Terrible beauty - The city that won't leave you or let you live
Great place to grow up. Terrible place to live.
Kolkata has always been the city to escape the minute one could. But it is also the city one can never leave.
Kushanava Choudhury's The Epic City: The World on the Streets of Calcutta is a book to fall in love with, just like the city he writes about.
It is also as tragic as the city is. Mejo Mama placing his portrait on the wall of his North Kolkata along with his recently deceased brother, because he knows there will be no one left in the family to mourn him.
Mike, the Anglo-Indian reporter at The Statesman, smoking furiously in his closed cabin as the newspaper collapses around him - from a once-great institution where a peon existed just to polish the cane of editor-in-chief CR Irani.
A mall where once stood an Usha factory making the sewing machines ubiquitous in our childhood. The smell of piss everywhere, on the streets, in alleys, on highways, and improbably even in the dark corners of office corridors. Old houses being bulldozed and concrete boxes coming up in their place.
"A metropolis crumbles and what rises instead are pigeonholes of 650 square feet."
Choudhury's Kolkata is the city that has never recovered from the trauma of Partition, even though it has buried it deep in its subconscious. It is the city that saw the most vicious killing between faiths. It is the city that saw ravages of famine several times, thanks to the British. It is the city where you could live your entire life and never enter paras that were poor and predominantly Muslim, unseen and unheard by the Hindu city.
"The lines drawn on the map by the Great Calcutta Killings in 1946 were still there, of Muslims here and Hindus there, even though no one cared to remember how they had been drawn in the first place. If this order collapsed, what would take its place?" asks Choudhury.
It is a city that is all too feral. Read Choudhury's description of what happened after Direct Action Day.
"Even the full force of the state could not control the violence for several more days. The killings went on for a week. Hundreds of thousands were forced into refugee camps. Five to ten thousand people were killed; the actual figures will never be known.
In the muggy August heat, dead bodies began rotting on pavements as they had during the Famine. There were so many bodies everywhere that the sanitation authorities could not figure out how to dispose of them. One the streets there were bodies being eaten by vultures. Bodies were being thrown into the Ganga. Bodies were burned round-the-clock at Nimtala. Bodies were buried in mass graves at the cemetery in Bagmari. Bodies were chopped into pieces and stuffed into drains, the water pressure of the city plummeted until, as the historian Janam Mukherjee wrote, Calcutta could finally 'digest its dead'.
Partition was born on the cannibal streets of Calcutta. After this there could be no more co-existence. There would have to be two nation-states: India and Pakistan."
It is a city of icons - Ramkrishna, Vivekananda, Tagore and Netaji, the Great Leader - the Bengali all-stars. It is the city of his grandmother, Dida, cooking, cleaning, clearing, sending servants off to the market, slipping a tenner in this one's pocket, in that one's blouse, for singaras from Gonguram's, for medicine to soothe a grandson's cough. It was a vast anarchic empire which she navigated and kept afloat.
It is also a city that is all too human. "We human beings are not meant to live exclusively indoors. We need to hear the symphony of the street, feel the pavement at our feet. The life outside our door beckons us to a destiny larger than the lonesome murmurs of our souls. To live the good life, Aristotle had said, you have to make a world in public, with strangers."
And nowhere is it possible to live so happily among strangers than in Kolkata. The city of dreams and of nightmares, of joys and sorrows, of dark and light. The city which celebrated Satyajit Ray as his fame was sanctified by the West, which mourned Ritwik Ghatak as he took to the bottle. The city that saw the bullets and bodies of Naxalites and then 30 years of "nothing" happening.
"If Calcutta felt like a place where time had stood still, it is because discursively it had. In a city still traumatised by the violence of the Naxalite era, the Party had come to power to keep the peace."
The peace of the graveyard. The peace of a city in terminal decline. The peace of a city that knows it cannot sink further.