Nehaveigur

A few years ago, I took a short trip to Kolkata to go to a wedding. I didn’t take any photos, but the trip is more vivid in my memory than most others I’ve taken.

The airport was crowded, old and chaotic. My friend was picking me up but he was late, and as I was standing there, I was surrounded by men offering me rides. It took some time to make clear that I wasn’t interested.

Like its airport, Kolkata itself was also crowded, old and chaotic. The architecture in the center was beautiful, had clearly been around for some time and wasn’t like any I had seen before. The British colonial influence is there but overall it’s unmistakably Indian.

The most unexpected aspect of Kolkata were the sidewalks. The city’s inhabitants didn’t consider them only as places to walk, but also as a place to stand, sit and sleep. As I was walking down the street, I often had to step over the legs of people who were taking a nap.

There was a refreshing absence of Western chain stores and brands. I went to a few fine restaurants but also tried the street food, carefully limiting myself to the fried stuff.

The wedding to which I had been invited was a very large, multi-day affair. The groom and the bride were both friends I had met back in England, and they were gracious hosts, especially considering the many other things that competed for their attention. I remember them sitting on thrones at one end of a large hall, eating colorful dresses and looking happy but exhausted, while their many wedding guests, including myself, helped themselves to the buffet.

I also took a two day tour of the Sundarbans, a mangrove forest in the Ganges Delta that I had read about in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide. From my air conditioned bus, I saw straw covered mud houses by the side of the dirt road and the families inhabiting them standing in ponds by the roadside, the dirty water up to their chests.

While I’d have preferred to see the tigers the tour operator had promised, the mudskippers I got to see were interesting too. Those fish walk around in the mud surrounding the mangroves on their pectoral fins, illustrating what the evolutionary transition of vertebrates from water to land may have looked like.

As I am writing this, I was wondering if the vividness of this trip is due to me not having taken any photos, so that it stayed fresher in my memory. Then I thought about it some more and soundly rejected that idea: the vividness comes from the vividness of Kolkata itself.