Khalid Mohamed remembers the ‘City of Joy’, a mahanagar steadily losing heritage, culture, and character, as Calcutta—like India’s great metros—faces inevitable change and erasure with the cruel passage of time.

Red double-decker buses: now remembered as ‘elephants of the road’ --were phased out in the early 2000s.

The 150-year-old tram system: the only one in India—has majorly declined. Many iconic routes have been permanently closed due to metro construction and traffic congestion.

Yellow Ambassador taxis: are being replaced by modern hatchbacks and app-based cabs. They are no longer the ubiquitous rulers of the road.

Wooden buses: The old private buses with rattling windows (often Tata or Ashok Leyland models) have almost entirely disappeared, replaced by metal-bodied counterparts.

Hand-pulled rickshaws: Though still present in small pockets like North Kolkata and New Market, they are challenged by constant calls for complete replacement with e-rickshaws.

Sari draping: The traditional way of draping a sari with a bunch of keys on the shoulder is now mostly seen only during festivals or weddings.

Old family mansions (Bonedi Bari): Sprawling colonial-era homes are being demolished to make way for high-rise apartments.

The Original Maidan Book Fair: For decades, The International Book Fair was held at the maidan in the heart of the city. Due to environmental concerns, it was permanently moved to Salt Lake.

Specific candies: Imli sweets and fruit jellies in shaped cases have largely been replaced by international confectionery brands.

Grand old family homes used to house entire generations. But households shrink and new buildings appear.

If Bombay/Mumbai is undergoing a haphazard ‘redevelopment’ accompanied by an altering vertical skyline with scarce concern for its heritage, we are not alone. Every metropolis in India and even townships in the nation are losing their original framework and character.

Change is a must, of course, but surely for the better. The question is–is it? 

Besides Mumbai, my born and raised-in megapolis, Calcutta – altered to Kolkata in 2002 – to erase its colonial-era name - spins me back to the occasional visits to the ‘City of Joy’. Ergo, this attempt at a yearn back to the Mahanagar, which was once and may still be fiercely but haplessly proud of its distinctive identity:

A forgotten song 

In fact, a tantalizing song – originally a German instrumental titled in 1958 and rendered two years later with lyrics most famously by the Sri Lankan, British singer Bob Forbes - will always replay on the turn-table of my mind. The song, rendered with harmonious ease by the forgotten Forbes, went like this: I’ve kissed the girls of Naples…I’ve kissed them in Paris…but the girls of Calcutta do something to me.

I never ever got to know the girls of Calcutta, but mere flashes of a walk on the streets assert that like the city itself, the Cal Gal is special: radiant, modest and intelligent. Those deep, kohl-laden eyes retain an ageless appeal.

Truth be told, Calcutta/Kolkata had cast a timeless spell on a Mumbaikar like me. Not the girls, but Bengal’s unrivalled literature and cinema served as wake-up calls.

For someone in his mid-20s, the city seemed remote, far away, a long-haul three-hour flight away on the domestic route, and sorrily, I didn’t know a friend or any family acquaintance who could give me first-hand knowledge to be in oh-Calcutta, misleadingly perhaps always described as a City of Joy given its visible signs of a vast contrast between the wealthy and the overwhelmingly marginalized yet resilient people.

The city meant Rabindranath Tagore’s superb anthology of poems Gitanjali, Satyajit Ray’s masterly Apu trilogy and of course, on an absolutely primeval level, its sweet delights: mishti doi and K.C. Das’s tinned rosogollas.

Getting to New Market

It was only as a lightly bewhiskered adult that I could experience the majesty of its Durga poojas and Jatra plays. I was at the feet of faith, worship and epical devotion. Colloquially called the Bongs’ the teeming population was unalike any other in the world. There was a dignity and a humanness in the face of dire poverty and sufferance. On my very first visit to Calcutta, I had no alternative but to make it to New Market from the airport, using the only mode of transport that was affordable for a journalist hamstrung with meagre travelling expenses. Feeling exploitative and callous, I clambered on to a human rickshaw to reach the dharamshala where my friends, Rafique Baghdadi and the late Rashid Irani, were waiting for me.

We were there, in the 1980s, for the International Film Festival. The neon lights of the streets whizzed by in a blur as an emaciated, 50ish rickshaw driver pulled me along, his body sweating but his face wreathed in a fluorescent smile. Bimal Roy in Do Bigha Zameen had underlined the plight of a rickshaw puller portrayed with amazing acuity by Balraj Sahni. His passengers, a foolish couple, lorded it over while their steed’ was about to collapse with fatigue. Hoping I hadn’t subjected the rickshaw puller to similar indignity, I mumbled, “Sorry but….”

He interrupted happily, “I’m matric-pass but there’s no other job for me. You don’t have to feel guilty. If you hadn’t taken the rickshaw, I would have gone hungry tonight.”

The rickshaw puller ensured that I had reached the right address, a dharamshala. Entrusting me to my friends, he said, “Don’t ever pity anyone in Calcutta. We don’t need pity, we need work.” As soon as he sped off, the lights went off, almost symbolically on the streets. “Welcome,” my friends grinned,” to the city of power breakdowns.”

  

Cinema lovers

The festival’s revelation, more than the films, was that the city’s elite as well as the hoi polloi are cinema lovers with taste. If there’s a debate about whether Ray’s or Ritwik Ghatak’s has been of superior political relevance, it's debated inconclusively to date.

The retrospective of the Nouvelle Vague French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard drew jam-packed houses. In Mumbai, the crowds would have either rushed to the American blockbusters or the exposure of explicit sexual scenes in films from Sweden.

The Chaplin, the Globe and the Metro were the action spots. If cineastes couldn’t get into a film by the Hungarian master Zoltan Fabri, no problem. They protested for an extra screening, and it was duly organized at midnight. Yes, there was love for cinema in the air, symbolized with a twist of sobriety on the other extreme, by the benign presence of Satyajit Ray.

The Unforgettable Mr Ray

Ray would attend the early morning screenings with son Sandeep, travelling with the press guys in the official bus while commuting from one cinema hall to the other.

Ray, expectedly, kept to himself. I didn’t dare approach him. The first time I’d been introduced to him was in Bombay. He caught my name and immediately intoned, “Oh, so you’re the one who wrote nasty things about Shatranj ke Khilari in The Illustrated Weekly?”

Gulping for breath before the imposing figure, I attempted to tell him that there were certain aspects of his first Hindi film which bothered me. Before I could start on my first sentence, he’d marched ahead. Anyway, so when I espied Ray in Cal, I kept to myself.

It was only years later, when his health was failing, and he was at Bombay’s Taj Mahal Hotel with his son and grandson, that I begged Ravi Malik, a friend of mine at the National Film Development Corporation, to somehow fix a one-to-one interview with Ray.

Happily, that was done, it was an interview that I’d longed for throughout my career. And I was startled out of my mind, when he said just as I was about to leave his room at the Taj, “Look, why didn’t you say hello to me when you were in Calcutta for the festival. I don’t bite, you know. I appreciate criticism, positive or negative…life’s too short for grudges.”

The Mercurial Mrinal Sen

Visits to Calcutta continued regularly after the first festival I attended there, of course. Nandan was a haven for those looking for quality cinema. I struck an acquaintance with Goutam Ghose, Buddhadeb Das Gupta also a poet, and Mrinal Sen.

It was Mrinal Sen who flabbergasted me. He gave me an interview in which he made some salty remarks against Naseeruddin Shah (they had bickered during the making of Genesis) and insisted that I should publish every word that he had said. I did.

Naseeruddin Shah had lashed back at Sen in print. And what do you think Mrinalda did? He accused me of quoting his `off-the-record’ statements and even had the nerve to complain to my editor, Dileep Padgaonkar, right in front of my face. Mercifully, the editor just heard him out and told me, “Not to worry. When they can’t handle things, they say they’re misquoted.”

And that strange retraction by Mrinal Sen was erased when a year later, on flying to the Venice film festival, Sen heard of my plight in securing a hotel room. I was cutting hours till daybreak when he saw me and compelled me to share the suite allocated to him as an official delegate. Humbled, I accepted till I could find shelter in another hotel, a crummy one inevitably.

  

Remember 36 Chowringhee Lane?

Aparna Sen, I had met on numerous occasions but had hardly gone beyond the ‘hello-how-are-you?’ stage. What would I say to her anyway? That I had sobbed my heart out throughout 36 Chowringhee Lane?

Another filmmaker I wanted to know and discover how he managed to fashion marvelous films from a shoestring budget was Rituparno Ghosh, of course. Had to catch up with his earlier work and though he kept promising to send me video copies, he never delivered. The flamboyantly dressed filmmaker with a flair for bold and beautiful cinema passed away in 2013, aged 49.

Remainders of the Day

Subsequently in Kolkata I’ve stayed at all sorts of places from the Grand and the Park and the Taj Bengal to the MLA’s hostel, the Astor and of course, revisited that sunless dharamshala.

Every time, the city has seemed as varied as its architecture and the landscape that whizzed past from the airport. The Science Museum…the football stadia…the still ponds…they always had a new face. What will never change is, of course, the majesty of the grand Victoria Memorial, the iconic Firpo’s restaurant, the Calcutta Club founded in 1905 with its sprawling jade-green lawns and justly reputed as ‘The Grand Duke of all Clubs’ and the authentic Chinese food joints punctuating the nightlife of Park Street.

The iconic Howrah Bridge and the teeming Chinatown live on, uncontaminated with the trappings of faux modernism.

First and Last Encounter with Soumitra Chatterjee

On lucking out, around 2017, I was commissioned to interview the legendary Soumitra Chatterjee, peerless actor and artist, for a book edited by Pritish Nandy.

Besides his artistry as an actor in as many as 14 films in the Satyajit Ray oeuvre, he was a playwright, theatre director, poet and artist. Despite his fluctuating health, he spoke for almost three hours, apologizing once or twice to check on his nephew, upcoming actor Ronodeep Bose, who had been grievously injured in a road accident.

The interview had a whiff of resignation, of an actor who had accepted the idea of impending mortality, yet with a sense of pride. “All good things, if I may call it that, must pass,” he had said, laughing at the trope he had just uttered.

He spoke as much about Ray as he did of other stalwarts Mrinal Sen, Tapan Sinha and Aparna Sen. Incidentally, he had been cast by Shyam Benegal as a trade union leader in Kalyug but had packed up after a couple of days’ shoots. “I was neither comfortable with my Hindi nor with my performance. Both Shyam and Shashi Kapoor (the producer) kept reassuring me that I was fine. But an actor knows within him when he is faking it.”

Taxiing back to the airport, new flyovers, malls and high-rises had sprung up. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s life-like cut-outs were at every traffic junction, exhorting people to attend a sponsored sports event. At the airport, the cabby handed me his visiting card, saying, “Call me when you visit us again.”
Soumitra Chatterjee passed away in 2020, aged 85.

The Unexpected Honour

There is no likelihood of Calcutta’s lust for cinema ever changing. To strike a personal note, and again going back in time, I was overwhelmed when the Bengal Film Journalists’ Association awarded me the Best Film prize for Fiza (2000), my first attempt at film direction.

Nothing could have been more valuable than a hosanna from one’s peers. A section of the Mumbai press (with its own agenda) had gone to town rubbishing me. The attacks were directed against me, not the film. That’s an entirely different story though. At the risk of repetition, let me state that the BFJA award meant the world to me and always will.

Aah Calcutta – Kolkata-- when it comes to friendship, warmth and celebrations, no other city has been as comparable. Ask me, I should know.   

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