The Way We Walk

I'm back in Kolkata after a substantial amount of time. A short break, mainly family business that takes its own time and has its own dimensions. On the sidelines, I observe the changed contours of the old hometown.

Kolkata was not a place I ever lived in, properly. It was the city of my ancestors, to which I returned periodically, the mention of whose name evoked memories of a creepy, narrow, three-storeyed house in a very congested part of the city. Childhood routines involved travelling from farflung places in India - mainly border towns - to Kolkata for the inevitable summer holiday pilgrimage to visit elderly relatives and distant cousins. In those days, the city was a place of overwhelming sensation - people spilling out of crowded buses, walking on the broken streets, cars honking madly while belching dark petrol and diesel fumes. What saved these memories from becoming one of many cliched tales of Kolkata impressions was the sudden movement of detail in these mass frescoes of humanity - a man who found the time (and the energy) to wink at me despite hanging on for dear life to the outside of a lopsided bus, a fruitseller at New Market, so old that my mother stopped deliberately to buy his wares, despite not needing (or subsequently eating) his wilting jamuns. I still remember the faded checked bush shirt of the former man, and the grizzled white stubble of the latter.

Aeons later, I notice how the urban spaces here have shifted, as have their uses. First, the positives. There is no question that people in general look better-fed and are better-dressed Maybe they don't appear so to untrained foreign eyes, but those of us who grew up here know the extent of the changes for the better that have taken place. The absolutely destitute who crowded around our childish elbows in the 1970s and 1980s, have receded into the occasional beggar at the Topsia traffic light. And all of this is a good thing, despite its incompleteness and unevenness as a process.

The spaces between the haves and the have-nots have increased, however, quite literally. As M. and I look over the balcony each morning, I notice that the street in front of my parents' house is walked most often by the people who service the homes of this middle class residential neighborhood - maids, fruitsellers, fishmongers, lock-repairmen - and by stray dogs and crows who fight for territory. The Kolkata middle classes who made up such a large chunk of the flaneurs of the preceding era are less visible. Their preferred stroll now is within the more sanitized territory of the shopping malls where the unpredictabilities of the street are well-controlled. Women stroll, window shop, eat pastries and drink cold coffee in relative calm. Part of me sympathizes - the unruly streets outside are particularly hard for the female pedestrian. Who wants to deal not only with stray dogs but with other menacing predators who also hunt in pack - eve teasers? Still, the other part of me laments the separation and segregation of the classes. A middle class teenager now might not learn from her mother to stop out of compassion for a geriatric fruitseller. For such a girl these days, that fruitseller is not only invisible, he is a fellow citizen with whom she will never learn to interact. A pity, really.