Eleven acclaimed writers come to Calcutta, but can only capture its aspects, not its essence
The Daily Telegraph has followed up its first—and award-winning—Weekenders project in Sudan by sending 11 writers to Kolkata, to spend a few days there, and write about the city: fiction or non-fiction. The line-up is impressive, from acclaimed Irish author Colm Toibin and Booker-shortlisted Monica Ali, to former England cricket captain Michael Atherton and Irvine Welsh, poet of depravity. The results are mixed.
W.F. Deedes writes about two children, recent migrants to the city, who get lost and find refuge in Howrah station. Ali writes about Deepak, who got lost and found refuge in Howrah station. Irvine Welsh’s narrator lived as a lost child for some time in Howrah station. Victoria Glendinning’s narrator makes friends with a little girl living on the streets. Initially mystified—surely there’s more to Kolkata than children living on streets and on railway platforms—I figured it out when I discovered that all the writers had been taken around the city by Tim Grandage who runs an ngo that works with street children. Leading to the above obvious outcomes.
There are also errors that nag. The Missionaries of Charity’s Nirmal Hriday is spelt Niram Hriday; first-class AC on the Rajdhani Express is very different from AC three-tier; many young sex workers at Sonagachhi are Nepali, not Tibetan. Toibin’s excellently researched article is marred at the end by his belief that the crowds at expensive restaurants are the result of Silicon Valley engineers booking tables in Kolkata for their parents, and paying the bills from their homes in the US. And even Howrah station, after all the limelight, becomes Homah at one point!
But these errors pale when in several pieces, characters mysteriously change their names. In Deedes’ story, Shefali suddenly turns into Lilian (Lilian!), Sunil becomes Salwan. In Welsh’s creepy masterpiece, the heroine’s sister keeps changing her name from Tasneem to Gitanjali and back again!
Yet Weekenders contains much good, incisive, touching and funny writing. Here’s Bella Bathurst on Kolkata rush-hour traffic: "You will learn that there are always at least three possible ways of approaching any route (backwards, forwards or sideways), that you should never on any account look behind you, that a strict but invisible hierarchy operates in all things, that an untimely death is only a passport to a better life, that it is necessary to hold fast to a belief in karma, that the true believer must pray with frequency and fervour, and that enlightenment is to be reached by first passing through several subsidiary stages—bewilderment, terror, intimate awareness of one’s mortality—on the way to a state of almost trance-like peace and acceptance." The perceptive Toibin manages to tell the world what most Kolkatans feel, that Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray are "the legacy of Calcutta, its true value, what the world should know. For them, the idea that the city has become synonymous, to the outside world, with the life and work of an elderly Catholic nun, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who did nothing except look after small numbers of the poor, is both absurd and insulting". This insight alone—plus Toibin’s analysis of the similarities between Bengali, Irish and Catalonian history—should be worth the price of the book for anyone who loves that beautiful and squalid life force that resides on the banks of the Hooghly.
Ali’s tale is as tender and moving as Welsh’s is chilling; the man made my hair stand on end several times during his pitiless exploration of a mind fast unravelling. But in all fairness, the story could have been set in almost any other great urban centre—New York or Cairo—without losing any of its power. The best piece of journalism in the book comes from an unlikely source, Atherton, about a man, who, tyrannised from childhood by a cricket-obsessed father, finally rebels by refusing an mcc scholarship. It is a finely detailed portrait crafted with sympathy and understanding. The reference to the father listening to Ajoy Bose’s cricket commentary is the stuff of the pinkest Bengali nostalgia.
But, at the end of Weekenders, Kolkata remains largely unexplored, with most of its caprices and terrible beauty hidden from sight. These will have to wait for more fervid burrowers and less accidental tourists. Not that Kolkata cares, of course.