Kolkata Diary

I am now in a South Kolkata state-of-mind. 

It took me a couple of days to get used this, and it is so, so different from the mental framework you need elsewhere in North India. For starters, you don't wake up to smoggy, cold mornings, wondering whether it is safe to take in a deep breath. The air is relatively cleaner, the sun rises earlier, and ebb and flow of social interactions is lot more relaxed, friendlier and jovial.

Thanks to the Covid lockdowns, I had not been in this city for more than two years, and I wondered how things had changed in the interim.

As has been my habit for more than a decade now, I started my day around 05:45am with a walk to the lake, aka Rabindra Sarobar. The streets were slowly coming to life in the twilight - flower sellers stringing up garlands, milk-vans doing rounds of the kirana shops, and sweepers cleaning up the roads, oblivious of protests from crows and sparrows. Further down from Dhakuria, on both sides of the narrow roads of Jodhpur Park, people filled up water from roadside taps, sipped chai at tiny dhabas, or bargained with the fish-vendors.  

Everything seemed just the way it was before, until i crossed the railway lines I found my usual entrance to the Lake Park barred by a locked gate. This was new - why had they closed this particular entrance to the park? I went across to a group of men sitting under a tree and asked them if there was another open gate nearby. A portly, bearded old man just laughed and said, "Andar jana he? - bas tapki maaro!" (want to get in? just hop across!) :)

Turns out that the gate was designed for doing a tapki, with easy, well-worn footholds for climbing across the 10ft gate. Welcome back to Kolkata, I said to myself, a place where unreasonable rules are meant to be broken.

Another unreasonable rule that is always broken in Kolkata is about footpaths. They are not exclusively for pedestrians. Here footpaths are an egalitarian public space meant for anybody who seeks a livelihood, and pedestrians get just enough space to file past the shops. On the busiest streets it is quite normal to see more than half the footpath width taken up by an endless row of tiny shops, and eateries. This has been going on for so long that even trees adapt themselves to the shape of these little shops, as is the case with this teashop enveloped by a banyan tree near the Jadavpur University crossing.

The hustle and bustle at these shops is a bit misleading though. People are still recovering from the Covid lockdowns. "People mostly come to just look at the wares", said one shopkeeper at Gariahat market, "It is a lucky day when we manage to sell half of what we used to sell before covid!". The same sentiment was repeated at Bedwin Rolls, an eatery famous for its mutton rolls but there is nothing remotely mutton on the menu now. "At INR 800+ a kilo, we just cannot afford it...usually a kilo works out to be enough for 10-12 rolls, but each would have to be priced at INR 150 for us to make a profit...and nobody wants a mutton roll at that price."

Unlike in NCR Delhi, few shops have had to close down entirely. Most of the small shopkeepers here seem to have adapted by changing the menu or product mix. There are more boards that display availability of oxygen and medicines, and, as expected, home-delivery services seem to be thriving now. For some reason jewellery shops are thriving too.  It seem the arrival of the big boys like JoyAlukkas, has had no impact on the numerous, tiny jewellery shops that dot the lanes of Dhakuria. Ditto for beauty saloons. The one nearest to us is "Rita's Parlour - Your Beauty is Our Duty"! :)

Yet, one big surprise is that hardly any shops accept digital payments. Again unlike in NCR, Tamil Nadu or Kerala, where just about every street vendor offers you the option of paying by PayTM, PhonePe or GooglePay, each and every shop I visited here insisted on a cash payment. 

Why is Kolkata / West Bengal bucking the national trend?