As cheesy as it may sound, I went to Calcutta in search of artistic inspiration. My own life had become a sort of inspid turnstile in the prolonged aftermath of my breakdown- A rite of passage, as metamorphic and turbulent as the first rush of butterfly wings and storm clouds that birthed the chaos theory. I had now covered distances unimaginable. Overcome the guilt of letting my animus, muse and literary ambition, perish in the cage of Mumbai’s kitschy bustle. I was thrilled with the freedom and anonymity of an almost nomadic life and was holding onto it with as much shrewdness as I could muster. But upon returning from my forced sabbatical from the city, I was shrinking again, into a veritable single- celled mucoid of broken down enthusiasm. I was suffering from writer’s block and suffering, from the lack of suffering.
And it was then that I felt alive again. At the prospect of traveling to Bangla Bhoomi, of seeing the decomposing architecture and the darkness and history smoothed into each stone fracture and wooden pore of such a famed city. I wanted to be absorbed into the roads, into the air and into the cultural biology of another place, as interesting and mysterious as my own. The possibility that this could happen anytime soon, had me so thrilled that a sort of restlessness was cutting and churning ribbons of anxiety in the pit of my stomach-a turning kaleidoscope, with changing colours of nervous-bile.
Each day in Calcutta was a revelation, a sort of warping of time and senses that started with the sultry day, bathing us in thin sheets of musky sweat from morn to twilight. We were living with a few close friends who had graciously arranged for a free stay in their nonchalant film-school hostel. SRFTI, seemed like a drowsy hamlet situated on the outskirts of the city, a world away from the claustrophobic rust of Calcutta. A bordello of film junkies, alcoholism and nascent dreams of making independent cinema. The campus made me think of my father’s archetypal government office, heavily laced with a sort of forced sense of artistry as if selling culture and beauty to a throng of designated ambassadors and tourist gawkers. However, the almost impervious sense of deathly quiet that shrouded the area rendered a surreal eeriness and melancholic beauty to the squat façade of porous buildings and stalwart trees. I loved the amphitheatre. It had an earthy sense of calmness and faded glory embedded in its well-worn semi-circle of quiescent stones. The perfect place to dream, prostrate and amble bare-footed. I loved the boarders as well. All of them shared a sense of no nonsense and genial camaraderie despite their absurd quirks and eccentric personalities that if ever, were rarely alike. I was blown over by their simplicity and intelligence and their affable cussing. Point to be noted: I have never in my short life so far, and limited experience of various sub-cultural eco-systems; ever heard such inventive and blatant cussing. In as many languages, dialects and syntax formations as one can imagine! Ever.
We would grab a morose bite at the hostel mess and head out in the stifling heat to the closest metro station, behaving like a set of rabid weirdoes, let loose upon the historic city. I had the privilege of enjoying my first and only ride in an air-conditioned metro on the initial day of our venture in the city. Companion number 1 chose to embody the swift and welcome state of quasi-narcoplexia. While I wandered onto the walls, shoes, fore-arms, back-pockets, and stories behind the place and people we were, in close contact with, in the small and comfortable vacuum of the Kolkata Metro. Companion number 2 and 3 (resident Eros and Psyche) decided to catch up on lost bits of privacy and mundane romantic banter. Number 2’s ear-rings fascinated me. Once we got off at our destination, we started walking in the shimmering post-P.M. heat (of Kolkata at it’s airless best) towards college street and the slow, hollow trams that intersected at its pedestrian lanes. The evening was spent languorously. We found a sugarcane juice vendor with a juice-press (that was sprouting the dinghy colours of neon Kanye -West-party-shades molested under the foot of a drunk reveler) and drank from his bowl-sized kulhad servings (whose heady, earthen scent mixed with the saccharine taste of the piss-coloured nirvana); We followed this up with a satisfactory stroll along the ant-like crawl of tin-shutter bookstalls that offered orgasmic sale prices to academicians, wannabe yuppies, book trawlers and the window-shoppers alike. I had the utter misfortune of having a stubborn blob of spit attaching itself to my palm, thereby making it’s loathsome presence felt for the rest of the evening. Companion number 1 almost expired like a batch of bad Mishti Doi when an oncoming tram’s cables crashed into a nearby tree branch, effectively reducing the cable into a quivering mass of electronic whips. Our dear survivor deemed himself fortunate to have such a non-fatal close call with the historic crawlers.
Most of our days in Kolkata were filled with exceptional sights. Human life, lives in all it’s bareness within the city. Unlike Mumbai, life here is not lived on the fringes. The city’s astronomical squalor lives in queenly abandon within the locus of its important buildings, important people, important history, important misery. No other city in the world perhaps, can lay claim to such a thing. Our daily metro travel and long, aimless walks along promenades, by-lanes, boulevards, docks and every possible inch of land within Kolkata took us to revelations like-Kumar Tuli- the oldest part of Kolkata, more primeval than the city itself. It was sprinkled with artists, carving humanity into the clay edifices of Gods, Godesses and Demons alike. The artist’s hands never discriminate, I think. They render each piece with the flat reverberation it is supposed to evoke, as they work deftly.
Softly.
Quietly.
And then, there is Ganga Ghaat- ever restless and simultaneously stifling because of its brooding ennui. Life is liquid here. ..and stagnant sometimes. We saw the sun sober down into the silver waters during an evening sojourn to the river bank. Sitting there in companionable silence along with the ordinary throng of revelers, beggars and mystics, we exchanged peace, and a mutual love of sunsets and wandering. Even though, I have never counted myself in the upper echelons of the tea-loyalists of this country, I became a recent convert at the hands of an erstwhile immigrant and self-proclaimed pundit. He was to tea-making what Tagore was to poetry. His motion was fluid, precise and almost mechanical in its execution. He clanged the aluminum pateli with a measured beat, then rose it to great heights so that the masala chai, within, would flow like the Ganga into Shiva’s waiting hair, in cascades of mud-colored beauty. Or maybe, even pateli nan-chucks that he swing about like a mongrel Ninja, challenging, the contents, to plop elsewhere. He collected money, added sugar, adder rose-water, poured the chai and covered the kulhads with nan-khatai- all with the same measured movement, that he made the Chai with.
