Calcutta homecoming

A journey through time and distance to a long ago and far away city

Last week I went back to Calcutta, the city of the mind, in which I grew up, and which I still think of as home.

The journey, through time and distance, was effected by my going to a Bengali restaurant in Gurgaon with the apt name of Abar Khabo, I’ll eat again.

I once read that home is the taste of the food of your childhood. Of all our senses perhaps that of taste is the most evocative of the past. Taste incorporates the senses of aromatic smell, appealing sight, tactile touch, and the sound of the satisfied sigh of a meal enjoyed.

My Calcutta of long ago and far away was resurrected in the tang of the mustard oil in which the food had been made, in the hint of coconut which gave the gravy a silky savour, the nose-tingling keenness of the kasundi, sharp as happy surprise.

It was a feast, in more ways than one. All around was exclamatory Bengali which, along with Urdu, is perhaps the most melodious of the many languages of the subcontinent and which, together with Kutchi, was the most spoken in our Calcutta home.

Perched on the wall, its sound drowned in the sea of animated conversation, a small black-and-white TV played what looked like a Tollywood movie of the early 1960s.

And was it my imagination or did I hear amid this excited vocalisation the bass lullaby of the wheels of the last tram of the night which would lull me to sleep in our flat on Chowringhee Road, the north-south axis around which revolved the world of the city which I knew?

And could those be the strains of dulcet Robindrosangeet coming from a sleepy Sunday afternoon radio in Bhawanipur to the counterpoint of the faint sibilance of begoon bhaja frying for lunch?

And, thanks to the diaspora, from Manhattan to Melbourne, from Bradford to Baltimore, in places such as this, in the ember glow of memory, dispelling the illusion of time and distance, Calcutta is reborn, phoenix arising.