Ah Calcutta!

“You are going to my hometown! Kolkata is great” said Sahana when she heard that I was taking a flight to Kolkata in less than some two hours. Her eyes brightened. Kolkata is home to her, though she now lives in Dhaka. We were not sure of this trip even before 24 hours. One of our group members was rejected the visa making everything uncertain for everyone else. She got it the night before and the tour was on again. Others started by road the next morning; while I was held to witness the historical presence of one of my favorite (and one of the most outstanding) writers writing in English as he lectured at IUB on February the 22 nd . He is originally from the place I was going to. He is from Kolkata.

Amitav Ghosh has the capacity to detonate a grenade inside your mind. I admit that I was absolutely swept off my feet when I first came across The Shadow Lines. The narrative is so intricate yet powerful that for a very long time everything I read seemed utterly bland. For a very long time I was in a trance. I would only think of May who witnessed how the riotous mob cut open her lover’s throat; or, the anonymous narrator who hopelessly loved the girl he could never have. What tormented me most, however, was the longing of the narrator’s grandmother for Dhaka—her home—which had been callously cut off her life by the shadow lines of partition.

Every time I went to India after that, I could not help thinking of the invisible shadow lines of separation and of connection. I thought of it this time too. As I moved around Kolkata, I came across many people with a peculiar sense of longing for Bangladesh. One salesperson started calling me Boin instead of Didi and also started talking in a broken Barisal dialect when she realized that we are from the other side of the border. A friend of my brother kept talking about how much his father misses that part of Bengal and how he himslef doesn’t care a shit about that being born in Kolkata. I met my mother’s brother who has been living in India since 1964 and only has faint memories of Rajshahi. May be he has forgotten how his mother, my grandmother, looked 44 years back. She, now 84 years old and paralyzed from waist down, sometimes sobs “Debu, Debu” but soon her physical ailments overpower her sense of loss and she is pulled back to the reality. My grandma’s brother, a retired government officer, has a longing for Balihar, a remote village in Naogaon and his birthplace. He, nevertheless, understands that the Balihar of his imagination will not match with what he might see. Therefore, he doesn’t also want to puncture his mental picture.

We stayed in Kolkata for 3 days. It was fun for us girls; we did crazy shopping. The guys, however, had to remain satisfied with carrying our bags to the hotel. The steamy street food, the tana-rickshaws, the glitzy shopping malls, the mushrooming cineplexes and the tourists make Kolkata the olla podrida of colors and cultures. The flavor of internationalism is not altogether absent. But yet Kolkata remains different; different than all the other places that we might go to. It is a place with which we all share a love-hate relationship. We get angry why the hell we need visas to go there… it is not REALLY bidesh. . It is dirty like Dhaka yet it is lovable. After all, we share the same language if not the same nationality. There are so many shadow lines to connect us. Let’s not think for a while about the lines that separate. Ah Calcutta!