Sucheta Dasgupta | Of Delhi, Kolkata and a sense of belonging

In any narrative, place or positionality is an important element. A news report, too, has a place line next to its date. At some point or other in their writing life, every writer is, thereby, bound to become aware of, and open to, the possibilities of place.  

You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place... like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again, writes Azar Nafisi, the 68-year-old Iranian-American writer of Reading Lolita in Tehran.

And though I was never one for strange feelings, I must admit, having been quite ambitious while at the same time a bit hard-headed, when I first came to Delhi in 2004 and then moved in 2008 for the long term, I was determined to form a relationship with my new city, so that in exploring it I could find out what I did not know about its culture, politics and my own past. My interest was not specific to this place even. A writer’s motivation is very often to understand themselves by making sense of their immediate environment, their world. And while my conscious purpose of coming here was to learn the ropes of my trade through my office’s proximity to the corridors of power, I did not want to close myself off to non-work-related experiences, observe their connections to the news, hopefully find a few headlines myself, and even write those stories should the time arrive.     

Where are you from, though, remained a hairy question from work colleagues and neighbours. And even if I did not eat fish, young people usually don’t because it requires a certain maturity of the palate, “books, medicine and fish” was never an acceptable answer. But who cares for conversations where the answer is predictable? Do you? It was ironical because my interrogators, too, did not care to notice my absence of inferiority complex when I answered.

It did spotlight the statehood question. Did Delhi and the National Capital Region not belong equally to every Indian citizen? Who are the original inhabitants of Delhi, the Muslims of the old city, or the Rajasthanis before them? Or are they Gujjars who are still rare in the city’s corporate offices? Hypothetically speaking, beyond a (welcome) political advantage to any Opposition party if it is in power in the National Capital Territory of Delhi (because in democracy a healthy Opposition is an important requirement), is there a point to statehood?

Then I had an eye-opening conversation with another ‘authentic’ Delhiwallah. He was born and brought up in Delhi and is, unlike me, not just a five-time voter and a recently old property owner. During a ride home from work, the two of us were discussing if it was lonely to watch films unaccompanied in movie theatres and I found myself remembering to him my impression of Kolkata’s Purna Cinema. My friends having migrated to different cities, most of the films I have watched in Kolkata are on my own. Some of those halls have closed down now for many years.

Purna Cinema was one theatre my father had told me about from during his Calcutta Medical College days. I was brought up in Durgapur and born in Rourkela, Odisha.

During my seven years in Kolkata, I made sure to go to Purna at least once and watch a film. 1947 Earth was its name, and aside from it, my memory of the hall is a faint but distinct odour of urine coming from the aisles and straight-backed, bedbug-bearing wooden chairs. But it is a tangible memory, much more so than any Red Fort or Qutab Minar.

When I finished my story, I asked my colleague if he, too, like me had had a place of personal pilgrimage in this city of seven cities, starting with Indraprastha, and he answered, indeed, he didn’t, and specified that it was a point of difference between the two cities, Kolkata and Delhi, and that that was why the “Purana Qila has never been a tentpole in [his] life”.

Delhi is too large, too wide, and has existed at least for a millennium. When one goes to an old monument here, there is no sense of identification, hence no point of take-off; so that experience is not exactly transcendental. Despite its amazing history, all you get in Delhi is the here and now. So many people have come and gone from that spot that there is no imprint of footfall. Kolkata, on the other hand, is young, and small, extant for a little more than 330 years. It has folklore.

The next significant difference between Delhi and Kolkata pertains to its inhabitants. The ones who populate its offices and neighborhoods are there to build their career and family. They lead often humdrum and largely isolated lives. In Kolkata, if someone makes a joke or a smart spin-off, it travels around university circles and down generations until it eventually makes its way to every Bengali drawing room. Even young people ensconced deep inside the mufussil suburbs are not left out, much like it is the case with today’s WhatsApp forwards. Our social circles are not just concentric, they overlap. That generates more folklore.

A third difference? In Kolkata it is poor who are generous and friendly, the rich are upwardly mobile. In Delhi, the struggle is harder for the poor. Here it is vice-versa. It is the rich who are sometimes gracious. A fourth. In Kolkata, public life on buses and in the markets is urban. Delhi has rural pockets besides being surrounded by villages. Where the dress is different. So are lifestyles. The fifth difference is that in Delhi, the bureaucracy works so much better.

Yesterday, I rescued a migratory bird from under the ITO railway overbridge. It had broken its leg and lay on an unlit stretch and was sure to have been run over by a cyclist in a hurry or a biker. A young woman and I spotted it and we picked it up and reached it to the Bird Hospital at Chandni Chowk on an e-rickshaw. We did not make friends but exchanged numbers. It is a microcosm of my relationship with the capital.

If home is where the heart is, statehood for Delhi is correct, but we are not all homesteaders.  Like the woman in black burqa I had spied sleeping on the brown soil in front of her modest hut behind Jama Masjid, amongst tall, white geese walking her courtyard.