Nostalgia- Fond Remembrance of Your City

Aamar Shohor Kolkata

Home, as they say is where the heart is. Home is where mother wakes you up in the morning, screaming of your uselessness and yet rumpling your hair and cooking you food. Home is where father tells you to wake up because the sun is up and the day is new. Home is where sister listens to your incessant opinion about everything that is going on in this world and beyond. Home is where your heart is because your heart consists of the people you love. And for me, home is Calcutta.

One of the oldest cities in this country, Calcutta has an inexplicable charm and beauty of its own. It is surrounded by its old world charm as well as modernity. It is a place where women don’t mind wearing vermilion powder on their forehead and ‘shakha’ and ‘pola’ on their wrists to symbolize their married status while teaming it up with denims and a t-shirt. It is a place where the women wear western clothes and a sari with the same sort of élan. It is a place where you know you’ll never get lost because there will always be this one person smiling and guiding you to your destination.

Calcutta is the most beautiful city on this planet, according to me. You enter the city, you see the Howrah Bridge over the Ganga. You will never want to leave the place if you happen to simply glimpse the Ganges flowing beneath you. For a relatively non religious person like me, I do go to Dakhshineshwar and Belur Math religiously simply to sit by the ‘ghat’ and look at the flowing ganga. The amount of peace that one gains from it cannot be put down in words.

Calcutta is a beauty, it is magic. You wake up to the songs of the birds; you get to see sparrows perched on the balconies. Neighbours greet each other through the kitchen windows whereas some greet at early morning walks too. It is a place where everyone is ‘kaku’ or ‘kakima’ or ‘ dada’ or ‘didi’. Everyone is related, it seems, but in reality everyone is respected.

Calcutta is a place where a six year old will be taught how to ride a bicycle by everyone in the ‘para’ (locality), it is a place where everyone celebrates one person’s success and everyone mourns one person’s grief. Calcutta is a place where you can go for an early morning tram ride to work because you just felt like it and realize midway that you’re terribly late. It is a place where if a young girl feels dizzy or unwell in a crowded metro station, people actually notice it without her having to say it and they go out of their way to help her. It is a place where if you are outside your home after ten at night, the only thought that will haunt you is your parents’ scolding. It is a place where you can go to the local grocery shop in your shorts and bathroom slippers and the only weird thing will be your haste to get home so that at least someone cares.

Calcutta is defined by ‘Balwant Singh ka Dhaba’ where people go to eat religiously. Oh, and if you ever go there? Don’t leave without having ‘ doodh cola ‘. Yumm. Calcutta is ‘mishti doi’ and ‘roshogolla’ and ‘phuchka’ and ‘shutki machh’. Calcutta is both love and ‘bhalobasha’. Calcutta is people getting all awkward if two people hug in the middle of the road and yet smirking, looking away and walking off and letting them be.

Calcutta is Victoria Memorial and Alipore Zoo and the various families who plan their picnic there on the first of January every year. Calcutta is Princep Ghat and the lovers who happily plan their future there, a place where nothing seems to matter and everything so insignificant apart from the person one is with. Calcutta is New Market on Christmas and New Year where the entire city does their Christmas shopping from, regardless of whether they are Christians or not. Calcutta is Park Street all decked up where people go to party like crazy. Calcutta is Arsalan’s mutton biriyani and cewai and halim on Eid irrespective of what faith you belong to. Calcutta is Durga Pujo and the many beautiful women that you can see on those five days. It is the many love stories that are formed or sown in those five days, of which people speak to their grand children with moist happiness in their old eyes. Calcutta is Kumartuli, where the idols are made; it is an artist’s paradise. Calcutta is that one last flick of wrist which renders Maa Durga’s third eye complete. Calcutta is the red and white sarees that the women wear on Dashami and the Sindur Khela that ensues. It is the Pushpanjali on Durga Ashtami.  Calcutta is a place where everyone celebrates every single festival irrespective of the religion that they follow.

Calcutta is Nahoum’s plum cake and Flury’s for breakfast. Calcutta is Narayan’s kachauri for a delicious Sunday breakfast and the phuchka you get in front of Globe theatre. Yumm again.

Calcutta is where you don’t need to worry about losing yourself anywhere because some way or the other everything is linked. Calcutta is Saraswati Puja being the Bengali Valentine’s day. The one day when boys and girls dress up in their Indian best and go to school.

Calcutta is your neighbours telling you to continue your riyaaz at four in the morning because it’s a good start to their day. Calcutta is everyone being concerned about your board results and coming to your home with sweets to know your results. Calcutta is Pujo shopping and Pandal hopping. It is about family lunches every Sunday and dinners at ten every night. Calcutta is Red Road on Republic Day and Eden Gardens on any day. Calcutta is about every insignificant thing that one can think of in life. All those little things that make up life? Well, that is just one day in the City of Joy, Calcutta.

It doesn’t matter who you are and where you’re from, if you live in Calcutta, the city will embrace you with open arms. Calcutta is a place where everyone is family. Calcutta is the rickshaw pullers knowing exactly where you live; it is all those late night Dover Lane music conferences. It is about all those strong, Bengali, independent and argumentative people who are highly intellectual and fiercely protective and passionately loving. Piece of advice? Never, ever pick a verbal fight with a Bengali, you won’t even know how, when and why you’ve lost.

Calcutta is the best place and the worst place. It is slow, irritating, noisy, hot and humid; but it is beautiful, passionate and fiery too. You might want to run away from there because you don’t want the overdose of excess love that you’re bound to be embraced with in there. But once out of that city, you’ll want to go back.

It is that one place where you can argue politics anywhere and everywhere without your opponent keeping any hard feelings after the argument. Most of such arguments happen at social gatherings like family lunches or a wedding or a birthday party even. You can argue politics with your father but keep in mind, when you’re just on the brink of winning, your mother will call you for dinner. It is a city with which nothing else can match.

Calcutta is home for the people, for the silent buildings who have for centuries now smiled at first loves, smirked at lover’s tiffs, laughed at children’s idiocies and grieved at a good soul’s leaving the earth. It is that one place where no matter what, people will care. It is that one place where people will come to your home with food and stay there by your side at odd hours of emergency.

Calcutta is a beauty which is incomparable because it includes everything. The food, the people and their compassion, the transport system, the slow city life. The afternoon naps and the brilliant dates at Princep Ghat. Calcutta is home to me not because that is where i was born, but because of what the people there have given me and because of what I learnt in my time there – Hope, strength, happiness and an overdose of excess love. It has taught me to love, to hope and to instil hope in others as well.

‘Amar shohor Kolkata’ (My city Calcutta) will always be mine forever. You can take me out of Calcutta but not Calcutta out of me. That is home, and home as they say is where the heart is. 

-Sohini Bardhan

Batch 2014-19