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They have just opened the E-Mall near our office. I was very excited. Finally, a mall in Calcutta with a virtual dimension, what if with a capital “e”. I also appreciate the fact they have retained the hyphen that even the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has knocked off from 16,000 words in the age of Internet. (It is being called punctuational genocide.)
So I arrive at the E-Mall’s portals, standing under a screen that depicts gripping lifestyle scenes to anyone who would care to stand for a few minutes on Central Avenue. I don’t know what effect the screen will have on the rowdy, snarling traffic — will it cause sudden brakes? — but I assume it to be a virtual indication of things to come. In the mall, I hope for virtual women doing virtual shopping, to e-mail chocolate mousse to a friend, to chance upon my virtual self, to have e-coffee.
I step in. However, I do not have to click to enter. Two security persons in a familiar uniform greet me in, wishing me “Good Evening” in a Bengali accent. It doesn’t matter — I look to the left and see a store full of treadmills. They look like fierce bulls, their handlebars thrust at me like horns, asking me over to surrender my fat in hectic bouts of corrida. I feel tempted. How much does a treadmill cost? As a billboard in Park Street claims, it only costs Rs 2 or 3 daily, if stretched over the next 20 years perhaps. But what does “E” stand for then? Equipment?
I move on, passing a TV store, which has several screens flashing at the same time. The next stop is a mobile store, which is also its name. It has, well, many mobile phones. I can touch and hold and sniff any of them — and buy them if I can. For they come with real prices and it is not as if I can afford all of it.
I look to the right and only see a home theatre shop. But past it is the E-Court and facing it is the E-Lounge. At last the real things, I think, but want to keep the best for the last, and take the escalator, ignoring the small ‘e’, which drops me at the first floor.
The first floor is almost a replica — a virtual image? — of the ground floor, only possibly a furniture store in place of the treadmill store and a computer store in place of the mobile store mark the difference. I end up in a music store of a familiar chain.
As I enter, a woman with her young daughter in tow slams into me. I let out a real yell and ask her to look where she is going. She shouts back — it’s just like a real fight that I have in the world outside. I go to the third floor. There is a gift shop, where they sell bags and perfumes and toys, most of which are done in lurid colours, and a white goods shop, where there are laptops and washing machines and mixer grinders and microwave ovens and 10 plasma and flat TVs in two rows, five on top and five below, starting from around Rs 1,65,000 and ending at around Rs 70,000, all showing India battling Australia at Bangalore and India 9 for 1, while the covers are being drawn over the ground. I feel dizzy.
Then I have the e-piphany — that everything around me is the same. Everything is a copy of each other. Everything is a clone. That “E” stands for everyday. That this is not an e-mall. This is just a mall.
I rush down to the E-Lounge. It displays photographs of an earlier Calcutta, especially the Dalhousie and Esplanade areas, from the late nineteenth century to early twentieth century. Hogg Market in the 1880s looks neat and cute and well-brought up and the Metropolitan building, that once housed Asia’s largest department store Whiteway, Laidlaw & Co, looks glorious. And the E-Mall, with the shining screen on its parti-coloured front, was once the quiet and graceful GEC Building. I feel dizzy again, but in a different way. This is what is truly virtual.
As I step out, I look at my mobile phone. Where the screen should have shown my global position, or at least my local one, it says “sms CKT to”. Where am I?
chandrima @abpmail.com