You know how it is when you meet someone for the first time, and the person wants to know where you are from? For most people, that’s a straightforward question. But after having grown up in Mumbai, Kanpur, Chennai, Gwalior, Calcutta, and the UK, and having a surname that betrays a connection to Uttar Pradesh, and a family home in Uttarkhand, and a mother who is often mistaken for a Kashmiri, and facial features that recall south India, that question is something of a riddle to me!

Yet, of late, I find myself saying: “I’m from Calcutta, but I’m not a Bengali.” When I moved here six years ago, I was told that Calcutta is the kind of city that would grow on me. It didn’t take long. I loved it from Day One. This city, with its yearning for the glories of yesteryear while it looks forward to an attractive future, appealed to the Romantic in me. There is a battle that rages at the heart of Calcutta, between power, wealth, growth, and art, nostalgia, emotion. I identified with the uncertainty that characterises this city.

Calcutta appeals to the maverick in me. It does not judge me. It does not dictate. It lets me be myself. Calcutta appeals to the dreamer in me. It has given me rainy days filled with the notes of a guitar and voices rising in chorus. It has given me lazy afternoons lost in yellowed fiction on College Street. It has given me the quiet of a college campus once classes are over, the passion of the thousands that throng its streets during Durga Puja festivities. It has given me Michael’s chow mein, Coffee Pai parathas, Putiram’s luchi-alur dum, Kookie Jar’s lemon tart, Ganguram’s sandesh, Kusum’s rolls, Flurys’s rum balls, Nahoum’s chocolate fudge, every street corner’s chanachoor and jhaalmuri. Yes, I cannot deny it, Calcutta appeals to the foodie in me.

As I write, I think about the cities and towns I have lived in. Of quaint Gwalior and small town living, of the breathtaking English landscape, of late night picnics on an isolated Chennai beach. And I wonder what it is about Calcutta that makes it special to me. Perhaps it is the friends I have made here, perhaps it is the relatively problem-free adjustment to the city in my first few months here, perhaps it is simply that college is the most memorable time of one’s life, and I spent those three years in this city. I think again. Calcutta is special because it indulges my every mood.

I ask myself if I am painting too perfect a picture of this city. What of the traffic, pollution, noise, lack of discipline, swelling crowds and sweltering summer? What of the language problem? The lassitude? I’d be lying if I said these and other issues haven’t exasperated me at some point or the other. Yet, despite them, I stay addicted to this city. The crowds and the chaos, the lethargy and literature, the Maidan and the Metro, the phuchka and the pandals. The intellectual, and the pseudo-intellectual; sophistication, and pseudo-sophistication; the down-to-earth, and the affected. A city of contradictions. A city that refuses to let go of the past, yet reaches to the future; where the dance of the new with the old is a recurrent theme.

I’m a traveller, and I know I will not be here always. There will be other people, other places. But somewhere in me, I believe, Calcutta will remain home.