A day in Calcutta

I was relieved after the wedding. It was a lavish affair, and a noisy affair, besides being a crowded one. I enjoyed it as much as a tacit person can enjoy at a friend’s wedding-I chiefly was engaged in observing people through out the evening. But as I said, I was relieved after the wedding and my first trip to Bengal all alone, got transformed from a grueling exercise in desirable social etiquettes and mannerisms as it was at the wedding in Durgapur to a memorable sojourn when on the following day, I went to Calcutta.I had only half a day at my disposal and I was amazed that despite all my wooly-headedness, I could tell Namrata at the Howrah station where she came to receive me, that I should very like to go to a place where I could shop for Bengali books and music. She had nodded her head significantly. We traveled across the Hoogli river in a ferry and then, we walked along the avenues of Dalhousie on our way to a Chinese restaurant where she had wished to take me for lunch. On our way, admiring the colonial architecture of the buildings I commented, “I wish I could stay in one of these buildings!”
“Well, you can. All that you need to do is to find for yourself a groom hailing from any of the old bonedi families of North Calcutta; they live in such ramshackle old mansions.” Namrata said and I scowled in reply. It is very unpleasant, I told her, to hear jokes about one’s own marriage just after one has attended a friend’s wedding. We ate in a seedy restaurant where there were men drinking at 2 in the afternoon. I must have stared at them in amazement for long because Namrata reprimanded me, “Ai takash na obhabe. Tor Ahmedabad e theke ekdom shobhab kharap hoye geche.” (Don’t glare at the men who are drinking. Ahmedabad has clearly ruined your good habits/manners). I turned away self-consciously and that was my only awkward moment of the trip. Thank Heavens! We next went to Park Street and there, at the Oxford Book store, Namrata must have had to undergo a most difficult test of her patience as I quite shamelessly(am I being too harsh on myself, Namrata?) forgot her existence and squatted on the floor of the shop with piles of books. I began going through a Sunil Gangopadhyay omnibus, and also works of Sukumar Ray, Ashapurna Devi, Narayan Gangopadhyay and Shirjendu Mukhopadhyay. In a state of excited fervour, I had also picked Calvino, Mc Luhan, and Roberto Calliso. The book shop is one of the best that I have ever been to and unlike any other book store, has the books in its fiction section arranged in an alphabetic order after the names of the authors!
I could not allow myself to overlook the fact that I had only a thousand and five hunded rupees to spend on books and that I should be rather ashamed if I did not buy a book for my dear, old Baba who always buys books for me whenever he visits any place. It was a difficult task; a grave responsibility. I spend the next hour or so in a state of unbearably sweet agony, meticulously going through each of the tomes, trying to decide which of these works were absolutely essential for my existence. I figured Baba would like Shirjendu Mukhopadhyay’s wry, ironic humour as I much I do and that this could be one author whom both of us could read (unlike his favourite authors Bankim Chandra Chatterjee or Sharat Chandra Chatterjee whose classical style is beyond my power of comprehension given the fact that my Bangla vocabulary is rather limited). I also picked a volume of collected works of Narayan Gangopadhyay, a Calvino book called Adam, one afternoon, a couple of Tapan Sinha movies and a copy of the latest edition of Biblio, which I had last read a year ago in the TISS library! I finally stood up to realize that I have not spoken to Namrata, my gracious hostess in the city for over an hour now. Shit! I hurriedly looked around for her almost expecting to find her, mad at me for making her wait for so long But fortunately, she was reading something herself.(Was it not a book shop that we were in? What else could she have been doing?)
From the book store, we went to-because I hollered in excitement at the sight of the delicatessen- Flurry’s. I told her that I know of this place from the movie Parineeta, and that I also knew that it’s a very old pastry shop. In reply,she smiled indulgently. As I entered it, I had a deja-vu; I was reminded of Causeway in Bombay and its brightly-lit restaurants housed in old buildings.
Finally, when we boarded a local train at the Howrah station to Joka to go to Namrata’s house, we were both pushed and shoved so badly that I almost lost her. It began to rain soon and by the time we got off the train, it was pouring heavily. It was the most unexpectedly beautiful end of an unexpectedly pleasant day-when I had left the blazing city of Ahmedabad a day back, I had not hoped to get drenched in a downpour! Namrata was now looking for a cycle rickshaw to take us home….