Notes from Barasat, Part II

Part Two

Friday, 3 May 2024 —
While it is blazing hot outside, I am enjoying my 'hot' vacation in the chaotic Barasat, bravely putting on airs that nothing is bothering me.

Monsoons are still a month away, but the pre-monsoon thundersquall kaal boishakhi jhor* is already starting to arrive! And that's a relief. Only on the third day was I allowed to venture out in the evening, after 6.00 pm, as was suggested by all concerned, well aware of the ongoing heatwave conditions in Kolkata. I went to Hela Bortola, a bustling marketplace where you can pick up fresh vegetables, fish, fruits, meat, and groceries, including lentils, jaggery (molasses), and puffed rice.

When I lived in Kolkata for a brief spell in 2005/06, this was the place I often went to buy veggies and fish, and the place looks still the same as it had been during those days. Almost twenty years ago, it was a wonderful time. Although I enjoy scrutinizing the high-quality vegetables displayed in the makeshift shops along the roadside, the cacophonous environment is exhausting. In the evening, people who live close to Colony More and Nabapally come out to purchase their things from Hela Bortola and Choto Bazaar when the hot and humid weather lessens. Highly motivated and discerning people won't mind taking a long walk or hiring a toto to Boro Bazaar, adjoining the local train station: they do that with great love to buy a variety of freshwater and sea fishes like pabda, bhetki, chitol, koi, rui, katla, telapia, parshe, tyangra, and puti, among many others in Kolkata, the fresh fish capital of India.

Sunday, 5 May 2024 —
I went to Hela Bortola to pick up some vegetables (potol, kumro, kancha/dheba lonka, pui saak) and then brisk-walked home via the Choto Bazaar bypassing Durga Sweets, my favourite sweet shop in the whole of Barasat. However, I made the mistake of buying a round plastic case of rossogollas from Boisakhi Mistanno Bhandar, a nice little sweet shop by the side of the main thoroughfare close to one of the city’s crossroads called Colony More. This area is famous for its, as I was told, for its mistanno (sweets), chana chur, readymade garments, electrical, and hardware stores. I couldn’t agree less. I found the sweets from Boisakhi were just okay, not exceptional. Maybe the current humid season is to blame, which puts you in a bad mood for marking the sweets as flawed. These days, anything goes, but here’s hoping that this modest establishment, like others already more accomplished, will one day reach the pinnacle of Bengali sweet offerings. Who knows, it might eventually catch up with the delicious sweet treats that Durga Sweets, Jyoti Sweets, and even Tarakeswar Mistanna Bhandar have to offer.

Mouchak Sweets, one of the well-known sweets and tele bhaja (fried snacks) shops in the neighbourhood, is located off the main road, but its sales staff often seem to be in a foul mood all year round, which results in handing out irreverent customer service day after day that they are fast becoming to be known for all the wrong reasons! Tough luck, pals.

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Monday, 6 May 2024 —
Barasat today is a metropolis-like city, complete with the rough characteristics that a big city might have. It's chock-a-block with people, buildings, traffic, shops, convenience stores, rickshaws, totos, bastralayas, and malls of all kinds: small, big, and everything in between, with neon-lit, otherworldly signage popping up all over the claustrophobic place as if foreign-looking, multi-habited galaxy worlds have arrived from some planetary constellation in outer space and settled down here.

Is it any wonder Barasat, like every other city in our post-liberalized country, has become a hot furnace, being roasted alive due to extreme El Nino climatic conditions and humankind's continuous destruction of natural ecosystems to fulfil their concretized settlement aspirations?

Once upon a time, Barasat was a relatively handsome town with less population, smallish quaint buildings (that looked old and moist-ridden within a year or two of their construction, probably due to high humidity), greenery that grows around the house, pukur (ponds), on the rooftops, and open spaces, and gets the full sun and conveniently sparse traffic. Sadly, today, the times are as bad as it looks and as chaotic here as in any third-world country - not to mention the imposition of a vengeful tyranny of local politics and subtle, modern-day guillotining of human rights and respect of the aam janta, the commoners.

These peculiar-to-West Bengal specialties, of course, do not just apply to Barasat but to every town, city, or hamlet in the whole of Bengal. For the last fifty-odd years, Bengal has been politically under siege with decadence, corruption, illegal migrants from across the border, and shameless political hara-kiri that not only kills people’s aspirations but also makes the aspiring residents oust themselves to shift elsewhere in the country. Some (a large number of people) escape Bengal every year and go away to other cities outside of the state to make a living there professionally. They proudly say it is better outside than staying in decayed and decadent Bengal that does not have much to offer to its own people.

Talk about brain drain: precisely what has been occurring for decades in the formerly golden Bengal state, and Bengal has never felt able to reverse it. The political elite has neither cared nor shown concern nor gave a damn about the state of affairs. Maybe the last part is not entirely true, but you get the gist of the humungous problem the beleaguered state has been going through for decades and is still going.

Decades-long communism, centralized autocracy, despotic tendencies, autocratic trademark of local politics, and now the global pandemic of coronavirus has ravaged Barasat town beyond imagining.

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Friday, 10 May 2024 —
Barasat is usually a stopover place whenever we travel to Kolkata to visit my relatives or come here for a vacation. Speaking for myself, I’m sad to say that Barasat — and any other Indian town or city, for that matter — stands ruined by the economic development and growth that the 21st century has brought in.

A constant din of traffic noise, traffic-related air pollution, sound pollution, environmental degradation, waste production, construction of buildings, loss of lung spaces, water scarcity, and all problems you can think of have already begun to play havoc with people's lives. Increased risk of heart ailments, strokes a regular occurrence, and cardiovascular diseases are the order of the day. That alone is enough to dislike the Barasat of today but love the Barasat of old, which had no post-liberalized economic development. I'm not against development, but look at what problems they are causing. Life was more beautiful then; today, it’s sad to live with life-threatening, slow-poisoning pollution everywhere around our cities and towns. With so much development here, there is no peace or good health.

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Thursday, 16 May 2024 —

I travelled to Kolkata with four books. One of them, "Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder" by Salman Rushdie, I had already read more than half of it on the trip by train here and devoured it in one gulp. What a great read! Truly incredible. Amazingly amazing. Rushdie pours his heart out onto the pages, introspecting about the vicious knife attack against his life, surviving an attempted murder.

The other books in my backpack are: “India: A Million Mutinies Now” (V.S. Naipaul), which I'm ashamed to admit I had not read, oh my God, “Tell Me Your Dreams” (Sidney Sheldon), and “A House of Rain and Snow” (Srijato Bandopadhyay, translated from Bengali), which is about the family and friends of a poet in Kolkata in the 1980s. I am so looking forward to reading these books.

Salman Rushdie became my favourite writer after I read his grand Booker Prize-winning novel Midnight’s Children. Following this, I read Step Across This Line, Joseph Anton, The Golden House, The Enchantress of Florence, and other works of magic realism and historical fiction. Recently, I read Victory City, an outstanding novel. What happened to him recently shouldn’t have happened.

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Thursday, 16 May 2024 —
I brought my laptop backpack to use the option to work from home while staying in Kolkata, along with the latest issue of The Week news magazine. Plus, a daily newspaper The Telegraph comes in. Enough reading material for me to pleasurably survive for a month or so.

Say what you might, Barasat will always be a town as far as I’m concerned, not a city, even if its flavour and fervour slowly turn towards being a true-blue metropolitan. As of now, of course, I’m waiting for the monsoons to arrive, or at least a kaal boisakhi bristir jhor*, a thunderstorm, would be most welcome. Hail Barasat!

(To be concluded)

By Arindam Moulick

— May 2024

*kaal boishakhi jhor: Bengali for "nor' westerly thundersquall in Baisakh maash"

Wanderings in Kolkata - Part I

Part One

This blog comes to you from Barasat, meaning ‘Avenue,’ our stopover place in Kolkata, where I’ve just dashed into before buying a tumbler of tok doi sour curd, not misti doi sweet curd, that is for later, for sure; eggs, and bread at Hela Bortola, not far from the city’s once-great ‘Avenue’ — or seven rural hamlets, according to antiquity — built by Indian nobles and also a colonial-era British colonist. I'm especially taken with the fresh vegetables here. The fish is so dazzlingly fresh, and the sweets are to die for. Paradise truly regained!

Travelling to Kolkata in April or May, you will notice that the weatherscape changes (from bad to worse)—from the scorching, bone-dry conditions of Hyderabad to a sticky atmosphere of high humidity and unrelenting heat in the city and suburbs of Kolkata. A hot and humid climate is worse than a hot and dry one.

Not that I am complaining. Complaining about the weather has long ceased to be my raison d'être of coming to Kolkata for summer solstice if you like. Since it's sultry everywhere in India right now, I have, by this point in my middle age, become somewhat accustomed to the aforementioned continental weather variations, which is not a problem. But the constant wet and sticky feeling of sweating that drips off at the back of your body and underarms could leave you feeling a bit "blue."

At this usual time of the year, it comes as no surprise. Besides, who asked me to travel to Kolkata at this time? Was I out of my selfie-obsessed mind? Didn’t I know that the climate would be hot and muggy here (and everywhere else in the country), especially in the searing summer months of April, May, and June? Okay, I'll confess it: That didn't matter much because I'm knowingly used to the fierce tropical weather conditions in Kolkata, where I drop my anchor for a precious month and a half virtually every year. Likewise, my enduring affection for the eastern metropolis of Kolkata overcomes any other concerns about the uncomfortable heat and excessive humidity levels. Next year, I might think realistically about something different. Or maybe not. Kolkata is still a favourite.

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I had just arrived in Kolkata and quickly made my way to Barasat, a good ten kilometres away from the proper city limits, believing that its climate would be less oppressive than the core city area of Kolkata. But oh! What was I thinking! It’s equally bad here. The increasing urbanization of the Barasat city in recent years is directly responsible for continuous heatwaves here. (There are other problems, for instance, medical, political, and municipal. But it is better to look the other way and not talk about those ubiquitous issues, which have been a dreaded curse for the once-glorious state of Bengal since the 1970s generation). Thank heavens, there are no longer any blackouts here. I remember that back in the day, load-shedding used to occur frequently; occasionally, there were power outages, but that's okay. As I mentioned, it’s bloody hot out here. Maximum temperatures vary between 40 to 42 degrees Celsius and could rise abnormally higher, damaging human organs due to the extreme temperatures. Most regions of the country experience severe summers that exacerbate kidney, heart, and stroke disorders. That is unavoidable, as Barasat is only 4 meters above mean sea level (MSL) and receives, according to the Barasat Municipality website, "an average annual rainfall of 1,579 mm". Because of its location on the steaming hot Ganges-Brahmaputra delta, as most regions in these parts are, Barasat city experiences yearly summertime woes.

Practical health advisory tips were given to us, over and over again, over the phone and in person: Either you can venture out to buy groceries and stuff or meet friends in the first part of the day between 7 and 10 am, as has also been advised by the locally roaming municipality representatives over the loudspeakers, or you can go out in the evening to do likewise, after 6 or 7 pm. During that period, a grimdark time of day for the old and aged, sit at home, work from home, drink plenty of water, and stay hydrated, regardless of whether you are sufficiently thirsty while keeping Glucon D or ORS within reach. To relax, have copious amounts of nimbu pani or roohafza to chill off or read books before finishing your office work in the evening.

I have received — here we go — well-meaning sermons, been counselled, and even admonished in the highest terms not to go outside. I can't even indulge in my last surviving addiction (apart from books and travel): Chai pe charcha. Some sherbet-loving people don’t understand that chai is an obsession, even in hot summer months. (I flatter myself). Frankly, they don’t get it. Winter evenings are a great time for a cuppa, a la chai pe charcha, I know, but isn’t it frustrating for a tea drinker like me who cannot step outside even in hot climates to drink tea from a matir bhar (a clay teacup), a Kolkata specialty. God knows when the moment will come when I'll get off my tenterhooks and hold a chai cup in my hand, indulging with my long-time-no-see beloved new friends at the hippest tea shack in town. Mera number ayega. Waiting and hoping. Thus, I'm doing what I am told to do: not going out at all, hardly.

Last night, one of my cousins, his eponymous name being Loku (actually known as Mr. Bean within the family circle) for reasons known to all, got his short but somewhat amusing name taken from the God he worships every passing day: Baba Loknath Brahmachari dropped in carrying a jhola bag his mother had handed him to deliver it to us. He carried it in, proverbially like a good boy, onto the kitchen counter that hadn’t seen cooked meals for two long years up till now, dislodged its contents dutifully and carefully: the steel saucepans and tumblers heavy-laden with freshly-cooked Macher jhol, bhaat, tok daal, and shukto came out of the nylon bag while I swigged cold water sitting on my bed with the room air conditioner on in full blast mode, not minding about the electricity bills ratcheting up during this time of the year for our second home in Barasat city. Loku or Loka, a funny Mr. Bean, came into my room and suddenly started laughing when he looked at me, visibly suffering from the infamous Kolkata tropical heatwave.

The sight inside my flat also made me smile and chuckle, and I thought, "Dude, really! I'm feeling the effects of this vengeful humidity like never before," I exclaimed, snatching up the Shower to Shower powder, which provides "effective relief from prickly heat," written on the label.

Kirakom acho, Dadabhai? (How do you feel?), he said with a giggle.

Babaa re…ki gorom ekhane! (It’s so hot here!), I replied with a resigned air.

By Arindam Moulick