Last week, en route to my hometown, I had to stop in Calcutta for a few hours. With nothing to do, and an entire afternoon to kill, I wasn't quite sure what to do. Despite my intentions to take time to explore this city , I have somehow never managed to. My visits to Calcutta are always stop-overs for a a few hours in which I travel from Dum Dum to Sealdah or the other way round. There was the other matter of having to deal with the June heat and I was already regretting not taking having booked a connecting flight to Bagdogra as I stepped out of the air conditioned comfort of the airport to the thick humidity.
In proper tourist fashion, I put on my headphones and set my pod to the recently re-discovered Amelie soundtrack by Yann Tiersen as I got into one of the city's famous yellow taxis. My destination, Park Street could not have been more touristy, either. It was my accidental choice of music that proved to be a masterstroke, as it not only transformed my until then sour mood, but also as the day progressed, I discovered, proved a perfect backdrop for this most romantic of cities. The music often blended with the sounds of the city, most notably in Soir de Fete where the sound of footsteps made me turn around to check if there was a horse-tonga behind my taxi.
You can tell a lot about a city from its taxi rides. Bombay has its ancient Fiats - uncomfortable, hot at any time of the year but no one really cares; the attempt to find the faster route (there seem to be three of them for everywhere) a constant preoccupation with the taxi driver. Delhi taxi drivers often have an earthy charm, complete with ready wit and mischievous grin, suggesting the sharing of some inside joke with you and most prone to being chatty. I am told things are different now, but they have been traditionally notorious for stunning you with a sudden "Right se le loon?" at a random turning and once having ascertained you don't know the way, take you for a spin all over the city. Travelling by a Calcutta taxi often seems to involve having to deal with the tiffin, lunch and tea time of your driver
True to the words of the Airport security guy, I did not manage to find an open internet cafe in the entire journey from the airport to Park Street as it was lunch time. It was exactly this sort of thing about that city that had riled one of my friends no end, who having spent most of her life in Bombay had to spend some time in Calcutta. I imagine on a regular basis, something like this would get to me as well, but being there for just a few hours, I was inclined to see it as amusing rather than exasperating. The taxi ride involved some random gyan on the city ranging from Howrah Bridge to the Indian Museum to Sourav Ganguly and Greg Chappel to Sonagachhi and an invitation to get a private tour of Eden Gardens for a hundred bucks in the "off-season". We stopped for tea at a corner tea shop where my driver debated animatedly with a bunch of other taxi-drivers about what time I should leave from Park Street to comfortably make it in time to catch my train.
Despite having visited Park Street many time, I had never been to the cemetery and headed there straight. I reached there just before 4 pm and had about an hour to roam around before closing time. In his short story, 'The city of dreadful night', a colorful and fascinating take on the city, Kipling described the cemetery as standing in utter desolation. "Men must have been afraid", he wrote, "of their friends rising up before the due time that they weighed them such cruel mounds of masonry." For a tourist spot not quite so popular anymore, I was very glad to find it well maintained, clean with neatly clipped vegetation. Its a great walk, calm but for the occasional bird sounds, serene yet majestic. Those buried here included William Jones who founded the Asiatic society, the great poet Henry Louis Vivian Derozio and famous Indophile British officer Hindoo Stuart. The causes of deaths were commonly tropical diseases but what surprised me was the number of people who had died as a result of being struck by lightning. The largest edifice belonged to Elizabeth Barwell, a famous beauty and supposedly the heartthrob of many an Englishmen. Eventually, I found the one I had been looking for. I had been fascinated with Rose Aylmer ever since I read about her in Vikram Seth's book. A spiral obelisk, her tombstone was inscribed with the beautiful elegy by Walter Savage Landor. A family friend of Landor, Rose Aylmer was instrumental in inspiring some of his finest poetry having gifted him a copy of Clara Reeves' The Progress of Romance which led to him writing the famous 'Gebir', quite simply his star-making poem. Landor wrote a most beautiful elegy for Rose Aylmer which was later inscribed on the tomb, a lovely ode to which I have felt a profound personal connection myself.
After an hour in the cemetery where I was charmed and moved, in turns, I headed for the customary visit to the Flurys treating myself to rum-balls and a stop at the Oxford Bookstore. Soon it was time to head to the station, a new slightly nondescript one in Chitpur. As I headed to the diner at the station, a slightly seedy establishment quite suitably named 'Khaan Pina' with margarita and martini glass shapes making the 'i' in 'Pina.' What was utterly strange about the place that the menu mentioned along the dishes and their prices, their supposed weights, also. Against my better judgment, I ordered a 325gm plate of Chicken Chowmein and having wolfed it down, rushed to catch my train. As always, my time in Calcutta was limited to a few hours, and having wet my beak but not entirely whetted my appetite, I left the city with the familiar feeling of being thoroughly charmed yet completely unsatisfied with the paucity of my time there.
