Journalists crouch around Uma Rani Ghosh, 95, as she goes to vote in Howarh on Tuesday. (Below) A paramilitary jawan at a polling booth in Bally. Pictures by Ruchir Joshi

“Oh, I used to be a champion at stuffing vocus!” says Fatima (name changed) cheerfully. “I used to organise hundreds of vocus across three to four wards for the CPM.”

“Vocus” is a truly beautiful word forged in the molten-metal factory of Howrah politics: an alloy of “vote” and “bogus”, with a glaze of the “focus” it must take to steal votes from non-voting citizens. Fatima, however, is now less than proud of her past achievements. “One day, the local MLA came to visit and Z-bhai brought me forward and praised me to the skies, saying ‘Fatima has done the maximum number of vocus voting for us!’. The MLA patted my back. The moment they praised me I began to sense I’d done something really wrong and shameful.”

If that was a first realisation, another one followed soon afterwards. “A local leader, G-bhai, asked me one night if I wanted to see Bangladesh. He said he could show it to me from the roof of this building. I wondered, ‘Bangladesh? From here? How?’, but I went up with him anyway. The second Hooghly bridge was bright with lights. Eden Gardens bhi chamak rahaa thha.” Eden Gardens was also shining. Fatima pauses. “But the basti below the building was dark. G-bhai pointed to the lights and said ‘That’s India’. Then he pointed to the dark basti, grinned and said ‘And that’s Bangladesh’. Then he started talking about various plans, connector roads, apartment blocks, shopping malls, all to be built once the basti was removed. I don’t think he realised I actually live in that basti. There he was, calling my basti ‘Bangladesh’. That woke me up.”

Bangladesh. Pakistan. What the novelist Sankar once called Kolkata’r khata-paikhana, Calcutta’s service latrine. The workshop of Calcutta. It’s manufacturing liver. The “suburb” on the “wrong” side of the river. The cockfighting pit.

On a solidly hot May morning, Howrah, town and district both, brace for the onslaught of all the different parties that want its vote, genuine or vocus. This is the mini “Red Fort” the Trinamul wants to wipe out; this is where the CPM wants its Stalingrad, a redoubt to be held at all costs, from where the tide will turn; this is where the BJP has put in a lot of weight, as has the Janata Dal (Secular) and otherwise.

In the rising summer heat, the streets and lanes of Howrah look not so much like a latrine as a hodge-podge godown of squalor: ugly, new hyper-coloured multi-storey buildings rise out of a mess of grey-brown bastis and rusting old factory buildings; the shops that are open seem measly and ill-supplied, belonging more to a run-down mofussil town than the biggest urban adjunct of Calcutta; cycle-rickshaws yaw wildly, the rickshaw-wallahs un-used to having so much space in the lanes that are usually stuffed with smoking traffic; people mill about on the corners, waiting to vote, waiting for trouble.

I say goodbye to Fatima who refuses to tell me who she’s voted for. It’s clear that she’s ambiguous but equally plain that her loyalty to the Left Front is long gone. I join up with B, a young journalist who writes for a Calcutta Urdu paper, K, her colleague and photographer, and another person. The idea is to drive to three or four of the most troublesome booths and see if anything is happening. I ask if one can get a cup of tea somewhere. B laughs out loud. “Not without a coupon today, it won’t be easy!” she chortles. “Coupon?” I ask. “Yes, you need a coupon, from one or the other party. Then you can get tea, or even biryani. Without that it’s difficult on voting day.” B’s colleague K adds this classic nugget: “The candidate of the X party spent so much money buying liquor and chicken for people, telling them to eat and drink and vote for him. But he made the mistake of stopping two days ago, so now the folks have gone over to where the other parties are serving food.” My third companion pipes up: “The tiranga should be replaced with a flag with two motifs: a bottle and a chicken. That’s what this country has become, all over, in every state!”

As we move from booth to booth in urban Howrah, Bally and Liluah, there is an undertow of tension that was missing in most of the Calcutta polling. “There’s never been an election in Howrah without some serious trouble.” B tells me authoritatively. “Every polling day, you’ll get murders, bomb-maari, at least a hundred people arrested. This morning seems to be passing calmly, but it can’t last. Just wait till afternoon.”

Talking to people, the broader picture I get is this: if a fair vote happens, including a high-ish polling percentage, the CPM is in danger of being wiped out here; they can only counter by making it difficult for the Biharis and Marwaris to vote and so the trouble is likely to brew up from those pockets; surprisingly, there’s been nothing in the morning, except one shooting in Baksara which the local SP claims is not a political case, but people expect trouble from noon onwards.

In front of a major booth in a school, the Janata Dal (Secular) candidate smiles an oily smile at B. “Aap pehle to yeh bataaiye ki aap didi hain ki behen hain? Uss sey rishtey mein fark hota hai!” First tell me, are you an older sister or a kid sister, it changes the relationship. B is unimpressed by this unctuousness from the older man, she’s seen too much of it from different party honchos, often followed by bullying and borderline violence when she’s written something they don’t like. “Do you expect trouble here?” She asks Shri J-D Secular. “Well, these people are making a difference for sure.” He says, pointing to the CISF jawans checking IDs at the school gate. “But who knows? Let’s see what happens in the afternoon.”

At another school, in the Bally area, I ask a young paramilitary man if there’s been any jhamela. He looks at me with the contempt oversized Australians cricketers once used to reserve for Sourav Ganguly. “Merey hotey hue yahaan kiski himmat hai jhamela karega?” Who’s going to have the guts to make trouble when I’m standing here? The guy is tall and fit, he has his submachinegun strapped across his back and in his hand he carries a big dandaa. The trash talk is very effective — I certainly don’t want to try and meddle with his booth.

Traditional booth-capturing now being a thing of the past, people try other techniques. Till mid-day the only problem seems to have been one presiding officer taking too long to process voters through, something seen as a CPM time-wasting ploy to reduce the opposition’s score. “Haan, udhar slow-motion mein voting ho rahaa thha to usko hataa diya. Ab vahaan theek hai.” Yes, voting was in slow-motion over there so they removed him. Now things are fine there. The person speaking is a sidekick to the local Congress boss. Walking away from the others he’s very clear that peaceful voting in Howrah means only one thing: parivartan. But he’s also clear that this is temporary, that what Adhir Chowdhury has done in Mushidabad is the right thing. “Abhi to hum unkey saath hain, baaki baad mein dekhiye kya hota hai.” Right now we’re with them (the Trinamul) but see what happens in the future.

Driving back from Liluah, a strange landscape unfurls, one ruled by its own slow-motion, empty rail-tracks criss-crossing, green climbing up abandoned factory chimneys, ponds and trees alternating with packed human habitation. Everywhere, there is an overwhelming sense of a place of great, snail’s-pace struggle which yields very meagre rewards. Nearing Howrah station, we turn a corner and the driver suddenly brakes.

In the middle of the crossing is a wheelchair with a very old woman curled inside it. Journalists are crouching around her, asking questions and firing their cameras. K, the photographer, gets out to join them and so do I. We all take photographs of Uma Rani Ghosh, 95 years of age, being taken to cast her non-vocus vote. On the day when one end of GT Road, close to its terminus near Peshawar, is finally freed from Osama bin Laden, I watch this surreal sight at the other end of the old highway, in Shibpur, Howrah, in the company of a bright young woman who has very different conceptions of Islam, democracy and communism from the old men trying to retain control over those belief-systems.