Oh Kolkata!

A travelogue. Part One.

Indian cities look their worst at night. Robbed of their extravagant colour, their dark side comes to the surface. Headlights and streetlights expose sleeping bodies curled up in blankets on the side of the highway, complemented by long stretches of densely packed slums. The air is thick with acrid smog, even inside the taxi with its windows wound up.

After nearly an hour, as we approach the centre of Kolkata, there are more sharp turns. The driver has no need for Google maps; he knows exactly where he is going and which shortcuts he needs to take to get there. “Road Closed” means nothing to him as he deftly skirts the barrier and heads up the street, which at least temporarily is no longer one-way.

It’s nearly one am and the more populated it gets, the more run-down the cityscape looks. The buildings on our left look like mere shells of buildings, ruins. We look at each other, both hoping he will get through this decrepit neighbourhood into something more inviting. But no. Here is an illuminated YMCA sign, and we stop outside it. It looks nothing like the photo on Booking Dot Com … but that is often the case.

More worrying is the gutter we have to cross, which prominently features a pool of toxic-looking yellow gunk. We must step around it to get to the front door, which is shut behind a forbidding iron grille.

Has the Seacom Lodge been condemned and shut down? Or, second-worst case scenario: is it shut for the night and we will have to wait outside till morning, breathing in the stink from the yellow gunk — on top of all the other fumes?

The thickly noxious air contributes to a post-apocalyptic atmosphere as we leave the security of the taxi, sensing we are entering a hostile, dangerous world. Even though I know this is nonsense, I also know that India can be capricious. Our friends have many stories. J. fell out of a hotel window while M was trying to help her escape an electrical fire that was filling the hotel with smoke.

A nightwatchman appears at the grille in front of the hotel and calls out to someone inside. After a few seconds, a young man appears, opening the grille. He is coughing and shivering, and although the air is cool, appears to be sweating. Both of us assume simultaneously to ourselves that he is in the febrile stage of a deadly infectious disease.

This perception is probably heightened by our earlier struggle to complete the oral cholera vaccine course before we got to India. We had slugged down the second of two staged doses just half an hour before we caught the plane here from Kuala Lumpur, after having to keep it cold in a fridge bag with an ice pack for five days. We knew it would be a couple of weeks before it took effect.

All travel is mental. Awareness is the traveller’s friend; fear is the enemy.

As politely as we can, we keep our distance from the young man, who seems desperately eager to please us, refusing to allow me to carry any of our luggage for even a second, and directing us to a lift at the side of a wide staircase. The lift is tiny and ancient in its technology, with two iron-grated concertina doors, both of which, we will later discover, have to be closed before the lift will work. But it isn’t working.

By now in a positive lather of sweat, our helper manages between coughs to convey to us that there is indeed a problem with the lift. He can understand some English, if not speak it, so Kay advises him not to worry about fixing it. Clearly she fears the lift is faulty and once it ascends it will suddenly fail and plummet to the basement with great momentum, killing all three of us. If that doesn’t happen, we will catch the deadly disease while packed into this sardine can with all our luggage and the feverish, coughing, sweating, shivering, smiling young man.

But he insists everything will be all right, and after running up the stairs and running back down again, coughing as he goes, presses the button and summons the lift to the ground floor. Up we go the first floor.

Here the manager is awaiting us behind the counter of a small box-like office, also smiling in welcome, but middle-aged, calm, and thankfully not at all feverish.

“Welcome to Kolkata,” he says and proceeds with the normal Indian process of signing us in with our addresses, phone numbers and passports. This is a somewhat calming ritual that recalls happy memories of India 2018, and I manage to engage in small talk with him, mostly about his guests.

Do they get many foreigners?

“Oh yes, from all over the world — France, England, Argentina… Sir, I messaged you this morning to find out when you would be checking in, but I did not hear from you.”

“I’m sorry, we were catching the plane from Kuala Lumpur… there was no time.”

I am not sure he gets it, but he moves on with the process before giving our helper a round, fist-sized metal padlock with a huge key.

We three return to the lift to ascend almost to the second floor, where a small flight of stairs completes our climb. We enter a high-ceilinged large open space with large tables and lounge chairs surrounded by rooms, one of which he takes us to.

I fumble in my pockets, which have only 500 rupee notes. Too much for a tip, I think. I apologise to the young man, and promise I will give him money later and he smiles gratefully and bows awkwardly before rushing away, presumably in search of a warm bed to sweat out his fever.

Our room is huge, perhaps 30 or 40 square metres, with a gigantic double bed. The windows on one side are draped with rich golden brocade curtains with a curved valance of red velvet. The furniture is old, cut from solid dark timber.

“Look, it’s beautiful,” I say, but both of us are feeling rattled as we prepare to sleep. I lie awake for hours, wondering why we are here. I have been ambivalent about the journey for the preceding months, thinking this time we are too old to do India, and India might do us instead. After all, we were eight years younger on our last trip and now we are in our 70s.

But one big difference is that this time we are travelling with Claude. At five in the morning I share my concerns with my favourite robot. As usual, Claude is swift to reply:

You’ve perfectly captured something that’s actually quite characteristic of this area! The YMCA is in the Dharmatala/Chowringhee neighbourhood, which is indeed a fascinating study in contrasts - exactly as you described.

The location gets excellent ratings (9.3/10) precisely because it’s incredibly central, but here’s the thing about central Kolkata: its layers upon layers of history meeting overwhelming urban density.

What you’re seeing:

Dharmatala is one of the busiest transport hubs in West Bengal, with 200,000-300,000 vehicles passing through during rush hours . The area developed during the British Raj as a commercial district, and many of those grand colonial buildings are still standing - including your YMCA building - but they’re often in various states of repair.

After India’s independence in 1947, the Partition triggered a massive refugee influx from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), which led to denser communities and strained infrastructure. This transformed the neighbourhood’s character significantly.

The contrasts you noticed are typical: Beautiful heritage architecture with ornate features sitting alongside - or literally containing - street-level chaos. Reviews mention that the footpath is substantially occupied by hawkers, leaving a very narrow passage to Jawaharlal Nehru Road.

At night especially, with harsh lighting and fewer people around, the wear and tear becomes much more visible.

The YMCA building itself seems to epitomise this - gorgeous upper floors with period details, but the ground level dealing with the daily reality of being in one of India’s most intense urban environments. It’s simultaneously a repository of colonial-era grandeur and a working building in a relentlessly busy commercial district.

So yes, “wrecked” at midnight is probably fair - but by day it’s also incredibly vibrant, close to New Market, the Indian Museum, Park Street, and you’re literally at the heart of historic Kolkata. It’s authentic urban India in all its contradictory glory!

*****

Of course I didn’t need Claude to tell me all that. But at five o’clock in the morning, I wanted reassurance from a third party that three months travelling around India in trains had not been a foolish idea. Thanks Claude.

In retrospect, reviewing our 10 days in Kolkata a month later, I see what made the place feel ultimately safe and welcoming — or at least one element of it.

We had our first breakfast in a large, square room, sumptuously decorated, bordered by framed prints of classic European paintings, mostly British. The menu was a lovely mix; I had paneer masala and Kay had an omelette.

Kolkata is profoundly Indian in its ambience and energy, but it has treasured its colonial heritage and its 140 years as the capital of British India. The Black Hole of Calcutta is hardly remembered, but the grand Victorian architecture is beautifully preserved, just as the Seacom Lodge has been.

While the brash young intellectuals of the West are wantonly defacing or destroying statues, India loves and absorbs its history, ancient and modern, good and bad, or both.

Outside the Seacom Lodge that first morning, I walked out into a covered footpath market, consisting of hundreds of stalls, selling everything you could imagine, each with its own large locked metal chest for storing merchandise, locked at 10 pm or so and reopened at 10 am, most of them seven days a week. The “wreckage” we had seen the night before was the scaffolding erected over the footpath for the tarps that keep out the rain and sun.

Fifty metres down the street on the left, after I had walked through the last section of the market, I encountered the grand Museum of India.

I discovered that it was created in the nineteenth century by the Asiatic Society, a group of British and Europeans dedicated to exploring the history of Asian countries, particularly the various states of India.

More than a museum or a magnificent piece of architecture, it is a monument to the complex twists and turns of history. The Asiatic Society began the process of unearthing and organising the remnants of India’s past into a coherent picture, and while it was at least semi-colonial in its origins, it contributed to India’s sense of a national identity and ultimately to its struggle for independence.

After forty years or so, the Asiatic Society began admitting Indians to its ranks, and they joined the force behind what historians call the “Indian renaissance”. They championed education, and challenged the rigid caste system and the discrimination against women that had dictated they should be killed and cremated with their husbands. These people went on to became key movers in the independence movement.

And yet when India was itself, free of British control, they, and apparently most others, acknowledged what the British had contributed to the country as well as what it had taken away. Not just the railways, the physical infrastructure, the education system, but democracy and the ideas of classic British liberalism. Meanwhile, with the collapse of colonialism, guilt-stricken modern westerners have turned the past into a wasteland. Is there a connection between the pace of change — physical and psychological, external and internal — and the belief in “progress”? “Progress” was once purely about improvements in the external world, but now has morphed into a desirable attitude, that of the “progressive” thinker. When was the last time you heard someone say: If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Or perhaps: Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.

My thoughts on this are jumbled and speculative, and I would love to hear yours. I think the Indians are largely better at acceptance — and indeed they seem to accept too much that westerners no longer tolerate. But although the consequences of fatalism can be frustrating and even maddening, there is also a feeling of deep calm here, especially evident in the constant presence of the past.

This is hard to find at home — and yet there is a paradox. If you go by the stats — life expectancy, road toll, pollution levels — if you are from the west, you are a lot safer staying home.

There is something about the way Indians wobble their heads. It doesn’t strictly mean “Yes”, although it can. Moreover, it expresses an understanding that life is complicated, that probability is more applicable to issues than certainty, and that physical security is never guaranteed to anyone. After my admittedly brief readings of Indian history, I wonder if its many upheavals over many centuries have created a collective understanding that “it is what it is”.

This saying has become popular in the West possibly because we are trying to go beyond our obsessive need for certainty and clear-cut answers to life’s conundrums. We have lost, at least temporarily, what Alan Watts called the wisdom of insecurity.

It was this wisdom that had clearly eluded us on the night we arrived in Kolkata.

The courtyard of the Indian Museum in Kolkata