While returning to the mothership city after eight months, Calcutta starts to welcome me back at New Delhi railway station itself. It's not that I've been missing the city, not that I'm aware of, but there it is, leaning on the doorway of my bogey, invisible but palpable, as the Sealdah Rajdhani pulls into the platform eight hours behind time before it's even begun its journey. Invisible-Palpable grins at me, 'Oh, hello, it's you again! Ha, ha, just try blaming this north Indian fog on me, just try!' It has got me. I cannot reach for my Blame-Calcutta button. It stays switched off. This crazy winter fog is a north Indian problem, we in Cal don't do fog, not like this King Kong kuasha. That the trains don't have some sort of radar to navigate safely in the muck is also not our fault, it's been a while since we had a railway minister from Bengal and had she or he still been there, she or he would have done away with fog - 'Vanish!' - and had Lalu still been there he'd have bribed it to go sit only over Rajasthan and Haryana. Alas, when the next morning 'dawns', we are still just barely at the outskirts of Noida. The attendants are exemplary in their service, even as they turn the knife by telling us 'Forget about making up time, we are not getting to Calcutta before 2 am tomorrow.'
The food is simple but clean, the cleanest and healthiest tasting I've ever had on an Indian train. Progress is slow; it's a good time to catch up on one's reading. The attendants may have taken sadistic pleasure in giving us the bad news but they weren't lying - we finally pull into Sealdah at 4 am, roughly 18 hours late. I've just spent the last few months in far colder parts of the world and, as I alight, I'm happy with the amateurishness of the 'winter' nip in the air. Everybody around me looks like they are in the Gulag Archipelago in February. Empty streets escort me and I'm home in rapid good time. ' Dekhli?' Asks Invisible-Palpable sitting next to me. 'Amader smooth traffic ta kirom? (See? How do you like our smooth traffic?)' 'Not bad for 4.30 am', I want to reply, but I leave it. I realize I have been missing home and want to make nice for as long as possible.
It doesn't last long. The first night I sleep like a log but from the second early morning the symphony begins: at 4.30 am someone in the next building switches on their musical water-filter, at 5 am there are the frayed strands of multiple azaans from Park Circus, at 6 am the VHP neighbour from the other adjacent building slides in his mata ke bhajan CD (how did he know I was back?), at 6.30 am the overweight and under-brained morning walk mafia start hitting their horns in the parking lot below my window, at 7 am the guys bathing the automotive population start to enact their version of John Cage's aleatory piece for parked cars, complete with car radios scanning stations, alarms going off, doors opening and slamming shut. At 7.30 am, the traffic proper starts around the flyover and I know I'm really back.
Those of us who live here don't need to be told about the glory of the winter-time markets in the city. As soon as I can, I go to do bajar, looking forward to exploring the great edible bounty our delta offers us in the clement months. Entering the market, I almost walk past my normal supply store. The old gent has downsized in the time I've been away. The storage behind the shop is proving too expensive and possibly the big supermarkets are starting to bite harder. We exchange greetings. I start to list out the things I need. When I pause for a moment, a young woman in a smart sari jumps in, demanding this and that in an imperious tone. While the old shopkeeper and I address each other as ' aapni', she snaps out her orders using the familiar 'tumi'. I almost say something, but it stays at that. After she leaves, I point this out to the gent. 'Oh, they are all so rude nowadays but there's nothing you can do.' Moving to my vegetable stall, I pause to take in the mountains of fresh colour. I resist the urge to over-splurge but just as I'm leaving the vegetable baron thrusts some packaged cucumbers into my thaila. 'What's that?' I ask him. 'Just try them babu, they are amazing!' I see the package marked with one of India's oldest oligarch brands and I demur. 'I don't want their produce, just give me normal shosha!' No chance, he will pay me back double if I don't find these to be the tastiest cucumbers I've ever eaten.
On the road, at this peak morning hour, several empty yellow taxis trundle by, not even bothering to stop. Later, talking to taxi drivers and to my friends, I understand that the asphyxiation of Calcutta's normal taxicabs is continuing relentlessly. The last time the meter pricing went up was roughly five years ago, the price of diesel has hopscotched upwards several times since then. Some friends are now paying yellow taxis 20 to 30 rupees extra without being asked. When I mention this to one Bong acquaintance, he snarls in outrage: 'Why I should pay extra!?!' 'Huawei you should?' I reply, 'Because you mast do Samsung!' That is if you want the normal affordable taxis not to drown under the tsunami of the Uber-Olas.
Talking about tsunamis, the winter in Calcutta means a barrage of cultural events, a bit like all the long-distance trains landing up at Howrah and Sealdah from the opaque fog of the rest of the year. There is that meme we all know, where Batman slaps Robin when he starts to utter some currently widespread nonsense. In my mind, I deploy this meme whenever I hear some cold weather itinerant non-Calcuttan starting to spout about how lovely, cultured and friendly the city is - one thwack! - if you haven't spent serious time here in the bad months just keep your Calcutta paeans to yourself.
No, a serious inability to resort to violence is, I suppose, a good thing. This means that one quietly puts up with some execrable documentary being shown in a respectable institution without really challenging the incompetent 'film-makers' who've inflicted it on us. This means you don't laugh out loud when a rising man of letters introduces another author's book, first by reading his own review of it, followed by a longish poem he has translated from Bangla, supposedly apposite, only coming to the book under discussion after he has fully showcased his own doubtful talents. This means you don't jump out of your taxi or rickshaw to remonstrate with someone bent upon destroying your ear-drums with their car horn. An ability to deflect anger and frustration is priceless when confronted with an evening traffic jam stretching to smoggy infinity on the Maa flyover.
This is winter, the loveliest time of the year in the city that owns you. The air is, mostly, far better than in Delhi or Bangalore. The fooding in all its variety is great and more or less affordable. Some of the cultural output isn't that bad. On the streets you often see kindness of the sort you don't see in other cities. And then there are always the moments when you have to laugh out loud at the absurdity of existence in this most absurd of all metropolises. At odd moments, Invisible-Palpable ambushes you with its grin: 'Don't lie. Happy to be back, no?'
