The thing is, you don’t expect foreigners to join in the dhakka-dhakki. The chief reason the ex-sahib or ex-mem doesn’t do this is because unctuous waiters and managers usually make sure they don’t need to — goras always get served out of turn, served more, served the best bits, and then served again while even the grandest of brown grandees are sweating it out in line. This little trick of residual racial power allows Westerners — Brits usually — to sneer as they gaze upon the wealthy natives climbing over each other to get to alimentation as if they’ve just come out of a famine area. But on this Oktoberfest evening, things were different. Somehow, everyone was having to queue, especially to get to the grill where the sausages were being sizzled. I myself was making the best of a wurst situation and fielding a phone-call while standing in line, empty plate clutched in hand. Where the queue made a right turn past the Wurttemburgian noodles there was a small natural gap, a kind of breathing space, if you like, between over-packed vertebrae. As I tried to explain to my caller the difference between wheat-beer and normal lager, I saw a large gent of Caucasian extraction starting to slide into the aforementioned empty space. He had on his face the same cunningly innocent look Jeb Bush might have had while fingering a chad in Florida — “Hm, is this an opportunity I see hanging before me?” As I went into the gentle chicane, the fat guy cut in front of me, casually, as if he was completely unaware that there was a snake of a hundred or so people behind him, people wearing extremely heavy jewellery who’d been waiting with un-Calcutta-like patience to get their dainty fingers around a succulent tube of fried pig. At first, I could not believe the effrontery, the sheer nerve being displayed by Fatso. Then, as he slid his large backside firmly past my plate hand, I began to confront reality: this is how Clive must have done it at Plassey, Outram at Awadh, Dalhousie at Hastings.

Once I computed what was happening, my riposte to this posterior-putsch was swift and ruthless and yet looked slow and accidental: at one point, the queue passed through a doorway and, as the doorway came closer, I began to nudge into the man. He moved slightly to his left because of natural socialization. I used the filo-pastry of civility, (the same thin element he was relying upon for people not to object to his queue-jumping) and his lack of detailed spatial awareness (he was looking at the food we were passing, and oblivious of the approaching doorway), to move him further and further to the left, to the point where I left him confronting a door-jamb while the rest of us went through. As I did this, I sensed approval growing behind me from people who were unwilling to raise a voice but happy to keep up the speed so that the Large-Shaheb was cut out of the line.

In describing this non-incident, I don’t at all mean to etch for my self-portrait a heroic figure. I did what comes naturally to anyone born and brought up in Calcutta; just as a certain class of Marathi will have a sense of classical melody, just as a certain kind of Brazilian will feel a football at his feet, just as many a Frenchwoman or Italian man will have a certain sense of elegance in dress, a Calcuttan of a certain generation has the natural, almost genetic, ability to elbow people out of the way without them realizing it.

As I returned with my loaded plate, I saw my victim, still trapped in the queue, looking at me with what I imagined was a mixture of resentment and envious admiration. It was the kind of look I might have had if I’d tried to play tennis with Roger Federer: it’s not that I wouldn’t have understood where the ball was going, it’s just that I would have been able to do nothing about it.

Analysing the whole thing later, I came up with some conclusions. One, space and time are shrinking the world over, and Westerners/ First-Worlders are no longer taking the luxury of supremacy for granted. (The man I’d trumped was not a German, he was not English and he was not American, but somewhere he belonged to the West and not to Eastern Europe or South America.) Two, we both had a sense of personal space and of the laws we were trying to break or uphold. Two-a) Like me, my adversary was middle-aged or even a bit older, and this awareness is something which is now disappearing among younger people, regardless of where they are from.

Non-Bong, non-Cal, friends would scream with laughter every time I committed this reflex action in Bombay or Delhi. In return, I would point out to them that this was a civility that came from a city that was many times more crowded and chaotic than the one they lived in, and for all their money, glamour and fast roads they could do with some generosity towards other people’s physical space. Remembering this, it now seems to be a gesture not from the last century but from the one before that.

Walking in London or Delhi or Calcutta, it’s the same: you realize that people have forgotten, or not even learnt, how to move aside for someone coming from the opposite direction. People now just walk through others, hoping for the best, assuming that the other person will move and make way. This happens across country, culture and class, it happens across gender, it happens across all ages roughly below thirty. The only difference is, abroad, in the rule-ridden West, cars don’t act like they are humans, people driving them still make way for other cars and for pedestrians. Here, in Calcutta, if you walk down a narrow lane with no sidewalk, you get no sense that the drivers of the vehicles tearing by have ever set foot on the ground.

In these post-Puja doldrums, I’m not sure I’ll be sad if thousands of badly driven Nanos go missing from Calcutta or anywhere else in India — no doubt other unsuitable manufacturing projects will arrive. I certainly won’t miss Sourav Ganguly — I’ve been wanting to miss him for four years now, and I have no doubt this population will soon throw up another sporting hero. I certainly won’t miss the Left Front if and when they go — I don’t expect the Didi who will replace the Babu to be very different. What I do miss, and what I don’t think even Ma Durga can bring back, is a sense of the living, moving, sympathetically human urban space that was, perhaps inadvertently, one of our great gifts to the world.