A tale of two cities.

Now that I have spent around three months before returning home, I can go into analyzing what it is about Calcutta that draws me so much to it. Is it that Calcutta has “life” as the character in Ray’s ‘Pratidwandi’ tells the protagonist? Despite all its frustrations, its various ills, its myriad eye sores, the oscillations between the aesthetic and the repellant, Calcutta has a pulse, which might seem feeble at first, but that’s just because it takes one time to perceive and realize its presence and its call. Once that threshold has been crossed, the city engulfs you within its folds, its pangs of mouth drying moans, its sudden gusts of monsoon winds.

At one moment, she might lead you to believe that you’re a Parisian dandy, with a decadent, frivolous air serenading beneath cobbled bridges, sniffing around for the freshest whores. The very next moment, the city holds up the mirror to your countenance exposing you for the cheap beggar you are scrounging around for whatever you can lay you hands on. There have been innumerable occasions when I have felt such disparate experiences residing in almost harmony beside one another. Whenever I have left the precincts of a brightly lit pandal housing within its warm ambience the collective festive spirit of the season and turned the corner to take the lonely road, such a dichotomy of emotions has struck me most deeply. The humble, dim lit road beside the opulence of light and laughter, makes me believe as if I’m an outsider not quite familiar with the city’s mannerisms. Loneliness and a certain sense of dis-belonging have always been my faithful companions on such occasions.

In Delhi, what I miss most of Calcutta is its speculative life. The indulgence to sit back and take it all in, ruminate and then crumple it to be thrown into the little dustbin of cynicism inside of me. Delhi, on the other hand, thrives on the life active. In this case, by Delhi I mean south Delhi, as I haven’t had the chance of visiting the ancient parts of that city. Almost whatever I knew of Delhi came from books of fiction and sociology, describing in magnificent terms the grand history of the place built during the finest epoch in Indian history-the Mughal period. The British wanting to ‘beautify’ the city and to move out of crowded, claustrophobic lanes of the old city, built the new settlement known as Neo Delhi. So, as is apparent, my encounter with Delhi has been partial and deadening because the Delhi in my psyche-the city mired with regality and politics, with avante garde poetry and irreverential iconoclasm, the haven of a truly cosmopolitan intelligentsia-has been hidden from my sight by personal sloth and the easy comfort of air-conditioned malls and the second rate patriotism evoked by India gate.

Calcutta evokes poetry then, to me as it has done to so many. That is why I have to keep coming back. To look into the mirror and admire the hideously funny turn of events that have befallen me and whose signs keep piling up on me.

“I slay mermaids, messing up blood all over,
Stock them in the vault, Shower, and then
Attend the evening’s festivities,
Blessing young girls while offering them coins
Of cold silver.”