Monsoon Mutations

Sometimes, They turn down the lights over this city. At 11:30 in the morning – some might scorn and say ‘Afternoon!’- the sky is the colour of unpolished steel. Tubelights become conspicuous within grocery stores and music shops, just as they do at night. Kolkata is enveloped in a mist of dense water and cloud.

Drops of water drip across my car window, molten and heavy, dissolving everything beyond. Magnificent fern-like leaves drip their green onto a wavy fence holding them in. The red of buses drips onto the roads. The soft sky melts into and mixes into the yellow arcs of taxi roofs. The mime academy dissolves silently afar, without a whisper. Bags of garbage are transformed into grotesque bulbuous masses of wasted colour.

The blue buses flow into the mud, and for a moment, the gray city mutates into only chocolate and blue. Bricks of silver emerge from within golden puddles of soil on footpaths. Umbrellas – black, platinum, fuschia, red and azure suddenly seem to blossom. Broken footwear, the thick sheet of water on my window and balconies swirl. An orange God with a beard and four hands stands solitary against barbed wire stretched along a deserted green street.

The blue lines across yellow taxis become spattered till I fear they will turn green. A dove behind a bus flies into this amalgam of elements.

Thunder cracks and explodes somewhere, and rumbles into the landscape. Vision and sound cease to exist and become a liquid whole.

Where the sheet of water breaks into droplets, everything in the landscape is magnified and condensed at the same time through each of them. Only one spell of rainfall and the city has become fantasy.

If I’m not high on Kolkata, I must be drunk on vintage Cal.

Independence Day and one or two Culinary Adventures

Kolkata has many culinary adventures to offer those brave of palette. And a few misadventures. Rolls at the canteen opposite my building at university look like absolute gems. Delicately crispy and glistening, the tingling essence of street food emanating from them, stuffed with untold treasures of poultry, eggs, vegetables and that magical chutney roll-mkers brew in their basements across the country. It wasn't a bad experience by any means till I reached that stringy, pulpy piece of elongated flesh within. I had asked for chicken, not every unidentifiable body part of it.

South City Mall was alive with orange, white and green on Independece Day weekend. A massive India cut out flanked by swirly coloured vases blessed all those busy emptying their pockets in sales on all floors.

Independence Day was, as usual, a day I swell up and bulge with pride and revel in all things wonderful about India. All societies have glitches, but there is None in which I would rather live.

Papda is a fish cooked whole with head and tail and fin. My first experience with this creature was my finger getting caught in its cooked jaw and its nose nuzzling me everytime I reached out for the cottage cheese. The hypocrit in my non-vegetarian acts up when animals are served looking like animals. But what the heck, being a hypocrit is not a good thing. I proceeded to take a bite.

The Bistro cafe inside Shopper's Stop is a quaint little place for a small meal. A word of caution though - their Hot Dark Chocolate sounds exotic, but you might sense a whiff in it of your childhood and the bournvita (or whatever brand of milk chocolate your family bought) you had to consume daily. The sandwiches are light. The mousse cakes and pastries look elegant. So when you're done empying your pocket at all the sales, head to the Bistro.

It is here I observed that Calcuttans have a thing for foccacia and pizzas. More than other typically Western snack food. These are vibrant, like Kolkata is. They offer a sense of completeness in themselves, a bit like Cal. And everything is above the surface. The politics, the olives, the cheese, the breeze, the babycorn and the underground, the diversity, adversity and South City, the salt and the Salt Lake. The rain, the brain drain, the dust, the crust. The culture, the squelch, the chicken, nit picking, the Bangla, L'Angleterre.

The Return of Kolkata

I had imagined that blogs were periodical momentary things; expressions of a desire to tell. This one keeps coming back though. There is something about the chocolate and the blue of this city that refuses to be kept sealed away. It must be produced with a flourish on the screen.

So what have I been up to, you ask?

I have been reading Chomsky while caught in a road blockade even as Bangla slogans hit my ears, yellow-taxi drivers get down to stretch and beggar girls with sparkly green bangles stare. I have been exploring the nooks and crannies of bookstores for a French dictionary. Forgetting to return food court debit cards and then losing them for good. Awaiting Independence Day and the flag hoisting. Awaiting the left parties' bandh of 20th August which should hopefully shut down the university too. Dabbling with the rain. Hypermarketing. Wondering what charms lie within the National Library, what enchanted objects stand stacked in its shelves.

I've been watching the children of the proletariat, dressed in perfect punk, trying to fly kites at night on dirt mounds. Neon green T-shirt, bandana, ankle length faded light blue jeans, and a blue scarf around his neck, he tugs at th string while the other dressed in the simplicity of singular underwear and golden hoop earrings throws the kite up at the other end. Afar, another kid sits on debris, chucking stones at the kite. And then a fourth appears with long thread, his kite high, and running.

Old men magically appears from behind run down brick walls to gaze at Bangla movie posters. Students of International Relations order fried fish and sit under trees, in front of political posters.

And I have even begun using the word Calcutta. I knew the city would make me change something about myself.