The original distance between London and Calcutta, when Job Charnock disembarked famously by the Hooghly to found the city, was about 8,000km, give and take a few kilometres here and there.

This distance has fluctuated over the centuries, especially from the time Mamata Banerjee took over as chief minister of Bengal in 2011 and announced that she would turn London into Calcutta. Calcutta wannabe London. Oops, Calcutta wants to be London.

Since 2011, it has been quite dizzy, with or without the Calcutta-London flights. The Bengal capital has often come close, very close to British one, for example, when VIP Road saw the installation of a Big Ben replica in 2015. Calcutta will come tantalisingly close to London again on Friday as the second Test of the India-New Zealand series begins in the Eden Gardens.

Sourav Ganguly, president, Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB), has installed a bell, like the one at Lord's, at Eden, which will be rung by Kapil Dev before start of play on Friday. Ganguly has announced the installation with pride on more than one occasion.

The ringing of the five-minute bell at Lord's by a well-known cricket personality was introduced in 2007. It signifies the start of a match. To be asked to ring the bell has come to be regarded as an honour, which Ganguly himself received in 2014 on the fifth morning of a Test match.

When the bell rings on Friday morning, Eden Gardens will hopefully transform itself into Lord's, with all the extra noise eliminated and ungainly sights photoshopped. It is just as well, because the last few attempts to turn Calcutta into London fell short, sometimes by a few feet up.

The Big Ben replica that stands like a surprise at the busy Lake Town-VIP Road crossing looks very much like Big Ben, except that it is a little too little. The original is 315 feet and the copy is 135 feet. On a closer look, the exterior of Little Ben looks like someone else's skin. The original famous clock tower is made of concrete. This one, a Rs 1.36 crore project, has been made from a special material called Fibre Reinforced Polymer. It is the brainchild of MLA Sujit Bose and South Dum Dum Municipality chairman-in-council Mriganka Bhattacharya.

Little Big Ben, instead of bringing the two cities together, made Calcutta look smaller. One wonders how Big Ben has fared since.

Mamata in 2011 had promised to bring over several other parts of London to Calcutta. She had announced that the Hooghly would be the theme for the transformation of the city, such as Thames was for London. She had promised future iconic structures: a city gate like the Gateway of India in Mumbai, a ropeway, and a giant Kolkata Eye, like the London Eye.

The Strand along the Ganga was "beautified", but much of the rest did not take off. The Kolkata Eye did not happen, which spared its riders a close view of all the things floating on the Hooghly.

But no one could stop the city from being lit up every evening by glaring blue and white fairy lights wound roughly up the stems of trident lampstands planted at random. The illumination, also an attempt to turn the city into London, lit up poverty and squalor, if it did not decorate them. It increased the distance between London and Calcutta unfortunately.

Banerjee's 2015 visit to London, when she met Prince Andrew at Buckingham Palace, bridged the gap a bit again.

Now comes the bell ringer. We are arriving again.

But, then, London is everywhere in Calcutta. In Gariahat, rising out of milling Puja crowds and rows and rows of sari shops and bling salwar kameez sets, rises Hotel Thames International.

Come to think of it, Calcutta is London. It just looks different in the UK.