The City Of Joy

DOMINIQUE Lapierre's sardonic banter has stuck. On an immense span of the Howrah bridge a legend has been carefully scrawled: Calcutta is beautiful. We love you Calcutta. From under the shadows of the great bridge roads snake out to connect far flung parts of the city. Beauty and love become progressively evident. Decrepit, crumbling buildings wearing a century of soot, dust and cobwebs stare down with lidless NIRMAL eyes at the anarchy of traffic and the misery of desti-tutes who live, eat, sleep, defecate and squabble in Burra Bazar, Manicktala, Narkeldanga, Ultadanga and beyond. A blanket of smog hangs overhead day and night. Everywhere you turn, the city festers with its dying and the dead. Paritosh Sen, the painter, whose work underwent a reorientation in response to the enormity of Calcutta's emotional upheavals told me matter of factly: Calcutta has no future. So he is moving out of his middle-class Ballygunge neighbourhood of 27 years and shifting to the tranquility of super affluent Alipore. My sister Gayatri Lahiri told me the story of Abdul Ghani Khan Chowdhury, which just about sums up the paralysed nature of Calcutta. The former railway minister had once engaged an expert to learn how to board and disembark from a local train. As trained, he fought, kicked and clawed his way into a train in Sealdah station for a 33-minute journey to Dum Dum. Dazed and exhausted by the effort, he soon noticed that the 33 minutes were over. Once again he elbowed, jostled, dived and slammed out of massed bodies and fell on the platform belly up. When he recovered, someone told him that the train had never moved. It was still standing at the Sealdah station.