A lane in North Kolkata. Photo by author

Kolkata must bear the cross of being the centre of gravity of a political culture that only knows how to traumatise millions

Through me is the way into the woeful city; through me is the way into eternal woe/ through me is the way among the lost people. …Before me were no things created, unless eternal, and I eternal last. Leave every hope, ye who enter!

The dismal Situation waste and wilde/ A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round/As one great Furnace flam’d, yet from those flames/No light, but rather darkness visible On an ordinary day,

Kolkata resembles Dante’s Inferno or Milton’s Pandemonium (described in the lines above).

Neither of them really had a possibility of envisioning a city so close to an everlasting nightmare. If they had, the great poets would have been less at pains to describe what they had envisioned in their inspired moments.

Yet, Kolkata is no Hell. Hell is fulsome in its pain, truthful in its denial of happiness, must be a handsomely built architecture of gloomy melancholy. Kolkata is none of the above, but a garish, kitschy, a despondent film set erected cheaply and in a hurry that merely resembles Hell. Because even in its attempt at realising Hell as closely as possible, Kolkata has been denied the basic artistry of a dignified imitation. It’s a hack painter’s rush job, a scratchy poem written on the back of a forgotten notebook, a musical note that the cacophonist wrote under delirium.

After five years of being away, out on a day of bandh, this is what Kolkata looks like to me. This is the day the city is stripped of its daily pretence to survive, its break-next botheration about reaching work on time, its apparent business of going to business. This is the day when it bares its bare soul in full public. Kolkata, the city of palaces, the second city of the British Empire, the mercurial metropolis of art and angst on bandh day, as on most others, looks like a bare-boned animal fading in the midst of its own streets.

But Kolkatans have always braved misery with the deftness of swatting a fly. A similar skill it has come to acquire about its bandh preparedness, a clockwork skill that is entirely at discount any other day or time. On Thursday, not even an hour after the bandh had been announced, every possible apparatus in the city rose to collective action to ‘combat’ the bandh, though for most the combat strategy was how to spend the next day at home. The minority who trudged to office had done it all before and will do so ever after. No one stopped to ask why the assault on a few leaders in faraway Mangalkot should trigger a bandh that would traumatise millions elsewhere. This is the city where bandhs, like its grime, come cheap.

A quick round of the city, 40-odd kilometres on the road on Friday morning revealed no secrets, no events of gratuitous excess, except that the police were seen in a faux-busy parade at important crossings! At Rashbehari crossing, after rather pale trouble between the forces of the Bandh and the police in whites, when the crowds were gathering, a smalltime cop was overheard praying for heavy rain. No wonder the decrepit unbrellawallah was seen repairing his stock in his non-descript shop not far from the place, blithely ignorant of the shuttered shops around. So, Kolkatans take it easy.

In any case, people here exercise their option of going to work not more than two-thirds of the year. But never is the will to worklessness more profound than on the day of a bandh. As on any other bandh day, people in street corners were seen with a halo on their face, the halo of exercising their democratic right of not going to work. Others were seen fretting hard on the cricket ball and later getting afflicted with bandh-day muscular atrophy. Still others gathered around the corner tea-stall for a discussion on the spuriousness of forcing a holiday. And many more stayed at home and listened to the grandmother’s tall tales on news channels.

Bandh means closed. A better approximation, at least in case of Kolkata, would be closure. Because Kolkata needs closure — closure from being what it is, from the suffering to be what it has to, from the cross it has to bear. Kolkata is of use to no one anymore except a class of lumpens and leaders of their ilk who use the city as a giant petri-dish to release their particularly repellent variety of political excreta. The forever city, the city of joy hence needs closure, more than anyone else among us who have killed it.