Kolkata III

Kolkata III
Breakfast on Sudder Street in the open air place, where I’d been eating. I had a new waiter. He seemed like a pretty good fellow. The little café had two aisles and the two waiters worked an aisle apiece. Things did not go smoothly. With over 1500 languages in India, it doesn’t take the Almighty to confuse workers. Whatever it was, breakfast was not quick in coming. Two Oriental ladies left before the food reached them. I’d have left had I been in a hurry but my empty belly and overly tired legs told me no. Voices raised behind the counter but my new waiter gave as much as he took. I’d be back for supper and for my meals the next day. It may have been the new man’s weekend; I didn’t see him around after that meal.
This would be an easy day. The National Museum is at the corner of Chowringhee and Sudder so I strolled down and entered the huge building. One day a museum will put on an exhibit of how museums have exhibited what they have to show but do it historically. Probably the earliest museums were temples where the handiwork of the god(s) was displayed. One story I read when I was a boy was about some Greek sailors, who explored the west coast of Africa. They captured a hairy black woman, who after a time took the ship and a few sailors apart. It was decided that she needed killing and afterwards they skinned her and preserved the hide. Upon returning to Greece, they presented the wonder as a temple alter cover. The modern take on this tale is that the sailors tangled with a female chimpanzee and that the taking and preserving of the skin was the beginning of the art of taxidermy. Take as much salt as is needed with that story but the display of the skin on the alter would qualify as a museum exhibit. About twenty-five hundred years later, I prowled a museum in Lafayette, Indiana during the winter of 1943-44. They displayed a mammoth tooth in the proximity of the biggest rattlesnake skin ever taken in Gillespie County, Texas (it must have been at least ten feet long and the snake was [my guess] 80 years,) and not far away from the snake skin was a water-cooled, .30 caliber machine gun. The National Museum of India is a little more sophisticated. There are display cases filled and labeled long before I was born with a sign saying “Echinoderms.” You see twenty to forty fossil examples with no more explanation and then you can go on to the coelenterates. No effort is made to relate the display to the visitor. Times have changed but for anyone interested in the historical art of display, this museum is a must-see. There are many museum guards; none armed with feather dusters.
That evening I again walked to the south side of the Victoria Memorial to find my hosts of the day before. They seemed pleased to see that I remembered to join them and we traded some ideas before the sun settled down into a time to adjourn. I planned on leaving the following day for a hill station in the north and I wouldn’t see them again in all likelihood. So when we said our good byes, it was farewell. Not what a person wants to do but that is the way things happen.
I walked around the great marble building for the last time and started off across the grass to the north turning a few degrees to the east where I thought the end of Suddar Street might intersect Chowringhee. After having gone maybe a half mile, I looked back over my shoulder. The memorial, now surrounded by early street lights, took on the copper and reds of the last of the day. Calcutta or Kolkata, regardless how you spell
or pronounce it, has a breath of its own and I may well walk across the Maidan in a year or two years from now. Whether I return or not, I carry its special memory with me.
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