Kolkata: unsystemized impressions

I was beforehand scared by the scale of the city that I would not be able to handle…so huge it would be.. yet, it appeared much more welcoming and smaller than I pictured it…

Haora train station looked very busy with the flow of its daily routines… too busy to bother you… a very rare quality for a train station… I took a 4-Rs ferry crowded with the people starting a new day: during a short journey a one-legged man did his crawl asking for money, a few shoe-polishing men in doti were roaming around with their wooden boxes akin to the huge irons, tapping their wooded brushes against the boxes and searching for a pair of dusty shoes to polish. The ferry brought me to a very nice locality nearby the Stock Exchange. Once done with my tickets I consulted a policeman in a white uniform manually regulating the traffic and took a 4-rupee bus to Sealdah, the train station wherefore I was to catch my night train. The bus was quite short, had wooden seats with little carvings on the backs, the strips of wood on the floors; a conduction with a little leather bag that could be sold for a decent amount of… not rupees, dollars! at an antique auction; and very polite gentlemen who would give you your legitimate lady seat without you having to ask for it and who would not try to squeeze in the gap between you and the next sitting passenger (while the gap may be sufficient for 2 men from the North). Once done with my luggage I took another bus to Park Street, a very pleasant locality. Later on I tried the metro (again for four rupees) that looks like the brand-new one in Delhi would probably look in a decade below the line: not sterile, but still well-maintained ad habitable.

I checked out the New Market that prides itself on an enormous variety of goods from a needle to an elephant… and I got indeed amazed by the density of the shops housed by the famous red building and the diversity of the range they offer… Moreover, the whole area around Esplanade consisting of shops and street stalls and the rush around made a shocking impression on me. I got this picture of Kolkatians pursuing a hobby of obtaining things – going out to the markets, interacting, bargaining and getting things… One episode I observed was rather descriptive of that. At a non-food market a huge jeep was leaving the parking lot. Bizarrely enough, a man with two cauliflowers appeared nearby and started reaching with those to a woman sitting in the car, “Gobi, gobi! Bis ke do!... Ok, pandra, pandra rupea!”… What a spirit!...

I checked out Maidan, “possibly the largest urban park in the world” according to my guidebook. As my companion, the guy I met during my tea dispute (the chai-man wanted to charge me 5 Rs instead of usual 2-3 for a cup of tea and the guy paid both my tea and his on this clearly inflated rate – not very reasonable, but very male – this was how we met)…anyway, as he explained the park was pretty much exploited by the couples. Well, no surprise – this was the main usage of the parks in Delhi too. Yet, when I looked around I realized a critical difference between two metropolises. In Delhi the couples were represented by shameful girls in salwar-kameez and their more Westernized (in terms of clothes) boyfriends who would seat next to each other holding hands at some remote spot of a park. Here in Kolkata the couples would express their emotions more explicitly even when walking together (!) on the streets… So the parks are saved for even tenderer hugging with the full usages of the open areas, bushes, shady places and umbrellas.