Taking a walk on Kolkata’s (formerly Calcutta’s) Chowringee Road is a fraught business. You strike a balance between watching precisely where you put your precious feet, and not dwelling too much on what your eyes tell you: a huge hole in the ground leading to some unspeakable infinity, or a reeking pile of household rubbish, or a humungous, slum-fed rat nosing about in the nearby drains.
Most of all, this is the territory of the street-dwellers, whose impoverished country pasts have led them to try to survive in this grand old dame of a city, which has been absorbing destitute migrants for many decades. The street belongs to them. On the pavement, you are walking through their homes: their kitchens, with fragrant cooking pots precariously perched on rickety charcoal braziers; their lounges, with underfed babies crawling over tarpaulin carpets; their bedrooms, bed rolls tucked away neatly in the corner; their bathrooms, where privacy is a luxury they can ill-afford. All of this occurs in a space the size of your kitchen table.
People do their best to try to survive this urban warfare. They never, ever stop working. Calcutta’s food vendors, for example, bring great variety and richness to street life here. The vegetable sellers pile their produce high, with aubergines, cucumbers, garlic, onions, potatoes and tomatoes in prominent colourful displays. At the food stalls, the combined scents of hot oil, rice, lentils, vegetables and a myriad of pungent, sinus-clearing spices – cardamom, chilli, coriander, cumin – tempt street sweeper and office executive alike to sample their delicious samosas or kathi rolls. Raw sugar cane is squeezed in an antique press, making a sweet juice. This democratic space, where class, caste or creed is of no consequence, is a temporary breather from the viciously hierarchical nature of the broader Indian society.
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Some of Calcutta’s sights render you virtually shockproof thereafter. A toddler with no legs pushes herself along on a homemade cart, little hand outstretched for a few rupees. A group of men carry a just-dead human body shoulder-high: face serene, head still bobbing, adorned with flowers. A man selling chickens dispatches them efficiently on the spot to ensure freshness. A goat has been spray-painted all over in cerise pink, tethered to a pole. A poor little donkey has one ear hanging off.
Between the romantic, mouldering decrepitude of the Raj-era palaces and the gleaming glass monuments to grabby 21st century India, the traffic is horrendous and worsens year on year. Drivers persistently honk their horns, despite ironic road signs entreating ‘Silence Zone – No Horns Please’. Traffic lanes don’t exist and every imaginable mode of transport competes for space. The air is a poisonous choking cocktail of car fumes, dust and noxious gases. The whole city has had a giant heart attack, arteries clogged with pollution and garbage.
Along Chowringee Road’s western side lies the Maidan, the enormous park containing many of the lofty remnants of British rule. Fort William military base, the globally famous Eden Gardens cricket grounds and the pompous marble peaks of Victoria Memorial. None of these are as important, however, as the simple fact of providing at least some space in such a chock-a-block city, albeit more parched brown than green.
And then, just when I start to tire of it, I hear a beautiful chat-up line, delivered in charming Bengali English: “Excuse me, madam, what part of the world is the poorer for your absence?” Calcutta reeks of poverty and pollution, but it also reeks of character. It can be stressful, frustrating, enchanting, but certainly never boring and always memorable.
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