling. the
pavement outside the writers building needs repair but sells fritz lang and
tarkovsky to the intellectuals. the intellectuals gather in the double heighted
coffee shop on college street and talk kafka and kant. the shops outside still
sell 60s intellectual fodder alongside gre and toefl books or management tomes.
within this stained and decrepit city victorian monuments rise like dreams. the
maidans in the evening with horses and a burning sky. in the distance the
vidyasagar setu crisp and sharp against the skyline. we lazed till darkness and
then walked to park street with its institutions of bengali high society. we could
do without the dry pastries at the overrated flury's but olypup had
personality. kolkata seemed to be a soft easy self satisfied city. neighbourly
and perhaps a little claustrophobic- if i was from there. kalighat, beyond the
pandas vying for your attention and the grey slime of the river, had a market
that made a spectacular photograph on my iphone; komartulli was alive with the
half made bodies of multiple kalis in horrifying gestures; tangra- the
chinatown was nowhere near as alive in the other cities where they exist. in
the middle of warehouses on the periphery of the city, where leather used to be
tanned, the houses are low rise clusters while the old warehouses now house the
chinese restaurants in dark pink light.
marble palace and thakur bari
kalighat
city center mall
tangra
1 comment:
So much nostalgia frozen and preserved in a few words.I'm saving this for brooding over. Perspective comes with distance i suppose. I have never been able to quite accurately place that smell of leather in tangra or the musty double heighted innards of college street which once a year, used to be the delightful source of most of my childhood(literature).But then i was only a little girl for whom all of kolkata was divided into two-My mum's parents and my dad's parents localities in two ends of the city.Still is sometimes, though i recently discovered park street on a college study trip.Haha.
The collective lethargy of the place, in spurts, is a relief. While walking to the shared rickshaw stand, on the way stopping to watch a group swim in the pukurs(being swallowed up slowly, by high rises), you stop at a shop.the shopkeeper asks you to go pick up the pack of biscuits yourself from the top shelf in the shop(after climbing the ladder) and then put the money in the drawer and take change, while he/she takes that never ending nap and you know you're in kolkata.
Great post!
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