Calcutta Diaries: Part 3

A walk past the streets...

No one would call crowded Calcutta a peaceful city, but it could teach the world a lot about tolerant coexistence.  My Calcutta is rich and ethnically mixed. A walk past Bowbazaar made me realize that it was the Kolkata of Kolkata.

We began by turning off Chittaranjan Avenue into a labyrinth of narrow lanes. First up was Buddhist temple Street, with a guesthouse for travelling Buddhists from all over the world. Round the corner on Weston Street, children in smart brown uniforms were clattering in to Sacred Heart School. It was a pleasure watching them enter when a girl smiled at me and greeted, ' Good morning Didi.' That smile was probably priceless.

Christian areas have the best bakeries, my friend had said pointing out Ajmeri bakery, piled with fruitcake and sweet-salty bakarkhani naan. It was early morning and milk was being delivered. We followed the “milkman” and his flock to the British-built military housing that gave the area its name: Bow Barracks. After independence, the three-storey apartment blocks, green balconies and shutters contrasting with red brick, were taken over by Anglo-Indians, who love to keep their Christmas traditions alive.

Next year Maa had visited Bowbazaar during Christmas when she had mentioned, 'I saw a santa greeting everyone and he was pulled by a rickshaw!'
I had told her that she had been extremely mean since she didn't take me there. Of course, she justified it by saying that I was busy.

Round the corner on Metcalfe Street, we had stopped for a clay cup of chai. It was 8am and the streets were thronged: a man at a tiny desk had been offering use of a mobile phone to migrant workers; in an ironing parlour, irons that looked like museum pieces were being heating on a wood fire. This is a Parsee territory, my friend had said: a large red and grey building is the Zoroastrian fire temple, where a sacred flame had been burning since 1912. The main temple was out of bounds, but in the outer arcade we admired carvings and stained glass depicting the flame and the Faravahar winged disc symbol, and nodded to a priest in snowy white robes. The Parsees originally fled persecution in Iran but now contentedly shared a street with a subsect of Shia Islam: the Aga Khan Jamatkhana – place of worship for the Ismaili community – stood rights opposite.

The main artery of Bowbazar is BB Ganguly Street. Plied by ancient creaking trams, it had several personalities: a loud and noisy wholesale vegetable market in the east, then a carpentry quarter, then the optical district, with glinting spectacles. But we were off to China – a short step away around Sun Yat Sen Street. Here, red flags hung over doorways bearing Chinese names, hawkers sold prawn crackers and water chestnuts and people were slurping Chinese breakfasts of fishball soup. We could be in Shanghai or Soho. There were noodles, incense sticks, dried mushrooms, and every other shop seemed to be a butcher’s, all pig carcasses and strings of Chinese sausage.

After traveling so much, my friend stopped halfway and I too had to stop. I asked him, 'Tell me how did you feel?'
The only answer which he gave was, 'Can we go around the streets again after a while?'
'Sure...' I smiled telling him that such was the marvel of my Calcutta.