Something Like A Love Letter Maybe

If Kolkata were a person, it would probably be a woman, and she would probably have split personalities.

No, hear me out. I have thought about it. Over the two years that I was away in another city, I have really thought about her.

If Kolkata were a person, she would definitely have split personalities. One would be a prim, sophisticated woman in her twenties, clad in a flowery, billowy skirt and lacy blouse and preening to the music, full of an elegance and grace and glamor that shimmers through the night. And another, well, that would be of a kind, gentle grandmother, the sort who pampers you excessively, shields you from your mother's reprimands and asks you to bring her all kinds of sweets, almost bursting with a warmth that fills out the sky on a gloomy, frigid day.

I've come back to her, again and again, and I cannot do it without a sigh.

I peer at her and I find familiar faces milling around, even though I've never known them. I look at the streets streaked with dirt and garbage caked in corners, and I don't balk at them. I curse under my breath (or loudly, if I'm feeling bold), but then I move on. Because when I think of this city, I think: College Street. With books spilling from every corner, piling up in heaps precariously, begging me to go touch them. Shopkeepers calling out to me leaning out of their shops, making my attempts at dodging the fingers of temptation much harder. The faint hum of intellectual and trashy conversation and the mandatory clouds of cigarette smoke invading our senses as we bound up the stairs of Coffee House. I think: Nandan and lebu cha (lemon tea). With its lush green sprawled out on the lawn, the leafy, too-leafy trees snaking around the theater halls. The fountain water spattered over my skin, rooting me to the spot. The lake behind it looking serene and its watery surface unbreakable as ever. The scores of differently dressed people ambling up the paved grounds, hanging out in their own little worlds, making their own little worlds, the music of their guitar strings carried over to me by the soft-blowing wind.

I think: Maidan and trams. The slowest crawl of the tram wheels on the tracks, their loud whine as they scrape against the metal, screech to a halt, and then go on coasting along the narrow street flanking the field again. The field scattered with everyone from preteens to late-fifties, stretched over the grassy plain, or sauntering away and around the horses and straggle of jugglers, hand in hand, taking a languorous break from their clamorous life.

Photo from Google

I think: Rabindra Sarobar and mutton biryani from Hajra More. The stoned pathways winding around the big, sprawling lake, with a copse of trees making sheltered canopies overhead. The couples of teenagers and adults making whispered conversations and stealing small kisses under them, forcing us to cringe and smile and wince and get on. The white swans tearing through the watery surface, leaving trails of ripples behind them like bubbles of air you can't help breathing. Us dangling our feet from the edge of the lake, staring across the water while ripping apart the piece of meat and gobbling it up hungrily with the biryani rice.

I think: blue buses and yellow taxis and purple metros. The throng of people holding on to the window bars and hanging from outside the pregnant bus, not afraid to risk their lives for a few hours of slavery. The metro doors barely closing with the heaving crowd inside, the stench of the sweating men wrapping around our nostrils like a piece of cloth used to staunch a nosebleed. The taxis speeding through the Howrah bridge, toward the stifling swarm of people pressing into the gates of Howrah station. The bus conductors yelling hoarsely names of places you carry with you over the seas. I think of all the laughter and tears and anger and break-ups and gossips buried in these places. The things that make them special, though they look nothing so. And I wonder, what is home? Is it all these places, or is it the people in them? Though, really, it doesn't matter, does it? Because at the end of the day, no matter how much I want to leave this place, I also want to stay.