Calcutta 1946.
When I was a boy in Chandannagar, just past the age of nine, a new song burst upon us and achieved instant popularity. It could be heard on the gramophone, and it was played on loudspeakers all over the town. It had a sombre message presented in a mocking tone, in that peculiar north Calcutta argot in which English and Bengali words were artfully combined – the English ones pronounced in a Bengali way so as to rhyme with the Bengali words:
Calcutta 1943 October.
ARP, military,
Pathe-ghate bhikiri
Accident and crowd,
Control, permit, blackout;
And sab jinisher barlo dar:
Calcutta 1943 October.
It had everything: famine, destitution, overcrowding, the war, air raids and rationing.
Calcutta was the city of every mofussil Bengali’s dream. The sombre message passed me by, and I thought of Calcutta only in terms of its variety and abundance. It had everything that Chandannagar lacked. No doubt London was even more magnificent, but it was out of my reach, even in imagination. Calcutta, on the other hand, occupied a central place in our folklore, and it must be remembered that my earliest experience of the city goes back to the time “before the partition of India.
First: the Calcutta of my imagination, before my return from boarding school. Chandannagar was...
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