Sweat the Good Talk

Every few months, I feel this inexplicable longing for Calcutta.
Maybe this is my version of homesickness, which I otherwise claim not to suffer from.

I wonder what it would be like to be an 'antel' (as we say it in hard-core teenage Bengali school-talk) from the Presidency College Physics Dept, to bear the grime of Calcutta University on my hair, be able to snack on understated canteen food everyday without having to bother about money, to wear the plainest 'kurta-s' to college everyday, to be around people who would be intellectually sound and able.

I wonder if I'd be a different person if I stayed back in Calcutta. A city can do a lot to you, especially when it has 19 years to its claim.

I was pretty sick of the city by the time school got over, but college would have been different, and of course a lot less challenging. Sometimes I wonder if I am strong enough to be an alien for the rest of my life in a country that makes me feel like an infant every step of the way.
It's new and foreign. Every place I go, I am noticeably conscious of the smallest movements I make, the obscurest of sounds that I mumble. For once, I feel like resting my shoulder, shedding off the alertness and the indolent smile.


I crave the Khatta-Gola from landmark.
I miss Park Street and Gariahat.
I miss my aunt's place where we staid up countless nights chatting like there was no tomorrow.
I miss the times we cooked and messed up and the times we didn't mess up.
I miss Class 10.
I miss Sruti's spectacles.
I miss the water-logged lane outside of my school.
I miss Spectrum.
I miss the smell of Durga Puja.
I miss the time I got locked out of my house for 6 hours.
I miss the kajal and the sultry glow Bengali twenty-somethings boast.
I miss the stupid boys with their funny school uniforms that we mocked endlessly in school.
I miss the rain that photoshopped the city a notch brighter.
I miss Trincas.
I miss College Street. I distinctly remember the last time I walked that place alone, wondering if I would ever wander about those streets again, the streets that almost got my foot fractured by a caged-van. I haven't been there in 4 years now.
I miss the 5 Rupee ice-cream and the 4 Rupee bus rides.
I miss the school fests that I avoided attending with all my might.
I miss all the over-hyped extracurriculars my classmates were so into.
I miss the rickshaws.
I miss the trees that looked like they had chicken-pox
I miss a minimum of 10 degree celsius in the coldest of the Winter days.
I miss the time I was unfathomably thin.
I miss not bothering to shampoo.
I miss feeling at home, no matter where I went in the city.
I miss being able to judge people by the way they spoke.
I miss tea, the diesel, the boats at Ganga, the lights at Victoria Memorial, the traffic jams at Dum dum, the coffees at Coffee Day, the gravel of the worn out roads, the obnoxious taxi drivers, the plain middle class Bengali families at the bazaar, the sluggish afternoons when the city literally stops working, the lovers at Rabindra Sadan, the glitter and dazzle of a Calcutta Christmas.







I miss taking my City for granted.





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