Kolkata

The big advantage in arriving in an Indian city during the dark hours of morning is that there is no traffic. The downside is that the driver pushes his rig to its bone rattling limits. I think the last time I crossed the great bridge over the Hooglia, I was riding in a rickshaw and my driver was taking it a step at a time. But after the taxi driver made some twists and turns, I saw a park off to our right. “The Maidan?” The driver said yes. Too dark to look for cactus so on to Sudder Street. There were a bunch of no star hotels there and the one I looked for was the Maria. About the time you think the world is filled with Hindus and Moslems, the Christians pop up again. It could have been that a Portuguese ship’s passenger overslept at Goa and found himself on the Bay of Bengal side of India. For a no star, it was adequate. The Lonely Planet said that the hotel had a pale green courtyard. That’s where I’d find hot water for the ablution in the morning. The notice gave the hours when the heater was turned on. I stretched out on the bed beneath the ceiling fan and left the details for the morrow.

In daylight I found a clean looking café with an English menu, which got my feeding contract very quickly. I looked out the open front of the cafe and watched a neighborhood that had gone to bed sometime before four in the morning. Sudder Street was undergoing road and sewer upgrade and was the only busted up street I found in the city. I’m sure Madurai has it’s virtues but I just happened to be watching the on-coming traffic, jumping a hole in the road, and smelling something that even the dogs and the house crows would not clean up. As I said the Gandhi Museum looked to be a maintained building. The grass was mowed. But at least in the foreign ear, to say that Kolkata looked good after Madurai is a damning statement. Well Kolkata does look good! And before nightfall, I had included it on my list of places to spend at least part of the year should I retire in India.
Sudder Street is alive with people coming and going and selling and begging and just living. I’ve had a friend who after staying at the Chelsea for a month told me about the energy he felt in New York. Want energy? Try Sudder Street. Locals and foreigners walk along dodging each other and the traffic that plug the street. One day the street will be rebuilt and movement will become smoother. The street runs east and west, which means that it will always have a shaded side where you can dodge the sun. The street dead ends in Chowringhee Road by the Indian National Museum. Chowringhee is Main Street in Calcutta. Now both the city and the street has had a name change but what was, still is at least along the Hooglia, and I suspect my feelings for the city comes from my being able to connect now with what I experienced four decades back. Calcutta was our first glimpse of India and I seemed to have revisited those memories more times then I realized.
The Kelty Traveler, the type of pack I carry, is two packs in one. The larger holds my sleeping bag and coat, along with outer clothing. Then zipped on to this pack is a smaller one where I carry pills, toothbrush and underwear. This second and smaller pack makes a good day pack if you dump the contents and stow life’s daily necessities, one copy of the Lonely Planet’s India, a plastic bottle of mineral water, and a roll of toilet paper. The latter is becoming more popular in India but you only find it in the hotels with stars. Since I rarely stay in such places, I buy a roll in the shops, the little places tucked beneath larger buildings. Sudder Street is lined with the little shops all the way out to Chowringhee Road.
The British laid out and built the city but surely not in one project. Bit by bit they put it together. Chowringhee Road is the big north/south road, wide and bordered on the east by large buildings that front on a broad sidewalk. Since I was here before, the officials have looked the other way and allowed stands to be set up on the sidewalk. Even with these impediments to walking, there is still room to move along quickly without breaking stride - no holes or creative sidewalk construction. One west side of the boulevard has a sidewalk, at least for stretches but this is the Maidan, a park of probably a half-mile wide and a mile and a half or two miles long. As I said, Calcutta was not built in a day and this was a site of one or more Indian neighborhoods. The British razed the site and created a large common complete with carriage paths, trees, and several square miles of grass. Unfortunately, the Maidan was restricted to Raj only but today it’s a place for kite flyers, picnickers, bicycle riders, snake charmers, and a certain peanut merchant who set near a stand of prickly pear. At the south end of the Maidan stands the Victoria Memorial, a graceful pile of marble, which Kolkata kept as a historical museum. When I was here before, the memorial exhibited paintings and memorabilia of the Raj. The exhibit presently on display is the history of Kolkata, including the both Indian and British history. But I’m getting ahead of myself. My first day in Kolkata was to look for the peanut merchant, who has occupied a corner of my memory just as surely as he occupied the northwest corner of the Maidan. So I walked north and then finding anyone with gray hair waiting to cross the avenue, I fell in step with them, reasoning that if they’ve lived this long without being hit, they’ll make it through the day with my pacing them a yard away.
The East Indian Trading Company used the Hooglia to float their ships into this area, bringing in merchandise and taking away Bengali raw materials. This patch of ground became their headquarters. The story goes that the area gets its name though the meandering of language from the Temple of Kali well south of the Maidan. At the north end of the Maidan, the British built their government houses. The Residency is used by the West Bengali governor, which seems more heavily guarded than the White House. I had walked nearly to India’s IRS headquarters before I reached the corner I remembered. Any similarity between what I found and what I remembered was zip. Here was a well planted lush patch of ground with trees and gardens. What I remember was a rather barren patch of grass with the prickly pears being about the tallest plant around. Beggars crying, “Baksheesh!” crawled along the paths, each competing with the other. I had not heard “baksheesh” since I’ve been in India. Beggars are still here but not in the number that there were then. Then beyond this din, I saw the prickly pear surrounded by men with their backs to the street. When I walked closer, I saw the peanut merchant, squatting on his haunches, twisting cones of newspaper and filling them with peanuts. He sold peanuts as fast as he could load the cones. He dressed in slacks and a short sleeved shirt. His hair was combed and he looked healthy, wealthy, and a step well ahead of the beggars. He seemed delighted to see my wife and I. He stopped twisting cones. He snapped his fingers and took a peanut and held it close to the ground. Out of the prickly pear ran a good-sized (and well-fed) rat. The merchant switched the peanut to the other hand, grabbed the rat by the base of the tail, flipped the rat into the air. The rat did a full flip and landed safely in the merchant’s palm. The man gave the rat the peanut and the rat ran back into the pear patch to enjoy his wage. The bystanders were not so skilled and so simply hand-fed the more untalented rats that ran out of the stand of pear.
I didn’t expect to find the man and I was told by Bengalis, while at Kodaikanal, that the rats had all been exterminated. The Communists had taken over the state government and with the new administration, change had come about. Possibly they exterminated the prickly pear. So the Communist are still in the government and the rats are gone but there has been a technical revolution since I was last here. The computers operators have needed problem solvers and the private schools and colleges have provided them. Pour coffee in your laptop keyboard and you’ll be visiting with some of these graduates, who now make up this new middle class. The peanut merchant did not go onto Bangalore and the call centers. But it could be that his children did. It is the originality and inventiveness of India (the merchant being an example) that has always pleased me about the country and people.

But back to my not so steady hand and my coffee drinking laptop, dealing with Dell does have its compensation. One being that the Bengali, who was on the other end of the line, told me that one could find a nice apartment in Kolkata in a good neighborhood (Victoria Memorial area) for about $135 a month. Although I didn’t run down any apartments from the want ads, I mentioned this price to other Bengalis and they agreed. That area has great baronial mansions from the mid 19th century. You may remember from “Shelter” my description of the marvelous bathtub with its other century plumbing. A person, who finds comfort in simple things like a dry bed and a functioning ceiling fan, could stand some posh (port out, starboard home) rooms. I’d leave an apartment search for another visit.
I walked toward the river and through the court buildings. Gentlemen along with ladies of the court strode by hurriedly either off to the courtroom, the office, or to lunch. While the buildings look to be from the time of the British, the barristers have not kept the periwig tradition….at least not outside the court. They are robed and wear bibs and narrow ribbon ties. It was lunch time and so I didn’t stop. I was on my way to the Strand and to walk along to look at the river. No, the view is blocked by a barricade and shops. So I kept walking north to a church called St. Johns. The building is under the protection of the national government much like our National Registry. Tucked away in the back part of the church property is the grave of Job Charnock, Calcutta’s British founder along with an obelisk, which is a memorial to those who died in the Black Hole of Calcutta, the site of which was at Fort William, still a walk farther north.
There is a tank in Tank Square which was used as the city water supply in the early days of the town’s founding. The square would be renamed after Lord Dalhousie, lieutenant-governed during the earlier part of the 20th century. The building directly north of the tank and square is called the Writers’ Building. It stands today filled with bureaucrats just it did in the 18th century when the East India Company governed India. In this building there was an attempt (they killed the wrong man) on Dalhousie’s life. After Independence the historians reinterpreted this moment in history and decided that the square should be renamed for the plotters, who are now seen as striking a blow for freedom, rather than bungling a murder. The present official name of the square is BBD Bagh with each of the assassins (Binoy, Badal, and Dinesh) remembered by one initial of his name. The facts, if known, are fixed but interpretation is as lose and free as watercolor splashed on wet paper.
To the west of the square is the Main Post Office, which like all the other buildings is huge, big enough to cover the site of Fort William. The fort fell to an attack by the nawob Siraj-ud-Daula in 1756 and it was there in a small room that the British prisoners were packed. The room had no ventilation. In the morning the door was opened and the living staggered out, the forty dead were carried out, and the site has come down through time known as the Black Hole of Calcutta. For a little modern interpretation, I’ve had Indians tell me that none of it ever happened.
I kept walking north and wound this way and that until I was turned around, which is another way of saying lost. Where I did find myself was in a neighborhood of Christians and talking to a young man name John, who could hold his own in an English conversation. We talked about his studies and hopes and it was one of those pleasant moments when you remember really why you came back to India. I stood on the street and he hung out the window gave me instructions to where I wanted to go, the Bengal Buddhist Association. A few turns later I was in the courtyard of the building where Bobbi and I spent the nights and days of our stay in early 1967. We were perfectly comfortable but I do remember the courage it took for me to face those cold water showers in the cool of the early January mornings. I considered asking for a cell but I was settled in the Hotel Maria and was now thinking about how I’d like to stretch out on my bed there. So I said my good byes to the nice lady, who seemed to be in charge, and made my way back to Chowringhee Road, this time walking south.
The sun dropped and became dim though the dust and smoke and I hurried on toward the Maidan. Time a little after five when what do I see in the rush hour traffic but a herd of forty or fifty goats trotting up the street. I wondered where they had been at about 2:30 and whether the herdsman had been planning a rush hour move. The traffic is always on the move on Chowringhee but I couldn’t believe anyone would drive animals on this road at this time of day.
When you walk you get hungry and when you eat you get sleepy and before long I was curled up in bed with the ceiling fan slowly turning overhead. My bones and muscles ached but I had gone looking for a personal memory that was long gone. The merchant was as likely as not still in the world of the living. I sincerely hoped that he was as comfortable as I on this March night.

#