There’s a raga playing in my head. Memories bubble up: faces, parts of names, weird evenings, smells (some of the strongest memories are triggered by odors), noises and, always, a sheet of dust, evening dust, even in winter.
This trip began in what they call Kolkata now. Strange change that, to replace the name of a city with that of a village. Job Charnock probably never spelled much of anything the same way twice but he is the person who founded Calcutta, the place that became the second city of a great empire. I don’t believe he used very many ‘k’s’ in what he wrote and I wonder if the ground around his grave, there in Bengal, is stirred from the rotations he’s recently been performing.
Still, what’s in a name, a rose is still a rose and Calcutta at 3 in the morning just after you’ve been unceremoniously dumped into a rank cab (not a cab rank but a rank cab, there is a distinction) retains much of the character, and much of the fug, that it had when last I visited nearly 30 years ago.
The street cars are still there, older and more worn but trundling along at about the same speed. The slums go on, maybe slightly less horrible than before but still seemingly endless.
There is surely more wealth. There are new buildings, some fly-overs, an improved airport and, hidden, serious new information infrastructure. The hotel I stayed at was slightly charmless, a vast, modern palace, luxurious and lost. Always, out the window, there is still India.
I remember just a few years before and not far from Calcutta (sorry, Kolkata comes slowly to me) I stayed at a slightly frowzier hotel in Dacca where we overlooked a slum superimposed on an urban, human wetland. Always, out the window, there is where you are unless the window is simply an image and the room, air-locked and sterile and nameless, is your atomistic reality.
Bengalis have always been charming, intelligent, subtle, wise and well-read. Not all of them, of course, but a significant enough minority of those one comes in contact with to develop what is probably an entirely incorrect generalization about national character that differs them from people of other parts of India.
Then we had a dinner at a restaurant – Oh Calcutta – that claimed to reproduce cuisines that reflected the city’s history – something Portuguese, something French, some Mughlai, a bit of Bengali and, of course, something tasteless and British. It’s clear why the best restaurants in Europe are in Britain; in even the smallest town there are places for curry, kebabs, Chinese and Continental; in their newfound, post-Thatcher prosperity the British rediscovered their taste buds and they’ve been indulging them ever since; even pasties have gotten better and the Waitrose is undoubtedly the best grocery store chain in Europe.
Perhaps the discovery that most surprised me was that India now has wines that are drinkable. Three decades ago something was produced somewhere along this Western Coast – I’m in Bombay (sorry, Mumbai) as I write this – that passed for wine but was mostly made of seawater. Things do change! In Calcutta we were given a merlot from near Pune (I like that one, it’s the easy, clear version of Poona). It was big and red and full – like a Chilean, born and beaten under a hot, bright sun. There may be other wines that are as good, a bunch are on offer, but I’m sticking with this, I like it!
The flight to Mumbai was fine, the airline was good, my seat was too small and the legroom was miserable; I thought I was back on Southwest.
Bombay now has 17 million people. It sticks out into the Arabian Sea like a huge, booming, fetid finger. Unlike Calcutta, prosperity and change is not hard to spot, it’s there, in your face. The city is transforming itself nearly as rapidly as Shanghai did. In a few years this will no doubt be a rival to the Chinese city. Meantime, its economy is leaping ahead, driven by comparative advantage in language and education. The information infrastructure is more advanced than that of Calcutta, my hotel has wireless everywhere (even poolside!). Sure, there are slums but you get the impression that these aren’t temporary structures that have become permanent but genuinely momentary dwellings that will be abandoned soon; the change will be from cardboard, sticks and other urban jetsam to poorly made concrete but the change will be an improvement. Some few, too few still, will even go farther, to block houses or small homes in high-rise apartments that march, like HG Well’s enormous Martian invaders, across the flat coastal plain.
It’s been nice to be back. I think I’m too long gone and too set in my ways to easily re-adapt but my younger doppelganger, wherever and whoever he is, will certainly find it even more exciting than I did in the bad old days. More than anything physical, India has changed its mind and that’s great!
